TIFF '11: The roles we play

In the last few years I’ve been able to interview Werner Herzog several times in connection with his Toronto International Film Festival premieres, and as much as I enjoy these experiences—Herzog is nothing if not entertaining company—our conversations, if you can call them that, along with his public appearances, have made me increasingly suspicious: Has the filmmaker become too much of a showman? Has his schtick become too wrote, his eccentricities token, a put-on, an extension of the sort of too-recognizably Herzogian branding that threatens to over-burden films like My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, converting them into a sort of check list? When I speak to him I feel less like he’s responding to my questions than he’s launching almost randomly into his prepared anecdotes, which are part of his hard-sell. (“Herzog always delivers!”) But I’ve just seen Into the Abyss, his new film about two inmates in Texas—one on death row, one serving a sentence that wouldn’t see him up for parole for another 40 years—and the families of those inmates victims. It has no trademark Herzog voice-over, and features no exotic landscapes (unless you consider rural Texas to be exotic). And watching it I realize that, while Herzog the public figure may seem less than engaged with an honest and open exchange, Herzog the filmmaker is in fact more invested in people at this point in his career than at any other. In Encounters at the End of the World he was as interested in the people who filter down to the bottom of the world as he was in the Antarctic undersea strangeness. In Cave of Forgotten Dreams he was as curious about the scientists at work in the Chauvet Cave as he was in the cave’s astounding Stone Age art. Into the Abyss is an extraordinary film precisely because of Herzog’s faith in his subjects, all of them struggling to come to terms with different kinds of murder, to supply the film with its wonder and meaning. He listens exceedingly well. He provokes, he seeks out quirk at every chance, but he also exudes real compassion without flamboyant sentiment.


On a somewhat similar note, Alps, the latest from Yorgos Lanthimos, which had its TIFF premiere to some very enthusiastic fans last night, echoes Dogtooth, its predecessor, in its obsession with role-playing and heavily constructed modes of behaviour: the film is about a group of people who rent themselves out as surrogates to people who have lost a loved one, pretending to be the dearly departed for as long as it takes to get over the loss. Of course, it’s kooky and formalist as all hell. It’s also fascinating, and surprisingly poignant. A potential point of contention for some will lay in the fact that while the flat performance style of Dogtooth was contained within a cloistered family unit, Alps opens up the canvas to the rest of the world—and it turns out that everyone else acts like that too. But this filmmaker, so drawn to intricate, rule-laden systems and the process of how they inevitably break down, is not as schematic as the oppressive patriarchal figures he creates. As rigorously Bressonian as his films’ now apparently de rigueur performance style is, there is still room for spontaneity. There are moments when his protagonist—beautifully played by Aggeliki Papoulia—becomes so immersed in the people she’s temporarily resurrecting that emotional or guttural responses break up, or rather transcend her deadpan. There are real people with real feelings in Alps—it’s just that they’re placed in situations that interrogate the very notion of how feelings are expressed.

Future family values: Dogtooth on DVD

Sea, Motorway, Excursion, Carbine. At least three of the four “new words of the day” to be learned by the three children at the start of Dogtooth (Kynodontas) could be associated with escape, while the word “escape” is itself unlikely to have entered their vocabulary. These children are actually adults, or at least on the cusp of adulthood, though they behave like pre-pubescents and have apparently never in their lives set foot beyond the confines of their family’s home, located somewhere in rural Greece, a clean, middle class fortress of self-imposed seclusion, complete with swimming pool, and nearly devoid of anything that denotes the contaminating influence of contemporary culture, which for some reason includes any consumer technology produced after about 1986. The parents have informed the children that they would have no chance of survival should they leave the property, and have taken a totalitarian approach to home-schooling, right down to the essentials of language acquisition. Sea, for example, is a leather armchair. Excursion is a very resistant material. A pussy is a big light. Dogtooth is a very strange, darkly hilarious, and rather ingenious movie. At least it seems strange while you’re watching it. Once it’s over, you may find yourself thinking it’s one of the most lucid studies of family life you’ve seen.

Why is that woman being driven blindfolded along a freeway at dusk? Why is that couple having sex while they both wear headphones? Dogtooth is crafted in such a way that context is rarely explicit. This extends to the composition of the frames, which will often depict only the torsos or legs of characters, or reveal only one speaker in a conversation. (I’ve already told you more than you’d probably ascertain in the first 20 minutes.) But the movie is far too playful, attentive, and mischievous to label as withholding. What it does, and does very well, is allow us to gradually understand the rules of its cloistered world largely from the limited perspective of its inhabitants. There’s what we might call an anthropological rigour to Dogtooth. It’s about a kind of social experiment with unintentional yet deeply sinister implications. The family property even resembles a cult compound. Where our story goes is, I think, eerily logical, though it’s also, I think, oddly hopeful.

