Toronto 2008: A Panda Sneezes, a Baby Swears (*)
(*) Note to folks who weren't there: Don't even ask.
What kind of TIFF did I have at the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival? The kind where I only watched 34 movies, the lowest tally since I first began attending in 2001. The kind where I kept myself on a stubborn five-film quota, refusing to watch - or even attempt - a sixth movie, even when it fit snugly enough into my schedule and I had nothing better to do except browse DVD-racks and eat muffins. The kind where, in deciding on my first screening of the day, I took careful note of starting-times as well as (maybe even more than) auteurs and buzz, and indeed more than once watched a movie in preference to another, almost-certainly-better movie simply because it allowed me another half-hour in bed. Above all, the kind where I fucked off to Montreal in mid-Fest for two days of lounging and sightseeing, treating TIFF and all its workings with a disregard verging on contempt. In short: I wasn't into it.
I don't blame TIFF; it was just the way it was. Elegy was in the air, possible finality (I feel I'm nearing the point when I can no longer justify devoting most of my annual vacation to watching a bunch of movies on the other side of the world), an obscure sense of changing times and chapters drawing to a close. It was there even from the start, on Day 0, in the plane across the Atlantic, when I sat in the middle of a row-of-three, flanked by a Turkish college student heading back to Canada and a girl who ... well, who knows what she did or where she was from. Three people travelling alone, crammed in the same tiny space for 7 hours, and we only spoke once - when the girl got up to use the toilet and I had a brief, 30-second conversation with the Turkish student, during which I learned he was a Turkish student and he asked absolutely nothing about me - all of which got me thinking back to other long-haul flights and unwitting travelling companions, the prog-rock chick who raved about 70s band Camel for two hours on a London-Larnaca flight when she and I were both 19, the middle-aged lawyer who vocally disapproved of my reading Hemingway, the dotty old woman I sat next to once who claimed she could sense I was depressed (she was right), dug into the recesses of a huge handbag and produced a pungent botanical concoction which she vowed would instantly dissolve my inner demons (she was wrong) ... all from the days before personal monitors and digital in-flight entertainment, when polite silence between strangers necessarily drifted - to prevent terminal awkwardness - into small talk, then chatter, then occasional connections. All gone now. Elegy.
Please note: I don't mean nostalgia - because in fact I dreaded those airplane conversations, getting stuck with some lunatic for hours on end, and much prefer the current system, where I can listen to Arcade Fire and catch up with the Golden Age of TV (tm) on my way to Canada. And I don't mean sadness or lamentation, though it seemed oddly fitting that David Foster Wallace's - senseless, ridiculous - suicide should've taken over Day 10 of the festival. All I'm trying to say is my mood kept drifting, throughout this year's TIFF, to questions of change and evolvement, things coming to their natural end or transforming into other things. Maybe it held me back, kept me from embracing the onscreen offerings with my usual enthusiasm (this was by far my worst TIFF in terms of ratings, though I'd like to re-watch a couple of films - notably the Kore-eda and Claire Denis - which I may have underrated). It's hard to acclaim mise-en-scène when one is thinking, however indirectly, about Mortality. Then again, maybe 2008 really is just an off year for cinema. For my sake, I hope so.
ELEGY FOR TIFF (1)
TIFF is changing, of course; the question is how? As the pre-film announcements made clear (34 times, in my case), the Festival will soon be moving to Bell Lightbox, its purpose-built new home which it ambitiously hopes to turn - according to Piers Handling in the program book - into "the most important destination in the world for film lovers". BL (so it's claimed) will be "a bustling marketplace and network for international industry professionals, a place of inspiration and mentoring for future filmmakers, and a facility used by local partners engaged in creating awareness through film" - though not, apparently, a great place to watch movies or kickass gathering-place for rabid film buffs, at least it doesn't say so in the program book. Piers & Co. would presumably shrug that the new location's cinephile value is taken for granted - but that, for many people, is precisely the problem, that TIFF is taking its captive cinephile audience for granted and focusing on lucrative words like "marketplace" and "network". The hotly-debated question thus became: Is the Festival's shift merely geographical (a welcome adjustment, if only to avoid the current press/public split between the Varsity - where most press screenings are held - and the downtown venues where the Festival proper takes place) or indicative of a bigger change, a shift in values - a process of turning away from "film lovers", and bending the knee to studios and publicists?
On one side were those who claimed to see signs of exactly such corruption, pointing to the absence of arthouse favourites like the new Hong Sang-soo (NIGHT AND DAY) and Lucrecia Martel (THE HEADLESS WOMAN) - two of the year's most-anticipated movies, at least in some circles - and the embarrassing glut of flimsy mediocrities in high-profile slots. On the other side were those who retorted that Toronto has always been a mish-mash, unafraid of juxtaposing auteur-driven hits and middlebrow dross; the Festival was just being itself, the naysayers guilty of selective memory. The debate wasn't limited to amateur film buffs; Bruce Kirkland of the "Toronto Sun" publicly charged the Fest with having turned into "an elitist corporate spectacle" and cried out (in print) for Piers & Co. to "give the Toronto film festival back to the people" - but he wasn't really talking of the films per se, more about money-grubbing TIFF policies like affording special treatment to Bell Lighthouse donors. That the Fest is now more cash-minded is undeniable, and probably inevitable; but has programming really changed? I dug up an old program book at random (2004, to be precise) and was mildly shocked to see how many bad films played that year, most of them as Galas. Sure, TIFF '08 had its OTHER MANs and PRIDE AND GLORYs - but who now recalls RED DUST ("an intense, elegant thriller set during South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation hearings"), a Hilary Swank-starring stinker that played as a Gala four years ago before going straight to DVD? Or how about RETURN TO SENDER - remember that one? - a Bille August Joint and another '04 Gala? Or AN ITALIAN ROMANCE, "a sweeping romance set in fascist Italy"? ARSENE LUPIN, anyone? JIMINY GLICK IN HOLLYWOOD? And though folks are right to bemoan the presence of EL GRECO in this year's Fest, let's not forget (much as we'd like to) the presence of MODIGLIANI in 2004.
You get the point. TIFF, in its broad outlines, is much as it ever was. (And yes, the exact same charge of "commercialization" came up last year, and the exact same debate gets endlessly recycled.) But there is one thing I noticed in that '04 program book, viz. that many of the big Sundance movies from that year - PRIMER, TARNATION, THE WOODSMAN, THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES - were playing in Toronto; this year hardly anything was, except maybe SUGAR. Now, of course this may be a result of Sundance hits having been commercially released in the meantime, or maybe there just weren't any worthwhile Sundance films this year - but it's also true that early-in-the-year Fests like Sundance (or Berlin, where the Hong Sang-soo played in Competition) don't have much to offer in the way of potential purchases. Buyers have already seen these movies, even if ordinary cinephiles haven't. Fresh meat (i.e. North American Premieres), on the other hand = interest from buyers, which in turn = possible big deals = front-page headlines in the trades = publicity for TIFF = interest from sponsors and donors = cash for the much-beloved Lightbox. If there was ever an idealistic TIFF Idea based on movie-love over lucre, tied in with the whole Festival of Festivals spiel ... well, that Idea is probably over. No wholesale changes, then, but certainly a change in priorities.
