Toronto 2004: Desultory Diary
Day 1 (+ pre-screening)
Original Schedule: Moolaadé (pre-screening); When Will I Be Loved (8.30 a.m.); 3-Iron (11 a.m.); Kings and Queen (1.30 p.m.); Clean (4.45 p.m.); The Alzheimer Case (7.15 p.m.)
Revised Schedule: Moolaadé (pre-screening); Cool (9 a.m.); 3-Iron (11 a.m.); Private (2.30 p.m.); Clean (4.45 p.m.); Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinemathèque (7 p.m.)
Local Colour of the Day: Actually a few days before, but I'm still getting over the mother and child who sat behind me on the bus to Niagara Falls. Mother tired-sounding, self-abasing, old before her time ("I'm 32," she kept saying, as if 32 were really ancient), daughter no more than 10 or 11 - but treated by Mom as a girlfriend, to her obvious embarrassment. "I told Mike he was a piece of shit," confided Mother, then explained, "I do love him but I'm not in love with him. You'll understand what Mommy means when you get older and start having boyfriends". Later, a request for a second Coke sparked a whiny diatribe on family finances: "I need money, and I don't have a job, and I can't afford -" "OK, OK," cried the panicky child, "is that enough 'and' in the sentence?". Jesus, people, get some real friends to whine to and start being parents to your kids in my moralistic opinion.
Film of the Day: Remember all those jokes about making sure you don't arrive 5 minutes late for WHEN WILL I BE LOVED (it opens with That Shot of Neve Campbell)? That was funny - at least till I mistakenly set my hotel-room alarm for 7.15 in the evening and only realised when I woke up panic-stricken around 8 o'clock, meaning I could just about make my 8.30 Toback date but would probably be a few minutes ... well, exactly. Being fairly paranoid about missing the beginnings of films even when they don't involve naked girls in showers, I immediately changed my Opening Movie to COOL - from which I emerged to discover more changes necessary, as the Press Screening of KINGS AND QUEEN had meanwhile been shifted to Day 7. (I also fell in with Chris Stults, a bad influence who convinced me to switch from undistinguished Belgian thriller THE ALZHEIMER CASE to the long but worthy Langlois doc.) Not the most auspicious start, really - though typical of what turned out (for me) to be a uniquely discombobulated TIFF '04.
Nothing in Day 1 really stands out as a film worth discussing at length; I'd like to tell the world why the universally-acclaimed MOOLAADE ain't All That - but maybe it's best to think positive and put in a good word for PRIVATE (72) (dir., Saverio Costanzo) Lior Miller, Tomer Russo, Mohammad Bakri, which I'm guessing not many others will do. To be sure, it won the Golden Leopard at Locarno, but those eternal spoilsports at "Cinema Scope" have already stepped in to bemoan the "sinful cesspool of half-baked humanism and mirthless melodrama that characterized the crippled 2004 Competition" at that Festival; and there's also a formidably awful ending to contend with - Roger Waters hijacking the soundtrack to bleat about "the Arabs and the Jews" - some clunky dialogue as the two sides converse in not-too-convincing broken English, and a rather obvious metaphor wherein the occupation of Palestinian land (a family home) by the Israeli Army stands in for the Occupation of Palestinian land by the Israeli Army. Yet in fact the metaphor is meticulously fleshed out. The family patriarch ( = Arafat) is prickly, authoritarian and stubborn, not especially sensitive to the needs of his 'people', admirable only - though he is admirable - for his strength of will and refusal to be cowed; one son is a militant yet not quite an ideologue, bringing his problem-solving mind to the situation (he's a bomb-maker rather than a suicide-bomber); the older daughter is an ideologue but not really a militant, at least in the sense of being a foot-soldier (her hatred tends to be intellectualised); another daughter is traumatised - she's the one who could end up a suicide-bomber - another son speaks for all the myriad Palestinians who just want a 'normal' life away from the intifada; meanwhile, the TV blares constant poisonous propaganda, while the soldiers are split between those ashamed of their actions and those who see their presence as a necessary evil (neither side's extremists really make an appearance - neither the Arabs who want Israel destroyed nor the Jews who claim Palestine as their own - which is just as well as they'd probably have unbalanced it). In short, this isn't some opportunistic attempt to nab political brownie-points through a glib metaphor; more like a neat, pre-arranged schema around which the various aspects of the Palestinian problem are thoughtfully laid out.
Of course, neither humanism nor political sophistication would mean much if it didn't work as a movie. Two things should be emphasised. First, I found the situation remarkably tense - literally curling up in my seat as the family's youngest boy trustingly walked up the stairs toward Forbidden Territory, where the soldiers waited. Second, even though the film is DV at its DV-est, and some of the daytime shots look unconscionably flat, I found the heavily-pixelated night scenes to be utterly beautiful - more beautiful than anything in HERO, as I unwisely told fellow Fest-goers who looked at me with pity and confusion. Like the sound of cicadas in Deep South movies, that fuzzy, degraded look captures something about the hot sticky quality of a summer night, the (seemingly) physical weight of darkness against one's skin - but a diffuse inchoate enveloping darkness, like the half-formed quality of the video image; if nothing else, Costanzo's extreme DV is a lot more interesting than the drab DV of Wenders' LAND OF PLENTY, another film with (more naive) political pretensions. In the end we get a never-ending cycle, glints of violence and a time-bomb - or at least a grenade without a pin - ticking away in the garden; Roger Waters aside, it's really quite perceptive.
Rest of the Day: MOOLAADE (43) (dir., Ousmane Sembene): This is not the sophisticated Sembene I recall from XALA - closer to the deadly Idrissa Ouedraogo (YAABA, TILAI) of Burkina Faso. As it turns out, it's a co-production with Burkina Faso and the final credits are thick with Ouedraogos, hence perhaps the declamatory acting, flat stagy rhythms and ethnic 'local colour' ("Fetch me three kilos of bread"; "It is as if you already have them in your belly"). Still quite intriguing while it's alive to the ambiguities in the situation - notably the fact that female circumcision is in fact performed by women, complicit in their own gender-oppression - but increasingly obvious and didactic in celebratory 60s bra-burning mode, and downright confusing in the second half when it pretty much forgets about the 'moolaadé' and turns its attention to the women's confiscated radios and TVs (standing in for Education, Empowerment, etc); maybe it should've been called RADIO. Unintentionally funny line: "The era of little tyrants is over. From now on I am keeping my TV on!". § COOL (30) (dir., Theo van Gogh): Cops that look like male models, teenage hardasses about as scary as your neighbour's 12-year-old doing Eminem impressions in the backyard. Guns are waved around, everyone raps a lot (one of the gang is a human beatbox), a goat is shot (!) and the music stops dead in shock. There's a slightly older gangsta who admires Hitler and listens to Wagner - don't tell anyone, but I think that guy might be a neo-Nazi - and likes to lecture underlings while nibbling on pieces of fruit for that Tony Montana casual-menace effect (first a carrot; later on, an apple; then another carrot). Amusingly inept, though it's interesting that the scariest (and best) scenes have to do with an Orwellian reform school aiming to break the kids with doubletalk ("positive culture") and peer pressure - but it turns out the young actors are in fact students from this real-life school, and TvG presumably approves of its methods. Weird. § 3-IRON (67) (dir., Kim Ki-Duk): ... or "Zen and the City". The stoic Buddhist from SPRING, SUMMER... faces urban life, silently subverting like a metaphorical - and finally literal - ghost in the machine. Superbly made, with at least one luscious set-piece as hero fells heroine's abusive husband and they run off together to the strains of an Arab love song - visuals turn ethereal, literally a case of smoke and mirrors - and a touching exchange of glances (with focus-pull) later on at the police station. Kim seems to be Westernising - or just Festival-ising - his mercurial style, getting increasingly smooth, though still not too far from the becalmed surfaces of THE ISLE; hard to say what it's all saying - but maybe (as per a possibly key scene) that the world is a prison, where the spirit can only try to hide in the crevices - forgotten corners, borrowed homes - or (if properly Zen-trained) escape into weightless transcendence. Elegant, if not quite essential. § CLEAN (65) (dir., Olivier Assayas): Assayas is one of the world's great directors - no-one else (except maybe De Palma) knows how to build and release tension so well, following a hemmed-in dialogue scene with a liberating bit of style and vice versa. The trouble is glamorous Maggie Cheung, who (a) never convinces as a bitch and (b) gets too much her own way - her kid, her career - without really having to change or sacrifice; it's like she's too glamorous to be saddled with too much suffering. Also didn't get the emotional landscape, e.g. unpleasant friend Jeanne Balibar thinks "people don't change" but gives Maggie a chance to do exactly that, whereas Nick Nolte (whose weathered kindness is the film's great asset, and one of the year's best performances) solemnly asks Maggie to give him her word that she won't take the kid, but doesn't seem to mind overmuch when she breaks it. Briefly thought it might be 'about' the creative process, and how hard it is to be truly original - as opposed to being "like a lot of other stuff" - but apparently not. Oh well. § HENRI LANGLOIS: THE PHANTOM OF THE CINEMATHEQUE (45) (dir., Jacques Richard): To quote the little girl in A TALKING PICTURE: "I enjoyed that, but it was a little bit tiring". 210 minutes of Henri the Post-Modern Guy - insisting all films are equally valuable, conservation-wise - with the final hour, detailing long-ago bureaucratic tussles, being mostly for insiders. Great stories of saving films during the Occupation - THE BLUE ANGEL might've been lost, if not for a Dietrich-loving Nazi - and a real sense of movie-geek camaraderie in the early days of the Cinemathèque; revelation of Langlois' homosexuality might've come a little earlier than Minute 209 of 210, though. Jean-Pierre Léaud is by now so far gone it's beyond embarrassing.
