February movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2007)

The German film The Lives of Others, directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, won the Best Foreign Film Oscar this year, and is a most worthy entry in Germany’s continuing dissection of its taxing past century. In 1984 East Germany (five years before the demise of the Wall and then the country) a stiff-necked Stasi (secret police) officer is given a surveillance assignment, to uncover the suspected subversive activities of a notable playwright and his girlfriend, an esteemed actress. The officer has little personal life or inspiration beyond occasionally hiring a whore, and he is strangely moved by the interaction of his two subjects. At the same time, he becomes attuned to the moral and ethical corruption of the system within which he’s spent his life, including the basically sordid motives behind the investigation. Eventually his spying starts to bear fruit, but instead of taking this back to his superiors, he fabricates bland reports. The complications that follow make for a fascinating narrative, loaded with significant moral and political weight.

The Lives of Others

The film depicts a ruling system that’s totally lost its ideological bearings, serving only to crush or warp everyone within it. At the start the playwright appears relatively content, subject to being allowed some minimum room for personal expression and some basic human tolerance; it’s only the excesses of the state, particularly in hounding a colleague of his to suicide, that radicalizes him. Likewise, the officer’s unquestioning loyalty starts to erode only when his superiors flaunt their pragmatism too blatantly. But the film is also I think about the power of art in a totalitarian state, for it’s clear that the officer – initially a strenuous Philistine – becomes infatuated with his subjects’ ability to connect, and comes to perceive his actions partly as his own aesthetic creation, played out with real lives and consequences instead of on a stage.

The Lives of Others is a film of drab grays, communicating the failure of the Socialist promise in every miserable frame. The trajectory of the officer, particularly as we follow the next ten years of his life in the film’s epilogue, has an almost Chaplin-like pathos to it at times. The film is too much an artistic creation to be completely convincing I think – there’s a considerable compression of events, and at times Henckel von Donnersmarck’s masterly control comes at the cost of a sense of spontaneity (although as I said, that’s part of the point). But these aren’t particularly significant caveats. Some people have said it’s the best film about surveillance since The Conversation, and although that may be true, I barely thought about that aspect of it at the time, perhaps because the bugging and snooping is so clearly a mere symptom of a society where all claim of meaningful self-determination has long been extinguished. As for the Oscar stakes, I think Pan’s Labyrinth would have been the better winner, for the greater breadth of its vision, but The Lives of Others is certainly one of the more deserving victors of the last twenty years.

Hannibal Rising

Hannibal Rising is the fourth film about the charismatically intellectual cannibal introduced in Manhunter and catapulted into legend by The Silence of the Lambs, this time going way back to his formative years in WW2 Lithuania. Hannibal is a nice little boy, living in the bosom of his family, and very protective of his little sister, which sets him up for psychological turmoil when he witnesses her being eaten by a bunch of scuzzy militia (led by my old schoolmate Rhys Ifans). Hannibal grows up in an orphanage, eventually hooking up with his aunt by marriage, played by Gong Li, weirdly out of place in such tacky material, but no less fascinating for that. He goes to medical school and then of course embarks on the quest to track the scumbags down one by one, along the way becoming more depraved at every turn.

As others have pointed out, there’s something very wrongheaded about trying to devise a quasi-respectable, psychologically motivated background for a character who so inherently epitomizes high-end pulp fiction, and the film’s painterly aspects just compound this nonsense. The movie’s biggest act of cannibalism is in taking director Peter Webber, so promising at the helm of Girl with a Pearl Earring, and corralling him into this; it’s well enough put together, and surprisingly (pointlessly) restrained at times, but never has zero potential of transcending extreme wretchedness. Hannibal is played by Gaspard Ulliel, who’s allowed to embarrass himself with shallow, grimacing work.

Factory Girl

Factory Girl is another visit to the (apparently) endlessly fascinating milieu of Andy Warhol and the Factory, this one focusing on Edie Sedgwick who was his golden girl for a few years before they drifted apart, precipitating her decline into drugs and premature death. Sienna Miller plays Edie, and she’s quite good on the downslide, but never conveys what made Edie seem quite so special in the first place. This is largely the fault of a vague, rushed narrative that lacks much period flavour, depth or continuity. Try to imagine how such a movie might look – the big close-ups of Edie talking to the camera (via her therapist), the highs of activity captured in snappy musical montages, the traumatic drugged-out scenes, the embarrassing public flame-outs, it’s all here, exactly as you’re visualizing it right now.