Fair enough. To be honest, I'm not too bothered; TIFF is already so capacious I barely have time to watch all the stuff I want to watch, let alone bemoan the absence of Hongs and Martels. But sometimes I just had to roll my eyes, notably with KISSES (37) (dir., Lance Daly) Kelly O'Neill, Shane Curry, Stephen Rea, a film of slick energy but near-comical uselessness (Victor also has moral objections, which I can't really see except insofar as it panders to a certain liberal-bourgeois idealization of youthful anarchy). Let me first note that this flimsy Irish drama was placed in the Vanguard section ("Innovative Filmmakers and Bold Films That Challenge Our Social and Cultural Assumptions") and given a rare Priority Press screening, marking it out as high-profile - and let me then proceed to the wafer-thin movie itself, an extended short (72 minutes) wherein a pair of Irish ghetto-kids escape their abusive families and spend a day and night in Dublin as free-ranging runaways. We know the families are abusive because the parents beat each other up and exchange dialogue like the following: "Don't tell me to shut up! You fookin' shut up!". We know the little boy is sensitive because he has asthma (actually it's clear from his wounded eyes and puppy-dog demeanour, but I think I chuckled out loud when the inevitable inhaler was produced near the end of Act One). We know the film is an Urban Fairytale because the city is all arty grain and shallow-focus and neon signs reflected in wet streets, and because the kids meet quirky types like a friendly immigrant barge-worker and a Bob Dylan impersonator (who rasps approvingly when they tell him they're running away: "I know that feelin'. I've been runnin' away all my life."). Above all, we know it's "innovative" and "bold" because ... um, because it starts in black-and-white to illustrate dysfunctional home life then shifts to colour - gosh! - as the 'magical' elements take over (quietly reverting to b&w once the adventure is over); way to challenge our cultural assumptions, useless Irish movie. Is there any reason why this film should be in the Festival, let alone in a prime slot? Yes: because it features kiddies, Oirish accents and a safely bittersweet sensibility - all the things buyers (and their masters, the middlebrow-arthouse audience) think are awesome. Oh, TIFF...
Round-Up: Day 1
LIVERPOOL (53) (dir., Lisandro Alonso): What I've always liked about Alonso: the tension between his constricted protagonists, forever focused on narrow quests, and the expansive outdoor spaces that surround them. That's why a cargo ship makes a perfect setting for his style - and the first 10 minutes, with their gradual opening-out of space (from a cramped engine-room to the vastness of the sea itself) got me quite excited. Alas, we soon head off to dry land and another narrow quest - followed, with about 15 minutes to go, by a shift in perspective that people are calling a Great Leap Forward but actually seemed to diminish the impact, ending on quite a banal faux-poetic note ('And so Life went on ... But sometimes a memory stirred in the girl's humble peasant mind...'). Guess the real problem is that Alonso has a good eye - the scenes on the pier, lights glinting on slushy water, are especially beautiful - but can't create human beings, falling back on exotic, rather fake-looking Third World stereotypes who play cards in dingy cafés, eat desultory meals and take frequent sips of maté. Speaking of which, why d'you have to sip it through a straw? Does it have bits or something? § DERNIER MAQUIS (56) (dir., Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche): Hard to know who to identify with, which I guess is more strength than weakness. The workers are presumably the "last Resistance fighters" of the title (the last shot seems to mean they're piling up the pallets in an improvised fortress, another meaning of "maquis"); then again, the boss - played by the director - seems a good man, and his decision to shut down the garage because he's losing money (offering alternative jobs) isn't unreasonable. On the other hand, he uses Islam to manipulate the workers, appointing his own Imam and forcing them to convert - then again (on the other hand) the new convert's clumsy embrace of Islam, including cack-handed self-circumcision ("I should've researched it") isn't much of an alternative. Truth is, I have no idea what to think about this movie, nor do I think it makes much of the divisions - both racial and professional - between the workers; very watchable nonetheless, with sparky characters and unusual setting, plus a thoughtful non-hysterical view of Islam in ordinary lives. Also a trapped coypu (large rodent), providing a rather unexpected pastoral interlude. Like I said, puzzling. § GHOST TOWN (51) (dir., David Koepp): Starts off really funny, esp. when Ricky Gervais fulminates at/about annoying people (trying to keep his temper with a doorman who keeps saying "Bless you": "Look, it's not you ... OK, it's a bit you..."), ends up tired, reduced to Great Dane jokes. Big mistake is trying to turn Gervais into a romantic lead (should've just spiralled into farce, like in Danny Kaye's WONDER MAN) and most of the rom-com stuff is pretty dire, but it does have compensations: Greg Kinnear is delightful, Kristen Wiig as a daffy surgeon gets a great routine when Ricky's trying to establish if "anything unusual happened" during his operation (he died, it turns out), and props also go to a blonde receptionist who says: "Uh, okay, in my opinion? you didn't make sense just now". Thought they were going to make the human-rights lawyer the villain, which would've raised it another 5 points right there, but in fact he's just humourless and sanctimonious. Oh well. § THE BROTHERS BLOOM (69) (dir., Rian Johnson): Absolutely brilliant, but they can't keep it up; the pace flags, and most of the second half - after our heroes get to Prague, basically - is low on invention. The first half is a great hurtling contraption, nothing like Wes Anderson's pinched little comedies - closer to something like THE GREAT RACE, an ornate slapstick vaudeville that leapfrogs across stories and genres (it's explicitly about stories, the scams being a series of narratives in which Adrien Brody finds himself "crippled"), adding throwaways, edge-of-frame gags (Rinko Kikuchi peeling an apple in the background), non sequiturs and lines like "Look at this watermelon. It's a pinhole camera". Definitely plan to see it again, but what I really want to talk about is Rachel Weisz - possibly my most-hated actress, a smug infuriating presence who's somehow (how?) been coaxed into a dazzling display of madcap, blithe charm and joie de vivre. Moral: being a good director isn't just about the pretty pictures.
Also on Day 1: Upstream Battle
ELEGY FOR TRUTH
Of all the reams of comment on THE DARK KNIGHT, from close analyses to fanboy ravings, one random line has stuck in my memory. I forget where I saw it, but someone - some blogger, I assume, or maybe someone at the IMDb - was talking of the prisoner's-dilemma involving the two boats (each one, you'll recall, equipped with a detonator for the other one) and opined that the passengers on each boat had in fact been given the detonator for their own boat, i.e. had they succumbed to temptation and pressed the button they'd in fact have blown themselves (not the other boat) to kingdom come. What I found striking was how purely speculative this comment was, since the film gives no indication that the Joker is lying (indeed, the point is he's trying to inculcate Gothamites with his own amoral credo, a lesson that would fade if amoral passengers were punished for their selfishness) - but the blogger justified his thinking on the grounds that the Joker always lies, so if he promised X the truth is almost certainly Y. It's weird to me how fans of this (hugely successful) film perceive its anti-hero, how cool they are with the concept of total up-is-down chaos (even supplying their own when the film is silent), how completely Truth is devalued in their mental landscape of the movie - but maybe not that weird, given the times we live in.
Simply put, Truth is more slippery - and maybe more irrelevant - today than it's ever been. Everything's fragmented, the so-called information superhighway turning out to be more like a warren of narrow streets, each with its own noisy sub-culture; every truth seems to spawn another truth - or at least, no matter what you start to believe, you can always find someone believing (and arguing) the opposite. Is passive smoking harmful, or not that harmful? Does global warming spell the end of the world, or have its dangers been exaggerated? Did God create everything in seven days? Did the CIA plan 9/11? Everyone lies, especially in public life. I won't say politics has grown more mendacious - hypocrisy's always been a given in that sphere - but it seems clear that people don't believe politicians at the moment, and surely there haven't been too many wars fought on such a barefaced lie as the WMDs of Saddam Hussein (even the "Cyprus Mail" ran an article pre-war pointing out it was logically impossible for Saddam to have WMDs, given the checks and embargos on Iraq at that time, and we're just the "Cyprus Mail" for goodness sake). But truth, as I say, has always been a casualty in politics. The real point is truth between people, totally transformed by the new technology: I'm talking here of the online revolution, listservs and chat-groups and Facebook-style networking sites, which for many folks (especially young folks, the kind who revere THE DARK KNIGHT) have created a second life - often more vivid and time-consuming than their everyday life - allowing for unprecedented licence to invent, embellish and generally make stuff up. Again, this isn't new: people have always invented a persona for themselves in social interaction. But it always had to be measured against the reality (the truth) of their actual self, placing limits on what was plausible - whereas now the truth is irrelevant, because we control the flow of information; the self is transmogrified into avatars and internet handles, Photoshopped images and doctored YouTube videos, plus the elaborate profiles on Facebook (which I know nothing about, except that they are in fact elaborate). Everything you see may be fake, daily interaction taking on the wary, cynical tone once reserved for paranoid conspiracy theories. It doesn't matter whether or not you do it - the point is you can do it. Truth, like God, isn't the inescapable arbiter it used to be.
