Piano man

Steven Soderbergh says Behind the Candelabra is his last film for now, but I don’t really believe him, because if you were announcing your last film at the age of fifty, wouldn’t you make something that felt like your last film, by virtue of its extremity or joy or despair or profundity or whatever it might be? Behind the Candelabra, a depiction of Liberace’s six-year late-in-life relationship with his much younger lover, is an entertaining project, but there are a million semi-forgotten stories in the dusty archives of popular culture, and this is merely one of them; you can react to the material and its historical resonance, but as a piece of filmmaking, it’s less stimulating than most of Soderbergh’s recent work.

Changing times

It may be less notable for itself than as a measure of changing times. Soderbergh has been talking in interviews about how he tried and failed for years to get financing for the project as a theatrical release (“the consensus was that there would be no audience for the movie outside of a gay audience”); eventually it came to the attention of HBO, which immediately said yes (although it’s now on cable in North America, it’s being released as a movie movie elsewhere, and it was even part of the competition at the recent Cannes festival). I don’t think this necessarily marks HBO as being morally or culturally superior – it’s a different business model (driven by customers’ continued interest in subscribing for the channel as a whole, rather than enticing them into buying one experience at a time) in which the “edginess” and “risk-taking” is inherent to the branding. But it’s certainly another indication of how it’s increasingly meaningless to address the mainstream film industry as anything other than a commercial enterprise.

Another evolutionary marker: Michael Douglas and Matt Damon play gay characters with a straightforward commitment that’s remarkable only for no longer being remarkable; even ten years ago, such choices would have been discussion points in themselves, and twenty years ago (the year Tom Hanks won an Oscar for Philadelphia, although his performance now seems timid by comparison) they would have been commemorated as profiles in courage. On the other hand, every viewer of the film knows that these are two iconic stars, comfortably (in Douglas’ history-of-sex-addiction/glamorous-trophy-wife- adorned case, even strenuously) established as not being gay: the movie is plainly an expedition from the outside into gay history, not a report from within it.

The same story

Also, the truth of this history seems blunted in at least one key respect. The film starts in 1977, when a friend introduces the wide-eyed Scott Thorson, who has vague dreams of becoming a veterinarian, to the famous and glamorous piano player, one of the kings of Las Vegas, who maintains an image of outrageous campiness and yet insists for public consumption that he just hasn’t found the right woman yet, and that ice skater Sonia Henie was the lost love of his life. Behind the candelabras and the spotlights though, it’s all out in the open, and Thorson’s soon installed as the latest in a long line of disposable boyfriends (where he sets a record by lasting four years). The thing I think is blunted is this: Thorson was 18 in 1977, 48 years younger than Liberace; Matt Damon is currently 42, which is 26 years younger than Douglas. No matter how good he looks, this casting decision imposes an undertone of at least relatively greater equality of desire and experience, and although the sex scenes between the two are as frank as you’d usually need them to be, they don’t convey the clashing physicality of a teenager and a man pushing sixty.

 

On this point, Soderbergh said in an interview: “The dynamic of the relationship that he had with Scott was very volatile, but it’d be the same story no matter what the gender: Older powerful figure, younger beautiful person with no power…” But this seems disingenuous, in that much of the movie’s interest comes from its depiction of a very specific gay culture, intertwined with but largely hidden in the folds of showbiz, where a man like Liberace – through the combined forces of money and willpower - is able to develop and sustain apparently enormous appetites, serviced and protected by circles of enablers. Liberace was also one of the first celebrity victims of AIDS (although his retinue, including his physician, initially lied about it) and so constitutes a complex transitional figure – this is in the movie, but really just as a brief postscript, less central to its overall effect than a fantasy scenario in which Thorson drifts away during the funeral, to imagine one last show-stopping performance. All in all, although the movie may have been too gay for the studios, I think you can easily argue that the movie would have constituted a much more piercing historical investigation if it were gayer.

Plastic surgery

Soderbergh seems most engaged during the passages dealing with plastic surgery, in which the neurotic star first touches himself up, then decides Thorson would also be enhanced by becoming a Liberace replica; Rob Lowe’s performance as a doctor who provides a walking cautionary billboard for the perils of his trade pushes the film into surreal territory (contrasting sharply with the naturalism of others in the supporting cast, including Dan Aykroyd and Debbie Reynolds). But again, I’m not sure the film really tries to make us feel the reality of what’s happening there, of a teenager manipulated into altering his features to satisfy a much older man’s sexual circuitry. My point isn’t that Soderbergh should have presented this as a stops-out episode of abuse (I don’t know whether it’s that or not) – plainly, plenty of people defend plastic surgery as an exercise in self-expression and self-determination, whereas others argue it’s driven much more by misplaced societal preoccupation with appearances, but as presented here it’s little more than, say, quirky. The point about appearances might seem to have some correlation with Liberace’s emphasis, both personally and professionally, on opulence and spectacle, and more broadly with out of control consumerism, but the movie doesn’t pursue that line of investigation either.

Anyway, it goes down very easily, executed with all the director’s customary skill, and Douglas manages to convey something of Liberace’s inner life, and external charisma, without posturing or falling into caricature. But in an inversion of how (according to one source) Oscar Levant said something to the effect that if you strip the phony tinsel off Hollywood, you just find real tinsel underneath, it feels at times as if Behind the Candelabra, once it goes behind the candelabra, just finds a bunch of other, sadder-looking candelabras, which it then doesn’t bother peering behind.

2006 Toronto film festival report - part 2

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2006)

 

This is the second of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival.

Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako)

During the last year or so I watched the documentaries Life and Debt and The Take, which slammed the malign effect of IMF and World Bank policies on Jamaica and Argentina respectively, and made me think I had been insufficiently skeptical of those institutions (if only by not thinking much about them). Then I had the almost life-altering experience of visiting South Africa, and going to a township, where I found myself at a loss to imagine how such deprivation could be constructively addressed in my lifetime. Sissako’s new film, combining these strands of thought, was high on my must-see list for this year. It’s based in the brilliant concept of a legal proceeding - African Society vs. the International Financial System - held in a courtyard in a destitute Malian village; there’s some stinging testimony against the ruling economic powers (and some distinctly weaker arguments for the other side). The film teems with outrage, although it doesn’t grasp at easy solutions – the greatest tragedy, it implies, is in how the history of exploitation and belittlement has by now seeped into the country’s DNA (manifesting itself, for instance, in institutional corruption and fraught personal relationships). It has many fine moments, but a fair amount of it seems rather laboured too, leading overall to a less revelatory experience than I was hoping for.

