Long Pauses

Tag: TIFF

  • Three for Three

    Three for Three

    Perhaps it’s simply the inevitable result of paring down my schedule from 44 films in 2005 (only 35 of which I actually saw) to “only” 33 this year, but my sense while researching and planning over the past weeks was that TIFF’s lineup is stronger, top to bottom, this time around than in previous years. I’m a bid disappointed that neither of my favorite filmmakers, Claire Denis and Hou Hsiao-hsien, has a new film here, but, otherwise, I feel good about all of my picks. None was chosen simply to fill a hole or out of convenience. None feels like a risk. And so far, three films in, my excitement over the quality of this year’s lineup has been confirmed.

    After spending two weeks meticulously filling in my TIFF spreadsheet, I was surprised to find Climates, the latest film by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, at the top of the heap — surprised, mostly, because I’d never seen any of his previous work. I rented Distant (2002) last week and was completely captivated by it. Even before reaching the scenes that make explicit reference to Tarkovsky, I was smiling at the more subtle allusions — the clanging wind chimes, the mothers and sons, the struggling, alienated artists. How could I not love a film that was so obviously an homage to my all-time favorite, Mirror?

    Climates didn’t move me quite so powerfully, but it’s a very good film nonetheless. Ceylan and his wife (Ebru Ceylan) play the starring roles, a couple in the final throes of a failing relationship. He is older, a university professor struggling to finish his thesis; she is an art designer working to establish a career in television and film production. The film opens as they’re breaking up and then follows him over the next few months, as he attempts to begin the next — and hopefully more satisfying — phase of his life.

    Climates includes three or four key scenes — a daydream at the beach, a night in a hotel, and a brilliant sex scene — that will certainly be among my favorite moments of any film I see this year. Often employing incredibly shallow focus, Ceylan taps into that transcendent Tarkovsky “magic” by shattering his images into abstraction and, in doing so, offering shards of subjective emotion. At times, I was reminded of Denis’s sex scenes in Friday Night, but I haven’t decided yet if she and Ceylan are working toward similar ends. After I get home, I hope to give more thought and time to Climates, which, like Atom Egoyan’s Calendar, also uses photography and ancient religious architecture to raise questions about memory and national identity. (That last phrase is such an art film cliche [or maybe an art film criticism cliche], but I’m confident it’s true in this case, and it will make this film fun to write about and discuss.)

    12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu) is set on December 22, 2005, the sixteenth anniversary of the overthrow of communism in Romania. A small town news anchor celebrates the event by inviting two men to join him for a live, on-camera discussion of their experiences in 1989, and he frames the chat with this central question: “Was there or was there not an actual revolution in their home town?” (That question, actually, is a more accurate and literal translation of the film’s original title.) Did anyone participate, locally, in the dangerous rebellion against authority, or did they simply join the national celebration after the revolution was complete?

    12:08 East of Bucharest is neatly divided into two acts. In the first we meet the three main characters: a drunken school teacher, a retired principal, and the television “journalist.” The film works so well largely due to the lead performances, each of which is sympathetic and often hilarious. Porumboiu, an efficient storyteller, gives us snapshots of each man’s life and of life, in general, in 21st century Romania, begging the larger, more important question: what is the legacy of the revolution, and who, if anyone, benefited from it the most? When the three characters finally come together for the shooting of the TV program, the film shifts gears, and the final 45 minutes or so play more or less in real time. Their discussion, including the comments of call-in viewers, is pointed and at times even touching. It is also really, really funny. 12:08 East of Bucharest lends itself to over-simplified discussions of postmodernism and history, establishing “facts” before quickly dismantling them again as distorted and subjective memories. For every history of the revolution there is a counter-history, but Porumboiu, I think, finally comes down on the side of “the people,” in a liberal, humanist, and barely-political-at-all sense. For that reason — along with the laugh-out-loud comedy — I can see this becoming one of those films that, if properly marketed, is the foreign language film talked up by Americans who see only one or two foreign language films a year.

    Judging by the snores, giggles, and sighs of frustration I heard around me in the theatre, I’m likely among the minority when I call Hamaca Paraguaya (Paz Encina) a stunning piece of filmmaking. It is the prototype of the “boring art film.” By my count, in fact, there are only fourteen camera setups in the entire movie, and they’re employed with an almost geometric rigor. By the fourth sequence in the film, its rhythms become obvious — they’re observable and dissectable. I’m tempted even to plot out the film’s form on graph paper. But the strict construction is only so interesting and effective because Encina maintains a constant tension between it and what really drives her film: the mysterious grief and love shared by the main characters, an aging couple who await the return of their son from war.

    I use the word “mysterious” not because the couple’s love and grief are unmotivated. The plot, spare as it is, explains their son’s reasoning for going to war and it informs us that the man and woman have been together for decades. Rather, the “mystery” of the film is the mystery that haunts and shapes so much of human experience. It’s our strange tendency to deflect grief by talking about anything — anything — other than that which grieves us. It’s the rituals of intimacy. It’s the pendulum swings between hope and despair. I have a lot more to say about this film, and look forward to doing so when I have more time.

  • TIFF 2006

    It’s official. Late last night I received a confirmation email from the Toronto International Film Festival box office, notifying me that I would be seeing all thirty of my first choice films. Given that so many of my friends are still awaiting similar confirmation, mine appears to have been one of the first orders processed — just lucky in the lottery draw this year, I guess.

    After Girish’s avant-garde blog-a-thon last month, I decided to make a-g films a much higher priority at TIFF this year, so nearly half of my picks are from the Wavelengths and Visions programmes. This means that I won’t be seeing many of the most talked about films — not until they arrive in Knoxville, at least. No Pan’s Labyrinth or Shortbus or Rescue Dawn or Lights in the Dusk or The Host. Or, more in the mainstream, no Babel or The Fountain or Breaking and Entering or All the King’s Men. I’m eager to see all of those films, but I’m willing to wait.

    Instead, I’m going to use TIFF to bury myself under experimental and formally-inventive films. One nice side effect of this plan is that I’ve managed to avoid scheduling a single film in the massive and incredibly uncomfortable Ryerson Theatre. I’ve heard reports, though, that the Al Green theatre, where I will be seeing a lot of films and which is a new addition to the fest this year, is just as hard on the legs and back.

    Here’s my complete schedule. Titles noted by asterisks (**) are films that I might see, depending upon word-of-mouth, ticket availability, and, as the festival progresses, my physical and psychological stamina. Like last year, I plan to post daily capsule reviews of everything I see, with the goal of writing longer responses to select films after I return home.

    September 7

    September 8

    September 9

    September 10

    September 11

    September 12

    September 13

    September 14

    September 15

    September 16

  • Impossibly, Even Scarily, Geeky *

    Five weeks from today I’ll be in Toronto, enjoying day two of the film festival. A little more than a week before then, I will have dropped my ticket requests in the nearest FedEx box. Which means there’re only 27 days left to choose which films to see. Time’s a wastin’, people! Let’s get a move on. The folks who have festival’d with me in the past probably know what’s coming next: It’s time for the spreadsheet.

    The idea of creating an Excel file to collect information about each of the 300+ films occurred to me two years ago, when a friend (and TIFF veteran) told me he chose his films based on very particular and personalized criteria. The idea appealed instantly to my more obsessive tendencies. I’m a total dork for research and analysis, not to mention cataloging and organization. After methodically determining and weighting (by points) my own criteria, I dropped them and every film title into a spreadsheet, set up a simple formula, and began digging for information.

