Toronto 2006: Day by Day

INTRO: PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES

 Five years ago I was in Toronto when the world momentarily fractured. Five years on, the wound may be healing - or at least subsiding into a familiar ache, an obscure sense of loss, like the distant phantom throb of an amputated leg - but the after-effects linger on. I would've preferred it, for instance, if my transatlantic flight from London to Toronto weren't on British Airways Flight 93, especially when I noticed it appeared on my ticket thusly:

   05 SEP    BRITISH AIRWAYS 93    WRLD TRA    WFFEUR

It didn't matter that Flight 93 never actually crashed into the WRLD TRA Center, or that I might never have made the connection if UNITED 93 and its inbred cousin FLIGHT 93 hadn't recently implanted the number in my brain (nor, indeed, did it matter that WRLD TRA actually stood for World Traveller). I was unnerved - and things didn't really improve at the grim airport hotel near London-Heathrow where I made my overnight stop en route to Canada. The girl at Reception was bright and nervous, English clearly her second language. Behind us, as we waited in line, a decrepit old doorman sang "Honky Tonk Women" to himself in a loud rasping voice. There were hundreds of rooms in this large impersonal way-station, but my room for the night turned out to be ... Room 93.

 For a moment, panic set in. I'm fairly superstitious, in a passive low-key way - the way of people who "don't believe in astrology" but take a quick glance at their horoscope because what's the harm - and a ludicrous childish fear gripped me for an instant. What if God were choosing this particular moment, this particular flight, to break His/Her silence and send me a sign, the string of 93s proving that the trip was ill-fated? What if I dismissed the whole thing as coincidence, and boarded the flight, and the plane suddenly dipped, or plunged, or exploded over mid-Atlantic, as I shook my head in disbelief and a low, Orson Welles-like heavenly voice rumbled "Well, I tried to warn you"? What would happen in the afterlife? Would I be consigned to some outer circle of Hell for the fatally stupid? 

 The fear passed, of course. I boarded the flight, but a faint doubt persisted as I gazed at my fellow passengers, as though the fear of flying had reconfigured itself into an all-purpose wariness, a free-floating bafflement at the strangeness of the world - and the strangeness of the trip I was taking. One woman in particular caught my attention. She was maybe in her 20s and a big woman, square-shouldered, high-chested, built like a mountain. She might've been an Olympic discus-thrower, except that she was travelling with two very old, silent ladies so I assume she was a nurse, or some kind of companion. She was bulldog-faced, forbiddingly muscular - yet there was also a coquettish delicacy about her. Her bulky frame was draped in a light-pink blouse, she wore her hair in pigtails (pigtails!) like a country girl, and spoke to the  frail old women in a high sweet voice. "Everything you're carrying - except your clothes, of course" - and she giggled girlishly, as if they might've been tempted to strip down to their undies then and there, if not for her warning - "has to go in the tray," she instructed them at the X-ray machine - then, when her turn came, took off her shoes and positively sashayed to the electronic gate like a debutante making a grand entrance, thick calves grinding below her short skirt. Who was this woman? I wondered. What was her deal? And was it more absurd to be this woman, accompanying two half-senile biddies to an old folks' home or some quiet suburban cottage on a leafy street - or was it more absurd to be me, crossing an ocean for the fifth time in as many years so I could ... watch a bunch of movies for 10 days? 

 I mention all this because the slight doubt about the trip (not even a doubt but a question mark, a shadow of a doubt) lingered imperceptibly - and totally irrationally, because this was by any reasonable measure my Best TIFF Ever. My furnished suite was five minutes from the action, incredibly roomy, cheaper than most hotels. Having done Cannes (unlike in previous years), I wasn't caught in the usual bind of chasing after way more films than I could possibly watch - yet an unusually strong Venice meant I always found more than enough to get excited about. The socialising, mostly with what Noel Murray calls "the usual crowd", was cannily skewed between late-night drinking and poker nights, avoiding the sad spectacle of film nerds going straight to bed after a day's movie-watching but also the equally sad spectacle of film nerds tramping to the same grotty sports bar (a.k.a. Burgundy's) night after night. In short, everything - notably including the films themselves, which included at least one 80+ (the other's still provisional) - was as perfect as it's ever likely to get. 

 The only problem was me - not all the time, not even most of the time but intermittently, in momentary lapses, like a runner whose mind suddenly wanders in mid-sprint, putting him off his stride. My physical stamina was very disappointing this year. I made a fairly respectable 44 movies (plus one walk-out) but dozed off more than once, which is understandable on Day 10 after unwisely swigging three pints of strong dark beer in mid-afternoon - Necessary Addendum: I'm really not a huge drinker but I do have a soft spot for ales, and this was the year when I finally discovered the go-to place for dark beer (Volo!) in the Bloor-Yonge area; Tipple of the Year, for those keeping score, was Sierra Nevada Porter, imported from Canada's own devils on the doorstep - but not so understandable on Day 2, especially while watching a film I was quite enjoying (THE LIVES OF OTHERS). Trying to debate the very sharp people in "the usual crowd" I found myself forgetting details, unable to recall films to mind the way I usually do. At times, in the theatre, I felt tense and jumpy, almost claustrophobic. Maybe it's the first step to jadedness (I hope not), the cinephile fatigue that's already afflicted at least one member of my cinematic circle. Maybe it had something to do with seeing TIFF in a slightly new light, on which more later [see Day 8]. Mostly, however, I suspect the passivity of film-festival-going, which seemed so subversive 5 years ago - such a brilliant dodge, ducking out of the world and its rules, watching films and getting paid for it - now seemed just a touch too emblematic of the gap between my life as it is and how I'd like it to be. Ungrateful? Probably. 

 Still, I mustn't exaggerate. Like that briefly-distracted runner, I spent almost all my TIFF-time sprinting with all my heart - and if, looking back on the race, I tend to dwell on the distractions rather than the running, it's precisely because they were so unexpected. There was much to enjoy - and I mostly did enjoy it. Here we go...                 

DAY 1: TRIALS

 Not as in trials and tribulations, but literal courtrooms - or at least metaphorical in the case of 12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST (71) (dir., Corneliu Porumboiu) Mircea Andreescu, Teodor Corban, Ion Sapdaru, which takes as its crucible a local-cable talk-show in a small Romanian town, and a live discussion aimed at finding out what actually happened in the town when Ceaucescu fell in 1989; news of the dictator's overthrow came at 12:08, so if the townspeople had already flooded the main square before that, then the Revolution may be said to have occurred (the Romanian title literally translates as "Was There or Wasn't There?") - whereas if they only took to the streets after news of the goings-on in Bucharest had filtered down, then they were merely following History rather than shaping it. The film centres round a quest for Truth, but its true originality lies in a brave conceptual stunt that transforms the style halfway through, deliberately hobbling itself in pursuit of a larger point. The first half is made in what might be called Allusive Arthouse, a deadpan long-take style that's become a staple of festival-fodder, the style (with variations) of Tsai, Kaurismaki and assorted lesser imitators; it works in master-shots and wry background jokes, so e.g. one scene sees an old man - known for playing Santa Claus at Christmastime - loudly making a phone call in the foreground while a woman comes and goes behind him diffidently cleaning a Santa suit, her quiet concentration undermining his blustery dialogue just by existing. Another shot, a static view of a street, is punctuated by a kid with a clarinet who shuffles into frame after the action is over, blows a couple of notes on his instrument, then shuffles out again. Often the static camera is part of the joke, as when the old man decides to take revenge on the kids throwing firecrackers who've been making his life a misery; in a single wide-shot of a doorway and a wall, with two random guys standing inscrutably about halfway across, we see him enter from frame-right, stop and purchase something from the men, then disappear into the doorway at frame-left; a pause, then he reappears and comes to stand with the men again; another, longer pause - then the sudden loud sound of firecrackers and a gang of terrified kids bounding out the doorway and out of frame as the old man looks smug, having paid them back in kind.

 Above all, the deadpan style creates distance - because, as in many Eastern European films (and in Kaurismaki), the film's comedy is the comedy of decay and ineptitude. Everything's falling apart in modern-day Romania; TV sets don't work, phones don't answer, homes are messy, bookshelves overloaded, people hung-over, unreliable or just incompetent. The style acts as a shield as well as standing surety for the director's superior sensibility, affirming that though he may be from this place, he's not of it - that he's one of us, the arthouse audience watching the chaos and shaking our heads - which is why it's so brave of Porumboiu to abandon Allusive Arthouse halfway through, embracing the incompetence as he puts himself in the shoes of the clumsy cameraman filming the TV discussion. Suddenly the framing is off, the camera's always in the wrong place, compositions are plain to the point of ugliness - and the film becomes almost a chore to watch, especially because the tone also changes, no longer elegant but blunt and emphatic (even the humour is cruder, more farcical). It becomes - in every sense of the word - a trial, the point being that fripperies must be abandoned when you're trying to get to the essence of things, when Truth is in the balance - and the stunt is deeply admirable, even as it also makes the film less enjoyable. In many ways I think Allusive Arthouse does more harm than good, building a wall and calling it Art, cloaking emotion in arched eyebrows and sleights-of-hand; there's an argument for directness over indirectness, especially if arthouse films hope to break out of their self-imposed ghetto - a conversation I had with the estimable Chris Stults who countered with a quote from Raul Ruiz' "Poetics of Cinema" (which he happened to be reading at the time), to the effect that obliqueness is better because "some things dissolve when you approach them without ceremony". Maybe so - and Porumboiu's way too smart to pretend he's solved anything by placing Romania in a makeshift tribunal. In the end, the truth remains ambiguous and we go back to the film's most beautiful sequence: lights coming on at dusk, just as it opened with the lights going off at dawn, except the image has now been made meaningful - a symbol of Revolution coursing through the nation, as per something the old man says during the TV debate. Are the lights any more beautiful for having been 'explained'? Or is Beauty in fact our only constant in a world where Truth - despite the un-beautiful pursuit of Truth - remains inconclusive? The film doesn't answer, nor does it have to.

