(originally
published in The Outreach Connection
in September 2001)
This is the first of
Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2001 Toronto film festival
Last Wedding (Bruce Sweeney)
Sweeney’s gala
opener (a brave choice for such a spotlight) tracks the downward spiral of a
young couple’s relationship after their overly impulsive wedding; his two best
friends’ lives are simultaneously on more or less the same track. Although the
details of the three plot strands may differ, there’s not much tonal or
thematic variation to any of it, and the film seems much less rich and
provocative than Sweeney’s Dirty. He
has a taste for actors with low-key styles and just a dash of quirkiness (Molly
Parker is the best-known face, but she’s less interesting than her lesser-known
co-stars, most of whom are excellent) and a penchant for occasional shock
tactics (usually involving sex of course). Sometimes, the combination of the
two creates something quite unpredictable and unsettling. The arc of the main
relationship, from infatuation to open contempt, is thrilling in some ways (the
open contempt, by the way, never seems to completely exclude the possibility of
having sex) but it’s undermined by what seemed to me a patronizing portrayal of
the woman; she’s an aspiring country-rock singer dropped into a movie populated
by white-collar professionals like architects and librarians. On that subject –
there’s something about the line “I’m not a dinosaur, I’m a librarian” that may
stay with me for a while. The film’s weakest point of all is its ending – a
simple period/exclamation mark to cap off events, where you might have hoped at
least for a question mark of some kind.
Animal Love (Ulrich Seidl)
The festival devoted
its “spotlight” section this year to Austrian director Seidl. Of the four films
shown, I caught only this 1995 semi-documentary about a succession of
emotionally, economically or sexually marginal people and their close (and
that’s generally a euphemism) relationship with their pets. The animals –
mostly dogs (some rabbits, no cats) – put up reasonably well for the most part
with their owners’ tactile excesses, which include one scene of man/dog French
kissing and lots of dubious romping on beds. Much of the film is set in drab, confined
settings, with no good-looking people in sight, and most of it is
self-consciously posed, consisting of sad little snapshots of grim lives, or
monologues or confrontations that the camera obviously couldn’t just have
“happened” upon. Some of it though is all too obviously real – like a painful
scene of a dog sinking its teeth into another’s neck and refusing to let go.
One of the subjects says that animals have a higher moral code than humans do
(in another scene, we see this same guy and his wife advertising for sex
partners) but most of these people seem way too needy to afford morals. You
watch it with equal parts empathy and disgust, which is probably exactly the
intent. On the whole though, it’s too narrow an artistic thesis to be of
enormous interest; the film’s exploitative form certainly conveys effectively
the exploitative behaviour of its human subjects, but repetition sets in
awfully early. The movie, thankfully, left me feeling relatively secure about
my relationship with my own dog – although not entirely so.
Ignorant fairies (Ferzan Ozpetek)
A middle-class
doctor finds out that her suddenly-deceased husband had a seven-year love
affair – with another man. Numerous films, like The Daytrippers, have made entertaining diversions out of similar
ideas – Ozpetek belabors it for an entire movie. The woman makes contact with
the lover and gradually gets drawn into his circle – a slice of gay society
that’s portrayed as a colorful cavalcade of conviviality, with people always
dropping in for lunch (there’s also someone with AIDS, a transsexual…everyone
you’d expect). Her immersion in all this doesn’t make much sense except on the
vaguest level of self-discovery, healing and assimilation; the developing
suggestion that she and the lover might themselves get together struck me as
the lamest plotting imaginable. Equally simplistic are the contrast between the
lover’s warm, colorful apartment and her sterile white-walled home, and the
extension of the “liberation” theme to include a much younger man who sets his
sights on her. The lead actress is unusually frosty and glum, and her heavy
touch seemed to me to embalm much of the film. Ozpetek’s The Turkish Bath had danger signs of melodramatic excess; that
adverse promise is sadly realized here. The film’s self-regard is confirmed by
not one but two loving pans along the faces of the group within the last five
minutes, and by the outtakes and on-set footage included with the closing
credits.
Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Kurosawa’s film
initially seems like a fantasy on the false promise of technology, with the
idea of connectivity turned on its head – ghostly websites start to appear on
computer screens, pulling the users into suicidal depression. Later on, the
film becomes broader and more apocalyptic – and also more explicitly
supernatural, which to me meant a lessening of its insinuating power (how many
films by now have created a mythology of portals to the spirit world?) Overall
though it’s the best of the five films reviewed in this article. Concentrating
almost entirely on students and people in their 20s, the film draws excellently
on youthful angst and uncertainty, and its apparent centre keeps shifting:
these are skillful genre mechanics, aided by a brilliantly sustained washed-out
color scheme and a design that locates the fearsome empty spaces even in the
best-lit and most ergonomically friendly environments. At its bleakest, Pulse posits that “ghosts and people are
the same, whether you’re dead or alive,” that there’s no real connection
between any of us, and the film’s heart certainly lies in desolation and
capitulation, regardless that it closes on a plaintive assertion of happiness.
The Business of Strangers (Patrick Stettner)
It’s definitely fair
to summarize this one as a female In the
Company of Men, although it’s more straightforward and the dialogue doesn’t
crackle nearly as much. Stockard Channing is a hard-driving businesswoman who
hooks up on a stopover with Julia Stiles, a low-level assistant that she fired
earlier in the day. The two sort of bond, get drunk, then join together to
humiliate a headhunter who may once have raped a friend of Stiles’. The movie
is dark and moderately potent in contrasting economic and sexual concerns and
neuroses, finding affinities and enmities between the two women in equal
measure. For example, Channing’s economic upper-hand is overturned when she
identifies Stiles as “privileged little brat” who’s never had to work for
anything, and whose attitude is rooted in complacency; her own modest origins
still rankle. By the end the landscape is so confused and fractured that
conclusions are hard to draw; the movie may be overstating the inherent
interest and novelty value of the premise that women can be as multi-layered as
men. It’s dramatically pretty satisfying though on the whole, and at 84 minutes
it's nicely concise. Channing and Stiles are both excellent.
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