Long Pauses

Tag: Region: Canada

  • Queens of the Qing Dynasty

    Queens of the Qing Dynasty

    Dir. by Ashley McKenzie

    – – –

    This essay was originally published at Metrograph.

    – – –

    Near the end of the first act of Tony Kushner’s 1991 play Angels in America, Prior Walter, a gay man recently diagnosed with AIDS, sits alone on stage in front of a dressing mirror and applies make-up to his face in “the new fall colors” he lifted from the Clinique counter at Macy’s. It’s a comically failed attempt to boost his spirits. “I look like a corpse. A corpsette,” he says. “Oh my queen; you know you’ve hit rock-bottom when even drag is a drag.” Hold for audience applause. And then, miraculously, Harper Pitt appears. When last we saw Harper, she had taken too many Valium, as is her habit—a byproduct of her marriage to the gaslighting Joe, a closeted Mormon on the fast track in the Reagan administration. “What are you doing in my hallucination?” Harper asks Prior. “I’m not in your hallucination. You’re in my dream,” he replies. It’s one of the great scenes of American theater. Prior and Harper immediately recognize the other’s suffering and sadness, and in each other’s presence are somehow both able—again, miraculously—to experience something akin to grace.

    Harper: Deep inside you, there’s a part of you, the most inner part, entirely free of disease. I can see that.

    Prior: Is that… That isn’t true.

    Harper: Threshold of revelation.

    Angels in America is subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” which could be applied as well to Queens of the Qing Dynasty, Ashley McKenzie’s quixotic film about a “queer friendship romance” between a suicidal young woman and a non-binary Chinese immigrant whom she meets while hospitalized. The magic of Angels in America is found somewhere in that notion of the “fantasia”—in the plays’ swirling, outrageous harmonizing of poetry, camp, comedy, embodied tragedy, beauty, political outrage, and self-aware theatrical illusion. (In Kushner’s words, “It’s okay if the wires show.”) McKenzie’s film is similarly fearless in its ambitions and in its sense of play. Shot on location in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, on a small budget and with mostly untrained actors, Queens of the Qing Dynasty is nonetheless a big movie—cinematic, imaginative, startlingly uninhibited, and dense with ideas. Forgive the overwrought comparison to Angels, but the Pulitzer Prize-winning play is a useful precedent for reckoning with what McKenzie has accomplished here.

    When we first meet Star (Sarah Walker), she’s in an emergency room, sipping from a bottle of activated charcoal to counteract whatever poison she swallowed this time. She’s days away from turning 19, at which point she’ll age out of Canadian child protective services and be forced to confront the prospect of living independently or risk being assigned to a group home. It’s a precarious situation. Her life in recent years has been marked by trauma, by mental health crises, and by a steady stream of bureaucratic encounters with social workers, guardians, and the doctors, nurses, and hospital orderlies who all know her by name. (When a character scrolls through Star’s Instagram grid, they mostly see pictures of other hospital rooms.) McKenzie drops us immediately into the chaos of Star’s everyday existence by shooting in tight closeups, with wide lenses that distort perspective, funhouse-mirror style. As the team around Star monitors her vitals and prods her to keep sipping, McKenzie cuts to Star’s point of view, and the voices that surround her are drowned out by the electronic score. Barely two minutes in, Star (and the film itself) is already disassociating.

    Meanwhile, in a quieter corner of the hospital, a kind and sympathetic nurse prepares An (Ziyin Zheng) for their first meeting with Star: “You have to act as their advocate. Make sure they follow the rules,” he tells An. “She’s 18, and she has a disability.” An has emigrated to the isolated community of Cape Breton to attend graduate school and to pursue a new, more openly queer life. Volunteering as a companion at the hospital is just one more step on their long path toward Canadian citizenship. Our first glimpse of An is a closeup of their long, pointed acrylic fingernails, which dance and sway in time with An’s falsetto voice. They’re singing a traditional Chinese melody for the nurse, who looks on with fascination before sharing a song of his own. (This is the kind of movie where two characters sing to each other without any clear reason for doing so, and it’s simultaneously funny, strange, and sincerely moving.) An wears a neatly fitted, black mock turtleneck and stands with perfect posture, blinking slowly as they consider their new responsibilities.