Strangely, the downfall of Truth has coincided with a glut of media (cl)aiming to ferret Truth out - notably reality TV and the recent boom in documentaries, though of course they've only succeeded in muddying the waters still further. "Big Brother" and "The Real World" started out (albeit implicitly) as Griersonian experiments, training their cameras on life "in the raw" to extract observations on human nature - but it soon turned out that Grierson was wrong, and cameras were no match for human beings; all the shows elicited were bitchiness and bad behaviour, thinning out the meaning of reality (or truth) and cheapening the culture even more. As for documentaries ... well, I watched a couple at TIFF (unfortunately missing SOUNDS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT, a doc on the Junior Eurovision Song Contest apparently stolen by a charismatic 10-year-old Cypriot boy) but they're so slippery I barely know what to make of them. What to make, for instance, of WALTZ WITH BASHIR (50) (dir., Ari Folman), an animated doc about the war in Lebanon in the 1970s, seen from the perspective of young Israeli soldiers? Unlike last year's PERSEPOLIS, this sets itself up as a straight documentary, interviewing participants - albeit in cartoon form - and giving what presumably are their real names; much of it is vivid and raptly convincing, like the harsh-yet-lyrical story of the soldier who was trapped behind enemy lines when a bomb killed the rest of his tank-crew, hid out till nightfall then escaped by swimming back across the moonlit Mediterranean, watching the madness from a distance. I'm tempted to give a much higher rating, because the cumulative impact is considerable (it probably helps that I lived in Beirut just a few years before the film is set, and recognised some of the locations) - but it's ultimately hard to ignore its hidden function as self-exculpation, heavy with Israeli guilt and denial but actually painting its young (now middle-aged) soldiers as victims. Again and again we're told they were pawns, they were boys, they didn't know what they were doing; if they killed people - which they did - it can only be because they were young and scared, so they panicked and fired on anything that moved. The plot hinges on director Folman, plagued by nightmares, trying to recall his memories of Lebanon by talking to his old comrades ("Can't films be therapeutic?" asks his shrink self-referentially) - and the notion of repressed memory inescapably ties in with child abuse, the traumatised kids in this equation being of course our heroes. The film is a strange, incongruous mix of candid truth-telling - making clear e.g. that Ariel Sharon (now safely dead) had full knowledge of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, or that Israeli guilt over the camps is inextricably linked to memories of those "other camps" - and stubborn clinging to a reassuring, magical-realist view of War; surreal touches, like the titular waltz or a couple of dream scenes - or of course the heightened cartoon look itself - add to the feeling of unknowability, as if to say 'War is such madness, who really knows what's true or not?', which is valid but not too helpful in this context. On the one hand (like PERSEPOLIS) this is fiercely personal filmmaking; on the other (unlike PERSEPOLIS) it gives little pleasure, from crude animation to over-insistent music to creaky plot-devices and Folman's habit of cutting away to an illustrative snippet of whatever gets mentioned - "I imagined how my mother would react..." - then shifting back to the main plot. Truth, if any, gets lost in the shuffle.
Truth is also misplaced in UPSTREAM BATTLE (46) (dir., Ben Kempas), though that may be just my own personal prejudice. The set-up is simple enough. Hydroelectric dams in Northern California have blocked a river previously teeming with salmon, and a tribe of Native Americans who've fished in the river since time immemorial campaign for the dams to be removed, or at least remodelled in ways that'll allow the salmon to return. There's a complex story to be told here, because all sides have a point. The Indians have their traditions, but the farmers who use the water from the dams to irrigate their crops have their livelihood, and the (rather sympathetic) corporate types point out that hydro-electricity is eco-friendly and good for the environment. For a while, it looks like the film may stumble into something quite intriguing - a tale of venerable ethnic traditions being out of step with the modern world, and indeed standing in the way of responsible progress. Instead, it does the opposite, telling a predictable tale of virtuous Native Americans ranged against "corporate greed" and "capitalism at work". Kempas makes the farmers look bad by dwelling on a photo of George W. Bush (the government, admits a farmer, has been sympathetic to their cause), and plays Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down" on the soundtrack as the tribe's activists go about their work; the reverence throughout for 'native culture' is well-meaning but a little absurd, as when the tribe decide to stage a ceremonial dance outside the corporate headquarters in Omaha where an AGM is taking place. "The decision to dance wasn't easy," intones the voice-over, soberly averring that the dance had never before been performed outside tribal lands, "but healing their sick river was important" (the fact that the dance might have taken place outside tribal lands if the hallowed ancestors had ever heard of Omaha - or indeed anything outside their little world - is apparently irrelevant). UPSTREAM BATTLE is fascinating for all the wrong reasons, a film that finds itself in a rich situation and refuses to explore, misguidedly sticking to its preconceived Message - and it might be even more fascinating to know if Kempas was under orders to tell that particular story (the film is made with European money, including TV giant ARTE), the plucky-activist angle being what attracted the producers in the first place. The truth turns out to be bigger, and less simplistic.
Round-Up: Day 2
A CHRISTMAS TALE (72) (dir., Arnaud Desplechin): So much more than a family-gathering movie. Actually a movie caught between two worlds - a chimera, you might say (as indeed they do say) - the real world and the world of magic, imaginary wolves in the cellar, nameless things glimpsed in the mirror, spirits of the dead, MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM references and a girl named Faunia; which of course is what happens in family gatherings anyway (the dead appear in photos and memories, old stories hover like ghosts), Desplechin simply has the balls to push the material to a whole other level of expressive insanity. Mother and son talk like lovers, a puppet-show maps out a sad genealogy, and the possibility is invoked of solving cancer through mathematics - but we also see blood under a microscope, reducing its people to plasma and platelets, and may conclude that what makes us human is just as bizarre and mysterious as the skull beneath the skin of this magic-riddled family. Don't know why critics are calling this more conventional than KINGS & QUEEN - it's waaay flakier, without even the crowd-pleasing closure of "Moon River" moments - but its heady sensibility is intoxicating even though yes, as in e.g. Noah Baumbach, people don't 'really' talk to each other that way. "If we shadows have offended..." § BLIND SUNFLOWERS (41) (dir., Jose Luis Cuerda): Awful? Maybe not, but really bland, placing most of its chips on the priest driven mad by sexual desire - which it then mostly fluffs, limited to talky conversations with an older priest and a scene where he thrusts into a pillow, clutching a sexy picture. Climactic melodrama seems hollow, kid from THE ORPHANAGE is mostly annoying, Maribel Verdu - my main reason for watching - sadly wasted. Needed the kind of lurid Catholic-and-Civil-War guilt Spanish films had back in the day (check out Eloy de la Iglesia's EL SACERDOTE for a priest really driven nuts by 'impure thoughts'), before the country settled down to EU handouts and Zapatero's social reforms; this is just boring, sorry Spanish people. § HUNGER (70) (dir., Steve McQueen): When your film has hardly any dialogue and suddenly a 15-minute scene comes along that's nothing but dialogue, that's already somewhat gimmicky; when that scene is shot in a single virtuoso take (why? why not!), I think we can start talking 'stunt'. On the other hand the acting and writing in that scene are superlative, and the rest of it is superbly worked out - a very deliberate series of sounds and images, impressionistically focused on detail (a rat, bloody knuckles, a prison warden's wife watching from the window - waiting for bombs - as he starts his car in the morning); McQueen works with contrasts and syncopation, and though I'd have welcomed a little more transcendence the focus on the physical - filth on cell walls, messages passed in body orifices, masturbation - is both consistent with the IRA's "dirty protest" and (apparently) McQueen's own work as a gallery-artist. Possibly the most accomplished film I saw in Toronto, though the actual hunger-strike (i.e. Act 3) seems a little bathetic. § VINYAN (58) (dir., Fabrice Du Welz): Fighting sleep for a little while in the middle section, shamefully (because it's very good) but also understandably, because it's atmospheric and near-abstract - a jungle symphony, giving way to pulpy horror (APOCALYPSE NOW looks like a major influence). Du Welz shows his hand from the opening image, with the frame slowly taken over by gathering bubbles (?) as an awful screechy racket builds on the soundtrack, and holds on to that sense of irrational dread - though what our heroes actually find in the jungle may be eerie or a little silly, according to taste. Definitely plan to see again, in any case.
