2009 Toronto Film Festival Report - Part 2

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2009)

Big Eyes (Uri Zohar)

The Festival kicked up some controversy by establishing a new “City to City” showcase program and putting the spotlight on Tel Aviv: cue protest letters, denunciations, op-eds, etc. Well, this may not be the weightiest contribution to that debate (not that I really think any of them were) but I’ve been to Tel Aviv and I think it’s a fine city that well deserves to be spotlighted. Much of the time there you could imagine yourself to be in the most tolerant, peaceful place in the world, and if that’s a superficial impression that ignores the underlying complexity...well, you know what, New York isn’t all Times Square and Central Park either. Are there aspects of Israeli policy that would benefit from constructive debate? – sure, but focusing so intensely on a goddamn film festival programming choice that even its detractors seemed to acknowledge was basically well-intended…I just thought it was puerile. The Tel Aviv movie I went to see, the 1974 Big Eyes, just deepened this impression, because by its very nature it’s an education: in focusing on the historically and politically charged Israel, or on one’s pre-conceived notion of what a “Jewish state” might look like, you miss the day to day reality of people just hanging out and trying to make their lives work and, of course, behaving badly.

Big Eyes stars its director Zohar, a big star at the time (who subsequently underwent a conversion and reportedly now devotes himself to the Torah), as Benny Furman, a basketball coach, married with two kids, but a compulsive chaser of other women. The movie, shot in grainy black and white, certainly mythologizes the character somewhat, lapping up the sleazy fun of his endless scheduling conflicts and lies and evasions, but it doesn’t look away from the pain he causes. Except for the names, a closing wedding sequence, and a brief news story glimpsed on TV, you could be almost anywhere. Except that knowing you’re in Israel, at a time barely removed from 1967, lends an inherent existential charge to Furman’s actions, and the hard edge to Zohar’s expressions frequently seems tinged with weary self-disgust.

Les herbes folles (Alain Resnais)

Resnais is 87 this year, and if my fantasy Nobel Prize for cinema had been instituted, he would have won it decades ago; films like Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel are central to any account of how the medium established itself as art. He’s still working at a steady pace, and it’s understandable if his films are less exacting now; astonishing though how with every new work he still manages to create a fresh cinematic space. In recent years he’s worked often with theatrical properties and with musicals, presumably stimulated by their preexisting constraints (not that you get the impression Resnais is easy to constrain). Les herbes folles is a broader creation though, with an intimate story at its centre, but for example making rich use of exteriors (his last film Coeurs never stepped outside), and it has airplanes!

He sticks to his practice of using familiar actors; his wife Sabine Azema plays a dentist whose purse is snatched; an aimless retiree played by Andre Dussollier finds her wallet and returns it to her via the police. He starts to communicate with her, to the point that she goes back to the cops to have him back off; later the dynamic shifts though, and the pursuer becomes the pursued. The canvas expands to draw in another dentist (Emmanuelle Devos), Looney Tunes references and a broken zipper (carrying huge symbolic weight here), before the action leaves the ground figuratively and ultimately, perhaps, in several other senses too. Meaning that Resnais’ ending could be seen either as being vibrantly alert to the continuing possibility of creation and reinvention, or else as being plain nuts.

 Well, you won’t be surprised I subscribe more to the former interpretation, not that it’s a sure thing. I’m not sure Les herbes folles communicates any specific insight, if that’s your thing, but it overflows with alertness and affection for the idiosyncrasy and unpredictability and often-mysterious longing of human personality and the strange structures and mythologies in which it ties itself up; it’s also quite beautiful to look at, and very quirkily funny at times. Sure, you can say it’s an old man’s film, but as he and Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer and others keep on proving, cinema remains a more than welcoming country for old men. If they’re French at least.

Air Doll (Hirokazu Kore-eda)

After just six movies, Kore-eda has already made it to the Festival’s Masters bracket (although the selection criteria there often seem a bit arbitrary). My favourite movie of his, of those I’ve seen, is Nobody Knows, a chronicle of abandoned children that’s true both to the situation’s inherent abuse and cruelty and to its peculiar freedom; Kore-eda’s coolness sometimes seemed contrived there, but his film’s subtlety played in my mind for days afterwards. Air Doll is an unabashed fantasy, about a blow-up sex doll who suddenly comes to life (“finds a heart” as she puts it, Wizard of Oz-like) and starts wandering around Tokyo while her owner’s at work, even finding herself a job in a video store. Kore-eda casts off his reserve completely here, creating a film of considerable charm and poignancy. Many of us might be inclined to regard a sex life built around such an item as being, to say the least, sub-optimal, but Kore-eda is alert to the potential beauty in loneliness, in the overlooked, in the garbage, even ultimately in senseless death; to the delicacy of human interconnections; to the possibility that despite all its problems humanity might retain a mystical capacity for transmigration. The film also has some pleasantly gentle humour, a plethora of appealing details (Kore-eda’s worked out the contours of his fictional universe exceptionally well) and a very imaginative sex scene.

Some of that sounds similar to what I said about Les herbes folles, but the trouble is, you know, at the end of the day Kore-eda’s film is still about a blow-up sex doll that suddenly comes to life. I would never deny the capacity of great cinema to spring from the least obviously promising roots, but Air Doll never casts off the feeling that a definite ceiling exists on what such a concept could ever realistically achieve (the recurring metaphor, that most of us in our different ways are as empty as she is, basically doesn’t seem like a whole lot). Much as the air doll inevitably suggests an inability to find a real date, Air Doll inevitably suggests an inability (however well disguised) to find a real concept.

2009 Toronto Film Festival - Part 1

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2009)

Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar)

“Films have to be finished,” says the director of the film within Almodovar’s film, “even if you do it blindly.” The fact that the director actually is blind adds to the statement’s resonance, but doesn’t it also make it seem a little crass? Well, maybe just over-enthusiastic then, for Almodovar is certainly one of cinema’s great enthusiasts. His films are highly entertaining, although with minor variations they’re usually entertaining in much the same way, and I’ve yet to have any desire to watch any of them a second time (Live Flesh sticks in my mind as my favorite, but it might just be that this was my first discovery of him in his lusher latter-day mode). He’s a great creator of unique structures, placing flashbacks within flashbacks and films within films, gleefully celebrating complications of gender and desire and health and economic circumstance; this restlessness can seem though as if he’s always turning away from something before it gets really difficult.  The pleasure you take from his films is usually similar to what you get on completing a particularly challenging and aesthetically dazzling jigsaw, which is to say that if you really wanted to appreciate the picture, you wouldn’t have chopped it up in the first place.

All of that said, Broken Embraces is as engrossing as his best (although a little too long).  The blind director spins the steamy story of how he got to be that way, involving a love affair 20 years earlier with his lead actress (Penelope Cruz), while making a movie financed by her elderly husband. It refers to dozens of other movies (explicitly or otherwise) and clearly delights in its characters; Almodovar’s facility in conveying his pleasure at his creations (and at his own luck) is one of his most endearing traits.