 Lights at dawn also fill the opening minutes of BAMAKO (68) (dir., Abderrahmane Sissako) Aissa Maiga, William Bourdon, Roland Rappaport, Danny Glover, another film that revolves round a trial - the plaintiff in this case being African Society, the defendant International Financial Institutions. I wish I could add that I deduced those identities from some artful symbolic set-up but in fact the film names its parties in so many words, making it seem the most didactic of debt-relief lectures; to make matters worse, I went in not quite agreeing with its thesis, viz. that the West needs to cancel Africa's debt - after all, the money was lent, and squandering a loan doesn't absolve you of responsibility to pay it back (I can see a humanitarian argument for making an exception in this case, but the case for debt-relief is seldom couched in terms of making an exception; it's always couched in rather self-righteous exhortations to Do the Right Thing, and I freely admit I've been soured on the matter by the preening of Geldof, Bono et al.). Even now I guess I'm not entirely convinced, but I have to say I've never heard the plaintiff's argument made more passionately - by real-life lawyer Bourdon - even as the film, to its immense credit, also gives the defendant's camp (real-life lawyer Rappaport) a fair hearing. Both lawyers are white -  though all witnesses are black, and the trial is being held in a small village in Mali - which may seem unfair and condescending, but it's part of the film's complexity that African society stands apart from the question of debt-relief, somehow transcending it even as it's inextricably bound up with it. Sissako's main coup is to intersperse the trial with scenes of village life - shot on lustrous celluloid while the courtroom scenes are shot on fuzzy video, the better to emphasise the latter's unreality - and one of them even has the villagers turning off the radio on which they're listening to the proceedings ("This trial's becoming annoying"); the effect is both to flesh out the rather shrill arguments about the "pauperization" of Africa and combat the implicit image of the pathetic African, begging the world for a handout. Sissako refuses to allow the West an argument based on charity; Africa still has its dignity, he says - debt-relief is something the West (the two white lawyers) must hash out for itself, recognising its own racism and its own complicity in trying to create "a privatized world". Elsewhere there are songs, surreal moments like a dream about the severed heads of various world leaders ('heads of state', you might say), a sardonic glimpse of Christianity in action and a cod-Western titled "Death in Timbuktu", harnessing the spirit of Glauber Rocha and the star-power of Danny Glover. I started the film ready to hate it, but ended up enthralled; "The goat has its ideas," notes a wise (if somewhat cryptic) villager, "but so does the hen".

 Trials, of course, are inherently dramatic - as are Neapolitans, with their tragic gestures and extravagant expressions. I followed up BAMAKO with three Asian films in a row, and maybe it was just coming back to fellow Mediterraneans that made THE SESSION IS OPEN (71) (dir., Vincenzo Marra) so enjoyable. I don't think so, though this has to be among the most entertaining documentaries I've seen - albeit with a sting in the tail, following the non-trial (the title is ironic) of a junior Mafioso. For obscure reasons, the court meets only on Saturdays, and the chief magistrate reckons they can have things sewn up by next Saturday as the film opens; when it ends, it's at least a month later and the court has barely been in session. Instead we see the judge being jaw-droppingly sexist in a casual chat with his (female) fellow judge about the role of women in society; we see the female judge bitching about not being able to smoke in chambers; we see the jury milling about aimlessly because someone's locked the door to the jury room (cue frantic calls to the janitor to come upstairs with the key) and the judge trying to find someone's phone number from a list of numbers scribbled on the wall like so much graffiti; we see a lawyer - billed as the best criminal lawyer in Naples - meeting with a pair of obvious Mafiosi (one of them looks amusingly like the actor Patrick Bauchau) and making a deal with a fleshy-faced colleague, both of them speaking in code as if planning a hit (the camera lingers, fascinated, on the colleague's porcine complacency). Marra lets the message - a System in paralysis - sneak up on you, filling the film with amusing minutiae as if in preparation for a main event that never arrives. The style is Wiseman-esque, only with a twist because the film is as much about personal shortcomings as institutional failure; it hones in on people outside the strict confines of work (albeit not exactly in their private lives) in a way Wiseman would presumably find unacceptable. If it weren't so hilarious it might seem unfair - but it is, and it isn't.

Rest of the Day: THE KING AND THE CLOWN (57) (dir., Lee Jun-ik): Pretty great, till it stops being great. Collision of showbiz (with cross-dressing angle) and politics (with mad-Emperor angle) is smartly done, both spectacular and psychologically tricky - lots of who's-controlling-who ambiguity - but excessive twists and way too many endings almost scupper it. "Comedy in a bloodbath" = biggest Korean film of all time (now surpassed by THE HOST). § DONG (53) (dir., Jia Zhang-ke): Artist in the drab Three Gorges region (also the setting for STILL LIFE) renders local youths - in their swimming trunks - in febrile, Gauguin-ish colours. The contrast is intriguing (how did he even end up here?), and a rural interlude where he visits a worker's backwoods family to inform them he's been killed is even stranger - they seem unruffled by his bad news, more impressed by the mangy toy doll he brings as a present for the family's little girl. Second half in Thailand (where he paints girls, somewhat surprisingly) seems irrelevant though. Should've been a short, probably.     

DAY 2: PLAYING IT SAFE

 "... but it's very middlebrow," was the inevitable caveat whenever someone in "the usual crowd" recommended THE LIVES OF OTHERS. Ohhhh, middlebrow, Sony Classics - beware, take care. Understandably (but still amusingly), hardcore cinephiles are allergic to the very thing distributors look for in a movie - the middlebrow quality that'll help them capture ... well, the middlebrows, the middle ground that can make a box-office hit just as it wins elections, by jumping this way instead of that (highbrows and lowbrows are harder to shake). I finally caught up with LIVES OF OTHERS and stunned myself by falling asleep, even though it was only Day 2; maybe it was sitting too far back at the tube-shaped Cumberland 1, maybe it was going to a 10.30 p.m. screening before my body had adjusted to festival rhythms - or maybe it's because the film was middlebrow, skilful (I was somewhere in the 60-65 range, having watched about an hour) but stolid, with its Stasi anti-hero given just enough positive traits to make him sympathetic - true believer, man of honour, something of an Artist - and enough repressed emotion to set up (I assume) a poignant finale. 

 I'll be catching up with LIVES OF OTHERS somewhere down the line - it's unlikely to disappear - but in fact middlebrow ruled at this year's TIFF; if there was one salient theme at the Fest it was the spectacle of cult directors going out of their way to become more accessible, hopefully without losing their personal signature. Herzog did it with RESCUE DAWN; Verhoeven did it with BLACK BOOK; Hartley tried to do it with FAY GRIM; Kim did it, to some extent, with TIME; and Hong certainly did it with WOMAN ON THE BEACH (74) (dir., Hong Sang-soo) Kim Seung-woo, Kim Tae-woo, Ko Hyeon-gang, which is no surprise since he'd warned of his intention to do it, at the end of TALE OF CINEMA when his protagonist turned his back on ingrown film-obsession (even stopped smoking!) and decided to live like a normal person. Hong is apparently on record as wanting to make "accessible" films from now on (no surprise, in a market as commercially-minded as Korea's) and this one is certainly less self-conscious than previous outings - though it's also recognisably Hong-ian, with its selfish protagonist who's a bit of a jerk, bifurcated structure, trip to the country (as in KANGWON PROVINCE and TURNING GATE) acting as a catalyst, random lives intersecting at intervals and relationships governed by irrational impulse and self-delusion (an audience member at the public screening apparently identified another Hong trademark - sex scenes that involve a headband - though I only heard about it second-hand and forget the details). The difference is that now the random lives are tied up like so many loose ends - the waiter who returns, disappointingly, as the motorbike rider - and the final scene is a visual metaphor so obvious it's almost comical - yet I still found it immensely touching in giving its heroine a happy ending, especially because the bad-news hero is clearly based on Hong himself, a moody film director who lusts after a glamour-girl (Ms. Ko is apparently a big TV star, described to me by a friend as a kind of Korean Jennifer Aniston) but finally realises he's unworthy of her. 

 They meet through a friend, one of those awkward situations where the guy's deluded himself into thinking of the girl as his girlfriend but is too paralysed to actually make a move. Joong-rae (our hero) takes over, briefly sparking a love triangle, only to draw back the next morning. He's a flawed hero, tactless and insensitive - damning the girl with faint praise when he says her music has "an amateur feel" and "the melody is soothing" - often petty, haggling over hotel prices and erupting for no reason; he bombards one girl with pointless questions about her life (trying to pick her up, but still), and draws another one a diagram (!) to describe his feelings. In the end his only true connection is with his work, his only triumph in managing to finish the script he's writing; when it comes to women he's a disaster, standing in for their biggest fears - "obsession" for one, "betrayal" for the other. Clearly, this comes close to personal confession, yet the film does seem less self-conscious than previous Hongs; he's managed to retain his personal stamp while making something lucid and intelligible, not as inscrutable as earlier films (though I missed the two before TALE OF CINEMA) and very light, both full of light and light on its feet. The borrowing of a Renoir title may be coincidence, but it's still appropriate; Rohmer will also be cited, though Rohmer wouldn't go for something as straightforward as the couple shouting out "I love you!" on the beach. To paraphrase Lady Bracknell: "My Korean auteur, you seem to be displaying signs of middlebrow".  