Day 2
Schedule: I Heart Huckabees (8.30 a.m.); Blood (10.45 a.m.); Nobody Knows (1 p.m.); Enduring Love (3.45 p.m.); Pour la Suite du Monde (7.15 p.m.); Tarnation (10 p.m.)
Local Colour of the Day: Not a lot of time for local colour on a busy day - but I'll cite the young man (and his friend) who sat beside me at TARNATION, bringing with him a portion of fries with four (4) small cups of ketchup clustered round a large cup of brown sauce, and proceeding to dip each fry in ketchup then brown sauce before loudly consuming it. At one point he stopped, looked up, licked his fingers and asked his friend: "How's your mom been? Still lonely?". And, receiving a muttered affirmative, went back to dipping fries in ketchup and brown sauce.
Film of the Day: Thought I'd found a trend for this year's TIFF, but now I see that last year too I was complaining about "tentative" films and "the turbulent state of the world overwhelming filmmakers, who no longer feel qualified to try and make sense of it". "I get the feeling no-one wants to make any Bold Statements anymore," I complained to Chris Stults on Day 4; "Maybe," he shrugged, "but Bold Statements aren't really what I go to the movies for". (This from a Lars Von Trier fan!) He's right, of course, and I don't mean SCHINDLER'S LIST-type Statements - but this often seemed a Festival of 'nothing happens' movies, starting with NOBODY KNOWS (60) (dir., Hirokazu Kore-eda) Yuya Yagira, Ayu Kitaura, Hiei Kimura, You, which had quite a few people reaching for the M-word ("masterpiece"). The film is wonderfully made, filled with imaginative touches: Kore-eda likes to film at one remove - a character brushing his teeth is shown with a shot of the bathroom mirror, held a few seconds before his head rises into it; a girl preparing to take a bath is shown with a shot of her feet (Important Note: I have never seen a movie with so many shots of feet) as she sheds her clothes. An adolescent's awkward perch between girlhood and womanhood is signified by her hands, one of which has painted nails and the other not. There are city shots in lovely greenish-blue twilight - the first hour is generally partial to greens, greys and blues - accented with lamplight; even near the end, after almost 141 minutes, Kore-eda can pull off a striking image, the kids amid the long grass in moonlight with the plane flying overhead. Above all, the film finds its own kind of magic, the magic of Time slowed down and a world taking shape.
But at what cost? This is a film about abandoned kids, neglected by a monstrous, immature mother - "Am I not allowed to be happy?" she whines, before taking off with her latest beau - left to fend for themselves in the middle of Tokyo. There's some trauma, glimpsed by omission more than anything - the older girl (the one with the single painted hand) takes to hiding in the closet, and generally disappears from the narrative. There's even a death, taking place discreetly offscreen. Yet this isn't remotely a tearjerker about little kids suffering and making do. Nor is it a film about kids taking refuge in fantasy, like OUR MOTHER'S HOUSE. Nor even really a film about coming of age. Nor a film about alienated kids gradually attaining equilibrium, like EUREKA. The closest I can think of is the final section of KING OF THE HILL, when young Aaron is forced to take charge of his life - but Aaron probably goes through more emotional states and character arcs in those 20 minutes than this brood do in 141. Our hero in this case (named Akira) has wonderfully expressive wise-child eyes, but his experience doesn't seem to change him particularly; there's a brief moment where Mom's villainy becomes apparent, and the eyes seem to flare into anger - but it soon becomes submerged in the general sense of philosophical acceptance.
Put simply, NOBODY KNOWS is a film about sinking into happy inertia; the kids' world gradually shrivels, their clothes and habits gradually regress into scruffiness, then desuetude. The narrative itself collapses: there's a scene where it seems clear they're about to get found out - the landlady pays a surprise visit, anxiously checking out the mess in their apartment and finding no trace of their mother - yet nothing happens as a result. Maybe it's intended to illustrate the point that people let terrible situations unfold right under their very noses (Alternate title: "Nobody Cares") - but it actually feels more like the film itself lacks the energy to send in cops and social workers for a dramatic climax (which presumably happened in real life, since it's based on a true story). Kore-eda fans pointed out a family resemblance with AFTER LIFE - another film about slowing Time down to happy moments, in effect taking refuge in inertia - but AFTER LIFE is a fantasy whereas this posits real children in a real urban jungle; it's surely not too much for a viewer to wonder how they coped, if they ever fought or got sick. Personally, I had a strange reaction to NOBODY KNOWS: after about an hour I started to get fidgety - even a little drowsy - and wondered if I'd last the course; after about 90 minutes, though, I'd fully adjusted to the rhythm, accepted the situation was going nowhere, and could easily have watched it toddle on for another hour. I didn't even have the energy to explore how (or why) the greenish-grey light of the early scenes gets brighter and harder, or how the film might fit into the oft-quoted problem of Japanese youngsters retreating from Society into videogames and solitude, or even why a world-class director would set himself so little to accomplish. I did wonder why so many feet, though. Maybe it's a fetish thing...
Rest of the Day: I HEART HUCKABEES (57) (dir., David O. Russell): Yada yada yada ... Bursting with ideas but there's something missing in the flow, so it often comes across as self-conscious babble. Still super-inventive, and good to see a too-much-happens movie in a nothing-happens Festival; tries for screwball but it's more Woody Allen, comically wrestling with Big Questions and the quest to make sense of Life, the Universe and Everything (see also Huckabees, "the Everything store"). Undeniable highlights include: Third World grandma chanting in Spanish ("We mashed locusts to make bread"); dream scene with Jude Law breast-feeding Jason Schwartzman (!); dinner with the family turning into a critique of soulless capitalism (see also Huckabees, "the Everything store"). A near-miss but totally admirable, and the first time Schwartzman has been really funny for us non-RUSHMORE-fanboys. "Have you ever transcended Space and Time?"; "Yes ... I mean no ... Space, yes, not Time. (shakes head in despair) No, I have no idea what you're talking about". § BLOOD (46) (dir., Jerry Ciccoritti): Good job TIFF programmers putting the Canadian two-handers in a slot where nothing else is showing. Good job also putting them in 'Visions' even when they're stagy adaptations of plays - must be all those desperate attempts to jazz it up via double exposures and meaningless split-screens (first 2, then 3, then 4...). Mostly revolves around kinky sex, mind-games and domination, plus dialogue like the following: "Clichés are like neckties. They're the neckties you use to hang yourself in your cell". (Oooh!) Lots of red and orange, a single room with peeling walls and Formica chairs, sibling characters trying to act 'edgy'. "Want some coffee?" "Coffee?" "Coffee ... Dark liquid? Hot? Comes in a cup?" Oooh! § ENDURING LOVE (51) (dir., Roger Michell): I can say exactly where this goes wrong - when it turns from gripping existential mystery into CAPE FEAR-style psycho thriller (the scene where Ifans turns up at the back of the classroom probably the point where I lost patience). Opening 45 minutes or so is excellent, asking how to apportion moral blame ("Who let go first?") and how to make sense of being a random participant in tragedy; is anything random? does everything happen for a reason? is there some divine point to Life? etc. Figure of the secular hero trying to come to grips with metaphysical temptations is very strong - but then it just goes wrong, and never recovers. It's a shame. § POUR LA SUITE DU MONDE (68) (Pierre Perrault / Michel Brault, 1963): Flaherty-like but better than Flaherty - MAN OF ARAN, anyway - because it doesn't pretend to be showing a 'primitive' lifestyle that actually exists; filmmaker is complicit in the tale, and nostalgia is part of the deal he's made with the islanders - who acknowledge his presence, and happily perform for the camera (it helps that they're 'characters' with delightful personalities). Still very idyllic - it's got everything except edge - but that's to be expected in this kind of Authorised Biography; hugely entertaining, and those shots of vertical stakes on a horizontal water-line sure are pretty. Final short section in New York is unnecessary, wrecking the sense of place - and possibly the reason why it just misses my Hon. Mentions for 1963. § TARNATION (71) (dir., Jonathan Caouette): Anyone who'd train a camera on his babbling, brain-damaged mother for a full two minutes is obviously an awful human being. Anyone who's already a drama queen at age 11 - 'playing' an unhappy wife in a weird Tennessee Williams-like monologue spoken into his camcorder - is obviously not a reliable witness. Anyone who was once diagnosed with "depersonalisation" is obviously going to be detached from his life. Yet the awfulness is riveting, and the childhood-and-youth scenes especially - e.g. spattered in stage blood and screaming into the mirror - seem torn from the depths of his psyche. One reservation: we learn Caouette was traumatised before we see the found footage (in the lengthy text prologue), pre-directing our response to it. Whole thing is manipulative, Caouette doesn't come across as a witty person, and you do feel sorry for the family who (presumably) suffered the brunt when teenage Jonathan was "acting out", breaking furniture, etc; yet there's also love in the mix, just enough to be troubling and ambiguous. Thought the Q&A was going to last forever - yet in fact the audience was hesitant, as if afraid to probe; no surprise, really...