Guy Pearce plays Warhol, and he’s pretty good, but the film doesn’t seem interested in more than the same old Warhol mannerisms and affectations (maybe it’s because I saw the very good David Cronenberg-curated exhibition at the AGO last year that this all seemed particularly shallow and pointless). And then Hayden Christensen plays a version of Bob Dylan, which is just an utter waste of celluloid. As directed by George Hickenlooper, the film feels pretty pleased with itself, but I can’t think of one good reason to see it.

The Russian film The Italian belongs comfortably in the long tradition of films that depict childhood innocence and resourcefulness in strained or violent circumstances. The setting here is a miserable modern-day orphanage, from which the prize children are sold off to wealthy foreign couples; one boy is designated for Italy, but instead becomes preoccupied with finding his birth mother, and takes off on an unlikely quest. The film is a sobering depiction of a coarse, often violent environment, in many ways on the verge of breakdown, although the focus on the boy prevents it from getting too heavy. The happy ending is unconvincing but not grating in the circumstances, because the underlying point seems to be about the need to transcend these sad truths, and to do that within Russia’s own confines rather than through soul destroying transactions with the rest of the world.

My movie

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2004)

An obvious question came up again the other day: why wouldn’t my interest in cinema translate into a desire to make my own movies? Over the years I’ve sometimes thought of buying a camera; at least once I came this close to doing it. This was in the pre-DV days when one would have needed a projector, a constant supply of film, and God knows what else. As an aside, it’s rather beguiling how stories of shoestring filmmaking - for example Mario van Peebles’ recent Baadaaaaas – emphasize the simple challenge of obtaining enough film (the celluloid itself) to make the movie. Maybe I’m idealizing it, but it seems to me that such sensitivity for the scarcity of the basic raw material couldn’t help but inspire better work. That may be my ascetic side talking though.

Anyway, I’ve never taken the step, for a combination of reasons. Basically, I haven’t felt a compelling need to do it. There’s nothing inherently problematic about being happy as a committed spectator/commentator, unless you get neurotic about the “those who can’t do, teach” thing. There’s not much appeal to dabbling with home movies, and I don’t see myself hustling around raising money to make my breakthrough masterpiece, so what’s the point?

Mechanics of Filmmaking

An even greater problem might be the fear – it could even be a conviction – that I wouldn’t be any good at it. I completely believe whoever it was that said that making a bad film is just about the hardest thing you could ever imagine, and that making a good one is just a bit harder. I always feel a little guilty – truly I do – when I throw out lofty criticisms (say, like calling De-Lovely’s Irwin Winkler a “chronically inadequate director” the other week); that’s how easily Billy Wilder’s “Close but no cigar” line becomes something like “Close, so here’s a kick in the ass.” But as Michael Cimino said, somewhere in the middle of running up a record budget overage on Heaven’s Gate, if you don’t get it right what’s the point? Anyway, I’m not the most meticulous or patient of craftsmen, so there’s no particular reason to think I’d have any natural talent in this area.

Yet another problem – I actually think that if I had the mechanics of filmmaking too much in mind, even as an amateur, it would detract from my enjoyment of watching movies. This is how it works for me with writing fiction – because I also have occasional ambitions in that area, I have almost no desire to read anyone else’s (unless, oddly, it’s in French, where that problem doesn’t apply). I can envisage myself dwelling too much on how this or that wasn’t quite right. I do that now in the normal course of movie watching, but the observations come and go more loosely than they might if I kept analogizing to my own amateur efforts.

In this regard, I think of Martin Scorsese’s documentary on Italian cinema (I haven’t seen his Personal Journey through American Cinema), containing wonderful commentaries on ten or fifteen films in particular. I recently rewatched Luchino Visconti’s Senso – a film that occupied no particular place in my mind – in the light of Scorsese’s observations, and found it utterly transformed. Scorsese is also famous for incorporating references to a myriad of films into his own work, apparently without diluting his own sensibility – but then he’s Martin Scorsese. I’m not sure I could as easily switch between practitioner and connoisseur.

