2004 Toronto Film Festival Report, Part Fourteen

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2004)

This is the fourteenth of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2004 Toronto Film Festival.

Bad Education (Pedro Almodovar)
Almodovar stands now at the peak of European cinema in the same way that Fellini, Bergman and Truffaut did in their heydays – like them, he wins Oscars (for both All About my Mother and Talk to Me) and his films attract people who don’t usually go to foreign films. And as with them, of course, there’s bound to be an ongoing debate about whether this preeminence is completely deserved. I wouldn't miss a new Almodovar movie for anything, unless it were a choice between that and a new Rivette, Akerman, Assayas or well, to be honest, quite a few other directors. There’s no Almodovar movie even close to making my DVD-worthy cut. But I confess I’m surprised to find myself writing this, because the recent films have been quite superb. Talk to Me, in particular, is a marvel of outlandish material spun into something rich and meaningful. But its smooth hum evokes a slight concern that Almodovar might be reducing trauma and joy and all else into a generalized benevolence – for now it resembles a philosophical state, but maybe it’s more like the avoidance of one. At the time, I thought the director’s next few films might be critical in establishing his place in the ultimate pantheon.

Sad to report then that Bad Education left me utterly cold. It’s another hall of mirrors plot with flashbacks within flashbacks and multi-layered motivations, all set out in the usual sumptuous gay milieu, but on this connection failing to forge any kind of emotional or thematic connection. The credit sequences feel like 60’s Hitchcock, and there are moments in the film that strongly evoke that director’s use of women (this being Almodovar, they’re enacted by a man in drag). More generally, the film is a kitsch film noir, with some minor Spanish social history as flavouring. I confess though that I make these observations as I might list the attributes of a pearl-bedecked ostrich – perhaps interesting on some hypothetical level, but not of much relevance to anything that’s going on today.

The plot has Gael Garcia Bernal as a struggling actor who brings a story to a famous director he knew in school – it recalls their treatment by a corrupt, molesting priest, with a layered-on epilogue of come-uppance. The director decides to make a movie out of it, hires the actor as the lead; then the priest (now a book publisher) turns up as well, with a different version of things. I confess that after a while I was drifting, and even as I write this a few hours afterwards, cannot recall the film’s intricacies with confidence.

“There’s nothing less erotic than an actor looking for work,” says the director at one point, which captures something of how I felt about the film’s hollow virtuosity. I doubt that Almodovar would care about anything I’ve written here – the film is surely not designed to be analyzed, although the twists and turns, presented with the vividness of revelation, sometimes feel like traumas pulled into the daylight by a flamboyant psychoanalyst. His view of mankind is generous and informed, but his characters know only desire, and movies, which increasingly seems insufficient. But Bad Education has also been acclaimed (albeit a little less than Talk To Her) so maybe there’s a substantial audience that knows only as much.

Keane (Lodge Kerrigan)
I often wonder what some directors do during their long absences from view. Since Stanley Kubrick died, we’ve had several accounts of the crazily meticulous research and deliberation that filled those five or ten-year gaps, but you can sense that gestation in Kubrick’s films, and anyway he could afford to stay at home. But what about a director like Whit Stillman, AWOL for six years since The Last Days Of Disco. Stillman seems much more pragmatic than Kubrick, and surely films like Metropolitan and Barcelona can’t have provided that big a money pot (maybe I’m being naive on this point) so where the hell is he? How does he keep it together, away from the camera for that long. What if he’s sick? What if he’s dead and no one knows it?

At least we can stop worrying now about Lodge Kerrigan, who hadn’t been heard from since Claire Dolan in 1998 – and since Claire Dolan never got released after the film festival, it might seem like even longer (I guess to the 99% of readers who’ve never heard of the guy, it might seem like a whole lot longer). It was a film about a prostitute, starring the late Katrin Cartlidge, and although it sometimes had the uncomfortable air of a male director trying too strenuously to assimilate the classic trappings of feminist filmmaking, it was still an interesting work, avoiding stereotypes and easy enigmas while carefully cultivating a cool ambiguity. To put this another way, the lead user comment on imdb.com is titled: “A bad, bad, bad, bad movie.” Maybe that’s why Kerrigan disappeared for so long.

Keane looks at times almost like an off the cuff project, but as it proceeds it acquires great deliberative power (although not quite six years’ worth). Damian Lewis plays the unbalanced Keane, who lives alone in a cheap rooming house, oscillating between quiet decency and outbreaks of clear mental illness. He says he had a daughter who was abducted, and is obsessed with finding her – he frequents the bus terminal where it happened, retraces his steps, runs through scenarios in his head. He meets an abandoned woman struggling to take care of her own daughter, who’s about the age of his own girl when she disappeared. He helps her out, and then the woman starts to rely on him for help with the girl while she tries to get her life back on track.

Hitchcock defined suspense as the opposite of surprise, being when you expect something to happen and it doesn’t. In that regard Keane is a suspenseful film, for the character is genuinely unpredictable, and you fear profoundly for the girl’s safety. But Kerrigan isn’t primarily after dramatic effect here. Actually the prime Hitchcockian echo is of Vertigo; like the second Kim Novak, the girl provides Keane a chance to redeem his earlier loss. Visually though, the style is grainy and closely observant, like the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta or The Son, although the movie doesn’t quite have those films’ intense spiritual dimensions.

Lewis gives an excellent, completely sustained performance, which seems to bear the marks of intense research; at the start, before its shape starts to emerge, the film seems entirely focused on assimilating the character, as though it were a case study. Ultimately it’s a strong visceral experience. It puts Kerrigan back on track to be a leading American director, but let’s be brutally frank – many of the greatest directors make films of twice the complexity of Keane in one third of the time. So his next move will be interesting.

Financial times

It’s a tragedy how little we collectively learned from the financial disasters of recent years. So many aspects of market ideology were discredited, if not decimated, at a huge cost to the economy (even if that “cost,” it seems to me, was largely measured by clawing back wealth that was largely illusory in the first place); our prevailing (if wretchedly complacent) assumptions about what we can reasonably expect from society – employment levels, housing standards, pension entitlements – are still teetering from it. There’s a general awareness that something has to change. But the “change” that’s advocated for is largely incoherent, based on a woolly assumption that major sacrifice and realignment can either be dodged or borne by the voiceless, or else on a barely tweaked version of the same theories that got us to where we are (as in so many things, this is even more gruesomely vivid in the US than it is here).

The problem, I think, is that the society we’ve created for ourselves feels so solid – it’s too daunting a thought experiment to imagine it might actually be fragile and unsustainable. Since we got this far, and our technological capabilities are now greater than ever, then of course we’ll steer our way through, however bumpily. Sure, I suppose it’s likely that some version of humankind will make it through, just as plenty of people survived the Titanic. But through willful blindness and inaction, we’re forcing ourselves to careen into the iceberg, leaving the fate of the passengers to little more than blind chance.

Pay for performance

One thing’s for sure, the captains won’t be among the last on board – they’ll be whisked away in a private helicopter, and back in the warm mansion while the victims of their negligence battle the waves. Executive pay has exploded out of proportion to any index of performance or prosperity, answerable to no logic except its own self-referencing one. It’s absolutely true that corporate leadership is almost unimaginably complex and potentially murderously stressful, laden with risks of various kinds; the job certainly warrants a different magnitude of reward. But that general philosophy has been distorted to justify almost no practical limits. Most egregious is the notion that outsized compensation packages constitute a necessary motivation; that if a CEO didn’t get paid $50 million, or whatever (and didn’t pay as little tax on it as possible), then they couldn’t possibly turn in the optimum quality and intensity of personal contribution. Needless to say, this kind of psychological analysis isn’t applied lower down the work chain (if you’re not sufficiently incentivized by your twelve bucks an hour, well, there’s the door).

Although you can find any number of think pieces criticizing this trend, they’re just so much background noise. It’s important to realize that the executive pay racket is just as much an arbitrary redistribution of wealth as a punitive tax regime would be; there’s nothing “natural” or inevitable about the network of boards and institutions and advisors that keeps it going. But anyone who tries to critique or limit this normalized corruption is too easily caricatured as an enemy of “freedom,” or even as a socialist, as dancing on the slippery slope that leads to all your money being taken away and handed to welfare cheats.