    My criteria:

    • Availability (0 to 5) — I go to TIFF to see all of the films that will never make it to Knoxville or, in many cases, that will never make it even to home video.
    • Reviewability (0 to 5) — Are Long Pauses readers interested in the film?
    • Director (0 to 10) — I typically give 5 or 6 points to every first-time filmmaker. Discovering new directors is half the fun of a festival this diverse.
    • Actor (0 to 5) — a.k.a. “The Cate Blanchett Criterion”
    • Theme (0 to 5) — Films about violence usually get a 0; I’m a sucker for coming-of-age films and marriage dramas.
    • Buzz (0 to 15) — Word of mouth and reviews. Bonus points to films that played at Cannes and Venice.
    • Nation (0 to 10) — I have a weakness for films from France, China, Eastern Europe, and South America, and am less likely to see films from England, America, and South Korea. Also, I give bonus points to films from national cinemas that are completely unfamiliar to me. Again, it’s the thrill of discovery.
    • Length (-5 to 5) — When you’re seeing three to five films a day, nothing is more painful that a 3-hour film.
    • Etc. (0 to 10) — Any number of miscellaneous factors. Last year I gave a few bonus points to documentaries, this time it’s going to be experimental films.

    After doing this twice now, I’ve found that the top ten point-getters are films I would have seen anyway. (In 2005, the top four were L’Enfant, The Wayward Cloud, Cache, and Three Times, for example.) Where it becomes interesting is slots thirty through fifty. That’s where I found Angel, Marock, Something Like Happiness, and Little Fish, all really pleasant surprises.

    For anyone who’s interested, here’s the spreadsheet. It includes all of the films that have been announced so far except for the Canadian series films. I usually skim over those when the catalog arrives. Feel free to use, modify, and mock it however you see fit.

    * The title of this post was borrowed from an email exchange with Girish in which we were discussing my spreadsheet and the child-like, pre-TIFF anticipation we both begin to feel every August.

  • Le Temps qui reste (2005)

    Le Temps qui reste (2005)

    Dir. by Francois Ozon

    I hadn’t planned to write about Le Temps qui reste. As has been the case with the few other Ozon films I’ve seen, it feels slight and undernourished, like a short story pushed to novella length. Melvin Poupaud plays Romain, a thirty-ish fashion photographer who, in the opening moments of the film, is diagnosed with cancer. Rather than suffer the side-effects of aggressive treatment, he decides, instead, to accept the three-month life expectancy given him. He decides, also, to keep his condition a secret — the first of several head-scratching choices that alienate him from everyone in his life. At a family dinner, he humiliates his sister with a barrage of savage insults. At home, he matter-of-factly breaks off his relationship with his boyfriend. By the time the film reaches its inevitable conclusion, Romain is quite literally alone. (Ozon’s final image is frustrating. I still haven’t decided how I feel about it.)

    I hadn’t planned to write about Le Temps qui reste, but then, while typing up notes this morning, I tripped over this line from E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel: “My sister and I can never inflict total damage — that is the saving grace. The right to offend irreparably is a blood right.” In Doctorow’s novel, Daniel and Susan Lewin are the son and daughter of characters modeled closely on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the young Jewish couple executed in the summer of 1953 for giving the secret of the A-bomb to the Soviets. Daniel’s line, I think, has a doubled meaning. As the child of traitors, he has inherited a particular ability to offend, to enlarge and extend personal grievances into a wider sphere of influence. But he and Susan have also inherited a particularly tragic history and, with it, the right to offend. “He’s such a bastard,” acquaintances must surely think, “but give him a break. Can you imagine all he’s been through?”

    In Le Temps qui reste, Romain tells only one member of the family about his illness, his grandmother, played by Jeanne Moreau. Their brief scene together is the most interesting in the film. He’s drawn to her by their shared relation to the world — both will be leaving it soon — and she is likewise alone, alienated from family and community. During a late-night conversation, she confesses to having had a string of lovers soon after her husband’s death. She is unapologetic, though, and refuses to judge the friends, family members, and neighbors who so callously judged her at the time. “They didn’t understand,” she tells Romain, his head resting on her shoulder. “I would have died otherwise. It was survival instinct.”

    When Ozon introduced Le Temps qui reste at TIFF, he called it a “personal and secret” film, and, while I have no interest in psychoanalyzing Ozon or presuming to extrapolate conclusions about his life, I do suspect the film’s “secret” is closely related to Romain’s and his grandmother’s “survival instincts.” For Doctorow, Daniel’s “right to offend” has political connotations. The Book of Daniel is, in Doctorow’s words, “the story of the American left in general and the generally sacrificial role it has played in our history.” Daniel is a walking, breathing reminder of an iconic and tragic past. He has, in a sense, earned his right to disrupt our complacent social mores.

    Ozon’s film is a smaller, more personal (and, ultimately, less successful) work of art, but it’s no less transgressive. I also like its ambitions. When Romain first learns of his prognosis, he immediately asks, “Is it AIDS?” I’m not gay, and I worry that I’m wading into dangerous critical waters here, but Le Temps qui reste works most effectively as a study of, for lack of a better word, gay psychology. Romain dies of cancer, but he’s haunted by the same specter of mortality that floats through the work of so many queer artists of the AIDS era. It’s important that we hear the word, I think. And it’s also important that we’re reminded of the difference between heterosexual and homosexual mortality — that is, the procreative aspect of sex, the ability to share DNA with one’s lover in the formation of a new life that will carry on beyond one’s own. A side plot involving Romain’s decision to impregnate a woman whose husband is impotent, though underdeveloped in the film, does touch upon some quality of gay psychology (again, excuse the poor choice of words) that I seldom see addressed in films. It’s another of Ozon’s “secrets,” I suspect. Another survival instinct.

  • Un Couple parfait (2005)

    Un Couple parfait (2005)

    Dir. by Nobuhiro Suwa

    Look closely at the image above. It’s Un Couple parfait in miniature — a story told in body language. The husband (Bruno Todeschini) is an arm’s length from the table, his shoulders turned perpendicular to his wife. His cup sits untouched, reminding us, even moreso than the expression on his face, just how unwelcome these daily rituals of marriage have become. The wife (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) has a Mona Lisa smile. At first glance, she appears perfectly content — a woman deeply in love and endlessly curious, perhaps? But look at her eyes. They’re staring past her husband, lost in thought, wandering. There’s something absolutely beautiful to me about the way her right arm rests against her leg. And the way her body leans forward, gesturing toward him despite the growing distance.

    The image is also a capsule of Suwa’s cinematographic style. There are maybe thirty-five shots in the entire film, all but a few from the fixed, static perspective of a waist-high camera positioned some distance from the characters. Suwa has said that, while working as an assistant director, he came to distrust the artificiality of traditional blocking. He chooses, instead, to allow room for his actors to move freely, to breathe and embody emotions more complex than those expressed in their dialogue. Language is slippery in Un Couple parfait. Or, not slippery, but irrelevant, maybe. Suwa isn’t at all interested in offering some metacommentary on the entanglements of postmodern discourse. Rather, his style — allowing actors to improvise lines while the camera is running, for example, or admitting, even, that he often did not understand exactly what his French actors were saying — is more humanist and psychological. Like an analyst, he observes quietly and respectfully the unspoken, looking for clues in behavior and movement, ripples from the subconscious.

    Notice also the door that separates the characters from the camera. When asked why he so often underlights his actors, losing their faces in shadow, he said, “There are two ways to watch. One is to open your eyes and look closely; the other is to close your eyes and imagine.” Unlike so many filmmakers, Suwa clearly values the latter as much as the former, and his film is, on some level at least, a pedagogical instrument. At more than one point in Un Couple parfait, the husband and wife sit in adjoining hotel rooms. After one or the other shuts the door between them, Suwa lets his camera run, trapping our vision for a time. These, he claims, are his favorite moments in the film, for as we sit suspended, staring at the closed door, we’re also allowed room to move, to empathize or judge or imagine freely.