 Then again, there's no pleasing some people. Most of my friends seem to think Guy Maddin's also playing it safe with BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! (81) (dir., Guy Maddin) Sullivan Brown, Gretchen Krich, Maya Lawson, which would certainly strike a Maddin newbie as a bizarre opinion. Ah, but that's the point: non-newbies know he's been there, done this lots of times already - notably in COWARDS BEND THE KNEE, another wildly surreal pseudo-Silent. I couldn't find my tape of COWARDS to give it another chance, and maybe it's as simple (and retarded) as having seen that one on video, this one in a theatre - and not just a theatre but a one-off live event, with an orchestra in the pit and ingenious foley artists actually smashing plates to simulate the onscreen smashing of a plate - but I'm not so sure. I've always been 'pro' on Maddin but only twice (here and in CAREFUL, despite the political shadings of SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD) has his pastiche style seemed more than a stunt - and it's surely no accident that BRAND is a case of form matching content. For one thing it's a memory-piece, grown-up "Guy" looking back on his childhood; for another, it's a tale of trying to restore and re-visit the past, the villainous Mom in the story trying to recapture her youth via a rejuvenating nectar culled from the scalps of abused orphans (don't ask) - just as Maddin himself works in a register of fever-dream nostalgia, a quest to recreate forgotten syntax (the same could be said of his "Jolly Corner" column in "Film Comment"). The past looms large in his work, yet many of the previous films seemed stymied (slightly) either by excessive goofiness - often tied to implicit embarrassment over being Canadian, like the ice-hockey hi-jinks in COWARDS - or the opposite, attempts at a dolorous melancholy (most obviously in SADDEST MUSIC). This may be his perfect material, a faux-Victorian melodrama that embodies his concerns, accommodates his OTT style without derailing into all-out spoof - because the spoof is embedded in the material - and shades into creepy obsession rather than melancholy, a more Maddinesque sentiment whether he admits it or not. Then again, I don't really know; I'll have to watch the film again - firstly because I spent half the time being distracted by foley artists, rotund castrati, etc, and secondly because I was so transfixed, so astonished, that I didn't take any notes at all throughout its 95 minutes. I can offer no higher compliment. 

Rest of the Day: THE BOTHERSOME MAN (47) (dir., Jens Lien): Misleading prologue took me ages to get over - implying both that the protagonist is dead (making the rest of the film an afterlife/Purgatory fantasy) and that he was sexually awkward or dysfunctional (he jumps to his death, apparently at the sight of a couple kissing). Neither of those is true, it turns out, the film being primarily a satire of the bourgeois lifestyle - rabidly materialistic, lacking in emotion or childlike curiosity, a world devoid of taste, feeling, even dreams ("I don't want you to talk like that" pleads his girlfriend when our man describes a dream about a moose). Slim pickings, bolstered by some fancy moves and the dark Scandinavian sense of humour. Best bit: getting run over by a train. Repeatedly. § HANA (44) (dir., Hirokazu Kore-eda): Kore-eda does tenement comedy - a kind of baggy DODES'KA-DEN - with an irreverent tone. Some of it is funny, like the overturned cliché about the peace-loving samurai who refuses to unveil his skills, however much he's taunted and provoked - turns out he really is useless - or the bawdy innuendo when our hero's uncle comes to visit, most of it is either half-baked or lost in translation. Overall joke is that it's set in a time of peace, when samurai are lounging around with nothing to do, but 127 minutes is a long running-time for a tall tale about not-very-much. Catchy music, cheerful scatological streak, mysterious title even more mysteriously in capitals.          

DAY 3: YOUNG LUST, OR: I WAS A TEENAGE TAJIK

 TO GET TO HEAVEN FIRST YOU HAVE TO DIE (67) (dir., Djamshed Usmonov) Khurched Golibekov, Dinara Droukarova, Maruf Pulodzoda might as well be called 'The Sex Life of a Young Tajik' - albeit a 20-year-old, despite my title above - and plays like a Central Asian DEEP END (Mike D'Angelo cites Buster Keaton, which is even better), at least till it takes an unfortunate left-turn with half an hour to go and never recovers. Its calf-eyed, mopey hero is first seen with head bowed, taking off his clothes - but only for a doctor's exam; he's married but unfortunately impotent, and most of the film is taken up with his mopey attempts to lose his virginity. It could be that he pines for his late mother - her death was the reason he got married in the first place - hence an abortive interlude with an older woman on a train. It could be that he's just unlucky, standing outside a supermarket hoping to help some willing hottie, finally finding a woman who accepts his offer to carry her bags, following her home, climbing up flights of stairs loaded down with grocery bags to her apartment - where it turns out she has a husband, who nods curtly and shuts the door in his face. It could be that he's just ineffectual, unable to act even though girls swarm around him (shades of SEVEN CHANCES) when he stands outside a factory - unlike his macho cousin who dismisses love as "bullshit", advises eating lots of eggs (a natural Viagra) and buys him a hooker, to no effect. That cousin should've been a warning to the film's agenda, which is unreconstructed nonsense about being a "real man" - and it turns into a crime drama with no obvious irony, hero hooking up with a violent thug en route to an ending that begs for ambivalence but doesn't really get it (even the final scene has a prospective father saying he hopes the baby is a son). In retrospect, an ugly film - but the first hour is really quite delightful.

 More young lust in SUMMER '04 (49) (dir., Stefan Krohmer) Martina Gedeck, Robert Seeliger, Peter Davor - really young in this case, since the one doing the lusting is a 12-year-old girl ("She's almost 13," notes someone in mitigation). I may be underrating this, or it may be a problem with coding - a common problem for me at this Festival, see also Day 7 - because it definitely seemed like the film was coding its heroes (the parents of the girl's slightly older boyfriend) as misguided rather than enlightened in their ultra-liberal values ("We respect your privacy," they say, and "Who am I to judge?" when the prickly subject of a sexually-active 12-year-old comes up). Just about everyone agrees that the ending - i.e. the last couple of scenes - is a mistake, casting the girl as Sacrificial Lamb, but I had some issues with the rest of it as well - perhaps conditioned by a review in "Now" that mentioned Chabrol (note to self: don't ever read "Now"), but also by shades of Haneke like the teenage boy obsessed with war-games or the pristine spaces of the lakeside-chalet setting, ripe for despoilment (at some point I noted it came off like FUNNY GAMES with permissive morals in the role of Peter and Paul). The film seems to be setting itself up for violent explosion - there are even teaser lines, as when Dad cheerily asks "Did you drown your girlfriend?", and teaser scenes like the macabre "bog-bodies" - possibly accompanied by the Chabrolian dark joke of the bourgeoisie finally triumphing regardless; it's par for the course in this genre that guilt and remorse aren't allowed to take root, which is also a political comment on the middle-class talent for conspicuous consumption (country homes, sailboats) untempered by any sense of guilt or noblesse oblige. 

 Instead, though there is indeed a tragedy - and it comes, significantly, at the very moment when Mom speaks for the first time of setting rules - it exposes nothing about the characters, no hidden cruelty, no skull beneath the skin; at worst it's passive-aggressive, and even then quite mild (it's a case of bad judgment more than anything). It's a dramatic catalyst, as in any drama - and maybe my coding was just off and the film is indeed a drama (not a slow-burning thriller), five dysfunctional people in a summer by the lake. It's hard to parse, because there's surely a repressed something in the badminton games and al fresco dinners, the glossy surface of family life - but maybe it's just uncertainty, played off the girl's imperturbable certainty. She remains a mystery, and even when we hear of her hysteria - when she supposedly goes off in a sulk because the neighbour rejected her advances - we only have his own unreliable account to go on (it's just as likely he attacked her, or indeed that nothing much happened and he's just spelling out his repressed desires). Throughout, permissive adults and precocious children seem to have switched places - and maybe that's the point of the ending, that even when the adults seem to triumph (when they finally 'set the rules') they get undermined. It may be worth seeing this again, if it plays at Thessaloniki...        

Rest of the Day: SLUMMING (55) (dir., Michael Glawogger): Feels like a construct, though the characters are apparently based around the actors playing them, as you'd expect from a documentarian (Glawogger's noted that the actor playing the demented street-poet was even more outrageous in real life). Street-poet is one of the heroes, the other being an unpleasant rich pup who specialises in meeting women through the internet and taking photos of their crotch under the table; he also makes up lives for people he sees on the street, echoing the film's theme which seems to be the varied richness of humanity (as you'd expect from a documentarian). Has its moments but characters are thin, and the ending - when rich pup goes to the Far East and seems to find happiness, the apparent point being that all he needed to cure him of his toxic ennui was a change of scenery - is even thinner. Unless I missed something. § THE SUGAR CURTAIN (52) (dir., Camila Guzman Urzua): Growing up in Cuba in the 70s and 80s, when things were undoubtedly different (Fidel could rely on the Soviet Union for subsidies) but the film's interviewees were also kids, a detail they seem to have missed as they go on (and on) about the decline of the Revolution. "Money was unimportant then," they recall sadly, but money is unimportant in a happy childhood; "The last 3 years of the Cold War were the happiest of my life," claims someone, which sounds impressive till you realise he was 15-18 years old at the time. Their criticisms of today's schools ring hollow ("no snacks" seems to be the main problem), and when Guzman Urzua interviews 00s Cuban kids - e.g. at the rural camp - they sound happy enough; besides, even as she claims Cuba used to be a paradise she also admits she clashed with authority as a teen and chafed at many of the rules, so not much change there. Fascinating for its inner tension, unspoken nostalgia unacknowledged by the filmmaker; Havana does look fairly tattered (esp. in grotty DV) and it's clear things haven't gone so well - a whole generation seems to have chosen to live abroad - but it's a study in self-delusion more than anything. Best line, from a local musician looking back on his teen years: "We lived like the Greeks, eating simply and thinking great thoughts..."  § 7 YEARS (42) (dir., Jean-Pascal Hattu): People seem to like this, so I dunno. Love triangle of sorts - wife, incarcerated husband, prison warden - not well acted imho (the lead actress is especially wooden), focus switching without much coherence. Starts on wife's POV, then shifts away to suggest various promising avenues (e.g. that it may in fact be a love story between the two men), none of them explored very rewardingly. The kind of film where people's emotions seem to change from scene to scene, and it's hard to know if that's evidence of complexity or incompetence; I chose the latter, and tuned out halfway through. § CATCH A FIRE (35) (dir., Phillip Noyce): Apartheid drama in (yes!) Black and White, with Derek Luke as the peace-loving family man - mocked as an "Uncle Tom" by fellow blacks, which doesn't sound very South African - finally stung into action by the iniquities of the System. Tim Robbins is the villain, who's not just a villain but a clever villain (he knows apartheid is doomed) but still turns up to harass Derek's wife chewing on a toothpick like a thug in a cheap Western. No cliché left unturned - notably: ANC funeral cross-cut with Afrikaans cops getting medals - plus Mandela cameo and copious mention of "terrorists" for that topical flavour. No surprises, except how did the other ANC comrades avoid giggling every time Comrade Pete My Baby's name came up in conversation?  