Day 3
Schedule: Notre Musique (11 a.m.); The 10th District Court: Moments of Trial (12.30 p.m.); The Woodsman (3 p.m.); Les Choristes (4.30 p.m.); Spider Forest (10 p.m.)
Local Colour of the Day: Overheard in SPIDER FOREST rush-line, spoken by a nasal-voiced twentysomething (who's apparently an aspiring filmmaker) to his girlfriend (who is "in the industry"): "Eight minutes of a girl walking down a stairway? Unless it's Scorsese in GOODFELLAS, I don't even wanna see that!". Unfortunately I didn't catch what film they were talking about.
Film of the Day: "The dream of the Individual is to be Two. The dream of the State is to be One," goes one of the best and most typical quotes (attributed to a "French Catholic girl in WW2" or something equally obscure) in NOTRE MUSIQUE (62) (dir., Jean-Luc Godard) Sarah Adler, Nade Dieu, Jean-Luc Godard - and it surely exemplifies Godard himself, the eternal champion of individual freedom who's also the eternal proselytiser, dreaming of getting you over to his side. Others may of course prefer a different quote - "If anyone understands me, then I wasn't being clear" - as the best definition of the maverick director, though not many seem to have pointed out what a notable departure this new film is from the belligerent, Spielberg-baiting Godard of ELOGE DE L'AMOUR.
The big intervening event is of course 9/11 - I actually saw ELOGE at TIFF '01, a couple of days after that atrocity - which seems to have made quite a difference. MUSIQUE includes the line "Killing a man to defend an idea isn't defending an idea. It's killing a man", which seems a direct dig at the ideologically-driven violence of recent years (it's hard to imagine the Godard of WEEKEND, or even MASCULIN FEMININ, putting it so baldly and censoriously). It also includes a bit where Godard himself shows a photo of a ruined city and asks listeners to guess where it is; as it turns out it's neither Stalingrad nor Sarajevo, but in fact Richmond during the Civil War - a surprisingly generous admission that Americans too can be victims. Above all, there's the film's structure, which starts with the brilliant "Hell" montage - saying not much more than "War is Hell" but saying it with hypnotic force - progresses through the downbeat and desultory "Purgatory" section, in which participants at a writers' conference try to make sense of War, and finishes with "Heaven", an idyllic sort-of dream sequence where various people play with an invisible beach-ball and invisibly stamp each other's hands. Godard being Godard, this seems obviously a reference to the ending of BLOW-UP, i.e. calling for a 'new way of seeing' - and inescapably connecting with earlier lines about the Real and Imaginary being like a counterpoint of Uncertain and Certain (one of various such counterpoints, the silliest being perhaps Shot / Reverse Shot and its Hawksian illustration). Certainty, in other words, lies only in the Imaginary, whether beach balls or stamps or indeed Cinema, defined as "our music" per the title. What the film seems to be is a conscious turning-away from activism - all the more striking after the righteous anger of ELOGE, though that film contained a lot more than its anti-American asides - and indeed turning away from the world, looking for refuge in the idea of commonality through Art ("our music"). Or just Art itself, like a movie-mad archivist with no interest in the world beyond.
In fact, the film is shot through with defeat and resignation. A Palestinian intellectual claims there's more humanity and inspiration in defeat ("the lucky ones are the defeated" goes an actual quote). Earlier, we're ruefully told that "Humane people don't start revolutions. They start libraries". A little later, the whole idea of victimhood and activism - each feeding off the other - gets a scathing putdown: the world is divided, says someone, into those who voice their misery and those who get off on listening to it (there's a moral comfort in being virtuous). More than ever, one gets a sense that living in today's world is like "staring into the void"; the most heroic thing we hear about is an Israeli woman's pointless self-sacrifice in the name of peace. Godard himself appears throughout the middle section, but seems curiously aloof and dispassionate; at one point, someone asks if he thinks the Digital Revolution can save the Cinema - but he just sighs and says absolutely nothing, as if to scoff: 'There's no such thing as Revolution'. Or perhaps: 'What do you know of the Cinema?'. Or perhaps: 'Why ask me? I'm past caring'.
It's tempting to surmise that, for an ageing French lefty, seeing violent radicalism in the hands of al-Qaeda over the past few years has been deeply disillusioning: in effect, his position as venerable anti-capitalist sniper has been taken by infinitely cruder, more barbaric usurpers - just like his position as political filmmaker has been supplanted by the buffoonish likes of Michael Moore (no wonder JLG bashed F9/11 sight unseen). There's a rueful kind of self-deprecation when he has someone say that Communism did once, briefly, defeat Capitalism - when Hungary beat England 6-3 in a football game. NOTRE MUSIQUE seems to me either the beginning of a new chapter in Godard's life - in effect, the beginning of his old age - or an aberration brought on by the upheavals in the world since 2001. Time will tell, obviously. Meanwhile the film is fascinating, not always gripping - "Purgatory" goes on too long - but full of little details to mull over. When our hero says "Grivas, my car!" could it possibly be a reference to General George Grivas, who helped lead Cyprus' armed struggle for independence in 1955-60? Godard being Godard, anything is possible.
Rest of the Day: THE 10th DISTRICT COURT: MOMENTS OF TRIAL (67) (dir., Raymond Depardon): Wish I could write more on this. Depardon wants to make the most self-effacing (read: 'objective') documentary ever - even makes a point of warning us he himself selected the "moments", as if it could be any other way - and kind of succeeds, only the result depends so much on each viewer's pre-existing baggage it's not very illuminating. We see judge setting out case, defendant giving his/her side, lawyers adding comments, judge giving verdict. Is the judge a fount of common sense, correctly ignoring emotional excuses - i.e. human frailty - and applying the letter of the law? Or is she in fact a control freak, getting off on the defendants' subjugation? The encounter with the one defendant who seems to have read the law and makes some (very good) points about his case - instantly drawing her wrath, and making her lose her temper for the first time - points to the latter, but then I was predisposed to think so, finding it obscene that she previously ignored human quirks and rubber-stamped everyone "guilty as charged". Slight variations in camera angle aside, director's voice is negligible; everything depends on the viewer (even Wiseman builds to some kind of climax). Fascinating, but so frustrating. § THE WOODSMAN (42) (dir., Nicole Kassell): Kevin Bacon is a self-loathing paedophile, Kyra Sedgwick the tough beautiful girl who stays with him because "I see something in you. Something good" (turns out she was also abused as a child, neatly covering all bases); Mos Def is the cop, hiding a serious purpose behind casual chatter. Too glossy to really convey the situation, with cheap suspense sub-plot - another paedophile stalking the kids across the street! - and little sense of working-class life. Builds to a pivotal scene that comes within a hair's-breadth of saying it's okay to be a child molester because fathers do worse things to their daughters (speaking of which, are we meant to think the Dad played by Benjamin Bratt is indeed 'in denial' about his feelings?). Weirder than it thinks, though also more conventional. § LES CHORISTES (w/o) (dir., Christophe Barratier): Walked out on 45 minutes, with a rating in the mid-40s. Could've stayed but I had other things on my mind - though I'll bet no-one else walked out. Instant crowd-pleaser, full o'cute kiddies. Actually overheard a studio buyer at the MILLIONS screening a couple of days later talking about it (right after dismissing HUCKABEES as a "let's make a BEING JOHN MALKOVICH kind of picture ... Way overwritten"): "I liked that one a lot," said buyer re: CHORISTES. "It's real sweet. If they release it around Christmas, it'll do perfect business for them". Sad, really. § SPIDER FOREST (68) (dir., Song Il-gon): Basically a genre piece - genre being RING-style supernatural thriller - done in a lush, moody style with Lynchian overtones, strange old men handing out blue keys in hospital wards, mystery calls on a cellphone and a rich score that could well be Badalamenti (or Bernard Herrmann). Starts with the titular forest - thin trees in half-light, lone female figure watching as we slowly move towards her (and that luscious music on the soundtrack); later delights include a tunnel like a cone of orange light and a man taking woman doggy-style while shouting "Life is war!" and drooling bits of apple all over her (how Korean); plot remains a bit obscure, but sensually it delivers. Meaningless trivia: my second film today - after the Godard - where characters pantomime actions (in this case eating invisible fruit). What does it mean, etc.