Transylvania (Tony Gatlif)

Gatlif is of Gypsy descent, and devotes most of his work to illuminating that underappreciated culture. He crams his pictures with tumultuous music and human chaos - a word that comes to mind is “zesty”. His last film Exils was an entertaining romp, and the new effort particularly appealed to me because of the presence of the explosive Asia Argento, who’s directed a couple of kinetic movies herself. And indeed, it’s hard to imagine Transylvania existing without the two of them. Argento plays Zingarina (now there’s a Gatlif kinda name!), a French woman who comes to the country in search of a Transylvanian boyfriend who got her pregnant back home and then disappeared. She finds him, he rejects her, and she goes off the rails; ditching her friends and settling into an itinerant life with a rough-edged petty wheeler-dealer. Among other things, Asia gets to scream, break plates, have milk poured over her, have sex on a car within feet of a foraging bear, smoke while pregnant, and submit to a harrowing labour scene. There might be a rough allegory there for the new European melting pot, and the mythic connotations of the setting lurk around the edges too, but it’s hard to get past such ramshackle psychology and narrative motivation. Hard to worry too much though, when it’s all so damn zesty.

Le Voyage en Armenie (Robert Guediguian)

Guediguian spent years making gritty, heartfelt movies – often very compelling ones - in a particular quarter of his native Marseilles, usually with the same lead actors. He’s only now broadening his reach a bit, first with a recent film about Francois Mitterand (not shown here to my knowledge) and now with Le Voyage en Armenie. Sadly, this film merely plays like a slower, bourgeois version of Transylvania. Ariane Ascaride plays a French doctor exploring her Armenian roots while searching for her dying father. Much of the movie is basically a travelogue with minimal narrative finesse: within a day or two of arriving she’s acquired a motley collection of friends, tangled with gangsters, gone up in a helicopter, visited strip clubs and churches and slums, and made a fair stab at learning the language. Later on the thugs come to the fore, and matters turn rather silly before stumbling to the inevitable closure, in which of course she’s acquired a new equanimity about her family and heritage. Inevitably, given its approach, the film seems to provide reasonable coverage of Armenian tour bus highlights, but it’s so contrived that you can’t engage with it as much more than a series of postcard images. Unfortunately, it’s one of those movies that tempt you to reevaluate the director’s previous work downwards; you wonder whether the modesty and commitment of his Marseilles projects obscured comparable weaknesses.

Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell)

Well, you’ve probably already heard about this one – a contemporary comedy about relationships in a very specifically post 9/11 New York, featuring lots of unsimulated explicit sex: it’s locally notorious for featuring the CBC’s Sook-Yin Lee (who turns out to be one of the film’s less interesting performers). It follows Mitchell’s first film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which didn’t do a thing for me, although I suppose I may not have been the target demographic. No such problem here – the target demographic is presumably anyone who likes sex, and isn’t ashamed about it! Sure, it’s surprising at times in its physical, uh, concoctions, but even more surprising is the delicacy of some of the characterizations, even if a lot of it is just scattershot liberalism. Some of it, conversely, is rather trite and silly, and the movie exhibits what you might call Magnolia syndrome – it returns constantly to sweeping animated shots of the city, and pumps up its mythic scope through symbolic uses of blackouts and musical numbers (and, of course, orgy scenes). Overall though, Mitchell’s feeling for the milieu and the people is highly persuasive, and the film never compromises, visually or ethically. Every year, the festival crosses yet another new frontier in mainstream cinema sexuality, and some of those seem primarily like stunts (take 9 Songs for instance), but Shortbus periodically feels almost necessary.

I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang)

Tsai’s garish, porn-packed The Wayward Cloud was one of my favourites of last year’s festival, although it seemed to indicate a director in desperate need of a new preoccupation. His new film actually turns out to be more of a retrenchment, but it’s an extremely satisfying one. Although Tsai is filming for the first time here in his native Malaysia, he reduces the city to a largely familiar wasteland (although with an emphasis on diversity), threatened by rising water levels and lousy air quality, following a few deprived people holding on to love-starved existences, desperate for a meaningful connection (sometimes expressed tenderly, sometimes comically, although perhaps the broader point is the difficulty of telling the difference). The plot, such as it is, mostly focuses on a homeless man who’s beaten up and then taken in by a Bangladeshi immigrant who nurses him; when he recovers, he forges a connection with a local waitress. Tsai again deploys long takes, structured around recurring, elemental preoccupations – with a place to sleep, with images of one person tending to another (either functionally or erotically or perhaps both at once). Romantic old songs play on the soundtrack, their underlying sentiments strangely valid for all the strain in the circumstances. Take back what I just said about Shortbus - Tsai’s vision of modern relationships makes Mitchell look merely crass and opportunistic.

Torments of the young

The work of the wonderful French director Olivier Assayas might be divided, very loosely, into two broad categories: culture and tech-savvy bites out of the globalization-fraught modern world; and more traditionally “French” human dramas. A character in one of his finest recent films, Summer Hours, cites at one point the use of a modern telephone (not even an iPhone!) as a symbol of too much progress, and Assayas seems to carry a profound sense of the modern world’s competing debits and credits – he’s a man of immense learning, and of pride in that, who nevertheless understands the potential appeal of succumbing to mindlessness. Canadians might be most aware of his film Clean, a chronicle of an addict trying to take control of her life, notable among much else for making probably the best ever filmic use of Hamilton, Ontario (including a guest appearance by Metric, playing Dead Disco). As in all his works, Assayas invests that film with details that may only make vague sense as you watch them, but which convey an immense sense of layering and intimacy.

Something in the Air

A viewer of his new film Something in the Air (playing at the TIFF Lightbox as I speak; available soon in other formats) would certainly benefit from knowing a bit about the French political and cultural landscape in the aftermath of the May 1968 riots (to which the film’s original title, Après Mai, refers explicitly). The year is 1971, and the protagonist, Gilles, immerses himself in political activity, while also committing to developing his skills as a painter. He and his friends distribute flyers and sell newspapers; they attend meetings; they paint slogans on school property. The group argues about the scope of its activity – for example whether to extend its activities to address broader social problems, or to focus on student rights. They draw on the movement’s connections to make contact with other collectives; they smoke endlessly; they fall in love and have sex. Group members may differ in their degrees of idealism or passion, or in their pragmatism regarding future steps, but they’re not “alienated” in the way of many films about young people – they occupy their lives completely, absorbing experience without straining for it.

The film belongs then to that second category of Assayas films – fully immersed in a very specific, and very French time and place; among much else, it’s consistently ravishing to look at. But the horizons aren’t narrow – various characters travel to Italy, Afghanistan and Britain; they talk about going to the States, or to Nepal. It’s a striking (presumably unplanned) contrast with another film also playing at the Lightbox, which I wrote about here last week, Michel Gondry’s The We and the I. Gondry’s film, set in present day New York, also focuses on a group of teenagers, but the group’s energy is almost entirely invested in transient testing and positioning – who likes who, who’s going where, who knows what, and so on, all heavily reinforced and abetted of course by the ever-present cellphones. In an interview in Cineaste magazine, Assayas drew out the contrast: “kids like myself…we functioned with basically no money…the money you had you would spend on books, usually radical books, newspapers, and coffee…today it’s different; there’s too much money…it’s only consumerist logic that generates products that have a predetermined obsolescence.”