Too Big to Fail

Curtis Hanson’s Too Big to Fail, now playing on HBO Canada, is a good springboard to thinking about these issues. The film is set over a few days in 2008, as Wall Street’s major institutions realize the damage done to their stability and liquidity by the age of irresponsible mortgage lending and uncontrolled derivatives trading. William Hurt plays treasury secretary Hank Paulson, the quarterback in the effort to avoid a domino effect of bank failure that might trigger another great depression. Working under unimaginable pressure, and to a great extent making it up as they go along, he and his team find themselves spending hours on strategic decisions that would normally require months; such as ordering major companies to merge with their competitors, or asking Congress to free up $700 billion on the basis of a three-page bill. We may forget (or maybe it’s that the momentousness of it all was hard to absorb at the time, even if you were watching closely), but it’s all true.

The film is remarkably efficient, telling the story in barely more than an hour and a half, with a super-capable cast (including Paul Giamatti, James Woods, Cynthia Nixon, Matthew Modine, and many others). It’s a fiendishly complex story of course, meaning Hanson spends much of his energy on basic exposition (for a while, it feels like half the screen time consists of old clips from CNN and CNBC): like last year’s Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job, if you have a general sense of these events, the film serves primarily as a recap, providing limited new perspective. Hanson (most famous for LA Confidential) is more than competent, but he’s not much of a stylist (at some point the story demands a fearless six-hour version, as Olivier Assayas made last year about the terrorist Carlos – among much else, this would allow more space for Hurt’s subtle evocation of Paulson’s underlying torment). Still, it’s sadly unusual to receive any films at all on such subject matter, and Too Big to Fail doesn’t squander the opportunity.

Saving their souls

In the end, Paulson assures his colleagues that what they’ve put in place will work, but his uncertainty is evident. As you may recall, the system didn’t collapse – not yet anyway – but it didn’t rebound as they hoped for either. The US economy remains far from where it should be to fund the accumulated heartbeats and entitlements and dreams. Unemployment is high, with all the human cost that entails; the mortgage mess isn’t even close to being sorted out; the company’s finances are out of control. And yet in 2010, Wall Street compensation was the highest it’s ever been. Many of the rules had been broken and rewritten, but as a couple of exchanges in the closing scenes make clear, the executives’ pragmatism about the life and death of their institutions didn’t extend to their own pay: they’d sell their companies long before they’d sell their entitlement-driven souls. Indeed, ironically, the demise of some competitors and the enforced mergers of others meant the remaining players became bigger and more vital than ever, increasing their mystique and reducing their susceptibility to oversight and moral suasion: despite all that’s happened, “excessive” regulation – even over something as demonstrably volatile and perilous as the derivatives market - is still easily demonized as job-killing interference. Sadly, it’s as likely as not that the main “change” we can look forward to is a repeat crisis even worse than the last one.

2004 Toronto Film Festival Report, Part Thirteen

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2004)

This is the thirteenth of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2004 Toronto Film Festival.

The Machinist (Brad Anderson)
Anderson’s low-key mood piece, which played in the festival’s Midnight Madness section, has already opened commercially, attracting most attention for the remarkable weight-loss regimen undertaken by its star Christian Bale. It pays off – from some angles he looks truly scary, and when the movie includes a couple of shots of the pre-deprivation Bale toward the end, the contrast is chilling.

He plays a machine-worker, unable to sleep, wasting away, with little human contact except for a prostitute (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh). Strange things start to happen to him – a freak accident to a fellow worker; mysterious notes left on his refrigerator - and his mental state grows increasingly brittle. From the start it’s obvious that this will be one of those “meta’ movies where everything will ultimately reorient itself in some fundamental way, revealing itself a dream or an enclave inside a Pennsylvania national park or suchlike. Such structures long seized to be interesting as ends in themselves, and this one adds nothing very new to the canon.

Still, the film maintains its drab aesthetic very effectively, and it has some moments of gorgeous masochism (such as when he throws himself in front of a car). But I think Anderson made a tactical mistake in following his last film, the forgettable chiller Session 9, with such a similar piece of work. His earlier bossa nova-tinged romance Next Stop Wonderland was full of delicate observation, with a feeling for its female character that makes a depressing contrast to his lazy use of Leigh in The Machinist.

Demain on demenage (Chantal Akerman)
One of my formative filmwatching experiences, in the mid-80’s, came when I saw Chantal Akerman’s Les rendezvous d’Anna on late night TV. I can no longer remember much about the plot, but I still have a profound sense of the film’s portrayal of alienation and detachment. I’d never seen something that felt simultaneously so unfamiliar and yet so psychologically relevant; it made the kind of movies I usually watched, with their conventional notions of pace and realism, seem paltry (since the title character is a film director, I suppose it also carried a certain glamour). Much later I saw Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, perhaps one of the greatest films about the toll of domesticity and mundane social structures. She’s made many movies since then, including numerous documentaries, most of which are hard to see outside film festivals (the easiest to catch on TV is A Couch In New York, her lumpy comedy with Juliette Binoche and William Hurt; predictably, it’s her worst effort from those I’ve seen). She seems to have an endlessly probing nature, accepting few preconceptions, continually turning over questions of femininity and sexuality and identity, often excavating themes of loneliness or lack of fulfillment.

Many of her films have screened at the Toronto festival, which this year showed her latest, Demain on demenage. It’s a rather strange film, and deliberately so. A mother (played by Aurore Clement, the Anna of Les rendezvous) moves in with her daughter after her husband’s death; they soon decide to move again and start showing the house to prospective buyers. A stream of visitors enters, each with his or her loopy evaluation criteria, some leaving in seconds, others remaining interminably and almost becoming part of the furniture. Meanwhile, the daughter labours away at an erotic novel, building in fragments of conversations she hears around her – she thinks it’s sexy, but people find it funny. The film prods and twists definitions of personal space, both physical and psychological, showing the programmed nature of normal responses and creating a near-carnival of the absurd; it often has the pace and rhythmic joie de vivre of a musical. (By the way, it also has a preoccupation with chicken that I was never able to make sense of).

But toward the end the women find an old journal kept by Clement’s Polish mother during the war. She reads the opening lines: “As I am a woman I cannot say all that I feel…I can only suffer in silence.” It’s a moment of great reverence, and the film almost seems to pause for a formal moment of silence. It soon starts up again, finding a non-traditional happy ending that Akerman merrily sends up even as she presents it. But the point has been made- Akerman may be able to goof around this stuff now, but it took a battle to get there. I can’t imagine Demain on demenage will inspire anyone as Les rendezvous d’Anna once did, but maybe the point is that it doesn’t have to. Fighting for less esoteric ground than Catherine Breillat, Akerman seems able to take a breather and play around with matters that in Jeanne Dielman were quite simply a source of agony.


Old Boy (Park Chan-wook)_
Park’s work is unknown to me, but he has a high profile aficionado in Quentin Tarantino. The new film Old Boy won the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes event, which everyone assumes was due to Tarantino chairing the jury. The theory seems plausible: if only from the first line of the write-up in the Toronto programme book – “As mannered as a hyper-violent manga...” – you somehow suspect it wasn’t Tilda Swinton marshaling the Cannes jury in that direction.

The film is indeed tailor-made for Tarantino – it has the grim self-immersion of Kill Bill without the tiresome cross-referencing. It’s about a man who’s mysteriously imprisoned for 15 years; when he’s let out, transformed into a semi-crazed Kitano-like force of nature, he sets out to get revenge. It has several scenes with a knowingly high repellence quota, and several fiendish concepts and plot twists, presented in a style that fuses deliberate excess with a darkly tragic grandeur.

It’s a reasonable enough piece of work, and a gift for genre fans, but the fact of this movie and Fahrenheit 9/11 winning top prizes at Cannes only seems to me to illustrate how even rarified forums of cinema are infected by woozy capitulation to pop-culture and sensationalism. Old Boy’s flashy manipulations and contrivances don’t even belong in the same category as the festival’s best films. Park explains his intentions as follows: "I'm often misunderstood as a director who enjoys violence, but really I want to show how violence makes the perpetrator and the victim destroy themselves. I think I give more moral lessons to the audience than Disney!" All right, but this kind of theme is wearily familiar among modish directors, and the choice of moral benchmark speaks for itself.