    Queens of the Qing Dynasty isn’t so much a telling of the evolving relationship between Star and An as a heightened, sensory-triggering experience of it. Like Prior and Harper, Star and An first encounter one another in a drug-induced fantasy when Star finally settles into her hospital room, drifts off to sleep, and is visited in a dream by An, who places golden, ornamental nails on her fingers, bonding the two of them. Much of the film is conspicuously desaturated and institutional gray, but in these rare moments of intimate communion, the visual palette explodes into technicolor greens and reds. “As characters, Star and An refused to be tempered by a social realist mode of cinema,” McKenzie has said of the film’s style. “I made aesthetic choices with the goal of bringing their inner color, musicality, and generative rhythms to the surface—letting the film vibrate on their frequency.” Star wakes to find An sitting at her bedside, already a familiar and comforting face, although they’ve never met. “We have chemistry, chemical connections,” Star tells An. “We’re mixin’ chemicals. I can feel it.” It’s the beginning of a new kind of connection for them both, one that suggests the possibility of both healing and liberation.

    Queens of the Qing Dynasty’s two-hour runtime allows McKenzie room to chase ideas, to stretch conversations well beyond the point of cliché, to play with form and pacing, and to stitch together a patchwork mythology in which Star and An are the heroes. The film’s title refers to a story An shares, of ancient Chinese concubines who manipulate men to consolidate power and avoid manual labor. “They extend their empire while keeping their nails long,” An says. It plays into the film’s larger queering of gender and relationships. An’s deepest desire is to be a submissive housewife, to be loved unconditionally, and without jealousy, by a brown-eyed man who fits them just right. “I am an absorber of energy,” they tell Star. “I suck, suck, suck, suck, suck.” (This is also the kind of movie where bukkake is ascribed poetic and redemptive qualities.) Like a classical Hollywood melodrama, there are two worlds in Queens of the Qing Dynasty: the harsh, winter-sky reality of impoverished, provincial life and the also-real expressionistic spaces of felt experience.

    The two worlds meld in Walker’s and Zheng’s remarkable performances. McKenzie never strays far from their faces, shooting them like still portraits. Walker’s large round eyes stare without blinking or fully comprehending what she sees, but also without judgment or irony. One of the many pleasures of Queens of the Qing Dynasty is the emotional intimacy generated by a character who lives in a perpetual state of radical, reckless honesty. When Star and An visit the maternity ward and watch nurses swaddle newborns, pinning down their arms and legs with a knotted blanket—“I very much want to be one of those babies,” An confesses—McKenzie cuts from a newborn’s face to Star’s, reinforcing our understanding of her as someone completely untainted by ego. “You speak what’s in your mind,” An tells Star. “I like that.” Star is a kind of holy fool whose self-abnegating humility reflects the sacred around her. I can’t think of another character quite like her.

    But that level of vulnerability is dangerous, too, like an open wound. “Truth tellin’ causes dilemmas,” she warns. Midway through the film, Star leaves the hospital and attempts to live in an apartment of her own. It’s a difficult scene to watch because the minor disaster that unfolds is so stupid and inevitable, but McKenzie stays locked-in to Star’s subjective experience throughout. It’s uncommonly generous filmmaking, totally without pity, as if the camera has taken on Star’s purity of vision, too. In the final act, An picks up Star for a day out together, treating her to Chinese food at an opulent restaurant (An is wearing the same green jacket that Star wore in their first dream encounter) and taking her to an arcade where they play games and lose themselves in a Virtual Reality world. It’s a miraculous scene, with dialogue worthy of Kushner. “I’m no longer trapped. I like your love,” An says, as the VR game’s sentimental score swells. Star lifts her goggles and smiles. “Maybe we should kiss. We are going to conquer empires.”

  • 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 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.