Crispness and clarity

The point isn’t just about nostalgia. Writing in the Globe and Mail, Rick Groen calls Something in the Air “a wispy picture, likeable certainly but lacking in crispness and clarity.” By comparison, I suppose The We and the I is eminently crisp and clear, but it’s related to the disposable crispness of the latest YouTube video, to the weightless clarity of the current talking point. The very point of Assayas’ film seems to be document a milieu marked by the absence of such qualities, and to muse – in a very specific historical context - on the necessity of that absence, necessary because to lay claim to clarity at that age is merely to prematurely sacrifice possibility and internal and external mobility (which is exactly the trajectory of many of those kids in Gondry’s film, whether or not through any fault of their own).

Peter Howell’s Star review also seems to be imposing some preconceptions on the film. He notes that the characters “face the moods, passions, raging hormones and unrequited love that torment the young.” But actually, you could hardly have a picture about teenagers where “raging hormones” are less of a factor: the characters hook up with ease, and if they’re occasionally in the situation of love being unrequited, then they seize on the situation’s dramatic grandeur rather than becoming morose and consumed about it (in the same interview, Assayas says “films about teenagers are always centered around sentiment, love, boys and girls, blah, blah, blah…I recall being interested in those concerns – but they weren’t the centre of my life”). If anything, they don’t “face” those issues; rather, they invite them, realizing their centrality to a full life experience.

Revolutionary syntax

The film returns constantly to the symbolic power of fire, as both a political and a personal symbol, of both destruction and commemoration. It’s hardly an unfamiliar motif of course, but it’s a long time since I’ve felt it deployed so intimately. The characters carry on a recurring debate about whether “revolutionary film” must deploy a “revolutionary syntax” – for example whether even a film sympathetic to left-wing struggles, if shot and edited in a conventionally accessible way, will implicitly support the bourgeois social structure that gave rise to those conventions. Assayas’ syntax here, no question, isn’t revolutionary; but then, the revolution didn’t triumph. His recurring strength, as much here as ever, is to master the evocative force of the syntax we know, and to demonstrate how frequently we squander it on cultural products of, well, predetermined obsolescence.

In the end, inevitably, the characters must start to move on: some double down on their activism, others return to a more traditional path; others are left at least temporarily adrift. Gilles goes to Britain, where through family connections he gets a job on a mind-blowingly cheesy movie set, wonderfully recreated by Assayas (in real life, he had a trainee job in the editing room of the first Christopher Reeve Superman film); he still sells newspapers though, and still attends experimental films (although he refracts the images through his own memories). Earlier, a friend chides him for his aesthetic interests, telling him: “Art is a choice – it’s a solitude,” and a choice incompatible with investment in a collective revolutionary effort. As the film ends, Gilles is starting to refine the choice, his interests shifting from painting to cinema (by definition less of a solitude – almost the last thing we see him doing is lighting his cigarette off that of another crew member), and his political activities becoming more formalized. It’s perhaps already a greater concession than he may have envisaged, and will no doubt become more so still…but even so, what wouldn’t you give to live in a time where even the compromises are so thrilling?

2006 Toronto Film Festival – Part 1

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2006)

This is the first of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival.

When the Levees Broke (Spike Lee)

I actually saw this on TMN before the festival, in installments, but I’m glad the programmers allowed a space for it on the big screen, where it must have been overwhelming. Over four hours, Lee constructs a detailed, often anguished account of Hurricane Katrina, built primarily on the testimony of those who lived through it, who lost their homes or family members, or were dislocated, or left crushed by the inadequacy of the response at all levels. The documentary footage, of course, is hard to process; the frailty of human infrastructure has never been established so cruelly. Lee’s approach is sober and meticulous, nailing all the salient points about FEMA and Bush and insurance companies (who are subject to some particularly damning testimony) and the local authorities, but never overplaying it, always returning quickly to the human consequences - it’s conspicuously short on the moments of optimism that normally pepper such documentaries. Six months or more after the disaster, vast areas remain unreclaimed, bodies continue to be found, and victims languish wherever they were dropped down (often without regard to family unity), and although the Mayor talks about rebuilding New Orleans, there’s no sense that the institutional willpower exists for such a task. For a director often regarded as flashy and bombastic, Lee is amazingly restrained here, and his film soars on that sorrowful maturity.

Belle toujours (Manoel de Oliveira)

De Oliveira, believe it or not, is 98 years old. His films don’t get shown much outside the film festival, but I very much enjoyed his Je rentre a la maison a few years ago (made when he was a mere 93) – it was clearly self-referential, but with an entrancing sense of ethicism and elegance (and a funny contrivance about a phenomenally miscast film of Joyce’s Ulysses). The new film is a homage and quasi-sequel to Belle de Jour, dedicated to its creators Luis Bunuel and Jean-Claude Carriere, with two of the main characters meeting again forty years later (Michel Piccoli reprises his original role, and Bulle Ogier replaces Catherine Deneuve, quite effectively). De Oliveira isn’t as elegant or as wicked a filmmaker as Bunuel, but his more static style suits the premise of personal demons relaxed by age, and he does work in a couple of images and ideas weird enough to suggest that the old surrealist’s spirit may momentarily have taken over. At other times, in truth, the film just seems a little off (it has, for one thing, the least persuasive prostitutes in recent cinema, not that I didn’t find them rather charming). Much of it though is silent and contemplative, so that the homage is most persuasive at the broad conceptual level, when it merely conveys the contentment of observing something (or someone) of abiding beauty.

Fantasma (Lisandro Alonso)

This is Alonso’s third film; at the time of his second, Los Muertos, the festival programme book called him “one of the most talented and visionary filmmakers to emerge from the New Argentine Cinema movement.” Difficult to assess exactly how huge a compliment that might be, but Los Muertos struck me as somewhat academic, although well sustained. Fantasma is built around a premiere screening of Los Muertos, with the lead actor and virtually no one else attending. The event is framed by various mundane activities within the somewhat run down building complex. In subject and execution, the film is an elevation of cinema, insisting on the fascination inherent in marginal events and on the privileged nature of our spectatorship; and Alonso’s willingness to place his own previous film in such a desultory light shows some laconic amusement at the ultimate stature of the cinematic artist. Having said that, the “vision” here is limited and insular, and the film yields nothing that hasn’t been amply implemented elsewhere. As if it wasn’t already divorced enough from externalities, Fantasma is also (per the programme book) a “devoted homage” to Tsai Ming-Liang’s Good Bye, Dragon Inn, prompting the thought that Alonso’s next film desperately needs to be about anything other than cinema itself.