Backstory and Cinema Museum (Mark Lewis)

Lewis is previously unknown to me, but he’s a notable multimedia artist (Canada’s representative at this year’s Venice Biennale), and this rich, stimulating program of two short documentaries links to an upcoming series at the Cinematheque. Backstory illustrates the longstanding device of rear projection (where material shot with actors in the studio is foregrounded against a previously filmed external backdrop); in the current Cinematheque program, Lewis cites its invention as the point when film “became fully and definitively ‘modern.’” The interviewees – filmed, in an example of form reflecting content, against an ever-changing series of rear-projected locations – are all members of a longstanding family business: in their heyday they just did one job after another (in the 80s in particular they owned everything from the Rocky movies to The Naked Gun) but in the digital age they struggle to get anything going at all.

The film is mainly a work of anecdotage – the father and son jawbone about everything from past love affairs to Sylvester Stallone’s directorial ineptitude, but they don’t address their contribution other than as craftsmen.  As such it’s an entertaining piece, and oddly beguiling – the visual illusion clearly works even though the entire film is devoted to reminding us of it, embodying how cinema not only survives deconstruction but even thrives on it.  The relationship of light and focus and positioning in Lewis’ images gives the film a textured structure of a kind that, whether because of new technology or relative indifference to composition nowadays, seems inherently old-fashioned and rather poignant.

Cinema Museum takes us through a cluttered archive of cinematic artifacts in London (it’s called a museum, but the vast majority of the contents – in the manner of those stacks of boxes that sat in your cellar for decades  - don’t even seem to be practically accessible, let alone being formally displayed). The curator takes us from room to room (the building used to be a workhouse, where the young Charlie Chaplin briefly resided) – moving past books, cans of film, posters, random old signs and fixtures from long-destroyed movie houses – chattering away (with enthusiasm, but no particular insight or finesse) while the camera sometimes follows along, sometimes wanders off, in a series of extended takes. Cinema itself is secondary here to the medium’s immense capacity for generating ephemera and brands and traces of various kinds; until recently at least, the medium’s inherently social nature allowed (if not demanded) that it function as much as architecture and science and cultural engine, and if one so chooses (and many do), the detritus of these collateral processes becomes as mesmerizing and consuming as the images themselves (and with the advantage that the images can’t be grasped, whereas an old “House full” sign certainly can be). The museum does have some (marooned-seeming) artifacts from recent movies like Chicago, but belongs overwhelmingly to the past, embodying a physicality that again is surely diminishing in an online world. Lewis doesn’t necessarily suggest this necessitates a decline in what cinema can mean or achieve, but virtually everything we see in the film connotes an inadequately catalogued loss.

L’enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea)

Another great body of cinema’s mythology lies in its what might have beens, in films dreamed of but never realized, or even more tragically, actually started but never completed – Orson Welles, as I’ve written before, fascinates his followers (like me) almost as much for his stranded fragments and cul-de-sacs as for his “official” body of work. In 1964, Henri-Georges Clouzot, best known for The Wages of Fear and Les diaboliques, began work on what was to be his masterpiece, L’Enfer. The plot was relatively straightforward – a man is consumed by jealousy at his wife’s imagined infidelities – but Clouzot intended to create a new cinematic language for the husband’s inner landscape, to tangibly depict the contours of inner torment and delusion. With a generous American-backed budget, he launched into the project in style, carrying out extensive tests, and then descending on his lakeside location with a massive crew. But once he got there, he seemed to lose his way (“searching with 100 people around him,” as someone puts it), endlessly reshooting scenes already carried out or merely freezing in indecision, and his always tough manner with actors became destructive, so that lead actor Serge Reggiani stormed off the set, never to return. Clouzot soldiered on, but then suffered a heart attack, and L’Enfer was dead.

The footage survived in storage however (although missing a soundtrack) and this documentary – also drawing on interviews with surviving participants, and using new actors to provide vocals for some of the scenes - gives a terrific sense of what might have been. Much of the footage remains stunning, and the film would surely have enhanced lead actress Romy Schneider’s already iconic standing, although there’s also a fair chance the movie would mainly be viewed now as a somewhat dated and maybe overwrought curio. Its final sentiment is that “you have to see your madness through” (a reasonable restatement of the Almodovar dialogue I started with), and if Clouzot didn’t quite manage that, his labors at least now find a more coherent ending.

Movies on tap

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in February 2008)

Andrew Wagner’s Starting out in the Evening is uncommonly satisfying for such a knowingly “small” film. It stars Frank Langella as Leonard Schiller, a recently-retired professor of English who published, years earlier, four mostly-forgotten novels and hopes to complete a fifth. He’s approached by Heather (Lauren Ambrose), some fifty years younger but a throwback, in love with literature, determined to write her master’s thesis on Schiller and in the process perhaps to redeem his reputation. After initial resistance he agrees to help her, and a friendship of sort, maybe more, develops. Meanwhile, Schiller’s 40-year-old daughter (Lili Taylor), unmarried and getting desperate for a child, rekindles a past relationship with a genial activist (Adrian Lester).

Starting out in the Evening

The movie sticks closely to these few characters and a handful of others, and to a few Manhattan blocks; Schiller has spent his whole life in this milieu, and whatever expansiveness his art may possess, he’s moved past almost all spontaneity. Langella is terrifically precise, but for me the revelation was Ambrose, who I never really registered on Six Feet Under. She’s radiant, you can’t look away from her, but she’s also somewhat gawky and overdone and just a little too much. It’s a brilliant portrayal of someone who for all her certainty is highly malleable and not all there yet; in ten years’ time, she might be entirely different. When you think about it, this is much rarer in movies than it should be – even teenagers dole out wise cracks and presence as if they came out of the womb that way (does the protagonist of Juno, for instance, suggest any real capacity for becoming anyone other than she already is?)

The central subtlety of Starting out in the Evening, and again it sounds like a small thing if I write it this way, is the notion that Heather, perhaps truly Schiller’s biggest admirer and even his biggest hope, nevertheless fundamentally fails to grasp his work or the nature of his personal and creative maturing. We never hear a word of anything he’s written, but we understand that his oeuvre breaks down between two emotionally highly-strung early novels drawn from his own experience, each with a strong female character inspired by his wife (who was killed in an accident after the second book) and two more sprawling, objective works. Heather can’t find a way into these latter two and views them as a sign of lost direction, but the more mature Lester character, with no pretentions as a literary critic, evaluates things the other way round. We’re clearly meant to take this as the fairer view I think. No matter how bright her gaze at him, Heather doesn’t seem truly to see Schiller as he is; she steals an old photograph of him from his office, seeming to think she can somehow conjure up that long-vanished figure.

But then Schiller is a dreamer too, still chasing his characters around the page, unable to conceive of a day that wouldn’t largely be spent before his typewriter. Their dreams don’t mesh, nothing about them ultimately meshes (the contrast between his big slow-moving body and her lithe one is visually very striking, not in a leering sense, just as a seemingly insurmountable demonstration of worlds that can’t possibly intersect, even if they both at various times – but never quite at the same time – dream otherwise). But we don’t see the literary world very often in movies – there are lots of filmic characters who are writers, but mostly as a plot convenience – and there’s something very touching about the milieu here. As the film deftly shows, and as we could all figure out, the tightness and claustrophobia of it generates some bitchiness and backbiting, but that’s just people looking for validation.