    What you can’t see in the image are all of the subtle touches that make Un Couple parfait such a satisfying film. The look of wonder on Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s face as she wanders through a museum. The brief interruption of “reality” when an actor sneezes, another says “God bless you,” and they continue on with the scene. The occasional hand-held close-ups that jar you back into close identification with the characters, preventing the film from becoming a formal, intellectual exercise. The late-night conversation between Bruno Todeschini and an old man he meets in a cafe. Or the final scene, which rediscovers a cinematic cliche by taking the “irrelevance of language” to its logical extreme. Un Couple parfait is a kind of collision between the visions of Ingmar Bergman and Hou Hsiao-hsien: brutally incisive but always fascinated and tender.

  • And Then There Were None

    Home again. Back in the suburbs. Back in the southern heat and humidity. And just a wee bit depressed about it. A friend’s line last year was, “Thank God there are no more movies. I wish there were more movies.” That about sums it up, I’d say. A last batch of first impressions . . .

    Un Couple parfait

    Dir. by Nobuhiro Suwa

    Suwa offered my favorite line of the festival. When asked why he so often underlit his actors’ faces, he replied, “There are two ways to watch. One is to open your eyes and look closely, the other is to close your eyes and imagine. I want audiences to do both.” To be honest, I only scheduled this film because I’ve developed a bit of an infatuation for Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi. (She also has a small role in the new Ozon film.) Un Couple parfait ended up being one of my favorites of the festival, though — a small relationship film shot in long takes, often from a fixed, waist-high position. I asked Suwa what attracted him about that particular shot, and he said that working as an assistant director taught him to hate traditional blocking. He wants, instead, to allow his actors room to move, to embody emotions more complex than those expressed by the dialogue. He admitted, even, to not understanding the actual words being spoken at times (he’s Japanese; the actors are all French). Their emotions were real enough, he said; the words were largely irrelevant. Another great festival find that I hope to write about at length at another time.

    U.S. Go Home

    Dir. by Claire Denis

    The two films I scheduled for Friday afternoon, 51 Birch Street and Bed Stories, were both late additions, neither of which particularly excited me. So I decided to skip them both and spend a few hours, instead, at the Toronto Film Reference Library, where I was able to see (on un-subtitle video) Claire Denis’s 1994 TV film, U.S. Go Home. Starring Alice Houri and Gregoire Colin, again playing sister and brother, it feels a bit like a prequel to Nenette et Boni. I’d read on a number of occasions that Denis’s obsession with Eric Burdon and the Animals was deep, deep, and it’s on full display here. U.S. Go Home will never be released on any home video format because rights to the music alone would surely cost in the millions. Along with the Animals, we hear a whole bunch of Otis Redding and other ’60s soul. The new Song of the Moment, The Animals’ “Hey Gyp,” plays in its entirety in a dance scene that rivals Denis Lavant’s at the end of Beau Travail. If it hasn’t become obvious over the past few months, Claire Denis is now, hands-down, my favorite active filmmaker. U.S. Go Home is another perfect little film.

    The Death of Mister Lazarescu

    Dir. by Cristi Puiu

    Thirty minutes in, I wasn’t sure if I would make it. I was exhausted from the week, and the idea of spending two more hours watching a character die in a Romanian hospital was almost too much to bear. But then a remarkable thing happened. At some point I slipped into the film’s rhythms, forgot that I was watching actors, and became completely engrossed in one of the most technically-impressive and beautifully humanist films I’ve ever seen. Shot entirely in hand-held (that brand of photography we’ve been trained to associate with verite), Puiu’s film exposes class divides, critiques modern health care systems, humanizes patients and medical professionals (for good and bad), and makes allusions to Dante, the Bible, and mythology. And it manages to do so in the service of a brilliant and deceptively complex narrative. Really an extraordinary film. Not to be missed.

    The Wayward Cloud

    Dir. by Tsai Ming-liang

    Oh my. Give me some time for this one. I love all of Tsai’s film, this one included. In some ways, The Wayward Cloud is his richest and most extravagantly emotional film yet. But I’m not sure what to do with that last 20 minutes. Um, wow. My notes are filled with questions. I haven’t come up with any satisfying answers yet.

    Angel

    Dir. Jim McKay

    I’ve come away from TIFF this year with a long “to see” list. To the list of directors I want to explore — Carlos Reygadas, Jean Paul Civeyrac, Ning Ying, Bohdan Slama, and Nobuhiro Suwa — I’ve also added Jim McKay, who impressed me as much by his Q&A as by his new film. I should say, first of all, that Angel is not a perfect film. J. Robert and I agreed that the ending is amibguous in the least satisfying way. But it’s ambitious, and I like McKay’s particular ambitions. When he was asked about the film’s lack of a score, he confirmed what I had suspected during the screening, telling us that he’s been most inspired by recent films from France and Iran (and, I would guess, Belgium, Austria, and Taiwan). Angel is as close as we’ll likely come to getting an American Dardennes film. First-time actor Jonan Everett plays Angel, a good kid from Brooklyn who’s been kicked out of him home; Rachel Griffiths is the social worker who takes him in. The film is a quiet character study of both, shot mostly in close-ups. Another really nice surprise.

    L’Enfant

    Dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

    I’ll say it. I was disappointed by L’Enfant. But part of my disappointment stems from the fact that L’Enfant happens to be the film the Dardennes made after The Son. I think I expected them to improve on what I feel is a perfect film. An unreasonable expectation, I’ll admit. L’Enfant will still be among the very best films I see all year, though, and I’m looking forward to discussing it with others. There’s a lot to wrestle with here.

    Backstage

    Emmanuelle Bercot

    I should have stayed in the hotel or gone out for a beer. But the pull was too strong. One last film. One last chance to watch that damn anti-piracy short. Emmanuelle Seigner plays an emotionally disturbed pop singer; Isild Le Besco plays an emotionally disturbed fan who forces her way into her idol’s life; both look really hot. And then there are some scenes with music and backstage drama. Honestly, my favorite parts of the film are two montages of Paris at night. Backstage was shot by Agnes Godard and looks typically amazing. There’s not much else to recommend the film, though.

    And so that’s it. I hope to write about a few of the films at length, but I’m not sure when that’ll happen.

  • Movies, They’re Everywhere, Man. EVERYWHERE!

    Last Thursday, Girish introduced me to a friend of his, a Toronto native who had just returned from Montreal, where he had seen 54 films at that festival. He had another 45 tickets in hand for TIFF. I don’t get it. I just left my 31st film (I think), and I’m exhausted. Completely. Like I felt the week I took my doctoral comprehensive exams.

    I’ve realized that part of the reason I’m so tired is that I’m just not built to process films — or any information, really — in this manner. I’m not shy, but I’m deeply introverted, and so, as much as I’ve enjoyed sharing the festival experience with a group of friends, the social element — the scheduling and the meals and the intense discussions between films — is taking its toll. I’m enjoying this moment right now. Alone in my room, drinking hotel coffee, staring out the window, taking a long pause. Nice.

    I’ve also realized that I’m the last person who should be posting first impressions live from a fest. It’ll take a few weeks’ time and several hours at the computer before I discover what it is that I particularly like and dislike about the films I’ve seen. I’m finding myself increasingly tongue-tied when asked to justify my fondness for some of the films I’ve enjoyed. They worked for me. I enjoyed experiencing the world from each director’s particular perspective. Why? I have no idea. Give me time. I’ll get back to you.

    But, in the interest of this on-going experiment, here are a few more quick thoughts . . .

    Vers Le Sud

    Dir. by Laurent Cantet

    I’ve seen only Cantet’s previous film, Time Out, and I like it quite a lot. I appreciate his ability to make money real in that film. It’s not just another middle-aged white man has a crisis story; instead, like Bresson’s L’Argent, it shows money changing hands and determining lives. That was my favorite part of Vers Le Sud, as well. The story of wealthy western women who vacation in Haiti in order to sleep with young black men, the film is very much about “exchanges” — of money, power, love, domination. I appreciate the ways in which Cantet explores the pathology of the relationships, acknowledging both the benefits and the degredations inherent in them.

