A Musical ‘Grand Tour’ Through AIFF 2024

By AIFF Staff

The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal

Filmmakers and musicians are both faced with the challenge of how to make their work heard over a tremendous din. How does the serious artist stand out from the endless digital backwater? What’s evident over the last several years, and exemplified by much of this year’s Atlantic International Film Festival program, is that filmmakers and musicians seem to be growing more cognizant of each other. Their mediums have become more conversant — a heartening development, since their combined energies can result in new horizons on both ends.

Music is central to several documentaries at AIFF, as audiences hunger for context on under-documented acts and scenes. Luther: Never Too Much (screening September 13-14) tracks the rise of Luther Vandross from backup singer in David Bowie’s Young Americans band to ‘80s love-balladeer who reached out to an audience of African-American women like few singers before or since. Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story (September 16) follows the deep-soul singer and transgender icon, who brought a much-needed shot of Tennessee bottom end to Toronto’s mid-‘60s club scene and whose moment finally arrived (just before her death) with the 2017 Numero compilation of the same name. The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal (September 12 & 15) introduces a gigantic series that provides the first comprehensive screen biography of the Canadian rockers.

The most seminal musical “scene” on this year's AIFF roster is heard in Disco’s Revenge (September 18), a tour through the heyday of disco and the now-embarrassing attempts to undermine it. The doc is tied together by anecdotes and discursions from musical minds as diverse as Grandmaster Flash (godfather of the cutting and scratching now standard in DJ culture, the natural next step from disco’s endless groove), Kevin Saunderson (one of the OGs of Detroit techno, whose 1988 single "Big Fun" signalled house music as the disco of the next decade), and particularly Nile Rodgers, the gregarious dreadlocked guitarist with the liquid-gold tone. As co-leader of Chic (the finest of all disco bands) and producer for Bowie, Diana Ross, Madonna, and Daft Punk, Rodgers is the ideal tour guide, from the string-soaked sweep of the mid-‘70s to the novelty bops of the early ‘80s.

Those are the front-facing music docs, but there are other musical names at AIFF that might slip under the radar. Julie Keeps Quiet (September 15), an unspooling character drama set around a Dutch tennis court, is scored by Caroline Shaw, a Pulitzer-winning disciple of the American minimalists whose instrumental and rhythmic textures are all over contemporary film music. The fact that this isn’t Shaw’s first soundtrack is indicative of her (and her cohort’s) lively engagement in popular culture, and of the heartening crossover between the gallery and the club, the arthouse and the multiplex. Maybe it’s hard to believe now, but there was a long time when ambitious capital-c Composers mostly kept to themselves, comfortable in the concert hall. Shaw’s superb Partita for 8 Voices crossed over enough that pop fans might even know her by name through a couple of eerie 2015-16 collaborations with Kanye West (may he rest in peace).

An even less obvious name than Shaw’s is Sneha Khanwalkar, who chips in to Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls (September 12 & 16). Khanwalkar is far from a household name in the west, but is nevertheless the true heir to the golden age of dance-based Indian film music epitomized by composers R.D. Burman and Ilaiyaraaja (and singer Asha Bhosle). Pumping infectious folk melodies with hip-hop beats and layers of eclectic instrumentation, her soundtracks for the rousing Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008) and the Hindi crime epic Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) are easy recommendations for anyone curious about contemporary Indian music. Her work for Girls Will Be Girls is atypically spare, but crucial to the movie’s effects.

A roll call of other noteworthy music at AIFF 2024 would include Jia Zhang-Ke’s Caught by the Tides (Hou-Hsiao-hsien collaborator Lim Giong), Rachel Elizabeth Seed’s A Photographic Memory (beloved session harpist Mary Lattimore), Shiori Ito’s Black Box Diaries (Soul Coughing keymaster Mark De Gli Antoni), Kaniehtiio Horn’s Seeds (bedroom noise-punk from Alaska B of Montreal’s Yamantaka/Sonic Titan), and José Avelino Gilles Corbett Lourenço’s Young Werther (indie-folk darling Owen Pallett, plus liberal use of an electro-funk remix of Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon”). Not to mention Andrea Arnold’s Bird, which does for British rock of the late ‘90s what her American Honey did for contemporary trap and country-pop.

BIRD

But the most deceptively musical film at AIFF is one that might not get talked about in those terms: Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour (September 15-16). Tracking a cowardly beau who absconds from his chipper, undaunted fiancée, Grand Tour’s “story” is “set in 1918,” and I put those words in quotes because Gomes consistently undercuts any reverence for period accuracy: within moments, we’re whisked away by a brass band playing Sousa and the hum of modern traffic. The dramatic action with the two “leads” was shot on Portuguese soundstages (echoing the film’s debt to ‘30s screwball comedy), but as our “plot” goes from Rangoon to Singapore to Bangkok to Saigon to Manila to Osaka, Gomes and his camerapeople (including Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s main DOP) intersperse contemporary documentary footage from various tours of east Asia. They bridge these transitions with musical segments that would be deemed “interludes” in a more conventional film, but are here woven directly into the text.

Music is central to Grand Tour’s progression, and the film gets plenty of humour from the way music—and by extension, language itself—can vary wildly in meaning between cultures. In one scene, our lead coward is told that a tune called “Endless Passion” is called “Infinite Sadness” in the next village over; in another, Gomes draws out the unlikely similarities between the Portuguese and Japanese tongues. An English choir sings the “Eton Boating Song” over shots of the Bangkok Port; “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” is heard as woozy jazz in a Shanghai nightclub. In one scene of thrumming weirdness, the sound of cattle heaving and mooing in a ship’s hull gives way to a belting, lightning-accented performance of Verdi’s “Di quella pira”. Scenes like these wouldn’t seem like they’d fit in the same film where a Nike-capped Manila restauranteur gives an impassioned karaoke performance of “My Way”, but they do, and as we travel further into mountains and jungles it feels like we’re picking up gorgeous folk melodies from all over East Asia and the Indian Ocean. After years of movies whose idea of “world music” is a drum loop with an “exotic” voice keening over it, the sonic wanderlusts of Grand Tour feel boundless, and indeed the film is never far from the tactile pleasures of, say, plucking a cacti’s needles like a kalimba.

GRAND TOUR

Just as shooting an image in black and white is a way of immediately abstracting it, liberating a film from history — musical as well as visual — makes the “real” world seem stranger and more fantastical than the “fake” one. The effect is of seeing life anew, as through the eyes of a child, teeming with energy and delirious serenity. Maybe this is only legible to deep cinephiles, but: imagine if Raúl Ruiz shot an East Asian version of Tony Gatlif's Latcho drom, that astonishing 1993 travelogue through “gypsy music” that traced the history of Roma migration from the Thar Desert through continental Europe. Even as the music gathers density, something essential about its world remains unchanged, and this seems to be what Gomes implies through his even more radical blends of sounds and mediums: it’s all shadow puppetry, it’s all music, it’s all basically the same thing, or at least part of the same thing. Music and moving images, fiction and non-fiction, past and present: they don’t so much blur together as mix and mingle, and the art is richer for it.