  • Wavelengths: Tamalpais and Hotel Roccalba

    Wavelengths: Tamalpais and Hotel Roccalba

    Tamalpais (Chris Kennedy)

    Toronto filmmaker Chris Kennedy is a familiar face at Wavelengths. His films Memo to Pic Desk (co-director, ’06), the acrobat (’07), and Tape Film (’07) were all screened in the program, and my limited sense of him based on those projects was that he was still experimenting (pun intended) with the material of movie-making but hadn’t yet successfully married form to an equally compelling concept. Tape Film, for example, is fascinating to look at — it’s a disorienting and super-saturated self-portrait — but it feels scholastic, like an assigned exercise in the mechanics of handprocessing and stock manipulation.

    Kennedy’s latest contribution to Wavelengths, Tamalpais, represents a significant step forward for him, I think. About two-and-a-half minutes into the fourteen-minute film, we see in the distance a lovely composition of the green hills north of San Francisco; in the foreground, a handmade wooden frame in the classic movie ratio, 4:3, the same as the film itself. This shot puts all that comes before it in some much-needed perspective. The wooden frame is cross-sected by ten wire lines, six vertical, four horizontal, that divide the framed space into 35 smaller frames, and it’s only in hindsight that we realize each of the opening shots in the film was inspired (probably the wrong word) by one of those smaller frames. Like the twelve-tone composers of the early 20th century, though, it’s what one does with the given notes that determines whether a particular work is successful or pedantic or (insert your own evaluative adjective here), and Kennedy’s real achievement is at the level of individual shots, which are often beautiful and demonstrate a curious deftness with focus and depth of field. Kennedy recycles the technique six or seven times, creating slight variations on his landscape theme and shepherding his audience through shifting relationships with the material, from the simple pleasure of the opening images to the puzzle-like gamesmanship of his structuralist conceit and back, finally, to the beauty of his shot-making.

    Hotel Roccalba (Josef Dabernig, 2008)

    Hotel Roccalba (Josef Dabernig)

    Until watching Hotel Roccalba and then immediately googling Dabernig to learn more about him, I’d forgotten about his previous film, Lancia Thema, which screened in Wavelengths three years ago. I remember wondering at the time why Andrea Picard was so enthusiastic about him — the film struck me as slight and offbeat, like a Stella Artois ad — but Hotel Roccalba may have made me a believer. The film opens on a shot of two women knitting outside. He then cuts to others in the courtyard — an old man chopping wood, a bicyclist repairing his bike, a woman in a lawn chair. It’s only after introducing his characters — and make no mistake, these are staged tableau, this is a fiction — that Dabernig situates them in space by planting his camera on a tripod and panning 180 degrees.

    Hotel Roccalba is also relatively slight and offbeat, funny even, but the execution is so precise and Dabernig’s cutting so angular and shocking that it feels right at home in Wavelengths. My favorite section of the film involves an elderly man and a put-upon bartender who wouldn’t be out of place in Satantango. As in the opening sequence, Dabernig reveals their relationship gradually and in splintered fragments, cutting from a series of medium one-shots to a long-range, wide-angle shot that provides something like an objective perspective on them both. A note to cinema studies teachers: this would be a great piece for a unit on editing.

  • 2009 SFIFF Diary 1

    2009 SFIFF Diary 1

    Adoration (Atom Egoyan)

    There’s certainly no mistaking an Atom Egoyan film — the non-linear narrative, the technology fetish, the intertwined obsessions with history, identity, and trauma, and all of those secrets and lies. Closest in spirit and form to Ararat, Adoration is another interesting jumble of ideas from Egoyan that, to my surprise, works more often than other critics had led me to expect. I especially like the scenes between Scott Speedman and Arsinee Khanjian, who are the only two actors in the film who consistently make Egoyan’s dialog sound like words an actual human being might speak. (In Egoyan’s defense, the performance of language and identity is a central concern — and plot point — of the film, so some of the awkwardly-heightened language is clearly by design. Egoyan alerts the attentive viewer to this fact by formal means, though I’m not sure if that defense justifies the unfortunate shifts in tone he creates.) Egoyan’s at his best when he manages to balance his wealth of ideas with drama, when his characters transcend the intellectual and psychological conceits they are intended to embody. That happens often enough in Adoration, particularly in the final act, to make it my favorite of his films of the last decade. (I’m still eager to see Citadel.) One final note: Mychael Danna’s original score is fantastic, but I’d prefer to hear it alone on a soundtrack album. I suspect I would have liked Adoration a good deal more if Egoyan had trimmed 75% of the music cues.

