TIFF '10: Traversing precarious terrain

Wednesday evening’s Mavericks session at the 35th Toronto International Film Festival featured Kelly Reichardt, the American director of Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. It was probably the most captivating and intimate session of its kind I’ve ever seen at TIFF. Reichardt was interviewed by Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum, who would not have been my first choice for the role but in fact did a remarkable job, alternately supporting and gently provoking her subject. Reichardt was warm, good humoured, yet utterly frank about her particular anxieties as a filmmaker who, in the ten years between her first and second features, gradually came to realize the myriad filmmaking methods for which she was not suited and essentially refused to work. Joking somewhat painfully about the disappointingly smallish crowd that turned out for the on-stage Q&A—among them actors Shirley Henderson and Neal Huff, and composer Jeff Grace—Reichardt matter-of-factly tried to explain how she was acutely aware that her opportunities to make the sort of films she wants to make—the sort that are handmade, that use skeletal crews, that offer the talent no pampering whatsoever, that are shot on film despite tiny budgets, that grant the director genuine and complete independence, that reject diversion in favour of quietude, narrative dynamics in favour of close observation and emotional nuance—could evaporate at any moment. Reichardt is beloved and respected, especially amongst local cinephiles, and everyone there seemed to want to reassure her of this, yet honestly, I think her anxieties are perfectly valid. What makes Reichardt’s work so valuable and enduring is also what can make it seem like some sort of endangered species.

Meek’s Cut-off, Reichardt’s fourth feature, roughly approximates a western, though it forsakes widescreen vistas for square images of landscapes dissolving into other, similar landscapes. It offers a paucity of action, and is firmly committed to conveying the arduousness of settling in unmapped territory. It is distinctly immersive and may very well be the best American film of the year. Based on true events and set in 1845, it chronicles a trio of families traversing Oregon with the increasingly dubious leadership of big-talking, biker-bearded Bruce Greenwood’s Stephen Meek. Terrain proves troublesome and water progressively scarce. Henderson’s character is pregnant. A strangely moving scene finds her chasing a kerchief across parched gray earth in the mischievous wind. Washing up, repairing wheels, building a fire: drawing inspiration for Robert Flaherty’s films, Reichardt allows the group’s chores to play out in real time, and in doing so slowly changes our sense of time. From a distance we watch Michele Williams fire and then reload a musket in a state of panic and it is an unnervingly long process. At one point the men capture an Indian. Against Meek’s wishes they let him live so as to lead them to water. There are no subtitles and we have no special access to his thoughts or intentions. He isn’t ennobled or humanized any more than anyone else. He’s a man, which is enough for Williams’ character to fear him, but also to treat him with respect. She’s pragmatic first and sympathetic second. The film’s ending is sublimely well judged, resolving almost nothing yet ushering us right to the moment where our desperate convey of characters must surrender any notion of being able to control their destinies. Beautiful. But political? It’s that too, but I’d rather you discover those layers on your own.

TIFF '09: "Without patience you can't be a fisherman..." Two new films from Mexico

My most treasured discovery at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival came from Mexican filmmaker Rigoberto Pérezcano, whose previous film, XV en Zaachila, was, quite tellingly, a documentary. Northless, co-written by Pérezcano with his producer Edgar San Juan, is imbued with a vivid and intimate sense of place, even if its themes finally have something to do with the difficulty of finding a place where one truly belongs. It follows its protagonist Andrés (Harold Torres, marvelous) from his native Oaxaca to Tijuana, where he makes a series of fumbling attempts to illegally enter the US but unintentionally begins cultivating an attachment to a handful of individuals who give him work, food, and shelter while he comes up with his next scheme to trespass the frontier.


Its interesting to note that the Spanish title of the film is Norteado, which means to be disoriented, or without a compass, or without a sense of north. The English title, though clearly an inaccurate translation, actually strikes me as the richer one, because it makes the north seem like a paradise, which is to say a place that doesn’t really exist, and it renders Andrés a man who is missing something, who suffers from the absence of some state of being he seems to think is necessary for living. His ostensible destination feels increasingly abstract as the story goes on, and his glimpses of it are delivered in a very amusing sort of shorthand—side-by-side headshots of George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger—whereas the transitory life he establishes along the border—the most northernmost point he seems able to get to—grows only more welcoming.