Woody in Paris

The other day I was watching the 1931 film Kameradschaft, set around a coal mine on the French-German border (mined from both sides, with a dividing wall in between); when a devastating accident occurs on the French side, the Germans put aside their differences (not a small thing, since this is barely more than a decade after they were slaughtering each other in the World War One trenches) and rush across to aid the rescue effort. At the end, the two communities come together, agreeing that their shared identities as miners will define them in future, not the dictates of their masters. Ten years later, of course, this would have seemed like the most tragic of roads not taken. Watching it today…well, the borders have largely dissolved, and the French and German workers are united at last – in bailing out the Greeks.

Why we need Europe

That’s flippant of course, but you don’t need to be a Nobel-winning economist to grasp the essence of where it went wrong – the risks became pan-European, but the rewards (conditioned by the cultures of individual countries and the degree of responsibility of their political masters) remained local. The miners of Kameradschaft were right about one big thing – their unity revolution would have to start at the bottom and work up, rather than be hatched in offices of state and shoved down. As it is, it’s pretty obvious no one knows what to do to fix the mess (any more than they do in the US).

There may, for sure, be trouble ahead. And it’s tragic, because if you engage with the world to any degree at all, and think about this gorgeous, messy, contradictory creation we’ve sped and stumbled our way into, I’m pretty sure you’ll conclude eventually we need Europe to be the way it is. The glory of Canada is largely predicated, really, on not being that necessary to the world’s aggregated image of itself; that’s why we have such equanimity and perspective. In contrast, America is being rapidly smothered by the heavy illusion of its own exceptionalism – it’s an increasingly dull, off-putting national narrative. Europe’s historical and cultural exceptionalism, and the depth of its heritage and resonances, are far more fully established - being in Paris, for instance, approaches sensual and intellectual overload. Europe is festooned with absurdities, many of them archaic and unsustainable, but if we ever let those go, we’d be on a headlong rush toward cold functionalism. I mean, it’s economically ridiculous to think you should be entitled to retire at 62, but thank God there’s a country somewhere with the audacity to argue it.

Midnight in Paris

The literal reason why Woody Allen - for so long the emblematic downtown New Yorker - now works mainly in Europe seems to be that they keep inviting him there, and they have the money. But it would probably be necessary anyway, because his career has become one of those anachronisms that need nurturing, and they’re much better at doing that over there. Clint Eastwood, to compare, is even older than Allen and just as productive, but he sets out to make prestige pictures and/or major hits (usually achieving one if not both aims). Allen, on the other hand, just makes Woody Allen pictures, and frankly, it often seems like everyone (at times, even including him) has had enough of them to last a lifetime. But who wants to call an end to such a long-standing tradition? Not the Europeans anyway.

And not me – I’ve seen every film he’s directed. I reviewed his last movie, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, less than a year ago in this space, and now he’s back with Midnight in Paris. In that last review, I noted how the film’s last few minutes (with a vintage version of When You Wish Upon A Star playing on the soundtrack) “looked kindly on dreamers and modes of escape,” and noted that although his own work has been mostly earthbound, he’s often acknowledged (for example in Purple Rose Of Cairo) the power of cinema to transform reality. As if on cue, Midnight in Paris is perhaps Allen’s fullest embracing of that theme. A hack Hollywood screenwriter Gil (Owen Wilson) is in Paris with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and her parents; he wants to move there and to try writing a serious novel, but she can’t think outside the privileged box she grew up in. Walking alone one night, he’s summoned into a passing vintage car, and inexplicably finds himself thrown back in time, rubbing shoulders with Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds and Cole Porter. He falls in love with a Picasso muse (Marion Cotillard) and soon falls into a happy rhythm of alternating between the two worlds, mostly of course to the disadvantage of the present one.

Familiar borders

Midnight in Paris is one of Allen’s most coherent and sustained films in a long time. He doesn’t sweat the details here – there’s no explanation of how the magic actually happens, and the rules governing Gil’s oscillation between worlds seem highly bendable. Although the protagonist may exhibit some of the director’s longstanding tics, the film itself is as un-neurotic as anything you’re likely to come across nowadays, confident enough to leave opportunities galore on the table. For instance there’s a funny scene where Gil tells Luis Bunuel the plot of one of his future films, The Exterminating Angel, and Bunuel doesn’t get it: Allen could have filled his movie with variations on that gag, but doesn’t need to. Adrien Brody pops up as Salvador Dali – it’s his best work in ages, but it’s just one scene. A relative marvel of economy overall, the picture wraps up after barely more than ninety minutes.

Allen also raids his nostalgia file for yet another portrayal of an overbearing intellectual (Michael Sheen), and also shows off his blinkered side by dumping McAdams into a miserably shrewish, superficial role (not the first actress who’s suffered that fate at his hands; his treatment of Cotillard, in contrast, is immaculate). The film is full of echoes of his previous creations, including short stories like The Kugelmass Episode. A few shots at right-wingers and Tea Partiers make you realize how little politics and social consciousness has figured in his work. But this is how it is with the late films of aging legends – you don’t expect to cross new borders, but rather to relish the frontiers they’ve long been exploring (although, miraculously, sometimes you get both!) Although Allen is almost excessively self-effacing in recent interviews, discounting his own work to the point of saying he doesn’t think any of it will last, Midnight in Paris exhibits a consistent quiet pride of sorts, and a relief at being home.

2004 Toronto Film Festival Report, Part Twelve

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 2004)

This is the twelfth of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2004 Toronto Film Festival.

p.s. (Dylan Kidd)
Kidd’s follow-up to Roger Dodger (in which Campbell Scott played a chillingly articulate, almost nihilistic man on the prowl) plays as if the director was freaked out by the dark psychology of that film (not that it took things to the extent it might have) and thus retreated as far as possible in the opposite direction. This yields p.s., an ethereal piece of tissue that will probably play forever on women’s cable networks (it’s already opened commercially). Laura Linney plays a dean of admissions at the Columbia University art faculty, swept off her feet by a young applicant (played by Topher Grace) who reminds her of an old boyfriend (he even has the same name). Linney is wonderful as always; she’s the only actress I can think of who seems to act with her skin, and the initial sex scene between them (within a couple of hours of his formal interview) is nicely done.

But the movie has a total tin ear for human behaviour – you won’t often hear anything as arch and contrived as her initial phone conversations with Grace and those with Marcia Gay Harden as her best friend. It takes off in a weird, unfocused direction in which major incidents increasingly seems to be happening offscreen and recounted to us afterwards; I started thinking I might be watching an Alan Ayckbourn-type experiment where the best stuff was being projected in the theatre next door. In the end you can just about join the dots to see a broad notion of how Linney’s nothing-happening character has come through an intersection of revelations about secret desire and cast off her unnecessary mental baggage to accept Grace simply as a “beautiful snowflake” in his own right – she seems blissfully happy in the end. For the audience, this provides a generalized payoff of well being, but no more than you’d get from staring at a kitten for a few minutes. And I can’t imagine what Kidd was thinking.

Los Muertos (Lisandro Alonso)
Los Muertos is the second film by Alonso, who according to the programme book “is one of the most talented and visionary filmmakers to emerge from the New Argentine Cinema movement” (I didn’t see his first film, Freedom). It follows a man who’s released from prison after many years and travels to see his daughter, living in dirt-poor circumstances in the heart of the jungle. His journey takes him by road, working in some fascinating glimpses of dusty, threadbare communities, and then by boat. He’s a man of few words and he stops frequently to contemplate things he hasn’t seen for years. The film moves correspondingly slowly, but precisely.

But at the start of the film we saw what looked like bodies lying in the forest, and a man standing over them. Presumably this is a memory of his crime (in the following scene we see him waking up). The film has the vague trajectory of Apocalypse Now – a journey that appears to be headed for the heart of darkness – and at various times it seems certain that something dangerous is about to happen. The possibility of violence is made explicit in a surely unfaked, startlingly matter of fact scene where he kills and disembowels a goat (where were the cat-killer protestors when this movie was showing?) The expectations are never met, and it seems to me that this is largely the film’s point – not to tease us exactly, but to make us aware of the limitations of our preconceptions, by showing us something far outside our normal frame of reference. Looked at that way though, it’s a bit of a set-up, a “gotcha” exercise.

That aside, the film is a wonderfully sustained study, fascinating in its details, but I’m not wholly sure what it amounts to. The festival program book calls it “difficult to label,” which seems right, although the film raises the disquieting possibility that the label may be “less than meets the eye.” I concede though that Alonso’s future films may prove me vastly wrong about this.

