Some boring movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2006)

It must be amazing to be Bryan Singer and, from the looks of it, be allowed to make any movie you want to make. Orson Welles said something about a film set being the biggest train set a boy ever had, and something of that delight comes across in Singer’s films. His new one, Superman Returns, even features a train set, part of a vast model landscape in the lair of arch-villain Lex Luthor. And the film itself, resurrecting the Superman franchise after almost twenty years, and with many widely reported false starts in the years since then, is a dream opportunity for a Superman fan. Singer’s approach is highly conscientious, with a plot that picks up where the films left off in the 80’s (he retains John Williams’ original theme), touching base with all the core elements of the mythology and adding a carefully plotted new threat, courtesy of Luthor and some leftover crystals from Superman’s home planet.

Superman Returns

You can hear a “but” coming, and here it is: the movie is as boring as hell. I don’t completely know why – maybe it’s true that Superman doesn’t have the right resonance for current times. He’s basically a square, and his powers are so vast that it’s hard to feel much emotional investment in whether or not he pulls off his various feats. The special effects are mostly great, which may count for a lot on an Oscar judging panel, but doesn’t hit you where it hurts. And then Singer mostly squanders the cast. After The Usual Suspects, the prospect of him directing Kevin Spacey and Parker Posey would have been thrilling…well, don’t ask how it turns out here. And don’t ask either about Superman Returns’ only point of thematic interest – the horrendously pretentious allusions to Jesus Christ (including a beating that sure seemed reminiscent of Passion Of The Christ). What’s the point of meddling with such stuff unless you have a point to make about Jesus, or the nature of faith, or the power of religion, or something.

Anyway, I wanted to like it, and I had a hunch that maybe I would, but instead I just ended up feeling old. But regardless of whether that’s true, Bryan Singer should put away the train set for a while. And make something like A Scanner Darkly, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s book, and a film that’s been anticipated for decades by a small but fervent group. Now the versatile Richard Linklater (Before Sunset, The School of Rock) has delivered it. It’s a twisted tale of drug-induced hallucinations, surveillance and manipulation in the near-future, and Linklater heightens its surreal underbelly through the same technique he used in Waking Life, where real actors (including Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr. and Winona Ryder) are filmed in real settings and then the images are “rotoscoped” to produce an intensely vivid, fluid animation.

The dialogue has an unusual density and the film has an anguished underbelly that serves as a sober contrast to breathier views of the future; overall, Linklater’s versatility and control are astonishing. Ultimately though I didn’t find it a very different viewing experience from many of the recent films that mess with our sense of reality and relationship to the narrative; it’s a hermetic creation that barely even seems to need a viewer. This isn’t inappropriate to the film’s traumatized fabric and the main character’s fractured grasp on reality, but still makes for a movie that will likely be more admired than loved. What I’m saying is, it’s kind of boring too.

Who Killed The Electric Car?

I shot my environmental wad a few weeks ago in writing about Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, so I’ll spare you an extended response to Chris Paine’s Who Killed The Electric Car?, which would read much the same way. In the mid-nineties there seemed to be good momentum behind a wholly electric car, in particular GM’s EV-1 model – ten years later, the US car companies have all but quit that line of growth, surrendering the market to Toyota’s Prius. Meanwhile of course, the case for the technology (oil prices, Middle East turmoil, global warming, faltering hydrogen technology) just gets stronger and stronger. The movie tells the story effectively enough, mostly from a sun-baked Californian perspective with the obligatory sprinkling of celebrities, finding enough blame to go around, but also finding enough of the de rigeur room for optimism that America will come together to do the right thing as it always has. Overall, watching the entire film doesn’t add much to what you can glean from the trailer and the reviews. It’s much closer to being boring than I would have guessed.

Two Comedies

Strangers with Candy is based on a Comedy Central series I’ve never seen0, with Amy Sedaris as a long-time jailbird with a depraved history who goes back to high school. Liam Lacey said in the Globe: “Audiences should find the film brilliant or repellent. At the most interesting moments, it’s a bit of both.” Well, I certainly wish that were right. I have no idea what the case for its brilliance might be. It’s negligible as social satire, and barely any more effective as a satire of the high school genre (as if, in any event, that would count for much). It occasionally makes more of a stab in the direction of repellence, faintly evoking John Waters, but stops way short of anything truly biting or transgressive. As a fan of Sarah Silverman’s stand-up film, I kept wishing some of her lines could have been worked into the script. The film does have plenty of striking one-liners, some pleasant cameos, some strikingly surreal set-ups (I liked the gym teacher who subjects the students to a recreation of the Pamplona running of the bulls, with real bulls), and it avoids the flagrant stupidity and carelessness that makes many contemporary comedies painful to watch, but…well…when you come right down to it, I guess you can guess the adjective…
 

It must be amazing to be Kevin Smith, and to be a famous filmmaker with some degree of freedom…and then gradually realize you just don’t have any ideas. Clerks II might as well be called Cry for Help, particularly if you remember Smith stating at the time of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back that he was done with that entire territory. But Jersey Girl was a flop, so here he is, back where he started in 1994. It’s actually rather endearing how the situation of the dead-end protagonists mirrors Smith’s own lack of momentum, and no film of his comes without laughs, even if they all come from rearranging the same ten or twelve words in a different order. Who is he kidding though…this is lame lame stuff. And by casting his own wife as a self-absorbed shrew who’s comprehensively overshadowed by Rosario Dawson (the film’s only engaging presence, just as she was in Rent), he also loses points for lack of gallantry. I bet even he was mostly bored through this one.

Mostly music

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in February 2008)

I remember someone referring to John Sayles as a determinedly independent filmmaker who then strangely makes movies with many of the faults of mainstream ones, a judgment you might aptly apply to his new one Honeydripper. It’s satisfying overall, but incredibly clunky and clichéd at times. Set in 1950’s Alabama, it revolves around Danny Glover as the owner of a rickety watering hole (the Honeydripper) who hopes to give business a boost by kicking the live music from old-time blues to new-style guitar; he books a big time singer, but then has to improvise when the guy doesn’t show up.

Around this are a dizzying number of subplots, not always welded together with much finesse, and the script is full of redundancies and repetitions. For all of that activity, it often feels strangely flat and lacking in energy. It’s a fascinating period, both for the social attitudes (especially re those of the local whites, it’s often hard to believe it’s even as recent as 1950) and the cultural evolution embodied by the Honeydripper’s musical transition. Sadly, the film just isn’t strong enough to be trustworthy as a window on history. But it generally ambles along pleasantly enough, the music is good, and there are some eloquent moments.  