    Bluebeard (Breillat, 2009)

    Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat)

    God bless you, Catherine Breillat. When Bluebeard started last night around 9:40, San Francisco time, I’d already been awake for 19 hours. Who else under those circumstances could put me at the edge of my seat, giggling and gasping at the nerve of a film? A playful and stylized period piece in the (formal) vein of Rohmer’s Astrea and Celadon, Bluebeard is a wicked dismantling of a fairy tale that, although lacking Breillat’s trademark nudity and explicit sexual content, is no less obsessed with bodies. Mary-Catherine (Lola Creton), Bluebeard’s young bride, is one more Breillat heroine, tempted by, curious about, and fearful of both sexual desire and by sex itself — by the physical, biological realness of it. I can’t think of a better image to represent Breillat’s cinema en toto than a shot of the massive, shirtless Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas) being watched unnoticed by his waif, virgin wife. Brilliant film.

  • Films of the ’80s

    Films of the ’80s

    At TIFF 2007, I caught Les Bons Debarras (Francis Mankiewicz, 1980), which screened in the Canadian Open Vault program. Regularly included on short lists of the greatest Canadian films, it’s about a precocious adolescent girl and her single mother surviving in a small town in Quebec. Steve Gravestock has written about the film in Cinema Scope, and Girish mentioned it in his post on Quebecois Cinema.

    While watching Les Bons Debarras, I was struck by how familiar it felt. I was eight when the film was released — near enough to the age of Manon (Charlotte Laurier) that I was able immediately to recognize that particular era of childhood, even if her experience of it is so much different from my own. Much of the credit for the film goes to its cinematographer, Michel Brault, who is best remembered for being a father of cinema verite and for his collaborations with Jean Rouch. We often associate naturalistic styles of narrative filmmaking with the ’60s and ’70s, and it’s obviously experienced a great revival in the last decade-and-a-half, but in the ’80s a film like Les Bons Debarras was something of an anomaly. I remember thinking at the time that I wanted to find others like it. I was reminded of that again last week while browsing through this “Best Films of the 80s” discussion at The Auteurs.

    Thanks to the fine folks at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?, I was able to pull out the most critically acclaimed films of the decade and order them by overall rank (download pdf). Not too many surprises near the top. A lot of Scorsese, Kubrick, Lynch, and Spielberg. Among the films I’m eager to revisit or, in most cases, to see for the first time:

    • Once Upon a Time in America
    • Local Hero
    • The King of Comedy
    • The Dead
    • Love Streams
    • Reds
    • The Verdict
    • American Gigolo
    • Bad Timing

    Any other gems hidden among the wreckage of so many blockbusters? What are the other great, lost films of the ’80s?

  • 2007 TIFF Day 6

    2007 TIFF Day 6

    I don’t see much point in writing about Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light without mentioning the final scene, so consider this your warning: SPOILERS AHEAD. Both of Reygadas’s previous features, Japon and Battle in Heaven, use a subjective camera to achieve what I’ve developed the lazy habit of calling “Transcendence” — that is, they use formal means to represent cinematically the extra-worldly or extra-Rational or Metaphysical or whatever you want to call it. Silent Light is being praised as a significant departure for Reygadas — mostly, I suspect, because of its relative lack of transgression. But the bigger surprise to me is how staid, almost conventional, his camera has become. Silent Light is one of the most beautifully lensed films of the festival, and the opening and closing sequences are stunners, but Reygadas here dips less often into his impressive bag of aural and cinematographic tricks. Although I was actually a bit disappointed by this development (I like his tricks), that’s not a criticism. Rather, I see this as a transition work in which he is attempting to shift a heavier burden over to narrative and drama. And apparently he’s been revisiting the old masters for inspiration: Bresson, Bergman, and Tarkovsky are all over this film. And then there’s Dreyer, who Reygadas “covers” here by restaging the climax of Ordet. A remake of THE great moment of transcendence in all of film history?! The cajones of this guy. (See that? I used Spanish there.) Silent Light is a fascinating experiment, and it’s very likely a brilliant film, but I’m still processing. The climactic scene did not move me at all, and I’m genuinely curious to know why. From the opening moments of Battle in Heaven, the first of his films that I saw, I’ve trusted Reygadas completely, so I’m confident that Silent Light realizes his ambitions. I’m just not sure yet what, precisely, those ambitions are. Or, to put it even more bluntly, I don’t understand this film. I really don’t. And I can’t wait to see it again. One other throw away observation: With a few notable exceptions, the filmmakers to whom Reygadas is most indebted worked in the Academy ratio (4:3), and I can’t help but wonder what he would do with it. His ‘Scope compositions are gorgeous, of course, but they seemed to me too plastic at times here.