More on Before Sunset

Despite all that, I’m currently thinking more than I have for a while about taking the plunge. Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, which I wrote about last week as a near-exemplar of a certain kind of cinematic purity, may have been a key contributor to this mindset. Linklater’s film is mostly just two people talking, but for much of the time it makes you wonder why you’d ever want anything else from a movie – and described in terms of the raw elements, it’s something that anyone could do. Of course, it’s also true that in terms of the raw elements, anyone could sit down and write a novel to rival Philip Roth.

But because Linklater’s film is so deceptively simple, it focuses you on the mechanics of the filmmaking process in a way that more ostensibly complex productions might not. At one point, we see Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy from the front, walking along, and a runner comes up behind them. Hawke glances over his shoulder as the runner approaches. Then there’s a cut so that the camera’s now behind them, and we see the runner come by and run off ahead. It seemed to me that the timing was a little off; that he took too long to appear in the second shot, given his apparent proximity in the first. I’m sure they considered it painstakingly, so it might just be me, and it was only a matter of milliseconds, but it took me outside the film for a while.

But this only served to make me reflect on how seldom that happens, and I actually appreciated the fact that the illusion, the immersion that pulls you dreamily along, had been temporarily suspended; all the better to weigh the miracle of it occurring at all. Watching Before Sunset, I thought on occasion of directors like Ozu and Bresson and Dreyer – directors who happily forego some of cinema’s flashier possibilities, because they realize that those possibilities are merely ones of cinema, not of life. Once my mind goes there, I can’t think of anything more thrilling than engaging with that process for myself. Just on the most basic level of organizing shots, of experimenting with montage and juxtapositions, it seems irresistible,

Short Films

Of course, I’d be better off starting off with short films, rather than trying to launch into a Pickpocket or Ordet. I’ve been watching a lot of short films this year on DVD – Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, and a collection of Roman Polanski’s early student works. I’ve written about the Brakhage films here before – they’re brilliant, but not the project I have in mind (they’re also, even more clearly than many other works, specifically products of film, not of digital technology). Deren’s allusive Meshes of the Afternoon suggests some directions, but maybe that territory’s been fully occupied already. Polanski’s films are astonishingly accomplished, already recognizable as his own. In all these cases, the works’ brevity facilitates an appreciation of their great craft. The possible directions are endless.

And then there’s the possibility of documentary, or of essay films like Chris Marker. The very fact that I can consider all these possibilities probably tells you a lot about where this is likely to go – unfocused dabbling, collapsing in inertia. But even more than the road to hell, the road to bad cinema is surely paved with good intentions.

Serious stories

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 2009)

I didn’t like the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men even half as much as the consensus view. The Coens’ assurance showed in choice after choice no other director would make, but much of the film seemed to me either sleazy or affected. After which I wrote here: “I’ve been in this place with the Coens before. I’ve seen all the movies, but I’m not sure I’ve seen any of them more than once (maybe Fargo, but I don’t think the repeat investment paid off) and I’m straining to cite one truly interesting or provocative thing I ever learned from any of them. I guess maybe I learned a bit about how people talk in Minnesota, so that’s something.”

Burn after Reading

That’s what I wrote last time, and it’s true enough, but maybe I should be a little more temperate and underline the fact that I’ve seen all the movies; I’m sure that to have skipped any of them would have seemed like a dereliction of a cinemaniac’s duty. Their work has a creative zest that puts most other directors to shame, and given their productivity and variety, they surely know how lucky they are (even if they only grudgingly acknowledge it in Oscar acceptance speeches). But I always feel distanced from their films, as you might from someone who has the fullest social calendar around, but goes home to a bare and lonely apartment. Maybe I’m just getting older, but I find myself more appreciative of the hedgehog directors who really know what they know, even if that’s a smaller and much more repetitive knowledge, and even if you strain to vaguely evoke what it actually consists of (I find I especially appreciate them if they’re French). The Coens are the kings of the strutting foxes, masters at stealing chickens, but when are they at peace?