As you can tell, I was very captivated by the film’s craftsmanship, and I haven’t even mentioned all of the strands. There are several keenly observed moments of readjustment – see for example the wonderful moment where Heather unknowingly shatters a Schiller reverie by asking a waiter what he has on tap. And anyway is there a phrase more often heard in life, but correspondingly less on screen than “What do you have on tap?” Well, maybe that’s just my life…and hence just my kind of movie.

Cloverfield

A big film masquerading as a small one, Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield depicts (again) the end of the world, or at least Manhattan, as we know it, this time via a Godzilla-like beast of astonishing destructive power. The conceit, and not a new one by now, is that we only see what’s captured on a particular handheld video camera, wielded (with great diligence in the circumstances) by one of a group of stylish friends whose partying is horribly interrupted. This generates a fairly gripping overall atmosphere, although the basic narrative is more contrived than it needed to be, even given that it’s about, well, a monster. More than in the recent I Am Legend, which couldn’t resist the adult playground potential of a post-disaster New York, there’s a real sense here of a lifestyle and attitude being comprehensively ripped up and buried. Of course, at the time we were told that had happened on 9/11 too. You could almost imagine Cloverfield was made by someone regretting our subsequent return to equanimity/complacency, deciding to raise the stakes, big-time.

Persepolis

Persepolis, directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, is based on Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel of the same name and tells of her childhood in Iran during the transition from the old imperial to the current militant fundamentalist regime, with a mid-teenage sojourn in Vienna. The film too is an animation, with very little colour; mostly it’s blocks of ungraduated black and white, with bodies indicated by blobs and faces by kindergarten-quality features. It actually works well, particularly because the style amplifies the shapeless anonymity that’s imposed on women by the regime. There’s a funny visual gag about Marjane in a still-life class, with herself and the other shrouded students drawing a female model of whom virtually nothing can be seen except a nose. “She looks the same from every angle,” bemoans the protagonist.

At other times Marjane is outspoken, flaunting the rules, not always realizing the full decrepitude of a woman’s place in such a culture; she’s a mild rebel but not a melodramatic one, and the movie itself communicates a similar balancing. It’s a loosely structured work, tracking her journey through sexual discovery, a failed marriage, and ultimately the threshold of freedom and maturity (but with the sadness that leaving her home country, for all its compromises, means the loss of belonging). The film is French, so comes with voices by Catherine Deneuve and Danielle Darrieux and others, providing a further layer of cultural oddity. It didn’t spark any huge reaction in me – once you’re clued into the basic nature of the project and the tone, you start to coast along with it after a while – but it’ll certainly be one of this year’s more accomplished curios.

Summer movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in July 2005)

Quick reviews of a plethora of summer movies.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Even more than most mass-release films, this comes packaged as a major-league pop culture event, by virtue of the purported Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie romance. If true (and admittedly, this may be pure subjectivity on my part), the film sure makes it look as if it’s her that has him around her little finger. She just smoulders here, although compared to the classic female smoulderers of the Golden Age it’s a lightweight, disembodied kind of attribute. The film itself, about a stagnating married couple who find they’ve both been leading secret lives as assassins and then have to carry out contracts on each other’s lives, sporadically has the potential to be a warped commentary on the oddities of modern marriage, but the two key words in what I just said are “sporadically’ and “potential.” It gradually heads into incoherence and gleeful excess, crushing whatever “touches” the director Doug Liman (a long way from the highly engaging Swingers) was trying to bring to it. Still, it seems unfair to me to lump this in with something like Charlie’s Angels, as a few writers did; there’s a human core in there, albeit buried under innumerable bodies.

Cote d’Azur

It’s easy to take a film like Cote d’Azur for granted – it’s utterly light and fluffy, involving various couplings and uncouplings among a French family on their summer break. These couplings are both gay and straight – one sometimes suspects that the makers meticulously plotted a 50/50 ratio in both directions. In this sense (and in the use of nudity, for another), the film feels calculated at times, but it’s purely giddy at others – it contains a couple of utterly nutty musical numbers. And its main recurring motif consists of guys getting caught masturbating in the shower. But we know there are many places, not so far from here, where this happy film might be denounced as sick and perverted. How can you not be in its corner?

Howl’s Moving Castle

Japan’s Hayao Miyazaki is one of film’s most unique talents. His animated films are completely bizarre – when I watch them I hover between awe and bemusement, constantly asking myself how anyone ever came up with this stuff. The visual style is simultaneously naive (in the familiar style of anime conventions) and dazzling (you’ve never seen sights like this before). The films convey considerable humanity and liberalism – they’re bursting with transformations and realignments in which Miyazaki rejects physical and temporal limitations and conventions about how heroes and villains work. At the same time, Howl seems like the most sweepingly romantic of his films that I’ve seen (I’m not going to attempt even a cursory plot summary). It’s completely fascinating, and yet I wonder if the films’ immense idiosyncratic assurance doesn’t confine them to a second tier of interest – one marvels at Miyazaki’s facility, but then at what else?

Mysterious Skin

Gregg Araki returns after a long hiatus with a film about two teenage boys – both molested years earlier by their Little League coach, one of them now a hustler, the other haunted by repressed memory. The film has some highly disturbing scenes, setting out the range of emotions (from contempt to desperation) implicit in child abuse; it’s frank about showing how the victims’ immaturity might subsequently allow the memory of the encounters some twisted allure, which only continues the pattern. The film is glossy and sumptuous, often carrying the impact of a classic melodrama, but at the same time seems utterly disillusioned, ultimately offering no better answer to the human mess other than to hope at some supernatural means of transcendence (while acknowledging this as a mere illusion). It’s not as kinetic and viscerally thrilling as I recall Araki’s earlier movies as being, but its mastery of seduction and repulsion is perfect for the material.

Layer Cake

The latest in a long line of modern British crime thrillers, this one is a bit more restrained (on all of gruesome violence, flashy camera tricks, and colourful profanity) than many of its predecessors, which unfortunately just makes it duller. Daniel Craig plays a drug dealer caught up in a complex web of intrigue – he’s a useless, amoral, self-satisfied character who in this movie’s context passes as the symbol of refinement; the film dutifully ticks off all the stock elements around him. The genre’s abundance seems to me to indicate something very neurotic about concepts of masculinity in Tony Blair’s Britain, but there’s no awareness of that here (for a far more intriguing counterpoint, see Mike Hodges’ I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead from last year).