Also on Day 2: Waltz With Bashir
ELEGY FOR CINEPHILIA
Well, yes and no. I'm still watching as many films as ever - but something's changed, and I felt it at TIFF this year. Maybe it's not cinephilia that's faded/subsided/whatever but merely its festival incarnation, what a bud with a style all his own recently called "the super intensivical picture watching" - and it may be even worse at press screenings because not only is everyone on the picture-watching treadmill but everyone's also at work, their minds on blog-posts and press conferences and last night's party, taking away another measure of that wonder or 'magic' or whatever it is cinephilia thrives on. Maybe that's the problem; but I think it's more than that. What's changed isn't the rate at which I like to watch movies, but the way I watch them to begin with - and it now occurs to me that what cinema does better than any other art is fashioning alternative worlds (meaning viable worlds, living worlds) which of course is also the source of its escapist lure, the cheap-opiate side that never gets it any respect. Most art is challenging because it impels you to stop living in the world, forces you to jettison everyday conceptions in order to deal with it. Thus a book or play or painting works by alchemically transforming the world into something else, which is what the reader or viewer then has to grapple with - but a movie is a recognisable world unto itself, which is why John Q. Plausibles are forever criticising this or that film for not being "realistic". And it now occurs to me that there's a time in one's life when one is especially susceptible to this kind of parallel-world-ism - a time when one still isn't settled, when the future hangs in the air, rife with possibilities. A time when dreaming oneself into a movie seems natural and even useful (survival instincts are at play, even here), part of exploring one's limits and finding one's place in the world.
I don't want to reduce this to something as banal as cinephilia being a 'young man's game' - how, in that case, to explain the indefatigable Ken Rudolph, now in his 60s and watching more films than I ever could? - but I still note how 'advanced' film-buffery so often morphs into a love for the avant-garde (which of course doesn't fashion viable worlds, but alchemically transforms in the manner of plays and paintings) or else a Dave Kehr-like concentration on old movies, scavenging the past in lieu of thinking about the future. And then - coming from the general to the particular - there's my own case. I've now been living in the same place for 15 years, and working in the same job for 10 years. That's the longest I've ever lived in one place, and the longest I've ever worked in one job. I'm also starting to acknowledge what people have always told me (and I've always believed; don't get me wrong), viz. that making it as a filmmaker is near-impossible, and my vague dreams of doing so are unlikely ever to amount to much. I won't say I'm 'trapped' or 'frustrated' - it's a natural process; it happens to everyone - but I know my possibilities are shrinking with each passing year and that's bound to affect the way I approach movies, both in blunting the process of dreaming myself into a film (suspension of disbelief, you might say) and stifling the heightened, passionate appetite for new worlds that separates the cinephile from the mere escapist film-fan. After all, it's not just movies. I dream less in general, both literally and metaphorically. Going on the train to Montreal, it occurred to me that I've always liked to gaze at the homes beside the railway tracks as the train whizzes by, wondering what kind of people live there, looking at their curtains and satellite-dishes and the junk in their backyards - but that I wasn't so intrigued this time, giving the houses a cursory look but not really thinking about it because I knew (or thought I knew) that their occupants might be soya-bean farmers or antiquarians, butchers or bank clerks or undertakers, amateur mountain-climbers or secret pederasts, might've bought the house cheap or inherited from some senile great-aunt, and it really wouldn't matter because the general trajectory of their lives would be much the same, youthful floundering then the business of making a living, marriage or not-marriage, possible parenthood then middle-age, old age and death. Cinephilia's bound to wilt slightly under the onslaught of Time. (It's called 'growing up'. Or maybe 'settling down', I forget.)
Maybe it's all for the best. Apologies to people who were also at TIFF and heard me talk about this ad nauseam, but it occurs to me there's an explanation for why hardcore film-buffs so often shrink from expansive sentimentality, why the People's Choice award at Toronto (voted on primarily by ordinary filmgoers) invariably goes to the likes of BELLA or WHALE RIDER - or, this year, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE - films which most of my cinephile circle either can't bring themselves to watch or else view with unabashed contempt. Cinephilia militates against touchy-feeliness, because (by definition) it's a love for arm's-length emotion, the emotion one observes on a screen from the safety of one's seat. That's the paradox, how film is both so immersive - fashioning its living, breathing worlds - and so dead, so unlike the immediacy of concerts and theatre. No wonder ordinary film-fans are so obsessed with celebrity gossip, desperately trying to lend recognisable life to the onscreen shadows - but of course the true cinephile disdains gossip, because he (or she) likes the shadows to be shadowy, at-one-remove from life; one could even say ardent cinephilia is a sign of some missing intimacy-synapse, which is why at its most extreme (when it shades into cinemania) a passion for movies can appear downright autistic. There's a certain emotional tone I associate with this, a cool intensity often found in Arnaud Desplechin films - ESTHER KAHN might be a direct metaphor for film-love, given its heroine's awesome ability to assimilate emotion while eschewing any real closeness - and it's very much present in A CHRISTMAS TALE, an eccentric film whose arch emotional tone is the very opposite of touch-feely. Unfortunately (or fortunately), TALE was one of my films of the Festival. Looks like I'm not quite cured yet...
Round-Up: Day 3
GOMORRA (63) (dir., Matteo Garrone): Contrast with CITY OF GOD, which mined a similar milieu and crime-ridden ambience for sensationalism; then again, GOD was also exciting whereas this is kind of gruelling and prosaic. No moral judgments or distinctions - the only real difference is between those who work and those who don't - no laborious connections either, though some of the characters (like the two young punks playing Scarface) seem a bit one-dimensional. Also can't help thinking that if it were English (or North European in general) there'd be way more casual violence and at least one 'psycho' character - whereas, being Southern Italian, everyone's garrulous and really quite sympatico, even though they're criminals. Yeah I know, national stereotypes Bad Thing... § I'M GOING TO EXPLODE (45) (dir., Gerardo Naranjo): Could've done so much with this premise (two teens run away on romantic escapade, basically): the boy is rich and the girl is poor - in a country with a massive gap between rich and poor - but social tensions never emerge in their relationship, nor do these putative misfits seem remotely fucked-up, nor does Naranjo (apparently) think it's interesting when they start turning into their parents, nagging each other while the boy brings out the barbecue. Just a lot of John Hughes antics with-an-edge and hedonistic hi-jinks from the Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN songbook (Diego and Gael are executive producers). Why is this at NYFF? Dispiriting. § THE MARK OF AN ANGEL (57) (dir., Safy Nebbou): "Based on a true story", alas, meaning the thriller elements and occasional shock moments (kid leaping into frame in a Spider-Man costume, stuff like that) are something of a red herring. Basically needed one of its heroines to be psychotic, and it really wouldn't matter which one - had it been Catherine Frot, it would've worked in friendly-stalker, HARRY HE'S HERE TO HELP vein; had it been Sandrine Bonnaire, it would've worked in Chabrolian, discreet-madness-of-the-bourgeoisie vein. I'll say no more, but that's the basic problem: spare and elegant, lots of tension in PAGE TURNER vein, all a bit too civilised.