A tout de suite (Benoit Jacquot)
The festival has treated Jacquot very well over the years – he was the subject of its spotlight section a few years ago, and most of his subsequent films have been screened there. But I wonder how much of an impact this has made. Jacquot’s movies tend to leave little after-impression, and barely seem as if they’re meant to – they’re more like pages than chapters, brief eruptions of incident. My favourite has been A Single Girl, with Virginie Ledoyen as a disaffected young hotel worker whose life is on the brink of acquiring actual responsibility and definition. But maybe the pace of that film – she’s in non-stop motion between cafes, hotel rooms, kitchens, lobbies – provides a more distinctive rhythm than is usual for his work.

A tout de suite is now my new favourite Jacquot film. It’s about a girl who falls into a romance with a young Moroccan. One night he calls and tells her he just robbed a bank; she helps him escape, and then joins him and his accomplice as they flee to Spain, then Morocco, then Greece. The film is shot in a grainy black and white, and is another Jacquot exercise in immediacy – the title “Right now” could almost be his work’s emblematic label. But it’s highly affecting, because it probes the shortcomings of such short-termism as a psychological state or life strategy. The girl, often expressionless, almost never voicing anything of much depth, has the air of someone always on the verge of arresting her momentum, but lacking the resources to pull it off. She’s a student artist, and in an early scene at class, when they’re asked to draw an outline of a person but not the face, she unthinkingly disregards the instructions; she already has outlines aplenty, but needs inner connectivity (perhaps it’s significant that, at the very beginning, we’re told about her distanced relationship with her mother). She smuggles friends in to stay the night, coordinating the logistics with the assurance of someone constructing a secret routine more real than the real one. “It was the good life,” she says of the early days with her boyfriend, “I don’t know if it was true life.”

The character is young, and the consequences of her impulsiveness inevitably grow beyond her capacity to marshal them. But the film doesn’t identify her condition merely as a phase – it’s clearly a psychological state – “to put myself in people’s shoes.” There’s surely something of such a condition in filmmaking too, which is perhaps why A tout de suite, for all its apparent throwaway qualities, feels so measured and consequential among Jacquot’s works.

Reset button

Regular readers may recall last week I quoted from a book about Jacques Rivette, evoking films that place too much emphasis on the world rather than on the idea, and end up “presenting a flat and unquestioning copy of the world that demonstrates no more understanding of it that does a cow fascinated by the trains flashing past its field.” What a coincidence then that the next new film I went to see, Le quattro volte, spends much time on depicting goats (even better than cows!) in fascinated observation. No trains though, and certainly nothing flashing past. Le quattro volte might in fact exist in a parallel universe where the concept of flashing (and all its synonyms) has been eradicated.

Le quattro volte

The film’s title translates most closely as “the four times,” but also carries a sense of “the four phases.” It’s set in a tiny village in Southern Italy, and initially follows an old goatherd on his unchanging daily ritual. When he dies, the focus becomes a newly-born kid goat, then later a tree under which it dies, then the charcoal into which the tree is burned. Writing in Sight and Sound, Jonathan Romney called it “a film at once severe, poetic, beautiful, comic, philosophical, hugely complex and sublimely simple. It also contains the single finest extended sight gag I have seen since the heyday of Jacques Tati, and makes the best ever cinematic use of goats.”

That same article quotes director Michelangelo Frammartino as follows: “The film is based on the ideas of animism and reincarnation...(the sixth century BC philosopher) Pythagoras supposedly said that each of us holds within us four successive lives, each one enmeshed in the others. Man is made of mineral, because he has a skeleton; he’s a plant, because he has blood flowing through his veins like sap; he’s an animal, because he has mobility; and he’s also a rational being. So in order to fully understand himself, man has to understand himself four times.” You’ll detect from this that the film resolutely refuses the narrative and cinematic conventions that place man at the centre of things. It has no identifiable dialogue – it requires no subtitles – and the goatherd is the only character who receives a close-up. The star of that extended sight gag is a dog, reacting to his master’s absence and to an Easter passion parade by barking at everyone in sight, and then engineering a way to free the goats from their pen. As well as being, indeed, very deadpan funny and logistically impressive, the scene (done in a single 10-minute take) extends that theme of interconnection and intertwining ritual, and depending what you think of dogs, injects a further complexity into that distinction between the animal and the rational being.

Dust in the wind

Le quattro volte is indeed a sublime viewing experience; by its very existence, it speaks to the spiritual paucity of hyped-up mainstream cinema. On the weekend we saw it, we had guests, and if I were a better host, I would have gone with them instead to their preferred choice of X-Men: First Class. By all accounts that’s a good film too, but I understand less and less the appeal of these convoluted mythologies which trip over each other for multiplex space, especially since the cultural space assigned to them seems to be financed in large part by trashing the value of reflection and self-examination (unless it’s the feel-good Oprah brand). How did we ever lose control of things to the extent that trees and goats constitute a rarer and more surprising subject for cinema than, you know, planets blowing up.

I suppose one answer might be that fantasy and invention are to be celebrated, because they evidence a productive restlessness with limitations; if the world was built on the implied value system of Frammartino’s film, we’d barely have advanced out of the caves. I do wonder whether Le quattro volte doesn’t limit its impact a little by so thoroughly ignoring, if not denying, virtually everything about the modern world; it’s set in a place where you feel you could pick out a mere speck of dust in the wind and follow it for hours until it comes to rest. From the limited evidence presented to us, the villagers invest their lives largely into religious or cultural rituals, and into forms of work that haven’t changed in centuries: the process it depicts for making charcoal, while perhaps objectively somewhat inefficient (in the same way that herding goats is so much less efficient than factory farming), resembles creating an art installation, all the more stunning for how closely its destruction follows upon completion. In such a place, even a skeptical materialist might believe in a formative connective tissue that still endures, and that the old goatherd’s soul could actually transmigrate into the newly-born goat (the film leaves it open though whether you interpret it that way, rather than as a broader evocation of interconnection between carbon-based forms). If you tried to set such a project in downtown Toronto, it would likely seem nuts. In that sense, Frammartino isn’t (yet anyway) the equal of Robert Bresson, who may have made the best ever cinematic use of a donkey in Au hasard Balthazar, but without looking away from what the world had become.

Political film

According to Sight and Sound again, the director says he considers Le quattro volte a “political film, because it gives viewers choices” – he contrasts this with a dominant Italian culture of “controlling images that were very seductive and very brutal – that prevented you from having any say in the whole equation.” One can see what he means, but again, there’s some irony that such a political project would have to set itself so far away from the big machine it’s reacting against. Unless, that is, we regard the film as a kind of manifesto, a statement that things have become so convoluted and unmanageable and perverse that we require a comprehensive reset button, stripping away all those imposed rhythms and acquired notions of value and necessity, rediscovering the most elemental formative truths. The final image, which calls to mind the white smoke announcing a new Pope, might be read as announcing the birth of a new spiritual order (while perhaps hinting it won’t remain that pure forever).

But as Romney says, much of the film’s intent is comic, embodied in particular by the bravura scene with the dog, but also in the broader sense that, beyond a certain degree of abstraction, it’s almost impossible to know where profundity ends and a cosmic joke begins. After all, mankind might all just be something God threw out to amuse himself after working on bigger and better things. Ultimately, it’s inevitably ambiguous whether Le quattro volte exhibits a superior grasp of underlying truths, but at the very least, it is in no way flat and unquestioning.

2004 Toronto Film Festival Report, Part Eleven

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 2004)

This is the eleventh of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2004 Toronto Film Festival.

Modigliani (Mick Davis)
An obvious labour of love, this gala presentation (and Davis’ debut as a director) concentrates on the last year of the tempestuous artist’s life, in particular his intense relationship with his common-law wife (who ultimately committed suicide the day after his death) and his knowingly pumped-up rivalry with Picasso (who, years later, uttered the artist’s name on his deathbed). The film looks great, with the appearance of slightly yellowing canvas; it sounds less good, partly due to the questionable decision to employ an English-language soundtrack. It depicts much turmoil, but doesn’t touch on the only thing that really matters – the source of the painter’s distinctive aesthetic (what did those swan necks and gracefully distorted proportions really mean?) The lack of a critical perspective ultimately leaves it feeling somewhat inert. Most of its devices, like Modigliani’s conversations with his younger self, or the use of Chariots of Fire-type music to drum up excitement for a big head-to-head painting contest near the end, are clichéd.