Day 4
Schedule: The World (9.15 a.m.); 9 Songs (12 p.m.); A Hole in My Heart (3 p.m.); Tropical Malady (5.30 p.m.); Midwinter Night's Dream (9.30 p.m.)
Local Colour of the Day: What we have today are two wacky homeless guys. One homeless guy stands at Bloor and Yonge singing along with Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" as it plays on a tatty CD player - then, when the (horribly monotonous) song is over, simply replays it and starts singing all over again, much to the disgust of the hot-dog vendor where I'm buying a sausage. A little later, the second homeless guy is sitting on the steps of the Varsity, fixing passers-by with a baleful glare. He looks a bit like Kramer from "Seinfeld". I glance up at him quickly as I walk past towards the theatre. He notices my glance and seems to stir slightly. "And I DON'T miss my wife," he says clearly in a loud, deep voice - then lapses back into sulky, inscrutable silence.
Film of the Day: I'll keep this short: I have little to say on TROPICAL MALADY (89) (dir., Apichatpong Weerasethakul) Banlop Lomnoi, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Udom Promma, the most magical film I've seen in years - except I don't think it really counts as a film at all. Seriously. Any readers who may be thinking, 'Wow, he finally gave a film something over 85, this is going to be the best movie ever' should think again. Yes, this is among the best experiences I've had in a theatre since I started this website - but I have very little faith the experience could be replicated if I saw the film again. In a way it's like asking what rating would I give a film if I watched it with Selma Blair crouching in the aisle next to me giving me head - except in this case the blow-job (or at least the sense of relaxation and euphoria) was included in the movie. I initially decided to make the film ineligible for my Top 10 list after watching it (in the same way I exclude avant-garde films, shorts, etc) but have now relented, since it seems a little daft to reduce something so momentous to a p.s. - though I should really say something like "#1. The Experience of Watching TROPICAL MALADY (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) at 5.30 p.m. on Sunday, September 12, in a Near-Deserted Press Screening at Toronto while everyone else was Watching either L'INTRUS or THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES". But then I'd seem precious, and other geeks would laugh at me.
So anyway. The film is in two parts, unrelated yet related - both dealing, you might say, with intangibles, the Inner Core of things, except the first is urban and the second rural (this was also the rough structure of BLISSFULLY YOURS, except that seemed to depend on tension between the two whereas this has them feed into each other). The first limns the hidden forces that give our lives soul, moments when we half-glimpse some inchoate Beauty or Spirit: playing football in the soft light of dusk, meeting by chance on a busy street, driving through the hazy energy of the city at night - or just hanging out with a person you like, as Like turns to Love. We often hear mention of ghosts and past lives, and twice see the borders between tangible and intangible - when our heroes walk down a deep cave, and the known world gradually starts to recede, then again when one hero is swallowed (in beautiful and terrifying God-shot) by the enormous blackness of a forest. The second half is set entirely in the forest, a place of profound shadowy stillness, far-off birdsong and the rustling of leaves - and it's somewhere here that the film takes off into another realm, sinking so effectively into its relaxed sensual vibe that we're not surprised when a monkey turns out to be telepathic, or when a cow's spirit leaves its assumed body, or even when a giant firefly hovers over to a greenish-gold tree making a noise like radio static.
An opening caption has claimed that men are "by nature wild beasts", and it's their duty to harness and control their bestiality - but it now becomes clear the film doesn't agree, or rather that it does and it doesn't. Harness it, certainly, it says - but don't ask people to try and suppress their inner nature; rather, ask them to become one with it. Isn't that how Love works, after all, being what sublimates raw sexuality - our animal nature - and turns it into something 'acceptable'? The film's midway rupture can be seen as a literal new beginning, with the second half as a recapitulation of the first, but it probably makes more sense to view it as the same story continued - only shifted to a higher plane, expressing the moment when the heroes' relationship veers into the inexpressible (though the estimable Jeremy Heilman has a less exalted take, seeing it more as a metaphor for the mental barriers to be cleared in deciding to consummate an explicitly homosexual relationship).
That piece of magic - expressing the inexpressible - is what MALADY accomplishes, though I should of course say what it accomplished, for me, in that time and place. A lot of it, I'm convinced, had to do with viewing conditions (the same is true of BLISSFULLY YOURS, which I couldn't fully embrace in part because a woman with big frizzy hair sat in front of me and blocked off part of the screen). I doubt the film could work with a restless or unsympathetic audience. One hacking cough, or rustling packet of chips, could break its spell. Indeed, I doubt it could've worked for me - to the extent it did - with a packed Press screening, however well-behaved; that sense of expansive real-life space was part of the deal. Needless to say, it could never work on video (I suspect it'd be a 60+). Michael Sicinski's experience was marred by a balcony door left open at the theatre where he saw it. Any kind of bad projection would probably wreck it. All of which is to ask, what kind of film is it that exists solely on a fragile level where aesthetics meets metaphysics, giving off a sense of well-being comparable only to being on holiday - but giving no narrative or even documentary satisfaction, nothing you can hold onto from screening to screening? (Even LA LIBERTAD - which Mike D'Angelo used as a counter-example of a dubious 'film' I have no trouble accepting - is easily quantifiable, whatever one may think of it.) Answer: not a film at all. But why grumble, when we're having so much fun?...
Rest of the Day: THE WORLD (58) (dir., Jia Zhang-Ke): Irresistible opening shot got me all fired up, but sledgehammer-heavy central metaphor (for globalisation) and generally uninvolving plot cooled the jets somewhat. Still looks amazing - I think it's partly that Yu Lik-Wai seldom lights faces, going for a dusky clouds-of-light effect - and not without humour or energy; Jia can go from a long static shot of a conversation (lit only with a table lamp) straight to an animated interlude then a gaudy musical number. Abiding themes seem to be the absence of trust and lack of human contact in Chinese society (also, globalisation), with side-swipes at Chinese isolatedness and the (literally) rickety infrastructure being created by the rush to capitalism; interesting, but starts to ramble at 140 minutes. How did they get that shot with the jumbo jet passing overhead?... § 9 SONGS (46) (dir., Michael Winterbottom): I think this could've worked if the relationship scenes were shot on film - the more beautiful the better - and given a slow, stately rhythm; in short, if they were separated from the live-music scenes, giving a picture of emotional connection implicitly driven by the buzz of rock'n roll (i.e. sex). As it is, the couple's byplay seems to be trying for tenderness or romance or something - even the dildo scene has a wry piano accompaniment - yet the look is so plug-ugly it's impossible to pay much attention. "An exercise in reductionism," as our hero says (of Antarctica!), a.k.a. pretty pointless, a.k.a. another nothing-happens movie; I nearly lost it right there in the Press screening when the Von Bondies kicked into "C'mon C'mon", though. § A HOLE IN MY HEART (48) (dir., Lukas Moodysson): "What should I do?" asks the girl, and "This isn't real", and talk of stuff being "documentary-like", and cross-cuts with Barbie dolls - emphasising both the characters' dehumanisation and their status as Moodysson's puppets; also there's the story told about undersea creatures living in the most inhospitable places, the character wondering if filming those creatures (exposing them to light) may in fact have killed them. 'Some things shouldn't be filmed', is the clear implication, and more broadly 'how far should a filmmaker go?' - an interesting meta-question as Moodysson tries to be as shocking and provocative as possible. Incredibly silly and alarmist on any surface level, even more so when they bring God into it - "God refuses to look", but we somehow must - with a crude simplistic worldview and gross-outs reminiscent of MONTY PYTHON'S MEANING OF LIFE; yet still interesting in the age of reality TV, which the film expressly apes (blurring out brand-names, etc); question seems to be 'how much reality can you take?', point being - I suspect - to shock the viewer into never watching that kind of trash again (even LILYA wasn't quite so humourless). Warhol and Gaspar Noe equally in evidence, but the vomit-in-mouth coup de grâce is all Lukas' own. § MIDWINTER NIGHT'S DREAM (34) (dir., Goran Paskaljevic): Serbian ex-soldier with inner demons from the war in Bosnia bonds with little girl who's a Bosnian refugee, and also autistic. "Sometimes whole societies lose coherence," explains a doctor - just like autistic children. Wait! Surely not a laboured metaphor for post-war Serb society, where "the Brain fell apart" and nothing makes sense anymore? Yes indeed. And don't call me Shirley.