What makes the film such a refreshing take on the border-crossing genre is above all its tone. About a third of the way through I suddenly became aware of the fact that the film wasn’t a drama but a comedy, albeit of a very subtle, unassuming kind, pitched somewhere between Jim Jarmusch and Charles Burnett in its use of deadpan humour, static images, repetition, seductive music, and situational comedy. There’s a tremendous warmth that emanates from the film once we get to the scene where our hero finds himself sitting in the front seat of a truck, drinking cans of Tecate and eating peanuts with the older woman who’s taken him in, partly out of kindness and partly out of reasons of her own. The film builds to a climatic sequence that’s too inventive and hilarious to spoil here. I hope you’ll have a chance to see it, and since the latest rumours have it that Mantarraya might be coming on as distributors, the chances seem decent.


I was less impressed with To the Sea, the Mexican film about three generations of men living in a remote fishing community in the Caribbean. I know many people who were deeply impressed by this work, but its beauty struck me as being strictly of the postcard variety, a very conventional perspective on an obviously wildly gorgeous locale. (Young filmmakers should always be leery of locations that offer nothing but spectacular beauty.) The child featured in the film, as well as the egret he befriends, are wonderfully natural presences on screen, but I couldn’t help but feel astonished by how little writer/director Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio brings to the proceedings. His hand as filmmaker is so light it barely seems to exist. It becomes difficult to believe that the characters wouldn’t have more to work out between them. I genuinely believe that Gonzalez-Rubio spent a lot of time with his subjects, got to know them and their lifestyle well. I just can’t believe the dearth of insight into their characters’ experiences he managed to conjure on film. To the Sea feels like a hybrid of a nature documentary and a home movie, but I have to say that I’ve seen better nature documentaries, and I’ve even seen better home movies. Incidentally, this film was in fact produced and will be distributed under the auspices of Mantarraya, though I’m not certain how they plan to get it out to a larger public.

More TIFF notes still to come...

Rough crossing: Sin Nombre

A revved-up hybrid of City of God and El Norte, nurtured and probably tamed by the Sundance Institute, US writer/director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s debut Sin Nombre, or Nameless, may not be as generic as its title suggests, what with its impressive landscapes, its novel and genuinely chilling brutality, and its surprisingly exquisite score (courtesy of Hollywoodland composer Marcelo Zarvos). But this infernal tour of Mexico’s decidedly unfriendly railway lines and its most grotesque nests of rural gang violence is nevertheless an obedient child of Hollywood convention. Amidst all the fighting, fleeing and filleting onscreen, another battle is being waged between a young filmmaker’s vigorous desire to invoke gritty, incendiary realism and increasingly frequent injections of sentimentalist deus ex machina. As we charge toward the climax there’s not much ambiguity surrounding which of these opposing forces will win out.

Willy, a.k.a. Casper (Edgar Flores), at first seems to represent just about the worst thing in his local Southern Chiapas branch of the horrifyingly vicious Mara Salvatrucha, founded decades ago in Los Angeles. He may not have erased his face with tribal tattoos like the gang’s ultra-scary alpha male leader—who provides us with the creepiest image of parenthood since Mike Tyson graced the Father’s Day issue of GQ—but as we meet him he’s ushering in a new member that still looks a couple of years shy of puberty. Sure, Smiley (Kristyan Ferrer) may have ended up in Mara Salvatrucha anyway, but if Willy didn’t recruit him at such a tender age the kid might have at least had a chance. Smiley’s initiated into their fold in the customary style: he’s ordered to kill an unarmed and terrified member of a rival gang held captive for just such a ritual. Smiley’s victim will soon be chopped up into dog food, just more grist for the mill, but the experience seals Smiley’s fate. Willy, whose tattooed tear is Fukunaga’s little giveaway that he’s really not such a bad egg, will steadily move toward redemption. Things for Smiley on the other hand will only get worse.

Despite the high drama surrounding all that unfolds around Willy, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) will emerge as our real protagonist. Her trajectory will take her from her Honduran village, hopping freight trains northward in the hope of making it all the way to New Jersey, where some family and a presumably better life awaits. Where the movies have more commonly explored the hazards of clawing one’s way onto US soil, the illegal migrants in Sin Nombre are clearly lucky if they even make it that far. Willy and Sayra will cross paths, and once he’s made a violent break with Mara Salvatrucha, Willy will become Sayra’s designated protector, even though she may be in more danger what with Willy’s ex-comrades on his tail. There could even be a love interest here, but you have to give credit to Fukunaga for steering clear of cursory romance in the midst of a story to desperate and blood-soaked to really make room for it. It’s one of the few deviations from cliché Fukunaga manages to hold onto.