Andy Garcia, carrying too many B-movie connotations, is a questionable choice as Modigliani, and the actor playing Picasso has the bad luck, in his very first scene, to be handed dialogue almost identical to that of an old Jon Lovitz SNL sketch. On the whole, it’s far below the best of the festival, which tends for some reason to be typical of gala presentations scheduled for the home stretch.

The World (Jia Zhang-ke)
This was my introduction to the work of Chinese auteur Jia - I didn’t see his acclaimed film Platform. The World is an engrossing work, illustrating a China in transition, touching on its persistent poverty (especially rurally), its abiding mystery and its banality. It focuses on a young boyfriend and girlfriend, both working in a Beijing theme park filled with scaled-down replicas of world landmarks (the Pyramids, along with a mournful-looking camel; the Eiffel Tower; a Manhattan skyline that as the manager proudly points out still has its World Trade Center). Their momentum seems to be toward marriage, but it’s a slow momentum; each is distracted by vague thoughts of other people, family problems, or a sense of alternative possibilities. The park purports to present the world at one’s doorstep, symbolizing its accessibility and the possibility for achievement, but instead it just formalizes their lives’ limitations; she remarks for instance that she doesn’t know anyone who’s ever been on a plane. The movie uses occasional cartoon inserts that through their peppy excess underlie the characters’ inertia (and, as a secondary theme, the mixed blessing of their reliance on cellphones). This all makes the film sound like a real downer, and it’s certainly melancholy, but it’s also filled with humour and incident and is a continuously fascinating work of anthropology – it’s particularly attuned toward women and the forces that drive them toward merely superficial advancement, ornamentation or even prostitution. In some ways the film reminded me of Edward Yang’s YiYi from a few years ago (although Jia at this point is a little more prosaic than Yang) and it was one of my favourite discoveries at this year’s festival.

Ils se marierent et eurent beaucoup d’enfants (Yvan Attal)
Attal’s follow-up to the blandly pleasant, self-referential My Wife Is An Actress (in which he played an ordinary guy married to a famous film star, played by Attal’s real-life wife Charlotte Gainsbourg) shows intriguing development. The early stretch is worryingly bland, centering on the creaky old formula of three buddies: the nicely domesticated one, the one married to a bitch, and the one who sleeps around while claiming to envy the others. Fearlessly embracing cliché, Attal even resorts to that hoariest of devices, the late night poker game. But the film becomes progressively more adventurous, throwing in fantasy, reversals of expectation, temporal shifts, new directions and sidelines, an enterprising music soundtrack with a heavy Radiohead quotient, and a cameo by Johnny Depp. Depp initially seems to be playing himself but later appears to be representing a female fantasy of the ideal male. Maybe that’s pretty much the same thing.

The movie increasingly takes on the air of a plaintive scrapbook, with the courage to leave matters largely unresolved – its ultimate artful messiness, connoting broken-backed compromise as being as good as it gets for relationships, is actually its strongest element. Ultimately it’s still pivoted on the favourite subject of middle-aged male filmmakers without a distinctive worldview (or maybe the second favourite subject, after the inner lives of hitmen) –how can a man settle for one woman when there are so many others out there? And as a secondary theme – what’s it all about anyway? The film has no major insights into all this, but it glides around the weary old battleground with increasing fluency. As if anchoring itself in a long tradition of middlebrow French cinema, it has cameos by Aurore Clement, Claude Berri and Anouk Aimee. The latter two, as Attal’s parents, are used simply to reinforce an easy point about how relationships wither; it’s a waste of resources and yet the excess is almost ennobling.

Ray (Taylor Hackford)
Hackford’s biography of Ray Charles, which has already opened commercially, is a consistently convincing reconstruction of the great singer’s life up to the mid 60’s (the point at which a heroin bust forced him to clean up and reevaluate his priorities). Jamie Foxx pulls off a note-perfect evocation of Charles, frequently achieving the presumed goal of documentary-like fidelity, the period is well caught, and scene by scene the movie plays well (the music, of course, is especially rousing). But there are an awful lot of these scenes, and you gradually realize that they’re not yielding any greater illumination than you’d get from reading a bio while listening to a greatest hits album.

I’m genuinely unsure, from watching the movie, whether Charles is an impossibly mercurial figure whose motivations are opaque even to himself, or whether that’s a measure of the film’s lack of depth. His refusal to play a concert in segregated Georgia, highlighted by the movie as one of his cornerstone achievements, comes across as a snap decision unmoored in any particular political awareness; his ground-breaking swing into country and western music comes from nowhere; his drug use and womanizing are observed but never felt. As if aware of its paucity of analysis, the film keeps flashing back to the death of his younger brother, a few months before Charles lost his sight, and even concludes with an imagined conversation where his mother tells him to clean up, something that smacked to me of desperation. Overall the film doesn’t live up to the considerable surrounding hype.

Looking for Guidance

In an article a while ago, I quoted critic David Thomson as follows: “This may be an era when the movies have to decide whether their subject is self- loathing or human aspiration.” To which I flippantly responded, well, we can have both, and then went on to muse for a while on the limitations of Thomson’s premise, which of course wasn’t that hard to do. But then a few days later I was reading a book about one of my favourite directors, Jacques Rivette (by Douglas Morrey and Alison Smith), in particular a chapter on the criticism he wrote in the 1950’s and 1960’s (which I’ve only encountered in the past in brief snatches), before he devoted himself entirely to making films.

Based on Morrey and Smith’s account, the underpinnings of Rivette’s writings would be easy to dispute, if not to lampoon, and as they acknowledge, his films suggest he might himself have later reconsidered many of his fundamental assumptions. Even so, as I was reading it I suddenly felt my own approach to cinema, even after nurturing and refining it for so many years, was tragically insufficient, built too much on lazily pragmatic, untested reactivity to whatever might be before me; an analytical equivalent of the nice guy who duly finishes last.

An Obscene Realism

I’ll try very briefly to summarize the Morrey/Smith summary. Rivette, as a critic, argued for an emphasis on capturing the totality of reality. He brought a rigorous moral dimension to this belief: “…certain subjects demand to be filmed in certain ways, and it would be unethical to film them otherwise.” He articulated this most famously in a rebuke of the largely forgotten 1960 film Kapo, a drama set mostly in a concentration camp (directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, who later made The Battle of Algiers, itself regarded as a kind of milestone in cinematic realism). Rivette argued “that Pontecorvo has not given sufficient consideration to the aesthetic questions posed by this difficult subject, opting instead for an obscene ‘realism’ that ultimately renders the spectacle of the camps tolerable for the viewer and thereby implies that they were also tolerable for their victims.” He denounced in particular a tracking shot moving toward a woman who’s thrown herself against an electric fence: “the point is that the horror of the camps requires no such emphasis, indeed that to emphasize it in this fashion reduces it to the level of any other subject.”

As this suggests, Rivette generally argued for a self-effacing directorial style, but this doesn’t merely mean one of minimalism and restraint. Morrey and Smith summarize his view of the dialectic of cinema like this: “If one takes the world as starting point, one risks missing the idea and presenting a flat and unquestioning copy of the world that demonstrates no more understanding of it that does a cow fascinated by the trains flashing past its field. If one takes an idea as starting point, however, then the risk is in never attaining the density of the real world, never fleshing out the idea with the weight of reality. The goal, then, is that the idea, by the necessity of its own internal movement, of its dialectic, should, little by little, recreate the world before our eyes, or rather create a different world, all the more ambiguous for being an incarnated idea, and a real shot through with meaning.”

Meaningless Assertions

There’s much more where that came from of course, and I may not have selected the most illustrative extracts. But my point, again, is that on reading this, and reflecting on it even briefly and inadequately, I felt very keenly the meaninglessness of most assertions (including my own) about cinema. I enjoyed it. I didn’t enjoy it. She was good. He was bad. It was too long, too violent, too sentimental, too complicated. The book was better. Some smart writers may explain these reactions more fastidiously than others (or at least express them more eloquently, so the lack of an explanation slips past you), but when you sort through it, they’re still just reactions, even if you intuitively agree with every word they say.

