Tag: Decade: 2010s

  • TIFF 2012 – Day 6

    TIFF 2012 – Day 6

    Dormant Beauty

    Dir. by Marco Bellocchio
    Inspired by the case of Eluana Englaro, an Italian woman who spent seventeen years in a vegetative state and ignited a national cause célèbreDormant Beauty tackles the subject of euthanasia by weaving together four stories. In the first, a Senator (Tony Servillo) with first-hand experience of the issue prepares to cast a vote that pits his conscience against his party. Meanwhile, his daughter (Alba Rohrwacher), while participating in pro-life demonstrations, falls for a man whose emotionally-troubled brother is arrested while protesting for the right to die. In the third story, a beautiful drug addict (Maya Sansa) with suicidal tendencies is nursed back to life — perhaps in more ways than one — by a handsome doctor (Pier Giorgio Bellocchio). And, finally, a famous actress (Isabelle Huppert) abandons her career, becomes a recluse, and dedicates her life to caring for her comatose daughter and praying to God for a miracle.

    As that summary should suggest, Dormant Beauty is in many respects standard, made-for-TV fare. The script hits every predictable beat. When two characters argue, each actor waits patiently for the other to finish his or her line before responding. Huppert’s devout Catholic whispers on-the-nose lines like, “I can’t hope Rosa wakes up unless I have innocence — unless I have faith.” And yet Bellocchio makes it so much damn fun to watch, especially the story line involving the Senator, which he turns into a Juvenalian satire of politics in a media age. Nearly every shot catches a glimpse of a TV screen in the background that is tuned to coverage of the vote, including several scenes set in the bizarre underworld of the legislative baths, where naked Senators consult with a mephistophelean character known only as Lo psichiatra (The Psychiatrist), who offers political advice and anti-depressants by the handful. I especially like one shot near the end, when Senators come rushing through a door after a vote and by some trick of the camera (a really long lens that flattens depth?), the Senate chamber appears to have been replaced completely by a pixelated video monitor. Dormant Beauty is a bit of a disappointment after Bellocchio’s previous film, the excellent Vincere (2009) — it loses momentum each time Belocchio cuts away from the Senator and his daughter — but its best moments were some of the most exciting of the festival.

    Something in the Air

    Dir. by Olivier Assayas
    Set three years after May ’68 and loosely inspired by Assayas’s own political and artistic coming-of-age, Something in the Air follows seventeen-year-old Gilles (Clement Metayer) from his first direct action in the student movement to a sojourn through Italy to his eventual return to Paris, where he studies art and apprentices under his father in the commercial movie business while attending programs of experimental films at night. Something in the Air offers an interesting point of comparison with Dormant Beauty. In both cases, the writer-directors produced fairly banal scripts, but whereas Belocchio frequently generates new and exciting images from the material, Assayas’s direction is strangely anonymous and unremarkable. For a film about beautiful young people discovering sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, and revolution, Something in the Air is inert and humorless. Boring, even.

    I did enjoy, however, some of the ironies built into Assayas’s backward glance. Something in the Air tackles a relatively un-sexy moment in the history of the Left and its heroes are refreshingly unheroic. More radicalism tourist than party soldier, Gilles is chastised in one scene by older revolutionaries for believing the reports of bodies washing up in Maoist China. And poor Christine (Lola Créton) abandons Gilles for a group of revolutionary filmmakers only to end up answering telephones and washing their dishes. Assayas’s version of the post-’68 Left is more than a bit sexist, and the concurrent rise of second-wave feminism is felt in the film — intentionally and ironically, I think — by its absence.

    Berberian Sound Studio

    Dir. by Peter Strickland
    Apparently I should have written about Berbarian Sound Studio while I was still in Toronto, because two weeks later I can barely remember it. My notes aren’t very helpful, either. The film opens with extreme closeups of analog sound equipment. Instead of opening titles for Berbarian Sound Studio, we see a fun, throw-back, animated credit sequence for The Equestrian Vortex, the low-budget horror film whose soundtrack Gilderoy (Toby Jones) has traveled to Italy to mix. And there is a dream sequence that was apparently impressive in some way. Thus ends my notes. (I average three pages per film at TIFF.)

    In a way, Berbarian Sound Studio is similar to Tower. Both are simple character studies that conform strictly to a set of internal rules. Here, Strickland limits his entire film to two locations, the studio and Gilderoy’s rented apartment, and likewise limits the camera’s perspective to Gilderoy’s increasingly unhinged point of view. The premise is enjoyable enough for forty minutes or so — I’m a sucker for films about filmmaking — but I was genuinely surprised when the closing titles started to run. I was still waiting for the plot to develop into . . . something. I suspect fans of Berbarian Sound Studio will enjoy debating which parts of the film actually happen and which parts exist only in Gilderoy’s mind. These types of questions are, I think, among the least interesting to ask of a film, and in this case I honestly don’t care.

    Nights with Theodore

    Dir. by Sébastien Betbeder
    Nights with Theodore is one of several oddly shaped films I saw at TIFF. The folding of the Visions program into Wavelengths allowed for more double features that paired, say, a 55-minute “feature” with a 30-minute “short.” Their schedule-unfriendly running times make films like this difficult to program, so I was encouraged to see more of them in the lineup this year. Most of my favorite films at the fest fall somewhere in this category. One pleasure of a 67-minute film like Theodore is that it necessarily breaks convention in the most fundamental way. As seasoned film watchers, we’re familiar, deep in our muscle memory, with 85- to 120-minute run times and predictable act breaks. (Peter Watkins, of course, has a thing or two to say about this.) I feel time differently, more consciously, when I watch a film like this because the shape of the narrative is rare and peculiar.

    In the case of Theodore, this unmoored-from-convention quality is essential to its success. A fragile nocturne of a film, it imagines the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris as a fairy-tale wonderland pulsing with occult power. Betbeder cuts throughout the film between the main storyline — Theodore (Pio Marmaï) and Anna (Agathe Bonitzer) are young lovers who leap the fence of the Buttes-Chaumont night after night, irresistibly — and documentary material about the park itself. The film opens with archival maps, photographs, and film clips and with a brief history of the park’s founding. We see video footage of the park during the day time when it’s teeming with joggers, tourists, and picnickers. And Betbeder also include a brief interview with an environmental psychiatrist who recounts the story (truth or fiction?) of a man whose bouts with depression corresponded directly with his proximity to the park. I’d like to see Theodore again before declaring whether all of the pieces fit together to offer anything more than an impressionistic portrait of a place transformed by history, imagination, and obsessive love. Regardless, I’m eager to see what Betbeder does next.

    The Last Time I Saw Macao

    Dir. by João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata
    Equal parts city symphony, essay, film noir, and home movie, The Last Time I Saw Macao is fascinating conceptually but a bit of a mess. Compiled from hours and hours of video shot over many months and on multiple trips to Macao, the film began as a documentary; it was only during editing that Rodriguez and Guerra da Mata stumbled upon the ultimate form of the project. Inspired by Joseph von Sternberg’s Macao (1952) and other Western, exoticized representations of the Orient, the co-directors scripted a B-movie intrigue involving an on-the-run beauty named Candy, a violent crime syndicate, and a much-sought-after, Kiss Me Deadly-like bird cage and then superimposed the drama onto the documentary footage by means of a voiceover and fiction-creating soundtrack. It’s a wonderful idea. Suddenly a random stranger pacing the street and talking on his cell phone becomes a side player waiting for a clandestine meeting. With the addition of gunshot sounds, a couple shutting down their storefront for the night become the latest victims in a gang war.

    Guerra da Mata described The Last Time I Saw Macao as a “fiction contaminated by memory,” and, indeed, “fiction” and “memory” are almost interchangeable here. Guerra da Mata spent much of his childhood in Macao. We hear his voice. The unseen hero of the film has his name. We see him as a child in old family photos. And I wonder if that might account for the uneven tone and pacing of the film. It’s not by coincidence that Candy lives on Saudade Road. (Saudade might be imperfectly translated as a kind of a deep and pleasantly painful longing for something lost and never to return.)

    The ideas at play in this film are almost too numerous to count: the political and economic consequences of China’s takeover of Macao in 1999, the complex legacies of Portuguese colonialism, the queering of glamor and a critique of Western notions of Asian sexuality (I haven’t even mentioned the opening sequence, which turns the classic femme fatale song and dance number, like Jane Russell’s from the original Macao, into a beautiful, campy drag show). But The Last Time I Saw Macao fails, finally, to shape them into anything satisfyingly coherent. It was telling, I think, that Rodriguez and Guerra da Mata invited their editor on stage for the Q&A. The noir idea could sustain an hour. The documentary images of Macao could as well. But Guerra de Mata’s saudade — what should be at the heart of the film — is described but too seldom felt.

  • TIFF 2012 – Day 5

    TIFF 2012 – Day 5

    The Master

    Dir. by Paul Thomas Anderson
    Because I’ve waited until September 21, the day of The Master‘s theatrical release, to write this capsule, and because hundreds of thousands of words have already been spilled on this film (Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s review at MUBI nails my response almost exactly), I’ll just add two quick thoughts.

    First, Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is truly a strange thing, and not just by Hollywood standards. The way he collapses his chest and distorts his face reminded me of Emmanuel Schotte in L’Humanite (Dumont, 1999) and also of Antonin Artaud’s disintegration from the striking beauty of The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928) to the toothless madman of his final years. Phoenix’s histrionic showdowns with Philip Seymour Hoffman didn’t impress me nearly as much as his moment-to-moment embodiment of inarticulate panic. I’d like to see a Douglas Gordon-like version of this film built from nothing but long-distance shots of Phoenix walking.

    Second, like nearly everyone else I think the final hour or so of The Master is muddled and frustrating, but I love the final scene, when Freddie: a. finally gets laid, and b. uses the language of “The Cause” as a means of seduction. My main complaint with PT Anderson’s previous film, There Will Be Blood (2007), is that the meticulous period detail is window dressing rather than anything like a real historical context, which is why I’ve never been convinced by readings of it as an analysis of a particular development in capitalism (or religion, for that matter).

    The Master, I’d argue, is about post-WWII America in a way that Blood is not about the early-20th century oil boom. Because it defeated a black-and-white evil in Hitler, we like to pretend the “greatest generation” wasn’t devastated — emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, sexually — by the trauma of war. While hardly a perfect film, The Master is, I think, a curious study of the anxiety and desperation that characterized the lives of so many returning veterans and the loved ones they’d left behind. (I never would have guessed a PT Anderson movie would remind me of The Best Years of Our Lives [Wyler, 1946].) That final sex scene makes explicit what has been implied throughout the film. Cults, modern marketing and advertising, talk therapy, family, religion, sex, love — especially love — are all a kind of maddening seduction.

    Prediction: Someone is already writing an academic conference paper on The Master and jouissance.

    Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica

    Dir. by Marcelo Gomes
    First, a quick game of Six Degrees of Brazilian Cinema. Hermila Guedes, who plays Veronica here, also starred in Gomes’s first feature, Cinema, Aspirins, and Vultures (2005), which was co-written by Karim Ainouz. Guedes also starred in Ainouz’s breakthrough film, Love for Sale (2006). Ainouz was at TIFF last year with The Silver Cliff, a character study of an attractive, 30-something dentist who suffers an identity crisis after her husband, without warning, leaves her. Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica is a character study of an attractive, 30-something doctor who suffers an identity crisis after her father is diagnosed with a vague critical condition. I mention all of that because Veronica is familiar in the worst ways. The Silver Cliff was one of my favorite undistributed films of 2011; Veronica, inevitably, suffers by comparison.

    Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica is book-ended by what we eventually learn is Veronica’s vision of ecstasy (or something like that), a strangely prudish orgy on a sun-drenched beach. The opening image is interesting simply because it lacks any context: What’s not to like about beautiful, co-mingled naked bodies rolling in the sand and floating in shallow waters? When the vision returns at the end of the film, immediately after an unnecessarily long, faux-dramatic shot of Veronica being baptized by sea spray and a standard-issue “making a new start” montage, it’s reduced to a banality. Perhaps this is Gomes’s stab at transcendence? There’s just no magic in his mise-en-scene, and certainly nothing approaching the rapturous image of Alessandra Negrini dancing her ass off in The Silver Cliff. Even Gomes’s documentary-like footage of carnival is boring. Seeing this film 24 hours after Far from Vietnam made me wonder what Chris Marker could have made of those crowd scenes. Talk about paling in comparison.

    Birds

    Dir. by Gabriel Abrantes
    I saw the double bill of Birds and Viola because so many friends — really, everyone I spoke to who had seen any of Piñeiro’s work — told me to. So I went into the screening without having even read the program description, which in hindsight I regret. Birds is a lo-fi, 16mm mash-up of ideas, most of which flew by me (no pun intended) on a first viewing. Told in Greek and Creole, it adapts Aristophanes’ comedy The Birds, turning it into an ironic commentary on the legacies of colonialism in Haiti. I hope to see Birds again before writing more about it. I suspect it will reward the effort.

    Viola

    Dir. by Matías Piñeiro
    The great discovery of TIFF 2012, Viola is a fantasia on love that dances between dreams, theatrical performances, and a kind of hyper-sensual reality. “When he was singing, I thought I truly loved him,” the title character says in the film’s closing line. It’s typical of Piñeiro’s fluid perspective — a wistful, past-tense comment on a joyful present. Had I not known Piñeiro is barely 30 years old, I might have guessed this was an “old man” movie. His acute attention to potential love (or infatuation) is almost nostalgic, as if that surplus of feeling is so profound because it was always so fleeting. There are three kisses in the entire film, each significant in its own way, but like the particular scenes from Shakespeare that he cuts and pastes into his dialog, all of Viola is charged with barely-suppressed desire. I don’t know how else to put it: this is a really horny movie.

    Except for a brief interlude in which we see Viola riding her bicycle through town, delivering packages for her and her boyfriend’s music and film bootlegging business, Piñeiro and cinematographer Fernando Lockett adhere to a unique visual strategy throughout the film. Each scene is built from only a handful of shots. Characters are typically framed in close-ups, usually from slightly above and with a very shallow, always-shifting depth of field. The camera moves often but in small and smooth gestures. And, most importantly, nearly all character movement happens along the z-axis.

    That’s all worth mentioning, I think, because the form of the film — or, more precisely, the video; Viola is the new standard by which I’ll judge other indie DV projects — is so integrated with its content. Piñeiro often builds scenes around three characters. In some cases all three participate in the conversation (my two favorites take place in a theater dressing room and in the back of a mini-van); at other times, two characters talk while a third remains just outside of the frame, either literally or metaphorically. Viola is a talky movie, and its eroticism (for lack of a better word) is in its language and in its shifting compositions of faces. Piñeiro seems to have found a new form to express the the classic love triangle. The best comparison I can think of is the cafe and tram scenes in Jose Luis Guerin‘s In the City of Sylvia (2007).

    According to Andrea Picard’s excellent program note, Viola is the second film (after 2010’s Rosalinda) in a proposed series “inspired by Gérard de Nerval’s Girls of Fire, an 1854 collection of short stories and sonnets each named for its eponymous heroine.” I can’t wait to see the rest.

    Wavelengths 4

    More to come in my full write-up for Senses of Cinema.

  • Nicolas Rey: differently, molussia

    Nicolas Rey: differently, molussia

    This interview was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    * * *

    Nicolas Rey’s third feature film, differently, Molussia (2012), is an adaptation of a novel he’s never read. Written between 1932 and 1936, Günther Anders’s The Molussian Catacomb analyzes the rise of fascism by way of a series of parable-like conversations between two men imprisoned deep beneath the surface of Molussia, an imagined country. Unlike Anders’s later philosophical work, with which Rey is quite familiar, the novel has never been translated into French or English. Curious about the book, Rey enlisted the help of a German-speaking friend, who selected and translated a few chapters, and from that material, Rey then chose eight sections to adapt. The resulting film is built from nine reels of 16mm, one reel per chapter, along with a wordless interlude. (“Lud is the Latin root for ‘play,’” Rey told me. “I think the film has an element of play in it.”)

    Rey introduced differently, Molussia at the Toronto International Film Festival by reading a long quotation from one of Anders’s later essays. In it Anders critiques the common usage of the word “totalitarian.” Rather than an adjective by which one speaker defines himself in opposition to another (it’s always the other power or system that is “totalitarian”), Anders argues that totalitarianism is instead characterized by its “sense of the machine.” What can be done, must be done. Once a technique is discovered, it must be marketed until a need for it is created, which can then be exploited for profit. Rey quoted Anders again during the post-screening question and answer session: “Nothing discredits a man more quickly than critiquing a machine.”

    Rey’s previous film, Schuss! (2005), explores how the radical innovations of the early-20th century improved manufacturing processes and made possible both weapons of mass destruction and, eventually, multi-national capital. Rey finds a metonym for this historical development in a French ski resort that flourished alongside the burgeoning aluminum industry. The majority of the images in differently, Molussia are static shots of landscapes and architecture that were filmed within a short driving distance of Paris. Because the locations in Schuss! are so essential to the content of the film—Rey returns again and again to shots of skiers at the resort, transforming them into grotesque embodiments of decadence—I asked him if any of the places we see in differently, Molussia have a similar historical significance.

    “Well, not in the sense that they relate specifically to fascism of the 1930s.”

    He smiled while drawing out those last three words. Rey describes the experience of reading his friend’s rough translations of The Molussian Catacomb as a “shock”: “these writings from the ‘30s also sounded contemporary to me.” In my own notes from the screening, I compared one of the stories, an ironic and maddening debate in a café, to the kind of ideological nonsense that now pollutes Facebook during an election season. Rey’s images of machines transforming the land, of computers predicting the future, of fences, vacant parking lots, and lifeless Modernist architecture—these images turn our contemporary moment into a beautifully strange and absurd dystopia.

    differently, Molussia is also timely in that it foregrounds the material of film at a moment when digital production, distribution, and projection threaten to sound the death knell for celluloid. The defining formal innovation of differently, Molussia is that its nine reels are assembled randomly for each screening, meaning that there are 362,880 potential versions of the film. Rey argues that this is a formal expression of Anders’s critique, that the very possibility of alternative narratives “opens something” in the viewer’s experience. But the randomness also makes audiences conscious of the handmade quality of this and every other film that has been pieced together and broken apart in a projection booth. “Handmade” is an especially apt descriptor for differently, Molussia, which Rey shot and processed using donated, outdated film stock. In his notes he describes the manual effort required to achieve the final result:

    “At first, it was so difficult to obtain an interesting image with [the old stock] that I considered dropping the idea of using it. But after a year of experimentation, I ended up finding an appropriate process and printing procedure: A grainy, rough, atemporal image as fascinating as paintings of Caspar David Friedrich.”

    Through his work at L’Abominable, a non-profit, artist-run film lab near Paris, Rey has become an outspoken advocate for analog film, and, indeed, he became most animated during our conversation when the subject turned to the economic realities of film production, preservation, and curating.

    I spoke with Nicolas Rey on September 9, 2012, the day after differently, Molussia screened in Wavelengths, TIFF’s program of experimental films.

    * * *

    HUGHES: You mentioned last night after the screening that in your efforts to read The Molussian Catacomb you tried to teach yourselfGerman?

    REY: I started taking courses just like anyone would to learn a language. But, of course, I soon realized that I wouldn’t be proficient enough to read literature. So I thought I’d trust Peter Hoffman to pick a number of chapters. I was glad that he liked the idea of collaborating on the film.

    I became friends with Peter earlier because he translated Schuss! in German. He’s a very good French speaker, and he knows my films. Peter and Nathalie, my partner, then roughly translated the chapters he had selected. Very roughly. And then I must say—I always forget to say this—what a shock it was to discover the text, because before that I only had a very rough idea of what the book was about. I felt close to Anders in many ways. And that is why I trusted—had faith—that I would relate with the book enough to be able to make the film. People who had read it would explain what it was about, but when I had the chapters Peter had chosen I felt very close to it. It was a very strong meeting.

    HUGHES: How did you identify with it? Was it the politics? The writing style?

    REY: A combination. In a way it’s very straightforward and witty. But these writings from the ‘30s also sounded contemporary to me. I was very impressed by that and happy to have found such a gem. Anders had a very clever understanding of what happened in Germany in the ‘30s. This understanding of the politics was the very base structure of his thought and of his way of seeing the world and of tackling problems.

    Even his philosophical writing is not academic at all. Parts are theoretical, but very often it’s straightforward and witty as well. So I already had a feeling for who he was as a writer from the other books I had read in translation.

    HUGHES: I was surprised to hear you say thatwhat we hear in the film is often a recitation of the entire chapter.

    REY: Yeah, some chapters are very short. Anders often says it’s a bit like 1001 Nights. The chapters are numbered: day 1 and then night, day 2 and then night. And it goes on like this. Each time it is one full short story. Sometimes it’s just half a page. Sometimes it’s ten pages. But, yes, most of the time it’s the full chapter. “Back to Nature” is just the beginning of the chapter.

    HUGHES: Can we use “Back to Nature” to talk about how you find your shots? It’s the only section that includes portraits, right? We see people working at computers?

    REY: I began with the idea that I would shoot the imaginary country of Molussia. That’s how I proceeded, in my head, to figure out what I would film. I realized, as I gathered the visual material, that there would be a feeling of distance in the image. This seemed appropriate because the book stages prisoners who speak about that country, although they are in prison. They speak about the outside world. A lot of the film is landscape shots, but I thought, “A country is also people, right?” So I tried to also film a few sections that would have people in it.

    How do I find shots? It’s just things I’ve been thinking about filming. I have ideas like this, and if they don’t fit into one film, they’ll fit into another. It comes back to memory at a point when it feels right. I’d had the idea of shooting weather forecasters for some time. Don’t ask me why. [laughs] It was important to me, also, to film people in front of computers as an update of Anders’ critique of technology. I mean, he died in 1992, but I think the Internet would have killed him. Also, weather forecasters tell you the future. It all fits in nicely, I think. You don’t see many people behind computers in films, although so many fields now involve being behind a computer.

    HUGHES: All day, every day.

    REY: All day, every day. We’re slaves to computers, but if you try to resist it . . . [laughs] . . . I don’t know. I escaped television completely—I’ve never owned a television, I never watch television—but I use computers as much as . . . [laughs] . . . well, too much.

    HUGHES: There’s also a beautiful image in “Back to Nature” that is more typical of the style of the film. I think it’s . . .

    REY: The pillar, yeah. It’s a bridge, a freeway bridge.

    HUGHES: You joked last night that you just drove around to film an imagined country. So you saw that bridge and pulled over? That’s the process?

    REY: Yeah, that’s the process. Totally. I mean, we drove over with Nathalie—she was with me for most of the shooting—and we had the cameras in the trunk and the sound equipment, and we’d pull over whenever something struck my eye or if we found a place where we thought the sound would be interesting. Most of the film [laughs . . . I don’t know if I should say this . . . most of the film is shot less than 100 meters from the road.

