(originally published in The Outreach Connection in October 2009)
White
Material (Claire Denis)
Denis is plausibly having the best current
run of any European director – L’intrus
was almost overwhelmingly evocative and complex, and Vendredi soir and 35 rhums
are the most beautiful miniatures you’ll ever find (most damagingly for
Toronto’s reputation as a promised land of cinema, none of these received a
regular release here). She tells great, vibrant stories, but isn’t at all
constrained by conventional notions of structure or pacing or narrative
linkage. Her movies aren’t merely jigsaws though, like so many now, in which
the temporal jumble eventually reveals an essentially simple concoction; it’s
rather that she thrives on possibility and inter-connection, and simultaneously
hears the displaced butterfly as clearly as the oncoming train. She’s portrayed
Africa before (she grew up there), and returns now to depict the last days of a
white-owned coffee plantation, as an unnamed country swallows itself up in
blood and lawlessness. Isabelle Huppert plays the operation’s main engine,
refusing to acknowledge danger, pushing grimly on while the rest of the family
plots to get out or simply loses its bearings.
This is grandly suited to Denis’ immense
strengths: every detail of the family’s existence embodies a differentiation
that’s historically unfair at its core, and yet they now embody continuity and
tendering and economic contribution where the social movement only brings waste
and pillage; the mournfully beautiful African spaces have never appeared so
intensely menacing and unknowable (the title indicates how the family finds
itself increasingly dehumanized, less participants in events than
historically-charged chattels, and existentially periled by the knowledge that
if expelled from this country, they have no natural home now in mainland
France). Denis’ film has no imposed speechifying, but bakes the tensions into
its very core; it’s a million miles removed from movies that complacently deny
Africans their own stories by focusing on a white protagonist, because the
traumatic transition depicted here is so resonant as a portrait of broader
historical legacies strained beyond sustainability. As always with Denis, the
flow of images – immensely evocative of the lived-in reality while uncannily
lighting up the thematic layers below – is peerless.
Soul
Kitchen (Fatih Akin)
Akin’s The
Edge Of Heaven was one of the stronger recent examples of the jigsaw
storytelling technique you see everywhere now, but the constant reliance on
coincidence rather wore out my welcome for it, particularly compared to his
brilliant, scalding breakthrough Head-On.
Akin is German, of Turkish ancestry, and his films keep a boot in both
cultures; he’s at the vanguard of the new Zeitgeist-busting European cinema
that burns across borders and genres. The new film’s title suggests an explicit
American influence, also evident in the movie’s brassy title design and music
score; to be honest though, the movie feels most American in its relative
simplicity and lack of ambition. The central character is Greek this time,
running a greasy spoon type restaurant in a flavourfully renovated Hamburg
waterfront space; when he upgrades the menu with the help of a highly-strung
chef, the schnitzel-loving clientele deserts him, until he catches a new wave
and becomes the hottest spot in town. He’s also helping out his petty criminal
brother, trying to maintain a long-distance relationship with a more bourgeois
woman, and fending off a scheming developer with designs on the property.
Nothing about the way this plays out is
remotely surprising – the American remake can proceed apace with just the most
minimal script tweaks – but Akin keeps it vibrantly buzzing along, cooking up a
good overall aroma. The movie doesn’t push the point, but makes it clear that
the spine of German society (the easy money and the sense of entitlement) still
belongs with the old stock; for immigrant cultures it’s a tougher climb, which
is not to say it can’t be done. Without any mention of the economic crisis though,
the movie’s vision of entrepreneurism already seems a little abstract: aren’t
those new-gourmet restaurants, full of young arty types, a prime symbol of an
unsustainable bubble?
My
Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog)
There was a time when Herzog was a crown
prince of art cinema, prodigiously generating varied chronicles of extremity,
benefiting immensely from the copious legends of his personal fearlessness and
eccentricity. He lost his mojo somewhere in the 80’s but regained it a bit with
the documentaries Grizzly Man and the
Oscar-nominated Encounters At The End Of
The World, and now he turns up at the festival with two new fiction films! Bad Lieutenant, which I left for later,
is by all accounts the better of the two. This other is a thin work, a
psychological suspenser of sorts about a man who loses his marbles, kills his
mother, and holes up in his house with two hostages; detective Willem Dafoe
pieces together the back-story. Judged as a genre exercise, it’s quite slapdash
and underdeveloped; seen as an examination of (let’s say) esoteric behavior,
it’s largely arbitrary and opaque.
Unless, that is, one muses (as many have)
on David Lynch’s credit as executive producer, perhaps suggesting a rare
bastard child of mismatched auteurs. Sometimes the movie definitely seems like
it’s working toward a Lynch-like mythology (what do all those ostriches mean?). But although it has an
occasional Lynch-like lack of naturalism, it has none of his depth of texture
or complexity of behavior – Lynch wouldn’t even allow a home movie of his to
come out so visually and aurally flat – so I guess we should take his
involvement as a tease. Anyway, it’s not saying much for Herzog’s latter-day
skills when the very possibility of someone else’s vague contribution to his
movie is more interesting than what he brought to it himself.
Face (Tsai Ming-Liang)
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