One can easily locate more analytical or theoretical writing about cinema, but a lot of this tends to be aimed at extreme specialists. Is there a visible, accessible figure who writes consistently about film from a rigorous moral position? I don’t use “moral” to mean someone who freaks out every time you see a bare breast - I’m sure the Internet is laden with those – but rather someone who writes about film as a way of writing about the world, and no more accepts certain cinematic practices than she or he would tolerate living in the midst of pollution? Whether or not you thought he or she was correct, either on the foundation of the reasoning or on the specific application, wouldn’t such a writer be more useful than just another self-contained opinion (in the way say that some columnists or commentators, even if one doesn’t usually – or ever – agree with them, contribute to synthesizing and sharpening one’s own thoughts)? Especially if such a writer were free of the primary obligation of responding to whatever happens to be new (which already means their role is driven by the demands of commerce) and wrote instead about what seemed to him or her necessary.

The Fascinated Cow

That’s why I found Thomson’s choice between self-loathing and human aspiration momentarily intriguing, even if trite and illogical for any number of reasons. We don’t need more responders – we need guides. The accumulated span of cinema is vast now, far outweighing our resources of time and money and knowledge and concentration. Sure, we can surrender to it and take the easy route, eating from whatever limited menu Hollywood and other service providers happen to be pushing, but that’s the kind of choice made available to laboratory mice. I’m pretty good at avoiding that – this week for instance I watched films by von Sternberg, Resnais and Hou Hsiao-hsien among others – but I fall into another trap, of trying to devour everything on the premium buffet table, forgetting that liking just about everything easily shades into appreciating nothing, like that cow fascinated by what flashes by.

Jacques Rivette, by all accounts, lives a very austere life, but most of us don’t. Who cares if we’re like that cow, you might say, if what flashes by allows us a period of untroubled contentment? And sure, you can make that choice, but only (I’d say) as a kind of defeat: I don’t think you can brag about it, any more than you could brag (unless you really don’t care) about eating solely at Macdonald’s. At this moment, I’m feeling more like that cow than maybe I should. But I truly intend to start figuring out how to turn away from more of those trains, and then to analyze my patch of grass like I never have before…

2004 Toronto Film Festival Report, Part Ten

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 2004)

Low-Life (Im Kwon-taek)
According to the Internet Movie Database, South Korean director Im has made 99 films, of which I’d seen exactly one – Chunhyang, made in 2000. It’s a great movie – a tale of mythic power, presented with great emotional specificity, carrying a strong political undercurrent. Low-Life could hardly be more different. It’s about the life and time of South Korea from the 50’s to the 70’s, through the eyes of a hoodlum who claws his way up the chain of corruption to superficial respectability – including along the way a bizarre and unsuccessful detour into the potboiler end of the movie business (these sequences, if one knew Im’s career better, are probably full of in-jokes). The film hurtles from one thing to the next, periodically flashing dates up on the screen, cramming in a lot of vestigial history (such as the corrupting influence of the contract-bidding process overseen by the CIA) and engineering some forced juxtapositions (his wife gives birth to their son right as the army takes over in 1961, that kind of thing) but seldom conveying a very substantial sense of anything (for an epic of sorts, it feels oddly claustrophobic). It looks deliberately garish, as though trying to convey the tabloid punchiness of a Samuel Fuller. And it doesn’t end as much as just run out of steam.

The film conveys a grimly judgmental attitude to South Korea’s history, but its analytical prowess pretty much begins and ends with the parallel between government and organized crime. Rather disappointingly, it ends up as one of those festival movies which is anthropologically interesting just by its nature, but which doesn’t make a very compelling aesthetic case for itself. One also suspects this movie gives a better sense of the quality of Im’s other 98 movies than Chunhyang did – still, it’d be good to extend the sample a little further.

Eros (Wong Kar-Wai, Steven Soderbergh, Michelangelo Antonioni)
Depending when you ask me, Antonioni may be my favourite director. I’ve seen The Passenger more than almost any other film (currently unreleased on DVD, it’s number one on my wish list). When I discovered him I was eighteen or so and no doubt susceptible to stylish alienation, so perhaps the impact of something like L’Avventura diminishes slightly with time. But Blow-Up and Zabriskie Point explore the possibilities of their milieu with immense, cultivated intelligence, and The Passenger is an astonishing fusion of form and theme – a film that seems to transcend normal limitations. Antonioni is now over 90, and suffered a stroke over ten years ago that seriously hampered his ability to communicate – even so, his 1995 film Beyond The Clouds contained moments of great eloquence. And now he’s contributed a segment to the three-part film Eros.

His segment, The Dangerous Thread Of Things, is a real throwback. Three beautiful characters lounge around in beautiful landscapes, frequently naked, voicing carefully elliptical dialogue. There’s no pretense of naturalism here – this is plainly one of Antonioni’s classic enigmas, with a mysterious criss-crossing reminiscent at times of Blow-Up (although much more stately, and without anything of that film’s temporal and geographical specificity). The film would probably strike the uninitiated as being vaguely absurd, but to an Antonioni fan it’s a welcome postscript – by far the most beautiful episode of Eros, showing an undiminished belief both in eroticism itself and in its inadequacy as a response to our deep-rooted insecurities.

One of the great omissions of this year’s festival was Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046, which received much praise (and quite a bit of bewilderment) at Cannes this year. After In The Mood For Love, Wong is becoming a masterful melodramatist of enormous scope, and 2046 reportedly continues this evolution. His episode of Eros, called The Hand, is just a minor mood piece though, about a young tailor’s love for an older prostitute (played by Gong Li); it’s atmospheric, but almost could have been constructed out of outtakes from In The Mood For Love.

The third director, Soderbergh, is in danger of executing a woeful career symmetry – the highs of Erin Brockovich and Traffic recently followed by Solaris and Fast Forward, both somewhat interesting but ultimately as forgettable as the product of Soderbergh’s ten fallow years after Sex, Lies & Videotape. The forthcoming Ocean’s Twelve may help him out commercially, although I’ve yet to meet anyone who liked Ocean’s Eleven very much. He’s a director of honest ambition and considerable intelligence, but his big ideas are all purely cinematic – cool cinematography colour schemes (Traffic), shots with ample ‘How did they do that’ quality (the car accident near the start of Erin), imaginative casting (The Limey), or just entire movies that no one else would think to do (Fast Forward). But I can't think of a moment in his films that resonated for long after the lights went up. His frequent homages to Hollywood (Erin seems designed as the ultimate star vehicle; Ocean’s Eleven is the ultimate galaxy of celebs; Ocean’s Twelve presumably will be the ultimate unnecessary sequel) just make his commentaries on any other subject seem even less compelling.

His episode of Eros, Equilibrium, is a curio set in the 50’s, about an advertising man (Robert Downey Jr.) who sees a shrink (Alan Arkin) for help with his creative dry spell and a recurring erotic dream. It’s well staged, and provides the only comedy of the three segments, but it adds up to very little, and the ‘eros’ content is peripheral. Overall, Eros has no coherence, and is just another entry in a long history of failed compilation films, but Antonioni’s amazing and presumably last testament gives it a place in movie history. The final image of his segment, and of the film as a whole, justifies the entire project.

Sideways (Alexander Payne)
I liked Payne’s film, now in commercial release, although I doubt I liked it as much as the critical consensus, which has been quite blissful. Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church play two buddies spending a week in California wine country before the latter’s wedding. Giamatti is a middle-school teacher, recently failed both at writing and marriage, who displaces his self-loathing into wine connoisseurship – his detection of “passion fruit” and “Edam cheese” in the bouquet seems like an expression of the mastery he lacks over more prosaic life matters. Church just wants to get laid; he’s in perpetual, bargain basement but accomplished pick-up mode. They hook up with two local women played by Sandra Oh and Virginia Madsen, and the movie’s pleasant late-summer feel admits an increasingly clear look at the men’s lurking sediment.

The movie is always thoughtful, but I found it rather too easy to take, bearing aromas not so much of the maturing oak barrel as of the sitcom-office water cooler. OK, I know that was lame, but the film so over-ferments its wine analogies that The Grapes Of Wrath plays on TV in one scene. Anyway, for all its articulacy and introspection, I didn't come away from the film with many new ideas into this complex fermentation we call life. Payne’s best film still seems to me, by a mile, to be the scintillating Election, a construction of such graceful metaphorical and allusive complexity I can’t imagine anyone taking cheap shots at it.

