Each film begins with the expected advertisement for the festival sponsors: a man finds an ear while mowing the lawn, a couple see a daisy chain of zombies crossing the road while light eerie music chimes in the background. Each character observes and gets on with their day as if nothing exceptional has just occurred. Two lines fade on screen: “After 16 days of films”, “Nothing will faze you.” This always garners a laugh – even for what I must assume to be second or third viewings at least for festival die hards on the second day of the VIFF.

I have to admit to not having seen much of Chinese Cinema outside the martial-arts-wire-rotoscoped-empire-supporting -epic-North-American-exports. And so I feel less able to give a sound opinion backed by viewing experience.

Dry humour born of almost an innocent observational style pervades Jiang Wen‘s film – it does an admirable job of lightening the heavy load of the grand cinematic vision of The Sun Also Rises.

The film jumps between four narratives of maddness, armouring, rifles and reverie. Each chunk not necessarily linked by linear time. The film does not overly fracture time and so the “where are we now” challenge was actually quite enjoyable. It occurred to me afterwards that the non-linear structure helps to establish a more sound contextual basis for understanding narratives that span both large distances and durations.

So much of our valuation of cultural content is unconsciously and radically affected by the recency effect. It’s a value based memory phenomena where films and books or whatever are appreciated more for the last feeling they evoke than for the collective endeavour.

In pieces where main characters die off or change for the worse, we are left as an audience with that aftertaste in a linear project despite the fact that the end result might very well not be the overriding theme. It might be inconsistent with the mean. In non-linear narratives, the author has more flexibility in manipulating the recency effect so that the mean has more influence. For example, the Mad Mother played by Zhuo Yun although she disappears mysteriously we aren’t left with this sombre sentiment, but rather with her jubilation at the miraculous survival of her son.

In the end, the non-linear structure in combination with or contrast with the recency effect begins to resemble a more intuition-based method of evaluation and memory because intuition is not based on recency but on holistic analysis. Intuition comes across as kind of non-linear.

You can add the letter of your choice to the universal acronym IFF to get your favourite International Film Festival. You’ve got your TIFF for Toronto, WIFF for Winnipeg, STRIFF for Stratford, FRIFF for Fredericton etc. Today, I’m at the VIFF…volunteering and previewing.

September opens with a smooth depth of field shift over tall dry wheat like the shadow of a passing cloud as the camera focus adjusts from foreground to background. Two days in the lives of Ed and Paddy pass by. The events of both days mimic the stark similarity of the western Australian horizon. Life is slow out here; time is spacious. And so is the editing of the film: The movie has the quiet feel of and rural minimalism made strongly more so by my bus ride home after the film. The rich saturated blowout of the dusty Australian sun vs the overcast damp Vancouver afternoon…hmmm

The spaciousness does not come at a cost of tension. The audience knows intrinsically what these characters are thinking and feeling and we urge them to speak, we urge them to do what’s right. It forces us to remember the context in which the two families had to live. The financial constraints of both fathers, and the growing adolescence of the teenagers. The pressure of class restraints is heavy.

This current of tension that runs through the entire film seems so easily created by the mere and obvious presence of racial inequality. But keeping that tension subtle and building it up slowly is what makes this piece so well executed. I suspect that this is why the minimalist technique works so well. The undercurrent grounds the spaciousness with purpose and expectation – the open gracefulness of the editing, cinematography and the script only carry strength because of the looming tension. It’s easy to use silence and have long takes with nothing going on in an attempt to mimic the sophisticated flavour of simplicity – but without the tension, without that expectancy and emotional charge, the silence can quickly fall into the trap of having nothing to say. Luckily September avoids this pitfall.

There are two instances of shot symmetry that are remarkable. The scene set up at the beginning of the film uses an out of focus shot of sunlight through passing trees on the road from one direction. At the end of the film we see the same shot makeup with the direction switched. Similarly, just before the point of no return in the film, Ed and Paddy stare at the giant moon and some satellite passing below. Only after we see this same shot upside down do we realise that we are now viewing Paddy’s perspective as the boys lie head to head.