(originally
published in The Outreach Connection
in October 2001)
This is the fifth of
Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2001 Toronto film festival
Warrior of Light (Monika Treut)
A documentary about
Yvonne de Mello, a well-to-do middle-aged woman who found her calling as a
social activist, working with kids in the slums of Rio. The film functions
mainly through observation: the children are all in terrible shape in one way
or another – sick and malnourished, but also prematurely morally weary and
locked into a wretchedly narrow frame of reference. You’re always aware too
that her efforts can only address the tip of the iceberg. De Mello works
through patient one-on-one nurturing, taking illiterate “savages of the
asphalt” and slowly expanding their resources and possibilities through
techniques as simple as listening to them (in the slums, she says, no one ever
listens). She organizes classes and group events and for some provides medicine
and housing and other fundamentals. The film sometimes verges on hagiographic –
it lets de Mello use grandiose phrases like “you build mechanisms to survive”
even in describing what she did to fit in at school. And by concentrating so
closely on the kids, the film provides only a limited sense of the
institutional battles and personal unpopularity that de Mello speaks to the
camera about. It’s generally unremarkable in its technique. But moments like
the 11-year-old girl, living in a home that can’t even afford a table, saying with
deep conviction that “it’s bad to have children,” are always moving.
The Son’s Room (Nanni Moretti)
Moretti’s films are
as understated and modest as the man himself seems to be – they prod gently and
quizzically at their subjects, but you don’t feel that any major possibilities
have been sold short. His new movie (a surprise winner at Cannes) deals with
the reaction of a psychiatrist (played by the director) and his family to the
death of a son. As is his custom, Moretti avoids many of the most obviously
dramatic moments (such as the death itself) and finds an alternative route
around the story, rooted in the quiet moments that illuminate the inner pain.
The comic touches are muted on this occasion, confined mainly to scenes of
Moretti’s patients and his ever-decreasing interest in them. Detractors might
claim, not without validity, that Moretti takes this approach because he’s not
up to creating scenes that lie outside his prevailing modest register. The film
is pretty conventional in many respects, and I think the Cannes award was much
too kind. And yet, it has an exquisite final passage, in which a passing
incident from the son’s short life provides a way to closure, and the grieving
family finally starts to rediscover its lost spontaneity and capacity for
reinvention.
Hearts in Atlantis (Scott Hicks)
How many movies end
with the hero recalling in voice-over how that long-ago summer marked the end
of his childhood, gave him a new sense of the world, etc.? The key event in
this particular chronicle is an encounter with an aging psychic, on the run
from mysterious pursuers, who holes up in the kid’s small town. Such material
would need extraordinary handling to avoid redundancy and ridiculousness, but
director Hicks films Stephen King’s book as though it were the Dead Sea
Scrolls. Every moment is probed and prodded for spiritual revelation – the
overkill expended on such silly stuff strikes me as a real insult to the
audience. Still, I thought the same thing about the similar King-based movie The Green Mile, and lots of people loved
that – so they may buy into this one too. The psychic is played by Anthony
Hopkins, who’s all but wearing a “Slumming” sign on his chest; the boy’s mother
is Hope Davis, whose perpetual suspicion of Hopkins’ proclivity for hanging
around kids is one of the film’s few points of psychological interest. At
various points the movie has the potential for interesting social history, but
that would require a clearer focus than Hearts
in Atlantis ever summons. The only bright point for Hicks is that the
general idiocy renders this film less boring than his last adaptation, Snow Falling on Cedars.
Enigma (Michael Apted)
A World War Two
drama built around the breaking of a vital secret Nazi code, with a
mathematician hero and a femme fatale lurking in the background of the action.
The film is an odd amalgamation of elegant, unconventional plotting and
shopworn stiff upper lip stuff, and it’s often hard to know whether its
frequent confusion and lackluster pace are deliberate or not. The heart of the
subject matter involves numbers on a page, endlessly scrutinized for their
hidden meaning, and the film at its most intriguing finds a style that echoes
this insular, obsessive heart. One example might be how it seems almost to
neutralize much of its own drama: at both points when the hero makes his
greatest deductive leaps, the cops are already there ahead of him. Or perhaps
that too is just an example of poor design. At least the movie is intelligent
enough that you can’t tell for sure (maybe one cuts it too much slack for being
written by Tom Stoppard). The action is all extremely modest and old-fashioned –
seldom going much beyond stealing secret files from cabinets, although near the
end a U-boat surfaces in a Scottish loch. The definite oddity of the project is
reinforced by a once in a lifetime producing credit: Produced by Lorne Michaels
and Mick Jagger.
This Japanese film
is an utterly distinctive chronicle of a newly unemployed man who travels to a
small town in search of hidden treasure. He takes a job as a fisherman and
falls in with a local woman who has an unusual condition: when she orgasms, she
gushes out vast amounts of water (which, when it trickles down to the river,
energizes the fish). It’s immediately clear from this synopsis that the film
has a mythic or fantastic quality to it – the wonder is that it also feels
utterly contemporary and relevant. The film sketches a multiplicity of private
worlds – an old woman lost in memories of a lost lover, an African runner who’s
chosen this bizarre setting for marathon training – and crafts its characters
and incidents with great delicacy, but no sentimentality or smugness. Imamura’s
beautiful widescreen compositions bring a classical framing and balance to
things as mundane as supermarket shelves and piles of garbage. His thematic
scheme is wide enough to make room for local stories, a detour into quantum
physics, and a certain amount of raunchy sex. Unpredictability itself may be a
large part of the design (even at the end, it’s introducing new subplots as
quickly as it wraps up others) but it all holds together – this really
illustrates what the idea of a filmic “master” is all about.
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