(originally published in The Outreach Connection in October 2005)
This is the eighth
of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2005 Toronto Film Festival.
Les Amants reguliers (Philippe Garrel)
In my preview
article I noted I'd never seen any of Garrel’s films, and was looking
forward to remedying that here; the anticipation only grew after he won the
Best Director award for this film at the Venice film festival (which ends
during the first weekend of the Toronto fest). Regular Lovers is a long film (just under three hours) and I won’t
claim that you don’t feel that length, but it’s a rewarding experience. The
protagonist is a young poet (played by Garrel’s own son Louis), initially at
the centre of the 1968 agitation – we see him burning cars, resisting the
police, and ultimately evading capture after a long, skin-of-his-teeth chase.
At this point he has every potential for cultural and political distinction,
but this slowly dissipates; he lives with several like-minded friends in a
large house owned by a rich friend, smoking drugs and languishing, and then he
meets a woman with whom he falls in love, but whose presence only seems to
increase his stasis (someone says that they are “losing the revolution
indoors”). Despite the reciprocity of her love for him, her trajectory is much
more familiar and coherent, leading to an inevitable outcome. The film is shot
in luminous black and white, and it generally maintains a narrow tonal
register; although the plot includes free love, the presentation is extremely
chaste by contemporary standards (the only sex we ever see is on a package of
dirty playing cards). This gives it a melancholy, repressed quality that’s
effective in evoking the unfulfilled underpinnings of what might otherwise seem
(as it did, for example, in Bertolucci’s The
Dreamers, which also starred Louis Garrel) as a lush wet dream of a
lifestyle); the girl says at one point, a propos of nothing in particular,
“It’s unbelievable, the solitude in every man’s heart,” and it’s this solitude,
immune to all genres of revolutionary provocation, that ultimately claims the
movie. Director Garrel (who lived much of this, and was in a long relationship
with iconic singer Nico) certainly indulges himself here, and I find it
difficult to make much of a guess as to what sense of him might emerge from
viewing his more than twenty earlier works, but Regular Lovers at least was one of the highlights of the festival
for me.
The Notorious Bettie Page (Mary
Harron)
This
sweet-natured account of 50’s pin-up queen Page is intended as a “celebration”
of her life, and so it is – it’s hard to imagine a more benign treatment of
once-inflammatory material. Page was an aspiring actress who started doing
glamour shots on the side and gravitated first to “tasteful” nudity and then to
S&M, 50’s style (per the film at least, she was only incidentally troubled
by, or even aware of, the use that male purchasers might have been making of
this material). Meanwhile, she went to acting classes, using thoughts of Jesus
for inner motivation. Gretchen Mol is very good as Bettie, achieving a complete
immersion in the character; as someone puts it, she’s consistently successful
in spending half the film nude without ever looking naked. The movie dramatizes
anti-smut Senate hearings – soberly and diligently allowing the testimony of a
grieving father who attributes his son’s death to the photographs’ influence –
and has a vivid period flavour, but there’s not much sociological ambition on
display here, and it ultimately feels like coasting for Harron (who was in more
dialectical mode with her earlier films I
Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho)
– the feminist angle is simply that regardless of what porn meant for women in
the longer term, Bettie’s career made sense to her, and that’s all anyone needs
to know. It’s not that I take issue with this...it’s just that it’s kind of
limited. Unlike most biopics, there’s no end note on what happened to Bettie
after she ended her career – the final mark of what might actually be an
over-respectful treatment of her.
The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang)
When you’re
seeing three or four films a day for ten days, you probably treat some of them
less kindly than you should, and I’ve always thought I was too snippy two years
ago about Tsai’s Goodbye Dragon Inn.
Subsequently I’ve read many great accounts of it, and the programme book at the
time said it had “the shape of an entrancing,
wordless vision.” I wrote it had “just the shape of one, with the feeling of an
absent centre.” This was surprising since I’d loved Tsai’s previous film, What Time Is It There, which I often
found virtually hypnotic. And recently I rewatched his early movie Rebels of the Neon God, a film utterly
anchored in a specific time and culture, with an aching identification for the
people it follows, and at the same time utterly timeless, cultivating a
transcendently perverse deadpan sensibility.
Tsai
is simply a terrific director. But the journey from Rebels to Dragon Inn
illustrates a diminishing interest in the contours of the real world, and this
perhaps troubling trajectory takes a further leap with The Wayward Cloud. The new film also ups the ante considerably on
sexual explicitness, often to the extent of seeming rather callow and tawdry,
but it comes together at the end with immense, unnerving authority. It’s
another desolate urban landscape, apparently with no running water (meaning
that bottled water litters virtually every scene) but with a surfeit of
watermelons, the erotic possibilities of which are juicily seized. The film is
a triangle of sorts, with a male porn actor at the centre, his female
co-actress at the other, and at the other a restrained young woman with whom he
develops a tentative mutual attraction.
The
film is full of images of displaced, warped sexuality, often immensely
well-conceived, and also (as in Tsai’s film The
Hole) incorporates various throwback musical numbers that through their
colour and panache further underline the wretchedness of the real world. But
the implications of all this seem familiar, circling round well-marked
territory, with the new relish for sexual excess serving as the only
(questionable) point of advancement. But then there’s the ending. which is
gripping, horrible, sick and nihilistic, all of which in the circumstances I’m
offering up as a compliment; it ensures that the film leaves more chilling an
after-effect than any of his previous works. Overall, in truth, I enjoyed this
garish work more than the objectively superior Goodbye Dragon Inn. But Tsai pulls it off only by the skin of his
teeth, and he is desperately in need of a new preoccupation.
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