Also on Day 3: JCVD, Still Walking
ELEGY FOR OZU
Yasujiro Ozu must be rolling in his grave - though not in anger, more through constant polite bowing as he's referenced by one Japanese director after another. Hirokazu Kore-eda echoed the plot of TOKYO STORY (at least as a starting-point) while Kiyoshi Kurosawa echoed the title in TOKYO SONATA (65) (dir., Kiyoshi Kurosawa) Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyoko Koizumi, Haruka Igawa, a film that becomes more interesting as it goes on. The subject is a middle-class family in crisis, precipitated when Dad loses his job and starts wandering aimlessly, unable to tell his wife and kids, like Aurelien Recoing in TIME OUT - but what's most intriguing is the family's slow disintegration from within, exploding in the final section as the film abandons its staid domestic drama to become tonally all-over-the-place. The key shot comes perhaps under the opening credits, when sickly-sweet Mom ("Welcome home!" she cries whenever Dad or kids arrive) is closing up the family home against a rainstorm - and she duly shuts the window but then re-opens it, unable to resist gazing out at the storm, just as later she's unable to resist joining forces with another, metaphorical storm. The family isn't enough, Kurosawa bringing dysfunctional baggage to the lodestone of Japanese movie culture, the film being also of a piece with his nameless-dread thrillers (once again there's a lot of dead time, eating meals and standing in lines; once again there are drab exteriors and cramped indoor spaces, like the living-room dominated by a large staircase) - and there's also a national angle, the Japanese family being much like Japan itself, a closed-off island against the rainstorm of the outside world. The family (like the nation) is assaulted by global forces, jobs going to China just as their elder son joins the US Army and heads off to Iraq - and it's surely no accident that his chosen profession reflects the patriarchal authority in the household yet his happy ending comes from embracing Iraq, just as the rest of the clan must abandon traditional authority and embrace the world beyond. The film has a very particular feel, alternating between rather stern and awkward family drama and a kind of dreamlike black comedy. It's not a massive spoiler to reveal that it ends with the younger son's piano recital, the piano music (in a move copied from Shunji Iwai and ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU) used as counterpoint to painful personal growth - but most directors would've faded out on the last notes of the music, the standard 'poetic' ending, whereas Kurosawa waits for the piano to finish then cuts to an overhead shot (spoiling the soothing effect of the music), brings the parents out from the audience and has the whole family walk out en masse, as if taking their leave at the end of a stage performance. It's drier than expected, and more surprising.
Maybe that's why I can't join the chorus of hosannas for STILL WALKING (63) (dir., Hirokazu Kore-eda) Yoshio Harada, Kirin Kiki, Hiroshi Abe - though admittedly I hadn't yet caught TOKYO SONATA when I watched (and quite liked) Kore-eda's take on the Ozu family drama (guess it was only seeing the Kurosawa two days later that made me realise what I'd been missing; then again, this one's better-written and more affecting). Apparently, the director joked to another TIFF audience that his own family (who inspired the movie) were closer to Naruse than Ozu, but he must know what he's doing when including pointed reference to a tatami mat - its gentle softness helps the buffoonish son-in-law sleep better - and making a film about a family gathering, even if in this case (unlike TOKYO STORY) it's the children who visit the parents. The result is a smooth ride, a crowd-pleaser (not in a cheap sense), warm and funny without being sentimental; the old folk are obviously heroes - they stand for traditional values, healthy daikon-radish over fast-food - but it's also true that salt-of-the-earth Grandma "doesn't have a delicate bone in her body" and can also be quite malicious, e.g. in inviting the boy (now man) whose life her son once saved to the son's memorial every year, specifically to make him feel bad; Grandpa, meanwhile, is a grim old coot, locking himself in his study so he won't have to face the family and refusing to help with the shopping lest the neighbours see him carrying a shopping bag, whilst the son-in-law - though pleasant - is lazy and unreliable, promising to fix the bathroom tiles only to eat, sleep and rush off ("as always," sighs Grandma). The film is streaked with darkness, not just thoughts of Death - anyone who doesn't see the final captions coming isn't paying attention - but thoughts of conflict and unhappiness; its fans would doubtless call it a masterly balancing-act - but the thing about balancing-acts is that balance is a delicate thing, easily destroyed if it's off by a smidgen. The film seemed a little too pat and benign to earn its plaudits, at least for me; the dead brother's ghost hovers a bit too explicitly, the pastoral setting (red train passing, azure sea in the distance) enfolds the action in forgiving tenderness, and there's too much cute - if enjoyable - knockabout like Grandpa telling a story in the foreground while the kids rush around trying to break a watermelon with a baseball bat (!) in the background. "It's a lovely film about family dysfunction," I overheard one critic tell another on Day 7, "where they never actually get over it, they just endure it". True enough, perhaps, but I need a slightly harsher film - or a madder one, like the Desplechin - before I can break out words like "endure" and "dysfunction". Look forward to watching it again, though.
Then there's 35 SHOTS OF RUM (49) (dir., Claire Denis) Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Gregoire Colin, which I guess I also need to see again (right?). After all, I clearly missed the boat, emerging underwhelmed from one of the Fest's most-liked movies. Yet in fact I'll never be more receptive to a film than I was for this one: rested, sober, ensconced in a good seat, grateful for a relatively sparse audience after emerging from a too-packed screening of WENDY AND LUCY, I was all set to love it - and at some point I think I need to stop blaming myself and start blaming Denis, especially since I had much the same response to L'INTRUS (which I did see again, to no great improvement). Can it be her shots don't really build (just in the obvious geographical sense), which is why I tune out? Am I too distracted by political-sounding bits - like the mentions of Fanon and Stiglitz - to notice relationships, forgetting that Denis isn't really a political filmmaker? Can it be her characters lack memorable detail? (Or are they just too subtle?) I feel bad, because apparently there is a thematic through-line - "the necessity, and painful difficulty, of achieving closure and moving on," according to Mike - which I totally missed; then again, most fans are raving about things I saw and liked (but not enough to rave about), things like train-shots and the lyrical "Night Shift" sequence and the "tenderness, caring, respect and empathy" between people that prompted Chris Stults to invoke (yes!!!) Yasujiro Ozu. Which I guess is where you came in.
Round-Up: Day 4
THE SKY CRAWLERS (68) (dir., Mamoru Oshii): Opening recalls LAPUTA: CASTLE IN THE SKY - airborne action, shot of plane tumbling to earth, cut to credits with Joe Hisaishi-like music - first hour recalls WW2 films like THE WAY TO THE STARS; sci-fi elements are revealed quite slowly - and don't actually change very much, except to make it (even) richer. Oshii has a knack for dead time and empty, desultory settings, a diner with motorcycle posters on the walls, a late-night reverie in a bowling-alley, the silence and waiting-around at the airfield with distant sounds carried on the wind; the film has all the fatalistic romance (and excitement) of airplane movies plus a melancholy air, as befits a made-up war - designed to supply futuristic humanity with a "sense of reality" - also befitting its heroes' life of permanent adolescence (is "The Teacher" a metaphor for death, or growing up?). Line describing the lives of the Kildren, also describing the experience of life at a film festival: "It's all just a series of vague impressions." § SUGAR (45) (dir., Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck): As I think I mentioned at the time, there's no reason why this film couldn't go on forever - or at least till "Sugar" dies of old age. Strange that a film co-directed by an editor (especially the editor responsible for the jagged, restless air of HALF NELSON) should be so plodding, giving its Dominican Republic scenes much the same rhythm as its Midwestern scenes, and it also does bad, bad things like the cutesy montage of cousins and aunts introducing themselves. Two things to admire: the subtle way it suggests that Sugar's own personality may be partly to blame for his alienation (his friend and replacement is much more outgoing), and the clear recognition that feeling horny has as much to do with his unhappiness as feeling culturally out-of-place. The rest is cliché, pretty much. § PONTYPOOL (59) (dir., Bruce McDonald): Slightly overrated by Lacan-reading types thrilled to find a semiotic zombie movie (and why shouldn't they be?), still audacious and clever when it's not being rather ludicrous - i.e. much of the third act, "Kiss is kill" (a conceptual joke that falters in the execution), the producer's attempts to behave like nothing's wrong when the world is clearly being invaded by flesh-eating zombies, etc (at least the manic foreign doctor shows the absurdity is partly/mostly intentional). Must be that Canadian humour I've heard so much about, and the (hilarious) French sub-plot clearly works as a comment on Canada, the Anglos in this bi-cultural nation literally unable to string a sentence together in French if their lives depended on it. Good advice that demands to be emailed to 90% of movie bloggers on the Web: "For greater safety, please avoid the English language." § TULPAN (52) (dir., Sergey Dvortsevoy): It's the Kazakh comedy with the sheep giving birth and the guy giving mouth-to-mouth to a baby lamb! What more do you need to know? Rural exotica in a few easy steppes, the kind of movie where Dvortsevoy presumably yelled: 'Quick, get the cameras, there's an awesome lightning-storm on the way'. Had he kept the camera completely still, it might've won highbrow friends for 'rigour'; as it is, the whip-pans and standard documentary approach make it unexceptional, if enjoyable. The (presumably improvising) baby steals the show.