    Contre Toute Esperance was my first encounter with Quebecoise filmmaker Bernard Emond. (Any pointers for tracking down his earlier work would be much appreciated.) Emond told us after the screening that it is the second film of a planned trilogy about the three Christian virtues: faith, hope, and charity. “I am not a believer,” he said, “but I cherish my Catholic tradition.” Contre Toute Esperance is an angry, political film that poses the questions, “How does one remain hopeful in a world turned by amoral market forces? And what role, if any, can the Christian tradition play in generating hope?” Contre Toute Esperance centers on Rejeanne Poulin, a woman who is forced to support her young husband after he suffers a stroke, only to lose her job at the telephone company where she works as an operator. The film plays like a bit of old fashioned Naturalism, with good people suffering (and suffering) the whims of an indifferent universe. Except that Emond creates, through formal gestures, a kind of holy space for his characters to inhabit. I can only imagine how many gallons of blue paint were sacrificed in the production of this film — the walls are blue, passing trucks are blue, clothes are blue, and the seas of blue are punctuated only by occasional bursts of deep red and purple. I suspect that the key to the film’s design is a brief scene in which Rejeanne visits a church to pray. In a high-angle shot, we look down on her kneeling at a pew, a long blue carpet running up the center aisle beside her. The entire world of the film, I think, exists symbolically within that church, making it (the world) a place of potential sacrifice, ritual, and dignity.

    Another work by a young female director, Naissance des pieuvres is a fascinating coming-of-age story that revolves around a central metaphor so perfect I’m surprised it hasn’t been used before: synchronized swimming. We first meet the three central characters at a competition. Anne, overweight and brash, competes with the younger girls; Floriane, an early-developed beauty, captains the top team; and Marie, a gangly tomboy, watches intently from the bleachers, seduced by the beauty of it all. Much to her credit, first-time filmmaker Celine Sciamma takes advantage of the obvious symbolic resonances without stooping to sentiment. All team sports make ripe settings for teen films — the struggle to fit in while retaining one’s individuality and all that — but synchronized swimming amplifies the tropes. With their garish makeup and aggressive smiles, the girls are performing a kind of make-believe femininity akin to drag. And they’re doing it all in bathing suits, which expose, literally, the strange bodies that inevitably influence each girl’s sense of self. At the risk of sounding like a dirty old man, I’ll admit to a special fondness for coming-of-age films about girls, made by women directors. (I’d include Claire Denis’s Nenette et Boni, Lucretia Martel’s The Holy Girl, and Tamara Jenkins’s The Slums of Beverly Hills on my short list of favorites.) Adolescence was not a good time for me — I was “husky” (or so read the label on my corduroy pants) and had braces — but I was never so keanly aware of my body as are the girls in these films.

  • Strange Waters

    Strange Waters

    Bruce Cockburn’s “Strange Waters” has been something of a theme song for me this year:

    I’ve seen a high cairn kissed by holy wind
    Seen a mirror pool cut by golden fins
    Seen alleys where they hide the truth of cities
    The mad whose blessing you must accept without pity

    I’ve stood in airports guarded glass and chrome
    Walked rifled roads and landmined loam
    Seen a forest in flames right down to the road
    Burned in love till I’ve seen my heart explode

    You’ve been leading me
    Beside strange waters

    Across the concrete fields of man
    Sun ray like a camera pans
    Some will run and some will stand
    Everything is bullshit but the open hand

    You’ve been leading me
    Beside strange waters
    Streams of beautiful lights in the night
    But where is my pastureland in these dark valleys?
    If I loose my grip, will I take flight?