    There was also the option of the spinning camera and the option of the wind camera. The wind camera has windmill blades of this diameter [extends arms two or three feet], the smallest windmill blades you can buy. Kristof designed and then we built this setup so that the blades are geared up to the mechanical Bolex. If there’s no wind, you can’t film, so you have to find a place where it’s windy enough to drive it because it takes a lot of wind to drive the camera. Once you find the right spot, you get out of the car and you pull out everything, you install it on the tripod—there’s a good brake on it so it doesn’t start before you want to—and then you release the break and step away, because it’s kind of dangerous when it rotates. You don’t want to have your arm in the way.

    The camera finds the direction of the wind, and if there’s a lot of wind it goes fast in the camera so it will make slow motion, and if it goes slower it will accelerate. The exposure also changes. If it’s going fast, the exposure will be faint, and if it’s slow the exposure will be very strong on the negative so it will be a clear image. For example, it’s very clear in the section in the tall grass, because there the wind was very shaky, so the exposure changes a lot. Next to the sea, the exposure is more constant because the wind is more constant.

    So, yes, we would drive around and use whatever apparatus was the right one.

    HUGHES: Along with the voiceover, the soundtrack is built from a variety of natural and mechanical sounds. Did you collect those on the road, too?

    REY: I usually don’t record synched sound. Although there is synched sound in this film, in particular, because when Peter Hoffman reads the text, that is synched sound that I shot by myself. It was a nice performance. [laughs] A one-man crew shooting sound film. That’s me sitting beside him, triggering the camera. So, I don’t record synched sound, but I usually record sound on location when I film the image—sometimes at the same time, sometimes I film but don’t record, sometimes I just record.

    HUGHES: You said you’d pull over whenever something “strikes your eye.” There are some beautiful images in this film, and I’m wondering what role, if any, beauty plays in your project.

    REY: In the beginning, I didn’t know what exactly I would film. It just built up along the way. It’s not that I would look for something specific. I would know that certain things would fit in because they would relate to other things I had already shot. Other things would be variations. It’s very intuitive. It was just a matter of, I think, trusting that my sensibility would meet up with Anders’s. That was the chance I took—that there would be some relation. Although I had a few shots in mind, like the weather forecasters, I trusted it would work because there is a kind of correspondence between us.

    HUGHES: I saw differently, Mollusia with a friend last night, and when I asked him what he thought of the film he said that after the first two reels, he wasn’t sure if he was going to make it. But by the third, his mind began to race as the structure of the film began to reveal itself. I had a very similar response both to this film and to Schuss! These are the only two films of yours I’ve seen, but would you say this self-conscious structuring and the repetitions are essential to your work?

    REY: My first film, Soviets Plus Electricity (2002), was shot while travelling by train from Paris to the Pacific Ocean through the northern regions of Russia that were an area of deportation. The film is chronological in the image and chronological in the sound. The sound is like a vocal diary, like aural notes of the journey, and the images are shots along the way separated by black leader. But the time frame of the sound and image are different, so you hear things that you see later or that you’ve seen earlier, or sometimes in the middle of the reel you’ll be at the same place in the image and the sound. The way it’s shot structures itself along the way because I didn’t plan how I would film before I left. I left out of the blue to make that trip.

    In general, when you make a film that is outside of conventions, it takes time for the person watching the film and listening to the film to find his position and to build the film in his head, because eventually that is where it is built. And it takes time. For different people, depending on a number of factors—ranging from the kinds of films you’ve seen to your current state of mind—it will take a different amount of time. Some people never find their way. Those are the people who leave. And I don’t blame them! Even when I edit I feel that. Sometimes it’s hard for me to be in the right position as a viewer. I think that’s true of all of the films I’ve made. It takes a little time to adjust to the film, to discover what position the film proposes.

    Also, you know, the order of the reels you saw yesterday was a rough beginning. The first two reels were the most engaging in terms of sound, they’re very chaotic, and then it eases off along the way and ends with the only story that doesn’t have direct philosophical speech in it, the sailor’s story.

    HUGHES: One of the chapters includes the line, “To begin a story is already a fabrication.” Had you already settled on the idea of randomizing the assembly of the film before discovering that line? Was it one more little point of connection between you and Anders?

    REY: I was settled on the randomness very early, but I was interested in that chapter not just because of that line but because I think that’s what relations are. It’s a very brilliant point.

    HUGHES: Is the randomization essential to the politics of the film? To your and Anders’ critique of totalitarianism?

    REY: I think so. The way the audience sees it, knowing it could be in another order, this opens something. It goes through your mind, “Oh, but this could have gone before what I just saw.” I’m interested in the variety of visual and aural experiences you can create with cinema. I’ve been a watcher of experimental films for a number of years, and I think that’s really something experimental film explores and can keep exploring. Although I think my films are maybe somewhere apart from experimental film now.

    HUGHES: In what sense?

    REY: Well, because I think the term “experimental” has now become historical. It’s time for the landscape to be remapped. When I hear “experimental” it’s like having a very old map. [laughs] I think it’s time for a certain corpus of work to be defended but not under the banner of “experimental”—under new banners.

    HUGHES: And are you willing to propose new banners?

    REY: No, no, no, I’m not. I don’t curate enough to really be able to think deeply enough about that. I don’t watch enough films. It feels a bit like it has a lot of weight, “experimental.”

    HUGHES: “Weight” in what sense?

    REY: I’m happy that the Wavelengths program here at TIFF has opened up. I was happy to see the crowd watching my film. I could feel they’re not necessarily the people who go out to see experimental film, and I very much like that. I like that the audience for my film can be wide and not used to watching that kind of cinema.

    HUGHES: What are your opportunities now for showing this film?

    REY: Well, I’ve been very lucky that this film has been shown, and is going to be shown, in a large number of festivals. Imagine trying to convince a producer today to make a 16mm film by saying, “It’ll show everywhere!” But we’ve shown it at about twelve festivals since Berlin, and there’s more coming.

    It’s very important to me to prove that you can still make films on film. There’s something very important about this. What’s at stake is organizing the possibility to continue producing on that medium. And showing films on that medium for people to curate. I’m surprised there’s not more questioning about that. Everyone has thrown up their hands and said, “It’s over. It’s over.”

    Of course, it will never be the same, and the industry will never come back completely We’ve set up a website, filmlabs.org, that is dedicated to artist-run film labs. L’Abominable is one of them, but there are many—27 worldwide, I believe—from Australia to Niagara Custom Lab here in Toronto. In the past fifteen years, equipment has become more and more available, sometimes for free because it was put out on the sidewalk. It’s just a matter of being at the right place at the right time to pick it up. We are trying to organize ourselves, as filmmakers, so that we can use it and make our work ourselves in a way that, while small, will also be very new in the history of cinema. I prefer to look at in that positive way rather than as the “twilight of cinema.”

    It’s not easy. It takes a lot of dedication, a lot of time. It takes proficiency in a number of fields, it takes people who are willing to do this, it takes places that are large enough to accommodate labs when you have no money. I’m sorry to be so materialistic, but we when we were evicted at L’Abominable, I faced this directly and was lucky enough to convince a city council next to Paris to give us space. So now we have space for at least a few years, where we’ve set up our equipment and will be able to make films.

    But even on the curating side it’s getting difficult. I’m amazed that cinematheques are willing to show films on digital formats, presented as “preservation.” They’ve abandoned showing the work in its original format. There was a big conference at the French Cinematheque and I didn’t hear them say, “We’ll show the films on film as long as we can. We’ll fight for that.” Not at all. Only the film museum in Vienna has made a strong stand on the matter.

    There’s a documentary festival in Lussas in France called Etats Generaux du Film Documentaire, and this summer they showed António Reis films, which are beautiful in 35mm. But they weren’t allowed to edit the reels together. Cinematheques hold prints but they won’t lend them because they’re too afraid that people will damage them. Prints cost so much, and they don’t have funding to strike new ones. They have funding only for digitization, and circulation is supposed to be digital. Preservation on film has become a secondary concern. It’s scary. In Lussas, it was shown in a small village from a truck that is like a travelling cinema. But since they didn’t have two projectors, there would be a kind of intermission after every reel and people got disgusted by the 35mm because they thought, “Well, this is shitty,” you know? It’s revolting, I think.

    I’m sorry. I get . . . [laughs]

    HUGHES: I was just about to say that you get more animated talking about preservation than about your film? Is that part of . . .

    REY: It’s totally part of what I do every day with the lab. I don’t have to get angry about my film, but I am angry about this situation. It goes back to the quote about totalitarianism that I read last night. I hope that showing a 16mm film makes a point.

    HUGHES: Wavelengths is always the highlight of this festival for me because it’s such a rare opportunity—especially for someone like me who lives in a relatively small town in the USA—to see grainy 16mm films and to hear the projector and to be reminded constantly that you’re watching film.

    REY: It’s a different medium in terms of perception, and it’s also a very different medium in terms of the work it requires, the practice, especially for filmmakers like us who process and print our own prints. Video has nothing to do with being confronted by chemicals and heavy machines. I hope we will find a way to continue. And I hope that people who show film will be keen on making it possible to show it.

  • TIFF 2012 – Day 4

    TIFF 2012 – Day 4

    Like Someone in Love

    Dir. by Abbas Kiarostami
    To begin: my favorite cut at TIFF. Soon after arriving at the home of a new client, a melancholic call girl makes small talk before strolling into his bedroom, undressing, crawling into bed, and falling asleep. Akiko (Rin Takanashi) appears finally to be at peace here, alone with Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), an elderly sociology professor who lives quietly with his old books, old photos, and old music. Takashi covers the young girl and lowers the lights, leaving her to her sleep. In a blinding cut, the softness of Akiko’s profile and the warm light of Takashi’s bedroom is wiped away by a trademark Kiarostami image: white clouds and blue skies in abstract motion, reflections against a car windshield. A subtle drone can be heard on the soundtrack. (Is this Kiarostami’s first-ever use of non-diegetic music?) It’s now the morning after, and Takashi is giving Akiko a ride to campus. Like magic, a whore and her John have been transformed in a blink into an anxious schoolgirl and her doting elder.

    Like Someone in Love shares with Kiarostami’s previous film, Certified Copy, a fascination with the fluidity of identity and the pleasures and dangers of role-playing, particularly within relationships. Akiko adapts as best she can to the pressures of her life, shifting moment to moment from prostitute to student to girlfriend to granddaughter (both real and imagined) as each new environment demands. Takashi, likewise, steps bravely (if foolishly) into the role of grandfather and protector when called upon to do so, and the film’s most dramatic turn comes when a real-life threat shatters, quite literally, the fantasy he’d written for himself. I’m hardly the first person to point out the fun irony of the film’s title: each character performs like someone in love, miming behaviors learned from sappy songs and movie melodramas, including God-knows-how-many Japanese “fallen woman” and geisha films.

    I’m beginning to think of Like Someone in Love as Kiarostami’s horror film. Blake Williams has compared it to Chantal Akerman’s Les rendez-vous d’Anna, and I think he’s right. There’s a sense in both films that deep  trauma — both historical and personal — has been papered over by convention and cultural artifice, but  threatens always to leak through. Akerman is more explicit about it: think of Anna’s late-night ride on a crowded train that is populated suddenly by ghosts of the Holocaust. Kiarostami works, instead, with suggestion, with vague allusions to “what happened” in the past. The final moments of the film are a shock but hardly a surprise.