Day 5
Schedule: The Assassination of Richard Nixon (9.30 p.m.); Millions (12 a.m.); Niceland (2.15 p.m.); Keane (4.30 p.m.); Downfall (6.45 p.m.); Mysterious Skin (9.45 p.m.)
Local Colour of the Day: MYSTERIOUS SKIN is showing at the Isabel Bader Theatre, which is right up against the U. of T. campus. It's the first week of term, and students are getting to know each other. Here's a guy with two girls, making small talk as they walk to their dorms:
GUY: 'Smith' is boring though, you need to change it.
GIRL 1: Uh, okay...
GUY: It has to start with a 'C'. You're both 'C's.
GIRL 2: Why 'C'?
GIRL 1: Omigod, my middle name starts with a 'C'.
GIRL 2: Mine too!
GIRL 1: Really? Yours too?
GIRL 2: That is awesome. Mine's Christie, how about you?
GIRL 1: Clare. Without the 'i'.
Film of the Day: At time of writing, I have no idea what 'serious' film critics think of DOWNFALL (74) (dir., Oliver Hirschbiegel) Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Ulrich Matthes, though I know it opened (last week) to huge success in Germany, and a couple of punters I overheard during the Festival described it as "phenomenal". I know I wasn't expecting very much; consensus among film-buff friends prior to the Festival was that not very much could be expected, because Hirschbiegel was "a hack" - and certainly THE EXPERIMENT wasn't a profound film, jettisoning most of its ideas to mutate into an action flick with prison wardens acting like ... well, like Nazis. What he'd do with real Nazis - an account of Hitler's final days prior to the fall of Berlin - wasn't an encouraging thought.
In the event, it doesn't matter - partly because DOWNFALL isn't an Oliver Hirschbiegel Film: he was no doubt hired to keep it moving, which THE EXPERIMENT showed he can do breathlessly well, but the real auteur is veteran producer (and occasional writer) Bernd Eichinger, who was born in 1949, obviously feels close to all this stuff, and sticks faithfully to historical fact (and the memoirs of Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge). Indeed the real auteur is History - and the result is History red in tooth and claw, a bit lurid and a bit of a comic-book (see e.g. Frau Goebbels disposing of her brood) but really nothing to be ashamed of when it moves so excitingly and achieves so many memorable scenes: Hitler inspecting the 12-year-old soldiers defending the city, his palsied hand trailing behind him; Speer's dignified farewell as he tells the Fuhrer he's been disobeying his orders, and refusing to carry out a scorched-Earth policy against the advancing Allies; wild parties in the bunker as the world outside goes to hell, led by a frenzied joyful Eva (who also admits she's always been jealous of Blondi the dog); sweaty middle-aged men yelling over maps as defeat looms ever closer; and of course Death everywhere, Allied bombs blowing out windows, soldiers falling to enemy bullets, vigilantes going door-to-door executing "traitors" as the Russians advance. For a while the film is merely impressive - then, as the cast of characters grows, picks up grandeur and momentum; the vivid alternation between ordinary people's travails and fear and loathing among the top brass becomes genuinely exciting, like a red-blooded WW2 movie with new-fangled psychological complexity (moral judgment gets apportioned on the basis of Truth vs Delusion, those accepting defeat vs those still in thrall to the dream of a Thousand Year Reich). The fuss over a more 'sympathetic' Hitler is clearly media-manufactured, since this Fuhrer is obviously deranged - and totally callous in his Darwinian, survival-of-the-strongest insanity ("If the war is lost, it's immaterial if the people perish too"); I guess some might argue he's still charismatic enough to inspire young neo-Nazis - but the fact is that's a risk we'll eventually have to take, and if 60 years of rabid re-education haven't made the world (let alone Germany) safe it's unlikely anything ever will. I'm anxiously awaiting the critical response - but have meanwhile upgraded my own initial rating, finding the rich fervid atmosphere still lodged in my mind a week later. Just before the final credits comes a list of the various personages in the 150-minute movie, explaining what happened to each in real life - and, with each name and photo, you realise you have feelings (good or bad) for each of these people, remember what they did and wish them well (or ill) at the hands of the Allies. It's a considerable achievement. [Addendum, May 2005: Still haven't re-watched it, but 'serious' film critics have once again bewildered me by not really minding the film's lurid tone but decrying its apparent exculpation of the German people. The charge (as e.g. in this piece by Klaus Neumann) seems to be that it portrays them as Hitler's victims, hence allowing them to escape their responsibility - but isn't it strange to complain of Victimhood when the (apparently desirable) alternative is a masochistic wallow in endless crippling guilt, simply on sins-of-the-fathers principles? Isn't that just a more extreme version of Victimhood, even if the charges against the film are true (which seems debatable given its emphasis on general hysteria, an entire nation in the grip of dysfunction)? I'm sympathetic to the argument - we need to break out of this whiny victim-culture, etc - but its application seems excessive here, just as it seems excessive for the London "Evening Standard" to be running accusatory pieces in the wake of DOWNFALL about Speer's post-war slithering, and how he did have "knowledge" of the death camps (didn't Winston Churchill?) despite his denials. The point, I suspect, is that modern Europe - specifically the EU - is founded on the rock of WW2 and desperately needs Nazism to remain beyond the pale as a continent-wide source of shame and guilt, bolstering its federalist dreams. I think it's time to move on though, and I'll take the film's account of collective madness (which doesn't even exculpate, but tries to describe what happens in wartime) over the preferred version of collective evil - it just seems more convincing. Maybe it's a generational thing.]
Rest of the Day: THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON (59) (dir., Niels Mueller): Basically TAXI DRIVER with a couple of juicy performances - not including Sean Penn, who plays the psycho card too early and also makes the hero a totally unconvincing salesman (presumably to shield him from the Evils of Capitalism), but very much including Jack Thompson, lip-smackingly complacent yet somehow dignified as his boss. Point seems to be that the System eggs our hero on to psychosis - Nixon being its arch-salesman - telling him "you have as much power as you say you have"; intriguing character study, though it probably wouldn't have been made at all if not for the 9/11 link. Michael Wincott great as ever, making hay with the line "You're a strange man, Samuel" (takes one to know one, pal); Naomi Watts underused, or just invisible. § MILLIONS (49) (dir., Danny Boyle): Superior kidpic with a priceless kid hero, though religious angle is surprising for Boyle - how to get from heroin addicts to Sunday-school tracts in 8 easy years - and it misses a couple of tricks, e.g. in downplaying how easily the charity do-gooder lady succumbs to money (why is her venality more surprising than the Mormons'?). Plotting also shaky, with the robber sub-plot perfunctory and the whole Nativity Play adding nothing much; disposable whimsy, but it works pretty well. Wonder if Boyce and Boyle ever saw this while they were brainstorming... § NICELAND (38) (dir., Fridrik Thor Fridriksson): Gratingly cutesy from the first moment ("NICELAND: Population 1,000,002"), especially when everyone's trying to figure out the "purpose of Life". Familiar digs at couch-potato bourgeois living sterile lives vs childlike, wide-eyed hero trying to make everything better, plus familiar smiley-happy idealisation of the mentally handicapped. Martin Compston (the SWEET SIXTEEN kid) can't really act very well, it turns out; Gary Lewis can, but gets nothing to do. § KEANE (74) (dir., Lodge Kerrigan): ROSETTA-like but also a more Soderbergh-ised Kerrigan (Steven S. was Executive Producer) with a punchier structure and more conventional 'resolved' ending: the last two lines are unfortunate, though the apology to Sophie just about works. Still hypnotic, compelling and a tour de force from Damian Lewis - though of course we know he's acting, i.e. not at one with his (deranged) character in the way of Emilie Dequenne in ROSETTA. Best attention to detail: hero's knuckles still bloody from a fight, many scenes after we see him getting into it. § MYSTERIOUS SKIN (64) (dir., Gregg Araki): Araki more 'mature', or at least mellow - though still lots of provocative levity in the early scenes, and I have to say the dark, un-ironic climax took me by surprise. Before that, juvenile digs at square Midwestern mom's teddy-bear sweater and gun-toting rednecks yelling "Faggot!", little kid cheering at a slasher movie when the blonde gets her head chopped off, bitchy bits of bawdy gay humour ("I hate it when they look like Tarzan and sound like Jane") and fearlessly committed performances - esp. from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, making a bid for bad-boy cachet. Surprisingly satisfying.