DAY 4: BODIES

 My own body let me down this morning - or perhaps vice versa, since I forced it to sit through a six-film day on nothing but breakfast and a couple of bagels then took it to a pub ("The Duke of Gloucester") with Charles Odell and Victor Morton, who's like a machine when it comes to booze (though I drank Irish ale, and he only drank piss-water lager). Anyway I didn't think two pints would be a problem, but I went to bed at 3, woke up at 5 with stomach pains, tumbled back into uneasy sleep and woke up at 9 with such a headache that - for the first time in my Festival-going career - I blew off a scheduled movie so I could get more sleep. Fortunately the film in question was Christopher Guest's FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION, which I kind of knew would be blah (it is, by all accounts) - but it still got me thinking about bodies, and the burden of bodies, and all the trouble they cause. The same thought must have occurred to Tsai Ming-liang, because I DON'T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE (73) (dir., Tsai Ming-liang) Lee Kang-sheng, Chen Siang-chyi, Norman Bin Atun is all about bodies - not so much the exciting things bodies do but the burden of bodies, the absurdity of carrying these things around with us and having to maintain them. I don't think I've ever seen a film with so many shots of bodies being groomed in one way or another - being fed, being cleaned, being healed, having their clothes washed, having makeup removed from their faces. Everything's a struggle - even, in the film's virtuoso final section, the act of breathing itself, the most basic part of maintaining a body (a thick haze descends, forcing everyone to wear masks as they wheeze and cough). Tsai's tackled such themes before, of course, notably in THE RIVER, but his doleful worldview usually gets filtered through deadpan jokes; here, almost for the first time, the jokes are gone, making for perhaps the purest expression of his sensibility.

 I don't miss the jokes, though it's true the shots are less dynamic than before, simply in the sense of less happening (I love the film, but I also love Dan Sallitt's comment that every shot is like "Where's Waldo?"). But it's hard to grumble too much when the visuals qua visuals are so luscious. One shot disperses light through a dark, gutted building, reflected in a kind of flooded basement along with the mirror-image of a lonely figure crouched on the first floor. A sickbed appears through a diaphanous haze, a mosquito-net effect that's both lovely and a little eerie. A street-scene at night plays neon signs off a clutch of shimmering sparklers, buzzing and fizzing in a corner of the frame. A Bollywood dance-number glitters like a rare jewel on a TV in a shop-window, obscured by the shuffle and rush of passers-by. Best of all is the wondrous opening shot - a hospital bed on which lies a supine, seemingly comatose figure, the paralysed man played by Lee Kang-sheng. The light in the room slowly brightens, then darkens, then brightens again - presumably a case of the sun through the window being covered and uncovered by passing clouds, but also a visual representation of the sick man's breathing, in and out, in and out. There's nothing in that shot except his breathing, just as he himself is nothing but a body (he actually seems catatonic rather than paralysed). Lives have been pared-down to the starkly physical (there's almost no dialogue), the only exception being the Bangladeshi foreign workers whom we see actually yelling and interacting, maybe because they're not strictly part of Malay society; the film is infected with a crushing, deliberate heaviness - but grace-notes do exist. A butterfly flutters through one of the scenes - expertly wrangled, so it floats around for a while then exits just in time for the scene to start - later to be mentioned in a song on the soundtrack. And then there's the final shot, a serene ode to the weightless and ethereal - a mattress floating down on the waters, entering the frame from top to bottom so it looks like a hovering spaceship coming down from the sky, a vagrant from a lighter, freer world. On it are a trio of people sleeping side-by-side, because - per the title - all we really have is other people, friends and kind strangers to help heal our bodies, lovers to press their limbs against our own. Is it love? Or just the numbed desperation of survivors huddling together on a raft in the middle of the ocean?    

Rest of the Day: BORAT (60) (dir., Larry Charles): Funny stuff, so it barely matters that there's only one joke - or actually two jokes, ignorant superstitious Borat meeting Americans who are nothing like him and ignorant superstitious Borat meeting Americans who are just like him (rednecks, gun-nuts, homophobes, fundamentalists). It'd be instructive to comb through it carefully and note where it goes all the way and where it pulls its punches (e.g. in the church scene) illustrating which US sub-cultures you can safely make fun of and which ones you have to be careful about - but why bother when you can follow Borat's quest for Pamela Anderson, a creature of charm, beauty "and the asshole of a 7-year-old"? Can't recall when I've been in a crowd that laughed so hard - if the Toronto press corps were representative of the mass audience, this film would make 100 zillion dollars - though the Laurel and Hardy reference got nary a titter. Nude wrestling scene = instant classic. § RESCUE DAWN (66) (dir., Werner Herzog): A tightrope successfully walked: Herzog makes a straightforward war movie, but also holds on to his Herzog-ness. Crowd-pleasing but quirky, mostly in the very Herzog-ian emphasis on authenticity - showing in detail how to pick a lock, focusing on hero's physical discomfort (he needs to go to the bathroom) when the Vietcong have him spread-eagled on the ground, etc - in the constant notion of Nature as antagonist, and just the way stock scenes are given a little fillip (as when the soldiers are asked if they're in or out re: the escape plan, and one of them says "out" when he means "in" leading to general confusion). Christian Bale gets less interesting as he goes along, starting as a true eccentric - he actually seems a bit retarded, moving thickly, talking without much expression - but turning increasingly heroic; Steve Zahn, on the other hand, may be in line for an Oscar nomination. § SCHUSS! (dir., Nicolas Rey): My annual dip into the avant-garde, which is why I've decided on no rating (I guess it'd be around 40); I should obv. have gone for the Wavelengths program with the Jennings and Dorsky, though the program-blurb made this sound way more enticing than it was ("reinvigorates the experience of film-viewing"?). Political subtext on the dubious development of an Alpine ski resort, plus the rather sinister history of aluminium production in the area, but it's actually a series of 'chapters' with a near-identical structure, each one supplying an abstract audio-visual impression backed by an old quote or document. Not much development, and I really should've walked out after the third or fourth 'chapter' - having realised I'd seen 90% of what the film has to offer - and gone to Greg's Ice Cream next door (which was closed by the time I finally got there) to sample their famous Marshmallow flavour, featuring that burnt-sugar taste which is also integral to Jones cream soda, Canada's main contribution to world cuisine. Wikipedia claims cream sodas exist all over the world but I've never had anything like that vanilla-shaded drink in the bottle with the white-on-black label; the last thing I always do before leaving Toronto is to use my remaining loose change to buy a bottle from the cream-soda stand at the airport (it's in International Departures, almost at the boarding-gates). This is my review of SCHUSS! in my opinion.      

DAY 5: SECRETS

 An object lesson: two great films, high style vs. low style (or perhaps no style), dealing in the same unquenchable theme - secret lives, hidden identities - with the same compelling results. PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES (69) (dir., Alain Resnais) Sabine Azéma, Lambert Wilson, André Dussolier, Pierre Arditi won Best Director in Venice, to which the only sane response is 'Well, of course it did'. Resnais once again does Alan Ayckbourn, once again - for better or worse - with the usual stock company, and I only add 'for worse' because Dussolier, for all his accomplishment, seems a decade too old for his role; then again, I got the impression he and the girl were supposed to be brother and sister whereas I'm now informed it was some bizarre May-December open marriage (was it? really?) so maybe I'm being unfair. The film is a bubble - it's a shock when we glimpse the outside world going by in a late shot - and made with a kind of magisterial abandon; the snow-clad dissolve-transitions from scene to scene are the most obvious bit of mise-en-scène, but even a typical shot might include, for instance, a discreet zoom-out from a Bible followed by a pan with Sabine Azéma (the Bible's owner) as she walks to the door; the opening segues from a snowy (presumably CGI) urban vista to extreme close-ups and shallow-focus in a matter of minutes, and - as noted by the great Michael Sicinski - space is throughout cut into slivers by bead curtains and glass partitions (the shallow-focus also plays a role here). The effect is to create a sense of isolated lives co-existing in a complex whole; there's a God's-eye view - and a God's-eye shot, when we gaze down into an apartment as if looking at a blueprint - and a sense of a bigger picture denied to each individual character, mostly of course because all the main characters have secret (private) lives known only to themselves. "Hell is within us," says (I think) Azéma, speaking for religion - the possibility of salvation, finding and redeeming that inner Hell - but the opposite view is claimed by Arditi, who asks: "What can we be except what we are?". That's why Resnais' style is apt, because he's a god moving characters like pawns - the play itself is so-so; as Michael notes, Ayckbourn isn't far from the British Neil Simon - and God, in the sense of determinism, lies at the core of the drama. Will the characters stay on their set paths, yearning for love, keeping their hearts hidden? (The French title is COEURS, and an alternative title might be "Hearts in Winter".) Or will they blossom, find their true selves, merge the private and public? I was with the film almost to the end, but the resolutions felt contrived (in a bad way), going for a rueful melancholy that seemed to come out of nowhere - or, more accurately, seemed to reflect the surface of what came before without accounting for its eddies and undercurrents; a suspended, playful ending (maybe the kind of sudden 'French ending' favoured by Jacquot or Assayas) might've been more appropriate. Or maybe Resnais should've heeded the words of the pious Azéma: "In the end, we're all judged and forgiven"... 

