(originally
published in The Outreach Connection
in October 2006)
This is the eighth
and last of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2006 Toronto International Film
Festival.
Summer Palace (Lou Ye)
The Chinese authorities recently
banned director Lou from making films in China for five years, after he took
this film to Cannes without the proper approvals. Presumably this was
substantively motivated by its depiction of Beijing University in the late 80’s
as a morass of volatility and sexuality, with not an ideological precept in
sight: it also includes a (somewhat murky) depiction of Tiananmen Square. But
the film certainly won’t seem very provocative to Western eyes. The first half,
based around a rural girl who attends the university and goes wild, before
dropping out in the wake of a busted love affair – is diverting but never as
probing or acute as one wishes for, and then the second half, following the two
ex-lovers in their divergent paths through life for the next fifteen years,
eventually comes to seem like little more than soap opera. The programme book
calls the film’s style “oblique,” but actually it’s all too comprehensible –
the attempts to mirror internal and external states come across as laboured.
With no particular finesse of technique overall, the movie is unfortunately more
interesting in theory than in practice, although the theory does count for a
lot here.
Renaissance (Christian Volckman)
I don’t have any
specific interest in animation, nor in the science-fantasy genre, so a film
combining both held no particular appeal for me. But sometimes you go with what
fits the time slot. Renaissance
certainly has a distinctive technique – it’s composed almost entirely of pure
black and pure white, eschewing shadings, so that foregrounds and backgrounds
can often be distinguished only through evocations of shadows and movement.
It’s impressive, for example, how much facial expression can be evoked through
the movement of four blobs of black. The problem is that the main aesthetic
takeaway is pretty well established after ten minutes, and so it all comes down
to the story, which is a humdrum concoction in the vein of Blade Runner and many others. It’s Paris in 2030, a young female
scientist has disappeared, and a hard-bitten cop searches for her, with a
sinister corporation lurking in the background. The film’s conception of the
future isn’t particularly distinctive or detailed, and whereas animation used
to carry the constant advantage of pulling off spectacles that couldn’t be
achieved otherwise, digital technology has narrowed that gap considerably. So
the movie basically didn't feel that necessary to me.
Paris je t’aime (the Coen
Brothers, Wes Craven, Alexander Payne, Gus Van Sant and others)
You could use up
your word quota just listing the directors and principal cast on this one, a
collection of 18 vignettes set in various areas of the City of Love. This was
the last film I saw at the festival this year, and since I was seriously
flagging by then, it was a just about perfect stopping point, delivering
goodwill and a vague sense of upper-middlebrow activity (hard to feel you’re
slumming it when all those auteur names keep popping on and off the screen)
without making any serious demands on the audience. Most of the segments are
just pleasant baubles. Alfonso Cuaron’s is, strangely, the dullest and least
inspired. Christopher Doyle’s is the giddiest and most boundary pushing. The
Coens deliver a very proficient metro nightmare. Gerard Depardieu recruits Ben
Gazzara and Gena Rowlands for a Cassavetes reunion, but then fails to think of
anything interesting for them to say. Olivier Assayas’ story of an American
actress and a drug pusher is one of the few segments that might productively be
stretched out to greater length. Tom Tykwer’s segment, with Natalie Portman, is
certainly the most hardworking. But nothing in the movie will persist as more
than the slightest footnote in its creator’s biography.
And then I saw
this one later on in its commercial release:
Infamous (Douglas McGrath)
This is the
unfortunate film covering almost exactly the same ground as last year’s Capote – Truman Capote’s researching and
writing In Cold Blood, in particular
his relationship with one of the convicted killers - and since Capote scooped up enough attention for
five average films, there was never going to be much left over for Infamous. It’s almost impossible to
write about it on its own terms, so here it is: it’s more or less the same
length as the first film, but spends much more time on his celebrity friends
and less in charting the precise impact on Capote’s artistic soul; Toby Jones
may be a closer physical match than Philip Seymour Hoffman, but is also less
charismatic and nuanced; the casting is blander all the way along the line; the
storytelling has much less finesse here, often relying on talking heads to
deliver key information or interpretation. I have to admit that I never quite
understood why Capote was so highly
valued, and found that film heavy going at times for all its strengths, so in a
certain lesser way it was actually more fun watching the glossier Infamous and ticking off similarities
and differences. But truly, this film’s only place in history, along with the
likes of Milos Forman’s Valmont, will
be to surface every five years or so in articles about strange movie
coincidences.
And that’s it for
this year’s festival. Many writers found this a bit of an off year. The opening
gala left many people cold, the most heralded premieres (The Fountain, A Good Year, All the King’s Men) frequently fell a
little flat and there was a lack of real breakthrough discoveries: the People’s
Choice went to a movie called Bella,
about which I barely heard a word before, during or after the festival. Several
writers even criticized the caliber of the visiting celebrities, or maybe it’s
more that they failed to do anything sufficiently splashy once they got here
(Sean Penn’s famous cigarette aside). I never know to what degree the quality
of the films I saw can stand as a representative sample, so I can only say that
I enjoyed most of them, although I did feel a little deprived of
near-masterpieces. The two films I liked most were probably Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone and Alain
Resnais’ Coeurs, and in truth there’s
probably a bit of a gap between those two and whatever it is that might take my
bronze medal.
I mentioned above
how I was flagging, and it’s true – I actually seriously (well, semi-seriously)
considered dropping out before the end. On two occasions in the last two days,
I actually went to the wrong theatre, which tells you a lot about how my
faculties were becoming undone. Is this the beginning of the end for your
indefatigable reviewer? Only time will tell!
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