    You’ve been leading me
    Beside strange waters
    Streams of beautiful lights in the night
    But where is my pastureland in these dark valleys?
    If I loose my grip, will I take flight?

    I asked Bruce about “Strange Waters” yesterday, and his answer was a tense, beautiful sermon. In order to read the full interview, though, you’ll need a subscription to Beyond magazine, the sweetest slice of ads-free goodness you’ll ever taste. And I’m here to help. Same rules apply. The first ten people who post “I want to taste the goodness” in the comments section of this post get a free subscription on my dime. Be sure to use your real name and email address, because I’ll need to contact you with additional information.

  • Childstar (2004)

    Childstar (2004)

    Dir. by Don McKellar

    My first and only five-film day of the festival began early Sunday morning with Don McKellar’s latest, Childstar. McKellar stars as Rick Schiller, a cinema studies professor and experimental filmmaker who finds himself working as a chauffeur to Taylor Brandon Burns (Mark Rendall), an adolescent heartthrob whose latest film, The American Son, is shooting in Toronto. Schiller soon hooks up with Burns’ mother (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh), becomes Burns’ legal guardian, and guides the young actor through his inevitable and by-the-numbers coming of age.

    During the post-screening Q&A, McKellar told the story of the film’s inspiration. (Here’s another version of the same story, as reported in the Toronto Sun.)

    It was the Dreamworks party for American Beauty, and I met Haley Joel Osment at the bar. . . . I don’t know what he was drinking, but I’m sure it wasn’t scandalous. Anyway, I talked to him for quite awhile before I realized he was 12 or whatever. He was so mature, there were no adults around him, he was just talking. And I thought what a potent symbol he was of something — of my experience of Hollywood. He was an unnaturally precocious kid in a culture where kids act too old and adults act too young.

    Part family drama, part satire of Hollywood, Childstar allows McKellar plenty of room to poke fun at the film “industry,” with its gangster-like agents, manipulative and cost-conscious producers, and exploitive parents. And for the most part, it works. I laughed out loud several times and enjoyed the relationship between Schiller and Burns. McKellar has the perfect face for the role; he always looks vaguely exasperated by the waste and ego of celebrity, and his intelligence and wit make him an entertaining guide through it all.

    I decided to see Childstar mostly for the opportunity to hear McKellar introduce it — I’ve been a big fan since first seeing him in Atom Egoyan’s Exotica — and his introduction set up the best laugh of the morning. His microphone was positioned at the bottom right corner of the screen, and he began by saying that he had promised himself that he would never be “one of those directors who goes on and on about the film, sucking the life out of the room, but that he wanted to take a minute or two to explain why he felt that he must make this particular film.” Remember that if you get a chance to see Childstar. (McKellar held little hope for American distribution, by the way, but said that it will be shown widely in Canada, beginning in October.)

  • La Villa Strangiato

    La Villa Strangiato

    When I was eight years old I was hanging out in my friend Dave Bourquin’s bedroom when his brother, Robbie, barged in to play his new album on Dave’s record player. Robbie was much older (12) and much cooler than I was, and I wanted nothing more than to be just like Robbie.

    “Listen to this song,” he told us. “It’s the coolest.” Robbie was something of an authority on such things, and so I listened. Intently. Sitting stone upright on Dave’s bed. And Robbie was right. It was most definitely the coolest. This wicked keyboard sound introduced a simple, shuffling drumline. “A modern day warrior, mean, mean stride. Today’s Tom Sawyer, mean, mean pride.” And then more keyboards and drums and bass and guitars and noise, and then the song ended and Robbie picked up the stereo’s tone arm and dropped the needle on the outer edge of the record, and we listened to the same song again and again. All afternoon.