 Judged, yes, but forgiven? Not according to Bobcat Goldthwait, who opened a hilarious Q&A by telling a woman in the audience to "shut your piehole" (she'd asked him a question about his girlfriend) and drew gasps by calling her "Yeasty" - but also made SLEEPING DOGS LIE (74) (second viewing: 73) (dir., Bobcat Goldthwait) Melinda Page Hamilton, Bryce Johnson, Colby French, a joke that turns into more. Even the style worked for me in this startling low-budget movie, which feels the way indies used to feel before they got glossy-fied - a homemade feel, with blocky staging, shots that don't always match and cheerful music plastered wall-to-wall as if to conceal flimsy sound design. At least the prologue features the imperishable "Boum", albeit over an unnatural act between heroine and canine companion; the act reverberates, finally erupting in the midst of a splendid meet-the-family sequence, as grotesque and claustrophobic as the ones in LITTLE MURDERS, ANNIE HALL and BUFFALO '66 - which is when the film really takes off, testing (and exposing) the hollow foundations of any say-anything relationship. As in CLOSER, the point seems to be that a little mendacity is a healthy thing between partners, at least - if nothing else - to avoid ugly scenes where Partner A refers to Partner B as a "dog-blowing cunt". Goldthwait doesn't have much flair but he has a sensibility - a knowledge that people are basically irrational, a faith in impulsive behaviour and a reckless desire to stretch things out and see how far they go. The film isn't much, but it's worth a dozen LITTLE MISS SUNSHINEs. [Second viewing, June 2008: Won't go so far as to say the absence of style is itself a style - but there's def. signs of directorial personality here, the personality in question being quite insecure (no surprise the Right Guy turns out to be a man with low self-esteem): Goldthwait uses clunky visuals, tinkly Muzak and deliberate coarseness ("I got fucked good because of it") to camouflage a shrewd and mordant view of human relations, just like he uses the Dog Thing to hide the film's seriousness. Hard to ignore, on second viewing, that much of it is just too brusque and cheap-looking to provide much pleasure, but I'm stunned how close it comes to greatness in the third act, moving into damaged-people psychodrama - and beyond the Dog Thing - with aplomb. Bobcat, you sense, knows comedy, but he understands unhappiness.]    

Rest of the Day: PRAGUE (w/o) (dir., Ole Christian Madsen): Danish yuppie and wife go to Prague, encounter hostile Czech types and Kafkaesque (tm) gloomy humour; meanwhile their marriage is falling apart. Gave this a chance when I couldn't get into GOLDEN DOOR, walked out on about 40 minutes when it became apparent the hostile Czech types were going to offer Life Lessons - "Life is hard and you can't have it all," our hero is told, and the line gets repeated verbatim a couple of scenes later. Who needs that shit. § THE MISSING STAR (33) (dir., Gianni Amelio): "I never imagined China was like this". Communication problems, as in other Amelios I've seen, but the deadlock was made beautiful in STOLEN CHILDREN and KEYS TO THE HOUSE whereas this is thunderingly banal, a tourist's-eye view of China (they eat weird things for breakfast, and build tall buildings without elevators). There's a translator girl who speaks Italian, only she says "devoured" when she means "divorced" (imagine that) and of course our hero wins her over as he goes about his quest. The quest turns out to be meaningless in itself - but it helps him find peace, sitting on a barge with gentle music on the soundtrack as the film winds down. Nondescript at best, mildly offensive for viewers who've seen actual Chinese documents like STILL LIFE; even Sergio Castellitto can't save it. § THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY (37) (dir., Michael Ian Black): Farrellys-derived, dark in a gross-out way - a diaphragm ends up in a sandwich; delightful Isla Fisher plays a tender scene with snot all over her face; hero later spits toothpaste all over her - building to a kind of screwball comedy with everyone in jail (though it pussies out on the truly dark strand of dead girlfriend controlling our hero's romantic life from beyond the grave). Pointlessly quirky minor characters - Russian friend is obsessed with circuses; Jewish dad made his fortune with toys aimed specifically at Jewish kids like the Jewla-hoop and the Jew-nicorn - occasional laughs in the out-of-nowhere moments like the cop who dry-humps a witness for no reason at all. Frantic, flashy and consistently vulgar; at least it makes a break from Festival fodder.    

DAY 6: THE BIG GUNS (MIS)FIRE

 Obviously today was the big day, at least on paper. With one obvious exception - and I'm told Nacho Cerda actually has a major rep in horror circles, which I wouldn't have guessed from his movie - every film on my schedule today should have played in the Masters section of the Festival (as it happens, none of them did). I won't say much on FAY GRIM (46) (dir., Hal Hartley) Parker Posey, James Urbaniak, Jeff Goldblum, Saffron Burrows, except that some have called it Hartley's comeback after 9 years in the relative wilderness - the years since HENRY FOOL, to which this is a sequel. To me it seemed exactly the opposite, proof that he's now forgotten what made his style click and can never come back, at least till he finds a whole new schtick. This is his jokey take on DA VINCI CODE, though also - credit to Victor for spotting the analogy - his take on THE THIRD MAN, with canted angles and a Harry Lime figure (initially presumed dead) who doesn't appear till the final act; it's also extremely annoying, because Hartley's deadpan style has been more or less preserved but speeded-up, thereby losing its point. The point was never the clever talk per se - the point was the silence between the brittle chatter, placing everything in invisible scare quotes, and the style that reflected that silence. To take an obvious example, Hartley's trademark trick of cutting back-and-forth to whoever is talking in any conversation becomes expressive - expressing alienation, blocking the characters off from each other - when it's given due weight, so you feel their isolation; when it's done fast (as here), it just becomes busy and enervated. Making things worse is that Henry Fool himself, once a vain loser, now seems quite a powerful man, squashing Osama types with barely a flicker ("How goes the jee-had, you cheap fuck?") - and making things even worse is the movie's look, that clinical hi-def which is fast becoming almost as repellent as the streaky DV it's replacing. Grim? Yes indeed.

 Fortunately, there's also Joe - Apichatpong to his mom, still sui generis to most of his fans though SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY (82) (dir., Apichatpong Weerasethakul) Nantarat Sawaddikul, Jaruchai Iamaram, Sophon Pukanok uses most of the techniques of TROPICAL MALADY (a new style is promised for his next excursion). The films are so similar it's hard to see how Joe fans can love one and not the other, though of course the subject is different in this case - not earthbound vs. rapturous or naturalistic vs. transcendent but simply old vs. new, rural vs. urban, which is bound to be a lost cause with some people (MALADY soars in its second half, SYNDROMES moves sideways). Then again, it's also hard to see why e.g. Christoph Huber in an (excellent) article in "Cinema Scope" calls the film "reliably mysterious" when Joe goes out of his way to provide mirror-images all over the place - including, most transparently, a group of guys and a group of girls who run into each other going in different directions, each group featuring a laggard who stays behind to tie his/her shoelace. Described like that, it sounds hopelessly schematic, but the genius of Joe's last two films (I'd say three films, if I could figure out a through-line in BLISSFULLY YOURS) is the way clues are casually dropped as the film meanders gracefully, picking up people's stories and soaring into moments of blissful abstraction. 

 Structurally, SYNDROMES works by repetition, opening with a doctor's interview in a country clinic that gets repeated (with small but significant variations) about halfway through in an urban hospital. The two halves cover similar ground, pointedly echoing each other. A black circle is a solar eclipse in the first, the nozzle of an exhaust-pipe in the second. Both end on a public performance, though the first aims to uplift and the second to improve. In other hands, the film might be dry and simplistic - especially the hands of a filmmaker bent on repeating the standard mantra about Rural Authenticity good, Urban Development bad (for all his virtues, Jia Zhang Ke has made a career out of milking this mantra). For a while, it's true, SYNDROMES seems to toe the Party line; the scenes in the hospital are more abrupt, the people less interested in each other's problems; when a monk visits a dentist in the first half, he relates his dream about killer chickens and listens to the dentist's own story (turns out he always wanted to be a DJ), but the urban repetition is more businesslike, less digressive. On the other hand, the second half is more visually interesting. The rural interview is straight-on medium-shots of applicant and interviewer, but when we get to the city it's an angled two-shot with more depth-of-field, taking in the urban panorama through the window. [Second viewing, and I think I may be wrong on this detail. In fact, shot-size and angles are almost identical in the two variations (though there probably is more depth-of-field), no surprise since the film is still concerned with establishing the doubling effect at this point. Read on for more second-viewing comments.] The old and new co-exist in each half, once in the rural half when a monk tries to trade potions (herbal medicine for sleeping pills) with a doctor, only to find the doctor ungenerous, then in the urban half when traditional healing is attempted on a problem youngster - and in this case one of the doctors stares straight into the camera to express her disapproval, a knowing device that deliberately breaks with classical storytelling. Above all, the urban half finds beauty in avant-garde combinations of movement and sound (much like the second half of TROPICAL MALADY), notably the pan through an empty cellar scored to ambient music. Joe's work is about looking closer, and perhaps about acceptance - not just mouthing standard humanist bromides but accepting different kinds of beauty, like the subtle shifts in rhythm between one variation and another. The city's more sophisticated visuals - and cinematic tricks - have their own kind of beauty, even if they miss the charm of the country. There's a (yes!) generosity here, and perhaps something pointedly Buddhist; there's no doubt Joe's peregrinations take him towards the ineffable - but you don't need to care about spiritual matters to admire his audacity. As I think I analogized at the Golden Griddle (it was late; I was tired), it's like someone saying that a bottle of ketchup is like the sun; a pantheist might agree, but agreement isn't really important - it's enough if you see what he's doing, follow his thought and appreciate the kind of mind who'd make that comparison. 