    Where the Truth Lies

    Dir. by Atom Egoyan

    Let’s see . . . I liked the music, so that’s something. And I enjoyed seeing Egoyan in person. (Much shorter than I expected.) Where the Truth Lies is a fairly unexceptional thriller, and, despite all of the controversy, it’s not even particularly erotic. So, disappointing on all counts. The most interesting part of the afternoon was hearing Egoyan recount his fights last week with the MPAA.

    Cache

    Dir. by Michael Haneke

    Please don’t expect me to draw any conclusions about this one yet. It might be the best film I see at TIFF, but I’m not sure why. It works perfectly well as a thriller — who knew a shot of a man laying down for a nap could be more exciting than a car chase? — but Haneke has also crafted a complex study of Europe’s post-colonial history and bourgeois guilt. Someday I hope to be able to justify that last sentence with a full-length response. Really remarkable film.

    Tristram Shandy

    Dir. by Michael Winterbottom

    Ten years from now, when asked to name my all-time favorite film comedies, Tristram Shandy will no doubt be near the top of the list. Like, maybe once a decade, a film this smart, this well-made, and (lord be praised) this funny comes along.

    The Wild, Wild Rose

    Dir. by Tian-lin Wang

    Tsai Ming-liang introduced this Grace Chang musical from the early-1960s, then hung around afterwards for a half-hour or so to talk about his film-going experiences as a child in Malaysia and the influence of the Cathay films on his own work. (Five of Chang’s songs can be heard in Tsai’s The Hole, and another is used in his latest, The Wayward Cloud). Chang is the “Wild Rose” of the title, a nighclub singer with a checkered past who seduces a young, naive pianist and drives him to alcoholism and crime. Quite a synapsis, eh? Part musical, part thriller, part comedy, part noir. I’m eager to track down other films of the era.

    The highlight of the screening, though, was listening to Tsai recount the history of the Cathay studios. Someone in the audience asked why he and other Chinese filmmakers (like Hou) seem to be obsessed with the late-1950s and early-1960s, and Tsai gave two reasons. First, because it was a golden era for film buffs. Tickets were cheap and, without VHS or DVDs, film-watching was a communal experience. Also (and more interestingly, I think), Tsai admitted that he is nostalgic for the genuine and oversized emotions on display in those films. “The music,” he said, “is the most pure form of those emotions.” The musical interludes in The Hole, I assume, are to serve the same purpose — offering a kind of psychic counter-point to the absurd human alienation that marks so much of the film’s “real” world. I see The Wayward Cloud first thing tomorrow morning.

    Why We Fight

    Dir. by Eugene Jarecki

    Why We Fight opens with a snippet from Eisenhower’s farewell address, the speech in which he coined the term “military-industrial complex.” That choice gave me great hope that this film would offer a rich historical analysis of what Daniel Bell called America’s “permanent war economy,” a term that preceded Ike’s by more than a decade. Instead, director Eugene Jarecki constructs an argument only slightly more nuanced than Michael Moore’s in Fahrenheit 9/11, moving much too quickly, I think, from the Cold War to what is clearly his main target, Iraq. I’ll admit that I’m mostly faulting Why We Fight for not being the film I wanted to see, but I’m becoming increasingly frustrated with Left-leaning critiques of America that don’t do the messy work of wrestling with multinational capital. Jarecki missed several opportunities to discuss the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, and America’s “open door” economic policies, which, in my opinion, contributed a great deal more to “why we fight” than Haliburton. Also, I’m getting tired of filmmaker’s who cut in shots of, say, “regular Americans” sitting in small town diners, and do so with an air of condescension. I have other strong opinions about this film. None are particularly favorable.

    Le Temps qui reste

    Dir. by Fancois Ozon

    While discussing Ozon’s latest with Girish afterwards, I realized that the film — which isn’t particularly great — did touch me in unexpected and deeply personal ways. When he introduced it, Ozon called Le Temps qui reste a “secret” film, and I think I know what he means, though I’m sure I won’t be able to explain it. It’s a film about “survival instincts,” I think — words used by Jeanne Moreau to describe the decisions she made after her husband died. And did I mention that Moreau walked within inches of Girish and me? Jeanne Moreau! Inches! That is so much cooler than spotting Cameron Diaz or Charlize Theron. The woman who walked through the rain wearing that black dress in La Notte walked right past us. sigh.

  • Losing Touch with Reality

    This is such a very strange way to live. Last night, while running from the Paramount to Jackman Hall, I actually felt a bit drunk, outside of myself. I’d come out of Capote, my fourth film of the day, and was surprised to find it dark outside. The sun had set, and I couldn’t recall having seen it that day. My back is starting to hurt, and, to be frank, so is my ass.

    I haven’t decided if the quality of films is improving or if I’m simply developing calluses to sentimentality and failed ambitions, but I’ve seen several good films (though few great ones) since my last update — and not a dud in the lot. A few more first impressions . . .

    I Am

    Dir. by Dorota Kedzierzawska

    I added I Am to my schedule because it was selected for NYFF and because the still image in the TIFF program is so stunning. It’s of a young girl, her head resting on a wooden table lit by candlelight. She’s staring at the camera, and another hand reaches from beyond the frame to stroke her cheek. It reminded me of the farmhouse scenes in Tarkovsky’s Mirror, and, as it turned out, so did many other images from the film. It’s just beautiful to look at. Amazing, really. The sepia-toned palette seems to have been chosen to match the freckles on the cheeks of the young boy at the center of the film. But the film lacks the mystery and transcendence of Tarkovsky (an unfair comparison, I realize). I Am is a “child in peril” story, and I’m not sure what more to say about it.

    Perpetual Motion

    Dir. by Ying Ning

    I have a real weakness for this type of film. A successful woman learns her husband is having an affair, so she invites to her home her three best friends. They gather to celebrate the spring holiday, but the host’s real goal is to discover which woman has betrayed her. As in a Bergman chamber drama or a Eugene O’Neill play, the characters in Perpetual Motion move gradually from light-hearted small talk to brutally frank discussions of their loss and pain. During her Q&A, director Ning Yang told us she is frustrated by depictions of women in Chinese cinema, claiming that one symptom of liberal markets is the commodification of youth and beauty. The result, she said, is that young women in Chinese films become copies of copies. With Perpetual Motion, she’s trying to counter that trend by focusing on menopausal women (her word), and she’s made a hell of a film in the process. I have several pages of notes on this film, too, and look forward to writing it up when I get home. Great film. I like it more with each day.

    Something Like Happiness

    Dir. by Bohdan Sláma

    My new favorite shot of the festival: Camera cranes up over the horizon of a field we’ve seen earlier in the film, pans to the left to reveal (and reintroduce) a major character, follows her down a path, then waits behind her as a bulldozer knocks down a brick wall a few feet away. I’d have to give away too many plot points to explain why the shot is so powerful, but it’s one good example of director Bohdan Slama’s creativity and economy of shotmaking. Something Like Happiness is another great festival find. Three fantastic performances (especially from Pavel Liska) and a really well-told story, from beginning to end. Too few films have had great final scenes this week; Something Like Happiness is the exception.

    Mary

    Dir. by Abel Ferrara

    All of my friends are seeing Mary later in the week, so I’ll hold off posting too many comments until we’ve all discussed it, but for now I feel confident in calling it an interesting mess. Some parts work, others don’t — most of them don’t, actually. But I could maybe be convinced otherwise.

    Little Fish

    Dir. by Rowan Woods

    I’ll admit it, I scheduled Little Fish in hopes of seeing Cate Blanchett. No luck. But the good news is that the film works. Blanchett and Hugo Weaving give the finest English-language performances I’ve seen all week — Weaving, especially. It’s a meaty role, for sure, but he knocks it out of the park. (Lord help me, I’m sounding like a celebrity reporter.) My family has been touched in really horrible ways by drug addiction, and Little Fish is one of the few films I’ve seen that shows adults (rather than teens and thugs) struggling to overcome the particular banality of its evil. Unfortunately, the script falls apart in the final act, but the film is worth seeing for the quieter scenes.

