TIFF '10: Life after cinema

Over the course of the picture, Jorge Jellinek loses his job, gets a haircut, abandons his luggage, and impersonates a law professor—and that’s only in the movie’s second half. By the end a sort of transformation has taken place, a change has come over his face, and he seems lighter, like a new man, or at lest trying to be. It’s a wonderful performance, among the finest I’ve seen at the 35th Toronto International Film Festival, one that's unassuming yet rippling with comic grace. Jellinek is just a pleasure to watch. He walks as though trying not to move his torso. Before the haircut he seems to be wearing a wig. Without his nerd-to-the-marrow glasses he could perhaps be Alfred Molina. His character has spent 25 years working at a Montevideo cinematheque, which is now dying. Cracked vinyl covers the seats, each of which Jellinek personally inspects. The key to the vault of reels is secreted away in the DVD case for Ikiru. A donation campaign is underway yet it’s hard to imagine anyone’s pocketbooks being pried open from hearing a flamboyantly dull radio lecture on the finer points of developing one’s knowledge of cinema history—I wish they’d pitch in for no other reason than the promise of a Manoel de Oliveira retrospective. Shot in black and white, in 1.33 aspect ratio, with all it’s credits at the top, Federico Veiroj’s A Useful Life is nostalgically clothed and promises to be an homage to vanishing chambers of cherished cinematic discovery, something along the lines of Goodbye Dragon Inn. As far as that goes, it’s affectionate yet not all that sentimental. It’s actually about something else, and it’s very funny. At one point Jellinek is weeping on a bus when he spots someone looking at him, someone who looks suspiciously like a younger version of himself. That’s the turning point, I think. As Jellinek says in one of his recorded pleas for support, “You are both a witness and a participant…” That goes for life and the movies. I only hope that more people see this movie, in cinematheques, multiplexes, or otherwise. (Oddly enough I saw it at Jackman Hall, the theatre in the Art Gallery of Ontario, which the TIFF cinematheque called home until only a few weeks ago when they moved into their new digs.)

Scentless Apprentice

Balthazar (Nicolas Cage) had been searching for the “Prime Merlinian” for 1270 years and in all that time never caught wind of this invention called shampoo. He did however develop a liking for ultra-long rawhide trench coats and other such comic book Goth super-stylings and at some point wisely chose to base himself in New York City, a place where one can go out wearing such flamboyant vestments without drawing too much unwanted attention.

Balthazar was biding time running a grimy midtown antique shop when he first met Dave (Jay Baruchel) back in 2000, but Dave was just a little kid then and not quite ready to assume his duties as savior of the world. Ten years later Dave’s grown into a nerdy genius physics major at NYU, and when Balthazar’s old nemesis Horvath (Alfred Molina) is resurrected from a pillar of roaches Dave’s belated date with destiny finally arrives. He’s taken under Balthazar’s wing, is ordered to wear pointy shoes, and learns how to make molecules vibrate faster and cough up plasma bolts and fireballs, both of which, it should be said, look pretty awesome. Indeed, the fairly seamless parade of luminous special effects in Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is by far the best thing in the movie, whose story is entirely mechanical, formulaic enough that you can take naps and not miss a thing, and whose performances range from pleasant to annoying.

Director John Turteltaub’s been making movies for all ages for ages, among them Cool Runnings, 3 Ninjas, Disney’s The Kid and both National Treasure movies, which I guess is where he became pals with Cage, who repeatedly flings his locks and trench coat but isn’t let off the leash enough here to be very interesting even as pure camp. Canada’s own Baruchel meanwhile delivers hunchy, squirmy, fidgety affectations that seemed fairly purposeful in The Trotsky but here just get distracting and oblivious to the vibe conjured by his collaborators, especially his token love interest (Teresa Palmer). You have to wonder, did they bother to ask Michael Cera?

In any case Turteltaub’s doesn’t give his actors enough space to fully play the comedy, but he keeps things jumping at least, letting our eyes roam all over as, for example, we watch a Chinese dragon careen through Chinatown or a brassy bull bash up Battery Park. Yet for all the expensive location work there isn’t a single scene in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice that actually resembles New York in the slightest. Too bad, since all that hocus-pocus would probably feel more magical if it were unleashed in settings that felt more like real life.

Prince of dumbness

Making even the Middle East safe for budget-busting spectacle cinema, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is the invasion we were all waiting for. Today’s empires don’t colonize but rather colon-ize. This video game adaptation with the long-winded title, the colon and the words that follow presumably promising abundant sequels, sweeps viewers off to CGI-enhanced ancient lands and holy cities and holy shit is it ever devoid of new ideas. The opening anonymous voice-over actually begins with the words, “Long ago, in a land far away…” (You mean, um, Iran?) Three different scenarists, not to mention Jordan Mechner, the video game’s author, actually got paid to write that.

