(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2007)
This is the first of Jack Hughes’ reports
from the 2007 Toronto Film Festival.
The
Man From London (Bela Tarr)
I’ve seen only one Bela Tarr film, The Werckmeister Harmonies; I
especially regret not seeing his seven-hour (OK, it’s a qualified sort of
regret) Satantango, most famously
championed by Susan Sontag (note – I subsequently
rectified this). The new film, which made it through numerous production
challenges, is his first since Werckmeister,
seven years ago now. Based on a George Simenon story, and a mere two and a
quarter hours long (and sadly feeling no shorter), it tells of an ordinary man
who witnesses a crime, retrieves a suitcase full of stolen money, and gets
drawn into the consequent spiral. In interviews, Tarr expresses a complex set of
ambitions for the film – “it deals with the cosmic and the realistic, the
divine and the human…” – but I don’t think these are fully realized. His
notoriously exacting technique – shooting in pristine black and white,
involving very long, deliberately paced, meticulously orchestrated takes –
seems rather constricting here, and the story is too generic for the “cosmic”
aspects to soar very high. Amid an authentically unhealthy looking cast, the
presence of recognizable (and badly dubbed) Tilda Swinton as the protagonist’s
wife just seems like a mistake. A couple of very long close ups of a secondary
female character might oddly be the film’s most riveting moments, but suggest a
latent desire to have taken all this in a different direction entirely. Sadly, you
get the feeling that the struggle to make the film may have slightly calcified
a great artist’s intuition.
Les
chansons d’amour (Christophe Honore)
This is the first film I’ve seen by young
French director Honore, and it certainly goes down easily. He seems to be
aspiring here to be a modern-day Jacques Demy in presenting the tangled love
lives of a few young Parisians, who frequently articulate their feelings by
bursting into song. Louis Garrel (who has a real throwback quality about him,
sometimes reminding me of Truffaut’s original muse Jean-Pierre Leaud) is the
centre – a young professional who travels through superficial bliss, through
terrible loss, to a state that’s far less definable but perhaps more
sustainable. He’s surrounded by an endlessly shifting network of plausibly
needy, uncertain, flawed people, and the movie is a great uncliched hymn to
Paris. Honore’s vision and style aren’t as joyously all-encompassing as Demy’s
(and the songs aren’t as memorable either) but he certainly takes advantage of
contemporary pragmatism while exhibiting a classical good humour and emotional
curiosity. The film’s closing line – “Love me less but love me a long time” –
is a nice summing up of its underlying sense of neediness, and given where the
film begins (a deliriously attractive guy-and-two-girls-in-a-bed set-up), one
would never guess the parties to that final exchange, nor its setting.
The
Past (Hector Babenco)
This is an unexpectedly intimate work from
Argentinean director Babenco, best known for his Hollywood stint that produced Kiss of the Spider Woman and At Play in the Fields of the Lord. It
starts with a young married couple undergoing one of the all-time amicable
breakdowns, after which he (played by Gael Garcia Bernal) initially falls on
his feet more comfortably than she does. But as he goes through a string of
break-ups and personal reversals, all somehow linked to the periodic
reappearances of his ex-wife, it starts to seem their fates are still linked
after all, something that she attributes to his failure to provide adequate
closure when he ignored her parting request to help sort through their old
photos. At times then it resembles a morality tale; at others it functions as a
tribute to feminine patience and fortitude; the pieces are often melodramatic,
and yet the protagonist’s reinventions of himself (his transition from
overweight crapped-out alcoholic into a sleek personal fitness trainer is
particularly startling) almost have the feel of science fiction. It’s certainly
interesting, although never really fulfilling. Gael brings a lot to the
essentially passive main character, although the actress playing his ex-wife,
with far fewer scenes, dominates the film, creating a character who seems
capable of lurching at any given moment in any direction, and yet is still true
and moving.
Le
voyage du ballon rouge (Hou Hsiao-Hsien)
Hou has been moving recently from his
original project of dramatizing the political and social history of his
homeland Taiwan toward a more universally-based immersion in cinematic joy; the
new direction may be less rigorous in some ways, but it’s starting to look as
if Hou should perhaps be counted as being two
of the world’s best directors! The new film is a tribute to Albert Lamorisse’s
1956 The Red Balloon (which I’ve
actually never seen), and it’s Hou’s first to be made outside Asia. It’s
breathtaking under those circumstances that it’s suffused in such easy
naturalism. Juliette Binoche (in one of her most colourful, magnetic
performances) is an actress and single mother who engages a Chinese film
student as a nanny for her young son; scenes of everyday life around their
wonderfully cluttered Parisian apartment contrast with vignettes of the red
balloon, which may or may not belong to a short film the student is making.
There’s little plot and no narrative closure as such, and the pace is serene,
articulated through Hou’s usual long takes (which are so much more intoxicating
than Bela Tarr’s), but the film swells with possibility and connection. It
deconstructs cinematic magic by laying out some digital tricks, but only to
remind us (and virtually every character in here is a creator of some kind) how
our sense of beauty in art is enhanced rather than dulled by an appreciation
for the underlying process. This is easily one of the best films of the last
few years.
The Walker (Paul Schrader)
In my preview article I cited this as being
perhaps my top pick among the festival’s English-language offerings;
consequently, it ends up perhaps being the greatest disappointment of the films
I saw. On paper it sounded great, bearing some echoes of Schrader’s early
success American Gigolo. The (gay)
scion of an esteemed political family (Woody Harrelson) now spends his life as
an amusing bauble on the arm of Washington’s wealthy older women; but when he’s
caught up in a murder investigation, in which he’s protecting a compromised
senator’s wife (Kristin Scott-Thomas), it all starts to unravel. Lauren Bacall
and Lily Tomlin are in the mix as well, so it’s certainly an interesting cast,
and Harrelson’s stylized performance becomes more persuasive as it goes on. The
sexual and political themes of Schrader’s best work are certainly implicit in
the material, but the handling is dull, and the whole thing becomes
increasingly swamped by (often barely penetrable) plot mechanics, yielding only
the vaguest and most generic of insights into the devious workings of the
machinery of power. I’ve enjoyed Schrader’s work most of all when his famously
turbulent psyche has been closest to the surface – his delirious version of Cat People being the prime example – but
The Walker is just too drab and
conventional to be any fun.
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