    Far from Vietnam (1967)

    A collaborative effort between Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, William Klein, Joris Ivens, Agnès Varda, and Claude Lelouch, Far from Vietnam lays out its position in the opening minutes: America’s military involvement in Vietnam is another “war of the rich waged against revolutionary struggles intended to establish governments that do not benefit the rich.” The bulk of the film then supports that argument via montage, juxtaposing footage of American jets taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier with images of Vietnamese women building make-shift air raid shelters out of concrete. Crowds of World War II vets chant “Bomb Hanoi!” while a young man holds his child and chants “Naaaaa-palm! Naa! Naa! Naaaaa-palm!” before adding with a sigh, “Kids like this are being burned alive. Kids like this.” A television broadcast of General Westmoreland discussing the “accidents and mechanical failures” that have resulted in a few unfortunate civilian casualties is cut against footage of a mangled Vietnamese child receiving CPR.

    Far from Vietnam is agit-prop. It was made as agit-prop and still reads as agit-prop (still-relevant agit-prop, unfortunately). It’s also a masterpiece. If tens of thousands of YouTube activists have co-opted the techniques of films like this, none have matched Marker’s violent cutting. The final sequence is as frenzied, exhausting, and incisive as anything I’ve ever seen. The film is also smart enough and self-aware enough to acknowledge and address the most obvious counter-arguments. “It gets complicated,” Claude Ridder says during the long, scripted monologue that is Resnais’s contribution to the film. The Ridder character plays the role of the conflicted intellectual, echoing (and complicating) a later, more biting charge from the film — that American society enjoys “the luxury of having students who protest” while slaves and farmers fight. Godard plays the role of Godard, critiquing the problems of representation and the very form of Far from Vietnam. His segment opens with a closeup of a camera lens, which in the context of the film becomes one more violent machine in a mechanized war. It’s echoed nicely by Klein’s section, a moving profile of the widow of Norman Morrison, the American Quaker whose self-immolation outside the Pentagon became a media sensation.

    Far and away the best feature film I saw at TIFF. I just wish it were easier to see again. Kudos to the festival for programming this beautifully restored 35mm print.

    Tower

    Dir. by Kazik Radwanski
    Radwanski establishes the formal rules of Tower in the opening minutes of the film and then, to his credit, follows them to the letter until the closing shot. The first image is of Derek (Derek Bogart) digging a hole in the woods. The camera is inches away from his face, where it will remain throughout the film, only occasionally panning or cutting away to the people around him. Tower takes the trademark cinematographic style of the Dardennes’ The Son to its logical extreme, performing a disarmingly intimate study of a 34-year-old man who lives in the basement of his parents’ Toronto home.

    The key word there is “intimate.” Derek is an awkward, unmotivated, and self-defeating guy, but he’s socially competent. He dates someone throughout most of the film. He’s invited to parties. He has friendly, if superficial, relationships with his co-workers. The camera, in effect, gets closer to Derek than any of the people in his life do, and as a result the film emphasizes real physical proximity. Think for a minute about the number of people you touch meaningfully on any given day. A spouse or partner? A child? Films often make physical isolation a metaphor for emotional detachment; Tower is about the thing itself. Intimacy is felt profoundly in the film because it is so profoundly lacking.

    Tower is in many respects a classic “first film.” It has the whiff of autobiography — Derek toils away in his bedroom on a short animated film that he’s reluctant to share with the world — and I quickly realized the film would stop rather than end (although a friend’s reading of the final sequence gives it a neater ending than I’d first assumed). Also, because it’s a kind of gimmick film (the form of it, I mean), I’m not sure what to think of Radwanski or how to predict his next move. But I’m eager to see what he does next.

    Wavelengths 3

    Just a quick word on Nathaniel Dorsky’s August and After, which was my favorite film at TIFF. The word I keep using to describe it is “breathe.” It breathes, and in ways that seem to mark a significant evolution in Dorsky’s recent work. The camera is moving more, and it’s moving into open spaces, even capturing portraits and ending on a long shot of a ship out at sea. For the second year in a row Dorsky’s film literally blew a fuse in the Jackman Hall projection booth, and I couldn’t have been more happy about it because it gave me a second chance to look at what might be the most beautiful filmed image I’ve ever seen. It’s a shot of a flag billowing against a dark sky, which Dorsky filmed as a reflection in a window across the street. That image alone is staggering, but it becomes downright transcendent when, miraculously, a mannequin appears from shadows behind the window. And that’s when you notice the clouds passing in front of the sun. Shadows and light. Shadows and light. It’s like all of cinema reduced to a single instant.

  • TIFF 2012 – Day 3

    TIFF 2012 – Day 3

    Gebo and the Shadow

    Dir. by Manoel de Oliveira
    I won’t pretend I know anything about Raul Brandão beyond what I’ve just learned from his Wikipedia page — that he became a journalist while working in Portugal’s Ministry of War, that the most productive period in his writing life came after retiring from that career, that he’s an important figure in Portuguese Modernism. Gebo and the Shadow, the latest film from 103-year-old Manoel de Oliveira, is as far as I can tell an adaptation of one section of Brandão’s 1923 novel, Os Pescaderos, a sympathetic study of the beautiful and tragic lives of the hard-working residents of various fishing villages.

    Although Brandão is a generation older than Eugene O’Neill, de Oliveira’s film plays out like A Long Day’s Journey into Night. Stagy even compared with de Oliveira’s other recent work, Gebo and the Shadow is built from several long, late-night conversations that lead inevitably toward ruination. “It was you and her that bound me to life,” Gebo (Michael Lonsdale) tells his wife Doroteia (Claudia Cardinale), and in that one line is contained all of the film’s tragedy. The daily labors of life, the lies and deceptions, the sacrifices — Gebo’s every action is made in despairing love and generosity for Doroteia and their daughter-in-law Sofia (Leonor Silveira).

    Cinematically, Gebo and the Shadow is a fairly simple film. (I heard one other critic at TIFF refer to it as a script table-read.) The opening moments are fantastic, though. The first shot (shown above) is an unnaturally lit, not-quite-realistic image of Gebo’s son João (Ricardo Trepa), who we see in profile, his face and body casting black shadows. (This allusion to the film’s title is obvious to me only in hindsight.) After a quick, impressionistic recreation of one of João’s crimes, de Oliveira cuts to the small room in which nearly all of the remainder of the film occurs. Sofia stands in front of a window, illuminated by candlelight, and as the camera dollies, we catch a glimpse of Doroteia in reflection. It’s a lovely shot that reveals the full physical space in which the characters exist, while also setting up the female leads as mirror images of one another. An especially nice touch is that the first image of Doroteia is blurred. At first it’s possible to mistake her for a literal reflection of Sofia, one of the film’s many reminders of the passage of time. (No reminder is more shocking than watching the aged faces of Cardinale and Jeanne Moreau.)

    differently, Molussia

    Dir. by Nicolas Rey
    Nicolas Rey introduced differently, Molussia with a long quotation from an essay by Günthers Anders in which Anders critiques the common usage of the word “totalitarian.” Rather than an adjective by which one speaker defines himself in opposition to another (it’s always the other power or system that is “totalitarian”), Anders argues that totalitarianism is instead characterized by its “sense of the machine.” “What can be done, needs to be done,” he writes. Once a technique is discovered, it will be marketed until a need for it is created, which can then be exploited for profit. Resistance, as they say, is futile. Rey smirked while quoting Anders again during the Q&A: “Nothing discredits a man more quickly than critiquing a machine.”

    The essays Rey quoted were written some thirty or forty years after his only novel, The Molussian Catacomb (1932-36), a collection of brief, witty, and incisive conversations between prisoners in an imaginary fascist country. Rey’s remarkable adaptation is built from nine reels of hand-processed 16mm film and shown in random order (making 362,880 possible versions of the film). Each includes a voice-over reading of a passage from one chapter of the novel, juxtaposed against images of landscapes, a soundtrack that mixes machines and natural sounds, and occasional portraits of the residents of Molussia (most of the film was shot within close driving range of Rey’s home near Paris). My interview with Rey and a much longer write-up about the film will be included in the next issue of Senses of Cinema.

    Night Across the Street

    Dir. by Raul Ruiz
    Long John Silver, rhododenrons, retirement parties, desert landscapes, Beethoven, pink walls, mysterious assassins, four-letter words, childhood memories, gun barrels, a beautiful dancer, bicycles, Antofagasta, classroom anxiety, shiny faces, a man who never speaks, ugly video, ships in bottles, a last desperate gasp of life, and ghosts and ghosts and ghosts.

    That’s all I’ve got.

    Wavelengths 2

    More to come in full write-up later this fall.

  • TIFF 2012 – Day 2

    TIFF 2012 – Day 2

    Barbara

    Dir. by Christian Petzold
    Every other contemporary director of traditional narrative films would do well to study Petzold. From shot to shot, cut to cut, Barbara is smart, precise, classical filmmaking at its best. There are no radical or self-conscious gestures in his style — most sequences boil down to some variation on establishing shot / medium shot / closeup / point of view — which here drops us into the secretive perspective of the title character, a doctor (Nina Hoss) who has been relocated by East German authorities to a provincial seaside town. Barbara conforms to all the plot conventions of the “beautiful stranger” genre, which makes the final act — and the final shot, in particular — a bit too neat for my tastes, but the pleasures are all in the filmmaking. There are no clues given about the location of the town, but in the recurring, fairy-tale-like images of Nina Hoss bicycling through the woods, the trees are always being blown by strong gusts, and seagulls can be heard around her; there’s no actual mention of the sea until the film is almost over. A colleague who visits Barbara’s apartment asks if she plays the piano, but, again, we don’t actually see the instrument in her room until a scene late in the film. Petzold’s precision allows him to create a world with suggestions.

    Mekong Hotel

    Dir. by Apitchatpong Weerasethakul
    Mekong Hotel is a small film. It feels homemade, even by Apitchatpong’s small-scale standards. But I found it really moving, especially the final few minutes, when the ghosts that have haunted so much of Apitchatpong’s recent work are embodied by a mother and daughter, who mourn for all of the mothers and daughters who have been lost in Thailand’s tragic past. “Daughter, I miss you,” she says. “I hate that my life has become this,” she says. Apitchatpong has a kind of super-human sensitivity and attentiveness to beauty and sorrow. I’m beginning to think of him as the other side of the David Lynch coin.

    Big in Vietnam

    Dir. by Mati Diop
    It’s a stupid comparison, I know, but this is the messy, ambitious, visually inventive film I wanted Tabu to be. When an actor disappears into the woods while filming a low-budget adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons, the Vietnamese director walks off the shoot and goes wandering through the city (Marseille?) until she finds a karaoke bar and meets a man, also Vietnamese, of her generation. Diop then crosscuts between the film shoot, now being directed by the woman’s son, and images of the woman and man as they talk and walk among French sunbathers. When writing about Big in Vietnam, I feel obligated to preface every statement with “presumably.” The 25-minute film is elliptical to the extreme, and the thematic connections are never made explicit. Diop has apparently received funding to expand this idea into feature length. I can’t wait to see it. Big in Vietnam is my favorite film of the festival so far, and by a fairly wide margin.

    Sightseers

    Dir. by Ben Wheatley
    I suspect I’ll end up writing at length about Sightseers in a few weeks, when I have more time. It’s an interesting and well-made film that I might have liked more had I not seen it with an audience that laughed loudly at every brutal killing. I don’t blame them for laughing. The film is designed for laughs. But if I’d watched it alone, it would have been a straight-up horror film, and if I can convince myself that it’s all in the service of a coherent allegory — working-class anger is the best bet — then I might also convince myself it’s a very good film. This is the first Ben Wheatley film I’ve seen, and I really like his visual style. I’m eager to see what he does next.