Joe Strummer

Julien Temple’s Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, a documentary about the Clash’s lead singer, covers another musical turning point. They were one of the pioneering punk bands, perhaps the best; after they split up in the mid-80’s, Strummer spent much time in search of a new direction, ultimately successfully via a new band and new relationship, before suddenly dying in 2002. Temple is, as usual, a master of assemblage, piecing together an often-impressionistic splatter of images, but there’s always a hit and miss feeling to how he navigates through the material.

The movie isn’t that effective at conveying basic information, nor even at showcasing the music, although that’s all readily elsewhere I guess, and it certainly overuses clips from 1984 and Animal Farm and suchlike, lest we lose for a second the taste of rebellion. Most of the interviewees (seemingly including almost everyone who ever knew the man, and a few celebs who didn’t) are caught during a series of campfire get-togethers, recreating one of Strummer’s favourite pastimes and generating a nice sense of conviviality. For Clash fans, it’s a solid, moderately idiosyncratic tribute. 

Bono’s in there too, and he’s also in U2 3D, capturing the band in performance in Buenos Aires – it’s in 3D and it’s on the giant Imax screen. U2 are a great band, no question, and seem on blistering form here – it’s a fine record of outstanding rock musicianship. The 3D aspect itself is certainly a net positive – there are times when you’re studying Bono more closely than anyone other than his wife should be allowed to, and I can hardly remember a film that conveyed such a detailed sense of a complex physical space. Very fluidly edited, it’s a terrific aesthetic experience. But it’s also rather weird – there are many times when the extreme presence of the foreground makes the background seem flatter than you’d register otherwise – and the technical virtuosity sometimes mutes the gritty sense of occasion you get from other rock movies. It gave me a hyper-awareness of being isolated from what I was watching, which isn’t really what you go to the movies for.

Still Life

By contrast, Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life completely enveloped me. The film contains two related stories of people coming to Fengjie, on the banks of China’s Yangtze River, in search of a missing spouse. The city is slowly being demolished as part of the massive Three Gorges dam project, and the region’s spectacular natural beauty recedes behind the atmospheric haze and the immense physical and social upheaval. While some do well, most don’t, kicked from their homes to make do as best they can, scrambling for money and space and identity; there are hints of both de facto slavery and widespread violence and corruption. Jia observes his people closely and sympathetically and produces a powerful human document; you can’t help your mind wandering to how advanced (indulgent?) by comparison are our notions of self-actualization and minimum entitlements.

The film’s not all bleak by any means – people find ways to get by; there are elevating moments of bonding, shared meals, Chow Yun Fat impersonations. Jia has a taste for rather glaring visual metaphors – such as the building that uproots itself and blasts off like a space shuttle in the background of one shot – but perhaps his point is the impossibility of monumental transformation for this region of China, whatever one may hear of its economic miracle (although even the apparently least advantaged of citizens seem to carry cell phones).

After the more urban and aesthetically crafted The World, a fine study of alienation among some of the more privileged of China’s new generation, and a couple of fascinating documentaries that largely continue the project of Still Life, Jia is generating an important body of work now, even if it’s hard to think of a potentially great director whose films are so necessarily pessimistic. In the past, the most important filmmakers could afford to dwell on us, on matters of self-definition and the human condition, but what if we’re entering a phase that can’t afford to venerate these as key virtues, because matters of survival assert themselves and make existential fine-tuning appear frivolous? What can we ask or expect of cinema then?

Lars and the Real Girl

I suppose there will always be some place – although we can only hope it’s a diminishing one – for fables such as Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl. I was put off by the premise and avoided this one for months, while noting its amazing longevity at the Carlton, but then it got an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay, so I cracked. Ryan Gosling plays Lars, a small-town sad sack character who suddenly produces a glamorous girlfriend, Bianca. The only trouble is, she’s an anatomically correct sex doll who came through the mail. But to Lars she’s real – either that or he’s carrying on the charade well beyond normal endurance (including in their private moments together) – and incidentally, it’s a chaste relationship too.

Conveniently, prompted by doctor’s advice and what we’re told is a form of love for Lars, everyone in town goes along with this, to the extent that Bianca soon has a more active social schedule than he does. Gosling is once again magnificent, like a gentle young De Niro in the detail he brings to his neurotic protagonist. And Gillespie handles the tone very well – it’s not too outrageous, not too preachy: it’s gentle and quirky, thus allowing the conclusion (presumably reached by a good number of Oscar voters) that we’re watching something touching and insightful and viable. But for all the finesse, this is ultimately the kind of codswallop that only exists in movies – a social and psychological nonsense, with no good music, whether literally or (re Jia Zhang-ke) figuratively.

More fall movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 2005)

Phil Morrison’s Junebug is one of the season’s wonders. It’s a low budget film about a North Carolina family where the eldest son, who long ago moved away to Chicago, returns to visit, with a sophisticated new wife. It’s an astoundingly subtle picture, spare but perfectly weighted, accumulating a remarkable series of implications. No recent film better portrays the “American heartland” so often referred to – George W. Bush isn’t mentioned in the movie, but it tells you everything you need to know about how he gets away with it – and it’s a borderline-horrific portrayal of family dynamics. The film is ambiguous enough that it could alternatively be read as a light, quirky semi-comedy (it works just fine as such) – as such it’s a masterful prism for exposing the prevailing complacency, and a great achievement by the unknown Morrison.

Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man is a documentary about Timothy Treadwell, who spent thirteen summers living in the wilds of Alaska among the bears, fancying himself their friend and protector, until one of them ate him. Treadwell left behind a hundred hours of video footage – containing some stunning footage of the bears, and much semi-crazed rambling on his part. This must have constituted a godsend for Herzog, and he uses the found material with superb intuition and judgment, fleshing out Treadwell’s story with interviews, and creating something that’s both scrupulous and respectful while remaining true to his own (less romantic but as bull-headed) sensibility. The film has been widely acclaimed, setting up the tantalizing possibility of Werner Herzog winning an Oscar?

Separate Lies, written and directed by Julian Fellowes, is a very British chronicle of an upper-middle class couple ripped apart by adultery and accidental homicide. It’s much less scintillating than Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (the screenplay for which won Fellowes an Oscar), but has some good moments (mainly thanks to lead actor Tom Wilkinson) and an intriguing overall shape. The German film The Edukators follows three young people whose bite-sized political activism suddenly lands them in big trouble; the movie dwindles away as it progresses, becoming increasingly arbitrary and energy-less, and failing  to offer as much actual political content as the premise seems to warrant.