The Caiman (Nanni Moretti)

Moretti’s movies are generally as understated and modest, and yet as slyly impactful, as the man himself seems to be, prodding gently and quizzically at their subjects, without leaving you feeling any major possibilities have been sold short. For much of its length though I wondered if The Caiman was equal to his usual standard. It’s about Silvio Berlusconi, only recently deposed as Italian Prime Minister after a long, incredibly controversial tenure; filtered through the device of a movie producer, down on his personal and professional luck, who’s trying to finance a young director’s film about the Great Man. In many ways, it’s Moretti’s most conventional work; the family dynamics and comic set-ups are distinctly short on the grace notes we expect from him, and they frequently overwhelm the film’s political core. The tone often seems rather resigned, as if implicitly accepting the opinion delivered by Moretti himself (in a cameo where he’s offered and turns down the lead role in the film within the film) that there’s nothing new to say about Berlusconi, and merely lurching on for the sake of it. But it all seems much cannier in light of the complacency-busting finale, where the framing story falls apart, the gloves come off, and Moretti makes the extent of Berlusconi’s assault on democracy almost frighteningly clear.

Coeurs (Alain Resnais)

In my preview article, I highlighted the 84-year-old Resnais’ new film as probably the one I was most looking to overall. Not that his films have necessarily been among my favourites, but I bow before any octogenarian who continues to experiment, particularly when the most recent results have actually been rather sweet. Coeurs is in many ways one of his most straightforward films, with six unfulfilled characters connecting in various mostly unfulfilling ways (it’s based on an Alan Ayckbourn play, with the illustrative title Private Fears in Public Places). The tone is mostly quiet, refracted through a gauzy, sometimes almost abstracted image quality and a recurring motif of falling snow. There are no exterior scenes, and indeed the search for a satisfactory living space is a key theme - as if one’s inner lack might be externalized and conquered through structure and furniture (the film’s most devout character, and possessor of its most astonishing hidden depths, describes the human quest as being to avoid damnation by trying to pull the hellfire out of ourselves). Resnais expertly blends the film’s depressing connotations into a strangely beguiling surface, one that sometimes quivers with melancholy; he’s well aided by wonderful acting, mostly by actors who’ve worked with him many times before. My hopes for this film were higher than my expectations, but it’s pleasing to report that hope triumphed.

Riding the bus

Michel Gondry’s film The We and the I is set almost entirely on a New York bus, mostly populated by teenagers heading home after the last day of school before the summer: the bus starts off full to overflowing, and ends up virtually empty. Early on it’s mostly full of goofing around as the kids feed off each other; as it goes on, and the collective energy gets diluted, more serious issues and preoccupations come to the form. Since the movie is set in the present day, everyone has a cellphone, so that verbal and behavioural connections are constantly reinforced with electronic ones (in this environment, when someone doesn’t instantly receive the latest video in circulation, it can only be a conscious act of exclusion). Beyond providing glimpses of what they’re looking at, Gondry expands the filmic universe only sparingly, through brief low-tech visualizations of various fantasies and experiences, reminiscent of similar arts-and-crafts devices he used in his films The Science of Sleep and Be Kind Rewind.

The We and the I

Gondry’s original conception of the film was quite vague and unfinished; he fleshed it out by working with real kids in an after-school Bronx program, so that much of what’s in there represents the participants’ own language and experiences. It must be taken in part then as an anthropological exercise, intended to capture something real and current and pressing about their lives and times. In this regard, much as you’d expect, the movie confirms some old impressions while asserting some newer ones. If, like me, you don’t spend that much time around teenagers, it’s easy to forget how sharply eloquent and inventive they are, and of course, how the dynamics of the group may punish those who can’t keep up, or otherwise fail to define their own space. Much of the conversation is a form of testing and positioning, of establishing who knows what and where it gets them. That aside, although the film is of course in large part a celebration, large elements of it might be assessed as fairly horrific. I don’t just mean the specific evocation of youthful death toward the end, but the low- and not-so-low-level harassment, invasion of personal space and property damage that seems on this evidence to be an inescapable part of their regular discourse.

Even more than for many new releases, it’s hard to see the logic of having this film open on one screen at the TIFF Lightbox in the same week as many other movies, with no particular fanfare or context: it’s overwhelmingly the kind of thing that one might take or leave, or at best leave for cable or DVD (when I went, there were fewer than ten people in the audience). This is the emblematic film which, if it has any hope of causing a ripple, can only do so as part of a broader conversation. Personally, I wouldn’t have had as good a time if the place had been full of boisterous Toronto teenagers, targeted into using the film as a springboard for active dialogue about their own lives, but it would have made more sense as a strategy for the film. To treat something like The We and the I as a regular filmgoing experience, presented for the sober engagement of regular cinephiles, runs the severe risk of denying the immediacy of what it represents.

Broader intentions

That’s not to say Gondry doesn’t have broader aesthetic intentions. In an interview he described how he had the original idea “about a more upper-class area in Paris, when I took the bus 20 years ago, and when the kids came out of school they were really shallow and aggressive. They would leave the bus one after the other, the group was getting smaller and the group would get more philosophical, personal.” That basic structure and shift is prominent in The We and the I, and although it seems valid as an exercise in group dynamics, Gondry makes the closing stretch much more philosophical and personal than what preceded it, using the “last day before summer” conceit to tease out various strands that one imagines might not be as pressing on a  regular day (for the riders at the end of the line, by the way, one can’t help thinking that there must be a closer school available – the film lasts over an hour and a half and conveys the sense of proceeding more or less in real time – but maybe that only tells you how little I appreciate the grind that a lot of kids have to put up with). It’s not that the material is implausible, but that it’s plainly compressed, and although that’s inevitable in any such project, one wonders here if it has the effect of romanticizing the milieu. But maybe that’s the whole point, to assert that this place and time, and these kids, support a whole range of emotional and thematic possibility, and of creative force (one kid makes a habit out of spinning engaging tall tales about his glamorous life, which Gondry visualizes in his trademark manner).

For another kind of example: at one point, the bus goes past a woman on a bike, her summer dress blowing, looking as serene as if she were traveling through a French meadow rather than the Bronx, and they all seem to catch their breaths at the unexpected loveliness, until one of them makes a vulgar remark and the moment’s gone. It’s a striking episode, and rather complicated: it taps into the universal longing for transcendent experiences, however fleeting; at the same time, it’s impossible not to register that this is virtually (and perhaps literally, I can’t quite remember) the only white woman in the whole film. The film would be poorer without this brief passage, and yet one wonders whether it’s a passage that belongs mainly to the “we” of the kids, or to the “I” of the director.

Beyond the bus route

On the other hand, if this imaginary group discussion I was visualizing taking place around the film was ultimately going to be worth anything, it would have to carry an aspirational quality – not that such communities should be ashamed or should focus on their own limitations, but it can’t be enough to say life goes no further than the bus route. The film has several students who are interested in art and others whose sensibilities appear a little broader; including the accomplished fantasist I mentioned. By its very existence, the film embodies the possibility of connection and crossing boundaries – Gondry is French after all, and his next project is a French-language drama with Audrey Tautou, which might seem as far removed from here as humanly possible. If the film were just about a bus ride through the Bronx, it might be hard to care that much, no matter what our sociological interests. But it’s a bigger journey than that.

