TIFF '10: Ways of dying

The 35th Toronto International Film Festival is in full swing, and I’ve finally found some time to give a few impressions. The weather’s been kind of rotten. I got soaked last night biking home from a sort of ridiculous event held at a downtown beauty salon. Everyone was waiting for Guillermo Del Toro, not the first guy you think of when you think of high-end cosmetics. Rubbery prosthetics, sure, but energizing foot moisturizers not so much. When he finally arrived the poor guy was accosted out front so insistently it took about an hour for him just to get in the door. I spoke with him only briefly. We had a very silly exchange about tacos. I guess I was hungry. It started to pour precisely when I decided to make my way home, too drunk on free wine to have the sense to take a streetcar. Halfway along my journey my complimentary bag of cosmetics became so waterlogged it burst all over Queen Street. As I parked my bike on the curb and ran out into Saturday night traffic it occurred to me that if I were hit by a cab and killed while fishing tubes of gels and creams out of puddles I would probably feel really embarrassed about it afterwards. But we’re talking about, I don’t know, $200 in beauty products here. Anyway, I didn’t die.


I have however been watching a number of movies about dying, how best to face up to it, and how best to deal with its aftermath. By far the most playful of these is Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg, which opens with what is certainly the most awkward on-screen kiss in recent memory before unfolding its narrative through something like cinematic snapshots, brief, often wordless scenes punctured with curiosity, mischief, humour, and a subtle, creeping morbidity. Whole days in Tsangari’s expansive chronology are conveyed with just a few such enigmatic passages. Like last year’s Dogtooth, which Tsangari co-produced, Attenberg is marked by its somewhat perverse engagement in family, belated sexual development, and an extreme case of naïveté that, aggressively quirky as it may be, is mercifully and rigorously stripped of affectation—its lead actress Ariane Labed just won a much-deserved award at Venice. Dogtooth director Giorgios Lanthimos meanwhile shows up here playing a kindly, soft-spoken love interest who connects with Labed by way of their mutual fondness for the ’70s electro-punk duo Suicide. Tsangari’s approach is at once anthropological, elliptical, and surrealistically comic. The movie surprised me more than once, not the least reason being that it genuinely touched me by the time it concluded. It’s the story of a dying widower trying to prepare his adult daughter for, well, basically for he rest of her life. Like Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums, this feels like another enormously creative variation on Ozu’s Late Spring.


Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful finds a very stressed-out Javier Bardem given only weeks to live and trying his best to ensure his children will be safe after he’s gone. The Barcelona they’re inheriting is forbidding, characterized most boldly by illegal migrant labourers living in secret huddled masses and in danger of mass arrests or meaningless death. Their mother is deeply unstable and unable to see her kids as dependents rather than peers. The movie feels like a study in entropy, though there is some consolation via rather beautifully staged intimations of an afterlife. Bardem’s character has a special gift: he speaks with the recently deceased and thus knows there’s something after all this suffering and worry. His performance is marvelous, alternately fiery and calm, and there are moments, sequences, actually, of real grace—we’re dealing with a director that above all thinks in sequences—but there’s also that nagging sense that González Iñárritu is, once again, just too heavy-handed, too eager to impart upon us his own ostensible profundity. I have very mixed feelings, though nothing in Biutiful irritated me as much as that third act of Babel.


Alexei Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls begins in the Kostroma village of Neya, “a place no one remembers anymore,” while its story deals with customs that are equally in danger of being forgotten. A woman dies, and her husband, the director of a paper mill, wants to deal with her remains in the traditional ways of the Merja, an ancient Finno-Ugric tribe from whom many of Neya’s citizens are descended. This involves, among other things, washing the body, fastening coloured ribbons to her pubic hair, and transporting her to a river, where she’s to be cremated before having her ashes deposited in the water. The ritual requires the cooperation of the paper mill’s photographer, who’s the picture of discretion, and also our narrator. Silent Souls just won the FIPRESCI prize at Venice and has already received a lot of highly enthusiastic reviews. It’s a serious, thoughtful, very respectful work, and I’m happy to see it doing well, but I just wasn’t quite as taken with it as many of my colleagues. Based on a novel by Aist Sergeyev, I am sure found it too reliant on voice-over, too overbearing in its use of music, and, even when taking the somberness of the action into account, its performances still struck me as a little more lifeless than seemed entirely necessary. Yet its story, especially as it pertains to the Merja culture, is never less than fascinating. It’s final image is truly poetic—and relayed almost entirely through voice-over.