    So I went home, and, as I recall it, I told my Mom that the next time she went to the Severna Park mall she should stop by Sound Odyssey and pick me up a copy of Rush’s new album, Moving Pictures, because Rush was the coolest band ever and “Tom Sawyer” was the coolest song ever and because I was now into rock music. Seriously. And for some reason, she did. Sort of. Actually, she bought Fly by Night, which, in hindsight, was the more reasonable choice. I mean, if I had a precocious eight-year-old son who told me to buy him a Rush album, I’d probably get the one with the pretty owl on the cover, too. (Actually, I probably would have laughed and told him to get a job, but that’s why I’m not a parent.) Have you looked at the cover of Moving Pictures lately? To borrow from Slater’s description of the one dollar bill in Dazed and Confused, “There’s some freaky shit going on in there.”

    So Mom bought me Fly by Night, and, of course, I pouted because, well, because “Tom Sawyer” was nowhere to be found on Fly by Night and, I mean, who listens to Fly by Night anyway? Cool third graders don’t, that’s for sure. Cool third graders listen to Moving Pictures, and so — get this — I convinced her to go back to Sound Odyssey and return Fly by Night in exchange for Moving Pictures. Unbelievable. She’s a saint.

    Twenty-four years later I still haven’t a clue what “Tom Sawyer” is about — this despite the endless junior high discussions of how Neil Peart was the greatest lyricist in the history of rock (and the greatest drummer as well, obviously) and of how 2112, in particular, showed his debt to Ayn Rand. One of my friends — Kirby, I think — even claimed to have finished reading Atlas Shrugged out of devotion to Peart, but I could barely get through Anthem, and when I finally did get around to really reading Rand, I was old enough to know better, thank God.

    But I was eight and I owned my own copy of Moving Pictures, and I played the hell out of it. Side one, at least. I played the hell out of side one of Moving Pictures, which is just about a perfect album side, you’ve gotta admit: Tom Sawyer / Red Barchetta / YYZ / Limelight. Play any one of those songs in my presence, and it’s 1980 again, and I’m just discovering the gut-churning sensation of rock music again.

    And I say all of that to say this. Tomorrow morning I’ll be flying for the first time into the Toronto International Airport — also known as YYZ. And just seeing those letters, neatly capitalized, on my e-ticket sent me running to my CD collection. Moving Pictures is still a great album (even side two), but when I want to listen to Rush these days I invariably pull out Exit…Stage Left, their document of the Moving Pictures tour. And so the new Song of the Moment is the other instrumental from that great double-album — not “YYZ” but “La Villa Strangiato,” which doesn’t have a five-minute drum solo, but does have lots of cool synthesizers and some nice guitar work from Alex Lifeson. And no singing from Geddy. Which, as we all know, is a good thing.

    Depending on connectivity issues, I’ll try to post daily updates from the film festival. If I can’t, expect a massive post when I return. In the meantime, keep an eye on Film Journey.

    Thank you very kindly. Goodnight.

  • Calendar (1993)

    Calendar (1993)

    In Atom Egoyan’s remarkable film Calendar (1993), a photographer and his wife (played by Egoyan and Arsinee Khanjian) travel to Armenia to take pictures of ancient churches for a calendar project. Once there, they are led through the countryside — and through the country’s historical narratives — by Ashot Adamian, an Armenian man who tells stories, sings native songs, and, eventually, vies for Khanjian’s affection. It’s a love triangle, but one with interesting metaphoric weight. Egoyan, the intellectual Westerner far-removed from his Armenian roots, is juxtaposed against Adamian, and Khanjian stands somewhere in between, torn between two symbols of her own hyphenated identity.

    Khanjian is, in both a literal and metaphoric sense, the film’s translator, and the process of translation — with all of its inevitable frustrations and miscommunications — is the film’s main subject. Specifically, Egoyan is concerned with telling the stories of the Armenian diaspora, all the while knowing that culture, politics, technology, and human memory will constantly reshape and reinterpret those stories. Like Abbas Kiarostami’s Close Up, Calendar represents this dilemma even in its form, blurring the lines between documentary and narrative film, fact and fiction.

    Made for German television and with a budget of only $100,000, Calendar is one of the most compelling and stylistically inventive films I’ve seen this year. Typical of Egoyan’s work, it is structured around twelve, non-linear episodes (one for each month of the calendar) and alternates between film and video footage. At times, the characters address the camera directly, their improvised dialogue lending the film some air of verisimilitude; at others, it all has a very staged feel, particularly when we watch Egoyan, now back at home in Canada, going through the rehearsed motions of dating. Calendar is quite a display of filmmaking — probably Egoyan’s best, this side of The Sweet Hereafter.