 In a way I'm glad I keep seeing Joe's films at festivals, before people raise my expectations; it may be impossible to fall under their spell if you go in expecting a masterpiece. He's a kind of Italo Calvino, playing riffs and variations, and it's no accident that Calvino wrote simply, without obfuscation; Joe, too, films simply, often lulling the audience into a gentle rhythm, the better to segue into one of his crystalline Perfect Moments. The guitar interlude halfway through SYNDROMES is one of the most magical things I've seen this year, but it couldn't work if I saw it in isolation - and it couldn't work for you if I described it, so I won't. Magic seems to issue from his films in a natural process, like blossoms from a twig. He's an original. [Second viewing, no change in rating, but one thing I noticed this time round is how aware the country people are of their environment and its capacity for magic; there's talk of "an invisible force", "a powerful place" - even when a character is told "Be careful that something doesn't pull you in" [to a lake] the implication is that "something" might be a demon rather than a fish. The city people, on the other hand, make no such comments - yet their environment is in fact much weirder, more suggestive, more redolent of magical forces. The frame (for the first time in the movie) is full of diagonals, we circle cryptic statues to the strains of unearthly music, not to mention that near-sentient nozzle; it's like TROPICAL MALADY in reverse - the jungle is simple, urban life is mysterious. And the point is that we have all this magic around us and never acknowledge it, instead creating an idealised view of the country as a more 'pure', 'authentic' place (indeed, every time city life intrudes on the country it seems wrong, and vice versa; the bureaucratic doctor who won't give the monk his pills, despite accepting a favour in return, and the woman trying the useless chakra treatment on the lost boy); Joe's target seems to be not spirituality per se but people's unwillingness to look - i.e. look deeply - at what's around them, and I'd say his sympathies lie more with the second half. He's the opposite of the Miramax-approved rustic idylls.]    

Rest of the Day: THE ABANDONED (24) (dir., Nacho Cerda): I don't even get what happens in this movie. (Neither, to my immense relief, did Jim Ridley.) Why do our heroes hang around the house saying they're going to be killed at midnight? (Run! Leave the house!) What's all the full-circle malarkey? Spanish director, Russian settings, English language, but still the kind of film where heroine goes into an old house deep in the forest at night, armed only with a torch, going through each room in turn shouting "Hello? Hello?" as the camera follows portentously (then she gets scared and tries to leave - but her car won't start!). Also murky and cheap-looking, beyond some reliably flashy detail (shafts of sunlight through the clouds, etc). Even the effects are dire. § BLACK BOOK (63) (dir., Paul Verhoeven): A rollicking yarn, and I guess you could say it's subverting WW2 movie convention by pulling the rug from under itself at regular intervals - there's at least two false starts in the first 15 minutes - showing what War is really like (i.e. volatile, unpredictable), but it's more likely the twists are part of Verhoeven's grand strategy of doing Hollywood in Europe. Hope it works out, and it may do - it's pacy, sexy, taking familiar situations (e.g. heroine making nice to a Nazi on the train to avoid pursuers) and making them its own (the Nazi turns out to be sympathetic, and changes her life); also smart enough to show how post-war chaos is almost as perilous as the war itself, also honest enough to show the Dutch Resistance being anti-Semitic even as they fight the Nazis. Too many twists, and the big one at the end doesn't really make sense (just like in Hollywood); also could've been more Verhoeven-ish, i.e. sardonic and extreme, but I'm not complaining. It's no SHINING THROUGH. § STILL LIFE (57) (dir., Jia Zhang-ke): Displaced families, cities in transition as China goes capitalist, the old giving way to the new. Absurdist detail ranges from the slightly laboured - Peking Opera actors playing videogames in full makeup - to the utterly demented (I won't spoil it; suffice to say the entire room was like "what the fuck?"), but I still found nothing in the film to be as strange as the artist in DONG, with his subtle incongruity in this provincial setting. Also thought it looked drab (can't get used to the chalky skin-tones and burned-yellow highlights of hi-def, though maybe it's a fault of the digital projection), albeit well-composed and sometimes remarkable in terms of logistics; the timing of the building that suddenly collapses in the background is as uncanny as the jumbo-jet that suddenly appears overhead at a strategic moment in THE WORLD.    

DAY 7: "I DON'T THINK YOU REALLY UNDERSTOOD THAT MOVIE"

 The perils of coding: What would you think of a woman who's sitting in a café with her boyfriend and lashes out - physically lashes out - at a waitress because she's convinced her guy was checking her out? Assume the same woman later wails to the boyfriend (who's shown no signs of wanting to leave her) "I'm sorry for having the same boring face every day!", and begs him to imagine she's someone else when they're having sex - only to berate him furiously when he does so. What would you call this woman? For me, obsessively jealous, insecure and neurotic to the point of psychosis would be fair enough. For Mike D'Angelo - with whom I had this conversation - a normal, eminently sane woman in the throes of a bad relationship would be a better description. For Kim Ki-duk ... well, who knows? But it makes a difference, because that's how TIME (62) (second viewing: 61) (dir., Kim Ki-duk) Sung Hyun-ah, Ha Jung-woo, Park Ji-yun kicks off, and how one views its heroine is bound to colour how one reads the movie. Especially if one was thinking AUDITION in those early scenes, and joining the dots between female hysteria and some later details, like a quiet girl who turns out to be a crack shot (cue shot of shells tearing violently through paper target) and a sculpture of a dog biting a man's penis, and a woman who crouches down on all fours to take the place of the dog - and parsing the film as a misogynist thriller, to Mike's evident bewilderment. "I don't think you really understood that movie..."

 Did I? Didn't I? Is Kim to blame? To some extent, probably. Films aren't real life; you only get a limited time - really just the first couple of scenes - to establish your characters, and if you're going to start said character at her full-tilt nuttiest, you have to expect some misunderstanding. Actually, I'm not even convinced I misunderstood; once possibly-nutty heroine gets plastic surgery without telling anyone the film becomes a kind of psychological mystery, with the audience trying to work out which of the many women Hapless Boyfriend comes into contact with (the blind date? the masked girl? the waitress?) might be his old girlfriend. Her aim is presumably (or possibly) to rekindle excitement by starting all over again, restoring the thrill of the chase, but in fact the film's dynamics - the informational imbalance, the knowledge that one character may be spying on another - give it a creepy undertow. Maybe Kim's style is just too robust for this kind of quasi-Hong gamesmanship; there's always a simmering violence to his films, a certain abruptness, a fondness for the clipped over the flowing e.g. in the way he shoots the argument in the café (though whether it's really there, or whether we induce it by the knowledge that we're watching a Kim Ki-duk Film, is a tough question to answer); the game feels edgy, like it might turn bad at any moment. It's easy to code his characters a certain way, as nutters and sadists - or to look at the more surreal elements, like the parallels being drawn in TIME between faces and masks, bodies and scupltures. That's what I latched onto, viewing the film as a tale of the unreality in human relationships - and the fear that ensues when we lose the familiar signpost of a loved one's identity. Then again, I was dozing off quite badly on Day 7... [Second viewing (16 months later) didn't really help: Knowing how it kicks off made the café scene go down a little easier, but it's no good - I really don't understand these people. I don't understand why the heroine is unhappy when her boyfriend falls in love with her all over again - proving that her face is immaterial, the experiment was a success, Time won't destroy their relationship - and why she becomes obsessed with making him choose between her old and new selves. I don't understand why he's so understanding and New Man-ish half the time, yet so volatile and violent the other half. Come to that, I don't understand why everyone's so incapable of having a public conversation without resorting to insults and fisticuffs - it's one thing when lovers let their feelings run away with them, but when the doctor says "Watch your mouth!" after hero berates him for operating on his girlfriend (when he could simply have replied: "What could I do? She wanted the surgery. I'm just doing my job") then beats him up and stands over him yelling "I'm a doctor!" ... well, the whole thing comes close to unintentional comedy. Might be culture-clash but I don't think it's a case of Those Nutty Koreans, I think it's that Kim is wobbly on characterization. He does have an eye for visual detail, though.]       

 It's a relief to go from TIME to ZIDANE: A 21st CENTURY PORTRAIT (61) (dir., Douglas Gordon & Philippe Parreno) - a good film but a film that exists in the conceptual realm, untouched by messy human relationships. Instead it's a film about icons, and levels of reality. On the first, most basic level - the level of a football/soccer game as it's actually being played, for a player actually on the playing-field - the game is a blur; Zinedine Zidane, one of the galacticos of giant Spanish club Real Madrid, is just another player, calling for the ball ("Hey!" he calls, and occasionally "Vamos!"), observing the game, trying to get involved; most of the time he does nothing, just waits and watches. On a second, more exalted level - the level of the game as a TV event, mediated and processed by the cameras, given a name and title (Real Madrid vs. Villareal, April 23 2005) - the game becomes coherent; Zidane is an icon, imposing his will on the goings-on (no-one thinks to ask what he's doing when he's not on the ball). On a third, yet more abstract level,  the level of the game as part of that day's events - the film takes advantage of half-time to list all the other stuff that happened in the world on April 23 - the game becomes a statistic, as distant and depersonalised as bombs in Iraq. The French title also translates as "Zidane: A Portrait of the 21st Century", which is actually better because the film is a portrait of the 21st century - a time of icons and sound-bites, messy reality tweaked, improved and handed back to us wrapped in glorious fakery. A goal is scored, and the commentator on TV goes wild; on the field, the players barely notice - Zidane doesn't even crack a smile, looking like a man in a dream - yet Zizou admits (in voice-over) that he often plays with a running commentary in his head, in the voice and tone of a TV commentator he remembers from childhood. Even in the midst of 'real' reality, we gravitate towards the manufactured one; it's how we experience football - and how we experience life. I'm pretty sure I understood that movie.               