Batman Begins

Christopher Nolan’s supposedly mature and intimately considered version of the Batman myth is only slightly more satisfying than the norm – in fact the studious attention given to justifying the various elements of Bat iconography often only serves to show it up more effectively for the crock that it is. Nolan certainly isn’t ultimately able to resist big silly action scenes, and he handles them more murkily than they demand; his notion of intelligent motivation relies on an endless amount of windy mumbo-jumbo. And Christian Bale is merely dour as Bruce Wayne. This version may be relatively dark, but the depiction of festering Gotham City is vague and the movie has almost no sexuality (fine in say a Spiderman movie, but surely an evasion in seeking to illuminate this particular super-psyche). Still, the prevailing standard for this kind of thing is so mundane that Nolan’s effort does leave you relatively impressed – little about it is actively silly or pandering, it’s just limited.

Land of the Dead

George Romero’s fourth film in his zombie series has a more mainstream cast and seemingly greater resources than the previous movies, and for much of the way this seems to generate a blander result – the zombies are getting more intelligent now, making for a more conventional set-up and structure. This version presents a city so secure and complacent that the zombies are almost forgotten (its fate is of course inevitable) in which capitalist exploitation has reimposed itself after the fragile allegiances of the previous films; in the end Romero posits that the bond between the normal working stiffs and the zombies may end up stronger than that between the ever-perpetuating hierarchies of mankind. At such times his old radicalism seems as strong as ever. The film is highly pacey and entertaining – it’s one of the few films you wish had been longer, to allow a more thorough examination of the city’s undercurrents. But even so, the film is a much more satisfactorily “adult” use of genre filmmaking than Batman Begins.

Missing movies

Writing recently in the UK Guardian newspaper, prompted by the rediscovery of two lost Peter Sellers comedy shorts from the 1950s, Xan Brooks expresses his fascination at “the idea of the films that get lost; that vast, teeming netherworld where the obscure and the unloved rub shoulders, in the dark, with the misplaced and the mythic.” He notes: “Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation estimates that as many as 50% of the American movies made before 1950 are now gone for good, while the British film archive is similarly holed like Swiss cheese.” The British Film Institute has a section on its website dedicated to the 75 most wanted British films, asking members of the public as well as collectors and archivists to “check attics and cellars, sheds and vaults” in search of Alfred Hitchcock’s second film as a director, Errol Flynn’s screen debut, three early works by Michael Powell, and seventy others. Although such attic searches would obviously be extreme longshots, success from such measures wouldn’t be unprecedented; as Brooks notes, if not for the storage room of a Norwegian psychiatric hospital, the world wouldn’t have as complete a version as we do of Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, one of the most highly prized films in history.

Where’s Parsifal (and who cares!?)

I entirely share Brooks’ fascination with this aspect of cinema, of how it reminds us that even the swaggering industrial stomp of the blockbuster is built from the most fragile of commodities, transient successions of images; if we can shut out a film by closing our eyes, then why shouldn’t the world send it into non-existence by turning its head. Many of the lost films date back to more haphazard times – the missing Powell movies for instance were 1930s “quickie” efforts that by all accounts barely seemed to count for much even as they were being made, so it’s not hard to see why everyone forgot to think about posterity. But others belong to the 60’s and 70’s, and the most recent is Where’s Parsifal, a reportedly bizarre 1984 comedy featuring Tony Curtis, Peter Lawford and Orson Welles (one commentator on the Internet Movie Database suggests the film can actually be found on ancient Australian videotapes, but maybe that’s no better than being lost in an attic).

Of course, momentary buzz aside, it’s a bit strange to be excited by (for instance) the rediscovery of a lost Peter Sellers film unless you’ve actually seen all the Peter Sellers films that are already available, which I imagine not many people have. For virtually any star or director you can name, a lot of the material that’s not actually lost might as well be, given how difficult it is to access. I’ve written before how the Internet has been a source of wonder in remedying some of this, albeit only in a rather chaotic way. I was recently startled when Peter Watkins’ 1977 film Evening Land recently popped up on Mubi.com, as I’d read in the past on Watkins’ own website that “The only known surviving 35mm copies of this film (two) are in the archives of the Danish Film Institute in Copenhagen. On rare occasions they may be loaned out to other Cinematheques, though their quality is not the best.”

Evening Land

Since then, he provided an update that the film was released on DVD in France, but nothing suggested it would be available here any time soon. The Mubi print seemed to derive from a Toronto-based distributor which has worked with Watkins in the past, Project X Distribution, but its website hasn’t been updated since 2009. As I watched the film (the quality of which looked fine), I couldn’t help thinking its reappearance might be that of a phantom, capable of being snatched away at any moment.

I wrote about Watkins here several years ago (you can find the article at http://torontomovieguy.blogspot.ca/2012/04/peter-watkins.html) noting among other things that “his critique of mass media malignity becomes ever more relevant as the standard of our public discourse grinds relentlessly into greater trivia, shrouding the mass erosion of quality of life and prospects for sustainability.” Evening Land fits entirely into that theme, taking what’s usually termed a “docudrama” approach to depicting the (fictional) upheaval after a Copenhagen shipyard signs a contract to build hulls for French atomic submarines: the workers’ rights to strike and to other means of public protest crashes into the immense governing interest in maintaining Denmark’s industrial base and its place within Europe (defined at that pre-expansion point by what we now think of as the old Europe). Watkins crams a lot into the film, and one can easily get lost within it, but that’s a deliberate strategy too I think, mirroring how the populace misses the incremental shifts that gradually shift the nature of power and influence. Hindsight tells us that democracy didn’t crash as rapidly as Watkins clearly expected it to, but if he was a pessimist on the timing, maybe that only speaks to the self-preserving refinement of the influences he diagnosed. It’s shocking that his work isn’t better known and more consistently accessible.

The Amorous Misadventures of Casanova

Talking of Tony Curtis, I recently watched another film from his fading star period, one which might surely have gone the way of Where’s Parsifal and yet somehow survives, a mind-boggling 1977 European mishmash called The Amorous Misadventures of Casanova, among other things (shifting titles are a common feature of such misbegotten projects, as if limply throwing darts at a target without a bullseye). Sometimes it’s called Some Like it Cool, which exactly points to how Curtis trashes his legacy here. He plays both an aging Casanova with performance problems and a younger lookalike; the film sends them on a strenuously intertwined plot of mix-ups, usually involving the bedroom; much of the time, you have the impression of merely watching a tired man delivering his anachronistic quips, propped up by a conveyor belt of boobs.

And yet (that’s right, even for a farrago such as this you can find an “as yet,” if you’re a true optimist) by its very nature, the film embodies a kind of joy in cinema that’s extinguished now, a faith in the notion that the very presence of a Star, doing some vague version of what he’s always done, is inherently magnetic; and in the allure of pretty titillation. I don’t think it can ever have been entirely true, because such films never seemed to do much for the career of anyone who appeared in them, but the notion persisted for a long time, before being gradually killed off by home video and then the Internet and the new attitudes that came with them. Watching The Amorous Misadventures of Casanova, I kept wondering how anyone thought that what I was looking at was good, but I suppose that’s the wrong question – no one thought it had to be good, it just had to be. And how easy then for such a film, maybe ten years or even a day later, to cease to be.

