This is the seventh
of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2005 Toronto Film Festival.
The Matador (Richard Shepherd)
A thin
contrivance that somehow hit the Festival jackpot as a gala presentation, this
under-nourished comedy stars Pierce Brosnan (relishing the opportunity and
almost carrying the picture) as a self-described “psychopathic but not
psychotic” hitman and Greg Kinnear as a struggling businessman who crosses
paths with him in Mexico; as in the recent L’homme
du train, their utter lack of common ground provides the impetus for a
bizarre rapport (although, Brosnan reminds the other, “just because we shared a
laugh doesn’t mean I’m not unsavoury.”) Events later lead to a second meeting,
on Kinnear’s suburban home turf, after Brosnan has fallen on hard times. Most
of the (isolated) laughs come from convoluted Brosnan asides such as: “I look
like a Bangkok hooker on a Sunday morning after the Navy left town” (which, if
you try it out, is much easier to write than to deliver). That aside, the movie
feels very musty – it could almost have been one of the lesser Lemmon-Matthau
comedies (a variation on Buddy Buddy)
and seems at least one rewrite short of completion, particularly as regards the
rushed ending.
L’Enfant (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
The Dardenne
brothers won a second Cannes Golden Palm for their latest film – the first was
for Rosetta in 1999. According to the
programme book, the inspiration for the new film was a young woman who the
directors observed frantically pushing a pram, and their films all convey a
disciplined adherence to documentary-style realism. Their last film The Son gained some amused fame for the
amount of time the camera spent pointing at the back of its protagonist’s head;
it was as scrupulous in following the quotidian details of his work, which is
his self-definition and ultimately a means of redemption for another troubled
character. One gets the impression that the Dardennes would consider
conventional notions of cinematic beauty to be merely frivolous, but the danger
has been that their films might become more interesting as anthropological
exhibits – like staring through the fence into a monastery – than as aesthetic
works. L’Enfant does nothing to
dispel this thought, and since the film’s sociological content is mostly trite,
it generally offers little more than easy entertainment, at which I must say
it’s rather too effective for its own higher-minded good.
The main
character is a young ne’er-do-well, living through petty crime, whose
girlfriend has just given birth to a baby boy; without consulting her, he sells
the child into black market adoption, gets it back when she freaks out, but
then finds himself in serious debt to the thwarted buyers. The character is
portrayed as something of a lovable rogue, but he’s clearly an embodiment of an
ethical and educational environment gone horribly wrong (it’s pretty easy to
decode the duality in the film’s title – the title of The Son worked in much the same way). The social critique has to be
largely inferred though, through such things as the film’s merely minimal trace
of any institutional intervention. It resembles a knowing antithesis to The Son in this regard, and in the way
that the character may be partly adrift because of having nothing better to do;
this is a somewhat conservative stance though, another respect in which the
Dardennes seem to me something less than humanist pioneers. Given that L’Enfant also has a soft, indulgent
ending (although the easily seduced will regard it as redemptive), that second
Palme d’or seems generous indeed.
Mary (Abel Ferrara)
Ferrara’s
fiery movie seems to have one overriding point: Mel Gibson is full of s***.
Although Gibson himself is only mentioned once, it’s impossible to imagine that
Mary would have been made if not for The Passion of the Christ; Ferrara
clearly finds obnoxious the self-righteous authoritarianism that surrounded
that film, and considers Gibson himself merely a narcissist. He dramatizes this
via an arrogant actor-director (played to the hilt by Matthew Modine) whose own
Jesus film is attracting heated protests, and whose co-star (Juliette Binoche)
has undergone a spiritual conversion and moved to Israel. Forest Whitaker plays
a Charlie-Rose like TV interviewer who’s conducting a series of interviews on
the nature of faith (with real-life interviewees, Zelig style); meanwhile he’s cheating on his pregnant wife. The
object lesson is that faith arises out of lived experience and properly takes a
multiplicity of forms; any claim to objective truth is generally repellent on
its own terms and ignores the contradictions in the Gospels and other
historical texts. Ferrara conveys this in a turbulent dialectical manner; some
would see the film as being something of a mess. Echoes of his classic Bad Lieutenant emerge in Whitaker’s
ultimate spiritual agony, but for the most part the film belongs to the sleeker
Ferrara of his later films like The
Blackout and New Rose Hotel. It’s
intriguingly turbulent, and seemingly persuasive as a handy survey of current
theological thinking; on the other hand the project seems inherently rather
petulant.
Entre ses mains (Anne Fontaine)
Fontaine’s
last film Nathalie played the
festival as a gala a couple of years ago. It’s about a woman who facilitates an
affair for her husband, and at times it explores the structure of desire in
subtle ways; the closing twist though couldn’t be more clearly signposted, and
the film suffers from distinct repetition and artistic narrowness. Nathalie stars Fanny Ardant, Gerard
Depardieu and Emmanuelle Beart, perhaps an inappropriately prestigious cast in
the circumstances, making the movie’s small virtues seem like water off their
plush backs. Fontaine’s new film uses much less high profile actors, and
achieves far greater success. It’s about a young married insurance claims
officer who becomes involved with a vet – initially he seems quirky and his
attention to her is diverting, but his idiosyncrasies gradually become
disturbing, perhaps to the point of identifying him as the serial killer who’s
terrorizing the town. Nothing very new to that outline perhaps, except the
woman’s profession, and that seems significant: insurance’s function as a
mitigator of risk and accidents illuminates the film’s examination of
contrasting (but of course also interconnected) emotional strategizing. He
avoids his pain by spreading his relations thin; she seeks to hedge the
predictability of her generally happy marriage. This premise becomes darker and
darker, so that what starts as a light observational diversion becomes
intensely primal and traumatized. Entre
ses mains suggests that Fontaine is capable of major work, although the
thesis of this particular film, despite its exemplary execution, ultimately
feels just a little too narrow for it to be categorized as that.
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