(originally published in The Outreach Connection in October 2005)
This is the fifth of Jack Hughes’
reports from the 2005 Toronto Film Festival.
A History of Violence (David Cronenberg)
I don’t
really think of myself as a big David Cronenberg fan, but maybe I’m getting
there, because in recent years I’ve watched several of his movies for a second
time. The most rewarding revisit was Crash,
which I’d hated the first time, but which after a few years seemed utterly
fascinating in how it constructs its own language of desire and engagement. In
a way the movie’s impact is based on sheer persistence as much as on its
specific achievements, and the emphasis on celebrity car crashes seems to me to
be making a conventional point about star worship, but overall it’s still a
stunning vision of tragic displacement. People often disparage sex films for
not actually being erotic – but here’s a film that really merits the
distinction: it’s hard to get aroused when the sexuality is so completely about
negation. I don’t quite know how meaningful Crash
may be as a metaphor for anything real, but at the very least it’s one of the
great gloomy fantasies of the age.
His last film
Spider seemed much more self-effacing
than his other films (excepting perhaps his motor racing movie Fast Company, which I’ve never seen),
and as such did perfect service to its peculiar protagonist’s inner world. I
admired it immensely, but unusually for a Cronenberg film I felt I more or less
“got” it at first viewing, which left little reason to want to see it again.
Taken at face value, A History of
Violence seems even more susceptible to this kind of reaction; in most ways
it’s his most classically controlled, seamless film. Viggo Mortensen plays a
small-town diner owner and family man thrown into the media spotlight when he
displays amazing prowess in taking on a couple of out-of-town thugs. The
attention attracts more shady characters, claiming that Mortensen is not who he
says he is, but rather a Philadelphia mob enforcer who disappeared years
earlier. Mortensen maintains his denial, but after another encounter pulls him
into further brutality, his world’s quiet surface further ruptures.
The theme is
in some way obvious – that any appearance of serenity in American life is
inherently built on violence and thus potentially unsustainable. Mortensen’s
performance is masterfully restrained,
allowing any number of interpretations regarding the true extent of his
suppression (his wife is a lawyer and presumably the major breadwinner, and
there are subtle hints that his situation is one of willing emasculation). When
the violence erupts, it’s always with extreme sudden intensity, and Cronenberg
focuses afterwards on details of the bloody aftermath, disrupting the comfortable distance normally
allowed us by generic convention (and providing the film’s most obvious visual links
to his earlier work). A subplot with Mortensen’s son, harassed by a school
bully but finding his own reserves of unsuspected brutality, establishes the
malaise’s recurring nature, how for all the nurturing appearance of family,
it’s as effective in passing down what is suppressed as what is visible.
The film is
generally quiet, eerily precise, conveying the thin line between picture-book
stability and sheer alien despair. And Cronenberg manages to transmit the full
warped power of the mob without tripping over into showy cliché or crass
glamour. At the end of the day, the material remains somewhat predictable, and
the general ideas are in one way or another well covered in contemporary cinema
(Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River is an
especially eloquent recent example). But Cronenberg suggests here an acute
analytical prowess, which could herald an excitingly expansive next phase in
his career.
The
Sun (Aleksandr Sokurov)
Sokurov’s film (the third in a
series of studies of twentieth century power, with Lenin and Hitler already
covered) is a fairly astonishing dramatization of Japan’s Emperor Hirohito at
the end of World War Two – a time when Japan’s defeat is clear, and he must be
the medium for its enforced transition into the modern world; but by virtue of
his officially divine status and intensely isolated existence can barely
comprehend the task before him. The Emperor’s life mingles ritual meetings with
personal diversions (such as studying marine biology) that, while on one level
banal, express his intense inner meditation on his status. The film is composed
primarily of ghostly yellow – there are virtually no other primary colours on
the screen – and frequently carries the visual and aural texture of science
fiction; the evocation of Hiroshima and subsequently of the devastated Japan
are simply overwhelming. Ultimately, the Emperor reaches a determination that
marks both a personal deliverance, and the spiritual death of the nation that
he embodied. The film’s Americans by contrast appear flippantly certain of
their entitlement to the modern world. The film is a wholly convincing
psychological evocation, and simultaneously a supernatural postulate of immense
dimensions, with a uniquely ominous governing tone; it may be one of the major
works of recent years.
Everlasting
Regret (Stanley Kwan)
I’ve only
seen one of Kwan’s films – Lan Yu,
which played at the 2001 festival. That one was mainly interesting for its very
existence – an unabashed gay love story, Chinese style, encompassing
full-frontal nudity and relatively little angst. It carried off its chosen
project so successfully that I felt it could have accommodated greater ambition
(although I may not be fully aware of what it took to get the film made at
all). Kwan’s most famous film is the earlier Actress, which I haven’t seen. His new film sees him in lush
melodramatic mode, tracking a former Miss Shanghai from the 1940’s to the 70’s,
registering partners that come and go in her own life and those around her,
incidents of joy and sadness, with regret (particularly for a separated best
friend) serving as the predominant emotion. It initially moves very quickly,
almost to the point of narrative shorthand, then later slows down a little,
while continuing to leap across decades and major incidents. Political events
register primarily as points of emotional demarcation – actions rooted in free
will intertwine with those imposed by institutional or other circumstance, into
a barely differentiated whirl of incident.
This is all
shot in a knowingly artificial, pastel mode, almost all in interiors; an
initial preponderance of social events such as dances and high living yields to
the staid (but not embalmed) rhythms of middle age. As with classic Hollywood
melodramas, the style appears inherently political in exposing the cracks
permeating the official version of Chinese history, although I think the
official version may now be sufficiently discredited that the project can only
arouse so much interest. I found the film watchable, but not of great weight –
Kwan’s style seemed to me too undifferentiated, resulting in a narrow
intellectual and emotional impact. I will admit though that of all the films I
saw at the festival this year, this is the one where I most wonder whether I
just didn’t get it.
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