Images of war

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in February 2007)

It was remarkably appropriate that Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima should open here in the same week that George W. Bush announced an additional 21,000 troops headed for Iraq. Bush may have had unwavering supporters for this move somewhere, but they were hard to find. Most Democrats, and many Republicans, thought the focus should be on winding down and pulling out. The dwindling band of hawks, in a grim application of the in for a penny in for a pound philosophy, mostly thought that any increase should be greater (Frank Rich pointed out that the total American military commitment, post increase, remained less than the manpower of the NYPD).

Letters from Iwo Jima

No one, of course, knows. These calibrations couldn’t be more spurious; Bush’s sense of the specific demands of the Baghdad insurgency, despite everything we hear about briefings and meetings and deliberations, never seems more than impressionistic, if not fantastic. But maybe it was always so. You look at our world in 2007 through one eye and it’s a temple of achievement – the gleaming payoff for centuries of slow progress. Then you look through the other eye and it’s the same primitive, ill-considered mess it’s always been. The main mark of our progress – one that’s destined by its nature to be short-lived – is perhaps merely the ability to keep these two dueling realities so clinically hidden from each other.

Eastwood’s other film from last year, Flags of our Fathers, focused on the creation of military heroes, dramatizing the vast ideological machine and its disregard for truth or the individual well being of the individuals who feed the beast. The film fell a little flat with most people, but watching the much starker, pained Letters from Iwo Jima, it hit me more clearly how Flags – for all its apparent respect toward American heartland values – exposes the machinations of a puffed-up, corrupt empire. The glory of dying for one’s country generally seems a function of rarity and positioning more than of inherent “achievement” or “meaning” – look at the news coverage of each Canadian military death in Afghanistan – which limits the impact of stories told from the perspective of the winners.

As if dissatisfied by the scope of Flags, Eastwood decided during its production to make this companion film about the other side. It’s certainly one of the bleakest examples of an increasingly bleak genre. Iwo Jima was a wretched island, considered strategically important in the final phase of WW2 for its position 650 miles from Tokyo. Facing a certain American invasion, the unraveling Japanese empire deployed some 21,000 men (now that number sounds familiar somehow…) to the island, with little or no air and sea support. The Americans sent in 110,000 marines in 880 ships. At the end of 36 days, one in three of the Americans were killed or wounded, but virtually all the Japanese perished. This, it seems, was essentially preordained – the Japanese strategy called for no survivors, asking of their soldiers only to maximize the slaughter of American troops before dying themselves. Letters from Iwo Jima focuses on the Japanese commander, Kuribayashi, on his deputies, and on some of the ordinary men, and I don’t think I’m giving too much away when I say only one of these survives. The film is not about fighting, but about dying.

Honour and Accountability

Certainly it has its fill of stirring incident and spectacle, and moments of human identification. Eastwood’s approach here is more linear than in the sprawling Flags, but still accommodates occasional flashbacks to previous lives, and voice-overs reading from the letters of the title. Narratively, the film is accessible enough. But it’s deliberately taxing and draining. The colours are utterly desaturated, rendering most frames a grim yellowish gray, with only the occasional grimy infusion of blood to vary the scheme. The Japanese spend much of their time staking out the enemy in tunnels, which creates an immense claustrophobic weight. Initially, Kuribayashi has the buoyancy of the true believer, and the film allows this to shape its momentum for a while, but the hopelessness of the mission soon becomes clear, the commander can do no more than agonize in his bunker about the collapse of all around him, and the film becomes increasingly fragmented, along with what it portrays.

The film has its weaknesses. I was surprised afterwards to read the Japanese had even as many as 21,000 men, because the film seems to suggest it was much less, thus facilitating the sense of hopelessness, and allowing contrivances such as repeated meetings between the commander and the film’s main everyman character. But it’s a film of great eloquence and weight. As things go on, suicide comes increasingly to dominate its scheme (more than any war film I can remember), further deepening its reverie on death, on what’s a good death in wartime, on the nature of duty to country and empire. Which, reflecting the rigid Japanese culture of honour and accountability, provides another obvious parallel with the feckless oversight of the Iraq endeavour.

Flags of our Fathers ended on a memory of camaraderie among the American soldiers, playing around in the sea. Letters of Iwo Jima closes on the dark, accusatory silhouette of the wretched island. Those two images, on their face, merely embody the spectrum between winning and losing, but the two films together, along with the good fortune of their timing (although a filmmaker as fast moving and canny as Eastwood can truly be said to make his own luck) establish the corrupt arrogance of those very concepts in war. They’re a powerful collective letter indeed.

 

Alpha Dog

Meanwhile, in the most privileged enclaves of modern day America, cinematic evidence accumulates that the life of the average young adult is merely a dissipated whirl of drugs and violence and casual sex and random connection. No wonder George W. Bush doesn’t want to bring back the draft! Nick Cassavetes’ Alpha Dog is based on the story of real-life California drug dealer Jesse James Hollywood, who in 2000 was at the middle of a spontaneous kidnapping that went horribly astray. Emile Hirsch plays the fictionalized Johnny Truelove, and the film’s best performance, truly, comes from Justin Timberlake as the sweetest natured, most tragically misled of his posse.
 

It’s a very full film in the sense that it’s stuffed with secondary characters and connections – the many young women who hang ingratiatingly around the swaggering dudes seem especially anonymous and interchangeable – and it’s absolutely never boring. But this territory has been covered so many times that one can tick off the thematic threads before the lights even go down:  stunted maturity; ineffectual parenting; lax morality; too much easy money; latent homoeroticism; parakeet fetishism. Well, I made that last one up. I have no idea how many people out there are living the Alpha Dog life, but I think the subculture has been adequately charted by now. Ain’t freedom wonderful though?

Jack Lemmon

Jack Lemmon is one of my favourite actors of all time. I know this is true, because I regularly rewatch movies I wouldn’t think of spending time on otherwise, solely because Jack Lemmon is in them, and there’s hardly anyone else I can say that for. A few months ago, I even watched Airport ’77 for Pete’s sake – that’s the one in which a failed hijack attempt sends the plane underneath the ocean. Lemmon plays the pilot, and it’s really not a role conducive to any kind of meaningful acting – the last third of the film plays mostly like an information film regarding the might of the US Navy – but his presence normalizes the melodrama at least a little. In the last few years I’ve also watched largely forgotten Lemmon films like The April Fools and Under the Yum Yum Tree, as well as many of the ones he’s actually remembered for.

Save the Tiger

Lemmon’s persona mixes intelligence, sincerity and anxiety, in a ratio that shifts from role to role; his characters are often swept along by a mixture of external mishaps and internal inadequacy, hopelessly pushing back against overwhelming circumstance, usually papered over by a veneer of jokiness or fast-talking. In the sixties, this made him the perfect embodiment of the young guy on the make, showing time and again how the business suit barely stays on for all the tics and pressures and excess booze; as he aged, accordingly, the suits may have got finer, but the man within them was more likely to crumble. He won his best actor Oscar in 1973 for Save the Tiger, where he plays Harry Stoner, owner of a faltering garment manufacturer who eventually resorts to arson to keep the business going. The film is a writerly artificiality, cramming years of escalating frustration into one day, stuffed with portents of loss and disaster (the plight of the endangered tiger being just one), but Lemmon is entirely fascinating, conveying both the agony and the perverse near-exhilaration of Harry’s looming personal and professional crack-up.

