(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 2005)
This is the ninth
and last of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2005 Toronto Film Festival.
Drawing
Restraint 9 (Matthew Barney)
Matthew
Barney’s already semi-legendary Cremaster
cycle, made over a decade, finally arrived at the Cinematheque, then at the
Carlton, last year, and the complete work ranked among my top ten for the year.
The films are as consciously “arty’ as anything you’ll ever see – their
perversity and incredible individuality serve as a constant challenge to all
preconceptions, but they also achieve a remarkable degree of coherence. They
didn’t seem to attract much attention in film circles, which I think shows how
even relatively enterprising viewers regard narrative and character as integral
to cinema (even for documentaries). They certainly felt like interlopers at the
Carlton. I came across one of the series again this year at an art museum in
Berlin, where – impeccably displayed against a white background in a vast empty
room, with rows of headphones neatly arrayed on a facing bench– it certainly
seemed more at home. But the Toronto festival – which also maintains an
avant-garde “Wavelengths” sidebar – nevertheless found room for Barney’s new
film in its Visions section. For added cultural resonance, it stars Bjork, who
is Barney’s off-screen partner, and it has songs by her as well.
The film is
as fascinating as the Cremaster
films, and somewhat more accessible if the measure of that is the semblance of
a linear plot (not enough of a semblance though that I would get anywhere by
trying to describe it here). The locus of the action is a real-life Japanese
whaling ship, on which the crew engage in vaguely industrial activities which
look convincing in terms of the obvious labour expended on screen, but by their
lack of utility are obviously an aesthetic contrivance; and a pair of “Occidental
visitors” played by Barney and Bjork, who undergo a strange process of
transformation involving nudity, extravagant dress-up, mutilation and
cannibalism. The film’s varied texture also draws heavily on Barney’s abiding
affinity for sticky, malleable substances that might seem to embody some kind
of creative potential.
His great
insight is of human activity – whether utilitarian or artistic – as an almost
rational outgrowth of organic, cellular processes (the refrain of Bjork’s
ultimate song is “nature conspires to help you”). He communicates this partly
through recurring imagery and juxtaposition – water is a repeating motif here,
both in its great capacity as spawn of life and as the medium for a climactic
death ritual - and partly through a rendering-strange of the familiar: a
tea-making scene comprises superficially recognizable steps, carried out
through completely alien-looking objects and ingredients. Barney is a genius at
creating a mythology appearing to carry centuries’ worth of elaboration and
weight.
Japan, which
to a (I know, superficial) Western perspective connotes both spiritual
refinement and extreme modern prowess, provides a whole realm of resonances
here, with the ultimate bloody denouement yielding a range of echoes from
hara-kiri to sushi (!) As with the Cremaster
cycle, the experience of watching the film generally seems to belong to
something other than straightforward cinematic pleasure, although to make too
much of that would understate Barney’s immense control of the elements, and of
his unwaveringly rich visual landscape. Overall it appears to me a masterpiece,
but even if he makes ten more films as good, I think it will be difficult for
Barney to earn his place in the pantheon; his work is beyond cinema, but may
too easily be perceived as something that falls short of it.
More Festival
Movies
So that’s the
last of the films I saw at the festival, and it was one of my favourites, along
with Les Amants regulieres, The Sun
and Three Times. Since then, a bunch
of festival movies have opened commercially, so here are reviews of some of
those. Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride is a
most nicely conceived and executed animated trifle; after the ungainly Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and
Burton’s string of underwhelming live-action films before that, it strongly
suggests that this is the best medium for his still delectably weird
imagination. Roman Polanski’s Oliver
Twist never completely transcends the feeling that another version of this
material simply isn’t necessary, but it’s extremely well-mounted. Some have
found Polanski’s hand barely detectable in the film, but the scrupulous
portrayal of its receding central figure amid such grimness and deprivation
provides a strong thematic link to The
Pianist, and then there’s the withering portrayal of societal hypocrisy.
Curtis Hanson’s In her Shoes has
Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette as superficially dissimilar sisters who, of
course, need each other desperately. It’s a pleasant but slack movie, not
ineffective at provoking the viewer’s emotions, but relying for that on easy
mechanisms of loss and reconciliation.
Proof was an entertaining play, although surely not as intellectually
scintillating as all the awards would suggest. John Madden’s filming of it
exposes the material’s thinness, losing the stage version’s coherence (and, if
memory serves, most of the laughs); it’s pleasant, but has no reason to exist.
Much the same goes for Everything is
Illuminated. I haven’t read Jonathan Safran Foer’s highly-regarded source
novel, but Liev Schreiber’s filming of it makes only limited sense on its own
terms. Elijah Wood’s main character is an eccentricity-bedecked cipher, and the
material amounts to little more than a meandering road movie puffed up with high-minded
allusions.
Mike Mills’ Thumbsucker is a moderately intriguing,
loose-limbed portrayal of its James Dean-lite central character – a teenager
whose neuroses are encapsulated in his inability to quit sucking his thumb –
but ultimately it’s too fragmented and inconsequential, with little thematic
payoff. And the best bits are all in
the trailer. Martin Scorsese’s No
Direction Home: Bob Dylan, a three and a half hour documentary on the
singer’s early career (up to his 1966 motorcycle accident), has already played
on PBS and is also available on DVD. Constructed from fascinating archival
footage and insightful contemporary interviews (including some surprisingly
articulate self-analysis by Dylan himself), it’s a wonderful viewing experience
(I would imagine that holds for anyone, but I’ll admit to be a longstanding
Dylan fan). The film richly evokes the musical subculture against which he
arose, without ever descending into trite evaluations or theories of causation
– it justifies the view of Dylan as the “voice of a generation” while
preserving all the wayward ambiguity about what that voice actually consisted
of.
Cameron
Crowe’s Elizabethtown was a big
disappointment at the festival, and had some twenty minutes removed before its
commercial release, in which form it still seems significantly overlong. It
would take an entire article to set out the film’s incoherencies, indulgences,
plain oddities and other weaknesses; overall it leaves the impression that
Crowe really had no good idea for a movie, and put something together out of
isolated scenes and concepts, lazily strung together with his trademark “mood.”
Orlando Bloom, as a failed shoe designer visiting a small Tennessee town for
his father’s memorial service, is hardly an effective centre for all this.
Despite everything, Crowe’s talent as a director does frequently come through,
but it really is a badly thought-out effort.
More next
time...
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