Peter Sellers

I was born in the UK, and started to become seriously aware of movies in the mid to late 70s, and it follows that I was aware of Peter Sellers long before I tuned into many other film stars. He started out as a local hero, on radio’s The Goon Show and in a number of family-friendly, unadorned comedies, accumulating a reputation as a masterful stylized chameleon. In the early sixties he became an international star, with an Oscar nomination for Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove and a great popular success in Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther and A Shot In The Dark – he married Britt Ekland and branched out into the kind of “international” career you used to see at the time, in which the movies were all sunglasses and boobs, and pretty much all flops. Edwards rescued him (as well as himself) in the mid-70’s with three more Pink Panther movies, giving Sellers a box-office stature he’d never had before, even as his performance became visibly tired and mechanical (which, looking at them now, helps to make the pictures seem more nuanced and complex than they might otherwise).

Behind the Mask

In 1979 he made Being There, which was one of the first “adult” movies I ever went to see in a theatre. It’s a parable of a simple-minded gardener who falls into high-powered circles where his utterances about tending the plants are taken as profound strategic commentary; at the end of the film there’s a suggestion he might go all the way to the White House (it’s no surprise the movie is still cited from time to time, as a reference point for the latest political idiocy). Sellers embodied the character perfectly, with one of his quietest performances, and received a second Oscar nomination for it. Then, as if out of sheer perversity, he made The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu, and passed away, at the age of just 54.

Sellers is generally regarded as an exemplar of the largely blank canvas who comes to life only through performing – a book about him was titled The Man Behind the Mask, the point largely being there barely was one. In the mid-60’s he played James Bond in Casino Royale, and insisted on doing it largely as himself, the way Cary Grant would have; the result was merely deadening. A few years later, in his down period, he made There’s a Girl in My Soup, in which his character is meant to be shaken out of his playboy life through a connection with Goldie Hawn – again, Sellers seems inert throughout, as if she merely bewildered him.

The Party

I recently watched Sellers in a couple of his more successful films though – Kubrick’s Lolita and Edwards’ The Party – and it struck me how his entire persona is based on a kind of loneliness. In The Party he plays a colossally incompetent Indian actor who single-handedly messes up a big Hollywood production and is blacklisted; through a mix-up, his name ends up on a list of elite party guests instead, and he basically ends up wrecking the place. The movie - formally fascinating even when it’s not actually funny (although personally I do find it pretty funny) – draws its coherence from Sellers’ grasp of Bakshi as an extreme outsider, someone who simply doesn’t grasp behavioural norms (especially in the pretentious and venal way the Hollywood big-shots apply them), technology, or much of the universe’s physical laws (especially as Edwards subtly bends them from time to time), and who’s aware of that in a way, but doesn’t seem to regard it as a personal limitation. At one point he quotes a “saying” from India: “Wisdom is the province of the aged, but the heart of a child is pure.” In general terms, of course, this contrasts the “pure” Bakshi with the dubious “wisdom” of those around him (prematurely aged in soul if not in body), but Sellers has too much resonance to be regarded as being “pure” exactly, and the character clearly has ambition and a libido of some kind. It’s this sense of lying slightly beyond our grasp that elevates the film, giving it the vague sense of an existential meditation.

Lolita illustrates a very different kind of alienation. Sellers plays Clare Quilty, in this telling at least (I’ve never read Nabokov’s novel) a monumentally strange and resourceful character who torments James Mason’s Humbert Humbert through a variety of schemes and guises. The character never shuts up, overwhelming Humbert with an arsenal of tics, eccentricities and ploys; the final confrontation between the two, which frames the rest of the film, feels so abstracted from the “reality” prevailing elsewhere that you’re tempted to draw a vague parallel with the starchild sequence at the end of Kubrick’s later 2001. The fuel for this twisted sense of lift-off flows directly from Sellers; we’ve never encountered such synaptic wiring here on earth. By comparison, his more famous work in Dr Strangelove almost seems like a day at the beach.

Inspector Clouseau

Quilty builds very obviously on Sellers’ formative British work - the famous “zaniness” of The Goon Show, and his boisterous embodiment of the emblematic union organizer in I’m All Right Jack. But that quality drained from him as time went on, in part because of basic physical limitations: he had a heart attack in 1964 (causing him to lose out on Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me Stupid) and another in 1977, and the third one killed him. In the later Clouseau movies, as I mentioned, he’s increasingly stylized and slow-moving, almost swallowed up at times by everything else Edwards shoves in there. The movies evidence a weird mythological ambition, as if the director somehow imagined they could constitute his Lord of the Rings; when Sellers died, Edwards constructed a whole new film, Trail of the Pink Panther, out of leftover footage and doubles and a plot about the search for the “missing” Clouseau (and he didn’t even stop there, going on to Curse of... and then, a decade-and-a half later, ending his film career with Son of...). Although Clouseau would have seemed to belong to Sellers as much as any character could belong to an actor, Edwards seems to have been possessed by the desire to prove otherwise.

Most people now have only seen a handful of Sellers’ films - mostly selected from the ones I’ve mentioned in this article – and his bland status as a “classic” comedian doesn’t really reflect the odd, sad shape of his achievements. I wouldn’t claim he’s among the greatest of screen actors, even if the assessment’s confined to the comedy genre. But his career is a fascinating artifact; it’s a full, multi-faceted story, in a way few actors have the chance to forge now.

2004 Toronto Film Festival Report, Part Nine

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 2004)

This is the ninth of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2004 Toronto Film Festival.

Stage Beauty (Richard Eyre)
This gala presentation has already opened commercially. Set in 1660’s London, it depicts the era’s leading actor of female roles (played by Billy Crudup) as the times change and a royal proclamation opens the stage to women actors. Coincidentally (the film often feels as if the city’s population can’t be more than a couple of hundred people), his dresser (Claire Danes) is the first woman to become a star, passing him on the way down in Star Is Born style, but then her popularity also wanes as audiences realize her technical limitations. Eventually, of course, the two reach a happy accommodation.

This is a bland film with an indifferent sense of its period. The cultural and societal change it revolves around is surely of interest, but as presented here it’s all a matter of whims and petty interactions. The film has a mild undiscriminating bawdiness that may be its most intriguing and authentic quality, but otherwise it misses out on any kind of depth or distinctiveness.

Moolaade (Ousmane Sembene)
It’s amazing that this year brought a new film by Sembene, the pioneer of African cinema. A couple of years ago, the Cinematheque ran a Sembene season, which left no doubt about his overall achievement. His 1966 debut film Black Girl, about a young African woman brought to France as a domestic, is still as fresh as the best of the French New Wave, and its relative lightness makes its indictment of colonial attitudes all the more potent and tragic. His 1975 Xala, by comparison, is a broadly colourful patchwork of moods and themes, showing the risks to a modern Africa of overreaching, and sharp-eyed about the continent’s propensity for corruption at the highest level; despite its hard-headedness, the film communicates real excitement about the prospect of transformation, which makes it a little sad now. His 1992 Guelwaar muses against another splashy, discursive canvas on the mixed blessing of foreign aid. Now he’s over 80, with an amazing biography, not as well known as he should be, but clearly a towering figure.

His astonishing Moolaade, if it turns out to be his last film, will stand as a triumphant summation of his career. It’s simple in its technique, with the unadorned clarity and straightforward quality of a children’s story, but it exposes both the beauty and brutality of Africa with powerful eloquence. The film’s subject is genital mutilation (or “purification”) – an unquestioned rite of female passage in its tiny village setting where the elders claim it’s required by Islam. Four young girls flee the mutilation ceremony and take refuge with the only woman who opposes the ceremony, and has kept her own child intact. She places them under a symbolic rite of protection, opening up a chasm in the village that brings out all its ugliness and unthinking acceptance of barbaric rituals. It’s a life of poverty but not deprivation, where tradition and legend are as tangible as stone walls; radio is prevalent and TV is trickling in, but the progress is haltering and could easily be reversed.

The film has a hopeful ending, but not a naïve one: it acknowledges that even progress of the most obvious kind may be a matter of some steps forward, some back. It mentions globalization and free markets, and one character knows enough of the world to label the proposed marriage of an 11-year-old girl as pedophilia, but that character pays for his progressiveness with his life. Moolaade has no layered-on artistry or theories or Westernized ironies. It’s entirely a film about Africa – a cinema that almost seems to spring directly from the land.