Anyway, their subsequent film, Burn after Reading, was inherently less ambitious than No Country for Old Men, but I actually liked it quite a bit more, as an increasingly intriguing statement on degraded human standards and self-worth, with Washington – perhaps the least clear-headed micro-society in the developed world (see also the recent In the Loop) – providing a coldly resonant setting. The Coens pepper it with subtleties you don’t expect from their lighter projects: for example, it’s frequently unclear whether a particular shot represents someone’s actual point of view, a subtlety that supports a broad theme of surveillance and chronic insecurity, wrapped up by the way the movie tells us rather than shows us how everything ends, and disclaims any knowledge of what lessons we should learn from it. By being both peppy and meaningful, the film only seemed to underline my doubts at its predecessor’s portentousness.

A Serious Man

Their new release, A Serious Man, is perhaps the year’s most divisive (leaving aside Transformers 2, where the divide existed between the critics on one side and the mass public on the other). Ella Taylor in The Village Voice says “the visual impact of all these warty, unappetizing Jews (even the movie's obligatory anti-Semite looks handsome by comparison) carries (the film) into the realm of the truly vicious...I worry…about what ancient anxieties lie behind the endorsement of a movie that dumps on Jews and Judaism with such ferocity.” Armond White in The New York Press, apparently in direct response, says any “critic’s suggestion that a film as lovingly, emotionally precise as A Serious Man typifies Jewish self-hatred is ridiculous.” He says the film “(embraces) ethnic superstition and (critiques) it simultaneously,” finding it “so sharp-witted that every irony makes life vivid rather than despairing.” Picking up on this, Jim Emerson on the Scanners website calls the film “a relentless inquiry into how we think we know what we think we know, and then asks where the knowing (or not knowing) gets us.”

It’s the tale of Gopnik, a mid-western suburban math professor in the late 60’s, Jewish (I guess you got that already), up for tenure, with perhaps no more than conventional anxieties. This rapidly unwinds – his wife leaves him for another man, his finances unravel, his professional ambitions become questionable, and even minor plagues (like the man at the mail-order record company, constantly calling to demand payment for a service   Gopnik didn’t order and doesn’t want) suggest some cosmic turn of fortune. The community’s elders offer little help: one rabbi offers platitudes; the second refuses to see meaning in anything, even his own proffered anecdote about a man with “Help me save me” engraved on the inside of his teeth; the third won’t see him; his lawyer just racks up the bills. The ending may be a confirmation of Gopnik’s fears, or a mockery of them, or may of course mean nothing at all. The latter seems most likely to me, in that the movie seems to mock – albeit not as unkindly as some might have perceived – the very notion of grand institutionalized meaning. Although its focus is on the Jewish community, it’s also a cousin to Mad Men and other examinations of misplaced post-war notions of progress and conformity.

Night Wind

The movie is full of incidental pleasures, not least of all from the acting, and yet when I came out of it, the word that came to my mind was “cartoonish”. Again, every scene’s busy plucking feathers. The previous day, as a random comparison, I’d watched Philippe Garrel’s Night Wind, a sparse drama with only around 1/20^th the action of A Serious Man and about 1/10^th of the dialogue, yet with a persistent sense of existential dread. At the end of it, my thoughts were racing; I felt I’d picked up something truly new and provocative and instructive. I don’t recall whether anyone in the film ever mentions God, but it’s as if the world only had a limited supply of human viability and too many walking shells, and everyone casts around trying to make it reconcile, through sex or drugs or intellectualism or immersion in one’s strenuously iconic despair. The student movement of 1968 – a key defining moment for Garrel – is a constant reference point, perhaps as the last best hope of a meaningful rebooting. It’s an aesthetic creation of course, but beautiful and profound in its desolation.

In large part it’s because Garrel’s lived and suffered and wouldn’t think of making a movie that didn’t draw on that. I suppose the Coens have suffered (the new movie might suggest they didn’t think much of their teenage milieu anyway), but you can’t really feel it even in their tougher-minded works. But then they don’t ever communicate much joy either. Sometimes they seem to know the workings of almost everything, but not the value of it.

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.