    Capote

    Dir. by Bennett Miller

    I have way too many personal connections to this story to write objectively about the film. Joanna is from Monroeville, the small town in south Alabama where Truman Capote met Harper Lee, and Miss Nell is a friend of the family. (I haven’t had a chance to meet her, unfortunately.) I liked the film quite a lot, but perhaps what most surprised me is that, despite Hoffman’s Oscar buzz and the typical biopic trappings, Capote remains a genuinely small film. It feels European, even. It’s shot almost entirely in tight close-ups, for instance, and in really shallow focus. It’s a story told by the actors, by the slight expressions in their eyes. (The cinematographic style of Capote is actually quite similar to Laurent Cantet’s latest, Vers Le Sud, which I’ll write more about later.) I look forward to seeing it again with Joanna.

    Wavelength

    Dir. by Michael Snow

    I traded my ticket to Gabrielle for a screening of Michael Snow’s landmark structuralist film, Wavelength. I’m really glad I did, as chances to see it projected with Snow in attendance are rare. Enough has been written about it already, but I’ll just add that I enjoyed all 45 minutes of it. Sometimes a film does live up to its reputation.

    I saw two other films this morning, but will write about them later, when I have more energy. Cache begins in two hours. Haneke. I’m not sure how to get into the right head space for this one.

  • The Very Best Intentions

    After three days, 14 films, a brilliant Sufjan Stevens concert, several fantastic meals, and too little sleep, I’ve abandoned my ambitions of blogging a brief capsule review of everything I see. There’s too little time, and I don’t want my TIFF experience to be hampered by blog guilt. Instead, here are some brief comments — first impressions and unsupported opinions, mostly. I hope to write up longer responses to the best films after I get back home and find some breathing room.

    Ballets Russes

    Dir. by Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine

    There are so many interesting films to be made about the Ballets Russes. There’s the story of their collaborations with the finest artists of the Modern era, including Dali, Picasso, Miro, Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy, and Copeland. There’s the story of how the Ballets Russes thrived at times under the glamorous spotlight of celebrity, bumping elbows with Hollywood elite. There’s the story of sexuality and the early-20th century ballet — of masculinity, in particular, and gay men who became women’s fantasies. But these stories are only hinted at here. Instead, Geller and Goldfine appear to have become trapped by the good fortune of their interviews, and the film plays like an episode of Biography in which dancer after dancer recounts those favorite stories that, I can only assume, they’ve been telling for the better part of eight decades. The surviving members of the Ballets Russes are endlessly entertaining, and there’s a real charm in their storytelling. The women are still elegant and graceful — sexy, even; the men are still full of piss. But the film doesn’t do much beyond providing a platform for their pride (in the best sense of the word) and nostalgia. Ballets Russes will likely play well on cable and PBS.

    The Sun

    Dir. by Alexander Sokurov

    My favorite moment in The Sun is a shot of Emperor Hirohito as he steps onto the front porch of his Palace. Sokurov shoots him from a low angle and tracks slowly — very slowly — to the left, panning right as he goes. The effect leaves Hirohito alone and still at the center of the frame but sets the background in motion, a perfect visual metaphor for the much-transformed world the Emperor has entered. If I’m not mistaken, it’s literally the first glimpse of sunlight in the film, and it comes forty or so minutes in. Set during the hours preceding Japan’s surrender, The Sun studies Hirohito in close-up, fusing the film’s perspective with the character’s subjective view. (Hirohito’s subjectivity transforms the battle sequences in particularly amazing ways.) I have two full pages of hand-written notes on The Sun. Great film. Really great.

    Three Times

    Dir. by Hou Hsiao-hsien

    Hou Hsiao-Hsien is in a close race with Claire Denis right now for the title of “Darren’s Favorite Active Filmmaker.” (Claire and Hou are incredibly jealous of the title, as you can imagine.) I had a stupid grin on my face during every moment of Three Times. There’s no chance I’ll see a more beautiful film this week, and, while I wasn’t as moved by it as I was Cafe Lumiere last year, I found it more interesting. It’s juxtaposition of three eras harkens to Good Men, Good Women, my favorite of Hou’s films. Three Times, so far at least, is the highlight of my festival, but I would have predicted as much.

    Shanghai Dreams

    Dir. by Xiaoshuai Wang

    For the first 90 minutes, I thought Shanghai Dreams was an interesting but flawed film, but then it broke one of my cardinal rules: Only really, really, really talented filmmakers get to rape a character for dramatic effect. At that point I began to actively dislike the film. My friends liked it a bit more than I, but we were all disappointed by the final act.

    Wavelengths 1

    I’m not sure what to say about Peter Tscherkassky’s Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine except, um, wow. Five minutes in I realized that my left hand was gripping my right forearm to the point that both actually hurt. One of the local critics described the film as the most exciting 17 minutes of the festival, and he was exactly right. It’s Modern in the defamiliarizing, “Make it new!” tradition, but it’s also a pastiche of pop culture, and it’s hip-hop in a way that someone like Darren Aronofsky only hints at. Amazing.

    Mrs. Henderson Presents

    Dir. by Stephen Frears

    Although nearly everyone I’ve spoken to in festival lines would disagree with me about this, I think this film has some serious pacing and tone problems, and I was also annoyed by a late plot development, but, good lord, Judi Dench is great fun to watch. There’s a scene between her and Christopher Guest that might include the greatest spit take in the history of comedy. Despite my complaints I laughed pretty hard at times, and it played well to the audience.

    L’Enfer

    Dir. by Danis Tanovic

    During his Q&A, Tanovic spoke often about how this film is his homage to Kieslowski. K’s spirit is alive and well in the content of the film — it poses another of those classic moral conundrums without offering anything like an answer — but I felt little of Kieslowski in the style. I’m ambivalent about this one, so I’ll hold my comments for a bit.

    Battle in Heaven

    Dir. by Carlos Reygadas

    I went in with doubts, but by the ten-minute mark I had surrendered my trust completely to Reygadas. Like Claire Denis’s L’Intrus, which sparked a great deal of conversation among my friends here last year, I enjoyed Battle in Heaven as a character study that does most of its work through a subjective camera. Though I have some theories, I’m not sure which parts of the film “really happen” and which are dreamed, and I’m not at all convinced it matters. All of the film is very, very real to the main character. I found myself thinking occasionally of Bruno Dumont during the film, as well. There’s something to the camera movements, especially, that suggest some kind of outside or transcendent force at play in Reygada’s world. It’s related to the film’s Catholic iconography, I’m sure, but I haven’t yet decided how. If it were playing again I’d be tempted to give it another shot. This might be the film so far that I’m most looking forward to discussing.

    A History of Violence

    Dir. by David Cronenberg

    It’s going to be a lot of fun watching how this one plays to American critics. It works wonderfully as a genre film, and based on the laughter and cheering that errupted throughout the screening, it will definitely play as such to many audiences. But it also subverts the genre and offers an allegory on Bush’s America that, in my opinion, holds together much better than Dogville. Another great film.

    Sketches of Frank Gehry

    Dir. by Sidney Pollack

    I’m addicted to the TV show American Chopper for the same reason I enjoyed this documentary: I love hearing experts talk about fields that are a complete mystery to me. Pollack’s film doesn’t break any new formal ground, but he avoids most of the biopic pitfalls (it’s not arranged chronologically, for example), and his close friendship with Gehry allows him some intimacy with the subject.

    A Travers la Foret

    Dir. by Jean-Paul Civeyrac

    I arrived a bit late to this screening after a mad dash down Bloor, so take my comments with a grain of salt. This film has some fine camerawork and nice performances, and I really enjoyed the tone. It worked for me as a “mood” piece (for lack of a better word), but I’m not sure if there’s much there there.