    Student

    Dir. by Darezhan Omirbayev
    Several critics I admire and whose tastes are similar to my own are big fans of Student, a concentrated, mostly-silent adaptation of Crime and Punishment (or Pickpocket or American Gigolo or L’Enfant, depending on your point of reference) from Kazakhstan. For now, I’m content to sit on any judgment of the film until I’ve had time to read their reviews. The title character is a brooding, non-verbal Raskolnikov, even by comparison to Bresson’s Michel, and for the first hour of the film, Omirbayev’s visual strategy — watching the student walk, zombie-like, stoop-shouldered, through town — left too much unsaid. But after the murder, as the accumulating guilt begins to spawn fantasies, the slow buildup pays dividends. More to come on this one . . .

    Wavelengths 1

    I’ll cover the Wavelengths shorts programs later, after I’ve had time to watch them again.

  • TIFF 2012 – Day 1

    TIFF 2012 – Day 1

    I’m covering TIFF for Senses of Cinema again this year, so later this fall I’ll publish a much longer and more thoughtful report there, but I’m determined to capture initial thoughts on everything I see this week. I will, inevitably, fail in this effort.

    In Another Country

    Dir. by Hong Sang-soo
    There are two great pleasures in watching any film directed by Hong Sang-soo. The first, oddly enough, is suspense. I say “oddly” because he makes talky movies about love and jealousy and the pained confusions of life. Hong’s writing and his cinematographic style, however, drop us into a uniquely unpredictable world. “So these things really happen?” a young woman and wannabe screenwriter asks in the second shot of In Another Country, soon after being told some bad news about her family. Hong captures her and her mother in a medium shot for several seconds before a jump zoom reframes them. It’s the first of many long-duration, single-take scenes in which Hong’s camera pans, tilts, and zooms from a fixed position, constantly recontextualizing his characters. A Korean man flirts casually with a visiting French director (the first of three roles played by Isabelle Huppert) before the camera pulls back to reveal that his wife is also sitting with them. Huppert #2 sits on the beach, whispering “beautiful, beautiful” to the sea until the camera pulls back to reveal her lover, who enters, impossibly, from outside the frame in what we soon learn is a fantasy. Hong’s narrative path consists only of blind turns.

    The other pleasure is tied directly to the first. The long takes and narrative suspense allow room for spontaneous and surprising performances. This has always been the case with Hong but adding Huppert to the mix shakes up the now-familiar chemistry of his films. My favorite moment comes at the end of the second story, when Huppert alternately slaps her lover’s face and declares her love for him. Huppert has until that point played this character, this version of the visiting Frenchwoman, as a relatively meek and flighty suburbanite. But in her final confrontation, she becomes Isabelle Huppert — all unpredictable intensity — and momentarily breaks the film. It’s great fun to watch.

    Laurence Anyways

    Dir. by Xavier Dolan
    With another decade or two of life experience under his belt, I can only imagine what kind of filmmaker 23-year-old Xavier Dolan might become. By that I don’t mean to damn him with faint praise because Laurence Anyways is a very good film. Based on this and Heartbeats (2011) — I haven’t yet seen his debut, I Killed My Mother (2009) — Dolan already has a remarkable visual imagination and, more impressively, a mature-enough understanding of form to execute it on screen. Before watching Heartbeats for the first time last week I expected him to stumble occasionally into interesting images; I was surprised, instead, to find a very young director in control of the film.

    I have a weakness for movies like Laurence Anyways — melodramas that combine realistic performances with explosions of expressionism. At this point in his evolution, Dolan excels at the latter, particularly when he takes camp to ecstatic heights. He’s at his best when the soundtrack is thumping and when the images subsume, temporarily, the characters and become the drama. If the realistic portions of the film drag at times, there is at least a marked progress here from what I saw in Heartbeats. Dolan has a talent for using reaction shots — both in generating a range of emotions from his actors’ faces and cutting them effectively in sequence — so much so that it’s in danger of becoming a crutch. In this new film, though, he’s progressed beyond that and built some nice, complex moments.

    Argo

    Dir. by Ben Affleck
    I’m the wrong person to write about Argo. At this point I honestly can’t tell the difference between parodies of Hollywood dramas and the real deal. Argo is competently made and occasionally fun, and I’m still hopeful that Ben Affleck will prove himself to be an interesting director, but this film is an exercise in manufactured suspense weighed down by a humorless lead performance by Affleck. That it treats the Iranian revolution like the Star Wars bedsheets, rotary dial telephones, and thick mustaches that lend the film its period detail might be forgivable if the film weren’t so boring. But, again, I’m the wrong person for this film. It will be a critical hit, I’m sure.

    Tabu

    Dir. by Miguel Gomes
    I’ve been anticipating Tabu since last February when it premiered in Berlin, and that feeling of anticipation never quite left me throughout tonight’s screening. I’m not sure what I mean by that, exactly, except that I wanted this film to be more formally daring or more politically complex or more opaque than the relatively simple film Gomes made. Now this is damning with faint praise: I wish Tabu had been around in 1997 when I was taking a graduate seminar in post-colonial literature. Memory, history, guilt, privilege, religion, symbols of captivity, dreams of hairy monkeys (!), a black woman improving her literacy by reading Robinson Crusoe (!!) — it’s all here, rendered in beautiful shades of gray. The sound design alone makes the film fairly compelling from moment to moment (although I’ll own up to being bored by sections of part 1), but I wanted more.

  • Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2012)

    Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2012)

    Dir. by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

    But one day, you may get a kick out of the stuff going on here. When you have a family, you’ll have a story to tell. Is that so bad? You can say, “Once upon a time in Anatolia, when I was working out in the sticks, I remember this one night which began like this.” You can tell it like a fairytale.

    I skipped Once Upon a Time in Anatolia at TIFF last September because I’d lost faith in Ceylan. Climates and Three Monkeys are both fine films, but he seemed to be treading water after showing such promise in his earlier, lower-budget features. Now, I wonder if the two recent films were necessary stepping stones to Anatolia, which is, by a wide margin, his best work yet. That Anatolia is expertly shot and directed came as no surprise, but this film marks what I hope will be a permanent shift in his writing. Ceylan has always had a smart and curious authorial voice, but for the most part he’s been content to remain an observer of his characters, always at some remove, seemingly impartial (except, perhaps, when mocking himself in his more autobiographical work). With Anatolia, he’s found both a structure and the animating ideas to match his cinematographic style. I expected Ceylan to fill 150 minutes with stunning images; I didn’t expect him to deliver one of the finest scripts of the past decade.

    Anatolia‘s final act takes place in and around a small village hospital, where the two main characters, a doctor and a prosecutor, await an autopsy of the man whose murder is ostensibly at the center of the film’s plot. As they talk, they’re interrupted by an elderly man who peeks through the door and then, realizing he’s in the wrong room, backs out again with some embarrassment. There’s something in that moment that encapsulates everything I so admire about this film. Before the intrusion, the doctor and prosecutor — and we should think of them by their titles like we think of the poets, professors, and scientists in Tarkovsky — had been discussing a fairytale-like story about a beautiful woman who predicted she would die soon after delivering her child and then proceeded to do just that. The elderly man is an audience for the prosecutor’s story and an emblem of old age. He’s a spot of local color and a startling burst of documentary reality into an otherwise stylized and formally precise fiction. He’s a kind of living lacuna in a film that is about the gap-filled stories we tell to make sense of our lives.

    What most impresses me about the scene, though, is that it comes near the end of a 150-minute film. It’s a few more seconds of footage that could have been easily trimmed, and yet it feels essential. All of Once Upon a Time feels that way — like the work of an author in complete control of his craft.

  • TIFF 2011

    TIFF 2011

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    – – –

    Festival Business

    The opening weekend of the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival also signalled the beginning of TIFF’s second year in the $200 million dollar TIFF Bell Lightbox. The public side of the facility features five theatres, a ticket office, two galleries, a store and two cafés; the upper floors hold office space, private screening rooms, areas for press conferences, and a rooftop patio that brings a hint of movie-star flavour to the experience. (During one of my interviews up there I became convinced TIFF had bussed in models from South Beach for set decoration.) Cinephiles and critics are a notoriously finicky and cynical bunch, so there were lingering and inevitable grumblings about how the festival had “sold out” to real estate developers and deep pockets, but for two weeks in September each year, the Lightbox is exactly what Toronto needed. Along with providing several outstanding new theatres, it also solves countless logistical problems, especially on the press and industry side. As promised, the Lightbox has remapped the landscape of the festival. The once-popular Varsity theatre, which last year marked the northernmost edge of the fest, was finally dropped completely from the circuit, as the majority of public screenings continued their move south to the AMC and press and industry screenings were relocated to the Scotiabank. This year, TIFF also outfitted the Broadway-style Princess of Wales Theatre with state-of-the-art audio and projection, giving the festival one more venue on King Street for high-profile public events.

    As far as I know, no one threw a birthday bash for the Lightbox, but it has certainly become the focal point of the festival’s identity. Audiences were treated to two Lightbox-related trailers before each screening, one a general branding and marketing piece, the other an advertisement for a gallery exhibit of Grace Kelly memorabilia, “From Movie Star to Princess”. That exhibit is, I think, a useful illustration of how TIFF’s current artistic direction, especially in terms of year-round programming, walks the fine and well-worn line between engaging cinema culture and serving commercial interests. Princess Grace brings glamour, name recognition, and popular appeal to the Lightbox galleries, while also giving the Cinémathèque license to show films by Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and Fred Zinnemann. It’s a nice metaphor, also, for the festival proper, which, especially in recent years, has established itself as an increasingly important marketplace and launching ground for Oscar winners, while simultaneously working to maintain its reputation as North America’s most important showcase of world cinema. As far I could tell, TIFF managed to accomplish both this year. Clooney, Pitt and Gosling all looked great on the red carpet, apparently, and I saw a lot of very good films.

    City to City

    After stops in Tel Aviv and Istanbul, TIFF moved to Buenos Aires for its third annual “City to City” (CTC) program. Advertised as “an exploration of the urban experience through film”, CTC is a welcome addition in Toronto if only because it’s one more curated section of the catalogue. The festival’s massive size and its everything-for-everyone approach is, of course, both a blessing and a curse. TIFF watchers (yes, such people exist—I am one) have been known to gripe about the seemingly arbitrary programming distinctions: to cherry-pick one example, this year Bruce McDonald and Robert Guédiguian were deemed “Masters”, while the latest films by Ermanno Olmi and Terrence Davies showed up in “Special Presentations”. More significantly, screenings of repertory films have been almost completely eliminated from the festival due to the shuttering of the “Dialogues” program, at which filmmakers, actors, and other significant figures would introduce and discuss landmark films – Max Von Sydow on The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman, 1960), for example, or Sidney Lumet on The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946). CTC addresses both of those concerns. In each of its three years, CTC programmers have taken a commendably catholic approach, balancing commercial films with more difficult fare, recent work with a few from the vault. I was especially pleased to see Pablo Trapero’s Mundo Grúa (Crane World, 1999) in this year’s lineup, although I didn’t choose to see it again (the double-edged sword of repertory programming). In the fall issue of Cinema Scope, Argentinean film critic Quintín accuses TIFF of having a “paternalistic” regard for his home city and yet still praises many of the specific programming decisions. I can’t speak to the quality of the lineup as a whole, but by coincidence I ended my fest with three films from the program, all of which I quite liked, and all of which benefited significantly from the juxtaposition.