2009: the year in movies

Let me first confess that I still haven’t seen at least one movie that I predict I’m going to adore. It's been a busy winter! Fortunately, I don’t think there’s any lack of love out there for Fantastic Mr. Fox and it’ll surely be heartily celebrated elsewhere. This may not be case however with my first pick for the best of 2009, which barely screened anywhere in Canada but is now at least available on DVD. In fact so many of my favourites didn’t hit theatres or had only limited runs that I’ve decided to comprise my list from anything that debuted in theatres or on DVD in 2009. This is hardly news of course, but given the current state of exhibitors, unless we all get to attend major festivals we need to look to screens of all sizes if we’re to embrace the spectrum of what’s exciting in movies these days.


The Headless Woman
A hit and run occurs. We don’t see the victim, but neither does the driver. We see the driver work through her decision not to look—the process is oddly transfixing. We then see her do many strange yet finally instinctively logical things in response to the accident. We’re dream-deep in noir territory, but the author of this beguiling movie is Lucrecia Martel, who made The Holy Girl, so along its periphery are unforgettably peculiar, unnervingly funny details, and troubling questions of class solidarity and willful blindness. María Onetto gives an immensely absorbing performance, like Gena Rowlands on Quaaludes.


Summer Hours
A final family reunion precedes a matriarch’s death. Her adult children, now spread across the globe, must reconvene to sort out mother’s legacy. Olivier Assayas’ most emotionally rich work is about things, “bric-a-brac from another era,” the residue of a life, its memories and secrets. It offers a sobering sense of mortality, followed by the consolation of renewal: the last characters we see are the matriarch’s teenaged grandchildren, whiling away the summer hours at grandmother’s old house one last time, before it becomes the property of someone else.


The Limits of Control
“As I descended into impassable rivers, I no longer felt guided by the ferryman.” The opening Rimbaud quote says it all: surrender to the drift, the buoyancy of the texture, mystery and playfulness will carry you along. Thus unmoored, Jim Jarmusch made one of the loosest, most chimerical and, it would appear, most divisive works of his career. Smartly suited Isaach De Bankolé slips across Spain, meeting with shadowy figures, deciphering cryptic messages, drinking twin espressos and even enjoying some after-hours flamenco on his way to complete a sinister mission. Pitched somewhere between Point Blank, The Passenger and Jarmusch’s own Ghost Dog, this is a cinema of wanderlust and hypnosis, far more concerned with architecture, atmosphere, jokes, musical logic, naked ladies, sensation and sensibility, than it is about, say, espionage. My second viewing was approached very skeptically. I still loved it completely.


Inglorious Basterds
Here’s some synchronicity for you: 17 years after Reservoir Dogs Quentin Tarantino finally goes completely bananas and reaches the peak of his maniacal, pastiche-frenzied craftsmanship at the same time. Who else could have made this insanely verbose, over-the-top epic about resistance in war-torn Europe that fantasizes both a scalp-collecting Jewish revenge squad and the complete annihilation of the entire Nazi elite in one explosive screening at a Parisian movie palace? I rest my case.


35 Rhums
This was Claire Denis’ entrancing and moving tale of a closely bound father and daughter gradually finding their individual paths after years of living together. Denis’ touch is so light as to seem weightless, her exposition so minimal as to seem neglectful of plot, yet no one makes movies like this, so alive, so warm and sometimes funky and funny, so sensitive to everyday rhythms and nuance, so trusting in story to reveal itself once nurtured. I could curl up on a rug and drift away with her films for ages.


A Serious Man
Remember the story of Job? Well, this is funnier. A physics professor’s wife leaves him. His brother is arrested. He could any moment be accused of taking a bribe from an alarmingly deadpan student from Korea. He’s inexplicably hounded by the Columbia Record Club. This is the Coen Brother’s vision of the universe, set in the Minneapolis suburbs, circa 1967. A tornado might come along and kill everybody. Uncertainty is the only certainty. There’s no comfort in religion, though it’s kind of fun to look for it anyway. As the Korean student’s dad advises, “Accept the mystery.”