Rest of the Day: EXILED (65) (dir., Johnnie To): Totally stylised - blood appears as a cloud of red powder after the bullet hits - totally into macho posturing over plot (script is credited to "Milkyway Creative Team", which may mean there wasn't one). Lots of comedy, lots of shoot-outs, lots of fun, but the themes of fraternity and honour (and the fear of exile from the charmed circle) were more substantial in ELECTION; best understood as visual patterns, which is fine for some. § THE JOURNALS OF KNUD RASMUSSEN (58) (Zacharias Kunuk & Norman Cohn): Gradually tuned out after a strong start, till it suddenly occurred to me that the film - in its quiet, undramatic way - was showing an entire native culture committing spiritual seppuku. Christianity is the culprit, though actually religion; "We believe happy people should not worry about hidden things," says an Inuit elder, adding that the spirits are offended "if we think too much" - and remote Jesus is contrasted with the shamans, who are part of the tribe and do their job like any other job ("Life's a dream," say the Christians, and the Inuit reply: "It is what it always is"). Too low-key and (yes) undramatic - but the climax, in its way, is as chilling as if one were at Jonestown watching the masses lining up to drink the Kool-Aid. (*) Loveliest line, from a dying old woman: "I'm overwhelmed by knowing I have had a happy life." (*) Though I now read J. Hoberman saying they're "starved into Christian conversion", so maybe this should be added to the many details I missed at this Festival; I def. got the impression they were converting voluntarily, not being coerced. Anyone who sees the film, please elucidate. § THE FOUNTAIN (37) (dir., Darren Aronofsky): So why is there three of him? Just because, apparently. Hugh Jackman floating in space in the lotus position, enclosed in a giant bubble, presumably explains "Premiere" magazine's hype as "The year's trippiest movie" - or maybe it just reads better than "year's murkiest" or "year's most pretentious". Jackman eats tree-sap that gushes out like shaving-cream in one dimension, while a Spanish Inquisitor flagellates himself in another and Rachel Weisz kisses Hugh in the bathtub (meanwhile dying of an obscure disease) in yet another. I'd better stop, before I make it sound interesting.      

DAY 8: OH TIFF IS SO AWESOME, PIERS HANDLING IS SO CLEVER AND GOOD-LOOKING

 Yes indeed; a little brown-nosing never hurt anyone. Besides, I may have to miss one or more TIFFs in future - those rising oil prices are murder on the plane ticket - so then I can show them this piece and get back in their good graces (wait, maybe I shouldn't actually advertise my hidden agenda in the piece itself though). In any case, I did miss last year's TIFF and was very impressed with the changes I found since two years ago, making a great Festival even better (you can quote me!). There used to be one press screening, but now many films have two. There used to be two public screenings, but now some films have three. Day 1 used to be pointlessly delayed - the idea being, I guess, that journalists could fly in in the morning, get their press pass and start watching films in the afternoon - but now it's a normal movie day with press screenings kicking off at 9 a.m. Speaking of which, those punishing 8.30 starts have gone as well - TIFF knows that TIFFsters get to bed late, and an extra half-hour of sleep is manna from heaven. On the other hand, press screenings now carry on till midnight on Days 1-7! We used to find ourselves at a loose end around 8 o'clock, our only option being to decamp to some public screening and spend an hour in a rush line - which might've been a problem in this year's inclement weather (by Cypriot standards, if not by Canadian), and in fact I wimpishly resolved not to rush anything unless the sun was shining or the night was mild - but now we could just keep going. Even better, the 10 p.m. screenings usually repeated the big Hollywood movies screened in the early morning, so you could pick up on buzz and avoid obvious stinkers (ALL THE KING'S MEN, apparently). The only downside was a near-total separation of press and public for the first half of the festival - but they were down at the Paramount anyway, so maybe it was all for the best.

 Getting back to those big Hollywood movies, though ... This was the first year I'd done Cannes in addition to Toronto, and it made a difference - for the first time I could snub the massive lines for films like VOLVER and BABEL. It was also, I felt, a bad year for Hollywood product (no SCHOOL OF ROCK, nothing that really leapt out), so I mostly avoided the massive lines for those films as well. This allowed me a whole new perspective on TIFF, though it was only around Day 3 that it finally dawned on me I was going from one half-empty press screening to another. There are nearly 1000 people in the Press corps, with probably just as many on the Industry side - but almost everyone goes for English-language fare spiced with the occasional VOLVER, a fact I always 'knew' but never quite registered before. "I haven't really been keeping up with the obscure movies," admitted an Industry type I fell into conversation with in line for the Jia, after I'd mentioned my Festival favourite was SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY. If you eavesdropped on people's conversations they were always talking about Galas ("High-Profile Films. Major Impact." raved the Festival program), or maybe Canadian films if they were Canadian. I went to the second press show of the obscure 7 YEARS, and was heartened to find a line outside the theatre - clearly, buzz had accumulated from the first screening - only to discover I was in the wrong place, and this was the line for Kenneth Branagh's THE MAGIC FLUTE. Why the fuck was there even a line for Kenneth Branagh's THE MAGIC FLUTE? (The line for Crialese's GOLDEN DOOR - a non-English-language film - was admittedly huge, but that may be put down to Day 5 and the press schedule thinning out before the assembled hacks did.)

 For many people, TIFF was an extension of the multiplex, mostly valuable in affording them bragging rights when they got back to Peoria or Saskatoon ('Yeah I saw BOBBY. Demi's great, Emilio did a good job, Sharon's okay but she doesn't look the same since the surgery...'). Then again, maybe tunnel-vision is par for the course. Maybe the world of movies is just too spread-out to allow for the dream of Eclectic Cinema. Waiting in line, I leafed through "Cinema Scope", where the aforementioned Michael Sicinski interviewed a dude called Scott MacDonald. MacDonald is himself an interviewer, known for the "Critical Cinema" series where he speaks to avant-garde filmmakers, and at one point Michael (no avant-garde slouch himself) put it to him that the people he speaks to are "often thought of as existing on the margins or as the radical fringe". Not exactly controversial, when you're speaking of folks like Su Friedrich and Rose Lowder - but MacDonald bristles. "Well," he says, "I've never thought of the filmmakers I interview or their films as 'marginal', or 'on the fringes of cinema' ... The filmmakers I interview are as central to the history of cinematic exploration and accomplishment as are Ford, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Kiarostami, Ozu, Herzog, whomever you want to mention."

 I'm not saying this is wrong or right. It just occurs to me how similar it is, in its way, to the people reflexively lining up for THE MAGIC FLUTE over 7 YEARS. Everyone looks after their own patch. Speaking of "Cinema Scope" reminds me of their "Vote for Pedro Costa" T-shirts, some of which people were wearing at the Festival - a good joke, but also a case of wearing your team's colours to the big game. (Maybe in future TIFF can award prizes by acclamation, so everyone gets to whoop for "their" movies and we'll see who whoops the loudest.) And speaking of Pedro Costa reminds me of the auteurist-sounding fellow whom I overheard insisting that his guy was "more experimental than people think"; craning closer to hear which director he was talking about (Aronofsky?), it turned out he was actually talking about ... Vince Vaughn. (I keep forgetting how many fans follow actors' careers as if they actually made the films they star in.) 

 Again, tunnel-vision - and it doesn't even stop at the macro-level. We each do different TIFFs, but we watch different versions of the same film as well. There's the problem of coding [see Day 7], interpreting things according to our various life-experiences. There's also the awkward problem of me being me and you being you. Even with a coterie of immensely smart, enthusiastic people, post-film discussion often stalled at the level of "That sucked" / "That was awesome". Even when films were 'explained', it didn't always help. Jeremy Heilman thinks TAXIDERMIA is an allegory of 20th-century Hungarian history. (What can I say? It could be.) Noel Murray has a theory on PAN'S LABYRINTH, a film I pretty much blew off when I saw it at Cannes - partly because I couldn't figure out what the Spanish Civil War had to do with the central plot. Noel's take (in broad terms; I forget the details) is that it's really about how our actions are judged then judged again by History, the girl's ostensibly 'wrong' actions turning out to be 'right' in the same way as the ostensible losers of the Civil War are now seen as morally superior. I have nothing but respect for Noel's critical chops, but this struck me as a pretty strained reading - and he must've caught a flash of incredulity in my expression, because he shrugged, smiled and added: "Worked for me."

 There it is, in three words; unarguable proof. We may watch films in groups (by convention, more than anything), but we're all alone when it comes to our response. If it works, it works. I'm actually surprised Hollywood hasn't funded any experiments (maybe they have) strapping various people to electrodes as they watch a movie and studying their brain-patterns. I'm convinced some tune out early, even if they like a film - maybe even earlier when they like a film - others maintain a steady pulse throughout, some brains overheat and others shut down. What would the encephalogram of someone watching COLOSSAL YOUTH even look like? I don't know - but I know we'd all be different. Maybe TIFF '07 can offer a free MRI with every four Discovery movies.   