Two for the Money, with Al Pacino mentoring Matthew McConaughey through a decline and fall as a big-time sports betting advisor, is a badly under-nourished movie with limited pay-off – Pacino may actually have played the part in his sleep. Tony Scott’s Domino, loosely based on real-life bounty hunter Domino Harvey, is an even bigger mess, and it received apocalyptically bad reviews in many quarters. This is not unfair, although the film’s escalating incoherence, frantic hyperactivity, odd approach to reality, and intermittent hints of social and political consciousness sometimes suggest (without ever actually delivering) true turbulent ambition. At the other end of the scale, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio is a levelheaded account of a 50’s mother-of-ten who keeps the family afloat by her consistent success in skill-testing competitions. The material is inherently rather drab, but director Jane Anderson finds entertaining ways to ventilate it, and it pushes the sentimental buttons deftly enough. Ultimately though it’s considerably less resonant than Far From Heaven and The Hours, in which star Julianne Moore played largely similar roles. 

Marc Forster’s Stay is yet another movie in which it’s clear from the start that things are not as they seem, and the only object is to wait for the exact nature of the revelation (is it all a dream? are they characters in a book? are they within a scientific experiment on an alien planet? etc.), and to hope you extract some fun and stimulation along the way. The film has Ewan MacGregor as a psychiatrist treating a troubled young man (Ryan Gosling) who intends to kill himself in a few days’ time; Naomi Watts is the doctor’s girlfriend, herself a survivor of a past suicide attempt. The movie is technically well executed, but is gloomy and monotonous, and the pay-off adds little to the catalogue – I’m sure a second viewing would allow a better appreciation of the intricacy of the film’s design, but would not be time well spent in any other sense. After Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverland, this seems like a bizarre retrenchment by Forster, only explicable as some kind of technical self-training exercise.

Ben Younger’s Prime is a comedy (I guess) about a Jewish psychiatrist who finds out her 37-year-old (non-Jewish) female patient is dating her 23-year-old son...and doesn’t like it. The movie has zero laughs, although I admit I wore a benevolent smile through much of it, largely because of the highly empathetic, too-good-for-the-movie performance by Uma Thurman as the patient (the usually mightier Meryl Streep is on this occasion no better than the movie requires). The thing has no authorial personality, and not to get extra-textual, but now that we have the inspirational precedent of Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, the ending seems gutless.

Mirrormask is a British fantasy from the Jim Henson studios, about a little girl who enters a dream world; some of the design elements, but not the overall tone (which is surprisingly low-key and uninsistent), are reminiscent of Hayao Miyazaki. Twenty years ago the movie would surely have seemed like a marvel, but we are in an age of visual marvels if of nothing else, and it could do no better than a single screen at Canada Square. Gore Verbinski’s The Weather Man is another barely appreciated film, a semi-comic character study of Nicolas Cage’s local TV forecaster. Thirty years ago it might have been directed by Robert Altman and amounted to something darkly probing; instead, it’s often overly glib and scattershot, with a very soft arrival point. Michael Caine, as Cage’s terminally ill father, is the actor best attuned to the material’s existential possibilities.

Sam Mendes’ Jarhead starts off like a remake of Full Metal Jacket and explicitly references Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, but the first President Bush’s Iraqi war was no Vietnam, and the film shows how a young recruit’s jittery dreams of action end up in prolonged frustration, generating substantial existential malaise. It’s an intriguing and technically impressive film, and its inherently undramatic core is quite enterprising for a big budget Hollywood film (although it works around this by weaving in some combat near misses and lots of other often-goofy incident). The picture’s ultimate purpose is a little ambiguous – it’s too engaged by military spectacle to convince as being antiwar, but if it’s merely anti- the particular war depicted, then it’s missing a lot of political context (its main point is probably broader, about the inherent arbitrary chaos of war’s impact on the individual). Still, I prefer this to the ham-fisted, basically hypocritical anti-violence musings of Mendes’ last film Road to Perdition.

More next time...

More Big Movies!

 
(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2007)

Ten Canoes is the first film made in an Australian indigenous language, set thousands of years in the past. A group of men goes on a hunting trip into a swamp, and on the way the elder tells his younger brother a story, which we also see enacted. It’s a chronicle of social and sexual frustration and of strife between neighbouring tribes, weaving in sorcery and mysticism. The quirky moral of the story struck me as being “careful what you wish for” – Stephen Holden in The New York Times pegs it as “All in good time.”

The film, directed by Rolf de Heer, is inherently interesting and admirable, but I had more reservations than I’d hoped for. Although the evocation of these ancient events seems diligent enough, the film always feels much more like a product of our own filmmaking culture than something born of a distant one (see Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat The Fast Runner for an example of the converse). The dual structure, switching metronomically back and forth between stories, and between black and white and colour, becomes a ponderous reminder of cinema making at work, and within that it resorts to too many familiar devices (for example, the men discuss various possibilities of action, and we see each one visualized on the screen, just as you might in a standard heist movie). There’s also an insistent narration, spoken by David Gulpilil (of Walkabout) that soon gets to be like listening to: “This is Dick. Dick is thinking of running. Do you see now how Dick runs?” And on and on.

No doubt there I’m disrespecting the rhythms and cadences of an important oral tradition. But that’s the impact of the film’s finicky calculations. The sometimes-bawdy dialogue also seems calculated for maximum ease of assimilation. Overall I doubt that the film challenges us enough to realize its enormous potential, or to rank with Kunuk’s film in the ultimate pantheon. 

Knocked Up

Grabbing on to that dawn-of-history bawdy dialogue and shooting forward to the modern day, we arrive at Judd Apatow’s hit comedy Knocked Up. The film has definitely caught a wave, with a big respectful profile of the director in the New York Times magazine, and enthusiastic reviews all over. The intrigue, perhaps, is summed up in the NYT’s observation that Apatow’s films “offer up the kind of conservative morals the Family Research Council might embrace – if the humour weren’t so filthy.”

Knocked Up depicts a slobby, non-achieving guy (Seth Rogen) who scores a one night stand with a way-out-of-his-league woman (Katherine Heigl) – when she wakes up sober, she can’t get rid of him fast enough, Eight weeks later, she calls him up: she’s pregnant and she’s keeping it, so in some sense at least they’re stuck with each other for the long term. The only question is  - what’s that relationship going to be?