With its images of migrants clinging to nocturnal trains like flies on a wounded animal, Sin Nombre leaves a deep impression, a sense of the trail of fear and ambition that branches off into the distance far beyond the relative serenity of the US/Mexico border. Above all, we’re given here a striking portrait of a world still on the move against all odds, of the Americas as a largely lawless wilderness where shelter is either absent or shrouded in bureaucracy and the worst kind of opportunism is able to flourish. In a way it’s almost a better documentary than it is a drama. It makes you wonder how Fukunaga will distinguish himself from here on out. Outsiders have often made great storytellers, but this gringo brought just a little too much luggage with him on his travels south.

Take this job and shovel: The Bastards

They wait maybe a dozen together, in ball caps and blue jeans, on a corner near a freeway in some vast, anonymous, mind-numbingly landscaped patch of American sprawl. Employers pull up in hatchbacks and trucks quickly filled with the huddled day-labourers leaping at the chance to dig ditches or collect trash. Negotiations occur in exchanges of broken English and Spanish so minimal as to be comical, never more so than when one boss improbably addresses his impromptu crew of underpaid workhorses as “amigos.” Mexican director Amat Escalante’s The Bastards drops us into the circuit of illegal migrant work, ensuring it’s deeply tedious and, most importantly, that no matter how much these rich gringos and desperate Mexicans interact there can finally be no genuine communication. Exploitation cannot engender friendships. Not on Escalante’s clock.

The Bastards was written by Escalante and his brother Martín, who previously collaborated on their debut feature Sangre (2005). Escalante was assistant director on Carlos Reygadas’ Battle in Heaven (05), and an aesthetic kinship is clearly evident here in the lengthy shot duration, often-static camerawork, deadpan humour and dearth of events in any one scene. This is definitely not a bouncy movie, but Escalante utilizes what might feel like Latino art-house tropes with craftsmanship and purpose. When so little happens in any one sequence everything counts: gestures, fragments of dialogue or a handful of actions bloom portentously, and sometimes quite funnily. We’re given just the right amount of digestion time to consider what things might mean before the narrative moves along. And where this narrative moves may surprise you. And then after it surprises you, it suddenly doesn’t surprise you at all.

The polemical core of The Bastards is in one sense simplistic. Policies that perpetuate exploitation, crime, economic disparity, suffering and death are bad. Guns, too, are bad, perhaps especially when in the hands of the young. The final scenes ram these perfectly sympathetic sentiments home with a grand wallop. But the bluntness of the film’s thesis is tempered by the sophistication and wit brought to the shaping of the story and skeletal character development. (And here’s where you stop reading if you want to avoid potential spoilers.)

The Bastards takes the animosity toward these so-called wetbacks invading US soil and toil and compresses it down into a single case of home invasion. Jesús (Jesús Moises Rodriguez) and Fausto (Rubén Sosa), who we first see on the corner with the other guys, with nightfall break into the cozy bungalow of Karen (Nina Zavarin), the single, apparently depressed mother of an uncommunicative teen. Karen’s got a penchant for crack—itself a metaphor for unconscious bourgeois desires to “slum” it—and, alone for the night, is already slumped on the couch and lost in a foggy dream when the boys break in with a sawed-off. Rather than load up on saleables and scoot, Jesús and Fausto ask for dinner and are served by Karen in a scene that almost perfectly mirrors an earlier scene involving Karen and her son. Karen asks if they were hired by John, her presumably monstrous ex, and Jesús blankly replies, “Si. John.” It’s unclear whether or not this is in fact true, as Jesús’ response reads to me as automatic and disinterested and quite possibly a very Mexican bit of mischief. But either way it struck me as revealing, Karen’s assumption that any difficult task performed by a swarthy Mexican must surely have been financed and organized by a rich white gringo.

Jesús and Fausto continue to linger around Karen’s house, and the promise of connection between them and Karen emerges again and again in a series of increasingly intriguing situations. There is even the suggestion that while this woman is obviously terrified, she may also feel that she’s been hurled into the darkest of transgressive fantasies in which the soul-draining effects of her lifestyle are obliterated through the erotic charge of violent class confrontation. The film’s neatly wrapped resolution is unable to process all these provocative thematic threads, but still, as far as heavily politicized home invasion dramas go, this is more imaginative and slippery than Funny Games (97/07).