More summer movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2007)

I eventually went to see the latest Harry Potter movie, Order of the Phoenix, on the Imax screen at the Paramount – sorry, the Scotiabank – giving in to the enticement of 3-D (for certain sequences only). An opening announcement informed us that a green symbol would occasionally pop up at the bottom of the screen, as the prompt to put on our 3-D glasses. As the movie kept rolling by without any sign of this symbol, I became convinced that I was missing it – perhaps by slumping too low in my seat for example – and spent much time sneaking glances at the rest of the audience, who I kept imagining might already be transported to a different zone of perception.

Harry Potter

Well, eventually the symbol turned up, and the glasses came on, just in time for some big flying dragons that naturally swoop out of the screen right into your face, and then for a good fifteen minutes beyond that. It’s a mixed blessing I’d say. Occasionally it generates astonishingly vivid, almost overwhelming images. But at other times the heightened definition in the foreground draws too much attention to the flatness of the background, and images containing characters at different depths appear unnatural. I had some trouble following flurries of action too. I’m not an expert in the science of perception, but I wonder whether the ambition of giant-sized 3-D isn’t fundamentally at odds with the way our brains process images. Oh, and the glasses they gave me had dirty lenses.

The technology may take yet another leap forward before 2009, when James Cameron returns with Avatar, supposedly to be filmed and exhibited entirely in 3-D. Anyway, that was really my only point of interest in the Potter movie. I’ve seen the previous four, and although I know the first was clunky and saccharine compared to later installments, I nevertheless enjoyed it the most, simply because of its sense of wonder and discovery. The Potter movies are much darker, more brooding now, which sounds more thematically interesting, except that it’s all such nonsense. At this point it becomes obvious I haven’t read the books either. Well actually I did read the second one, in French, just to see if I could pull it off. It seemed to me pretty dire. But that was after the translator got to it.

I’ve pretty much forgotten the plot of the fourth movie, but a lot of Order of the Phoenix seemed highly familiar, so I’m guessing that’s where I saw it before. As usual, a lot of great actors hang round to deliver a handful of lines apiece, and the central trio isn’t maturing very interestingly. Obviously the film’s technical accomplishments provide much to praise, just as a visit to a science lab does. I really don’t mean to be negative. It’s just not for me. It was the same week, you know, that Bergman and Antonioni died.

No Reservations

No Reservations is a distinctly 2-D remake of the 2001 German film Mostly Martha. That was a nicely poised, sensitive work, although seldom surprising. The new version, drenched in Hollywood sensibility up to the very brim of its pestle, blands out the recipe with off the shelf cuteness (and a side order of would-be poignancy). Catherine Zeta-Jones, who melds a little too perfectly with this limited ambition, is a brilliant chef who spends too much time in the kitchen and not enough in the bedroom; Aaron Eckhart is way too good to be true as the assistant chef who helps her make a breakthrough. Virtually all of the movie’s potential themes were handled more deftly in Ratatouille – even that film’s cartoon food looked more mouth watering than the real creations on display here (if you’ve seen pretty truffles and scallops and crème brulees once, you’ve seen ‘em a million times). The credits say it was directed by Scott Hicks, who made Shine, but it’s just as plausible that it was made by a PG-programmed robot: it has absolutely nothing idiosyncratic, nothing even slightly daring. Not even a recipe. Excuse me while I sweep the toast crumbs off the keyboard.

Two Days in Paris was written and directed (her debut) by the interesting actress Julie Delpy, who stars in it along with Adam Goldberg. They're a couple on a stopover in her native Paris, where their disheveled but highly viable relationship nearly buckles under the challenges of her wacky parents (played by Delpy's own parents - we can only hope for her sake that they're hyping themselves up big-time), her numerous old lovers, and Paris' charming (or to him, horrible) quirks. In many ways it's going for a vibe similar to that of Delpy's career highlight, Before Sunrise and its sequel, although she crams more into this film, giving it a more raucous energy (less potential profundity though). It weakens a bit as it goes on (although she finds a way to freshen up a conventional ending) but for most of the way it's very funny and engrossing. I hope she gets to make more movies.

Klimt

I was thinking that one day soon I should update the article I wrote a few years ago in which I mused on who might have won the Nobel prize for cinema, if one existed. If I get to that, I’m sure my fictional Academy will be awarding the prize to Raul Ruiz any year now. Ruiz, a Chilean exile who settled in France, used to make three or four films a year, many instantly lost to obscurity, although he’s slowed down now. I’ve seen only a few of them, and I’m sure I could spend my life searching and not get more than a third of the way through his oeuvre. The masterpiece of those I’ve seen is the 1983 Three Crowns of the Sailor, a remarkable piece of romantic myth that remakes itself over and over in the course of two indescribable hours. His most famous film is likely the 1999 Proust adaptation Time Regained: it’s certainly fascinating on its own terms, although I couldn’t say about Proust’s.

His latest film Klimt, another study of an artist, received a rare if brief Toronto release. It’s another fairly fascinating work, although I’d guess it’s solidly second tier Ruiz, with the air of revisiting (if not recycling) earlier techniques. The artist, sensitively played by John Malkovich, often seems here like little more than a pawn in a game of time bending, transposition, reverie and mystery, and some of Ruiz’s devices (characters who don’t really exist, a repeated motif of breaking glass) are definitely shopworn. When I left the theatre I didn’t think I’d learned much of anything about Klimt, although on subsequent Internet-aided consideration I was surprised how much of his essential biography the film contains. By the same token, Ruiz shows surprisingly little of the painter’s work, and explains less, but afterwards I was impressed how much somehow came across, as if Ruiz’s complex structure were a code that your aesthetic sense slowly interprets subliminally. This basic attribute, whereby even a director’s lesser works still resonate more rewardingly afterwards than most of their contemporaries’ prime achievements, goes down real big with my award committee.

 

Cinematic obsessions

Rodney Ascher’s new documentary Room 237 is an enjoyable journey to one of the many peculiar fringes of cinematic preoccupation. It’s an investigation of sorts into Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining, one of the emblematic works for which the whole somehow seems to amount to much more than the sum of the parts. Ascher builds his film around five unseen commentators, all after years of reflection and multiple close viewings proposing different paths into the film. One detects references to the treatment of native Americans; another to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust; another sees it as Kubrick’s hidden acknowledgment of his role in faking the footage of the Apollo 11 movie landings.

Filming The Shining

Kubrick’s film, you’ll likely recall, was based on Stephen King’s novel about a troubled man, Jack Torrance, who takes a job as a winter janitor in a remote Colorado resort hotel, bringing along his wife and young son, who has telepathic powers; under the hotel’s malign influence (emanating in particular from the supernatural imprint of a predecessor janitor who went mad and murdered his family), Torrance loses his bearings completely. I haven’t seen the film in a few years, and I haven’t read the book for decades, but I remember having mixed feelings when I first saw it – as many others did – about Kubrick’s dumping of much of King’s backstory, barely allowing us any time with the pre-crisis Torrance (the coarsening of Jack Nicholson’s image seems to date from his performance here). King himself disliked the movie, and later wrote and produced his own more faithful version for TV.

