(originally published in The Outreach Connection in October 2005)
This is the fourth of Jack Hughes’
reports from the 2005 Toronto Film Festival.
Le
temps qui reste (Francois Ozon)
Ozon’s 5 X2, rather to my surprise, was one of
my favourite films at last year’s festival. It’s the story of a relationship
told in five sequences, the structural innovation being that they run in
reverse order. The film’s intrigue is in Ozon’s near-incredulity at the
possibility that such relationships might exist at all, and in how he
consequently renders events calmly but ineluctably strange; among other things,
it may have provided last year’s most astringently gay perspective on a
predominantly straight world (Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education, although much more widely praised, seemed to me
merely gauche by comparison).
Ozon has
seemed for a while to be aiming for the top of the heap of European directors.
He’s extremely variable and resourceful, moving from the black comedy of Sitcom to the hermetic Fassbinder
tribute Water Falls On Burning Rocks
to the allusive and mysterious Under The
Sand to the contrived delight of 8
Women. Somehow his work nevertheless seems to be all of a piece, held
together by a wry skepticism at bourgeois assumptions. His new film Le Temps qui reste demonstrates all his
proficiency, but is probably only a minor addition to the canon. It’s about an
abrasive young photographer who receives a diagnosis of terminal cancer,
decides to forego treatment, and spends his remaining time sifting the elements
of his life – he breaks up with his boyfriend, reconciles with his sister, pays
a touching visit to his grandmother, and so forth. There’s also a somewhat
bizarre out-of-nowhere plotline that serves to reconcile his ambivalent view of
his own childhood, and to deliver him to an ultimate state of benevolence and
acceptance.
The film has some of Ozon’s most
overt homosexual content, but he’s content on this occasion to work within
familiar ideological and emotional structures – the character’s personal
journey is conventional, and the film is accessibly even-toned. None of this undermines its emotional impact
– scene by scene, it’s exceptionally well judged. But I saw it the day after
watching a pair of other French films - Gentille
and Un couple parfait – that
provided, between the two of them, as much enjoyment but a higher dose of
subtle subversion and technical provocation. By comparison, Ozon’s film simply
seemed minor. He’s so smart though that this is probably part of a deliberate
strategy, to establish his mastery of all points on the spectrum: his next film
will probably kick us hard, where it hurts.
Lie
With Me (Clement Virgo)
Virgo’s film was preceded by
advance buzz about its daring - the
programme book calls it a “distaff version of Last Tango In Paris”. It follows a young Toronto woman through a
series of sexual encounters (linked by instantly forgettable other stuff),
eventually focusing on her fraught relationship with a particular guy. The
movie is shot in a ramshackle, drifting, close-up style, and this is
occasionally successful in complementing the protagonist’s turbulent psyche –
it also benefits immeasurably from the fearless central performance by Lauren
Lee Smith. But on the whole it’s a superficial thing, unable to put these
elements to any even quasi-profound purpose. The character’s inner thoughts,
captured in voice over, are somewhat less than revelatory – for example: “I
didn’t know how to love him. All I knew what to do was f***. It’s not enough to
f***.” As for the sex, it’s at least more convincing than anything in Atom
Egoyan’s new movie, but not very interesting for anyone aware of recent trends
in European films. The movie does however attain a certain distinction from
setting these goings-on against such familiar settings as Dundas Square and the
Annex, which serve as compelling insurance against viewing any of it as being
remotely glamorous.
06/05:
The Sixth Of May (Theo van Gogh)
Theo van Gogh achieved his
greatest fame in death, when he was shot in Amsterdam last year, apparently in
response to numerous provocative statements on Islam. His films were not well
known outside the Netherlands – I had only seen one of them, and it wasn’t at
all memorable (I do recall it had something to do with phone sex). His last
film takes off from the other high profile Dutch shooting of recent times –
Presidential candidate Pim Fortuyn, who was killed in 2002, ten days before he
might well have won the election. The film posits that a photographer,
happening to be close to the scene, starts to string things together in All The President’s Men style, although
(this being thirty years later) with more technological panache. Events move
along zippily enough, but I will confess to not following all of the links, nor
even fully comprehending where matters end up. I don’t think this is just my
problem either – there’s not much sign that Van Gogh had his eye on an international
audience here, and in any event his direction is fairly run-of-the-mill. There
seems to be a vague attempt to embody some of Fortuyn’s signature issues and
complexities in the narrative; for example, the anti-immigration stance
inherent in his declaration that “Holland is full,” modified by his distance
from the far right that’s generally associated with such stances, is echoed here
in several inter-racial relationships, and perhaps also (maybe more
insidiously) in the deceptions engineered by one of the immigrant characters.
Intriguing as that is though, it’s far less resonant than any of the footage of
Fortuyn that’s interspersed through the film.
All
Souls (numerous directors)
Van Gogh’s death itself gave rise
to a festival film, a compilation of short segments by 17 Dutch filmmakers, all
linked more or less explicitly (for a non-Dutch viewer it’s not always easy to
know which) to his murder on November 2, 2004 (coincidentally, but with a
macabre artistic utility, the date of the last US election). As with most
exercises of this kind, the approaches vary widely, from symbolic fantasy to
erotic reverie to documentary to faux documentary to absurdist comedy to gentle
observation to impressionistic collage; the most common theme is the difficulty
of accommodating diversity and accepting societal evolution, without inhibiting
free speech and while accommodating “tradition” (at least partly a xenophobic
construct). The quality, in truth, averages out at the lower end of the
spectrum – in particular, this isn’t much of a showcase for the Dutch sense of
humour, although the best sequence, an evocation of an Amsterdam terrorized by
a mysterious cloud, yields the punch line (an effective one, in context) that
it was all caused by an old woman emptying her vacuum cleaner bag off her
apartment balcony. Highs and lows aside, the film ably communicates the immense
trauma of the event; it’s not analytical so much as bereft and woebegone,
circling round Van Gogh’s departed spirit as if in the forlorn hope of
effecting his return.
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