    The best of the films I saw in City to City— and one of the real highlights of TIFF, in general— was Nicolás Prividera’s Tierra de los Padres (Fatherland), although, frankly, I feel poorly equipped to discuss it in the detail it deserves owing to my scant knowledge of Argentina’s political history. Fatherland opens with a montage of black-and-white archival footage arranged sequentially from early-20th century film to recent video, most of it depicting war and civil unrest. The montage is set to a spirited rendition of the Argentinean national anthem and anticipates, in miniature, the overarching goals, both formally and rhetorically, of the film as a whole. Prividera ends the opening sequence by cutting to a high-angle shot of La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires’ wealthy Recoleta neighbourhood. Opened in 1822, the cemetery soon established itself as the final resting place for members of the city’s ruling and cultural elite. The more than 4,000 elaborately ornamented, above-ground vaults there include those of Eva Perón, Oliviero Girondo (whose poem “Atonement” features prominently in the film), and several presidents, governors and military leaders. Except for the closing sequence, a questionable helicopter-eyed shot that situates Recoleta within the larger context of Buenos Aires’ geography, both literally and economically, the remainder of Fatherland takes place within the high, marbled walls of the cemetery.

    After glancing at its description in the TIFF catalogue, I expected Fatherland to echo Forever (2006), Heddy Honigmann’s curious and sympathetic essay film about people who make pilgrimages to the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Instead, Prividera’s style owes more to James Benning’s brand of structuralism and to John Gianvito’s recent tour of forgotten American gravestones and monuments, Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007). Prividera recruits volunteers, presumably locals touring the cemetery, to read brief poems and snippets from letters, novels, essays, speeches and other historical texts that he has pasted into a thick red book. Each reader is staged in a static, precisely composed shot and recites his or her passage with little emotional expression. The duration of each shot is determined by the length of the reading, and Prividera adds syncopated beats to the rhythm of the film by regularly inserting documentary tableaux: friends singing sentimentally in front of Peron’s tomb, a busload of school children taking a guided tour, a young couple giggling and snapping photos as they emerge from an open vault, workmen cleaning and maintaining the grounds.

    Fatherland is interesting enough as a history lesson and as an ambivalent study of national memory; what makes it minute-to-minute compelling, however, is its form. Like Benning’s RR (2007), which finds infinite spatial variations in American landscapes, Prividera’s compositions are arresting as images in their own right, and the film’s repetitive structure trains viewers to spot the occasional, telling changes to the formula. For example, early in the film, a young man reads matter-of-factly from Juan Manuel de Rosas’ 1835 inauguration speech. It begins like so many of the shots that preceded it, but then the reader recoils ever so slightly, shocked at the words he’s hearing from his own voice. In the speech, De Rosas announced that the legislature had signed over to him absolute authority and that this concentration of power was necessary in order for him to save the country from itself. (When De Rosas was finally overthrown eighteen years later, the new national constitution included the “Suma del poder público” [Sum of public power], which made any future efforts to concentrate power in the executive branch a crime of high treason.) That brief pause by the reader, and the slight change of expression on his face, would be easily overlooked in other films; here, it’s a shock. Fatherland is most effective in moments like this, when it creates original and confrontational juxtapositions: a young member of the modern, educated upper class speaks in the voice of his country’s dictatorial past while only a few feet away, just outside the frame, working-class men scrub away at monuments to the dead for the benefit of tourists.

    One recurring theme at TIFF this year, particularly among the generation of filmmakers who remember 1968, was a wistful nostalgia for a time when meaningful political engagement seemed possible — revolutionary, even. In that context, Santiago Mitre’s directorial debut, El estudiante (The Student), was a fun change of pace. Mitre, who co-wrote Trapero’s Leonera (Lion’s Den, 2008) and Carancho (2010), is too young to be nostalgic (he was born in 1980) and too cynical to treat institutional politics as anything but the fuck-all world it is. Echoing a tale told in so many political biographies, Mitre’s hero, Roque (Esteban Lamothe), first becomes involved in a student movement because he’s trying to get laid. Paula (Romina Paula), a beautiful and committed teaching assistant, serves as Roque’s Virgil, leading him by hand (and another, more vital organ) through the Inferno of backstabbing, sloganeering and self-interest. Mitre’s script has often been compared by American critics to Aaron Sorkin, but the only similarities I see between the two are the word count and the coming-of-age thrill that flavours Roque’s first tastes of power. Sorkin’s four seasons of The West Wing are unapologetically romantic: the morally-correct politicians are always the smartest and most quick-witted people in the room. The Student makes no real effort to justify in moral terms — or even to explain — the goals of Roque’s maneuverings. There’s endless talk about “reform”, but as far as I can tell, the only real goal is to get one aging career politician a promotion. The Sorkin comparisons more likely stem from Mitre’s directorial style, which, though not yet in the league of David Fincher, does show a real knack for propelling narrative. Esteban Lamothe and Romina Paula are great on screen, both individually and together, which is essential for a film like this that, ultimately, is about getting fucked.

    Along with Crane World, the other open-vault film in this year’s City to City was Hugo Santiago’s Invasion (1969), which has, in recent years, re-entered circulation for the first time in decades after the discovery of a print in France. Co-written with Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, Invasión sits somewhere on the paranoid-dystopia spectrum between The Trial (Orson Welles, 1962) and Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965), although it’s not nearly as good as either. The film concerns a small cadre of middle-aged men who look like bored bureaucrats but who are secretly scheming to steal a truckload of radio equipment from the nameless, vaguely defined totalitarian forces who rule the land. The best and most absurd scene takes place in a sterile white room with three televisions bolted to the wall. One of the men has been captured and is being slapped around on a chair while an elderly woman mops around him, secretaries come and go delivering memos, and the sounds of typewriters and Morse code can be heard in the background. The banality of evil, indeed. The defining pleasure of Invasión, though, is its chaotic style. Cinematographer Ricardo Aronovich, who went on to work with Marguerite Duras and Louis Malle, shoots Buenos Aires in stark, grainy black-and-white, and Santiago’s cutting turns the narrative into a bewildering calamity. There’s desperation in every image, and the heroes are always literally on the run — the best of the many chase scenes takes place in an abandoned railway car, for no apparent reason. Later, a getaway car is blown up on the side of the road, again for no apparent reason. Whether this is a critical exploration of authoritarianism or simply sloppy filmmaking can be debated (I and most of the critics I spoke to in Toronto leaned toward the latter), but the resulting film remains a fascinating curiosity.

    Wavelengths

    In each of the eight years I’ve attended TIFF, the most expertly curated section has been Wavelengths, its program of avant-garde films. Much of the credit for the program’s success, both in artistic terms and in gross sales (it’s become a consistent sell-out over the last few years), goes to Andréa Picard, who officially announced during the fest that this would be her last year at the helm. Rumours about the move had begun to swirl in late summer, and the annual, close-knit gathering of experimental filmmakers, critics, cinephiles and friends at the Art Gallery of Ontario certainly did nothing to tamper them. But rumours be damned. Regardless of the reasons for Andréa’s departure, it’s a major loss for TIFF, and one that will be felt acutely by those of us who have come to consider Wavelengths the reason to attend Toronto. During her five years as sole curator, she invited onto the stage of Jackman Hall the likes of Michael Snow, James Benning, Nathanial Dorsky, Ernie Gehr, Jim Jennings and David Gatten. She championed brilliant younger filmmakers like Ben Russell, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Eriko Sonoda and Jennifer Reeves. And she supported the work of Toronto filmmakers, bringing much deserved attention to John Price, Chris Kennedy and Blake Williams, among others. On the last night of Wavelengths, before introducing his rapturous new film, The Return, Dorsky acted on behalf of most of us in the room when he gave Andréa a kiss and thanked her, sincerely, for the difficult and creative work she’s performed over the past few years.

    There were 25 films in Wavelengths this year, far too many to cover in detail. I’ll focus, instead, on a few standouts. The highlight of the first Wavelengths program, “Analogue Arcadia”, was Edwin Parker, Tacida Dean’s quiet and affectionate study of American artist Cy Twombly, who passed away just a few weeks before the screening. Dean shoots Twombly in grainy 16mm, alternating between close-up inserts of his hands or the sculptures and tools around his Virginia studio and longer shots of him at work, which on this particular day involves paying bills, a brief discussion of Keats with a visiting Italian curator, and lunch at a local diner. Twombly moves softly and speaks softly, and Dean watches it all patiently from a distance, squirrelling her camera away in unlikely places in the hope of capturing some nugget of insight from the 83 year-old. That’s what these portraits of the artist are for, right? Dispelling myths and stealing wisdom? Taking Twombly’s given name, Edwin Parker, for the title of her film suggests that Dean is more interested in the person who became the artist — or, perhaps, at this stage in his life, the man who remains after the artist. She implies that what connects the two, Edwin and Cy, might be something as simple and indescribable as taste. “I like that. [pause] I like that,” Twombly says with a sudden spark in his eye while looking at something just outside the frame. Edwin Parker ends, fittingly, with a kind of eulogy, a solemn and graceful shot of his studio after dark, where his sculptures stand in testament.

    The only feature-length film in Wavelengths this year was James Benning’s collection of video portraits, Twenty Cigarettes. As he travelled the world, Benning staged friends and acquaintances in front of various flat backdrops (an apartment wall, a graffitied steel fence, a sheet of plywood), asked them to smoke a cigarette, and then walked away, leaving them alone to interact with the camera however they pleased. The duration of each shot is determined by the smoker: in the opening minutes, for example, we watch Sompot Chidgasornpongse (a frequent collaborator with Apichatpong) struggle slowly and hilariously through his very first cigarette, while other, more practiced smokers make relatively quick work of it. The cigarette, of course, is a gimmick, the excuse Benning needed to get people in front of his camera and make them drop their pretenses and reveal their “real” faces. “The guard is down and the mask is off,” Walker Evans wrote, describing his own surreptitious photos of Depression-era subway riders. Evans’ book, Many Are Called, is a precedent for Benning’s work here, as is Jon Jost’s essay film, Plain Talk and Common Sense (Uncommon Senses), in which Jost invites strangers to pose for a photo and then pretends to fix a problem with the camera while his subjects “perform” nervously in front of it, first growing irritated and then, eventually, becoming bored and expressionless.

    Benning became interested in shooting faces again, he says, after revisiting Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (1965-66) for the first time in many years and after remaking two of his own films, One Way Boogie Woogie (1977, 2004) and North on Evers (1991, 2010). Twenty Cigarettes is certainly a more intimate experience than Warhol’s shorts. The simple, repetitive compositions and depthless backdrops focus the viewer’s attention squarely on the smokers’ faces, and the images eventually shrug off any would-be cinematic iconography. A few of the smokers attempt to strike a pose (filmmaker Thom Andersen is probably the most successful), but the deliberate awkwardness of the exercise frustrates their efforts. An attractive woman drops her femme fatale pout after the smoke repeatedly drifts into her eyes, causing her to squint and flinch. A young man maintains his tough-guy attitude for as long as he can muster it before finally giving in, stubbing out his cigarette halfway through, and walking away. “I feel like I know them all well now,” Benning says about the smokers. “It’s a funny thing. When I watch it now there’s a point in each shot when I feel the person.” That intimate connection between the filmmaker and his subjects proves to be both a strength and a weakness of Twenty Cigarettes. When I spoke with Benning after the screening, he seemed a bit sentimental. We talked more about the people in the film than about shot duration, off-screen space or digital technologies. In his attempt to “map the world into a package of cigarettes”, he’s made a kind of autobiography at one remove. Twenty Cigarettes is nostalgic and sweet, even, but it lacks the formal invention that makes Benning’s best work so impossibly compelling.