Two Lovers
Speaking of Jews in trouble. A Brooklyn dry cleaner’s son trying not to be suicidal, Joaquin Phoenix loves the sweet girl his family has implicitly selected for him. He also loves Gwyneth Paltrow, who’s clearly bad news but is so much more exciting. He also loves his mom, who happens to be Isabella Rossellini. James Gray is a master storyteller, and this is his best work, a vision of the abyss we traverse when we surrender fully to romantic longing, and of those harrowing moments when compromise wollops us upside the head until out ears ring.


Che
The first part of Steven Soderbergh’s portrait of Ernesto Guevara is a puzzle made of trial and error while the second arm-wrestles with The Thin Red Line for the title of Most Hypnotic War Movie. The whole thing eschews Guevara the T-shirt icon, yet it doesn’t hoist phony biopic vulnerability on him either. It’s by turns lyrical and strategic, a manual on armed revolution and a consideration of violence as a tool for social change.


Sugar
Miguel ‘Sugar’ Santos is hardly a revolutionary, but his story provides us with much insight into the uneasy alliances that span the Americas. Recruited to play ball, he leaves the DR for the US, discovers French toast and TV on the Radio, as well as the simultaneous warmth and cool conservatism of the semi-rural Midwest. So much more than a sports movie—though the baseball is rendered excitingly—Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s follow-up to Half Nelson is a beautiful, profoundly resonant tale of the unpredictable paths that characterize the immigrant experience.

Wendy and Lucy
One needn’t be an immigrant however to understand how riddled with obstacles American life can be. Kelly Reichardt’s neorealist story of a young woman stranded in Oregon, trying to find her dog and get to Alaska, uses the simplest of narrative elements to forge both a lament for the outsider in the ostensible land of plenty and an ode to the kindness of strangers.

Liverpool

A sailor goes ashore in Argentina. He says he wants to visit his home, a tiny village in the mountains, to see if his mother is still alive. It's winter, and the sailor drinks, swigging off a bottle he keeps in his small bag. But it may not only be the cold that he's bracing himself for. Lisandro Alonso's rigorously observational approach is employed with special elegance here, gradually gliding away from the protagonist to someone else, someone he's forgotten, until we rest on the image that explains the enigmatic title, and offers up some touchingly subtle gesture of things passed along from one generation to another.

Maybe not quite as good but still very good: Hunger, The Hurt Locker, Let the Right One In, Pontypool, The Road, Tulpan.

Denis dans le métro: 35 Rhums on DVD

The crisscrossing of rails seen through the smudged windows of a Parisian train glint softly under dusky autumn light. Soon it will be dark, and the faces and figures of passengers will appear reflected on the Plexiglas. Most of the characters in 35 Rhums work in transportation, driving the trains and taxis that move us around our cities. Among them are Lionel (Alex Descas) and his daughter Joséphine (Mati Diop), whose relationship, one characterized by warmth, patience and generosity, is undergoing transition. The images of Lionel and Joséphine—Jo, for short—that lingers most vividly are of them riding together on Lionel’s motorbike, or, in a brief, lyrical departure from the film’s dominant realism, a horse. Despite its abiding calm 35 Rhums is a film where perpetual motion is always being quietly emphasized, though the movements we witness will come to feel less like arrivals and departures than they do like circulation. This is a gentle story about letting things take their course.

With its attention to potent details that slip outside the dictates of conventional narrative, its resistance to explicit drama where implication will do just fine, and its utter lack of severity or formal rigour while maintaining a perfectly recognizable, carefully honed aesthetic, 35 Rhums is quintessential Claire Denis. 20 years after her feature debut Chocolat (1988), the French writer/director has emerged as an exemplary figure in world cinema, one of those luminaries whose work frequently dazzles audiences, is celebrated, discussed, written about and argued over, yet somehow rarely manages to appear on screens outside of major centres and film festivals. Since I first saw 35 Rhums at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of 2008 Denis has already released a follow-up, which possesses only marginally better chances at finding decent distribution thanks to its exotic milieu—war-torn Cameroon—and the presence of international star Isabelle Huppert. (Like I said, marginally better.) 35 Rhums in the meantime played a number of other major festivals but received no theatrical release in Canada. It’s now available on DVD from Mongrel.