When he won the award, Lemmon beat out Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail, Al Pacino in Serpico and Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, which must have seemed like the triumph of the establishment over the new wave (even if his film career was younger than  Brando’s). He won the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award at the age of 63, the second youngest winner at that point (Orson Welles had received it at 59), getting it ahead of people like Kirk Douglas and Gregory Peck who had a big head start on him. In other words, he rapidly became an institution, but one seemingly based as much on personal decency and affability as on the nature of his screen presence. It’s a little hard, even for Lemmon fans, to articulate exactly what it is that you’re responding to in his work.

Mannered regret?

David Thomson, not a particular Lemmon fan, wrote in his Biographical Dictionary of Film that the actor is “hugely skilled, meticulous, and yet- it seems to me – an abject, ingratiating parody of himself. Long ago, worry set in, the detail of his work turned fussy, nagging, and anal; his mannerisms are now like a miser’s coins…I can’t bear to see or hear that mannered regret any more.” Although I obviously don’t feel that way, I agree with Thomson in one respect: whereas most of Hollywood’s great stars never gave “bad” performances when cast in their comfort zones, Lemmon was fairly often over-indulged, becoming repetitive and even annoying. Blake Edwards directed him to one of his most raw, affecting performances in Days of Wine and Roses, but thereafter abused the actor’s faith in him. In The Great Race, Lemmon plays a comic villain, so broadly and monotonously that the film starts seeming as long as the race; later in the movie, he also plays a European crown prince who’s the villain’s double, and although the intention there is to convey idiocy rather than evil, the character behaves more or less the same, and just as annoyingly.

Even worse, twenty years later, Edwards cast Lemmon in That’s Life, which should have been a crowning achievement for both men: Edwards was coming off his most mature and strangely complex period (“10,” S.O.B.) and Lemmon had recently collected three more Oscar nominations (The China Syndrome, Tribute, Missing). But the movie ended up chronically self-absorbed and whiny, and at the same time off-puttingly opulent and smug, seeming like the sad product of too much time inside a self-indulgent bubble. The fault is no doubt Edwards’ more than Lemmon’s, but one feels an actor of his stature should have been able to push back more effectively against the complacency engulfing him (the film of Glengarry Glen Ross makes better, if still conventional, use of late Lemmon).

Lemmon’s vulnerability

If I also add that I’ve never much cared for Lemmon’s revered performance in Some Like it Hot either (writing about the film here a few years ago I said “his ‘Daphne’ is a gargoyle, tittering and screeching; to say the least, it’s an unsophisticated approach to the character”), it might raise the question of why I seem to be dwelling on his weaknesses as much as on his strengths. I think it’s because Lemmon’s magnificence, his uniqueness in American cinema, isn’t despite but is in large part because of his limitations and excesses – if his technique and control often falters, it’s a guarantee of his vulnerability, and therefore of his remarkable resonance in conveying the weight of modern problems. His trademark delivery style, which feels like he’s adding 50% of nervous digression to whatever was written on the page, seems to convey a deep-rooted fear of falling, all the more compelling for knowing that he sometimes did.

In several of his seventies films, Lemmon appears fully naked (from the back), and there’s nothing at all aspirational about what he shows – unexceptional musculature, thin arms, body hair and tan lines that just come as they come. Far from the general notion of Hollywood stars as physical and cultural ideals, Lemmon shows himself as a man who’ll have to get by on his wits, if at all, and who severely doubts how long that can last. It’s no surprise that his roles became less interesting in the 80’s, as pumped-up Reagan-era optimism became the dominant order of the day (Lemmon himself was a committed Democrat).

His great friend and co-star Walter Matthau was much less inclined to let his doubts show, more of the caustic gambler who figures he can bulldoze his way through anything. Their best film together is probably their first, The Fortune Cookie, where Lemmon’s pliable character gets manipulated this way and that by Matthau’s Whiplash Willie. Their old man buddy movies are just going through the motions, but even by their existence, they testified that despite the worries and stresses, Lemmon’s particular brand of everyman had somehow hung on.

Larger meaning

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in January 2006)

Steven Spielberg’s Munich takes off from the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics, following five covert Israeli operatives, on a mission authorized by Golda Meir, to track down and assassinate eleven men identified as responsible. Eric Bana is the leader of the group and Geoffrey Rush is his field officer. The film feels designed to be important. That’s partly a result of its making – shot in relative secrecy and then released for Oscar season with minimal media stroking by Spielberg or his cast (except for an exclusive Time cover that seems to have alienated much of the rest of the press corps), as though the film – like its protagonists – were expected to achieve preeminence through inherent smarts and moral entitlement. As it is, it aroused pockets of strong support – Slate’s David Edelstein for one counts it as 2005’s best picture – but a more general apathy, and some considerable antipathy.

Idea of Evenhandedness

I think that’s an understandable reaction overall. It’s a long movie – some 160 minutes – although I was generally engaged by it. But this engagement primarily took place on the level of a familiar and at times somewhat mechanical thriller. The movie quickly settles into a groove whereby each target is tracked down in turn via a mysterious French middleman possessing omnipotent information but professing no moral or political affiliation (except the very act of disclaiming all governmental allegiance), each set-up involves some new kind of explosive device or other quirk, and each entails some hiccup on the way to completion. Spielberg’s execution of all this is generally impeccable, but there’s nothing at all remarkable about any of it – it’s like a retread of however many John Le Carre-type adaptations.

This would all be fine, if it were merely the genre skeleton on which Spielberg imposed something thematically bracing. But it’s in this area that Munich proves most keenly disappointing, and disappointing in exactly the way that one has sadly come to expect from him. The film simply displays little intellectual heft or political courage; to take only the most recent example, it seems thin and undernourished compared with Syriana, which displays less grasp of classical filmmaking, but is nevertheless far more compelling by virtue of its willingness to pick a thesis and stick to it, balance be damned. Munich is merely frustrating, and constantly causes you to wonder why Spielberg took on the subject in the first place.

A few samples of the commentary will get this point across better than I can. This is Leon Wieseltier from The New Republic. “The real surprise of Munich is how tedious it is. ... It is soaked in the sweat of its idea of evenhandedness. Palestinians murder, Israelis murder. Palestinians show evidence of a conscience, Israelis show evidence of a conscience…All these analogies begin to look ominously like the sin of equivalence, and so it is worth pointing out that the death of innocents was an Israeli mistake but a Palestinian objective. No doubt Munich will be admired for its mechanical symmetries, which will be called complexity. But this is not complexity, it is strategy. I mean of the marketing kind. … Munich is desperate not to be charged with a point of view. It is animated by a sense of tragedy and a dream of peace, which all good people share, but which in Hollywood is regarded as a dissent, and also as a point of view.”

