(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2004)
On May 28th, 11 films opened
commercially in Toronto, which I’d categorize as a mixed blessing. The Day after Tomorrow, Soul Plane and Raising Helen could take care of themselves,
but the others were all niche pictures, and I seriously doubt you can tend to
that many niches all at once. Some of the films had at least had their trailers
playing regularly over the preceding month or more, but to the best of my
knowledge Love Me if you Dare, for
instance, just appeared out of nowhere. That weekend I went to see the four
films dealt with below (I’d already seen, and written about, Young Adam at last year’s film
festival), and the audiences were meagre in each case. But I know that even at
this pace, many fine films remain unreleased here (just look at The New York Times’ listings on any
given weekend), and I’m intensely grateful for places like the Carlton and
Canada Square and the Cumberland. I just fear for their future, if the commercial
releasing machine continues to treat its materials so haphazardly. During the
film festival, we consistently sell out 9 am showings of crappy movies that no
one’s ever heard of. Couldn’t we do slightly better at translating that
commitment to the rest of the year?
Alexandra’s Project
Australian director Rolf de Heer’s project
shows how an unhappy wife turns the tables on her self-regarding husband: on
his birthday, arriving home expecting a surprise party, he finds himself alone
and locked in, with only a video tape for company. Initially it looks like a
titillating gag, but we know better – the only question is how bad it’s going
to get. It’s essentially a two-handed film, with the additional handicap that
the two actors barely appear in the same room, but it’s effectively creepy. And
although de Heer may not quite be the David Mamet of Oleanna, he does a fair job of sewing ambiguity about which of the
two is most unsympathetic – the root cause is certainly the husband’s
complacency, but the movie establishes pretty clearly that he’s an Australian
archetype, and her revenge may well seem disproportionate. It’s the kind of
movie that will drive some to feel they need a bath, while leaving others more
productively musing on the perils of sexuality. The ultimate neatness of the
resolution, unfortunately, tends to emphasize the film’s contrivances over its
politics.
Intermission
This Irish tale of multiple overlapping
storylines might almost be trying to be an Irish Pulp Fiction – it has the low life glamour, the shifts of
perspective, the eruptions of violence, the colourful profanity – but seems
oddly muted and lacking in real commitment (it might be a sad comment on how
sleazy this urban genre has lately become that Intermission seems disconcertingly mild at times). Some of the
strands – such as the self-mythologizing cop being trailed around by a director
of fluffy TV shows who’s looking to expand into tougher material – are entirely
bewildering; others have a real sweetness, but of a very familiar kind. Colin
Farrell is the best-known cast member, but his presence doesn’t provide much of
a lift. It’s always entertaining, but that’s more a matter of momentum than
anything else – the fact that it concludes on a note of childish payback seems
like the final evidence of its shallow purpose.
Jeux d’enfants
Released here as Love Me if you Dare, this French film by Yann Samuel is being
marketed as a romantic Amelie clone
(on the Internet Movie Database you can find a bizarre message board argument
about whether or not the two films were directed by the same person). The
premise sounds romantic enough: a boy and girl fall into a never ending game of
ever-increasing dares, and of course their escalating attempts to humiliate
each other hide their intense mutual attraction. The movie acknowledges early
on that there’s a perversity to how they stick with this project, and that’s
putting it mildly – by any rational standard, we’re watching two sick people
engaged in monstrously sado-masochistic displacement. If you doubt this, wait
for the ending, which I won’t reveal here, but which could well make you vomit
and swoon simultaneously. This all surely drastically undermines the movie’s
popcorn credentials, and although the picture has visual panache, it’s more
sporadic in this regard than Amelie was.
The leads Guillaume Canet and Marion Cotillard (who played Billy Crudup’s wife
in Big Fish) are also slightly
nondescript. On the whole though, if Jeux
d’enfants were an entry in David Letterman’s “Is That Anything?” segment, I
would have to declare with some confidence that it’s certainly, uh,
something.
Crimson Gold
The strongest of the four films dealt with
here, Jafar Panahi’s Iranian film (written by Abbas Kiarostami) starts with a
pizza delivery man shooting himself dead in the wake of a jewelry store robbery
gone wrong, and then shows some of the events that brought him there. Several
writers compared the film to Taxi Driver,
and others evoked film noir more generally. These echoes (I don’t know whether
they’re conscious influences) are there for sure in the detailed portrayal of a
troubled psyche (a war veteran, bloated and seemingly slowed down from the
effects of the medication he’s taking for an unspecified injury) slowly
drowning in an urban landscape. But this is a specifically Iranian film,
crafting a devastating portrayal of how that evolving society shuts out the
figures on the margins. The streets of Tehran, as seen here, are crowded and
unprepossessing, but behind the walls the film shows substantial wealth, and an
increasing tolerant secularism (going hand in hand with Western-style neurosis)
in personal behaviour.
The deliveryman’s exclusion from this
circle – symbolized in particular by the jeweler’s condescension – sets the
stage for his disintegration, but it’s not a simple matter of class hatred. The
film’s at pains to show how he’s treated sympathetically at most stops, and
thus attains a power beyond polemic, showing how subtle evolutions in the
social fabric generate winners and losers with an inevitability that’s beyond
easy solutions. Perhaps the film’s most disconcerting facet is the character’s
stillness and fatalist stolidity, as if he knew his fate (just as the audience
does from the first scene) and was just waiting to see how he’ll get there. It’s
in this sense that the comparison to film noir seems most astute, although – in
another of the film’s fascinating strands – Crimson
Gold’s illustration of the country’s attitudes towards women suggests some
distance to go until the attainment of a Stanwyck or Joan Crawford, or even a
Marion Cotillard. On the whole, Panahi’s film is yet another highpoint in
Iranian cinema’s incredible 15-year run.
Although I guess three out of four of those
reviews might be termed “mixed,” readers will probably have realized by now
that I’ll put constructively engaged disagreement ahead of easy approval any
day. So I’d call that a great movie weekend. And I didn’t even see The Rage in Placid Lake or Superstar in a Housedress or Goldilocks.
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