Written by Denis and her frequent co-scenarist Jean-Pol Fargeau, 35 Rhums feels like an homage to the films of Yasujiro Ozu, Late Spring (49) in particular. It’s not simply the mellow air or the poetic intermediary scenes that invoke the Japanese master but the story itself, the widowed father, the adult daughter, the negotiations that lead to her full blossoming into independence. Not that any of this is clearly stated in the film—Denis’ approach feels antithetical to exposition, and part of the pleasure of immersing yourself into this film comes from gradually discovering the relationships and histories shared by the characters through their behaviour, their layers of trust, their boundaries. There’s Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué), the taxi driver close in age to Lionel who lives in the same building, who smokes a lot on her balcony, and observes, who’s perfectly at ease with Lionel and Jo yet also accustomed to being pushed away when she tries too aggressively to be part of their family. There’s Noé (Grégoire Colin), closer to Jo’s age, living in an apartment full of memories with a fat old cat and an intense, inarticulate desire to change everything in his life. And there are Lionel’s work buddies, who go out drinking when there’s an occasion to celebrate, such as the retirement of René (Julieth Mars Toussaint), a quiet man with a sweet smile and heavy-lidded eyes. He keeps a famous photograph pasted up in his locker of a guy keeping dozens of plates spinning on rods. What will René do when he has no more plates to spin?

Populated with actors who evoke through their mere presence a rich sense of past experiences—Descas, a regular feature of Denis’ work, is especially good at evoking a long, intriguing personal story without saying a word—nothing about what’s going on either up front or in the margins of 35 Rhums is entirely ambiguous. So much is communicated through glances, embraces, through the way people stand up to eat dinner in their kitchen, the way they might enjoy farting on the couch of a friend when he’s not home, they way they trade off partners when dancing in a small restaurant to the Commodores’ ‘Nightshift’—the song’s rippling guitar/bass/percussion/keyboard groove never sounded so seductive—after being stranded in some suburb when Gabrielle’s car breaks down on the way to a concert. 35 Rhums is elliptical, yet Denis isn’t withholding. She’s selective—what she chooses to show and what she chooses to leave out are major elements of her craft. When Lionel and Jo finally reach the moment where their paths must diverge we know we haven’t learned everything about them. We know their lives are far too much to fathom for a movie. But we’ve seen enough of what they share to sharply feel the rushing current of conflicting emotions welling up in both of them, and this variation on an oft-told tale becomes something singular.

TIFF '08: Reeling in the afterglow, with reflections on Che, Mickey Rourke, Hoffman-Kaufman, JCVD and the wiry physique of Ben Kingsley

Lingering in film festival-land during the final days is much like being the last guest at a party after the beautiful people have left, your host has passed out in the backyard, and you’re sifting through the ashtrays from smokeable butts, bleary-eyed, waiting for dawn. The press office closes down, the hotel lobbies are being shampooed, the limo drivers start vacation. I swear I saw a tumbleweed tumble down Bay Street. It seems so desolate now, who’d have guessed only days before I was sharing an elevator with Ben Kingsley—who really is built like a ninja as it turns out.

Yet it was on the very last day of the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival—at which I saw exactly 33 movies—that I finally caught Darren Aranofsky’s The Wrestler, a very hot ticket and the only press and industry screening I couldn't get into for the crowds, the film which a week before enjoyed the coup of winning the Golden Lion at Venice, the very same festival where Aranofsky’s The Fountain was famously booed two years previous. The Wrestler was something of a disappointment though: the narrative, about spandex-clad lord of the ring reaching a very lonesome middle age, was formulaic, the dialogue flat, the visual style shockingly anonymous considering Aranofsky's history of hyper-cuts and histrionics. But Mickey Rourke, with his leathery flesh and damaged beauty, was indeed wonderful, the physical punishment wrought upon him impressively gruesome, and the real reason to see the movie anyway is the milieu under investigation, which yields tremendous riches of human strangeness. And yes, wrestling, it seems, is indeed fixed.

What wasn’t fixed was any pre-set notions of what would be the highlights of TIFF ’08. There weren’t as many new films from high-profile filmmakers, and of those that did arrive, some were less than startling, like the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading or Richard Linklater’s Me & Orson Welles, which was pleasantly corny, while others, like Steven Soderbergh’s four-hour Che, proved difficult for many. I saw Che in two parts, and was at once dazzled and mesmerized, entranced by the obsessive attention to detail. But I noted a quieter, wearier, and smaller audience for the second screening, perhaps because while ‘Part One,’ covering the Cuban revolution, functions as an instruction manual for fighting a successful armed uprising, ‘Part Two,’ covering Che Guevara (Benicio Del Toro, superb) in Bolivia, does it all over again but ends in failure and death. But this is visionary filmmaking. Exhausting? Absolutely—but exhilarating, too, in its intensity of focus. Soderbergh’s a rare artist who makes you truly believe in the continued possibilities of movies.