Also on Day 4: Of Time and the City
ELEGY FOR TOUGH GUYS
I don't have much to say about THE WRESTLER (55) (dir., Darren Aronofsky) Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood, except perhaps to paraphrase Harold and Kumar: "What's the deal with Marisa Tomei? Why is she so naked?". Ms. Tomei - clothes-challenged co-star of both this and BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD - looks terrific for 43, and wants you to know it (not that I'm complaining); Mickey Rourke, on the other hand, looks like shit at 51 - but that's okay too, because it gives him character. Rourke is the Wrestler, a lovely man despite his raddled looks; his fellow wrestlers like him - they're a Hawksian community, laid-back professionals looking out for each other - little kids like him (even as they humour him by agreeing to play really old videogames), deli customers like him; only his daughter doesn't like him, but that's okay because she's played and written as a cold embittered crypto-lesbian. The film even throws in a Christ allegory, which is possibly going too far - but the mood is undoubtedly elegiac, bolstered by grittily 'authentic' New Jersey locations (Rourke too is 'authentic', testament to years of hard living, like an Eddie Bunker or Richard Farnsworth), even as the fight scenes hit JACKASS-level heights of violence and the plot follows its predictable trajectory. The only real question is whether it'll end like THE CHAMP - Wrestler's dodgy heart catching up with him - or the ROCKY saga, One Last Bout turning out to be One Last Triumph. I'll never tell, though in truth it doesn't matter.
The ending of JCVD (66) (dir., Mabrouk El Mechri) Jean-Claude Van Damme, Francois Damiens, Zinedine Soualem, on the other hand, may have been the best of the Festival, partly for its just-right sparseness of dialogue but also for the (seemingly improvised) bit where Jean-Claude Van Damme literally beats himself up with a phone when faced with the daughter he's neglected. THE WRESTLER protects its burned-out tough guy at every turn - even when he fucks up, he does it nobly - whereas Van Damme is an open wound, exposed as pathetic (the daughter's friends make fun of her whenever her daddy's on TV), despairing, barely keeping it together. Back in his native Belgium, probably the only place in the world where he's still a star, Van Damme attempts to regroup after losing roles to Steven Seagal (who's cut off his ponytail) and fighting a child-custody battle - but becomes embroiled in a bank robbery, taken hostage even though the cops assume he's the perp. Clearly, JCVD the action star weighs heavily on JCVD the man: the lawyer in the child-custody case has already used the violence in his films - gouging out eyes, kicking people in the groin - to 'prove' he's an unfit father, though JCVD the man isn't above invoking the action star to get special treatment, as when he thinks the bank has closed; the tension in the film's B-movie plot comes from wondering when JCVD the man (responsibly playing along with the robbers, trying to make sure nobody gets hurt) will transform into JCVD the action star and unleash his kickboxing skillz on the baddies - and the bit when he does (which brought down the house) recalls Peter-O'Toole-as-Errol-Flynn snapping out of his drunken haze to leap across the stage in MY FAVORITE YEAR, tracing a through-line to Hollywood heroes of old, though it should be noted that the film immediately reverts to JCVD the man (its true subject). It's not a spoof, not a piss-take, despite its cheap look and stream of gags - maybe that's why folks who watched at Midnight Madness were a little underwhelmed (*) - giving a clue to its intentions when someone stands beside a shelf of videos labelled "Emotion"; that's apparently what they call the "Drama" category in French-speaking video-stores, but "emotion" is exactly what we seek in this tale of a man haunted by a larger-than-life alter ego ("You're much nicer onscreen," grumbles a taxi driver, while the robbers admire his triceps and discuss John Woo) - and emotion is exactly what we get, above all of course in the startling mid-film monologue when Jean-Claude unburdens himself to the camera. "My dream came true," he says of Hollywood stardom, "but what have I done on this earth?" - and you can call it self-pity, or New Age nonsense (we've already seen a clip of a New Age show on TV, touting the importance of being "aware"), or you can wonder why beefcake action stars so often feel the need to go confessional (recall the eco-lecture at the climax of Seagal's ON DEADLY GROUND), but the power of the scene is undiminished, a case of a meta-layer punching - or perhaps roundhouse-kicking - its way into the spotlight. It's a case of JCVD the man taking his revenge on behalf of JCVD the action star, getting back at agents who don't read his scripts and arrogant directors who use him as a prop in their virtuoso one-take action set-pieces ("It's very difficult for me," pleads the has-been; "I'm 47 years old"). Then he cries real tears - but is it JCVD the man, or JCVD the action star playing the man? Discuss, etc.
(*) Clearly it helps going into the film with some residual affection for Van Damme, and I wouldn't recommend it to e.g. the snobby college-kids I sat next to in FOUR NIGHTS WITH ANNA, one of whom mused that JCVD stars Jean-Claude Van Damme "who I guess is quite a famous star" - prompting his friend to respond that "I always confuse him with somebody Diesel ... They're just names to me". Sigh...
Round-Up: Day 5
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (64) (dir., Charlie Kaufman): Hugely better than expected, though there is a stretch near the end - when it looks like the substitutes and alternations will go on forever - that makes you want to claw your eyes out. First half-hour very funny, the doublings already in place (stool/stool, pipes/pipes, right/right), cemented by a morbid strain of gallows humour ("Harold Pinter died ... No, wait, he won the Nobel Prize"); then it turns into ALL THAT JAZZ without the music - or dancer's snappy energy - the huge set being the synecdoche, reality and fantasy merging to form a chimera (the second mention of that word in this Festival - after CHRISTMAS TALE - though actually used to describe lovers' bodies merging in sex). Not sure it actually gets deeper as it goes along, then again I'm not sure it's supposed to; more like Fellini fantasia (Samantha Morton doing Giulietta Masina) dashing into various cul-de-sacs in search of Meaning, slowly establishing the proposition that "Everyone's disappointing" the more you get to know them, finding refuge in zeppelins and other random japes. Doleful, ambitious, a very special kind of fun. "I'm fun!" claims our Kaufman-esque hero, but his wife shakes her head unhappily: "Oh sweetie, no you're not..." § NUIT DE CHIEN (61) (dir., Werner Schroeter): Half the audience walked out, which suits me fine. Possibly my happiest experience at TIFF '08, not because the film is good - it's dated, feeling like it should've been made in the 80s - but because its seedy Mitteleuropean ambience and campy arthouse-CASABLANCA trappings were just what I needed at 9 p.m. on Day 5. There's cryptic dialogue, lush colours, one dude (I forget who) sitting ankle-deep in feathers round a gold-and-red-velvet throne, another dude who puts on a wolf-mask, disrobes and shags a woman in a bathtub, secret police torturing people (they have a statue of a crucified Jesus in their office), a whipping, a besieged city waiting to fall as Troops Come Closer, mention of lost ideals and a general air of pretentious decadence. Feels like a minor Raul Ruiz allegory, or indeed a sloppier variation on THE ROSE KING (my only other Schroeter); highbrows might see more, but I was happy.
Also on Day 5: Kisses, The Wrestler, Tokyo Sonata
ELEGY FOR CINEMASTERS
(I can say no more. It's a secret.)
ELEGY FOR TIFF (2)
Members of the public at TIFF this year grumbled of high ticket prices, Galas being excluded from the Pass (or something) and aforementioned issues like Festival donors getting special treatment. Members of the press grumbled too, though not always reasonably. Festival organisation remains superb, and if we lost the 10 p.m. press screenings - forcing a scramble for public-screening tickets - that merely takes us back to the pre-2006 situation, before night-shows were instituted. The one legitimate grumble came pre-Festival, when questions were asked about coverage. Journos seeking accreditation were asked to provide more coverage in their various outlets, the implication being that day-by-day coverage would be most preferred. I can see why TIFF should push for as much media exposure as possible. However, it behoves me to say - in a calm, polite, non-confrontational way - that this is wrong.