    The third Wavelengths program, “Serial Rhythms”, was a prototypical Andréa Picard collection. It included new work by several filmmakers who she has supported consistently over the years (Price, T. Marie, Kevin Jerome Everson and Rose Lowder, whose Bouquets series continues to be among cinema’s most perfect things) and also featured this year’s lone avant-garde “classic”, a restored print of Sailboat (Joyce Wieland, 1967), which struck me as an exercise in semiotics leavened by a punk rock wink. The 3-minute film shows a grainy blue image of sailboats passing at a distance from left to right, while the top half of the frame is dominated by the word “Sailboat” in block white type. The real discoveries of the program, though, were Jonathan Schwartz’s A Preface to Red and Karen Johannesen’s Resonance. Shot in Turkey, Schwartz’s film is part ethnography, part Vertovian collage. It opens on a field of red brakelights in a nighttime shot of traffic before moving into daylight and a series of portraits, street scenes and bits of abstraction. The thrill of the film — and it really is an exciting viewing experience — is generated by the cacophonous soundtrack, a mixture of electric white noise, thumping dance music, sirens, and distant voices, and by Schwartz’s associative cutting. Resonance is a fine illustration of Picard’s curatorial fondness for op art. (“Serial Rhythms” was a physically demanding program to sit through. My eyes ached when it was over.) Constructed from blown-up 8mm images of porch railings against a brick wall, the film is a rapid-fire, pulsing object. Johannesen introduces the basic material of the film — horizontal and vertical lines, warm sunlight and shadow, positive and negative space—in the opening seconds, then works through evolving variations on the theme, causing the screen to shake and grow.

    When I first read a description of Blake Williams’ Coorow-Latham Road, which closed out the fourth program, “Space is the Place”, I worried that it was so perfectly conceived that the description alone was enough, that actually watching the 20-minute video might seem redundant. Using Google Street View, Williams stitched together some 3,000 individual clips of a deserted highway in Southwest Australia, reconstructing the 46-kilometer route from the town of Coorow, named for the aboriginal word for a local stream, to Latham, named for an early English settler. The concept is thoroughly contemporary, relying on 21st-century technologies for its raw material, but Williams’ process for joining the images — Picard dubs it “spectral bookbinding” — harkens to the 19th century and the earliest days of the Kinetoscope. William’s formal strategy proves a fascinating and clever approach to the content. By no means an explicitly political film, Coorow-Latham Road does, however, foreground the colonialist history of the area by giving us a new (in the Modernist sense) perspective on the Outback, by which I mean both the literal geography of the place and also the “landscape” as a time-worn subject of art. The duration of the film is essential in this regard. Images fly by in silence, morphing impressionistically from one to the next, and for minutes at a time there are no signs of human life whatsoever. Williams very gradually pans (if that word is even appropriate here) to the left until even the last remnant of culture, the road itself, is beyond the edges of the frame. Google’s algorithm for interpolating the area between photos is optimised for urban and suburban spaces, so as the landscape streams by, it fractures occasionally into geometric shapes reminiscent of skyscrapers, an ironic visual metonym for “progress”. Watching Coorow-Latham Road proved, in fact, to be a singular experience, even within such a strong program of avant-garde films. It is simultaneously thought-churning, anxiety-causing and beautiful.

    Vive la France

    As usual, Toronto was the first stop in North America for most of the Cannes premieres, which this year included an especially strong slate of French films. Given that this report will be published nearly seven months after Cannes, I’ll devote the majority of it to titles that premiered in Venice and at TIFF, but I do want to make brief mention of two titles in particular. Bertrand Bonello’s L’Apollonide (House of Tolerance) is the best of the bunch. Set in a Paris brothel at the turn of the century, it combines an anthropologist-like attention to the day-to-day routines of prostitution with an overwhelmingly sensuous visual style. This film is dripping with warm colour and lush fabrics, but they’re not just set dressings or fetish objects. L’Apollonide is a melodramatic reimagining of the Grand Guignol that generates staggering emotion from its images. Bonello wisely avoids loading the narrative with back stories for the women of the brothel or the wealthy men who visit them there and, instead, records their faces, gestures and small talk, which speak so eloquently of their dreams, pain, and disappointments.

    Bruno Dumont’s Hors Satan (Outside Satan), which also played at Cannes, is, like so much of his work, a fascinating and frustrating mess. Now six films into his career, I’ve begun to think of Dumont as a novelist at heart and a mostly failed image-maker. On occasion he creates startlingly original visions that burrow immediately to the core of his obsessions — think of Freddy and his friends vibrating rapturously as they practice drumming in La vie de Jésus (The Life of Jesus, 1997) — but too often, especially in recent years, there has been a disconnect, I think, between his apparent intentions and his cinematographic style. Dumont told audiences in Toronto that the title of the new film could be treated as two separate words, that he was interested in “outside” (the camera only briefly moves indoors) and “Satan”. And so he shoots David Dewaele wandering without expression through the grey, desolate dunes of Boulogne sur Mer on France’s northern coast. Dewaele’s unnamed character is a prophet or a healer or a visionary of some sort; he’s also a jealous and vicious murderer. Dumont has often been described as a transcendentalist filmmaker (including by me), and Hors Satan certainly fits somewhere in that camp. He even makes allusions here to Ordet (Carl Dreyer, 1955) and to Tarkovsky’s final two films, Nostalghia (1983), in a test of faith scene that recalls Erland Josephson’s walk with a candle, and The Sacrifice (1986), when Dewaele envisions an apocalyptic fire. But even compared with Dumont’s previous films, Hors Satan feels like a calculated provocation, begging audiences to question, both intellectually and viscerally, the limits of faith or ethics or whatever it is that makes us draw a line between good and evil. I just wish the film itself offered more guidance and wisdom on the subject. Without it, Dumont comes off as a bit of a bully and a bore.

    At the midpoint of Nicolas Klotz and Elisabeth Perceval’s previous feature film, La question humaine (Heartbeat Detector, 2007), Mathieu Amalric’s corporate psychologist is taken by some younger colleagues to a late-night rave, where he drinks too much, kisses the wrong woman, gets in a fight, and blacks out. It’s a familiar genre convention made new and strange by Klotz’s mise en scène. Every film noir detective eventually abandons objectivity and “makes the case personal” but never has that on-screen transition been so ecstatic and otherworldly. Klotz and Perceval’s latest, Low Life, exists somewhere in the same psychological, political and aesthetic realm as that rave, an anarchic, strobe-lit, techno-beat space where youth act on instinct and chase the sublime. In their press notes, Klotz and Perceval claim to have made the film for their children’s generation, who were born into a “globalized mess” of a world mediated by technology and devoid of meaningful political agency. The filmmakers temper their nostalgia with a genuine admiration for today’s 20-somethings, who are “more lucid, braver than most” and who “make up other ways of resistance.”

    Low Life begins as a street-level view of a student political movement before narrowing its focus to one couple in particular. Carmen (Camille Rutherford) and Hussein (Arash Haimian) meet when she and her friends confront the police at a squat for illegal immigrants where he has been helping out however he can. When Hussein receives word that his permanent refugee status has been denied, he and Carmen retreat into isolation, spending days together in bed behind a locked, hidden doorway. That plot summary begs comparisons with Les amants réguliers (Regular Lovers, Philippe Garrel, 2005) and The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003), but Low Life is more directly indebted to the horror films of Jacques Tourneur, particularly I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and Night of the Demon (1957). In the latter, men die for simply holding a cursed piece of paper (the film has often been read as an allegory for the loyalty oaths of the anti-Communist era); in Low Life, the curse is real: having the right papers in 2011 is for many quite literally a matter of life and death. Klotz shot Low Life on a Canon digital SLR and the results are a little unlike anything I’ve ever seen before (Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth [2006] is the nearest point of reference). Most of the action takes place after dark, and Klotz’s high-contrast, desaturated palette of greens, yellows and browns turns Lyon into a gothic underworld, something akin to a Straub adaptation of Ann Rice. Low Life received mixed-to-negative responses when it premiered in Venice, but it was my favourite film at TIFF.

    Low Life also contains the single most striking image I saw at the festival. It comes near the end of the film, when a young, black immigrant paints his face white and performs a voodoo ritual. Klotz shoots him in a low-lit close-up. The paint has dried and begun to flake away, giving the boy’s face the appearance of a puzzle with missing pieces. It’s terrifying and uncanny, and a prime example of Klotz’s tendency to structure his dramas around brief, ecstatic interludes. By coincidence, the day after I saw Low Life, I encountered echoes of that image at the end of another zombie movie (of sorts), Chantal Akerman’s Almayer’s Folly. Akerman’s loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s first novel ends with a minutes-long shot of the title character, a middle-aged Dutch trader in Southeast Asia who has been driven to madness by his own foolishness and avarice. Drawn to the jungle by promises of wealth, Almayer (Stanlislas Mehrar) marries out of self-interest and then, in deference to the wishes of his benefactor, surrenders his daughter, who he genuinely loves, to a distant boarding school. By the end of the film, he’s penniless, broken, and alone — “living dead all these years,” he says caustically.

    When I spoke with Akerman at TIFF, she actively resisted crediting the source material and claimed, instead, that the film owes as much to Murnau’s Tabu (1931) and to her own biography as it does to Conrad. Her reconfiguring of the original text reminded me most of Jean Rhys’s novel, Wide Saragasso Sea, which foregrounds the racist assumptions in Jane Eyre by inventing a life and psychology for Charlotte Bronte’s exotic “madwoman in the attic”. Akerman’s film likewise rounds out the two female characters who are given short shrift in Conrad’s novel, Almayer’s estranged, Malaysian wife (Sakhna Oum) and their mixed-race daughter, Nina (Aurora Marion). By simply casting the wife’s role — by giving her a body and a voice — Akerman exposes all of the tragedy in her situation that Conrad elides. Akerman also shifts the balance of the novel’s perspective by moving more scenes to the city and, in doing so, gives more weight to Nina’s story. When Nina is finally evicted from the strict, Catholic boarding school, Akerman follows her in a long tracking shot through a dark, busy street in Phnom Penh (Cambodia stands in for Malaysia). Marion walks like a model, with her neck straight and her shoulders arched, and Akerman allows us the time and opportunity to really watch her. It’s a powerful moment of rebirth for a young woman who has spent the majority of her life “in jail” (Akerman’s words), but her triumph is short-lived. When Nina finally confronts the father who abandoned her, she tells him bitterly, “They taught me to walk like a real girl.” A contemporary, sympathetic reading of Conrad’s novel might commend it for its critique of the dehumanising tendencies of colonialism, both on the colonised and the coloniser, but Akerman goes a few steps further. By rebalancing the dynamics of the central relationships, she finds — surprisingly, perhaps — greater sympathy for everyone involved.

    Philippe Garrel’s latest, Un été brûlant (That Summer), begins with a fantasy. We’re first introduced to François (Louis Garrel), who is drinking alone and moodily (it’s Louis Garrel after all) on a sunny afternoon, before Garrel cuts to a high-angle shot of a fully nude, reclining Monica Bellucci, who slowly reaches out her hand toward the camera. Bellucci, we eventually learn, plays Angèle, François’s movie-star wife. Theirs is a tempestuous relationship marked by jealousy, betrayal and also deep, genuine affection. François is a recognisable Garrel “type”: artistic, melancholic, charming, reticent and philandering. Angèle is a bombshell and makes no apologies for it (it’s Monica Bellucci after all), but in her marriage, at least, she’s also sincere and solicitous. When François invites Paul (Jérôme Robart) and his girlfriend Élisabeth (Céline Sallette) to come live with them for the summer in Rome, Un été brûlant appears to be making that familiar turn into Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? territory, where the outsiders act as both a mirror and a catalyst, provoking a final, furious confrontation. And in some ways, that is, indeed, what happens, but Garrel’s compassion for each of the four characters prevents the film from becoming schematic. Like Klotz and Perceval, Garrel looks upon the next generation with both wonder and concern. There’s a moving and deep sadness in this film. It’s that familiar soul sickness that plagues so much of Garrel’s work. But unlike, say, La frontière de l’aube (Frontier of Dawn, 2008), which is so self-contained and dire, Un été brûlant exists in a larger world, where joy and sacrifice can offer absolution. Credit for the difference between the two films goes equally to Willy Kurant’s beautiful colour photography; to the invention of Paul and Élisabeth, who offer glimpses of an alternative to François’s despair (between this film and L’Apollinade, Céline Sallette was the star of the fest); and to a brief, unexpected, final on-screen appearance by Maurice Garrel, whose laughter and kind gaze haunt the film.