I now imagine that Kubrick assessed the source material as being essentially somewhat silly, and understood that normal concepts of “causality” and “motivation” and suchlike rapidly become absurd in such contexts; at the same time of course, suspending or short-circuiting these concepts allows huge potential creative flexibility and evocative power. One of the (I think) most prescient comments in Room 237 posits that The Shining works as a kind of dream in which elements of a fraught past circulate, and in which the film’s present represents an attempt to grapple with it (Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut seems to have flowed from a similar intention). To the extent it only encompasses the specific traumas of the hotel, this “waking dream” theory might seem largely obvious, but Room 237 is intermittently quite persuasive in arguing that Kubrick broadened the effect by implanting or knowingly allowing some or all of the historical events I mentioned to echo through the film, and it’s very informative on how aspects of design and artfully broken continuity contribute to this.

No accidents?

Even more than most films, little in The Shining is accidental. The sets were constructed entirely in England, somewhat based on, but in no way scrupulously faithful to, an actual hotel in Colorado; everything the commentators latch onto, whether the labels on cans of food, or the lettering of a room key, reflects some kind of deliberate decision of design or procurement (by someone anyway, if not necessarily by Kubrick). Because The Shining is so concentrated, and is so visually precise and uncluttered, and because of Kubrick’s immense attention to light and design, and his facility with startling swerves of behaviour and expression, his images carry immense weight; watching them before video and DVD, it’s no surprise if audiences carried the constant sense of something escaping them.
 

But does this in any way constitute a kind of “code” that demands to be broken? Girish Shambu argues, not unfairly, that Room 237 is essentially a “representation of the practice of film criticism,” and as such sees two problems in the film: that the practice “often comes across as outré, freakish or crackpot” and that “film criticism here is a largely apolitical, hermetic activity that moves inwards, carving out a self-enclosed space, the space of a cognitive puzzle, a puzzle to be solved based on clues well hidden by a genius filmmaker.” He goes on: “Spotting hidden references to the Holocaust or to the genocide of Native Americans is not in itself a critically or politically reflective activity. The Shining (while being a wonderful film, for many reasons) simply does not engage with these weighty historical traumas. It is not ‘about’ them in any meaningful way. And neither does it have to be in order to be a great film. But when Room 237 represents film analysis in a manner that treats it as little more than a clever puzzle-solving exercise, it gives no hint as to the social value and political/aesthetic worth of this public activity. It never intuits what is truly at stake in the activity of paying close, analytical attention to films.”

Total balderdash

I think those are entirely fair comments, if you accept the initial premise that Room 237 is in some sense about film criticism. But I don’t think that’s really the case. For one thing, film criticism is always inevitably a function of the critic’s own ideology, sensibility and so forth as much as of the film itself. But Ascher goes out of his way to withhold this element from Room 237 – we never see the commentators, and pick up only stray bits of biographical detail about them (at one point, one of them interrupts himself to go and deal with a crying child, a rather curious editing decision which at least confirms we’re not listening solely to a series of friendless loons). He could plainly have tried to adjudicate some of this, by bringing in people who worked on the film (Leon Vitali, Kubrick’s assistant of the time, has said he “was falling about laughing most of the time,” while watching Room 237, adding: “There are ideas espoused in the movie that I know to be total balderdash”) or appealing to more distanced commentators for perspective. Absent any of this, the film becomes more of an abstracted reverie (I doubt many viewers will keep all of the commentators separate in their minds – certainly I couldn’t) on engagement and possibility and, whether they’d acknowledge it or not, play. Shambu’s absolutely right: Ascher never says to them, basically, well even if you’re right, so what? - what do we now know about (say) the Holocaust that we didn’t before? But in this context you can see that as an act of benevolence rather than omission.

Frankly, as filmic obsessions go, we’re dealing in a fairly elevated neighbourhood here. I’m sure the majority of obsessive multiple viewing in the world is directed towards things like the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Star Wars series, an exercise which truly has no purpose other than to remove you from real concerns and to cement your identity as a hapless tool of calculated corporatism. The commentators in Room 237 may not be spending all their time as productively as they could, but at least they’re in an extended conversation of sorts with a work of art, which is more than most people ever manage to sustain.

World of choices

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2009)

I think I’m finally honed this movie watching thing to a state that pleases me. For years I’ve moaned about how the art of cinema gets crowded out, even for true believers, by the shrewd, calculating weight of the commercial machine. I’ve moaned about it, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been that good at resisting it.

As I write this, on the weekend of May 2, some 15 new movies just opened in New York, based on The New York Times review section. There is, categorically, no meaningful aesthetic, intellectual or life-enhancing standard by which X-Men Origins: Wolverine is the most significant of those offerings. Of course, by the nature of the investment it represents, it carries the most urgent commercial imperative, but this ought to mean about as much to film lovers as a new flavour of frozen juice means to a gourmet chef. And yet, even serious film writers give Wolverine pride of place (in, for example, The New York Times review section). Let’s not fool ourselves this is some reflection of democracy or cultural temperature. It’s an orchestrated crafting of the public discourse, and Hollywood’s great at keeping it going.

Spoiled for choice

I don’t mind it; I just wish I were better at ignoring it. But I’m getting better. Yes, I saw the previous X-men movies, although they never meant a thing to me. But no Wolverine - I mean it. After years of seeing three or even four new movies a week in a hopeless attempt to cover all the bases, I’ve kept it to two a week, at the most, this year. Further, those one or two are often far from the “obvious” two to see, if I were writing say for the Toronto Star. So by my weak standards, that’s some sustained fortitude. And this opens up more time for what really interests me more and more, which is to revisit and deepen my appreciation of cinema’s huge, gorgeous past. Of course, except in the most tokenistic of ways, it’s contrary to Hollywood’s ongoing needs to promote too acute an interest in previous decades, because if people really tuned into the extent of the decline, they’d just ignore all the new junk, stay at home and watch well-chosen DVDs.

In an environment where 10 or 15 new movies get into theaters (maybe not here, but somewhere), every week, and some multiple of that circulates around the festival circuit, it seems increasingly hopeless to me even to aim for capturing the cream of the crop. I mean, what are we supposed to put weight on? The Oscars? Hardly. A few well-chosen critics with sensibilities seemingly close to one’s own? It helps narrow things down, but no more than that. And how do you define the cream of the crop anyway? As I’ve often written here, movies’ lasting impact and stimulation often comes from their flaws (however you define that!) as from their unexceptional strengths. To be honest, I miss the old days (not that I was around for them) when everyone could simply agree to watch Bergman and Fellini; it must have saved a lot of time, and the payoff sure wasn’t too bad. But now we’re defined by democratization and fragmentation. Sadly, it means it’s increasingly harder to have an informed, engaged conversation about any aspect of culture, except for junk topics like Susan Boyle – no one’s ever seen the same thing. Choice and self-determination can be lonely things.

