(originally
published in The Outreach Connection in September 2006)
This is the first
of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival.
When the Levees Broke (Spike Lee)
I actually saw
this on TMN before the festival, in installments, but I’m glad the programmers
allowed a space for it on the big screen, where it must have been overwhelming.
Over four hours, Lee constructs a detailed, often anguished account of
Hurricane Katrina, built primarily on the testimony of those who lived through
it, who lost their homes or family members, or were dislocated, or left crushed
by the inadequacy of the response at all levels. The documentary footage, of
course, is hard to process; the frailty of human infrastructure has never been
established so cruelly. Lee’s approach is sober and meticulous, nailing all the
salient points about FEMA and Bush and insurance companies (who are subject to
some particularly damning testimony) and the local authorities, but never
overplaying it, always returning quickly to the human consequences - it’s
conspicuously short on the moments of optimism that normally pepper such
documentaries. Six months or more after the disaster, vast areas remain
unreclaimed, bodies continue to be found, and victims languish wherever they
were dropped down (often without regard to family unity), and although the
Mayor talks about rebuilding New Orleans, there’s no sense that the
institutional willpower exists for such a task. For a director often regarded
as flashy and bombastic, Lee is amazingly restrained here, and his film soars
on that sorrowful maturity.
Belle toujours
(Manoel de Oliveira)
De Oliveira,
believe it or not, is 98 years old. His films don’t get shown much outside the
film festival, but I very much enjoyed his Je
rentre a la maison a few years ago (made when he was a mere 93) – it was
clearly self-referential, but with an entrancing sense of ethicism and elegance
(and a funny contrivance about a phenomenally miscast film of Joyce’s Ulysses). The new film is a homage and
quasi-sequel to Belle de Jour,
dedicated to its creators Luis Bunuel and Jean-Claude Carriere, with two of the
main characters meeting again forty years later (Michel Piccoli reprises his
original role, and Bulle Ogier replaces Catherine Deneuve, quite effectively).
De Oliveira isn’t as elegant or as wicked a filmmaker as Bunuel, but his more
static style suits the premise of personal demons relaxed by age, and he does
work in a couple of images and ideas weird enough to suggest that the old
surrealist’s spirit may momentarily have taken over. At other times, in truth,
the film just seems a little off (it has, for one thing, the least persuasive
prostitutes in recent cinema, not that I didn’t find them rather charming).
Much of it though is silent and contemplative, so that the homage is most
persuasive at the broad conceptual level, when it merely conveys the
contentment of observing something (or someone) of abiding beauty.
Fantasma
(Lisandro Alonso)
This is Alonso’s
third film; at the time of his second, Los
Muertos, the festival programme book called him “one of the most talented
and visionary filmmakers to emerge from the New Argentine Cinema movement.”
Difficult to assess exactly how huge a compliment that might be, but Los Muertos struck me as somewhat
academic, although well sustained. Fantasma
is built around a premiere screening of Los
Muertos, with the lead actor and virtually no one else attending. The event
is framed by various mundane activities within the somewhat run down building
complex. In subject and execution, the film is an elevation of cinema,
insisting on the fascination inherent in marginal events and on the privileged
nature of our spectatorship; and Alonso’s willingness to place his own previous
film in such a desultory light shows some laconic amusement at the ultimate
stature of the cinematic artist. Having said that, the “vision” here is limited
and insular, and the film yields nothing that hasn’t been amply implemented
elsewhere. As if it wasn’t already divorced enough from externalities, Fantasma is also (per the programme
book) a “devoted homage” to Tsai Ming-Liang’s Good Bye, Dragon Inn, prompting the thought that Alonso’s next film
desperately needs to be about anything
other than cinema itself.
The Caiman
(Nanni Moretti)
Moretti’s movies
are generally as understated and modest, and yet as slyly impactful, as the man
himself seems to be, prodding gently and quizzically at their subjects, without
leaving you feeling any major possibilities have been sold short. For much of
its length though I wondered if The
Caiman was equal to his usual standard. It’s about Silvio Berlusconi, only
recently deposed as Italian Prime Minister after a long, incredibly
controversial tenure; filtered through the device of a movie producer, down on
his personal and professional luck, who’s trying to finance a young director’s
film about the Great Man. In many ways, it’s Moretti’s most conventional work;
the family dynamics and comic set-ups are distinctly short on the grace notes
we expect from him, and they frequently overwhelm the film’s political core.
The tone often seems rather resigned, as if implicitly accepting the opinion
delivered by Moretti himself (in a cameo where he’s offered and turns down the
lead role in the film within the film) that there’s nothing new to say about
Berlusconi, and merely lurching on for the sake of it. But it all seems much
cannier in light of the complacency-busting finale, where the framing story
falls apart, the gloves come off, and Moretti makes the extent of Berlusconi’s
assault on democracy almost frighteningly clear.
Coeurs (Alain Resnais)
In my preview
article, I highlighted the 84-year-old Resnais’ new film as probably the one I
was most looking to overall. Not that his films have necessarily been among my
favourites, but I bow before any octogenarian who continues to experiment,
particularly when the most recent results have actually been rather sweet. Coeurs is in many ways one of his most
straightforward films, with six unfulfilled characters connecting in various
mostly unfulfilling ways (it’s based on an Alan Ayckbourn play, with the
illustrative title Private Fears in
Public Places). The tone is mostly quiet, refracted through a gauzy,
sometimes almost abstracted image quality and a recurring motif of falling
snow. There are no exterior scenes, and indeed the search for a satisfactory
living space is a key theme - as if one’s inner lack might be externalized and
conquered through structure and furniture (the film’s most devout character,
and possessor of its most astonishing hidden depths, describes the human quest
as being to avoid damnation by trying to pull the hellfire out of ourselves).
Resnais expertly blends the film’s depressing connotations into a strangely
beguiling surface, one that sometimes quivers with melancholy; he’s well aided
by wonderful acting, mostly by actors who’ve worked with him many times before.
My hopes for this film were higher than my expectations, but it’s pleasing to
report that hope triumphed.
No comments:
Post a Comment