Dreamin’ Wild (2022 | USA | 110 min. |  Bill Pohlad)

Like Bill Pohlad’s Brian Wilson biopic, Love & Mercy, his retelling of what happened when vinyl collectors (and later, Seattle record label Light in the Attic) rediscovered Donnie and Joe Emerson’s 1979 album, Dreamin’ Wild is split over two time periods. Opening in the late twenty-aughties, Donnie (played by a grizzled and time-worn Casey Affleck) is raising kids, trying to run a Spokane recording studio, and performing as a cover band with his wife (Zooey Deschanel, who doesn’t have much to do here) at events around town, and still nursing wounds of a stifled music career. A surprise call from the label brings him back to Fruitland, WA where the entire family is shocked to learn about the existence of the internet, let alone a growing fandom for the record that the brothers recorded as teens in a studio on their ever-supportive and deeply earnest father (Beau Bridges) built for them. We meet older brother Joe (Walton Goggins), who’s long since made peace with a solitary farming life. But the prospect of a second swing at musical success stirs memories of their teenage years, and dynamic young actors Noah Jupe and Jack Dylan Grazer infuse these vibrant flashbacks with the optimism of youth and the bloom of realizing creative possibilities over secluded late night sessions. As the promise of a “reunion” tour and a showcase in Seattle at the Showbox loom, one wishes for more of the kid stuff (or at least its energy) to break through the present day gloom. Nevertheless, Affleck conveys Donnie’s reticence, cracks of optimism, the self-defeating strains of perfectionism that shaped both his past and present. His prickly performance brings inside the complex if uncomfortable emotional journey of the rare but tantalizing prospect of an unanticipated midlife encore. It’s a great story that gained national attention a decade ago, all the better to see it realized on screen and filmed locally.

Dreamin’ Wild has its final SIFF screening on Sunday May 21 at Shoreline Community College. It will be released by Roadside Attractions on August 4 2023.

Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert (Switzerland |  2023 |  111 min. |  Margarethe von Trotta)

With its interlocking nonlinear narrative fractured across major periods of her romantic and artistic life, Vicky Krieps salvages every scene of Margarethe von Trotta’s globe-trotting biopic of Austrian poet and author Ingeborg Bachmann. She is so luminous that it’s agonizing that so much of the film — and her character’s life — was spent in an apparently toxic relationship with playwright Max Frisch (a lumbering, jealous Ronald Zehrfeld, portraying the man as black hole with few redeeming qualities).

Striking cinematography and richly textured production design dazzle as Bachmann’s successes take her away from the stifling Zurich apartment they share to places like Vienna, Rome, and Berlin where she feels alive and connected to artistic communities. Between Phantom Thread, Bergman Island, and Corsage, Krieps is on a roll for exquisite portraits of creative disaffection. She adds to that canon here: no one has better embodied the deep sadness of being trapped in a neighborhood without good espresso within walking distance or in the deep relief of having returned to a city with thriving cafe life. The “into the desert” scenes promised by the title are easily the film’s most appealing and every digression from them inflicts a sense of pain from the audience. It’s there that we see Ingeborg emerging from a severe depression and accompanying Adolf Opel (played by an extremely dashing Tobias Resch) on a trip to Cairo. I suppose it’s a mark of the film’s success that every time the action retreats to her time with Frisch, it’s as agonizing for the audience as for its protagonist. We, too, yearn for more desert re-awakening, less squandered youth of jealous lovers, too many cigarettes, and bottles of pharmaceuticals.

Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert played as part of SIFF’s official competition; it will be released by Match Factory.