Cinevardaphoto (Agnes Varda)
I hope this doesn’t sound like damning with faint praise, but Varda strikes me essentially as a decent and pleasant director. She’s not quite on the front rank of filmmakers – maybe she’s too itinerant in her interests, and she hasn’t made that one overwhelming masterpiece that might have sealed her reputation - but her films are hard to dislike. Her 1961 work Cleo From 5 to 7 is still one of the freshest works of the French New Wave, with a vibrant female perspective, and her films Vagabonde and One Sings The Other Doesn’t have a clear place in any survey of feminist cinema. She’s done much to honour the work of her late husband Jacques Demy, making several documentaries on his life and work and leading the restoration of his wonderful The Young Girls Of Rochefort. Her most recent full-length work, Les Glaneurs Et La Glanesse, evoked much affection for its essaying on the act of gleaning in all its variants, mixed in with musings on how filmmaking might belong to the same tradition. To me it seemed like a doodle, if not a winding-down.

Cinevardaphoto is a compilation of three short films. Only the first, Ydessa, The Bears and Etc., is a new work. It presents Ydessa Hendeles, a Toronto-based art collector and gallery-owner whose “Teddy Bear Project” contains thousands of archival photographs, mostly innocuous groupings, each containing a teddy bear. She calls it “a fiction of a world where everyone has a teddy bear,” disguised to look like some kind of documentary. The photos indeed seem to coalesce into an illusion of a vast family, but the installation also threatens to become overwhelming, to render the viewer “suffocated by someone else’s obsession” as one spectator puts it. The film catches the Project on display in Munich, where it’s housed in a museum used during the Third Reich to display Nazi propaganda: Hendeles (herself the child of Holocaust survivors) has placed a model of a kneeling Hitler in the exhibition’s exit hall. The undercurrents of all this are potentially endless, and Varda teases them out lightly. Like all her best work, it’s bright and accessible without merely spoon-feeding the audience with conclusions.

The second film, Ulysse, made in 1983, revisits a photo taken almost thirty years earlier, interviewing the subjects (who disclaim much memory of it) and musing on the production of meaning. More complex, slyly funny and allusive than Ydessa, the film evokes Chris Marker; Varda seems to be pushing here beyond her usual limits. It won a French Cesar for best short film at the time. The third film, Salut les Cubains, goes back to 1963 – it’s a montage of Cuban photographs, celebrating the island’s culture and society and in particular its music. It’s a skillful assembly, moving almost invisibly between subjects, providing a strong visceral sense of Cuba’s raw energy. Taken as a whole, Cinevardaphoto ably demonstrates the immense capacity of photographs to generate meaning, and provides a smart, seductive summary of Varda’s range and longevity. But I think festival audiences will have viewed it as a bit of a trifle, as relaxation between more demanding excursions.

Reclaiming Chaos

Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, which came out a couple of years ago, was an achievement rare in any era – a small, highly specific and localized narrative of enormous, terrible implications. In just an hour and a half, it devastatingly illustrated how little validity still attaches to America’s bloated myths of mobility and renewal. At the time I described it here as “a superb exercise in form reflecting content. It’s quiet, precise, careful, and desperate, taking on, without any cinematic ornamentation, a sense of escalating threat.” The film was also beautifully ambiguous though, supporting a multiplicity of readings. Rick Groen, in the Globe and Mail, gave it four stars (it won the Toronto film critics’ award for best picture and actress), emphasizing its upbeat or redemptive aspects and describing its ending like this: “..the weakest among us delivers a lesson in uncommon strength – a pure act of selfless love, with none to bear witness and no reward in sight. Then, alone, she passes through.”

I didn’t see it that way, and responded like this: “Uncommon strength and selfless love…you can call it that, but isn’t it the raw material of survival every day at the very bottom of the food chain, that people somehow keep going, way beyond a point that (to those of us who’ve never lived under such limitations) seems impossible. It’s not selfless, it’s just the best self there is. The ending, I’d say, is a pure tragedy, a capitulation to a horrifying dead end.”

Meek’s Cutoff

Reichardt’s new picture Meek’s Cutoff has a similar kind of effect – virtually everyone agrees it’s a strong film, even a masterpiece, but there’s unusual disagreement on the nature of its achievement. The film, set in the 1860’s, depicts a small group of pioneers heading west, wandering off the main trail after their guide, Stephen Meek, leads them astray. With water running low and anxiety climbing, they capture a lonely native, disagreeing over whether to kill him or whether he might lead them to water. Frankly, that’s about as much of a narrative as the film ever provides.

The debate about the fate of their captive leads some to see the film, in part, as a commentary on Guantanamo Bay, or more broadly on the limits of morality in a time of strain. But I think this only speaks to the eternal and universal nature of uncertainty about making our way in the world. To me, the movie isn’t primarily interesting for its possible specific parallels, but rather for its broad vision of a collective ethos in the process of coalescing. It takes a long time to show us the three women on the trek; they’re filmed in long-shot, or in darkness, or hidden behind big bonnets. They’re also excluded from decision-making; when a vote is taken at one point on the next step, there’s no thought given to including them. We see this as clearly a remnant of the communities they’ve left behind, as ill-suited to the way ahead as the caged canary and grandfather clock they’re hauling along.

Meek says women embody chaos while men embody destruction, an inherently grim view of human capacity, hardly likely to yield much positive momentum. By the end of Meek’s Cutoff though, this inefficient structure is breaking down - you might say chaos is slowly asserting itself over destruction. Groen again senses the divine in his summing up of the ending: “a young country faces a fork in the road, wondering where to put its trust: in the flaws of a familiar leader, in the hope of a complete stranger, or in the love of an invisible God. Coming on to two centuries later, the road may be paved now, but the wondering continues.”

The Wondering Continues

I don’t really see where the invisible God comes in, but it’s true that the superb final moments are mythically charged in a way Reichardt rigorously avoids up to then (it’s the only time I thought of the much more fanciful way a film like Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout engages with the desert). And as Groen describes, those final moments sum up how the deliberate but self-deluding linearity of the opening scenes has been replaced by fundamental, terrifying uncertainty. Also, crucially, the implicit negotiation has become one between a woman and what we’d today call a “minority,” with Meek having explicitly ceded his last vestige of authority. This certainly resonates against the sociological realignment lying far ahead in America’s future, realizing the promise of this strange new chaos, but the big point is that it lies ahead, with no apparent hope of reconciliation in the film’s present. As Groen says, the wondering continues. And the wandering.

Meek’s Cutoff is entirely satisfying as a follow-on to and extension of Wendy and Lucy, confirming Reichardt as one of America’s most important filmmakers. There’s not a strained or ill-considered moment in the film; everything conveys a superbly considered weight, all the more remarkable for its extreme economy of means. It carries the most satisfying kind of complexity, flowing from a gloriously intuitive artistic personality, serious and reflective while avoiding strain and pretentiousness in a way that’s simply beyond most directors, even the good ones.

Mother and Child

For example, take Rodrigo’s Garcia Mother and Child, which was released last year and is now available on cable and DVD: it’s another unusually engrossing and intriguing film, focusing even more specifically on women. Annette Bening plays a woman who got pregnant at fourteen and gave up her daughter for adoption; thirty-seven years later, she’s still tortured by it. Naomi Watts plays the daughter, professionally successful but personally twisted and dysfunctional. And in the third interlocking story, Kerry Washington is a woman wanting to adopt.

Mother and Child is full of the kinds of coincidences, contrivances, twists and self-discoveries we’re used to from such multi-strand narratives, and I can’t say it ultimately amounts to much more than this: motherhood is a strange and wonderful thing, it’s glorious when it works out, and tragic when it doesn’t. Yep, I think that’s about it. But it’s continuously elevated by a psychological daring of a kind you don’t often see in such calculated works, aided by often sensational acting (Bening is once again amazing). Watts’ character, for instance, isn’t just screwed up – she’s flamboyantly so, and her treatment of a doctor played by Amy Brenneman in just two scenes is as deliciously cruel as anything you’ll ever see. At such times, you only wish Garcia took things even further. That aside, you can’t help having some misgivings about a film that, for all its means, seems ultimately less interested in separating women from their traditional biologically-defined roles than does Meek’s Cutoff, despite a century and a half of “progress.”