(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 1999)
This is the sixth
and last of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 1999 Toronto International Film
Festival
My Best Fiend (Werner Herzog)
Herzog directed
actor Klaus Kinski five times in the 70s and 80s (most memorably in Aguirre: the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo), with almost uniquely
obsessive and fiery results: both megalomaniacs of sorts, they enjoyed perhaps
the ultimate love-hate relationship. Herzog relives their collaborations in
this memoir, much of which consists of fundamentally conventional
straight-to-camera dialogue and archival footage, but which given the subject
matter makes for rollicking weird and wonderful results. Kinski was capable
both of fierce irrational rage and almost childish tenderness; he could be both
courageous and cowardly, virtually simultaneously; he believed himself a
genius, and sometimes seemed like it. Given the evidence presented, it’s not
surprising that Kinski is no longer with us; looking at the astonishing clips
from their films, one’s primary mourning is likely to be for Herzog’s
apparently burnt-out fiction film career.
Happy Texas (Mark Illsley)
Two escaped
convicts hide out in a small Texas town, masquerading as gay pageant
organizers. The movie has been praised as something fresh and distinctive, but
I can’t really see why – it’s a fragmented, flatly directed series of mainly
familiar set-pieces and relationships. The film substantially dispenses with
its “gay” theme pretty early on, and also underexploits the central pageant
concept, limiting Steve Zahn’s transformation from rough-edged incompetent into
inspirational leader to not much more than a few montages. Instead, it spends
most of its time meandering through such unexceptional plot strands as Jeremy
Northam’s falling in love with a woman who fixes on him as a confidante, while
he simultaneously plans to rob her bank. There’s a rather touching performance
by William H Macy as the local sheriff discovering his own homosexuality, but
his character is fuzzy as everything else in the film; Zahn, although his work
here has been widely acclaimed, relies entirely on a bizarre stream of
senseless mannerisms.
The Limey (Steven Soderbergh)
In this
triumphantly experimental film, Soderbergh sets out to evoke the elliptical
existential style that flourished in the 60’s (in the work of Antonioni and
Bertolucci and, more genre-specifically, in John Boorman’s Point Blank). The Limey
casts two icons of the decade, Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda, in a sparsely
plotted thriller about a hard-edged British criminal (Stamp, naturally) who
comes to LA to investigate, and likely avenge, his daughter’s mysterious death.
Fonda plays the high-living record producer who, as her lover, becomes the main
object of Stamp’s suspicion.
Los Angeles as
seen here is a strangely desolate, hazy, yet spatially engrossing environment,
and lends itself ideally to the film’s temporal experiments. In virtually every
scene, Soderbergh flashes forward to episodes yet to come or back to images
from those already elapsed, or to fragments of memory (using footage from Poor Cow, which Stamp made in 1967), or
to alternative possibilities. It’s an in-your-face technique, and at first it’s
a little unsettling and not particularly productive: one realizes, with some
sadness, how easily the radical experiments of 30 years ago led to
stylistically hollow hyperactivity – what’s often called an MTV style. In its
opening stretches, The Limey merely
resembles an elegant application of a chaos theory to filmmaking.
But it quickly
calms down and coalesces. Stamp is wonderful as the calmly focused limey
Wilson, who’s spent most of his adult life behind bars, offering no
concessions: no one can understand his Cockney-slang saturated talk. His
considerable limitations, as an effective player in the seedy LA underworld,
actually invest him with a serene sense of liberation: there’s one excellent
scene, when Stamp cuts loose with a beautifully fluid but highly vernacular
monologue, knowing that not a word he says will be understood by the cop who’s
interrogating him. If such serenity is emblematic of a certain strand of
sixties culture, then it’s as if Wilson’s long confinement has left him
relatively unscathed by everything that’s happened since: in his morally gray
way, he’s an ambassador of integrity and stability (exemplified by Stamp’s
almost spooky failure to age very much).
The Fonda
character, by contrast, captivates his jailbait-aged girlfriends with indulgent
memories and echoes of the sixties, while positioning himself on the cutting
edge of the nineties – he’s an apparently perfect survivor and synthesis whom,
we find out eventually, is actually just a sham: involved in a shady deal to
keep himself afloat, hopelessly passive and dependent on his guns for hire. As
the classic Easy Rider rebel who’s
lately reinvented himself as ever-smiling, genial Oscar-nominated reincarnation
of his father, Fonda is also perfectly cast here. So the film’s style, as it
goes on, seems ever more eloquently questioning and disruptive as it wraps
itself around these two enormously resonant antagonists, always emphasizing the
fluidity of time, the echoes of moments just elapsed and premonitions of those
yet to come.
In addition to all that, The Limey has a number of fine supporting performances, several truly exciting action sequences, some exquisitely funny lines. And at only 90 minutes, it has a concision that’s to be admired – in any decade.
Summary
That’s the last on
this year’s film festival. To summarize, while acknowledging I could
necessarily see only a small percentage of everything on offer (and am
therefore no doubt grandiosely extrapolating on the basis of an unscientific
sample), it was a pretty good festival – one with fewer truly high notes than
some previous year, but with widely distributed, solid quality. I saw only a
few movies that can’t be recommended in at least some respect (All the Rage may be the only one I’d
actively urge people to avoid). My favourite – and I know I’m in a severe
minority here – was L’humanite (the
controversial Cannes award-winner which, sadly, seems unlikely to be
commercially released here). Runners-up: The
Limey, American Beauty, The Emperor and the Assassin, Dogma, The Wind Will
Carry Us, Tumbleweeds, 8 ½ Women. The first two of those are already in
release – see them now, and look out for the rest!
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