I have to say I found the film’s answer to this question distinctly unconvincing – in particular, the choices made by Heigl’s character just didn’t make any sense to me, given what we’re told about her (some of the film’s supporters acknowledge this too; maybe it helps if you view it as self-confessed former dweeb Apatow’s goofy self-aggrandizing fantasy). The movie does have some emotional bite at times, mostly from the bumpy marriage of the secondary characters played by Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd. But for the most part it’s merely an easygoing laugh machine (although Apatow’s filthy one-liners don’t have the demented excess of Kevin Smith’s), particularly at ease with the slacker male bonding thing and with the pop culture that suffuses the guys’ lives (I don’t know though how they wouldn’t have heard by now of MrSkin.com).

Rogen and Heigl are pleasant but bland actors, and the movie as a whole made me pine for the days when comedies could be popular and funny and meaningful – meaningful that is as complex, specifically meaningful creations, rather than as perfect exemplars of an inherently second-rate culture.  And yes, I’m throwing the alignment with Family Research Council morals into that pot of criticism.

Mr. Brooks

There was a time when Kevin Costner must have stood higher with that group than just about anyone – just after the homespun Field Of Dreams and the soft Dances with Wolves. The Family Research Council probably lapped up the paranoia of JFK as well. No doubt the FRC would note approvingly that Costner’s momentum snapped around the time his picture book marriage broke up, and since then his movies have been an odd, mostly second rate bunch. His two famous flops – Waterworld and (especially) The Postman might actually reward viewing again at this point, and Open Range was his best directorial effort yet, but most of the rest was forgotten as soon as it appeared. Recently he’s shown potential as a charming character actor in The Upside of Anger and Rumor Has It, and is becoming more adventurous about financing his own work.

Whatever one thinks of Costner, his twenty years of ups and downs provide a busy old-fashioned backdrop of star-image allusions for any project he takes on now. Which brings us to Mr. Brooks, in which he plays a respectable and successful businessman who also has a compulsive hunger to kill. As the film begins he’s kept it under wraps for two years, but his inner voice (embodied by William Hurt) won’t leave him alone any more. So he kills again, but the curtains aren’t drawn, and he’s spotted by a voyeuristic photographer (played oddly and not very successfully by Dane Cook). Meanwhile, his daughter is back from college, and under the sweet exterior, he’s wondering how many of his less desirable genes she might have picked up.

Demi Moore is in there too, as the investigating cop, who happens herself to be a multi-millionaire. You can probably sense the excess of all this, and since director Bruce A. Evans (returning after a fifteen year gap since directing Kuffs!) isn’t much of a stylist, the movie often feels merely glossy and mechanical. But back to where I started. Costner’s character is a genuinely evil, self-serving individual who makes a mockery of the classic American success story. The movie’s notion of taking care of family is completely perverse. The movie quotes the so-called Serenity Prayer (Serenity blah blah Courage blah blah and the Wisdom to know the difference) in utterly degraded circumstances. And given the power of star identification, even Family Research Council stalwarts may find themselves rooting for the serial killer. None of this makes Mr. Brooks into a work of art, but it sure is interesting, in that uniquely Hollywood kind of way. 

Filming Toronto

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2004)

For the last week, the restaurant next to my building, passing as a Brooklyn bistro, was a location for a film called The Perfect Man. The film reportedly stars Hillary Duff, Heather Locklear and Chris Noth, at least some of who must presumably from time to time have been part of that huge crowd milling beneath our balcony. But I didn’t see any of them, didn’t look. However, the week before, when my wife and I were walking the dog one morning down toward the Skydome, we passed Laurence Fishburne. On previous dog walks, I’ve spotted Sylvester Stallone, Christian Slater and Margot Kidder. At other times we’ve walked by Sidney Poitier and Eric Stoltz. The number of films or TV shows in which I could point out some part of our neighborhood far exceeds what I can remember.

Screen Presence

There was a time when I would have thought all this tremendously exciting, but it’s long gone. My parents visited from Wales recently and virtually every day they’d tell us how they’d seen filming going on in this place or that. We couldn’t even fake mild interest. In an age of excessive celebrity-worship, I think this is a healthy thing. And it’s all the easier to sustain because, for all the activity, it doesn’t feel as if Toronto has much of a screen presence. I’ve seen our neighborhood represent New York, Chicago, Detroit, Washington, and various futuristic locales, but not very often represent Toronto itself. Somehow that makes it easier to ignore the whole thing, as though it were all a perpetual mirage projected from a far-off place.

It could be a little undermining to one’s ego, living in a city whose frequent fate is to serve as a facade, like an endlessly renewing badge of second-rateness. If the city itself is so unable to assert its identity, one might ask, why should any of us, its inhabitants, be any more distinguishable? I’ve always hoped that Toronto could find its own Woody Allen, or Francois Truffaut, or at least its own Paul Mazursky – someone who would treat the city with ease and panache and make it, at least among film buffs, a place that rings with emotional music. We haven’t come very close to that, although the recent Love Sex and Eating the Bones was a good step in the right direction by Sudz Sutherland. (If any generous producers are reading this, remember that Truffaut started as a critic, and give me a call)

The latest movie in which Toronto plays itself is Jacob Tierney’s Twist, a downbeat drama about male hustlers, with a plot loosely modeled on Oliver Twist. The focus in this version is on the Artful Dodger character, played by Nick Stahl, who lives in a crappy one-step-above-slavery arrangement overseen by Fagin, who in turn reports to the unseen Bill, whose mistreated girl Nancy runs the nearby diner where the characters hang out. Oliver is an innocent new runaway, pulled into the gang by Dodge.

Twist

“This city can really f*** you up,” says Stahl early on. The line took me by surprise. I mean, no doubt it’s true, but – at the very most - it’s no more true of my personal Toronto than it might be of anywhere else. But the Toronto of Twist is a depressing place indeed; a concrete desert of bleak streets, meagre finances and squalid pleasures where the only people out there are either johns or assailants. Time and time again, the film catches the downtown core, with the CN Tower prominent, in the back of the frame, but the characters never get close to it (in one scene, Oliver visits a more upscale neighborhood, but he’s quickly rebuffed). On the most basic level, this is a city that’s denied them. But then the characters’ prospects are so perilous that their motivation seems to be purely to find an equilibrium that holds together, however shakily, and then stick to it. Stahl tells Oliver in one scene how his life isn’t that bad compared to the alternatives, and he doesn’t seem in particular to be laying it on.