    Les Saignantes

    Dir. by Jean-Pierre Bekolo

    I scheduled this one because it was made in Cameroon and because only at TIFF do I get to see films from places like Cameroon. If I watch a film a day for the next ten years I’ll likely never see another one like Les Saignantes. Bekolo introduced it as a “science fiction, comedy, horror film about the future of his country” and said that making the film rescued him from despair. It’s about a movement of women who use their sexual power to overthrow the government. In the process, the film manages to suggest a kind of cool, untapped feminist political power, but unfortunately it does so by projecting onto women degrading male fantasies. Baby steps, I guess.

    L’Annulaire

    Dir. by Diane Bertrand

    Apparently during her Q&A, Bertrand said that she read Yoko Ogawa’s novel three times, wondering all the while how she could turn it into a French film. The comment doesn’t surprise me. As I watched it, I sensed that many of the scenes that played so badly on screen would work better on the page. L’Annulaire is ambitious, it’s a film of ideas, but it really didn’t work for me. I found myself laughing at scenes that I assume weren’t intended to be funny, though even that is up in the air, as the tone of the film was quite a mess.

    Marock

    Dir. by Laila Marrakchi

    Films like Marock are the reason that every filmlover should attend TIFF at some point. I knew weeks ago what my first 20 film picks would be; it’s the next 25 that take some research and some risk. For every Les Saignantes and L’Annulaire — films that, at some point, you stop watching and start waiting to end — there’s a Marock, a genre picture that likely won’t get American distribution, that will never be available to American audiences in any format, but that is just a delight to watch. Laila Marrakchi is a young (mid-20s) filmmaker from Morocco who has drawn from her own life for her first feature. It’s a coming-of-age film that employs all of the coming-of-age conventions, but it does so with a real confidence and grace. I was constantly suprised by small touches — slow pans, perfectly timed dissolves, great lines of dialogue. Hell, I was even moved by it, tears and all. Plus, you have to love a film that rediscovers David Bowie’s “Rock and Roll Suicide.” I’ll never think of the song in the same way. Highly recommended.

    Enough for now. I skipped Sunflower this afternoon for a much-needed walk in the sun but need to head out for I Am. Post any questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to reply.

  • Blogging TIFF

    I have tickets for 44 films this year, plus a ticket to Sufjan Stevens’ sold out concert at the St. Paul’s Centre. 44 tickets. It’s absurd. But with a 50-film festival pass, I decided to schedule as many as possible, knowing that I’ll end up skipping a handful along the way.

    Here’s my complete schedule, along with links to the descriptions at TIFF’s website.

    Thursday September 8, 2005

    Friday September 9, 2005

    Saturday September 10, 2005

    Sunday September 11, 2005

    Monday September 12, 2005

    Tuesday September 13, 2005

    Wednesday September 14, 2005

    Thursday September 15, 2005

    Friday September 16, 2005

    Saturday September 17, 2005

  • Christmas Morning

    TIFF '05 Out-of-Town Package

    Ah, the last Wednesday in August. It doesn’t quite match the morning I woke up to find a Millennium Falcon under the tree, but the sight of a FedEx truck in late August is just about as good as it gets. The plan is to spend the next few hours poring through the catalog, obsessing over the schedule, and checking titles off of my spreadsheet — yes, I created a spreadsheet — all in hopes of creating the most efficient and dud-free lineup of films possible. I then overnight my ticket requests back to Toronto and hope for the best.

    If all goes according to plan, over the span of ten days I’ll get to see new films by Alexander Sokurov, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Laurent Cantet, Atom Egoyan, Michael Haneke, Michael Winterbottom, Francois Ozon, Thomas Vinterberg, Jean Paul Civeyrac, Stephen Frears, Danis Tanovic, David Cronenberg, the Quay brothers, Bennett Miller, Patrice Chereau, Eugene Jarecki, Nobuhiro Suwa, Cristi Puiu, and about twenty others.

  • Dreaming of Movies

    I had my first TIFF-related dream last night. It was kind of like that dream where you show up for a final exam after skipping class all semester, except that, instead of sliding into a strange classroom, I was wandering around Toronto with no tickets because I’d forgotten to submit my out-of-town form. I woke up feeling anxious.

    Some of that anxiety may stem from a rookie mistake I made last year. I had passes for three films on the evening I arrived but had failed to realize that my actual tickets were housed in an office somewhere on the ground floor of a building near Yonge and College rather than at the box office, where I arrived thirty minutes before the first film began — plenty of time, I assumed, to get in line, rest, grab a good seat, whatever. Instead, I went running (literally) out of the theater, cursing the volunteer who had politely — and I say “politely” only in retrospect — who had politely handed me a map and pointed me north. By the time I found the ticket office, I was sweating and the tops of my feet were bleeding. (Note: Don’t ever run in Birkenstocks.) I ran back to the Paramount in time to catch the last 45 minutes of Nobody Knows.

    My TIFF dream was also related, I think, to Michael Apted’s 7 Up films, the first two of which I watched for the first time last night. We went to bed some time after midnight, and I spent the next two hours in that strange waking dream state. I don’t remember any specific details of the dreams, but they were full of those kids — Tony the Jockey, John the Reactionary, and Neil the Sad-Eyed Chess Player, in particular. Joanna and I were so moved by the films that we cheated. I looked up a few reviews of the later films to get snapshot updates of their lives. Part of me regrets doing so now, but I suspect that watching the other four films will actually be a better experience without the “suspense.”

  • Feelin’ Tingly All Over

    So this is kind of exciting.

    TIFF Poster

    Already on my must-see list:

    • L’Enfant dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes
    • Cache dir. Michael Haneke
    • The Sun dir. Alexander Sokurov
    • Three Times dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien
    • The Wayward Cloud dir. Tsai Ming-liang
    • A History of Violence dir. David Cronenberg
    • Where the Truth Lies dir. Atom Egoyan

    And the list will grow and grow and grow until even that 50-film pass will feel like a compromise.

  • TIFF By the Numbers

    The Films
    Number of films shown: 328 (including shorts)
    Number of films I saw: 27 (including shorts)
    Days in Toronto: 6 1/2
    Average number of films per day: 4.15
    Number of late arrivals: 1 (Nobody Knows)
    Number of walk-outs: 1 (Low Life)

    Some Favorites (in roughly preferential order)
    Café Lumière (dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)
    Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (dir. Theo Angelopoulos)
    The Holy Girl (dir. Lucrecia Martel)
    ScaredSacred (dir. Velcrow Ripper)
    Moolaadé (dir. Ousmane Sembene)
    L’Intrus (dir. Claire Denis)*
    Tell Them Who You Are (dir. Mark S. Wexler)
    Demain on déménage (dir. Chantal Akerman)
    Earth and Ashes (dir. Atiq Rahimi)
    9 Songs (dir. Michael Winterbottom)
    10e Chambre, instants d’audiences (dir. Raymond Depardon)**

    * L’Intrus continues to climb higher on my list, mostly because friends and I have spent more time discussing it than all of the other films combined.

    ** Again, this film only began to come together for me after discussing it with friends.

    Great Meals
    Thai: 2
    Vietnamese: 1
    Indian: 1
    Ethiopian: 1
    Cuban: 1
    $2 street vendor hot dogs: 2

    Friends
    Number of old Internet friends whom I was finally able to meet face-to-face: 8 (Doug, J. Robert, Girish, Rob, Jason, Candace, David, and Cindy)

    Miscellaneous
    Approximate hours spent in theaters: 46
    Approximate hours spent on subways: 14
    Approximate hours spent walking through downtown Toronto: 20
    Approximate hours spent in line: 8
    Approximate hours spent sleeping: 35
    Approximate hours spent discussing movies while riding the subway, walking, eating, driving, and standing in lines: 40

    Celebrity sightings: 2 – Penelope Cruz (I think) and Ivan Reitman
    Cinephile celebrity sightings: 13 – Theo Angelopoulos, Jonathon Rosenbaum, Chantal Akerman, Ken Burns, Claire Denis, Don McKellar, Pawel Pawlikowski, Mark Wexler, Atiq Rahimi, Ousmane Sembene, Liu Bingjian, Lucrecia Martel, Velcrow Ripper

  • Quick Update

    Connectivity is definitely an issue for me this week, so it will probably be some time before I’m able to post full responses. Of the 11 films I’ve seen so far, my favorites are probably Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow, Tell Them Who You Are, Moolaade, and Earth and Ashes. The real highlight, though, has been discovering Toronto, which, especially this week, is possibly the most international city in North America. I’m introverted by nature but have really enjoyed striking up conversations with strangers in line and in the theaters. So many interesting lives intersecting here.

