In our Way Too Indie Hangout #3, we discuss our experiences from festivals such as Cannes, TIFF, and SFIFF. Topics range from proper film festival etiquette, selecting our favorite seats, and if reactions are exaggerated during festivals. We also talk about what the best films we’ve seen in 2014 so far.

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The title of the film serves as a grand forewarning for what unfolds in this atmospheric indie drama about adolescent siblings questioning their own mortality as they deal with tragedy. Daniel Patrick Carbone’s coming-of-age film features a highly allusive narrative that gives off the haunting impression that danger is right around the corner, reinforced by reoccurring visuals of lifeless animals and isolated surroundings, yet the ambiguity that creates the mysterious aura also makes the film feel emotionally detached. The awe-inspiring cinematography in Hide Your Smiling Faces seems heavily influenced from the works of Terrence Malick, demonstrating that even death in nature can be beautifully captured.

Opening with a lingering shot of a snake consuming a fish, followed by some boys playing with a dead bird, Hide Your Smiling Faces wastes no time with setting it’s menacing tone. The film centers on two young brothers Tommy (Ryan Jones) and Eric (Nathan Varnson) who are enjoying their summer by exploring the woods, wrestling around with friends, and discovering old abandoned houses. After successfully pulling off a scheme to score a free meal at a fast food joint (these youngsters aren’t old enough to have jobs), they soon discover a neighborhood friend dead underneath a bridge. This tragic situation puts an enormous damper on their summer and taxes their emotions.

Each brother copes with the situation differently. Eric is more physical and violent in his grieving process, handling his anguish by smashing mirrors and destroying furniture. Whereas Tommy takes a much more reserved approach by mostly keeping to himself. With zero paternal guidance in sight, the young boys must come to terms with the situation on their own, whether they have the emotional capacity or not.

The biggest problem with Hide Your Smiling Faces is the amount of redundancy found throughout. The film insists on continuously showing dead animals well after establishing the death in nature motif, making it feel a bit heavy-handed in the end. Just about everyone in the film takes a turn speaking about suicidal thoughts, which happens often enough to make it noticeable and slightly irritating. Also, there are multiple scenes of kids wrestling with each other, which feel less significant each time their shown.

Hide Your Smiling Faces may contain a razor thin plot, but it makes up for it in spades with the atmospheric visuals from Carbone and his DP Nick Bentgen. Surrounded by lush forest landscapes, the camera beautifully captures the mortality found in nature and how two adolescent boys deal with death in their own ways. The film has a sort of Malick gaze to it. Rather than concentrating on what the characters have to say, the camera nonchalantly follows its subjects around and studies the expressions on their faces.

Thankfully the film doesn’t turn into some kind of murder mystery by revealing the specifics about the mysterious death, because the important part isn’t how the death occurred, but rather the effect it has on these adolescent kids. Uncertainty is a major theme of the narrative, so those expecting concrete answers may be disappointed that the film doesn’t provide any. Hide Your Smiling Faces is surprisingly absorbing considering the majority of the time is spent just observing characters contemplate their own mortality. But the film remains too translucent and void of any real substance to prosper on mood and poetic storytelling alone. Even if Hide Your Smiling Faces is not a complete success, Carbone puts his name on the map for directors to pay attention to going forward.

Hide Your Smiling Faces trailer

Hide Your Smiling Faces

Set in a beautifully photographed forested town in the rural North East, Hide Your Smiling Faces by Daniel Patrick Carbone is a moving, richly atmospheric coming-of-age film in the vein of Terrence Malick. It centers on two young brothers who, following the death of a friend, are forced to come to terms with the bitter taste of mortality, both in their own way. It’s a hauntingly accurate depiction of the dark side of boyhood and puberty. The boys wrestle with overwhelming emotions they don’t have the faculty to contain, and they wrestle with each other as well, literally, in their lush, deep green surroundings. Carbone and DP Nick Bentgen capture the landscape in amazingly composed, majestic shots that serve as the perfect framing for the boys’ bubbling emotions. Performances are good across the board, though the young actors feel more naturalistic and raw than the seasoned adults, whose polished skills feel less appropriate to the material. Highly recommended.

Bluebird

When Lesley (Amy Morton), a good-natured school bus driver, is distracted by a pretty bluebird perched inside her bus, she fails to discover a young boy hiding in a back seat during a routine end-of-the-day check-up. The boy goes into hypothermic shock when he’s left in the freezing cold overnight. Set in a frigid industrial town in Maine, Bluebird follows the families of both the boy and the bus driver as they’re stricken with guilt, grief, and inner turmoil. Morton and Louisa Krause (who plays the boy’s mother) are fantastic, and the supporting cast (including John Slattery, Margo Martindale, Emily Meade, and Louisa Krause) back them up solidly, despite their characters feeling like quickly-sketched small town stereotypes. Despite the horrifying nature of the incident at the center of the drama, the film lacks a sense of urgency or intensity, making it feel emotionally distant. Director-writer Lance Edmands shows promise, however, even though his potential isn’t fully realized here.

Rezeta

Following a free-spirited, 21-year-old Albanian fashion model whose jet-setting lifestyle has brought her to Mexico City, Rezeta is a somewhat messy, but peculiarly charming indie romance film starring talented non-actors. While at first Rezeta (Rezeta Veliu) has fun in her new environment, sleeping around with various handsome men, her romantic side begins to yearn for a more stable relationship. She finds this in a tatted-up punk rocker named Alex (Roger Mendoza), whose shy, bad boy personality draws her in. Rezeta’s flirtatious tendencies begin to form cracks in their relationship, and Alex eventually reaches a breaking point, though Rezeta won’t let him slip away without a fight. Director-writer Fernando Frias has an ear for naturalistic dialog, and he pulls good performances out of his actors. He makes Mexico City look as colorful and vibrant as Rezeta’s personality.

Congratulations!

Writer-director Mike Brune’s nutty missing-person drama Congratulations! will appeal to those who enjoy films about the stranger side of suburbia, like Blue Velvet or Quentin Dupieux’s Wrong, which played at Indiefest last year. When an 8-year-old boy named Paul mysteriously disappears during a house party, Mr. and Mrs. Gray (Robert Longstreet and Rhoda Griffis) are left frozen in a state of utter confusion. To the rescue comes Detective Dan Skok (John Curran), who believes that there is “no such thing as a missing person; only missing information”. All evidence points to Paul still being somewhere in the Gray family home, so Dan takes up residence, incessantly searching for clues, driven by the nagging memory of a similar case. As everyone’s mind begins to unwind, their behavior, including Skok’s, grows more bizarre by the minute. Brune conjures some deliciously weird shots (the image of the entire house covered in missing person posters is unforgettable), and the film’s pacing is spot-on. The cast is constantly, constantly deadpanning, which is hilarious at times, grating at others.