That much of Twist is interesting, but the film as a whole is a somewhat monotonous viewing experience. It’s hard to think of a film that’s so consistently drained of energy or expression, and although this succeeds impressively in suggesting the hollowing effect of their airless lifestyles, the point is made fairly early on. Apart from evoking in a general way the persistence of juvenile exploitation, the parallel with Dickens doesn’t add much either. Still, the film’s city of decrepit muffin stores and diners and warehouses is a compelling landscape, precisely because it’s so utterly uncompelling. It’s both recognizable as Toronto, and as nowhere worth naming.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Talking of disaffected youth, Harry Potter seems downright surly in the opening scenes of the new film, and his mood brightens only slightly from there on. Much has been made of how director Alfonso Cuaron gave this third entry in the Potter series a richer, more emotionally coherent air, and it’s all true. Compared to previous director Chris Columbus, Cuaron has a much better eye and sense of location, and his film’s engagement with the actors exceeds anything Columbus attained.

It struck me in the second film that Potter doesn’t actually do that much – he’s substantially a slave to events, weighed down by his wrenching past and by the endless threats and dangers that seem to mark his every day. In Prisoner of Azkaban, now that he’s clearly a teenager, this all seems like a witty expression of post-pubescent angst, and I couldn’t help thinking that the way the plot repeats much of itself, via a time traveling device, seems to reinforce the sense of adolescent ennui. (As for the actual plot – it seemed odd and borderline-incoherent to me, but I’m told it’s much easier to follow if you’re in the 90% of the audience that’s read the book already).

While actors like Gary Oldman and David Thewlis, and Emma Watson as Hermione, seem to be ploughing a new and grimmer vein, others like Emma Thompson and Rupert Grint as Ron (who doesn’t seem to be maturing into much of an actor) are stuck in a more gimmicky vein, and Daniel Radcliffe as Harry is little more than a cipher. I enjoyed the first movie in the series more than I ever thought possible, and liked in particular how it captured the young boy’s discovery at confronting a cavalcade of wonders. The second was more of the same, which meant it amounted to significantly less. With the actors rapidly aging, Prisoner of Azkaban represents necessary surgery. If the next few films progress at the same pace, and Harry’s mood continues to darken, the sixth or seventh installment may be closer in tone to Twist than to Sorceror’s Stone. Then we’ll be dealing with something interesting, especially if they film it in Toronto.

2009 Toronto Film Festival Report - Part 6

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in October 2009)

The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)

This won the Palme d’or at Cannes this year, and it’s a rare year when I don’t think much of anyone disparaged the choice. Haneke is a stern taskmaster, sometimes giving the sense that he intends his films as strong medicine for our fuzzyheaded engagement with history, culture and the world. His best known film Funny Games is a violent drama about a bourgeois family disrupted by thugs, designed both to masterfully push your easy-response buttons and to shame you at your capitulation; recently he remade his Austrian original for Hollywood, which might theoretically have led the project a greater heart-of-the-beast resonance, but instead just seemed rather forlorn. Sometimes, as in The Piano Teacher perhaps, the films’ shudder value tends to overshadow all else, but Cache and Code Unknown, among others, are superbly original, multi-faceted examinations of our modern condition.

The White Ribbon is one of his most mesmerizing works, although at face value one of the more conventional viewing experiences. In 1917, a small German village starts to experience an unsettling series of strange accidents, tragedies and brutalities; some of them explicable, others not. The community has few reference points beyond its own boundaries: much of the commerce flows from the local baron, whose feudal presence reigns over everything; the church goes unchallenged; marriages are still negotiated through the parents. Beneath this of course, much is hidden, but Haneke (who shoots the film in pristine, awesomely controlled black and white) is extraordinarily subtle in what he reveals. His narrator, the local schoolteacher, invites us at the start to read the narrative as a contribution to understanding events that later happened in the country, but for example there’s no anti-Semitism or explicit signposts toward subsequent complicity. The film depicts both benevolence and malignity; ultimately one can grab at Haneke’s masterfully arranged threads and ambiguities and come away with a feeling of closure and compartmentalization, or else conclude that almost nothing has been resolved or mitigated. In this sense, the film brilliantly evokes the tangle of perspectives, from certainty (even if hypocritical and manufactured) to despairing, that underlie war, or indeed any national purpose.

The Informant! (Steven Soderbergh)

Soderbergh is surely one of the luckiest of all directors, approaching filmmaking as (in Orson Welles’ phrase) the biggest train set a boy ever had; sufficiently connected to get financing for movies representing little more than whims; a fast enough worker that there’s always something new in the pipeline to distract from recent under-achievements (already this year he’s released the highly impressive, brave Che and the lightly provocative The Girlfriend Experience). If there’s a connecting theme to his work, it might be an interest in networks of control and idealism, an admittedly big tent notion accommodating tales of scrappy underdogs like Erin Brockovich, grim social analyses such as Traffic, or even the precision-engineered Ocean’s 11 narratives. You can fit The Informant! – which has already opened commercially (I actually saw it after the festival) - in there too. In the early 90’s, a high-ranking but (let’s say) flaky corporate executive spies on his colleagues for the FBI, collecting evidence on price-fixing schemes, naively believing he’ll be lauded as a crusading hero and his rise within the company will continue unchecked; well, it doesn’t turn out that way.

Soderbergh shoots the movie in a brisk off-the-cuff style, rather mysteriously plucking some stylistic elements from the 70’s; it’s being marketed as a comedy, although the extent to which it’s relatively light might also be a measure of its toothlessness. Ultimately it’s a moderately interesting narrative and main character, but a flat piece of work overall, not leaving you with much to ponder afterwards. Maybe Soderbergh just makes it too easy to reach for this analysis, but beyond settling on a few broad-brush strategies and gimmicks, you wonder whether the material ever received his sufficient creative investment.

Bright Star (Jane Campion)

Campion’s first film in six years continues her interest in feminine self-determination and sexuality, but without any of the provocations of The Piano and In the Cut; it’s an immensely surprising and moving work (also now playing commercially – I saw this afterwards too). It chronicles the brief 19^th century romance of poet John Keats and seamstress Fanny Brawne, and even though the film is Campion’s most delicate and ethereal, it might also ultimately be her most intense (in the same kind of way that Scorsese claimed at the time, perhaps a bit over-conceptually, that The Age of Innocence was his most violent work). Between Keats’ physical weakness, Brawne’s lack of worldliness, and the constraints of the times, there’s barely a hint of sexuality; it’s as if they channeled all their possibility into the creation of a shared sensibility, a heightened sensation of the present moment (“as if I was dissolving,” as Keats puts it). Campion’s finesse is dazzling, retaining objectivity while allowing full rein to the expressive possibilities of butterflies, cats and English lawns.