  • Grace, Too

    Grace, Too

    I have been following The Tragically Hip since becoming enamored of Atom Egoyan’s film, The Sweet Hereafter. His use of the Hip’s “Courage” is pitch perfect. Although I’ve never had a chance to see them in concert — the Canadian band seldom makes trips to the American South (and I don’t really blame them) — this version of “Grace, Too” just kills me. It has the ecstatic energy of the best live performances, but it’s something about that bass line and the way that Gord Downie unleashes the line, “Armed with will and determination / And grace, too,” that rips me up.

  • The Sweet Hereafter (1997)

    The Sweet Hereafter (1997)

    Dir. by Atom Egoyan

    Images: Beautiful compositions in 2.35:1. Notable images: close-up of infant Chloe’s face beside open knife blade; Nicole’s face with rotating Ferris wheel over her shoulder; Mitchell, wife, and child asleep together on mattress. Egoyan constantly returns to wide-angle shots of the sky and the Canadian landscape as a means of representing man’s insignificance in relation to nature. The images of snow-covered, tree-lined mountains, gray skies, and frozen lakes contrast beautifully with the warm interiors of the small town and the close-ups of its inhabitants. The flesh tones reflect their environment: soft and natural when inside, slightly blue when out.

    • • •

    There’s a scene in The Sweet Hereafter in which Mitchell Stephens — a big city ambulance chaser played to perfection by Ian Holm — sits in a cramped airplane seat, telling the passenger beside him a story from when his daughter, Chloe, was a child. The shot is framed with Holm’s face in a tight close-up, his companion to our left, her eyes fixed intently on his. During the entire, nearly six-minute monologue (there is only one brief interruption — a cutaway to a flashback), neither actor turns his or her head more than an inch. Holm’s eyes never look away from the back of the seat in front of him. And yet, it’s one of the most riveting moments from any film I’ve seen.

    And it exemplifies why Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter might be the best film of the 90’s. Stephens’ story is a step into an idyllic past. “It was a wonderful time in our lives,” he says. “We still thought we had a future together, the three of us.” Like Egoyan’s film, the lawyer’s story is an attempt to create a narrative from tragedy as a means of controlling and (hopefully) escaping its grief. The result is a film that is captivating despite — or perhaps because of — its preoccupation with sadness. Its very beauty is catharsis.

    Mitchell Stephens arrives in Sam Dent shortly after a school bus accident takes the lives of many of the small town’s children. Stephens’ goal is to unite several of the families in a class action lawsuit against the “deep pockets” who are to blame. For the parents, placing blame becomes a release, a means of turning their attention momentarily from loss and grief and reuniting the community. Many of Sam Dent’s residents are recognizable from Egoyan’s earlier films. Maury Chaykin and Alberta Watson play Wendell and Risa Walker, the proprietors of the town’s only motel and plaintiffs in the law suit. Bruce Greenwood (the lead in Exotica) is Billy Ansel, a widower who loses both of his children in the accident, but who refuses Stephens’ offer. Arsinee Khanjian (Egoyan’s wife) and Earl Pastko are Wanda and Hartley Otto, another couple grieving for their only child. And Gabrielle Rose plays Delores Driscoll, the bus driver who loses so many of “her children” in the accident.

    The acting is dynamic throughout. Of particular note is the performance of Sarah Polley (Exotica), who plays Nicole Burnell, a survivor paralyzed in the accident. The film demands that she strike a balance between the innocence of childhood and the pain of tragic experience (an important side plot reveals that the bus accident is not the only traumatic experience Nicole is forced to overcome). Polley’s approach is wonderfully subtle and understated. She has said of her performance: “The only way I feel I’m not faking it is to do nothing at all. I really don’t consider myself an actor, or a performer, but maybe as someone able to fill whatever void there is among actors who do too much.” As in Holm’s monologue, Polley is filmed almost entirely in close-ups and medium shots, directing our attention to her remarkably expressive eyes.