Anyway, that Saturday I went to a movie I’d never even heard of until a few days previously – Adrift in Tokyo, the latest example of the downtown AMC’s admirable policy of devoting one or two screens to obscure foreign films. To be honest, I read the movie was essentially two characters wandering around Tokyo, and since my wife and I spent a few days last year doing exactly that, I thought, well, that sounds good enough. The movie was sweet and engaging, but I wonder if any of us will ever hear of it again. Then the following day, having no idea how to choose between such possibilities as Act of God, Tulpan and The Lemon Tree, I just threw up my hands and stayed at home. Will this be a trend? I really don’t know. I’m not even sure what I’m hoping for.

State of Play

I’m not saying the occasional Hollywood movie doesn’t grab me, on thematic or other grounds. Star Trek probably will, but that’s a story for another week. The week before I saw Adrift in Tokyo, I put my money down for State of Play, directed by Kevin McDonald. It’s a two-hour Americanized adaptation of a six-hour British TV drama; I never saw that, but many writers detected a loss of complexity and nuance in translation. What’s left isn’t too shabby though. Russell Crowe (memorably described in The New Yorker as resembling a dumpling in a wig) is a crack journalist for the fictional Washington Globe, covering a local double murder; meanwhile the paper’s online political blogger, played by Rachel McAdams, stalks the latest political scandal involving hot young Congressman Ben Affleck, who happens to be Crowe’s best friend. The two stories turn out to be (a) linked and (b) just the ribbon on top of a bigger package.

It’s an old-fashioned creation, focusing on nuts and bolts gruntwork, and faithful to the continuing primacy of print media. I liked how the suspense highpoint involves Crowe merely hiding in a parking garage from a pursuing assassin, scared out of his wits; no Cage-like transformations of ordinary Joe into Superman. The film looks handsome enough, but could have used the greater stylization of someone like Michael Mann, or in particular of Alan Pakula, who owned the franchise on paranoia in the 1970’s (All the President’s Men, The Parallax View). There’s an evil corporation in the mix, but it’s an awfully dull creation: maybe that’s part of the point though, the banal face of high-stakes mendacity now. Likewise, the stream of flavourful secondary characters could profitably have been made a little spicier. Crowe himself though is very nuanced and enjoyable (and not at all like anything made from batter, or pastry, or whatever it is).

Getting Worse

Recent events may have overtaken the film a little bit. Assassins and bribery and political influence peddling seem positively quaint compared to, you know, almost bankrupting the world as we know it. And sadly the plight of the newspapers is currently even worse than the film depicts (in the course of the movie, McAdams’ character becomes something of a convert to the old ways, but in the real world she’d surely be more of a new-media zealot than that). Still, at the end it subtly tempers any sense of triumph; nowadays the spotlight of achievement just makes you aware of how much darker everything else is getting to be. Much as I enjoyed it, I wondered if in some subliminal way the essential message wasn’t that it’s safer to stay at home.

Home movies

I was reading an interview with the film blogger Girish Shambu, and paused on the following passage:

“Finally, scale of the image definitely matters to me; it’s hard for me to appreciate a film on YouTube. I saw a terrific transfer of Edward Yang’s The Terrorizers on YouTube recently. It’s a great, complex, nuanced film, but I’ve already forgotten most of its images. I doubt that would have happened if I’d seen it in a theatre or on a large TV.”

I went and looked for myself, and indeed, there it was. It’s exactly the kind of thing I love finding online – one of the less well-known films by a great director, one I’ve never seen before, and not readily available otherwise (there’s no North American DVD of it). And while I don’t know the legality of such things, I guess I could easily convince myself that YouTube is a highly visible and law-abiding concern, and that if anyone had a legitimate concern about the film’s presence on there breaching a copyright, then it would have been removed. So I watched it too, and enjoyed it a lot, and didn’t care in the least that it was on YouTube rather than on a big screen. I watched it on a pretty large desktop, and sat up real close, which was enough for me to feel immersed in it.

Submitting to the conditions

It seems to me that to be in love with cinema is also to spend lots of time agonizing about that love, and if you avoid one kind of agony, you submit to another. Shambu sets out various other reasons why he prefers to view films in a movie theatre – for example “I enjoy submitting to the regime of viewing conditions in a movie theatre... I like it that I can’t pause the film, get up and take care of something mid-film, or wait until later to finish it” – but while I generally like that too, over time I feel it more and more as, indeed, a submission. It’s not so much the constraints of the specific experience – although as I get older, I see others in the audience less and less as fellow contributors to a mutually reinforcing mass pleasure, more and more merely as sources of distraction – but of everything that surrounds it. If The Terrorizers played anywhere in Toronto, it would likely be at the Bell Lightbox, in just one or two showings, most likely on a weekday evening, thereby disrupting other stuff I value just as much as cinema. I used to do it – fifteen years ago there were periods when I was at the Cinematheque Ontario for several evenings in a row, even doing double bills some evenings, because there was just no other way to see those rare Fassbinder films, or whatever it might have been.

But that only gave me another version of Shambu’s problem with forgetting the images – my appreciation of the movies was perpetually being chewed up by the movie coming right after, by the logistics of scheduling and traveling and eating around it, by sheer fatigue. It’s the same reason why I stopped going to the film festival a few years ago. Although I know cinema inherently depends on our relinquishing control, I’ve become accustomed to controlling the conditions of my loss of control. For me this easily justifies the trade-offs on image quality and other matters, which I don’t think inherently bother me as much anyway. I’ve occasionally been completely immersed in films on flights for instance (albeit always on my own laptop rather than on the in-flight system).

Trade-offs of movie viewing

I do admit my experience of a film sometimes suffers for taking too many pauses in the course of watching it, but it’s just another trade-off – if I only embarked on watching a movie when I was assured of finishing it in the same sitting, I wouldn’t experience even a third as many films as I do. I guess I’m a believer that the perfect is often the enemy of the good.

Those fifteen-year-ago Cinematheque audiences were awfully thin at times, and while the new Lightbox may have changed that, I doubt it. Take how I found out about The Terrorizers, on the web from someone I don’t even know – if you extrapolated across the globe, you’d imagine thousands of people must know about it by now. But actually, as I write this, the film has only been viewed some 3,600 times, in over eighteen months! That’s derisory really, but that’s just how it is – only a tiny number of people care about foreign films beyond what’s new and current (if that), and even if they do care, they don’t have time to dip in more than infrequently. Experiences like The Terrorizers – even as opportunities you can tap into for free, without leaving the house - are already all but crowded out by the noise of the new and the necessary and the prominent and the easy. If we stipulate further that the experience is only fully realized when it happens in a movie theatre, then we’ll only slowly kill off what little space such experiences still possess in this world. So we have no choice but to retrain our faculties – to love and to own and to fight to remember that image floating on the desktop, or on our laps, or at whatever confined distance it might be, as if it were as high and inescapable as the sky.