At the start of the narrative, Brawne is something of a fashion innovator, and more economically successful than Keats, but this seems to dissipate as the film goes on, suggesting the inherently regressive aspects of a great love. The frequent discussion of financial constraints, and the character of Keats’ much more grounded and rough-edged best friend dispel any sense that the film can only idealize creativity (one of its most charming elements is Brawne’s failure to grasp much of Keats’ work); yet in the end it’s as blissful a work of commemoration as you can imagine. The entire cast is ideal, but Abbie Cornish is particularly exquisite as Fanny.

And Overall…

Well, as always, I can only comment on my own little piece of it, but I had a good Festival. My test for that is pretty straightforward – it means I saw far more good movies than bad, and the scheduling fell nicely into place (nowadays I don’t really like to see more than a couple of movies a day, and I also like to confine it mostly to the daytime, so you see I operate under self-imposed constraints). Among my greatest pleasures: Les herbes folles, Hadewijch, Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl, L’enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot, The White Ribbon and perhaps most of all Claire Denis’ White Material. Enter the Void wins a pennant for unduly occupying your mind once it’s over.

I saw no celebrities, went to no parties or other events…just saw mostly foreign movies, and made sure still to get my exercise and not to let my diet slip (that’s the Dr. Jack prescription for healthy movie going folks). The higher-profile side of it seemed like the usual mixed bag: George Clooney obviously nailed every step, but Megan Fox’s

Jennifer’s Body was the emblematic example of a movie with immense festival heat, but leaving barely a footprint in the world thereafter. And where did all the buzz go during the last four days anyway? Talk about excessive front-loading. And as I wrote earlier, the Festival didn’t deserve all that nonsense about its Tel Aviv tribute. Still, that all fell safely into the no-such-thing-as-bad-publicity quadrant. Overall, seemed like a hit to me!

2009 Toronto Film Festival Report - Part 5

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in October 2009)

White Material (Claire Denis)

Denis is plausibly having the best current run of any European director – L’intrus was almost overwhelmingly evocative and complex, and Vendredi soir and 35 rhums are the most beautiful miniatures you’ll ever find (most damagingly for Toronto’s reputation as a promised land of cinema, none of these received a regular release here). She tells great, vibrant stories, but isn’t at all constrained by conventional notions of structure or pacing or narrative linkage. Her movies aren’t merely jigsaws though, like so many now, in which the temporal jumble eventually reveals an essentially simple concoction; it’s rather that she thrives on possibility and inter-connection, and simultaneously hears the displaced butterfly as clearly as the oncoming train. She’s portrayed Africa before (she grew up there), and returns now to depict the last days of a white-owned coffee plantation, as an unnamed country swallows itself up in blood and lawlessness. Isabelle Huppert plays the operation’s main engine, refusing to acknowledge danger, pushing grimly on while the rest of the family plots to get out or simply loses its bearings.

This is grandly suited to Denis’ immense strengths: every detail of the family’s existence embodies a differentiation that’s historically unfair at its core, and yet they now embody continuity and tendering and economic contribution where the social movement only brings waste and pillage; the mournfully beautiful African spaces have never appeared so intensely menacing and unknowable (the title indicates how the family finds itself increasingly dehumanized, less participants in events than historically-charged chattels, and existentially periled by the knowledge that if expelled from this country, they have no natural home now in mainland France). Denis’ film has no imposed speechifying, but bakes the tensions into its very core; it’s a million miles removed from movies that complacently deny Africans their own stories by focusing on a white protagonist, because the traumatic transition depicted here is so resonant as a portrait of broader historical legacies strained beyond sustainability. As always with Denis, the flow of images – immensely evocative of the lived-in reality while uncannily lighting up the thematic layers below – is peerless.

Soul Kitchen (Fatih Akin)

Akin’s The Edge Of Heaven was one of the stronger recent examples of the jigsaw storytelling technique you see everywhere now, but the constant reliance on coincidence rather wore out my welcome for it, particularly compared to his brilliant, scalding breakthrough Head-On. Akin is German, of Turkish ancestry, and his films keep a boot in both cultures; he’s at the vanguard of the new Zeitgeist-busting European cinema that burns across borders and genres. The new film’s title suggests an explicit American influence, also evident in the movie’s brassy title design and music score; to be honest though, the movie feels most American in its relative simplicity and lack of ambition. The central character is Greek this time, running a greasy spoon type restaurant in a flavourfully renovated Hamburg waterfront space; when he upgrades the menu with the help of a highly-strung chef, the schnitzel-loving clientele deserts him, until he catches a new wave and becomes the hottest spot in town. He’s also helping out his petty criminal brother, trying to maintain a long-distance relationship with a more bourgeois woman, and fending off a scheming developer with designs on the property.

Nothing about the way this plays out is remotely surprising – the American remake can proceed apace with just the most minimal script tweaks – but Akin keeps it vibrantly buzzing along, cooking up a good overall aroma. The movie doesn’t push the point, but makes it clear that the spine of German society (the easy money and the sense of entitlement) still belongs with the old stock; for immigrant cultures it’s a tougher climb, which is not to say it can’t be done. Without any mention of the economic crisis though, the movie’s vision of entrepreneurism already seems a little abstract: aren’t those new-gourmet restaurants, full of young arty types, a prime symbol of an unsustainable bubble?

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog)

There was a time when Herzog was a crown prince of art cinema, prodigiously generating varied chronicles of extremity, benefiting immensely from the copious legends of his personal fearlessness and eccentricity. He lost his mojo somewhere in the 80’s but regained it a bit with the documentaries Grizzly Man and the Oscar-nominated Encounters At The End Of The World, and now he turns up at the festival with two new fiction films! Bad Lieutenant, which I left for later, is by all accounts the better of the two. This other is a thin work, a psychological suspenser of sorts about a man who loses his marbles, kills his mother, and holes up in his house with two hostages; detective Willem Dafoe pieces together the back-story. Judged as a genre exercise, it’s quite slapdash and underdeveloped; seen as an examination of (let’s say) esoteric behavior, it’s largely arbitrary and opaque.

Unless, that is, one muses (as many have) on David Lynch’s credit as executive producer, perhaps suggesting a rare bastard child of mismatched auteurs. Sometimes the movie definitely seems like it’s working toward a Lynch-like mythology (what do all those ostriches mean?). But although it has an occasional Lynch-like lack of naturalism, it has none of his depth of texture or complexity of behavior – Lynch wouldn’t even allow a home movie of his to come out so visually and aurally flat – so I guess we should take his involvement as a tease. Anyway, it’s not saying much for Herzog’s latter-day skills when the very possibility of someone else’s vague contribution to his movie is more interesting than what he brought to it himself.