Compromise and Dialogue

Here’s a more explicitly ideological expression of the same general reservation, from David Brooks in The New York Times.  “By choosing a story set in 1972, Spielberg allows himself to ignore the core poison that permeates the Middle East, Islamic radicalism. In Spielberg's Middle East, there is no Hamas or Islamic Jihad. There are no passionate anti-Semites, no Holocaust deniers like the current president of Iran, no zealots who want to exterminate Israelis.

“There is, above all, no evil. And that is the core of Spielberg's fable. In his depiction of reality there are no people so committed to a murderous ideology that they are impervious to the sort of compromise and dialogue Spielberg puts such great faith in.”

There’s much other available commentary along the same lines. And the basic point seems to me incontrovertible. Spielberg doesn’t help his case in a recent interview with Roger Ebert, where he seems to have little specific to say about his film’s thesis, but goes on vaguely about “larger meaning” and how “the dialogue needs to be louder than the weapons” and how discussion “is the highest good – it’s Talmudic.” Munich is duly filled with seemingly endless exchanges and meditations on how one act of vengeance may merely precipitate another. I cannot assess the claims for historical accuracy, but with a truly probing director that wouldn’t matter. Co-writer Tony Kushner wrote Angels in America, which generated great meaning and resonance, partly out of real people, without holding itself hostage to mundane pro- or con- accounting based on the mundane facts.

One of several weird paradoxes of Spielberg’s career is that he’s a master at creating fantasy worlds, bringing about our complete immersion in essentially outlandish premises, but then turns poky and pious in his “serious” projects. Munich ends with a shot of the World Trade Center, some twenty five years before 9/11, as a backdrop to the final conversation between Bana and Rush. The allusion is obvious, that what we’ve witnessed is in some way a foundation for the cycle of hatred and excess that culminated in that grave attack, and from there into the war in Iraq and God knows what lies beyond. But as insights go, this is not one iota more articulate or rational than George W. Bush’s aspirations for democracy in the Middle East.

Threat from within

Spielberg’s other 2005 movie, War of the Worlds, was inherently much easier to take, prompting some to wonder why at this late stage he spends his time on such material, and yet I actually found the film more politically provocative than Munich. That film also has 9/11 references in abundance, some of which might be considered merely opportunistic, but I thought the central metaphor of the overwhelming threat emerging from within, into the midst of a carefully evoked blue collar milieu, was a more intriguing commentary on middle-American complacency and vulnerability than anything in Munich. That film was justly criticized for its soft family-centric ending, and Munich again proves itself vulnerable on this score, as political calculations yield to the imperative of simply protecting one’s own.

The film does hint at some intriguing angles on the interplay of personal and political, through a recurring preoccupation with lost fathers, but this comes to seem more like a Spielbergian indulgence than a substantial contribution to the “larger meaning.” I don't want to overstate the case – Munich is full of intriguing sequences, and Spielberg’s calculating grimness is hardly more negligible than the achievements of many other serious films. But even as he explains it, his film’s lessons appear targeted mainly at unthinking zealots, and I don’t think I’m paying either myself or you the reader an unwarranted compliment when I say we may be a little beyond that.

A Woman under the Influence

I’ve written in this space before about the great director John Cassavetes, but that was in 2005, so it wouldn’t seem like a sign of obsession to write about him again (you can find the previous article here). I recently rewatched his 1974 film A Woman under the Influence, for the first time in seven years, and it was as magnificent and overwhelming an experience as ever. There are plenty of directors whose work doesn’t feel like anyone else’s, but it often feels as if you make your way into their films by trekking down a very specific and often very long corridor, leaving behind the rooms and the furnishings you usually hang out among, just hoping the journey will be worth it and that the carpet isn’t toxic. Cassavetes, in comparison, seems to be waiting at the entrance to the corridor when you arrive, pulling you along, gabbing in your ear, stamping you with his infectious enthusiasm, and yet also being an almost instant pain in the ass, so that you can’t help thinking you might turn and run from him, if not that he’d catch you up and probably knock you down.

John Cassavetes

In that previous article, which I wrote not long after the release of the Criterion boxed set John Cassavetes: Five Films (still one of the most crucial items on my DVD shelves), I emphasized such matters as Cassavetes’ delight in behavior, in performance, in love as the driving force of human nature. It’s sometimes occurred to me that Cassavetes (who died in 1989) would likely have regarded my own largely peaceful, conflict-free relationship as a soulless surrender, a shutting-down of something elemental. Although I’m quite certain I wouldn’t be happy living my life in Cassavetes fashion, his view of the world, as you’re watching his films, is so persuasive that it’s hard to entirely bat the question away.

My own favourite is his late film Love Streams (not in the Criterion set, but apparently coming soon), but A Woman under the Influence (which is in the set) was his greatest success, at least as measured by popular interest and Oscar nominations; it was a key contribution to a time when debates about women’s equality and liberation were active and heated. It’s a portrait of Mabel Longhetti (played by Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes’ wife), who maintains a household and brings up three kids while her husband Nick (Peter Falk) works long hours in a blue-collar job. From the start of the film, it’s unclear whether Mabel is by some definition mentally ill, or just extremely quirky, and of course there’s no clear point where one merges into the other. Either way, her behavior becomes disruptive enough that the family sends her to a hospital for six months, but when she returns it’s unclear how much has actually changed (which thus reinforces the question of whether she was ever under the influence of anything that could be treated, other than perhaps life itself).

Essential impossibility

Writing a few years afterwards, James Monaco said: “it’s by far the best portrait we have of the essential impossibility of the housewife’s role, and it’s a logically harrowing narrative of the painful neurosis that is so often the only response to that dilemma.” The film wasn’t in any sense a feminist fantasy though: Monaco also cited Susan Schenker’s assessment that Cassavetes “has purposefully designed the film without giving Mabel the slightest chance to explain herself. She has no girlfriend, no sympathetic listener to talk to, and so the deck is neatly stacked against her.” Even this well-intentioned critique seems at heart though to be reaching a conclusion about Mabel’s condition, that it’s of a kind that could only benefit from sympathetic listening (which, written in the context of the 70’s, seems to herald a lifetime of analysis) and so must in some way need to be talked away. But this might merely be a twist on the age-old labeling of female expression as “hysteria,” or worse.

The film’s key scene, I think, comes shortly after Mabel arrives home, far more subdued at first than we’ve seen her before. Almost before she’s had any chance to settle, Nick drags her aside, and more or less pummels her back toward her old behavior, telling her “there’s nothing you can do wrong,” and “I just want you to be yourself,” and forcing her to drag up some of the weird sounds she used to make. It’s a deeply ambiguous moment. In some sense, it seems Nick realizes Mabel will never reach a workable equilibrium in this anaesthetized state, and for her own good pushes her toward fuller self-expression. But it’s also clear that for the most part, he likes her the way she is, and throughout the film he behaves in a way that seems calculated (knowingly or intuitively) to spark confrontations and outbursts, both with Mabel and with others. Perhaps he’s partly a liberating force, but he also insists oppressively on setting the terms of Mabel’s rehabilitation.