The Terrorizers

As for The Terrorizers, it’s one of only eight films directed by Yang, who died in 2007: his best-known is the last, Yi Yi, which is on a Criterion Collection DVD, and I did pay to own that! The narrative follows several intertwining stories, but ultimately focuses primarily on an unfulfilled hospital researcher whose wife, a novelist, leaves him for another man – an event he finds impossible to accept or to rationalize. Although there’s some violence in the film, I take the title to evoke much more than that: the terrorizers might be the people who play thoughtless, destructive pranks, but also encompass chilly, soul-destroying work environments; those we can’t help loving even as they make us despair; and just the whole human infrastructure and its traps, and the toll of trying to navigate within it.

The film’s excellent climax first fools us into thinking it might have been one kind of story all along, while then revealing it was always a much quieter and sadder one. Yang controls the film exquisitely, holding everything in balance; afterwards you remember both the film’s many difficult silences and its sharp eruptions of danger. Whether or not you retain its images, I’m certain you’ll be influenced by the journey, which is all I ever hope for. And what a miracle, really, to live in a time when one can take such a journey at home, without paying a thing for it.

A film with Peter O'Toole

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in February 2007)

When Peter O’Toole won a special Oscar a few years ago, it struck me how barely connected he was to the rest of the event. Whereas Meryl Streep could survey the room at this year’s Golden Globes and announce (whether triumphantly or wearily, I’m not sure) that she’d worked with just about all of them, O’Toole poses a real challenge in the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon stakes (especially if you don’t cheat via the IMDB). I mean, can you name anything he’s done in the last twenty years? Actually, there’s a lot of it, but it’s all dross. Even those famous seven always a bridesmaid never a bride Oscar nominations, always excepting Lawrence of Arabia, won’t likely spring to mind too easily. It’s as if he was playing a different game all the way along. And of course he was. The elements of his legend can hardly be accommodated within the current industry – brilliant but stylized performances, usually in historical epics or manifest oddities; famously wanton behaviour, which must make Lindsay Lohan wistful if she knows anything about it; sheer longevity, albeit in escalating eccentricity and artistic obscurity. And, crucially, the inescapable sense that it should all have amounted to more, and still might.

Venus

Hence the excitement over O’Toole’s new film Venus, certainly his meatiest part in years, giving him a valid shot at that Oscar at last. O’Toole plays Maurice, a close version of himself, although hopefully the real O’Toole has somewhat better digs and isn’t getting by quite so hand to mouth. Hanging out in London with his equally aging pals, snatching a few days’ work here and there (mainly playing actual or pending corpses), he gets a new lease on life via the disruptive, self-centered Jessie, a friend’s grand niece. He takes her to the Royal Court theatre; she introduces him to Bacardi Breezers. He recites to her from Shakespeare; she comes back with Kylie Minogue. But already I can hear you saying, sure, that’s all very cute, but here’s all that matters: do they actually do it?

Well, better put this aside for now if you’re relishing the suspense of finding out for yourself, but the answer is no. Venus’ most interesting, albeit underdeveloped aspect, is in exactly how they don’t do it. Jessie is from a traumatic background, she’s been abused and belittled, and this has left her with “issues” about commitment and body image and connection. Part of her initial attraction to Maurice is no doubt his presumed sexlessness, although this quickly becomes complicated (he is played by Peter O’Toole after all). Slowly she offers him a bit of this, a bit of that, always subject to her own arbitrary but savagely imposed cut off lines. And Maurice goes along, communicating a certain self-disgust, but nowhere near enough that there’s a better way to spend his time. It makes for rather icky, almost sadistic viewing, difficult to reconcile with the chirpy Corinne Bailey Rae song so prominent in the trailer and the movie itself.

I doubt it’s giving anything away to say they don’t get to live happily ever after. The film’s final image is of Jessie, alone now, but having attained a different echelon of confidence, in her body and apparently in herself, now happily inhabiting O’Toole’s elevated vision of her. Based on this, the movie ultimately seems to stand as the story of a woman who puts herself on track by chewing up and spitting out a sad old man, albeit throwing him a few crumbs along the way. In this regard, Jodie Whittaker’s performance as Jessie is quite perfect in the sense that she’s resolutely (and I don’t mean to sound like an elitist about this) a second rate woman – not that pretty or sexy and seemingly not remotely interesting to listen to or be with: the kind of woman for whom one merely settles, because she’s the best there is.

Samuel, The Prophet!

The film effectively evokes the stretched, borderline seedy atmosphere in which Maurice is living out his days, sometimes coming close to the gritty socially observant document of modern Britain normally associated with writer Hanif Kureishi. But how interesting is any of that really? And more crucially, what does it have to do with Peter O’Toole, who never seems fully integrated into this scheme? It’s unclear how coherent the film is even trying to be in this regard: when he visits a church and reads the names of real-life contemporaries such as Robert Shaw and Laurence Harvey off the walls, it’s impossible not to relate this to the real life actor’s pending mortality. It’s all a big show, and ultimately you feel they’d have been better off dumping the plot, especially since it’s so weird and slightly creepy, and just creating moments. As exhibited by Vanessa Redgrave’s few scenes as O’Toole’s ex-wife, philosophical now about the way he dumped her and their three kids for some glamorous co-star, not given much here to convey beyond a kindly weathered quality, but doing it in classic fashion.

And as exhibited by one of the film’s most intriguing moments, although it’s little more than a throwaway, where Maurice has a small (but he insists pivotal) role in some Marie Antoinette-type costume drama. We see him deliver his few lines, and although we don’t know the context (and we don’t know if he knows either) it’s completely mesmerizing, and you have no doubt how the old pro would command the screen. This of course is the bread and butter of the real O’Toole’s career – according to the IMDB, his next film is called One Night with the King, and listed way down the cast list, he plays “Samuel, the Prophet”! The real object of Venus should surely have been to rescue the actor, if only temporarily, from such a fate, but it never really gets there, and thus ends up only sharpening your sad awareness of O’Toole’s odd place in the annals of cinema.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated

Kirby Dick’s documentary about the US MPAA ratings board recently opened here for a week, just ahead of its DVD release. The movie establishes easily enough that the process is excessively secretive, penalizes sexuality more severely than violence and in a manner subject to all sorts of silly rules and judgments, and is basically just a self-serving tool of the studio system rather than a rational contributor to the general understanding of movies. All of which is fair enough, but really, is that news? And although I love movies as much as anyone, and have no liking for arbitrary restrictions, this seems to me mostly inside-the-box special pleading. More movies get made than ever, it’s easier than ever to see them in one form or another, and what business doesn’t have its problems? The biggest issue is that Dick spends all his time fretting about Hollywood moves, and doesn’t chew on the real galvanizing questions, whether political, ideological or cultural. America, and the world it makes, sink deeper all the time into NC-17 territory, and being allowed to see a few more seconds’ naked thrusting in a failed Atom Egoyan movie won’t help one hell of a lot.