Face (Tsai Ming-Liang)

Another tale of decline…Tsai has made some wonderful, revelatory films about alienated Taiwanese youth, gradually developing a distinctive set of personal codes: dank and often flooded interiors; ornate musical inserts, their bright sentiments contrasting ironically with the grim surrounding reality; fish tanks; mysterious, furtive encounters. This was once thrilling as both style and content, but increasingly feels either like a narrow variation on ground already traveled, or else like a questionable variation to expand his range. Face is a bit of both, meshing his familiar iconography with a vague chronicle of a Taiwanese director making a film of Salome in Paris; the film explicitly pays tribute to Francois Truffaut, casting key actors from his life and career such as Jean-Pierre Leaud and Fanny Ardant. The Festival program book calls it Tsai’s “most stylistically inventive work to date” and says it’s about “how images can function as both facades and works of art.” Well, maybe so, but there’s hardly anything inherently revelatory in that subject, and while the invention is sometimes quite mesmerizing (the book correctly cites a remarkable climactic dance sequence), at other times it’s barely distinguishable from visual and thematic gibberish. Sadly, watching Tsai’s films now almost feels like a chore.

2009 Toronto Film Festival Report - Part 4

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in October 2009)

Life during Wartime (Todd Solondz)

Solondz’ film is a continuation of his earlier Happiness, with the same characters but different actors; since there can’t be much of anyone around who still gives a damn about Happiness, the very concept drips with both self-regard and desperation. Some of the greatest directors alive clearly draw on a relatively narrow vein of experience and/or preoccupation, and so does Solondz, except you get the sense his experience is all based in a conventionally miserable childhood and his preoccupations all revolve around snide fantasies of getting even. Therefore the most appealing characters here are merely unfulfilled and pathetic; the rest of them are sexual deviants, or at least suspected of it. The comedy turns on (for example) a lonely mother telling her 12-year-old son how her new lover made her wet, or on the son calling her a bitch, or on Allison Janney’s bare breasts (or perhaps that was meant to be gritty, I don’t know). Maybe that makes it sound entertaining, and I won’t deny this snotty stare of a film doesn’t carry a certain fascination, but among so much great work at this year’s festival, it’s a nothing. The closing insight is that “in the end China will take over and none of this will matter,” but as far as the content of Solondz’ film is in question, we need hardly wait that long.

Le refuge (Francois Ozon)

Ozon’s films put you in mind of short stories rather than novels: literally because they’re usually fairly brief, but more broadly because they tend to focus on a few characters and on a bet-the-house structuring premise that might either break new ground or else flounder embarrassingly. I loved his 5 X 2 (the break-up of a marriage told in five reverse-order sequences), but his most famous film The Swimming Pool squandered its dazzling fabric on a tired meta-reality premise; his last movie Ricky, about a boy born with wings, was generally regarded as a bust, and certainly sounds like it. In The Refuge, after her boyfriend died of an overdose, a young woman retreats to a borrowed beach house, where the dead man’s brother comes to visit her. Ozon is always good with actors, and there’s a typically alluring air to the interactions here. It’s all about the ending though, a double whammy representing I believe her delayed waking from shock and self-absorption and reemergence into the possibility of meaningful (which is to say, messy) interactions, where she defines herself rather than having other things (men, drugs, pregnancy) do it for her. It may be largely subjective whether this strikes you as a brilliant psychological coup, or rather as one of those only-in-the-movies elevations of bizarre or perverse behavior. It’s reasonably stimulating as such, but unfortunately it does increasingly seem to me that Ozon’s movies – for all their qualities - basically just aren’t that necessary or important. A nice throwaway moment here seems momentarily to be taking the movie into Eric Rohmer territory, before categorically veering away again.

Enter the Void (Gaspar Noe)

In the church of cinema, Noe is a raving new-age prophet; shunned by most, perhaps blindly adored by some, but then who knows how much comparison-shopping they’ve carried out? His last film Irreversible remains notorious for its brutal extended rape sequence, although I also recall its final love scene as being surprisingly tender. The movie was structured in reverse chronological order (like Ozon’s 5 X 2…any more of this and it’ll be old hat) and Enter the Void sets out to raise the conceptual stakes in a couple of ways. It’s told mostly from its main character’s subjective perspective – we view everything in the movie through his eyes or else from a point behind his head, clearly seeing his face only when he looks into the mirror. Oh, and for most of the time, he’s already dead, so we’re actually tracking his spirit, or his continuing essence, or however you’d put it.

The character is a young American drug dealer living in Tokyo, living with his stripper sister; he’s shot early on during a police raid, and the movie then tracks the event’s present-day aftermath while also flashing back to illustrate their tragic upbringing. It’s a very Oedipal creation: Noe recreates a primal scene of the kid walking in on his parents, the relationship between the siblings has incestuous undertones, and there’s a recurring image of sucking on the breast. Virtually all the characters are sad spectacles of one kind or another, adding to an overwhelming feeling of trauma and turmoil. It doesn’t feel like anything you’ve ever seen before – the camera swoops into abstraction and murkiness before clawing onto something recognizable, then gets pulled away again, at times effectively suggesting a tortured, disembodied consciousness perpetually fighting its way out of the darkness.

At times it’s most engrossing, but you’ve mostly got the idea after an hour or so, and then it goes on for ninety minutes more, becoming increasingly familiar and repetitive in its rhythms. I’ve seen it compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey – one of Noe’s characters refers to death as “the ultimate trip,” the same phrase used to advertise Kubrick’s film in one of its re-releases – but Noe’s merry digital splattering doesn’t feel remotely like Kubrick. On the other hand, Enter the Void is indeed probably best enjoyed as sensual abstraction: the narration is just familiar sleaze (its complete lack of distinction is actually rather surprising), and the metaphysics make no more sense than a viewer might choose to find in them.

Honeymoons (Goran Paskaljevic)

This movie left me almost more heated up than I could bear. Ironically titled to say the least, it has two separate but complementary stories of young couples – one Albanian, the other Serbian – seeking to enter Europe, their progress stalled in each case by suspicion and paranoia. Their home cultures basically resemble raucous, grating hellholes: the older men are sad and broken, the younger ones are vicious bigots; women barely have any meaningful role at all. Any moderate thought, or such sissiness as preferring beer to the more proletarian drink “raki,” is likely to get you beaten up; another race war seems barely held at bay. The nouveau riche, from the little we see of them, bleed complacency. Those who try to improve their lives by getting out only break the hearts of those left behind, and then in the eyes of the European gatekeepers, Albanians and Serbians form a barely differentiated threatening rabble, undeserving of even minor niceties.

