(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2005)
This is the second
of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2005 Toronto Film Festival.
Water (Deepa Mehta)
This was the
opening Gala this year, beating out the new Egoyan and Cronenberg entries. It’s
the third film in Mehta’s “Elemental Trilogy” – the previous two were Fire and Earth, neither of which left any impression on me at all. Since
then she’s made Bollywood Hollywood,
a truly terrible film, and the unappreciated The Republic Of Love (which
I didn’t see). Water is about the
mistreatment of women in 1940’s India, first married off at startlingly young
ages, and then – when their husbands die on them –internally banished to an
ashram for widows; based on what’s shown here, the only practical role men
might ever allow a widow to fill is that of whore. This is all rooted in Hindu
dogma, but as one character says, disguised as religion, it’s just about
money...having one less mouth to feed.
It’s powerful
material, and makes for Mehta’s best film. She went through a lot to make it.
The film originally started production in 2000 in India, but filming was shut
down after mass protests; the director received death threats and was burned in
effigy (it was ultimately shot in Sri Lanka).
Still, respect for Mehta’s commitment cannot dismiss the fact that the
film is still significantly flawed by her excessively linear sensibility.
Bizarre as this might sound from any synopsis of the plot, it often feels
somewhat sugarcoated, with a sappily portrayed love affair powering much of the
plot mechanics. It has some moments of considerable tragedy, but Mehta doesn’t
bring much tonal variation to events, blunting their impact both as drama and –
more significantly – as politics. The cameo at the end by an actor playing
Gandhi also seemed to me rather fanciful. It’s a handsome and engrossing work,
not unworthy of its high-profile status, but it’s hard to align oneself
wholeheartedly with the general wild enthusiasm it’s received.
The Well (Kristian Petri)
I subscribe to the
critical orthodoxy on Orson Welles’ Citizen
Kane – it’s one of my favourite films. As everyone says, it has immense
stylistic imagination and confidence and always seems boundlessly energetic,
but there’s something almost supernatural to its scope – it’s more closely
rooted (we now know) in Welles’ own psyche and destiny than he could possibly
have appreciated at the time, and performs a more effective biopsy on a certain
strand of 20th century culture than a young man should have been
capable of. Whenever I watch the aging Kane stagnating in his vast collection
of artifacts, his youthful exuberance collapsing into helpless intransigence, I
can’t help thinking of Welles’ subsequent career; with its countless unfinished
projects and restless shifts of focus, his unquestionable air of majesty,
figuratively and physically over spilling all normal boundaries, toppling over
(often knowingly, it seems) into bitter comedy. The imagery of artistic and
personal gluttony hangs heavily over him, but to see him only in those terms
obscures the delicacy, radicalism and considerable poignancy of his work.
Some of Welles’
uncompleted films are as famous as other directors’ masterpieces – The Other Side Of The Wind, and Don Quixote, which he shot on and off in
Spain in the 1950’s. In The Well,
documentary filmmaker Kristian Petri posits himself as a successor to Thompson,
the investigating reporter in Kane,
traveling through Spain in search of the secret of Welles’ love for the country
(he shot several films there in addition to Quixote,
paid extended visits throughout his life, and decreed in his will that his
ashes be buried in the titular well, located in a famous bullfighter’s private
garden) and perhaps of greater insight into the director’s fragmented career.
As he freely admits in his voiceover, the most compelling parallel may be
between Petri’s dawdling, travelogue-like approach to this project, and Welles’
almost compulsive inability to knuckle down and finish anything (vividly
described here by Jess Franco, his assistant for a time, and later himself the
antithesis of Welles as a mega-prolific genre director). Petri comes across as
naively earnest, ultimately concluding (underwhelmingly, obviously) that Welles
was “a riddle with no conclusive answer’; he also blows his film’s most
attainable prospect of true distinction by failing to show us very much of the
copious recently unearthed footage shot by Welles in Spain. Even the legendary Quixote is seen here only in a few
grainy fragments.
Still, the film is
fascinating for all those who revere Welles. He was fascinated by bullfighting,
and occasionally thought of making a movie about it, captivated in particular
by the tragedy of its structure, exemplified by the bull’s central “innocence.”
Ultimately, he concluded that a film on the subject could “never outstrip
reality...it would merely degrade it.” Which resonates with so much of Welles’
work, built around characters of extreme, wanton flaws and yet unquestionable
grandeur, observed with perhaps the most tender, intricate tenderness in all of
cinema.
L’Enfer (Danis Tanovic)
This
is Tanovic’s first film since winning the foreign film Oscar for No Man’s Land, based on a script that
might have been destined for Krzysztof Kieslowski (of The Decalogue and the Three
Colours trilogy), had he lived. It’s an overstuffed melodrama, tracking the
anguish of three sisters; one with a cheating husband, another in a hopeless
love affair, the third simply unfulfilled and hollow. The theme of absent or
errant fathers is central to the structure, with past errors and betrayals
replayed from one generation to the next. And the women react in turn,
sometimes by tying down the hatches and doing all possible to hold steady, but
sometimes more drastically. As one of the three makes clear in a presentation
on Medea: “under extreme pressure
women will ultimately explode...and children end up in pieces.” Add all of that together, and it seems that
modern life must be a hell indeed.
I
watched Kieslowki’s Red/White/Blue
again recently, and came away uncertain that the director for all his ambition
possessed a very coherent theory of modern existence. But he created
astonishing networks of allusion and connection, was thrillingly alert to the
currents in modern Europe, and was subtle enough in his evocation of the divine
and the mystical that it never seemed utterly contrived. By comparison, L’Enfer, although beautifully made in a
formal sense, seems much more conventional and ingratiating. Tom Tykwer also
took on left over Kieslowski material a few years ago with Heaven, and produced an oddly distant, academic work. Tanovic does
a warmer and subtler job, but it surely seems simpler in this version than the
wily old master would have allowed.
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