Day 6
Schedule: Duck Season (8.30 a.m.); Palindromes (11 a.m.); The Sea Within (1.45 p.m.); 5 x 2 (4.45 p.m.); Land of Plenty (7 p.m.); L'Intrus (9.45 p.m.)
Local Colour of the Day: Is this common practice? I'm looking at the coupon for the AGF People's Choice Award - the Fest's top prize, this year won by HOTEL RWANDA - and, besides asking you to "Name your favourite film at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival" and fill in your name, address, etc, it includes the following: "Skill Testing Question: (7+8+15-2) X 5 = __________".
I mean, what's the point? Is it to make sure people filling in the coupon are of sound mind or something? "Jeez, I can't believe this guy named TROPICAL MALADY as his favourite movie ... Oh wait it's okay, he put 3,876,918 as the answer to the Skill Testing Question. Obviously a loony". Or alternatively: "Here's a vote for COOL, that strangely unconvincing Dutch teen-gangsta drama. Is this for real? Wait, let me check the Skill Testing Question ... Yup, 140. I guess we have to let it count..."
Film of the Day: Fair warning: I am about to spoil 5 x 2 (71) (dir., Francois Ozon) Valérie Bruni-Tedeschi, Stéphane Freiss, Francoise Fabian, Michael Lonsdale in tedious detail, from beginning to end. I have to do it, both because it's a 'backwards movie' - so the 'end' is the key to the 'beginning' - and because people are stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the poignancy and power of its theme. Namely: that romantic love is the pernicious (yet resilient) ideal whereby women delude themselves into putting up with craven, weak, mendacious and generally asshole-ish men, however cruel or outrageously insensitive their behaviour.
The film takes a couple through five events in their life, in reverse chronological order: the day of their divorce, a party at their house (where the husband tells guests of the time he was unfaithful to his wife), the birth of their son, their wedding night, and their first meeting. The first episode seems shocking, with the wife all but raped by her now ex-husband just hours after signing the divorce papers. The filmmaking seems firmly mired in 'dirty' realism, with subdued lighting and no background score - then suddenly, as the wife leaves the hotel room, comes an absolutely golden, burnished-light shot of her walking down the corridor, to the plangent strains of a 60s Italian love song. The delirious romanticism of the moment is an overwhelming emotional coup - and also a bridge to the second episode, where much the same structure is followed. The couple and their guests (another couple, the husband's brother and his gay lover) drink good wine and talk in the civilised way of middle-class chatterers: Isn't infidelity natural? Why insist on rigid monogamy?, etc. The talk turns hurtful as husband humiliates wife in front of the others - but then, again, just before or after the debacle, comes a moment of pure bliss: another of those 60s love songs, and the wife gets up to dance, and suddenly she's flanked by the two men, all three swaying together. And all is apparently right with the world.
The third episode seals the deal, with the husband turning out to be more than just obnoxious: he deliberately misses the birth of his own son, letting his wife suffer hours of torture ("I got stuck in traffic," he lies blandly when he finally arrives at the clinic). It's not that he's evil, we learn, just craven and cowardly - and needy but resentful of his wife, as already gleaned from the first episode. What kind of woman would put up - willingly, it seems - with someone so useless? But then it turns out he's by no means unique: her Dad was absent at her own birth, and generally exhibits much the same behaviour - yet her Mom has put up with him for decades (though the couple are no longer talking as the film ends/begins). In the fourth episode, as boorish husband falls asleep on his wedding night and frustrated wife wanders aimlessly through the hotel grounds, comes the film's key moment - another love song, this time "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes", playing on the soundtrack as parents sway on the dance floor and wife watches from the window, herself hungry for love. "When your heart's on fire / You must realise / Smoke gets in your eyes," goes the song. What more obvious metaphor could there be for being blinded by Love? What more poignant image than these women, sleepwalking - like all women, goes the implication - in pursuit of something they'd see wasn't there, if they'd only open their eyes? Cue another swooning Italian love song.
At this point you wonder how the film can go wrong - one episode to go (the couple's first meeting in Italy, hence the songs), and all Ozon has to do is express the romanticism that informs the rest of the movie; it's like building up an evil mastermind in an action flick, then all you have to do at the climax is show him being evil. Alas, he muffs it, giving only a romantic final shot - the couple swimming beneath a golden sunset - and making the rest oddly trite; the husband-to-be even has a shrewish girlfriend, whom of course we know he'll leave for his future wife, and she's sketched so broadly it cheapens the situation. I assume Ozon did this to diminish the husband's feelings: he's in such a bad place he'll happily go with someone else - maybe he never even loved our heroine at all. But it still detracts from what should be a swooning final episode: we should be getting Demy-level transcendence, not this kind of flat TV drama.
There's one more thing I didn't mention - an apparent red herring in the fourth episode, as the abandoned wife makes love with another man she meets in the hotel grounds. She's reluctant to do it (he takes the initiative), and is obviously channelling her frustrated longing for her husband in any case; given the film's structure and everything about it, it seems wrong to conclude that guilt over this transgression is driving what we see in previous episodes (viz. her tolerance of odious hubby). But it's still confusing and unnecessary, and I'm not really sure why it's there. In short, the film has problems (also Stéphane Freiss is the dullest actor in France, second only to Laurent Lucas); still, only a blind man could deny what it's doing - and only a heart of stone could remain unmoved as it juxtaposes Songs and Life: the eternal dream of love, and its shabby reality.
Rest of the Day: DUCK SEASON (72) (dir., Fernando Eimbcke): Deadpan comic fun that turns into more: an examination of ethical questions (pizza guy turns out to be an ethologist) like being responsible for one's actions - helping bake a replacement cake after accidentally burning the first one, etc - and the necessity of helping others, just like the titular migrating ducks (final credits include a dedication to the crew for being united, just like the ducks). Touches on so many things, and so organically: incipient sexuality in the boys' relationship, disappearing innocence as we casually find out (right at the end) it's their last carefree Sunday together; yet the gags keep coming, video-football scene (and its aftermath) is the funniest thing ever, and there's wondrous bits like Unhappy Girl going on about how guys don't like smart girls and it's just not fair, etc etc, in the foreground while Moko carefully spears a marshmallow and sets about trying to light it in the background. Deceptively simple, immensely likeable. "There's four of us, just like the Beatles!" § PALINDROMES (60) (dir., Todd Solondz): Pro-choice? Pro-life? Or just a handle for Solondz to do his usual everything-sucks, everyone's-evil-except-the-victim-losers routine? "People are unreliable" - also grotesque and generally bad news, though the emphasis on paedophilia (exemplified in the doll-baby with a bottle shoved up its ass and "Fuck Me" scrawled on its body) doesn't really seem to come out of anywhere, any more than the Southern Gothic of Mama Sunshine and her weird brood (all of whom would've been aborted by pro-choice parents, as others have noted). Structure seems to be palindromic - going from uncertainty to certainty then back to uncertainty - but palindromes are kind of pointless when you think about it. Best T-shirt caption (under the graphic of a man with a giant erection): "Look. He likes you." Best line: "Our special daughter ran away, and she didn't even have any legs". § THE SEA INSIDE (40) (dir., Alejandro Amenabar): Javier Bardem is a quadriplegic who wants to die. Should he be allowed to kill himself? Yes, he should. The End. Ludicrously one-sided, all the more annoying because Amenabar neatly summarises the opposing view - the priest saying euthanasia takes the middle-class belief in private property to absurd lengths - then totally ignores it. Then again he also does ethereal dissolves, and ruins Bardem's matter-of-fact, intelligent speeches by slathering his own maudlin score over them; even the death scene is spoiled by silly cuts to 'the sea inside'. Please give him an Oscar so he'll go back to the creepy horror movies, thanks Academy. § LAND OF PLENTY (w/o) (dir., Wim Wenders): Walked out on 73 minutes, with the rating firmly rooted on 32 where it had been for at least half an hour; even if it got hugely better in the remaining 50 mins. - and apparently it gets a bit better in the last 5 - I doubt this could ever have cracked 40. There are two main characters - John Diehl as a Vietnam vet and Patriot Act patriot obsessed with various homeland-security idiocies, and Michelle Williams as a politicised young woman who wishes there was "more awareness" of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is also this exchange: "That's the last thing you'd hear about in the West Bank, poverty in America"; "That's the last thing you'd hear about in the West Wing, poverty in America!". Touché, Mr. Wenders, touché. Also it looks like crap. Avoid, in my opinion. § L'INTRUS (dir., Claire Denis): No rating, simply because it was the wrong film to watch as Movie #12 in two days, and unfortunately put me to sleep - but I quite liked the hour or so I managed to see. Flimsy theme seems to be concerned with borders and intrusions - cross-cultures, immigrants, transplanted hearts, etc - but the key shot may be the CU of a baby, looking at the world completely fresh. Or perhaps the awesome shot of dark clouds and metal-grey sea, accompanied by Stuart Staples' (of Tindersticks) haunting, shamanic score. Hope to see it again, on more sleep and as big a screen as possible.