The turbulence and atrocities of Latin America informed several other TIFF selections, notably Pablo Larrian’s Tony Manero, which follows a 52-year-old Chilean guy weathering the terror of the Pinochet regime by endeavouring to becoming the titular protagonist from Saturday Night Fever. That he wants to be a fictional character is revealing: like something out of a Roberto Bolaño novel, Larrian’s antihero seems to have taken the violence around him as tacit consent to release his own repressed aberrant tendencies, all moral logic eroding under the weight of his absurd fantasy life. It might synopsize like a movie about dreams trumping dictatorship, but this is not the case: Tony Manero is deeply sinister stuff, concerning a very dark passage of recent history.

Gerardo Naranjo’s Voy a explotar is an altogether wilder tale of familial disintegration, class rot and teen rebellion, a very fun homage to Godard about a girl who meets a guy she says is both “invented and real,” a son of a Guanajuato congressman who harbours homicidal fantasies toward al authority figures. Unlike Che or Tony Manero, the film is set in the present and is not especially politicized, though the undercurrent of class difference and the streak of political corruption especially is impressive. The lovers on the run run away from home, only to camp out on the congressman's leaky roof, a delicious testament to the Mexican elite's willful ignorance regarding what goes on right under their own noses. And the public service video the parents watch about how to cope with a runaway child was surely the most entertaining movie within a movie in a festival with a hell of a lot of movies within movies.  

But enough with the Americas—on to Europe! I don’t think I saw anything more elegantly realized than Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums, which follows the delicate negotiations between a father (dashing Denis regular Alex Descas) and his adult daughter, cohabitants in a Paris apartment block. There are two sequences—one set in a trainyard, the other in a bar—built mainly around music and movement, that are sensuous, poetic, pleasingly aligned to the rhythms of everyday life and among the loveliest things I saw this TIFF. Yet much of the film is relatively straightforward, examining the trails of the working underclass and the knotty entanglements of urban life, something evident in both the film’s web of acquaintances and its metaphoric use of the public transit system. There’s also a scene involving a horse that, while so very brief, speaks volumes about the image-power of Denis’ singular cinema.

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys, like last year’s The Man From London, offers something pretty unusual: a modern noir delivered in a highly meditative style. It kind of reminded me of The Reckless Moment, but more overtly bleak and, you know, brooding. Spanish director Albert Serra’s Birdsong follows the three wisemen on their way to greet Jesus, a film comprised mostly of landscapes being traversed which won’t do it for many but does possess a certain velvety, chiaroscuro beauty and bone-dry humour. Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky is a nearly sublime character study, with the relentlessly cheerful Poppy (Sally Hawkins, terrific) encountering numerous fellow Londoners who challenge her to consider the hidden consequences of her flamboyant optimism. Mabrouk El Mechri’s majorly meta JCVD blurs the real and fictional Jean-Claude Van Damme as he’s held hostage in a Belgian bank heist, suffers tax problems and a child custody suit. He delivers this fucking crazy, half-coherent monologue that recalls Brando’s in Last Tango in Paris. I don’t think Mechri can cash all of the cheques he writes in this thing—It’s a comedy! It’s an action movie! It’s a Charlie Kaufman movie!—but it’s pretty fun.

Speaking of Charlie Kaufman, I assume I'm not alone among Kaufman sympathizers in feeling I should probably see Synecdoche, NY again before I pursue any elaborate commentary. It's overwhelming,truly bizarre, and defies a glib summation. The film is certainly something you have to admire even when it's grinding you down. In fact, it's actually quite an amazing piece of work, singular in its aggrandizement of self pity, sprawling in its way, with Philip Seymour Hoffman's Kaufman stand-in suffering, often terribly amusingly so, through a life of misery, illness, disappointment and isolation, with only his never-ending play-in-progress, a colossal work of theatre that simulates Hoffman-Kaufman's sad life, as some sort of soul balm. I was perplexed; I was touched; I was entertained; I was bored; I was bummed; I was drained; but I want to see it all again.