  • 9 Songs (2004)

    9 Songs (2004)

    Dir. by Michael Winterbottom

    “It’s claustrophobia and agoraphobia in the same place, like two people in a bed.” Matt (Kieran O’Brien) delivers this line in voice-over after the fact — after his ex-girlfriend Lisa (Margot Stilley) has returned home to America and after he has returned to Antarctica, where he is researching glaciers. The threatening isolation of Antarctica, like Matt’s simile, feels forced in 9 Songs, a small film about intimacy, in its various shapes and guises. Winterbottom’s framing metaphor, complete with flyover shots of stark, white landscapes, is too heavy and the only false note in what is otherwise a fascinating and successful, I think, cinematic experiment.

    Intercutting scenes of the couple’s private moments (revealed in graphic detail) with their trips to live concerts, 9 Songs explores that juxtaposition and discovers in it something of the human struggle to balance one’s needs for protection and individuality, on the one hand, and self-surrender and love, on the other. Anyone who has ever closed her eyes and moved in perfect unison with those around her at a packed music venue will recognize in 9 Songs the almost tribal spirit of its live concert footage. Brought together with shared interests and with a desire for shared transcendence (or whatever you want to call it), concert-goers are often offered a glimpse, however brief, of ideal community. We lose ourselves to the music, lose ourselves to the rhythms of the crowd — a respite from the monotony and narcissism of our private preoccupations. And, best of all, with no long-term commitment required.

    Likewise, anyone who has ever stared across the table at a lover, aware of unacknowledged tensions but unwilling or unable to address them, will recognize 9 Songs‘ portrait of a failing relationship: infatuation, disillusionment, and escape. Like a contemporary Breathless — and O’Brien’s resemblance to Jean-Paul Belmondo makes such a comparison impossible to ignore — 9 Songs describes a relationship by exposing its most casual, least self-conscious moments. (I’m reminded of Stanley Kubrick’s desire for Eyes Wide Shut to be about “the naked woman at the refrigerator door as she remembers to put the chicken away before she goes to bed.”) My favorite moments in 9 Songs take place just before and after sex, when Matt and Lisa are at their most unguarded — laughing at a bathroom mirror, relaxing in the tub, fixing breakfast. I can’t think of another film that gets those moments just right.

    Which leads me to believe that 9 Songs succeeds where so many other films have failed, in part, because of its graphic sex scenes. Unlike, say, Dumont’s La Vie de Jésus, which features a brief penetration shot to emphasize the base desires that drive so much of human behavior, 9 Songs includes several extended sequences that reveal the complexities of any sexual relationship: the pleasures and insecurities, the playfulness, the self-gratification (at times) and the selflessness (at others), the awkwardness and the beauty and the joy — or, in a word, the intimacy. Friends and I who saw 9 Songs all agreed that, at only 65 minutes, we would have liked for it to be even longer, especially if we could spend more time with Matt and Lisa behind closed doors. Recommended (with obvious warnings, of course).

    Your reward for reading the entire response: “Suddenly” by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, one of the bands featured in 9 Songs.

  • Little Sky (2004)

    Little Sky (2004)

    Dir. by María Victoria Menis

    Félix (Leonardo Ramírez) is a young drifter who, in the opening act of Little Sky, jumps from a train, stumbles into conversation at a local bar, and finds himself working for room and board at a small farm. Its owners, Roberto (Dario Levy) and Mercedes (Mónica Lairana), seem content on first glance, but Félix soon discovers that Roberto’s drunken violence is the source of Mercedes’s quiet reserve and depression. When Mercedes finally leaves her husband, Félix takes her infant son Chango, with whom he has developed a close bond, and flees for the economic promise of Bueno Aires.

    Like a Frank Norris or Theodore Dreiser novel, Little Sky drives steadily toward its inevitable, and inevitably dark, conclusion. Despite his genuinely good intentions, Félix’s dreams of providing the stable family for Chango that he, also an orphan, lacked are romantic lies, and we in the audience can see it coming for miles. But Menis’s direction makes it a fairly compelling story, nonetheless. I quite liked the first half of the film and particularly enjoyed her handling of Félix’s and Mercedes’s relationship, which manages to avoid the most obvious of narrative cliches: the stud drifter bedding the sexually repressed, kept woman (see Schizo). Levy also gives what at times is a nicely sympathetic performance as the abusive husband.

    Soon after Félix and Chango arrived in Buenos Aires, however, I lost interest in the film and began waiting for it to end. Films of the type that play at film festivals typically resist narrative closure; they delight, instead, in ambiguity, allowing viewers to draw conclusions of their own. I’ll admit to a strong preference for this type myself, but I’m beginning to wonder how often “ambiguity” is, in fact, a cheap excuse for sloppy writing. Little Sky is clearly intended to be a social film with political ends, and so I recognize Menis’s need to carry her story through to its predetermined, tragic finale. But I think it would be a much better film if she spent even more time developing her three main characters at the farmhouse and ended it on the train to the city. Ambiguity. Just how I like it. So can this desire for ambiguity be a political or intellectual cop-out? That question, to be honest, interests me more than this film did.

  • Moolaade (2004)

    Moolaade (2004)

    Dir. by Ousmane Sembene

    Sembene introduced his film by reminding his mostly white, mostly Western audience that Africa — the entire continent, its nations, its governments, and its people — is experiencing a period of unprecedented transition. There was no moralizing or condemnation in his tone, not even a suggestion of the catastrophic crises and genocides that fill the back pages of our newspapers. Africa is in transition, he told us, and this film is about that transition.

    By the time it reached Toronto, Moolaadé was already the talk of the festival, having garnered much acclaim at Cannes from such influential voices as Roger Ebert, who is actively campaigning on its behalf. I knew only that it was a film about the traditional practice of salinde, or female circumcision, that Sembene was generally known as the “grandfather of African cinema,” and that several of my friends were jealous of my getting a ticket to the sold-out screening. In fact, genital mutilation is but one of the film’s many concerns. The salinde serves more generally as a site of contention between the women who, newly empowered by the creeping influence of Western humanism and technology, begin to rebel against the patriarchal structures of their society — salinde is a site of contention between these strong, young women and the men who wish to maintain their patriarchal hold on power.

    Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly) is a second wife who, still scarred from her own circumcision, had refused years earlier to have her only daughter “cleansed.” In the opening moments of the film, four young girls come to Collé for similar protection, and she obliges, instituting a moolaadé, or a ceremonial zone of refuge. Her decision sets in motion the principle conflicts in the film: the older generation of women (particularly those who perform the ritual) vs. those women who oppose it; the men of the village whose identity is founded on traditional notions of masculinity vs. those who offer an alternate model (the Western-educated son or the big city mercenary); and, more simply, the old (including a particular interpretation of Islam) vs. the new (symbolized by the ubiquitous radios that blare from all corners of the village).

    By the standards with which I typically judge a film, Moolaadé is too sentimental and predictable, and its performances are uneven, at best. (The notable exception being Coulibaly, who delivers my favorite performance of the year.) And yet watching Moolaadé is a gut-churning experience, in part, I suspect, because of its close proximity to “reality.” Sembene told us that he shot on location in a typical West African village and that he cast untrained locals in many of the speaking parts. These particular young women that we watch on screen represent thousands of others just like them, and their very real investment in the “transition” is apparent.

