This is the third
of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2005 Toronto Film Festival.
Three Times (Hou
Hsiao-hsien)
In my preview
article I said that this film by Taiwanese director Hou might be the prime
event of the festival, and it may well have lived up to that expectation. It’s
made up of three episodes, each starring the same two actors. The first, set in
the 1960’s, is a delicate examination of the gradually established love between
two young people in sparse circumstances. In the second, in 1910, the setting
is a high-class brothel, for an equally well-observed study of emotions, but
carrying a more fragmented outcome; this episode is filmed silently, with
intertitles, which is both an experiment in cinematic form and an evocation of
the restraint of the age. In the third story, set in present day Taipei (among
so much else, the film tracks Taiwan’s growing urbanization), cell phones and
text messages have replaced letters; the content of what’s conveyed has become
transient and disposable; and the relationships themselves have become coarse-edged
and self-serving (when the conversation is silent in this episode, it’s because
it’s drowned out by loud music). The film might thus have been designed largely
to show up contemporary society, but Hou’s approach is too nuanced to traffic
in easy attitudinizing. Three Times
is full of parallels and echoes, and is exquisitely constructed and
manufactured; the overall trajectory of each story is clear, but each retains
considerable mystery; each forms a mini social critique of the times. After
this and his last film Cafe Lumiere,
it seems possible that Hou is stripping down his film’s complexities and
becoming more purely a humanist, albeit a very specifically Taiwanese one, and
this should surely cause his audience and popular stature to increase, although
to the extent that this ultimately renders him more conventional, there is
something to regret in the evolution too.
Why We Fight (Eugene
Jarecki)
In his final
Presidential speech in 1961, Dwight Eisenhower chose to focus not on patriotic
platitudes, but on a specific and pointed warning about the US
military-industrial complex, and on the crucial role of an “alert and
responsible citizenry” in tempering its potentially reckless evolution. Forty
years later, all of Eisenhower’s presumed fears have been realized: an out of
control military budget directed through cozy if not wantonly corrupt
political-corporate affiliations; complacent media; an ideologically-driven,
arrogant administration (especially post 9/11) that launches a war of such hazy
rationale and stated benefits that you ask ten people what it’s all for and get
ten different answers. Jarecki’s hard-hitting, enormously effective documentary
sets out all of this in straightforward nuts-and-bolts terms. It’s obviously a
spiritual cousin to Fahrenheit 911,
but with a total absence of showboating. Among the possible objections to it
are, well, a lack of balance (although I’m only throwing that one out in my own
attempt at balance) and perhaps a little too much time spent on the personal
testimony of a retired cop who lost a son on 9/11, supported the war in Iraq to
the extent of petitioning the Army to have his son’s name painted on the side
of a bomb, and then suffered a cataclysmic meltdown of faith as the official
story crashed and burned. The film’s final grim reckoning is spoken by one of
the bewildered Iraqis: “America will lose because its behaviour is not the
behaviour of a great nation.”
Delicate Crime (Beto
Brant)
This Brazilian
film was one of my wild card selections – I went into it not even remembering
the programme book synopsis. It’s a work
of art of a kind that reminds you how easy and ingratiating even the more
‘demanding’ films can be. Initially it seems to be about a theatre critic – a
man “who has always lived life in the third person” – and his faltering
relationship with the off-stage world, but it slowly shifts its focus to a
one-legged woman with whom he falls in love, and the artist who uses her as a
model. The film reflects on the relative ethics of physical and artistic
violation, and the degree to which the motives and self-exposure (physical,
emotional, aesthetic) of the perpetrator might condition one’s judgment of the
action. Ultimately art surpasses life in the film’s scheme to the degree that
it sees no need to resolve the critic’s story – he is last seen lost in a stark
process beyond his control, while the model attains a nobility that initially
appeared impossible. The film feels a little academic at times, but on the
whole I count it as one of those classic, unexpected festival discoveries.
Takeshis’ (Takeshi Kitano)
In that same
preview article I said that Takeshis’
“sounds potentially self-indulgent, but should at least be highly entertaining
about it.” I’d say that was just about right again. This is Kitano’s 8 1/2, with the star playing both
himself and a guy behind a grocery store counter who wants to be an actor. The
movie goes off in all directions, with dream sequences within dream sequences
within dream sequences, at times dizzily surreal, and at others seeming rather
beautiful in how it strips conventional plot mechanics down to an absurdly
elemental framework. Apart from Fellini, it at various points evokes Godard for
its relentless deconstruction, and David Lynch (for a bunch of stuff I don’t
know how to explain). The film is not really a great advance for Kitano after Dolls and Zatoichi (at various points, it’s like watching bits of those
movies again, along with bits of everything else he’s ever made) – it has the
air of something he wanted to get out of his system, and although it’s formally
very interesting, and admirable for its pace and tenacity, I’d be very
surprised if it had an independent commercial life ahead of it here.
Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic (Liam Lynch)
I am not much of a
stand-up comedy fan, but even so I don’t mean it as faint praise when I say
that this recording of a show by comedian Sarah Silverman is probably the best
thing I’ve seen in the genre. Silverman ploughs the old “Is there anyone I
haven’t insulted” furrow, gliding through just about every available racial,
sexual and societal taboo, while nevertheless managing still to come across as
a generally nice Jewish girl, and weaving in shots at so many clichéd
middle-class attitudes and responses that at the end you’ll wonder whether
there’s anything left for her to cover. I would give you an example, but
virtually nothing she says can be printed here, and anyway it’s at least 80% in
the delivery. The film lasts only 73 minutes in total, about 20% of which pads
out the main show with musical and other inserts of variable quality. Like so
many others, Silverman has often been stuck in dull mainstream roles (a recent
one was the roommate’s girlfriend in School
Of Rock), although she had one of the more intriguing snippets in The Aristocrats, but come what may, this
should ensure her spiky/vulnerable genius a place in the hall of fame.
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