Day 7
Original Schedule: Stray Dogs (8.30 a.m.); Old Boy (11.15 a.m.); The Holy Girl (4 p.m.); Calvaire (6.30 p.m.); Kings and Queen (9.15 p.m.)
Revised Schedule: Old Boy (11.15 a.m.); The Holy Girl (4 p.m.); Kings and Queen (9.15 p.m.)
Local Colour of the Day: It's another loony of the streets, middle-aged with a heavy Eastern European accent, standing on the street with a large banner and protesting about - of all things - Children's Aid Societies. "Children's Aid Societies! Are bootchers! We have one hunnerd per cent of evidence for these brootal crimes!". Whatever happened to the war in Iraq, bud?
Film of the Day: Dunno about that, but Performance of the Day was undoubtedly given by Josh Rothkopf, who claimed to have really enjoyed KINGS AND QUEEN even though I was sniffling, sneezing and building up a mound of damp Kleenex not two feet away from him as he tried to watch the movie (sorry Josh). Woke up with a runny nose, obviously having caught a chill during the night, and it refused to go away despite infusions of orange juice and other healthful supplements. Bought a new box of tissues after THE HOLY GIRL and decided to skip my afternoon screening of CALVAIRE, hoping things would get better (they didn't). Tune in tomorrow for the rest of this sorry tale...
Rest of the Day: OLDBOY (65) (62 - second viewing) (dir., Park Chan-wook): Ultra-violent melting into poignant, in accepted Park fashion. The single-take battle I intend to call 'Please Hammer, Don't Hurt Them' is the best fight scene I've seen in years, and there's obvious sadism in the pulling-teeth torture (among other things) - but also dark humour, and a slightly absurd yet totally sincere Redemption sub-plot in the final stages (it's also wryly touching when hero tells heroine to pray for a younger man next time). Reference to "7 1/2 floor" echoes BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, just like the dotted-line trajectory from hammer to forehead recalls the animated 'square' in PULP FICTION - but surely no Western film would ever have a coda so perverse, all but advocating incest. Stylish fun, if sometimes hard to follow. [Not much more to say on second viewing (just as stylish, slightly less fun), except that it's also a revenge thriller that ends up exploding the idea of Revenge. The brother's quest for vengeance is worse than unjust or sadistic - it's a form of denial, trying to suppress his own guilt by making another just as morally culpable, though of course it's absurd since the two cases of incest aren't remotely alike (and beyond that it's wrong, because he's trying to shirk responsibility). Thus the audience's bloodlust is quelled - albeit by an even greater bloodlust, making it roughly equivalent to Groucho's "Hey you big bully, stop picking on that little bully". Still, I guess it's something.] § THE HOLY GIRL (63) (dir., Lucrecia Martel): Very much in LA CIENAGA style, crowded frames and family dynamics, but a lot more accomplished. It's a tale of miscommunication, often prompted by sexual repression or attraction (it's no accident the instrument of choice is a theremin, music without physical contact!): misunderstandings between doctors and patients - like the story of the patient who couldn't read her doctor's handwriting - between men and women, between God and Science, between the religion teacher talking of "vocation" and her young charges talking superstitions and ghost stories ("We're getting nowhere," she says disappointedly), or the woman who mis-hears words (males for madres) in the listening booth. Lack of harmony creates a constant tension, exemplified in scenes like the girl holding her breath in the swimming pool, ruptured by sudden sexual burgeoning - splashing the boys with the water hose, Mother dancing while the kids watch - finally ending in a more serious disharmony, the doctor reported for abuse - which is when Martel turns instead to a final shot of perfect harmony, the two girls swimming in the pool, totally (and of course asexually) in sync: in a world out of joint, that indeed counts as a Holy Moment. Marvellous. § KINGS AND QUEEN (66) (dir., Arnaud Desplechin): Not a lot to say, surprisingly. Mathieu Amalric is hilarious (not least when insisting that "women have no souls"), Desplechin the most unsentimental of directors (e.g. the final speech about kids) - but perhaps Amalric is aware of being hilarious, and perhaps Desplechin takes pride in being unsentimental, unable even to let a dead father rest in peace. Breezy, philosophical and eclectically literate, skipping from Yeats to "Moon River"; risk-taking and original, if a bit too convinced of its own amazing-ness.
Days 8 & 9: The Wilderness Days
Original Schedule: Kung Fu Hustle (Day 8, 9 a.m.); Primer (Day 8, 11.30 a.m.); Los Muertos (Day 8, 2.30 p.m.); Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (Day 8, 4 p.m.); Rolling Family (Day 8, 6.30 p.m.); Whisky (Day 8, 10 p.m.); Brides (Day 9, 11.30 a.m.); Café Lumiere (Day 9, 2 p.m.); Tomorrow We Move (Day 9, 6 p.m.); The Raspberry Reich (Day 9, 9 p.m.)
Revised Schedule: Primer (Day 8, 11.30 a.m.)
Local Colour of the Day: Sitting in the cyber-café on Day 9, trying to write my "Cyprus Mail" piece, can't help noticing the tiny sticker on a corner of the keyboard: "Warning: Some experts believe that any use of a keyboard can result in serious injury". I mean come on, what kind of legalistic crap is this? "Some experts"? "Any use of a keyboard"? I suppose you know that's about as helpful as saying "Warning: My friend Henry believes keyboards are alien probes designed to warp human brains into sponge-shaped spaghetti"? I mean jesus...
Film of the Day: I really don't think I should talk about PRIMER (69) (71 - second viewing) (dir., Shane Carruth) Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Casey Gooden at this stage. Not only was I sick when I saw it, but there was a problem with the sound at the Cumberland, flattening the dialogue even further in a film that takes pains to make its dialogue hard to follow in the first place. Indeed, there's such a temptation to zone out in the first hour or so - it comes across like a mathematician's WAKING LIFE, throwing out streams of talk to be happily dismissed as 'Science' and half-listened to while we groove on the rhythms - that there's something quite disconcerting when it turns into a thriller of sorts in the final section and expects you to keep up ('But you told me not to!' wails the hapless viewer subconsciously). The result isn't hugely satisfying (on first viewing) and yes, I found it just as incomprehensible as most people (on first viewing) - but the hi-tech sheen gleams alluringly, the characters are barbed in that edgy IN THE COMPANY OF MEN way, and the dialogue bristles both with convincing Science and the much-rarer commodity known as wit. Above all it's amazing that a self-taught filmmaker can emerge out of nowhere, fully-formed like this, taking on virtually every job except sound recordist (Carruth composed, co-photographed, edited) - and win Sundance, and make the year's densest, most original American movie, and do it all for a mere $7000. I am definitely seeing this film again. Soon, hopefully. [Second viewing (May 2005) not quite the hoped-for revelation, though it does almost entirely 'make sense' now. No doubt it's opaque and hard to follow, which is partly for good reasons and partly for bad; the good include Carruth's highly original storytelling style, deliberately dispensing with highlighting or signposting - the most vital scene narrative-wise, the little flow diagram explaining how the Machine works, is easy to miss since it gets the same emphasis as the reams of speculative science stuff - the bad mostly have to do with limited resources; Carruth's own performance lets him down at the pivotal moment when a 'double' is first glimpsed - his reading of "Who was that, Abe?" isn't up to the enormity of the moment (indeed, only on second viewing did I realise who "that" actually was), though I guess you could argue it's deliberate strategy. The real question, however, is what purpose is served by the opacity - and my impression (unlike in, say, MEMENTO) is there's little underlying profundity, just a puzzle to be worked out; even worse, the style works against the most intriguing aspect, which is the banal use to which the Machine is finally put (twisting Time so an engineer can get a moment of glory at a party). The key shot may perhaps be the early one showing the guys brainstorming in one room while Aaron's wife washes dishes in the kitchen next door, both activities given equal value - despite their fancy talk, these are mundane people living mundane lives, which is why they're unable to deal with the forces they unleash; ideally, the film should go the other way, getting simpler and more banal in its final section. Instead, by getting denser and more complex it takes its characters at their own estimation - and, by making the audience struggle to catch up, it makes them look cool, which is (surely) not the point. The other thing I liked is the idea that Aaron has a rogue streak of violence (the line about punching his boss, and his wife's surprised reaction) which gets expressed in one of his many 'doubles' - it's like each 'double' is a subtly different version of himself, and the one who gets more of the violent streak ends up taking over the others; then again, there's no way of knowing which Aaron says he'd like to punch his boss, whether it's the 'real' Aaron or one of the later ones, so maybe that idea isn't really there. Too much opacity, in other words; still, there's no doubting Shane Carruth is Man of the Year 2004.]