The wild frontier: El Norte on DVD

Near the beginning of El Norte (1983), a rural Guatemalan family sits around a table over which Josefina (Stella Quan) extols her practiced impressions of American life. “Even the poorest people have toilets,” she explains. “You flush it, and everything disappears.” As Guatemala is consumed by civil war, this vision of a utopia, a modern, ordered world where no one ever need look at their own shit, a world evoked most beguilingly in the images of vast antiseptic kitchens pictured in a well-thumbed Latin American edition of Good Housekeeping, plants within Josefina’s godchildren Rosa (Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez) and Enrique (David Villapando) the seed of a promised land, a place so longed for it blinds its pilgrims to the enormity of its shadow side.

These early scenes establish the peculiar tone of this extraordinary movie, which so flamboyantly rejected the then-dominant docudrama formula. Bookended with stark images of work, punctuated with moments that more closely resemble a horror movie, told entirely from the perspective of Rosa and Enrique, with no buffering middle-class outsider protagonist, El Norte is an epic chronicle of migration conveyed in three parts aligned to the three very different nations traversed, a tale with one foot in myth and the other in a still all-too-recognizable sociopolitical morass. Enrique bids his father farewell amidst a spectral thicket of maize. Rosa is courted by a local boy through the window of her parents’ home. Everything indoors warms in the glow of candles and kerosene, yet when Enrique, woken by spasms of gunfire, rushes from his bed into the darkness of a ruined hacienda, the eerie day-for-night photography cloaks all in ashen blues. Taking cues from both the Popul Vuh and the magical realist canon, a number of nature-derived symbols imbue the proceedings with enigmatic pathos. The uncanny resides alongside the real without pronounced differentiation or unneeded fuss. As the setting moves northward however, the real will gradually crowd out the uncanny, until the mystification, suffering and harsh electric light of the real is nearly all that remains.

El Norte is unusual in that its precarious earnestness is compellingly offset by its unannounced bursts of brutality, its mischievous, very Mexican humour, its subtle incestuous overtones, its almost pathological insistence on authenticity with regards to location, language and personae, and its unwillingness to redundantly polemicize on the injustices meted upon Rosa and Enrique as they abandon their devastated village to journey through Mexico and into the US to seek safety and work. As nurtured by director Gregory Nava, his co-scenarist Anne Thomas, and his astonishingly inventive cinematographer James Glennon; as embodied by the Mexican and American landscapes, the valiant cast and the experiences imprinted on their gallery of atypically cinematic faces; as contained and shaped by the limited budget and ideological rigour; El Norte assumes an oneiric, organic, striking and at times pleasingly oddball form.

Several scenes, some laughable in their melodrama, feel as modeled after telenovelas as the literary sources to which Nava pays homage. Yet the sincerity of Gutiérrez and Villapando, both very young and unseasoned at the time of filming, is disarming and rife with a flurry of emotions. Villapando’s silent film star saucer eyes convey such a distinctive naïveté, even when he learns to lie in English or, hilariously, talks a blue streak in Spanish in an attempt to sound like a Mexican. Rosa and Enrique are not so much incorruptible as they are perpetually stupefied, and their determination to move northwards—even when crawling through narrow, corroded drainpipes infested with rats—is fed by a pure, youthful faith in destiny.

‘In the Service of Shadows,’ the hour-long documentary on Criterion’s two-disc standard and blu-ray editions of El Norte, tells the story of the movie’s creation, which proves to be nearly as fraught with danger and buoyed by relentless resourcefulness as the movie itself. The indigenous extras who didn’t know what a movie was and subsequently were offended that they should wear costumes; the hostile Chapanecos driving the skeleton crew out of town; the Mexican military who held exposed film reels for ransom, eventually paid by Nava’s father, who smuggled $30,000 into the country in his cowboy boots—the fascinating stories connected to El Norte’s production are too numerous to recount here.

Another standout supplement is Nava’s student film ‘The Journal of Diego Rodriguez Silva’ (72), which dramatizes the final days of a poet displaced in the midst of civil war. It is graced by Nava’s attention to architectural detail and the likely influence of photographers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston. It’s an essentially meditative film, low on drama, rich with locale and haunting imagery and strange moments such the one where Rodriguez Silva comes upon his first corpse, circling it before carefully placing his hand upon its back as though to sense how much life might still linger within. From the little about Nava’s career I could glean, it seems like, despite a long-time affiliation with J-Lo, the guy was never able to fulfill the promise of these early works. Perhaps the conditions of American independent filmmaking at the time, however difficult, brought out the best in him. Or perhaps it was the simple fact that, like the dazzlingly talented Charles Burnett, Nava’s special interest in America’s marginalized failed to attract opportunities.