Everyday madness

But with the passage of time, it’s easier to see too how you might as well refer to the essential impossibility of Nick’s role – an ordinary if somewhat volatile man, eternally pushed and constrained by conflicting influences (in one of the extras on the disk, Rowlands and Falk recall how audiences booed his character, but that seems unlikely to happen now). The film ends on an extended scene of togetherness and marital syncopation, but it’s clear nothing has been resolved – the following day, Nick will go to work again, and the kids will go to school, and Mabel will have the same overwhelming question: how to make sense of her hours and days and years, to make them fully her own, while maintaining a functional interaction with the rest of the world.

Thirty years after it came out, the film seems startlingly radical and mysterious. Monaco’s comments about the essential impossibility of the housewife’s role, and Schenker’s about Mabel’s lack of opportunity to explain herself, would have to mean something very different in a world of revved-up distraction and connectivity, and the fact that there seems to be no chance of her looking for a job would surely have to be remarked on now. In some ways, we’re in an age that purports to prize personal expression (in matters of honesty about sexuality for instance), but in others – for example in the way we’re all meant to be consumed by electronic trivia and disposable media-fueled daily outrages – everything pushes us toward uniformity. Cassavetes might well have diagnosed such insularity as a form of collective madness, a systematic rejection of possibility, far more toxic to the soul than Mabel’s swooping into odd utterances and gestures and outbursts of wacky creativity and honesty.

Best of 2004

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2004)

This was a satisfying year – the first in a while where I find myself puzzling over what to leave off the top ten list rather than over what to put on it. Here’s where I ended up (in no particular order); apologies to any masterpieces released at the very end of the year.

Before Sunset

There’s something almost unbearably touching and joyous about Richard Linklater’s sequel to his 1995 Before Sunrise. The film’s concept (two people having an extended conversation in Paris) and execution are simple, but its impact seems to flow from the very heart of cinema, prompting endless reflections on memory and the power of the image. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are both magnificent, and it probably has the best ending of the year.

Uzak (Distant)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Turkish film had a brief run at the Cinematheque, where it evoked for me the transforming effect of watching Chantal Akerman’s Les rendezvous d’Anna at the age of 16 or 17; about an unemployed man who comes from the country to the city to stay with his more prosperous cousin, it’s visually ravishing and totally gripping from the outset as a thematic and psychological construction. The film’s beautiful choreography gracefully depicts the similarities in the two men’s solitary trajectories; it’s one of the best recent films on the classic arthouse theme of alienation.

Dogville

I wouldn’t strenuously disagree with the common list of faults identified in Lars von Trier’s Dogville: pretentiousness, repetition, lazy point scoring. Even so, this film about a woman’s humiliation in a small Depression-era village is stylistically so fascinating (it was shot in its entirety inside a Swedish warehouse, with no sets) that a reasonably minded viewer should be able to stay with it through these challenges. And it’s clearly a major piece of political cinema, even if one’s assessment in that regard is inevitably going to be coloured by personal preconceptions.

Cremaster 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Matthew Barney’s already semi-legendary Cremaster cycle, made over the last ten years, finally arrived at the Cinematheque, then at the Carlton. Overall it’s an amazing achievement by Barney. The films are as consciously “arty’ as anything you’ll ever see – their perversity and incredible individuality serve as a constant challenge to all preconceptions, but despite that they achieve a remarkable degree of coherence. With the director himself turning up in a variety of weird guises, the series is certainly narcissistic, but Barney’s multi-dimensional mirror seems at times to reflect almost the entire span of creative endeavour, and it’s thrilling both to watch and to contemplate afterwards.

Vera Drake

Leigh’s amazing film shows an ordinary woman in 1920’s England who “helps out girls in trouble” – she performs abortions, and eventually is arrested and put through the justice system.  The film is a devastating sociological critique, based in an almost supernatural evocation of time and place – in particular, each character represents a slightly different perspective on sexuality, shown here as a commodity inherently conditioned by class. The film is less showy than some of Leigh’s work, but ultimately I think it ranks second only to Topsy-Turvy.  

Metallica: Some Kind of Monster

Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s documentary on the making of Metallica’s last album delivers all the rock genre goods, but with a bizarre (until you’ve thought of it, that is) contemporary twist: the band members undergo relentless talk therapy as they try to hold it all together. It’s intermittently hilarious and always fascinating, and in a year of many fine documentaries stands out in the memory for its surprising thematic scope.

Demonlover

Olivier Assayas’ 2002 film finally played here at the Cinematheque after a long delay. It’s an amazing creation, straining what you’d think would be the edges of someone’s creative prowess. The first half is a precise, superbly executed drama of high finance (perhaps the best since Alan Pakula’s Rollover); the second half deliberately sheds all coherence, taking on the dream logic of a David Lynch film as alliances and understandings persistently redefine themselves. The film exhibits a cacophony of interests and influences, all spinning off the cultural, personal and sexual perils of high-tech globalization, opening up unimaginable wells of neurosis.

The Dreamers

When I saw Bernardo Bertolucci’s chronicle of sex and cinema in 1968 Paris, it didn’t seem likely to make this list. Certain parts of the film are utterly vibrant and compelling, but the emphasis on so much youthful beauty rather blurs its thematic possibilities, and the ending seemed far more visually arresting than meaningful. Even so, I find myself dwelling on the film far more than most others, perhaps because in making a film that draws so explicitly on his own origins, Bertolucci almost seems to be acknowledging his need for rejuvenation.

Son Frere

On the basis of my sole visit there so far, Atom Egoyan’s Camera (on 1020 Queen West) is an enticing addition to the city, especially since you can see a film there, walk a couple of blocks and then hang out at the Drake Hotel. It’s where I saw Patrice Chereau’s Son Frere, a hugely accomplished study of a man with a debilitating blood disease and his relationship with his brother. The film blends clinical precision of observation with an extraordinarily fluid perspective toward family versus sexual love, and the social implications of illness and its inherently marginalizing consequences; it’s emotionally wrenching, and thrilling in its thoroughness.

Million Dollar Baby

After the astonishing one-two punch of Mystic River and the new film, Clint Eastwood again seems close to the summit of American directors. The film shows no shame with boxing cliches; the characters are essentially stock figures, and much of the trajectory is familiar. But Million Dollar Baby seems to understand these mechanics more fully and fluently than almost any other film – it’s an eloquent study, minimally but beautifully styled, in how the sport’s strange mechanics and culture redefine the three main characters.

Other honourable mentions: The Triplets of Belleville, Broken Wings, Baadaaaas, The Mother, Zatoichi. That’s a lot of honourable mentions – it was a good year. As I mentioned, lots of good (or at least intriguing) documentaries too – My Architect, The Take, The Yes Men, The Corporation. Films like Sideways and Kinsey were terrific entertainments without quite convincing me as art. As always, I doubt that I saw the year’s worst films, but I was heavily in the dissenting camp on The Passion of Christ, and was lukewarm on Fahrenheit 911.  Also a great film festival year, lots of great DVD releases, and another wonderful year at the Cinematheque. Could I be happier? Sure, if they released Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind. See you in 2005!