    Other Fall Premieres

    I saw a handful of other features that premiered in either Venice or Toronto, and among them were the only two films at the fest I actively disliked. Steve McQueen’s Shame stars Michael Fassbender as Brandon, a wealthy New York businessman whose sex addiction begins to intrude into other areas of his carefully compartmentalised life. Carey Mulligan plays his sister, a pixie-ish, down-and-out lounge singer with razor-scarred wrists. Through their manic-depressive interactions, we’re gradually given vague glimpses into Brandon and Sissy’s shared and presumably tragic past. “This film features a sex-addicted character, but it’s actually about much more,” Shame’s defenders would argue, and I suppose I see their point. But McQueen’s artifice-obsessed visual style, questionable plotting (particularly a homophobic turn near the end), and Harry Escott’s bombastic score keep getting in the way. The only time Shame really came to life for me was during a long scene between Brandon and a coworker who he’s met for a date. Fassbender’s uncanny charm plays against him in interesting ways as he struggles, awkwardly, to maintain his pose.

    The other major disappointment of the fest also came from England. I was intrigued by the prospect of Andrea Arnold directing an adaptation of Wuthering Heights because her first two films, Red Road (2006) and Fish Tank (2009), are visually interesting but poorly plotted. I’d hoped that being constrained by a classic text would rein in her histrionics, and, indeed, for the first half hour or so the film does produce an exciting frisson. By casting young, working-class non-actors in the lead roles, and by making Heathcliff black rather than the “gypsy” of Brontë’s novel, Arnold defamiliarises a tale that has become bloated over the years with stuffy British airs. Watching Hindley Earnshaw act out his sadistic cruelty on Solomon Glave’s young black body — Arnold shoots with the same hyperrealism that characterises her other films — is a decidedly unusual viewing experience and one that forced me to rethink the Heathcliff creation story. The novelty, however, soon wears thin as Wuthering Heights follows the course set by Arnold’s first two films, collapsing into a frenzied mess in the final act.

    Two more auteurs premiered adaptations of classic texts this fall, both of them grotesque, absurd, and, on occasion, surprisingly stirring. Alexander Sokurov’s Faust opens with a CGIed descent through the clouds and a God’s eye view of a small mountain town whose Expressionistic design recalls Murnau’s famous telling of the Goethe tale. Sokurov then cuts to a close-up of a rotting cock. “Where is the soul?” Faust asks, leaning his face in close to the flayed corpse. Rather than concentrating on the consequences of Faust’s famous bargain (which, ultimately, don’t seem particularly grave), Sokurov is more interested in the motivating temptations. Mephistopheles appears in the form of a hunchbacked moneylender (Anton Adasinsky), who leads Faust (Johannes Zeiler) by the hand through the town — and through an endless, rambling discourse — before finally stumbling upon a soul-worthy prize, one night with the beautiful and innocent Gretchen (Isolda Dychauk). Sokurov packs his 4:3 frame with bodies that are in constant, stumbling motion. For the majority of its 130 minutes, Faust exists in a claustrophobic and deeply unpleasant world, which makes the few moments of clarity, particularly one radiant and silent close-up of Gretchen, all the more moving and sacrifice-worthy.

    Guy Maddin’s Keyhole is a gangster-style adaptation of The Odyssey set entirely in Ulysses Pick’s (Jason Patric) family home. Accompanied by an eccentric menagerie of characters, including a beautiful drowning victim and her tied-up lover, Manners, Ulysses sets off for the top floor in hopes of reconciling with his wife, Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini). Along the way they encounter ghosts of the dead and visions of trauma from the past. There are monsters to be fought, including a hilarious-if-juvenile joke of a Cyclops, and we eventually learn that Manners is, in fact, Ulysses’s lost son. Keyhole is a perverse and barely coherent explosion of Freudian chaos, even by Maddin’s own standards, and the critical consensus has been mostly negative. What saves it, I think, and what makes it very much a Maddin film, is the final reel, when the ghost story fantasy fades, leaving only the home, an epic battlefield. In the end, Keyhole is Manners’ story, and the emotional core of the film is that primal desire for the domestic security of childhood.

    The most pleasant surprise of the fest was Julia Loktev’s The Loneliest Planet, which begins in the vein of Antonioni before settling into something much smaller and more intimate. Alex (Gael García Bernal) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg) are an engaged couple backpacking through eastern Europe. The film opens as they arrive in a small town in Georgia, where they spend an evening drinking and dancing before deciding to hire a local, Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze), to lead them on a four-day hike through the desolate Caucasus mountains. Alex and Nica are by every indication a warm and committed couple. Loktev devotes the entire first half of the film to documenting the particular ease they share with one another — the way they pass familiar glances when in the company of strangers, or the simple pleasures they enjoy when climbing rocks together and making love. When the couple and their guide set off into the wilderness, Loktev breaks the narrative into chapters, dividing the sections with long, painterly shots of the imposing Georgian landscape accompanied by dissonant strings. These chapter breaks only heighten the increasingly palpable sense of dread and danger that characterises the first half of their journey.

    I was frustrated by Loktev’s first narrative feature, Day Night Day Night, because her decision to elide the specific political motivations of her central character, a would-be suicide bomber, turns the film into a prolonged exercise in Hitchcockian suspense. The deliberate ambiguity there seems provocative in the worst sense of the word. The Loneliest Planet turns on a similarly ambiguous provocation, but it works brilliantly in the context of this specific relationship. At the midpoint of the film, two men stumble upon the couple’s camp, and after exchanging heated words with Dato, the older of the two raises his AK-47 and points it at the young lovers. Alex, in a flash of instinct, pushes Nica between himself and the gun before immediately recognising his mistake and stepping back in front of her. It’s an unexpectedly literary turn for a film like this, the kind of obnoxiously symbolic moment that would doom a Hemingway hero. But Loktev does something remarkable with it. Instead of taking the expected turn toward increasing conflict and violence (I worried briefly I was in for another Gerry [Van Sant, 2002] or Twentynine Palms [Dumont, 2003]), Loktev simply continues documenting their relationship. They walk on in silence now, traumatised by the event and by Alex’s “shameful” behaviour. I use scare quotes there because the film forces us to judge Alex and also to examine our own gendered standards. The film is most interesting, though, as a portrait of a loving relationship in a moment of crisis. Alex follows Nica through an abandoned house, desperate to reach out and comfort her but familiar enough with her behaviour to know that it’s not yet time. Dato, unexpectedly, becomes a temptation for Nica, an embodiment of the petty, what-if fantasies we all have when we fight with our partners. Loktev wisely leaves the fate of the couple undecided, which is precisely why the film works so well. Long-term relationships last because both people commit to the struggle of forgiveness and reconciliation. The Loneliest Planet gives us every reason to believe Alex and Nica can survive as a couple, but will they?

  • Lucky Life (2010)

    Lucky Life (2010)

    Dir. by Lee Isaac Chung

    There’s a sequence about 25 minutes into Lee Isaac Chung’s new film Lucky Life that I’ve watched countless times over the past few months. In an earlier scene, the film’s four main characters — old college friends who reunite each year at a beach house on the Outer Banks — are sitting around a table outside a restaurant, telling stories late into the night, and one of them, Jason (Kenyon Adams), mentions that he’s never watched the sun rise over the ocean. “Well, you have to do that,” Karen (Megan McKenna) says with enthusiasm. “We’ll do that!” In a few typically elliptical cuts, Chung then moves us from their conversation to a scene back at the beach house, which is followed soon after by the three cuts I can’t stop watching: 1. a point-of-view shot from within a car that is pulling onto a ferry, 2. a medium close-up of the back of Jason’s head, and 3. a long, high-angle shot of the four friends walking slowly onto the beach, each of them staged like a visitor to the gardens of Resnais’s Marienbad. It’s well past sunrise by the time they reach the water’s edge, but like so much of the film’s plot, this seems utterly, delightfully beside the point.

    Movies about the lives of college-educated-but-still-rambling young professionals are a staple of low-budget American cinema, and it’s tempting in the opening scenes of Lucky Life to graph onto it all of the conventions of the genre. But there are several clues that Chung is up to something different here, that his cinematic points of reference extend well beyond Austin and Park City. The ferry sequence, for example, is held together by a music cue and by an oddly — and beautifully — subjective camera, the likes of which I rarely see in American film. Chung shifts regularly throughout Lucky Life from an objective perspective that captures conversations and the occasional shards of narrative to a more searching, melancholic point-of-view that is clearly designed or authored. It’s often reflected in the form itself, as he alternates between the kind of handheld photography we’ve come to think of, post-Dardennes, as “realist” and a combination of composed tracking shots and long, static takes. Isaac mentioned in a recent interview that he watched a lot of Mizoguchi before making Lucky Life; after watching the ferry scene eight or ten times, I sent him a stack of Claire Denis films. It’s that kind of subjectivity.

    Another clue to Chung’s strategy is the lead performance from Daniel O’Keefe. Mark is a recognizable “indie” protagonist. He’s a 30-year-old writer and husband. He sleeps late, works on his laptop at a neighborhood coffee shop, and seems resigned to his impending fatherhood. But he’s also introverted, soft-spoken, and moody, traits that make him a difficult point of entry into the film’s world. Or, at least, I assume other viewers will have trouble empathizing with Mark. He can be a bit of a prick. (He’s also more like me than any character I’ve ever seen on screen. For an insight into all that my endlessly-patient wife has endured over the years, watch Lucky Life’s crib-building scene. I shrink in shame each time I see it.)

    But Mark’s personality is somehow at the core of this film, which is deeply serious like Tarkovsky’s films are serious. Jason, we quickly discover, is dying and making what will likely be his last trip to the beach. Despite this loss and other personal trials, however, Mark shows few outward signs of mourning or emotional turmoil. He’s a young, American version of the stone-faced cipher we regularly see in art house cinema from Eastern Europe and Asia. But there’s not a shred of irony in Chung’s authorial voice. The film’s main concerns – How does one remain hopeful in the face of suffering? How can the artist transform the stuff of life into a harbinger of beauty and grace? – were heavy subjects when Tarkovsky tackled them, and they’re heavy now. The slightest wink to the audience would cripple Lucky Life, and it’s to Chung’s great credit that this deceptively ambitious film maintains its balance through to the final shot. (I’m eager to see how others respond to that shot, which is so painfully real to my own experience I can barely stand to watch it.)

    A few other random observations. First, I don’t make the Tarkovsky comparison lightly. When I interviewed Isaac a few years ago about his first film, Munyurangabo, we talked a lot about Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on History,” so I was thrilled to see how Lucky Life weaves together Benjamin’s “storm of progress” with Tarkovsky’s apocalyptic visions. One particular tracking shot makes it look like ocean waves are crashing against the old beach house, just as flames consume the house at the end of The Sacrifice. The recurring recitations of Gerald Stern’s poetry, which inspired the film, and Chung’s striking use of archival footage also call to mind Tarkovsky’s Mirror.