Interrogating the idea of the quirkumentary
Happy Winter
dir. Giovanni Totaro, 2017, Italy
Genre: Poetic-observational, character-driven
I would have been curious to see the feature length version of Happy Winter, but PBS was showing the 50-minute-ish television cut, which gave me a chance to see an economically trim version of this festival hit, about the Ferragosto celebrations at the beach in Palermo, Sicily.
It may be the concision required for the TV cut, but the popular-doc elements struck me for the way they played off the more straightford festival-doc style. For the latter, Happy Winter is a mix: poetic static shots and a city symphony like organization, observational footage of beachgoers, including recorded dialogue between several of the subjects, and character-driven doc focus on a few main characters. Thematically, it touches on several political and economic challenges facing contemporary Italy, as the log line and directors’ statement suggest, even if the documentary, like many festival docs, leaves much to the viewer to fill in the blanks.
But there’s something else in the film. Humor and some of the over-the-top exuberance of the beachgoers themselves. My initial thought was that Happy Winter is approaching the festival doc as a quirkumentary of sorts. I am not sure where the term quirkumentary comes from. I’m not even sure it’s in wide use. I’ve employed the term before but have to admit it’s not a rigorous critical category. Part of the problem is that quick is in the eye of the beholder. I doubt Palermo beachgoers see themselves as quirky and of course it’s patronizing to frame them as such. And yet I have no doubt that the subjects appear that way in the context of festival and other distribution. (PBS for instance used a fun but, well, quirky, GIF of older men doing a synchronized dance to promote the film on Twitter.)
But there’s something in the film itself which plays off the quirkumentary specatatorship. The ironic scoring, especially the theme from A Summer Place (an apt choice!), and popular-doc stylisic choices of drone cameras and rapid editing in parts lend a very different feel between Happy Winter and something like Sacro GRA, another hybrid of poetic-observational style and character driven ends based around offbeat subjects.
Maybe I should retire the use of the portmanteau quirkumentary, which lays pretense to being an actual genre. But it does capture how filmmakers, programmers, and audiences intuit some subject matter as being or particular interest for not conforming to the sobriety of discourse – and how films themselves play to that dynamic, sometimes quite productively.