(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September
2008)
Vinyan (Fabrice Du Welz)
One of my few largely random choices this
year, this is a broodingly exotic drama about a couple (Emmanuelle Beart and
Rufus Sewell) who lost their son in the 2004 tsunami; still in Thailand, the
wife becomes convinced the boy is alive, over the Burmese border. She convinces
her husband they should pay a shady character to get them there, and from then
on the film reminded me increasingly of Apocalypse
Now, although with a very different heart of darkness. Their journey is a
deliberately murky mélange of menace, spirituality, spectacular (but not overly
dwelled-on) landscapes, swirling river mist, and escalating ill fortune and
madness. It’s quite fascinating, although many of the elements seem questionable:
the set-up appears rather rushed, the ending fanciful (if impactful), many of
the details contrived. Du Welz doesn’t always seem in full control of his
apparatus – an early scene in the night of the city feels as if he mounted the
camera on the head of a frantic goat and just accepted whatever jumble of
images resulted. The beautiful Beart (I said the choice was largely random) is enormously
compelling, even if, again, her character’s psychology never completely
convinces.
Four
Nights with Anna (Jerzy Skolimowski)
Skolimowski was a key figure of the 60’s
through the early 80’s – bursting with radical energy out of his native Poland
and becoming an exotic wanderer of a kind you seldom see now. His best-known
film may be the compelling Deep End,
which still turns up on the Scream cable channel occasionally; you might also
remember Moonlighting, with Jeremy
Irons as a Polish labourer stranded in London. His last work, Ferdyduke, was by most accounts a
hodgepodge, and Skolimowski has not directed in the seventeen years since then
(he turned up as an actor in Cronenberg’s Eastern
Promises, playing Naomi Watts’ hot-blooded uncle). The new film takes him
right back to his roots, to the most unprepossessing Polish locations and
characters possible. The protagonist is a sad middle-aged lump of a man,
recently out of jail for a rape he didn’t commit, who develops an attachment to
a woman living in an adjacent block of nurses’ quarters; at first he spies on
her through binoculars, then starts to sneak into her room at night (having
fortified her sugar supply with ground-up sleeping pills). It has a wonderfully
creepy opening, slyly misleading us about the meaning of certain events, and
establishing a feeling of grey, unadorned (but very specifically visualized)
dread that persists through much of the film. To digress for a second, I always
tend to think of Skolimowski and Roman Polanski as being on the same general
page, and I recently rewatched Polanski’s late-90’s thriller The Ninth Gate – where Johnny Depp
tracks down the long-buried secret of communing with Satan. I enjoyed the
fluidity of it in a way, but I couldn’t stop thinking that Polanski must feel a
sense of loss within himself, at how the precise intimations of pain and evil
in his best earlier work blanded out into mere glossy artifice. The Pianist subsequently took him
somewhat back in the right direction, but he’s a rich international figure now
– it’s plainly too late. Skolimowski by contrast, never as feted or scrutinized
even at his peak, could yet experience a true artistic revitalization. Four Nights with Anna isn’t quite that –
for all its intrigue and impeccable handling (and, almost in the margins, its
concise portrait of the continuing limitations and lingering authoritarianism
in the post-Communist East), it’s ultimately just too minor I think. But this
is one of my favourite things about movies, when the old guys show who’s still
in charge.
Adam
Resurrected (Paul Schrader)
For some reason, I end up mentioning
Schrader in this space more than almost any other director – the arc of his
career (writing Taxi Driver;
directing movies from American Gigolo
to Affliction) and his personal
travails (born into strict religious fundamentalism; all kinds of obsessions
and addictions since then) fascinates me, even though the impact of his films
on me is hit and miss. The new film is in the higher echelon of his work,
although it’s also easy to criticize. Jeff Goldblum plays a Jewish entertainer
who survives the death camp by mimicking a dog for the depraved camp commander
(Willem Dafoe) and playing the violin as the victims (even his own wife and
daughter) march to the gas chamber. In the 50’s he’s in Israel, frequently
institutionalized at a facility in the middle of the desert, where he comes
across a boy who imagines himself a
dog; this allows Adam a symbolic opportunity to redeem himself, by leading the
youth out of his madness. That basic set-up seems forced and unconvincing, but
the film contains a lot of grim inventiveness, and Goldblum is as charismatic
and inventive as he’s ever been. On the other hand, it’s not clear that
Schrader ever fully worked out his attitude on the material – his handling of
the material in the camps seems particularly wan, and the ending strikes an odd
note. I don’t think the movie will stand as much more than a curio, but it
takes on more resonance if viewed as the latest in Schrader’s many portrayals
of obsessed, extreme individuals.
Appaloosa (Ed Harris)
Harris’ second film as director (the first
was Pollock) is a mostly conventional
Western, benefiting from the relative rarity of even conventional Westerns
nowadays, and from a few unusual angles on the material. Harris and Viggo
Mortensen play two wandering “peacekeepers” engaged to bring order to a small
town terrorized by the local bigshot (Jeremy Irons) and his gang. The twists
and turns conjure up echoes of virtually every movie ever made in the genre,
although only intermittently to the film’s advantage. Harris doesn’t bring much
visual distinction to the exercise (compared to Leone); the atmosphere is thin
and rather antiseptic (compared to Peckinpah); the occasional humour is shallow
and repetitive (compared to Hawks). Most interesting is the arc of the
character played by Renee Zellweger - a widow who draws Harris’ affections. She
takes on substantially more layering than we expect, and then the movie doesn’t
extract the usual price from her either, which sets up an unusual, quite
ambiguous ending. It’s good entertainment overall, although a very typical festival
choice – no one will ever again be as enthusiastic about it as they were, sight
unseen, that glitzy night on the red carpet.
And
overall…
Many say it was a lesser festival this
year, but my little piece of it (confined this year to just one or two films
every day) worked out as well as I could possibly have hoped for. I’ll
especially look forward to seeing Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Story again, but I was very consistently stimulated and
stretched, and barely ever bored. So no complaints from me!
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