In the first place, any requirement (or implied requirement) based on quantity is wrong. It goes without saying that daily coverage is a concept introduced by the blog revolution, but even bloggers don't necessarily update every day and there's no consensus that more updates = better blogging. A critic's only duty is to write honestly - and, one hopes, perceptively - about as many films as possible, and whether he does it day-by-day or in one massive chunk at the end is wholly irrelevant. Actually, even the number of films is irrelevant: a writer delving deep into three films is hugely more useful than a writer doing drive-bys on 50 films he didn't really get. Then of course there's the issue of quality - almost always inversely-proportional to quantity - which tends to be forgotten nowadays. I won't do yet another elegy, but I think it's fair to say most people would be happy if a critic gives a one-line synopsis of a movie, 100 words (i.e. two sentences) of thumbs-up-or-down and a couple of amusing one-liners (*). It's just The Way It Is, but that doesn't mean we have to encourage it.
Above all, however, any requirement for regular coverage during the Festival carries dangers, especially for smaller movies (which of course are the ones most helped by festivals). Some critics can write at the drop of a hat, and that's fine; I watched Scott and Noel - supplying probably the best and most timely TIFF coverage on the Web - hunched over laptops on a daily basis, spewing out copy in the breaks between screenings and the quarter-hours sitting in theatres before the film started. I couldn't do that. I have difficulty writing in public (I like to pace) and it takes me ages at the best of times. I write to deadline every day of course, at the "Cyprus Mail", but that's different; I couldn't grapple with a film I'd just seen and do it justice, not in that context. Thus, if I had to fulfil some daily-blogging stipulation, my only options would be (a) to write superficially or (b) to watch fewer movies - and indeed it's not even either/or, because even (a) requires (b). A five-film quota gives you one decent break per day, most of which gets swallowed up in errands and random conversation; you'd need to go down to four movies (as, I believe, Scott and Noel did) to have time for coverage - and of course going down to four movies means you have to start making choices, and of course making choices (since we all have to write about the buzz-driven titles) means you're going to start ignoring that little-known Turkish drama, or umpteenth French psycho-thriller starring Sandrine Bonnaire, or the Central Asian film that made a minor splash in Directors' Fortnight.
In short: a festival should be about the movies, not about the festival. I sympathise with Toronto, if indeed there's been a sea-change in their policy (which is still unclear); it must be exasperating having the bulk of TIFF coverage appear near the end, or even once the Festival is over. Besides, TIFF is nowhere near as importunate as editors everywhere, who've woken up to the blog imperative and are now demanding regular missives from the front (even the Wexner Center folks had to chime in, and they don't even have an editor). But the fact remains: more time writing equals less time movie-watching, which is bad news for everyone. Don't crowd us, TIFFsters.
(*) Which of course is exactly what I'm doing with the "round-ups" on this page, but that's meant to be a kind of witty shorthand so please no-one else point this out, thanks buds.
Round-Up: Day 6
SUT (57) (dir., Semih Kaplanoglu): Like a first-class photographer trying to make 'poetic' cinema - though I seem to be alone in finding this exceptionally well-composed (better than Ceylan, which it resembles): there's always something to catch the eye and set off the image, often stasis vs. motion in the same frame but sometimes shapes, the arc of a mountain vs. the straight line of a road, or of course foreground vs. background (see e.g. the first shot, anchored by the bottles on the table). Pre-credits sequence is amazing, going from rustic observation to bugfuck magical-realism in a mere three shots; then it just gets limp, lacking story or characters but also lacking the kind of 'poetry' obviously intended (they'd have been better off making something like TULPAN, to be honest). Incidental Note #1: Kaplanoglu - like Ceylan - seems to be his own producer, and thanks every single extra by name in the closing credits. Incidental Note #2: I'm from the Middle East, and nobody eats a pomegranate like that. § MARTYRS (64) (dir., Pascal Laugier): First hour is among the most intense I've ever spent in a movie theatre - not (just) because it's ultra-violent but because it plays with our sympathies, turning killers into victims, victims into killers, saviours into sadists, sadists into scientists. Then it shifts gears, becomes more Interesting but doesn't work so well as a movie - proving something quite basic, that watching 'pure' pain and suffering, however extreme or excruciating, isn't really so disturbing; what's disturbing are the feelings (hatred, fear, misanthropy) that impel people to inflict pain and suffering, and it's even more disturbing once those feelings are muddled. Recipe for the Scariest Film Ever: 2 parts blood, 8 parts moral equivalence. § JERICHOW (56) (dir., Christian Petzold): Guess I'll follow convention by not naming the film-noir classic this revisits, but the wrinkle is simple enough: Turkish immigrant refuses to play his assigned 'victim' role, trumping or subverting the well-known Western narrative. (The character was also an immigrant - Greek-American - in the novel and 80s remake, albeit not the Old Hollywood film version, adding an extra bit of irony when the Germans tell him he dances "like a Greek".) That's about it, the film itself being absorbing but a little stodgy, like the other (recent) Petzolds I've seen; some folks think it's dumb when the affair plays out so transparently - hero emerging from the darkness to embrace the heroine with her husband two feet away - but I guess it's just being post-modern. Also, Nina Hoss = Object of Desire? I dunno... § ACNE (37) (dir., Federico Veiroj): Yeah, the kid has acne, though it's not like anyone makes fun of him because of it. He also has frizzy hair and Mathieu Amalric eyes, indulgent parents who let him do whatever he wants, and an upper-class upbringing where a shrink is supplied as a matter of course and the maid's duties include deflowering the boys so they won't be self-conscious about sex. He's bad at piano, doesn't really think about much except girls, and presumably will grow up rich and successful like his daddy. Why exactly should I care about this privileged little runt?
Also on Day 6: Summer Hours
ELEGY FOR FREEDOM
Kelly Reichardt's project is freedom, in the sense of free spirits, the sense of Kerouac and hippy communes - which is also, in America, the sense of Thoreau and Whitman, and the pioneer spirit on which the country was founded (European ideals of freedom have a different flavour, more urban and often more violent, notions borne of an overcrowded continent with no tradition of the Open Road); her constant, unspoken rider is that freedom is in fact unattainable. OLD JOY looked at the splintering of the neo-hippy self, the only problem with that film being that its halves were too extreme; there must be some middle ground, one felt, between babbling madman and settled family-guy. WENDY AND LUCY (72) (second viewing: 70) (dir., Kelly Reichardt) Michelle Williams, Will Patton, Will Oldham lives in that middle ground - and it's very poignant, setting up an intelligible heroine: a girl and her dog, travelling the back roads on her way to Alaska. We see her first in a kind of commune, genial traveller types huddled round a bonfire in the woods (the transients include OLD JOY's Will Oldham, still in babbling-madman mode) but she's not like those people, she's just passing through. She asks so little - yet civilised life makes even that impossible. Everything is rules and regulations, small-town inhabitants as regimented as the dogs we see in a lengthy tracking-shot, trapped behind bars in the local dog-pound. "The rules apply to everyone equally," proclaims a self-righteous young man who catches Wendy shoplifting (for dog-food), which of course is the standard rationale for the ever-increasing regulation of Western society; it's the Rule of Law, it makes everything fairer (as for people who can't afford dog-food, "they shouldn't have dogs"). Hence the various procedures, hence the finger-printing machine at the police station (complicating life for the cops), hence the garage regulation, when our heroine's car breaks down, laying down a flat fee of $50 for getting your car towed - even when the car is literally next to the garage. Reichardt's point is the ever-more-mechanical, ever-less-human tempo of our lives - her bolder, more implicit point being that lip-service equality is something of a scam, at least in a world of rampant social inequality. After all, the rules may be equal but the people who enforce them are not; the self-righteous young man turns out to be a jerk in other ways as well - later ignoring the heroine when she's obviously distraught about the loss of her dog - while a middle-aged security guard who enforces another petty rule (telling her she can't park there, wherever 'there' is) turns out to be a gentleman. The film is a paean to freedom, defined primarily as the freedom to be human - to use one's judgment and be treated according to one's needs, to escape the cookie-cutter world of rules that make human connection impossible (the only genuine bond in the film - the one in the title - isn't between human beings) - and Reichardt gives it an appropriately loose, shimmery look, typical shot being perhaps when Wendy makes a call from a phone booth, the lights of passing cars reflected in the glass as she talks. Also, just for the record: I'm mixed on dogs, never owned one, and Lucy the pooch had nothing to do with this rating. Mike D'Angelo, however, is a well-known cat person.