Films of the Day: THE ISLAND (63) (dir., Pavel Lounguine): A bit like THE RETURN, another stark Russian landscape movie. Static moody grandeur, sea and rocks, a black-clad figure praying for forgiveness. Guilt hangs heavy, ditto fatalism ("It was preordained"), ditto God - though the hero, an ornery mystic and "holy man", is somewhat hilarious, giving bad advice to his various supplicants to make their lives as hard as possible (only through pain comes salvation, etc). His own redemption feels thin - the ending seems tacked-on - but much of the film takes a kind of Bunuelian pleasure in the contortions of moral masochism. Haven't seen any of Lounguine's previous films but apparently he specialises in skewering the excesses of the 'New Russia', so this old-style religious austerity may be more regressive (and less ambivalent) than it seems; 'very Russian', in any case. § THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY (57) (dir., Ken Loach): "It's easy to know what you're against, quite another thing to know what you're for." A worthy exercise, starting off simplistic with the nation united against an odious invader - "the shame of foreign chains around us," per the title song - only to get more complex as the Irish Free State sets off a bitter civil war between ideologues and pragmatists; alas, Loach's sympathies are obvious throughout, and it's too much of an action thriller, not enough of an elegy (the political debates are better than the shoot-outs, though the execution of a "traitor" is memorably unceremonious). Gritty but flat, like a LAND AND FREEDOM lacking in poignant romanticism; maybe Paul Laverty's just made Loach more boring... § THE DOG PROBLEM (53) (dir., Scott Caan): The exact same sensibility as in DALLAS 362, which is weird since the two films are so different. Once again, Caan tries to get a catch-phrase off the ground (and mostly fails, like that girl in MEAN GIRLS) - last time it was "It's a whole thing", this time "Life is a delicate negotiation". Once again, he casts himself as the jock best-friend to a more sensitive hero - though Ribisi's character is more of a loser (and Ribisi himself not as winning as Shawn Hatosy). Once again, the overall sensibility is macho - more explicitly in this case, with the hero's virility in question (everyone thinks his dog is a 'she', and you know what they say about dogs resembling their masters) till he proves himself at the climax. Once again, the dialogue riffs rather than builds. Once again, the last couple of minutes lets it down. Visual invention is low in this case, and there are missteps (e.g. an early joke is spoiled by cross-cutting to Caan catching up with the girl, instead of just disappearing in pursuit), but he's going to make a brilliant film someday. It's a matter of time. § THE FALL (59) (dir., Tarsem): Tarsem does THE PRINCESS BRIDE crossed with Arabian Nights fantasy about kings and castles (the garish colours and outlandish costumes also made me think of the Power Rangers); initially dreadful, but then it grows increasingly insane - the storyteller turns out to be a suicidal self-loathing creep, and he changes the story in mid-stream so everyone starts dying in violent ways and the little girl he's telling it to gets more and more freaked-out (it really exposes the cosy glibness of BRIDE's child-sized post-modernism). The girl herself is chubby, befuddled, hilarious and incomprehensible, either the worst or best child actress in recent memory (I vote 'best'). By no means a good film, but compellingly nuts; can we get a moratorium on Beethoven's Seventh now, please? § TRANCE (41) (dir., Teresa Villaverde): A track across an ice-sheet as it cracks down the middle. Whores dancing in a green room. A mad Italian youth comparing a vagina to a crushed flower. A man repeatedly asking "Do you like this music?" (there's no music playing). Also a theme about immigrant identity - the heroine is Russian, but not quite Russian - and exploitation (she's sold into prostitution), of women and presumably the weak in general. As in L'INTRUS, I lost interest and only recall the prominent details; unlike Claire Denis, Villaverde doesn't seem singular enough to warrant a second viewing (though I watched L'INTRUS again, and still didn't like it). Wilfully opaque, as per the title.    

DAYS 9 & 10: ELEPHANTS IN THE BEDROOM

 For a long time I thought of DAY NIGHT DAY NIGHT (73) (dir., Julia Loktev) Luisa Williams, Josh P. Weinstein, Gareth Saxe as another ELEPHANT. Not because it shares stylistic traits with the Gus Van Sant - the obvious point of comparison is instead KEANE - but because it seemed to be doing the same thing, taking a topical/controversial topic [spoilers coming up!] and turning it into a formal exercise. The film was thrilling, but I couldn't see the point - at least till the end, actually the very last line, when the penny dropped. The topic in this case is suicide bombers, following a female bomber's final hours before she's due to detonate her bomb in the middle of Times Square - and the film focuses almost entirely on Luisa Williams' face (burning eyes, full lips, rather low nose) and her actions as she prepares for the Big Moment. She bathes and cleans herself - soaps her skin, shaves her armpits, cuts her nails. She speaks, briefly, to her fellow terrorists. She's asked what size clothes she wears, and gives a detailed reply. She brushes her teeth and uses toiletries - body cream, deodorant - for the last time, then throws the cans away. Then she's in New York, walking through the city with a bomb strapped to her back - biding her time, buying junk-food indiscriminately, looking round at the sea of humanity. Loktev has much the same problem as Van Sant did, namely that her subject is so enormous it's impossible to make convincing. How does a suicide bomber really feel - I mean really - as he or she gets ready to push the button? What drives a person to that situation? And how do you show it all in 90 minutes? Clearly the girl is smart, probably smarter than her captors (asking, for instance, why she still has to detonate the bomb if no-one's around, and getting no answer), so why does she do it? Van Sant pretty much gave up on his killers, throwing an array of possible Elephants into the mix and concentrating on making pretty pictures (which is why ELEPHANT struck me as half-baked) - but Loktev is cannier, not spelling out her heroine's motivation but gradually allowing the kind of things affecting her mindset to bubble to the surface. The elephant in this case is religion, which of course is no surprise for a suicide bomber yet doesn't (or didn't) come to mind because the film is so matter-of-fact, so fixated on physical detail. Only near the end did it occur to me that divesting herself of possessions (even just toiletries) was a purification ritual, and the scene where she repeats details of her fake identity over and over - answering questions posed by the chief terrorist - was a kind of catechism; only in the very last moments ("Please give me a sign") did the subtle insanity of her world become apparent. Unlike KEANE, which faltered at the end, DAY NIGHT retains its integrity.

 Nothing but integrity in HAMACA PARAGUAYA (48) (dir., Paz Encina) Georgina Genes, Ramon del Rio, also a formal exercise, also a film with an elephant in the bedroom - the son of an elderly Paraguayan couple, fighting in the war against Bolivia. The film is defined by absence and uncertainty - uncertainty over the son's fate, but also over everything else. "Is it going to rain or isn't it?" asks the old man (or possibly the old woman). "I can hear the birds, but I can't see them," says the old woman (or possibly the old man). A dog barks, stops barking, barks again. The shadow of Death hangs over the land. "We have been forgetting many things lately," they admit - and the film's wry twist comes when the truth finally emerges, only for the couple to decide they prefer absence and uncertainty (rain finally arrives but only over the closing credits, after they pack up the titular hammock and go home). I give the film props, because I only went in reluctantly - I'd got it in my head that I should've seen DARK BLUE ALMOST BLACK instead - but found myself getting drawn into it, and had quite forgotten my reservations at the 20-minute mark; but it's also true that the spell wore off and my eyelids hung heavy at the end, which is pretty bad going for a 9 a.m. screening. I admit it's meticulous minimalism, and fully believe the folks (e.g. baaab) who point out that every single shot is matched with a rhyming shot; then again, it doesn't seem all that hard to work out a game-plan when you're making a 78-minute film with two actors and a hammock...    

Films of the Day: BELLE TOUJOURS (53) (dir., Manoel de Oliveira): Questions of sin, (un)reality and the passing of Time, vaguely evoking BELLE DE JOUR's ambiguous tone through its antic, stilted theatricality - though it can't evoke the passion, and it doesn't even try. Me: "So why'd they have to eat the entire meal in real-time?"; Jeremy Heilman: "Because it was funny!". You know what? I think he's right. § FANTASMA (27) (dir., Lisandro Alonso): A horrible thought: What if I only liked Alonso's two previous films because of their exotic settings, like the worst kind of cinematic tourist? Transposed to the city, his rhythms seem forced, his visuals slapdash, his in-jokes unfunny. Maybe it's just that it doesn't seem earned, since he'd previously made a virtue of invisibility - it's like watching the 'Making of' of a 'Making of'. Dull, to put it kindly. § ABENI (35) (dir., Tunde Kelani): "Nollywood" explained: it's because they don't have television! Most of this plays like a dubbed telenovela, from the flat lighting to the wall-to-wall music plastered over entire scenes to the self-regarding performances (no surprise that the leading man is also the producer) to the clumsy technique (a restaurant dialogue interrupted by a pointless insert of a hand holding a lemonade glass; a fight between 10-year-olds getting Mike Tyson sound effects for every punch). Mostly ethnological interest, like the incidental gay joke - Dad briefly shocked when son says he and his friend are "inseparable" - or the office colleague wearing a badly stained shirt without provoking comment (maybe the stains are just sweat, because they seem to disappear later), or indeed the middle-aged Nigerian man sitting next to me whose absorption in the film was so complete it initially annoyed, then shamed me for being so jaded. He was so into it he talked out loud to the characters, not in his guise as Audience Member but as though he were part of the onscreen conversation, saying "Thank you" and "Aha!" and "Okay" and "Bye-bye". Astonishing.      

CODA: 10 ITEMS OR LESS

1. "... all the memories we could stuff into three back-packs ..."

2. "Some roads are straight. Some roads are crooked."

3. "I blame the Jews."

4. "Mise en scène!!!"

5. "Trust your first instinct, Paul."

6. "It shows why Kim will never be a major director."

7. "You do know they booed in Venice?"

8. "The blacks are 100s."

9. "Be Fearless When Doubt is Stopping You From Expressing Yourself."

10. Why the bushy red eyebrows, though?