The program book says this is the first Albanian-Serbian co-production in cinema history and says it “reconciles the two nations by pointing out their similarities rather than their differences,” but it struck me less as reconciliation than a mutual scorching. Maybe it’s that I’m just not temperamentally suited to the cultures depicted here, but I could barely take it – I basically had nothing left with which to make an aesthetic assessment. I guess this makes the movie a success, but I would probably have been happier to watch a relative failure. I mean of course a nice Ozon-type failure, not a Solondz-level crap-out.

2009 Toronto Film Festival Report - Part 3

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2009)

Agora (Alejandro Amenabar)

Amenabar, whose last movie was the Oscar-winning The Sea Inside, delivers here a tailor-made gala presentation – an old-fashioned decline of the Roman empire epic bursting with eye-popping sets, beautiful destruction, grand-scale human mayhem and an adequate dose of intimate tragedy. And, of course, as much contemporary resonance as you want to find in there. It’s set in 4^th century Alexandria, a formerly peaceful, non-doctrinal centre of learning and reflection, as militant Christianity – embodied here largely by violent, boorish agents of mass destruction - tightens its grip on the centers of power. The key protagonist, played by Rachel Weisz, is a pioneering science geek obsessed with understanding the earth’s relationship to the stars, her position increasingly perilous because of her gender and clarity of thought. The various main male characters are all studies in weakness and capitulation of one kind or another, which you might think sounds pretty prophetic too; it would likely be more conventionally satisfying as drama if there were a Russell Crowe type in there somewhere, but maybe that absence is part of the point.

The film doesn’t really advance much on the genre; in particular, the use of English dialogue and a fairly modern vernacular (“perhaps I’m completely raving,” concedes Weisz at the moment of her key breakthrough) seems increasingly distancing now (especially after Tarantino’s highly effective critique of genre language conventions in Inglourious Basterds). Amenabar uses digital technology’s enhanced visualization possibilities very well when he’s anchored in physicality, but also bakes in too many questionable, clichéd flourishes (God-like shots that zoom directly from outer space to an interior close-up, that kind of thing). It works just fine though as an unashamed button-pusher, especially if like me you see virtually everything nowadays as a representation of how mankind long ago became a condemned property but just keeps slapping on the paint.

Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl (Manoel de Oliveira)

De Oliveira is 100 years old, and still making just about a movie a year (he really hit his stride in his 70’s), although they’re seldom easy to see outside film festivals (the Cinematheque has a season of his work this fall however). His latest is just over an hour long, and it’s not really a major work: a slight anecdote of an accountant’s love for a woman he spots standing in the window across from his office, and his difficulties in winning her hand. I use that turn of phrase because it’s that kind of film, possessing a highly engaging old-fashioned courtliness. One never knows how much flows from the translation, but how many pictures set in the present incorporate phrases such as “Can I call you Miss?,” “What a beautiful fan,” and my favourite: “Commerce shuns a sentimental accountant”?(!)

The story isn’t overtly surreal, but the spirit of Luis Bunuel seems to haunt the movie (one of de Oliveira’s most recent films, Belle toujours, was a sequel of sorts to the master’s Belle de Jour). The framing device, of the protagonist spilling out his story to the woman beside him, recalls Bunuel’s last work That Obscure Object of Desire; so does the broader trajectory of thwarted desire, and the prevailing air of stripped-down, cultured (if slightly lost-in-time) elegance. The film’s ending is somewhat abrupt, like a sudden harsh waking from a dream, but how many filmmakers in their second century could leave you wanting (and, since he’s reportedly already embarked on another picture) fully expecting more?

Vengeance (Johnnie To)

I’m not very familiar with the Hong Kong action genre and can’t get far for instance on debating the relative achievements of John Woo vs. Tsui Hark vs. Johnnie To. Certainly I can see the artistry there, but it’s just not that high on the list of what personally excites me about cinema (much like how Cirque de Soleil isn’t my preferred night at the theater). To’s latest has the significant differentiator of Johnny Hallyday as a Paris restaurateur with a shady past, in search of who wiped out his expat daughter’s family; he also has an increasingly faulty memory, eventually placing the movie into quasi-Memento territory. Under the circumstances, he gets to the heart of things very quickly (it helps that all the local hit-men ultimately seem to work for the same guy), and it’s mostly pretty conventional, although always entertaining, and with a few let’s-shoot-for-the-fences compositions (for example a shoot-out making memorably choreographed use of compacted trash bundles). Hallday’s character, named Frank Costello, seems designed to evoke Alain Delon in Melville’s classic Le Samourai, but it doesn’t come off (I guess there’s more to it than wearing a trench coat and not saying much). I’m sure it could have been better, but I guess I would have preferred the de Oliveira movie no matter how good it was, so why carp.

Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont)

Dumont’s films are modern pilgrimages, fascinated both by squalor and by the possibility of transcendence, resisting normal notions of cinematic beauty and identification. His people, seldom embodied by traditionally great actors, are equally likely to expose their genitalia or to levitate off the ground. There’s no doubt about his seriousness, but since L’humanite ten years ago (which caused a minor scandal when it won some top prizes at Cannes) he’s become a marginal figure, often perceived as rather comically self-important. Hadewijch should remedy that a little, if only because it consciously seems like a partial gesture at reconciliation. A young girl, played by Julie Sokolowski in perhaps the best performance in all Dumont’s films, is in love with God, but she’s rejected from a convent when the others perceive her self-punishing behavior as a form of egotism. She drifts unhappily through the world outside before meeting an equally devout Muslim man; although she doesn’t share his faith, he gradually persuades her that God can only embraced by acting in the world, which - within the framework he holds out for her - leads her towards terrorism.
 

The film is engrossing and persuasive, primarily because the character makes such blinding sense: she’s from a privileged background, with seemingly well-meaning but absent parents, and an underdeveloped sense of her own sexuality; her love for God is beyond doubt, but it doesn’t appear to be theologically complex, which of course makes her (like hundreds of thousands before her) potential fodder for earthly ambitions. But Dumont is careful not to stereotype the Muslim perspective either, and the lack of easily identifiable “evil” or cynicism makes Hadewijch much more disquieting. The ending too is surprisingly gentle by his standards, quietly reestablishing the more mundane vessels and events in which the devout might sense and draw strength from divine presence and purpose. All of that said, and for all its qualities, I could easily imagine sterner critics than myself once again dismissing the whole thing as a somewhat gauche cartoon.

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.