Jake Gyllenhaal, who has never before been such a dry screen presence, plays this street rat who gets plucked from a life of scavenging by a benevolent polygamist king and grows up to be this disturbingly inflated, giant-necked super-acrobat and ultimate fighting champ with L.A. rocker hair and stubble and a distractingly hazy British accent. Ben Kingsley’s his uncle, always looking a little fishy, wearing too much eye liner, and talking too smart for his own good. An unsanctioned invasion transpires, the king is killed by a cloak soaked in something flammable, and Jake takes the rap. With the help of Bond-girl Gemma Arterton’s ornery princess and a time-reversing knife, Gyllenhaal of course sets the record straight and saves the day. The fevered dumbness and political obliviousness wouldn’t be so bad if things weren’t so punishingly generic.

About the only thing that makes Prince of Persia relatively diverting is Alfred Molina, who keeps turning up with his entourage of black guys who don’t get to talk much. Molina mostly complains a lot about taxes but goes wild for ostriches, whom he races and kisses while fretting over their habitual depressions. Molina’s clearly been given a lot of room to stretch out with this potentially negligible supporting role, and that’s about the smartest thing director Mike Newell does here, taking his orders from the Jerry Bruckheimer/Disney juggernaut. The camera whips around a lot yet Newell can’t seem to piece together a scene with any real coherence, particularly when there’s a lot of action to track, often resorting to excessive slow-motion to cover the lack of useful coverage. Newell’s made some actual movies before, most notably Donnie Brasco and Four Weddings and a Funeral, but in joining the ranks of Michael Bay he’s managed to completely erase any sense of directorial personality. Given that video games, to my knowledge, don’t employ directors, you have to wonder if soon enough movies like Prince of Persia won’t save a few bucks and simply be helmed by robots.

Extracurricular studies: An Education

Their meet-cute is irresistible: there’s Jenny, after school, still in uniform, stuck in the rain with her cello, and here comes David, the older, eloquent stranger in his smart little car, offering to provide shelter not for her but for the beloved instrument, which as an unabashed aesthete he can’t bear to see in peril. So the cello gets the back seat while Jenny, for decorum’s sake—she’s only 16—walks alongside as David drives, slowly, gently questioning her, completing the first part of his seduction. A few scenes later Jenny’s in the passenger seat, and the way she looks at David, her vulnerability nearly palpable, her awe eroticized, all we can think is, man, has he ever done a number on her. That moment carries within it an awful lot of what’s initially wonderful and finally disappointing about An Education. Like David, the film’s deft with persuasion but falls short in the way of follow-through.

Helmed by Danish director Lone Scherfig and adapted by novelist Nick Hornby from Lynn Barber’s memoir, An Education is a coming-of-age tale set in 1961, with London not yet swinging and Paris still holding its position as the world capital of romantic-would-be-sophisticate teenage fantasy. The film’s beguiling enough to leave you uncertain as to how much power comes from Scherfig-Hornby-Babrber’s collective sensitivity to the heights of one’s first brush with adult thrills and how much comes from the immersive quality of Carey Mulligan’s startling central performance. The actress, now in her mid-20s, is a few significant years away from the heady experiences that Jenny—innocent, yes, but smart as a whip—gets her first taste of, but she registers her enrapture as through it’s all still fresh and undigested. She’s radiant and awkward, a child discovering elegance and sex, fixating while just holding a cigarette, listening to Ravel, or sitting motionless, one hand poised on the dining table while her parents argue in the adjoining room.

As David, Peter Sarsgaard, too, is inspired casting, sleepy eyes, smooth talk, an expert listener, and a pretty blatant grifter to anyone with a decent radar—something Jenny’s parents, played by Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour, rather implausibly lack. For as long as we sense only the vague threat of David without knowing quite what he’s up to, the film’s delicate and engrossing. A rake he may be, but David’s endowed with remarkable texture and charisma, so that we never feel that Jenny’s malleability is purely a matter of youth, or of movie convention. The problem starts when Peter exits the picture and turns into a bogeyman. The last round of scenes in which we discover the full extent of David’s deceptions are almost laughable in how they compress exposition into flat melodrama, rushing to resolve Jenny’s crisis, which suddenly boils down to a battle between David and Jenny’s English teacher, who's fighting on the side of feminine independence, social legitimacy, and what Jenny cruelly dismisses as the dread life of an old maid. Jenny’s young and bright and has everything ahead of her, so she recovers from David’s whirlwind fairly quickly, but the movie never quite manages the same feat. I guess buy the ending, I just don’t buy its ostensible consolation.