Rest of the Day: That would be the 18-hour (actually closer to 48-hour) rest I took for the remainder of Day 8 and most of Day 9. My cold having now expanded to encompass dizziness, a fever and a splitting headache, I gingerly made my way back to the hotel after PRIMER ended at 1 p.m. and crawled into bed fully-clothed, hoping a nap might do me some good. I didn't get out of bed till 9 the next morning, beyond staggering to the bathroom a couple of times for drinks of water and getting up sometime in the evening to put on a jacket (on top of my shirt, pants and socks, plus two blankets) in a desperate attempt to stave off a bad case of the shivers. Day 9 was a little better, but filing a Report for the "Mail" took forever in my enfeebled state, and I just wasn't ready - in any sense - for Hou Hsiao-Hsien at 2 o'clock. Then I crashed into bed again, and decided to call it a day. "Festival cold," diagnosed veteran Don Marks, nodding sagely, when I told him of my troubles. You said it bud.
Day 10
Schedule: Whisky (3.45 p.m.); Rahtree: Flower of the Night (6.30 p.m.); Tomorrow We Move (9 p.m.); Saw (midnight)
Local Colour of the Day: "More talky-talky. Less billy-billy". I guess you had to have been there...
Film of the Day: The idea behind final-night Midnight Madness seems to be that you have to suffer through a really bad movie in order to fully appreciate French toast at the Golden Griddle (where the fun didn't quite last till dawn this year, being a depleted bunch of geeks with at least one still-unwell participant). Last year's UNDEAD was at least better than THE BUNKER in '01 (I wasn't around in '02, or the great WILD ZERO in '00), but all those are better than SAW (24) (dir., James Wan) Cary Elwes, Leigh Whannell, Danny Glover, Monica Potter - though I guess I might've liked (or tolerated) this ludicrous thriller more if (a) it didn't start with such a strong, promising premise; (b) it didn't wallow so often in gratuitous sadism, with the Child in Jeopardy angle pushed especially hard; and (c) I hadn't been under the mistaken impression that it was supposed to be good, as opposed to so-bad-it's-good.
In fact, it's pretty awful. Performances are awful, Cary Elwes' hysterical posturing prompting Scott Tobias to say (much too kindly), "I could watch him whimper like a little girl all night without getting tired of it". Dialogue is awful, hitting every cliché within a 100-mile radius: "You lay a finger on them and I'll kill you! You hear me, you son of a bitch? I'll kill you!" yells Mr. Elwes in one of many auto-pilot moments. Direction is awful, not just favouring fast-motion montages with pounding music to pump up the action but also making everything super-literal; if there's a line like "I saw you at the house" we get flash-cuts - pow! pow! pow! - of that person at the house. Best of all is a scene where Hero 1 is telling Hero 2 about cop Danny Glover, each bit of his narrative illustrated with the requisite illustration shot; "He went crazy!" says the narrator - and there's a quick MS of Glover in his room, duly going Mwahahaha.
The real problem is the film's super-contrived way of parcelling out information as it suits the scriptwriter, i.e. inorganically. We start with what could've been a great premise in the hands of a David Mamet, or even a Vincenzo Natali: two guys wake up to find themselves chained to opposite walls in a room - and find a tape informing them, "Ten Little Indians" style, that one of them can only get out by killing the other. They also find two handsaws, and I knew things were going to get stupid when the man who's under death sentence throws the second handsaw to his prospective killer without having first cut off his own chains (this chap's behaviour is remarkably dumb throughout the movie - and eventually, when he walks towards a strange noise in a dark room without taking any normal-person precautions, prompted an exasperated audience member to yell out, "Oh, you idiot!"). Had the film stayed in the room and focused on the duo's attempts to work together - and the inevitable tension between them - it might've been a cool psychological thriller. Instead, the whole 'game' aspect turns out to be a front, padding the plot out with flashbacks and 'shock' revelations dropped whenever the script needs to move to another level, making for twists like Oh yeah that reminds me I was attacked by a deranged monster in a parking lot the other night. Needless to say, it makes no sense at all, unless you can somehow work out why a killer would have a man race across town to shoot the gormless Elwes when he himself (spoiler!) is actually lying about two feet away. (Most pathetic detail is perhaps the way we catch a glimpse of the real killer early on - I forget the context, it's when he's looking through a camera or something - in what's presumably intended as a second-viewing Easter-egg for true fanboys, except they overplay it and it just becomes confusing; 'That's the killer? I thought it was the other guy...') The midnight audience howled at the rampant idiocies and 20-second car chase - that was awesome - then unaccountably clapped at the end, possibly sending out the wrong message to the good folks at Lion's Gate. Maybe I just needed to be in the right mood - in the mood for idiocy - in order to enjoy it. Still, it'll take a lot of French toast to make me sit through that again...
Rest of the Day: WHISKY (58) (dir., Juan Pablo Rebella / Pablo Stoll): Very well made but I'm not crazy about the dynamic, which basically involves putting an extrovert Stanley Tucci type in a Kaurismaki movie and waiting for the gloomy Kaurismakians to either thaw or disappear up their own misery; shift in sympathies from Jacobo to his brother happens too early, really - should be a final-act reversal, if at all (there's a reason why Kaurismaki films seldom have outsiders; it makes the people look bad). Broken-down decrepitude makes for some nice gags, precise nature of relationships remains enigmatic - does Marta sleep with Herman? is that why he's all 'I travel a lot, I'm hardly ever home' the next morning? - and the taciturn ending is just right. § RAHTREE: FLOWER OF THE NIGHT (53) (dir., Yuthlert Sippapak): Looks for a while like it's out to create a new sub-genre - the Asian ghost story played as Renoir-ish community comedy - then suddenly collapses in lame EXORCIST spoof and silly slapstick. Subtext of Thailand Corrupted more or less survives - "Is this supposed to be a Buddhist country?" - with spoiled yuppie getting his desserts, local shaman exposed as a charlatan and greedy landlady running out of clients (needless to say, a real Buddhist priest manages to subdue the ghost in no time); only moderately fun, but hammy acting and crazy scuttling ghost never grow old. Also hands down the most likeable retard I've seen at this Festival, sorry NICELAND and PALINDROMES retards. § TOMORROW WE MOVE (64) (dir., Chantal Akerman): Seems to be a case of "Mankind cannot bear too much reality": heroine's "realist" prose just seems comic when it should be erotic, everyone's worried about sex lives, having kids, bad memories - and they all find refuge in screwball farce, making for the most exhilarating middle section as one thing leads to another, leitmotifs keep reappearing and stream-of-consciousness dialogue makes everything in the world seem funny. Final 20 minutes seem unnecessary, but maybe it's Akerman's way of making clear you can't (or at least shouldn't) escape your problems: characters face what they fear - Nature, memories, childbirth - and emerge stronger, farce no longer a refuge but a way of life (and of course sometimes farce can't be a refuge; the old man haunted by memories of the Holocaust plays no part in the middle section). A little dry but mostly delightful; Sylvie Testud is a poised comedienne among her many talents - but is it rude to suggest she and Roman Polanski would make a charming (if slightly scary) couple?...