Round-Up: Day 7
NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD (68) (dir., Mark Hartley): Lose a couple of points (I suspect) if not watching it at a festival, where its cornucopia of awesome-looking movies (Australian exploitation from the 70s and 80s) was utterly invigorating, casting off fatigue and making me fall in love with films all over again. Just a bunch of clips, admittedly, but also definitive, having apparently talked to everyone who mattered then gone back and talked to them again, telling each one what the others said and getting their responses. Eyeball-injections, catatonic killers, Outback-set horrors and naked girls crucified on the fenders of speeding cars; also Barry Humphreys, a.k.a. Dame Edna Everage ("Homophobia and racism can be charming"), and Quentin Tarantino, whose cretinous, best-ending-in-the-history-of-biker-movies excitement makes him an enjoyable MC: turns out the Aussies shoot cars "with this fetishistic lens that just makes you want to jerk off!". § FOUR NIGHTS WITH ANNA (66) (second viewing: 57) (dir., Jerzy Skolimowski): Kieslowski-ish but murkier, both in terms of visuals (which is fine) and in terms of story, which is less fine: I missed Kieslowski's (or perhaps Krzysztof Piesiewicz's) lucid mind, and in fact I'm still not sure if the hero's motive should be taken as obsession, dumb revenge or attempted redemption (I'm not even 100% sure what happens at the end; does that scene with the road-crew mean he's gone back to jail?). Lots of elegant dolly-shots, slow cranes-down and moody scenes of spying and obsessing, which should be enough for most people. [Second viewing, March 2009: OK, I just simply overrated it. Kind of a masterclass in parcelling out information, but it's more murky than moody, and only intermittently compelling. Blame it on 'Desperately Trying to Use Final Film to Redeem Disappointing Festival' Syndrome.]
Also on Day 7: Wendy and Lucy, 35 Shots of Rum
ELEGY FOR ELEGIES
They don't make elegies like they used to. Nostalgia ain't what it used to be, and all that sort of thing. For proof, look no further than Terence Davies and the bafflingly overpraised OF TIME AND THE CITY (47) (dir., Terence Davies), an ode to Davies' native Liverpool. You'd think this somewhat cranky visual poet would be the perfect candidate to make an elegy to the poor-yet-rapturous past of his childhood (in the 1950s); trouble is, he already has - in THE LONG DAY CLOSES, a film I suspect would be on my Top 10 if I watched it again - and has nothing more to say on the matter. So why this? Well, like it says in the closing credits - and Davies was frank enough to admit in his Q&A - Liverpool was/is the European City of Culture for 2008, one of those meaningless EU distinctions designed to get City Councils in a lather, and of course films were commissioned to celebrate the fact; Davies' career is in the doldrums, money was being offered (yes all right, with an application process attached), and the rest is history. Actually the rest really is history, a procession of found footage taking the viewer through three decades of a changing city, and it's very clear to me that either (a) Davies didn't have the creative spark, on this occasion, to create anything like the delicious alchemy Guy Maddin managed in MY WINNIPEG (doubtless because he had no big ideas on the project, and would never have got involved if it hadn't been commissioned), or (b) he saw/sees the film as his way back, and was careful not to try anything too 'fancy' that might jeopardise its reception; on this evidence - his surprisingly plummy speaking voice having erased all evidence of a Scouse accent - he seems ready for a Keira Knightley costume drama, the snobbier the better.
There are good moments, to be sure - albeit in a slightly fogeyish way, thinking back to times when goal-scoring footballers celebrated with grace "and never punched the air in victory" - and of course the film fits squarely into its auteur's personal history, the lapsed Catholic who fell out with God and made Memory his personal religion (you only have to listen to the choral music over footage of mundane 50s home life, Dads shaving and Mums cleaning windows). Trouble is, even if Vadim is right that the film exhibits many of Davies' formal strengths, those strengths topple into weaknesses when original footage is replaced with archive footage: when you choreograph and shoot your own lengthy tracking shots, it's impressive - but when you simply dwell on a lengthy tracking shot from an old newsreel, it feels like laziness. Maybe Davies isn't such a good candidate for this project after all, since he likes to stand back and admire or lament ("All are gone, the old familiar faces") when a more proactive style might've been preferable; then again, some of it is simply lame, like "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" over news of the Korean War (wrong decade, for a start) - and it's notable that the voice-over all but falls silent as the 50s and 60s shade into the 70s, obviously a time that holds few memories for Davies (so why include it? I guess that was the brief). At least we end with some nice visuals of the Liverpool docks, though speaking of visuals also calls to mind the biggest shock of all. Maybe I was too close to the screen, maybe the fuzzy video look should be blamed on the digital projector at the AMC, maybe it's all entirely intentional, but the man who made some of the loveliest images in recent memory - the rain-spattered river turning into golden Mediterranean in THE HOUSE OF MIRTH, or the ray of sunlight on the carpet in THE LONG DAY CLOSES - has now made some of the ugliest. (Addendum, Nov. 2008: This may be a bit unfair; I watched a couple of clips at Thessaloniki and it didn't look ugly - just the standard faded newsreel look - so it may have been a projection issue. I'll watch again when it comes to DVD.)
Harsh? Possibly; but I'm such a sucker for this stuff (I fully expected OF TIME AND THE CITY to rank among my Films of the Year), it hurts when I'm disappointed. I'd have liked to end what may be my final TIFF report - no, seriously - with a heartbreaking elegy; after 7 visits in 8 years, there's a whole chapter of my life that'll always be Toronto.
Instead I have to end with SUMMER HOURS (66) (dir., Olivier Assayas) Charles Berling, Juliette Binoche, Jeremie Renier, Edith Scob, which isn't exactly chopped liver though it lacks a certain something. I'm not going to call this Assayas' comeback - far as I'm concerned, he's never been away - but he lights on some wondrous things here, fashioning an elegy both for the past and one particular family. They're well-off, with artistic leanings (one great-uncle used to be a famous painter) and a house in the country; the house is full of treasures - but the family matriarch dies and the house is sold off, its treasures ending up in museums for strangers to gawp at. The place Art should have in our lives is one obvious theme - i.e. whether it should be enjoyed by those for whom it means something or transmuted into 'national heritage' and locked up in public places - but the film's true poetry lies in the family dynamics: Berling is the 'boring' sibling, a stick-in-the-mud economist unlike his globe-trotting brother and sister, yet also the one who's most sensitive to the pull of the past (it was the same with his parents, the radiator-salesman Dad having been apparently more sensitive than the 'artistic' amanuensis mother); he's the one who takes the kids to see the "austere" Corots hanging up in the living-room, acquainting them with the legacy they'll have to shepherd when their time comes ("It's another era," shrug the uncomprehending teenagers) - but of course he's wrong, because times have changed. In a globalised age of Internet magazines and designed accessories (love those "No PC Today" baubles!) the past falls by the wayside, left to the cold ministrations of experts and bureaucrats, which isn't necessarily wrong - objects are the "residue" of the past, says matriarch Scob; they should die along with it - but still a little sad. The film is potentially devastating, but two things hold it back (at least for me). One is Berling, an actor I can never quite warm to (imagine the role played by Jean-Pierre Darroussin); and the other is that Assayas' moves seem a little obvious, like ending the film with a teenage party at the now-deserted house - the future taking over from the past, etc - incidentally inviting comparisons with that party scene in COLD WATER. Still, anything that speaks of change and transition - "A lot of things will be leaving with me" - was bound to strike a sympathetic chord in me at TIFF '08, a fortnight of changes and transitions. Am I done? Watch this space.