Jim Jarmusch and the vice squad: sitting down for a hot dose of Coffee and Cigarettes

Addictive, unhealthy and socially unacceptable, the twin vices that inspire and give shape to Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes are, like cinema or conversation, capable of providing the purest of pleasures when experienced in the simplest of circumstances and with minimal distractions. Jarmusch has always been one of our finest practitioners of comic minimalism; although his films never seem bound by a rigourous, predetermined structure, they rely on formal constraints and carefully chosen repetitions to give them shape, tone, humour and, most rewardingly, meaning. The 11 short films that make up Coffee and Cigarettes give me such meditative pleasure because they feel loose enough to potentially slide off in any direction at any moment, and yet they whirl around within a tight enough thematic and visual landscape to allow me to participate vicariously in their subtlety, wit, cheeky philosophizing and finely-honed charm.

The films were shot between 1986 (the year Jarmusch made Down by Law) and the present, though most were made fairly recently, a sign that Jarmusch took plenty of time discovering the most appropriate context in which to create and present them, picking up a gag from one piece, a stray idea from another, until the final work felt like much more than just the sum of its parts. Each piece, naturally enough, centres around a table and two or three individuals, many of them familiar from Jarmusch’s previous works, smoking, talking and riding out a caffeine buzz. And nearly all, photographed in lovely black and white by some of the world’s finest cinematographers—like Frederick Elmes, Tom DiCillo and Robby Müller—feature eloquent overhead shots of checkered tabletops, dingy espresso cups, grimy ashtrays and scattered spoons that amount to the most painstaking fetishization of diner/café culture I’ve ever seen. (And as a connoisseur of the greasy spoon, I write this with absolute affection.)

The first piece, though by far the most overtly absurdist of the bunch, sets the tone nicely, with Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright meeting at a café, their familiarity with each other not especially clear, but bonding over their love of caffeine and nicotine before arranging a bizarre trade-off of personal duties, sort of a playful, banal version of Strangers on a Train. The young Benigni is oddly handsome and hilarious, while the cooler Wright provides one of the film’s funniest recurring notions: drinking lots of coffee before bed makes you dream faster. This is just one of several epiphanies surrounding consciousness, health and bad habits that build in silly sophistication over the course of the film.

In most of the pieces the actors essentially play themselves rather than characters, and the tension between these loners, eccentrics and famous or semi-famous people that we see in the scene between Benigni and Wright is echoed throughout: Tom Waits and Iggy Pop meet "Somewhere in California" and seem incapable of getting past their discomfort with each other’s peculiar celebrity; waiters struggle to balance the implied familiarity of their roles with customers; Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA and GZA are so starstruck by Bill Murray (clumsily and hilariously disguised as a cook) that they continually refer to him by his full name; a glamorous Cate Blanchett, in the film’s most technically impressive piece, squirms in the company of her resentful cousin (also played by Blanchett, in a rock-chick get-up that makes her look like Kate Bush). And in what is perhaps the all-around best piece, Alfred Molina sets up a meeting with fellow British actor Steve Coogan (the brilliant star of 24 Hour Party People) that becomes utterly stripped of conventional niceties by the two men’s mid-level celebrity status and the ridiculous hierarchy they perceive between them. Jarmusch is something of a dramatic purist in his ongoing interest in the follies of everyday communication (witness the role of linguistic barriers in several of his films) and the episodic nature of Coffee and Cigarettes allows him to attend to such scenarios with greater focus then ever.

Coffee and Cigarettes closes with a surprisingly poignant and beautiful piece featuring Taylor Mead and Bill Rice, who sit in a dim and dusty warehouse of inky shadows, drinking bad coffee, apparently on a break from whatever sort of paid work these two old guys could possibly be doing. A man sweeps the floor laconically somewhere behind them as Mead begins fantasizing about being somewhere else, explaining that, like the title of Gustav Mahler’s melancholy song (which the two catch a few bars of somewhere in the ether), he feels that he’s "lost track of the world." Mead suggests they pretend the coffee is champagne and they share a toast to better times. And at that moment the toast seems shared by all of us, a toast to the space that Coffee and Cigarettes inhabits, a place of refuge from the noise of the world and the demoralizing effects of modern life, a place where someone like Jarmusch can produce films outside the oppressive box of narrative commercial filmmaking. A place where things can move along with the ease of great conversation or sweet music and we have the freedom to indulge in the simple pleasures of life.