(originally published in The Outreach Connection in October 2007)
This is the fourth of Jack Hughes’ reports
from the 2007 Toronto Film Festival.
Encounters
at the End of the World (Werner Herzog)
Herzog has been making documentaries for
nearly forty years now, and in some ways this one involves fairly conventional
subject matter by his often extreme standards: a visit to the McMurdo Station
base in Antarctica, where he checks out the daily life and undergoes some
expeditionary side trips. Herzog doesn’t take the screen this time round, but
he’s highly present as narrator and off-screen interviewer, throwing in plenty
of his quirky self - he refers to McMurdo’s accommodating “abominations such
as…yoga classes” and fills his interviews with off-kilter queries such as whether
insanity exists among penguins. Herzog seems to be pessimistic about mankind’s
long-term chances, and yet is dismissive about “tree huggers”: always a wacky
theorist at best, he remains a celebrant of pioneers and iconoclasts, whether
it be scientists who spend their days on the lip of an active volcano (which
harks back to Herzog’s classic La
Soufriere) or a lone penguin determinedly heading away from its family,
toward the mountains and certain death – maybe insane, but certainly admirable
in Herzog’s eyes. The title refers not only to the geographic location but also
to the sense that mankind’s first outpost on an alien world might look
something like this; the beautiful underwater photography also resembles
science fiction at times.
Useless (Jia Zhang-Ke)
The young director Jia has already hit a
major high point with The World, a
piercing examination of alienation within modern China. In the few years since
then, he’s worked in a more minimalist vein, including a couple of
documentaries. The latest of these, Useless,
conveys the sense of a stream of consciousness, almost as if Jia started
filming in one fairly randomly chosen place and then followed wherever the
connections took him. Fashion is the primary linkage, from a rural factory to a
high-concept Paris fashion show, to poor tailors squeezing out a living on
mending threadbare garments. The title “Useless” is the translation of the
latest line by the designer Ma Ke, who while seeming sincere and pleasant,
nevertheless lives in astonishing splendour compared to virtually everyone else
in the film, spouting various airy aphorisms that suggest she’s lost touch. The
title also carries easy resonance beyond that of course. It’s almost impossible
to make a documentary about contemporary China that’s anything other than
fascinating, and Jia provides some fascinating parallels and contrasts while
withholding any overt interpretation (there’s no voice over and only a few
explanatory captions). It’s very worthwhile viewing but I don’t think this is
his most valuable vein: hopefully the next film will again evidence greater
ambition and personal investment.
Chronicle
d’un ete (Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin)
A festival sidebar devoted to Quebec
director Michel Brault provided my first chance to see this famous 1961 cinema verite milestone (on which Brault
acted as one of the cinematographers). It attracted a very sparse audience,
suggesting again that the festival’s great success in galvanizing the
mainstream for ten days doesn’t necessarily serve as the rising tide to lift
the cinematic appetite as a whole. The film is a great time capsule, at times
seeming more naïve than profound now, but yielding numerous fascinating
moments. Starting off by interviewing random passers-by on their degree of
happiness, it evolves into a more probing examination of working class lives
and then into broader vignettes of the 1960 summer. The Algerian war looms
large, and it’s an age when even a relatively young woman could have a
concentration camp ID tattooed on her arm, but we also take in St. Tropez
vacations and amateur rock-climbing attempts. The film comments throughout on
its own making, including an epilogue in which the main participants debate
what we’ve just seen, differing markedly on the degree to which some of them were
“acting” rather than simply being. For all the talk of truth, manipulation (in
the sense of directorial choice, influence, juxtaposition, etc.) is inevitably
prominent throughout, but the earnestness is still engaging. It’s a shame that
something like the Documentary Channel, in between seemingly endless close-up
examinations of the porn industry, can’t make historic material like this more
readily available.
And here are two more I caught up with in
their current commercial release.
In
the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis)
Haggis’ somber drama, an amalgam of
detective story and sorrowful war requiem, is a way better picture than his
Oscar-winning Crash, which I found
almost unwatchable. It also relies too much on coincidence and contrivance: for
instance, Tommy Lee Jones, playing amateur detective, is almost always a step
ahead of the cops on the case. But that helps here to illuminate the overall
theme of eroding American values, particularly in its most cherished
institutions. Jones plays a retired military man who’s probably never
questioned the code in his whole life; one of his two sons died in uniform, and
the other has now disappeared, just days after returning from a tour of duty in
Iraq: military and civilian police fight over jurisdiction, with neither side
seemingly caring. It’s carefully worked out, and although the film has struck
some as being rather plodding, I found the desolate tone – perfectly refracted
through Jones – quite moving. It’s good on the heartland culture too, precisely
deploying drinks and cigarettes and strip joints (and Bibles and Support our
Troops signs), and it dares to suggest that the strategic blunder of Iraq might
have engendered a near-pathology in the troops. A truly great film would have
explored that idea at least a little more directly. The denouement comes in a
bit of a rush, and the final scene (messing with the Stars and Stripes, no
less) is a return to heavy-handed symbolism, but it’s an interesting piece
overall.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik)
That train-length title tells you the
project here: to take a well-established, often-mythologized historical event,
and scrutinize it with an objectivity that eschews normal suspense; as such the
film runs over two and a half hours, and is often deliberately dour. Brad Pitt
is interestingly ambiguous, if as usual a bit too recessive, as Jesse, with
Casey Affleck doing pretty well with Robert Ford’s arc from naïve hero-worship
to spooked self-preservation. But Dominik doesn’t fill this ambitious framework
with anything like enough substance – there’s not a strand, not a ghost of an
idea here, that hasn’t been done better before. Of course that’s true of most
modern movies – it’s a mature art form, what can you expect? – but Dominik’s
apparent pretensions to stand astride the genre invite these comparisons to
come flooding in, causing the film to virtually implode.
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