In a video interview included on Kino’s new DVD, director and co-writer Yorgos Lanthimos, explains that the initial impulse behind Dogtooth was to make a science-fiction film that imagines life in a future where families are becoming extinct, so the parents at the centre of our story must go to extremes to preserve theirs. The movie Lanthimos made no longer bears the trappings of sci-fi, but it’s certainly easy enough to locate the essentially primal urges that motivate the parents: a desire to protect the clan at all costs; a desire to maintain a sense of (false) purity for as long as possible; and most of all a desire to redesign the world to your liking and raise your children within it. Such desires inevitably lead to disaster, but they’re still not that hard to identify with.

Winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2009 and easily the biggest surprise among this year’s Oscar nods—it’s been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film—Dogtooth has clearly made an impression. It’s as entertaining as it is insightful and twisted, climaxing with a living room talent show in which the eldest child (the fearless and inventive Aggeliki Papoulia) reinterprets a sequence of Flashdance while her brother plays bad classical guitar—having no one to compare himself to, he probably thinks he’s a prodigy. The performances are uniformly detailed and focused, founded in regulated behaviour rather than conventional character development. You’d never guess these were actually normal people. I saw two of them at a party during the 2009 Toronto Film Festival, where Dogtooth had its Canadian premiere, and I was amazed to see them chatting and laughing and sipping cocktails. If they can go through all that and come out of it so seemingly civilized, there may truly be hope for all of us.

Aside from being newly available on DVD, Dogtooth is also playing at Toronto's Royal Cinema, where it can be enjoyed on a double-bill with Attenberg, the likeminded film which stars Lanthimos and was directed by Dogtooth's co-producer Athina Racehl Tsangari

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.

TIFF '09: "People can't help it if they're monsters..." Two films about weird families

By isolating its family from the rest of the world, Greek writer/director Giorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth (Kynodontas) arguably gets a little closer to the bone with regards to just how deeply our parents impress upon us all an idea of how the world supposedly works, how we might find a reasonably safe place in it, should we ever have the opportunity. Depicting the quotidian routines of three adult children and their mother, the lot of them confined to a fairly luxurious gated country home by their patriarch, the film is essentially a smart, very dark comedy, only gradually yielding its insights and particular heights of strangeness.


The family’s cloistered existence is made replete through the appropriation and nearly surrealist manipulation of language. The sea is a chair. A motorway is a strong wind. A pussy is a big light, which if shut off leaves us engulfed by darkness. The planes that fly overhead are toys, and the children long for one to fall from the sky so they can possess it. Their obedience is ensured through the invention of artificial dangers while their sexual education is provided by anonymous guests procured by their tireless dad. But with time a serpent will enter their garden, bringing with it VHS tapes of Rocky and Flashdance, and their innocence is doomed to be broken.


Dogtooth creeps up on you, and by its end presents us with a surprisingly resonant equation and an elegant final image. Lanthimos’ style is detached, in keeping with the wryly anthropological nature of the whole premise, leaving the actors to really breathe life into the whole, which they do a truly remarkable job at, one deserving of some special ensemble award. I saw one of them at a festival party and was tempted to say hi, but the mariachi band was very loud, I felt shy, and wasn’t quite sure how to tell her that I really loved the way she liked her sister’s arm.


Another very different, if equally uneasy examination of family, Life During Wartime (nothing, sadly, to do with the Talking Heads masterpiece of first-person terrorist funk pop) is Todd Solondz’s sequel to Happiness. This leads us of course to more couples crying in restaurants, but also to a continuation of its predecessor’s enquiry into living with despair, uncertainty, and most especially pedophilia. “People can’t help it if they’re monsters,” declares Bill (Ciarán Hinds), himself a convicted pedophile. The statement is hardly a satisfying conclusion in itself, but Solondz seems interested in exploring the theme of forgiveness as much if not more than that of understanding, and forgiveness becomes an unusually fraught topic of conversation here given that a number of the characters are Israel sympathizers.

Life During Wartime ultimately feels less than fully realized, and its plot turns on a few pretty thin conceits, though it does have some superb sequences that could almost stand alone as fragments of some greater study of how emotionally crippled adults negotiate their way through thorny realms of need. I couldn’t help but wonder if it may have been more affecting had it used its original cast, but I can’t complain about the new one assembled, which beside the weirdly fearsome Hinds includes the always wonderful Allison Janney, Charlotte Rampling, Ally Sheedy, and Paul Reubens as a ghost.

More TIFF a-coming...