(originally
published in The Outreach Connection
in September 2001)
This is the second
of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2001 Toronto film festival
What time is it there? (Tsai Ming-Liang)
Tsai’s film confirms
him as a major poet of contemporary despair. A young watchseller has a brief
contact with a customer who tells him she’s going to Paris. She gives him a
cake, and it seems that this act of minor kindness shakes the structure of his
drab, circumscribed life. He becomes obsessed with changing every timepiece he
sees by seven hours, to conform to Paris time. The film is suffused in
alienation, longing and futile endeavors. His mother, grieving for her late
husband, devotes herself to rituals and superstitions that may tempt his spirit
to return (at one point she mistakes what he’s done to the living room clock as
a supernatural manifestation). Meanwhile, the girl’s stay in Paris is presented
as one lonely, mechanical scene after another. All three plot strands culminate
in desolate sexual encounters, but the film’s ending finds transcendence in
some truly inspired and deeply beautiful images. The film was often virtually
hypnotic to me. There’s no question that it’s slow and deliberate and narrow in
its preoccupations, but its central idea works perfectly: dour lives demand
grand gestures, whether physical or metaphysical, and even if these don’t
succeed as intended, it’s beyond us to assess the full scope of their
consequences.
The Pornographer (Bertrand Bonello)
A curious account of
a veteran director of pornographic movies who’s way past his personal and
professional peaks and can barely keep going. The pornographer started in the
business in 1968, when making porn was plausible as a political act, and he can
still conceive of himself as a former revolutionary, but that self-image no
longer holds. In the film’s saddest scene, the producer spontaneously takes
over the direction of a scene, disregarding the director’s fragile aesthetic
scheme to inject louder moaning and more money shots. The casting of
Jean-Pierre Leaud, archetypal 60’s French actor, as the pornographer, confirms
that the film is as much about the decline of cinema (not just of the porno
kind) as anything else. The pornographer’s story is generally presented in a
classical drawing-room kind of style, but it’s contrasted with a vaguely
Godardian treatment of his son, a student who joins an activist movement the
main weapon of which is silence, the thesis being that muteness is “the ultimate
opposition.” The juxtaposition makes for something genuinely weird and oddly
nostalgic, and at least halfway stimulating. Certainly at the end you’re left
with a convincing sense of decay and intellectual futility; given the film’s
esoteric preoccupations though, it’s hard to know how much value to place on
this. I think the film might be all but meaningless to someone not acquainted
with the heyday of New Wave French cinema (a declining breed, obviously).
The Navigators (Ken Loach)
Loach’s film shows
the readjustment of a group of Northern English railway workers after the
deregulation of the mid-90’s. The British public’s contempt for the state of
its railways makes this movie a pretty safe bet on its home turf, and Loach
punches home the easy targets, having great fun with the new customer-friendly
terminology and training video culture that suddenly gets dumped on the men. As
usual, he makes an efficient argument against capitalist excesses while paying
mere lip service to the other side; also as usual, he simplifies the real
economics of the case and grossly caricatures the corporate bosses. Largely
backed by a laconic jazz score, the movie is pretty easygoing compared to some
of Loach’s earlier works – it’s far more assured than last year’s uneasy Bread and Roses. Ultimately, his
protagonists seem like babes in the new market-friendly woods, and in the
melodramatic but affecting finale they sell their souls to keep on going; the
camaraderie of the opening stretch is replaced by a resigned, neutered
obedience. The movie is tremendously entertaining and covers a lot of ground in
an hour and a half – pound for pound, Loach is one of the prime storytellers in
the game.
A ma soeur (Catherine Breillat)
This typically
provocative film from Breillat is a further variation on her ongoing
investigation of female sexuality, this time contrasting two teenage sisters –
one a confident looker, the other clumsy and overweight. The “fat girl” (the
film’s title for English release purposes) variously gets both abuse and
affection from her sister; they’re fascinated and disgusted by each other.
“Hating you,” she says, “is like hating part of myself – that’s why I loathe
you so violently.” In the film’s key scenes, the fat girl pretends to be asleep
while her sister on the other side of the room has sex with her boyfriend – his
ruthless manipulation (you know what you’d do if you really loved me…) sets up
a continuum of exploitation and victimhood. The latter part of the film, as
their mother drives the sisters home from vacation, reduces them both back to
being just kids, and Breillat seems for a long while to be vastly overdoing the
shots of the car journey – time and again you anticipate an accident that never
comes. But then the film takes a turn that is truly shocking, and can be read
as sick fantasy, morbid come-uppance, terrible turn of fate, or as a
realignment of the sexual politics. It’s probably all four, and leaves a potent
after-impression. The movie will probably neither expand nor contract
Breillat’s circle of admirers – I found it more subtle than Romance, but not as rich as her earlier Une vrai jeune fille, although its peaks
may reach higher than that film’s.
Heist (David Mamet)
Mamet’s
stripped-down crime drama doesn’t make much of an impact; as with Robert de
Niro in the similar The Score, you
wonder whether Mamet is overly interested in sacrificing his talent to the
demands of genre. The movie’s terse plotting, snappy conversation and emotional
minimalism come from the “less is more” school, but set against the other films
I saw on the same day, it’s plainly just less. Lines like “he’s so cool, when
he goes to bed the sheep count him” try too hard for classic status, and they
read better than they sound. The film has some good twists and turns but that’s
all they are – the movie doesn’t have the philosophical and emotional richness
of Mamet’s last film State and Main,
and the frequent confusion over who’s doing what to whom gets harder to take
one you realize it’ll never really matter. Actors like Gene Hackman and Danny
DeVito keep it interesting, but they’re just fleshing out ciphers in an arbitrary
universe.
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