    I hope this is a fair comparison — I always worry about applying Western models to non-Western stories, imperializing them, so to speak — but as I watched Moolaadé I was reminded of certain American literatures of the late-19th century, another significant period of transition. If Moolaadé is didactic, then its didacticism might be forgiven: What value, after all, can be found in the other side of the genital mutilation (or slavery or suffrage) debate? And, a question of even greater value, I think: When is unbridled emotionalism (which I often too casually dismiss as “sentiment”) a perfectly appropriate and even politically resonant response to particular conditions? The emotional trajectory of Moolaadé reaches its climax when Collé is punished for her transgressions. It’s a brutal scene, but I found myself more deeply moved by a more quiet moment that followed. It’s the sound of a crying mother. That’s it. A crying mother. And it worked, breaking through my cynicism and emotional distance. Highly recommended.

  • Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (2004)

    Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (2004)

    Dir. by Theo Angelopoulos

    Angelopoulos introduced his latest with very few words. It is to be the first of three films about the life of a Greek woman who manages to survive the 20th century, and its concern is “the human condition.” What more would you expect?

    The Weeping Meadow opens with its first of many meticulously composed, extreme long shots. It is 1919, and a group of refugees have made land near Thessaloniki. At the center of the frame are Spyros (Vasilis Kolovos), his wife and son (Nikos Poursanidis), and Eleni (Alexandra Aidini), the young orphan he has adopted. The Trilogy will be Eleni’s story, and in The Weeping Meadow we are given the first 40 years of it — her love of Spyros’s son, her giving birth to twins, and the tragedy of her many losses during World War II and the Greek civil war that followed.

    The Weeping Meadow takes its shape from Classical Tragedy, but the Fates, in this case, are not so deterministic as to run trod over the complexities of life. While bathed in a sheen of melancholia and mourning, the film still takes great delight in the intensity of young love, the vitality of community, and the simple pleasures of music. Eleni’s young husband is a gifted accordionist whose original composition is developed first on-screen and is then folded into the film’s score, returning occasionally in the final act to comfort Eleni like a Greek chorus.

    This was my first Angelopoulos film, and so, perhaps, others who are more familiar with his work and who are accustomed to seeing it projected in 35mm will be less overwhelmed by the film than I was. I sat there in a stupor, to be honest, constantly in awe of the immensity of his imagination. The still image posted above is just one of thirty or forty that could be stripped from its context and hung on a gallery wall. And equally impressive were the choreographed camera movements that lasted for minutes at a time, exploring landscapes and interiors with the detailed eye of a great novelist. I actually gasped at the end of one shot, which like Russian Ark in miniature, captures an entire drama in a single take. Angelopoulos’s camera follows his young lovers through a noisy dance hall where they are confronted by a threat from their past. Setup, conflict, resolution — all in a single movement. Unbelievable.

    One week and nearly twenty films later, my imagination is still alive with memories of The Weeping Meadow. There are images in this film — sheep hanging from a tree, water rising around an ancient village, a floating funeral procession, a field of billowing white sheets — that I would not have imagined possible. Like the first time I saw Tarkovsky and Cassavetes, seeing Angelopoulos has forced me to reconsider the potential of cinema. Highly recommended.

  • Schizo (2004)

    Schizo (2004)

    Dir. by Guka Omarova

    Omarova’s debut takes its title from a nickname given to the main character. Schizo (Olzhas Nusuppaev) is 15 years old and a bit slow; his classmates abuse him and exploit his gullibility. He is soon hired by his mother’s thug boyfriend (Eduard Tabyschev) to recruit unemployed laborers for illegal boxing matches. However, when the first man he recruits dies after the fight, Schizo is drawn into a new life. Like Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes’s La Promesse, Schizo tells the coming-of-age story of a young man who commits to helping a woman and her young child, first out of obligation and, later, out of love. As I told a friend after the screening, Schizo is the most heart-warming bare-knuckle boxing movie I’ve ever seen.

    Told in minimalist style, with long takes, little nondiegetic sound, and a cast that includes several nonprofessional actors, Schizo is always compelling to watch, even if the story is, at times, too predictable. Fifteen minutes in, I was concerned that it would all collapse into either Of Mice and Men tragedy or Forrest Gump sentiment, so I was impressed with Omarova’s handling of Schizo, who, as it turns out, isn’t terribly slow after all and whose decisions constantly surprised me. I also really enjoyed Olga Landina’s performance as the young mother whom Schizo befriends. Like Natalie Press in My Summer of Love, Landina has a compelling face of a type that I see too seldom on the screen. Both actresses reminded me a bit of Badlands-era Sissy Spacek.

    Schizo is not a film that I am anxious to revisit, but it does exemplify one aspect of the festival that I greatly enjoyed: the opportunity to encounter a new voice in cinema, and one from a place that I will likely never visit. A woman from Kazakhstan recently began attending my English as a Second Language course, and I was surprised to find this person whom I had assumed was Chinese speaking Russian. On several occasions during the screening of Schizo, when the narrative was losing hold of my interest, I just sat and studied the people who populate the film. Kazakhstan has been called the “crossroads of Europe and Asia,” and that history is written into its faces.

  • Tell Them Who You Are (2004)

    Tell Them Who You Are (2004)

    Dir. by Mark S. Wexler

    Tell Them Who You Are has the best opening scene of any film I saw at this year’s festival. Haskell Wexler is standing in his camera equipment room, taking stock of his inventory for an upcoming sale. When his son Mark, who is shooting the documentary that we are watching, asks his dad to explain where they are standing, Haskell shakes his head, twists his face with exasperation, and says (I’m paraphrasing from memory here): “No, Mark. You’re holding the fucking camera. Just shoot the room, and you’re audience will figure it out. If this is what your fucking movie is going to be like, if you’re planning to just shoot a bunch of talking heads, then the hell with it. I want nothing to do with it.”

    It would be nearly impossible to make a dull documentary about Haskell Wexler. Now in his mid-80s, Wexler is as sharp and as full of piss as ever — still decrying injustice wherever he finds it, still ridiculing the mistakes of other filmmakers whenever he encounters them. Having shot nearly fifty features over the past five decades (including John Sayles’s Silver City, which also played at the festival), Wexler is justified in thinking himself an authority on the subject of filmmaking, which is why Tell Them Who You Are is such a fascinating movie. Being on the other side of the camera forces Wexler to revisit the aesthetic decisions that guided him through the making of his own documentaries forty years earlier, groundbreaking social films such as The Bus (1965), Medium Cool (1969), and Introduction to the Enemy (1974). He can barely tolerate his son’s direction at times, and that tension is at the heart of the film.

    Mark Wexler is quite good with a camera himself, however, and his film is remarkably well-constructed. What begins as a standard Biography-style portrait, complete with childhood photos, juicy gossip, and celebrity testimonials, slowly evolves into, first, a self-reflexive commentary on the ethics of documentary filmmaking and, finally, a touching story of forgiveness and reconciliation. One of the final images is of Haskell sitting at a monitor, watching his son’s completed film. Mark doesn’t linger too long on the shot or allow it to become sentimental, but the emotion is evident on his father’s face and it speaks volumes. Mark seemed reticent to speak too candidly after the screening but did acknowledge that having a camera fixed between them offered both men a much-appreciated filter and that their relationship has, in many ways, been healed by the process.

    I hope that Tell Them Who You Are finds decent distribution, and given the recent critical and popular success of so many documentaries, perhaps it will. It was one of my favorites of the festival, largely because of Haskell Wexler himself. His bottomless hatred of corporate interests and political conservatives (like his son) is inspiring and laugh-out-loud funny. But the film also exposes his pain and, though he would be loathe to admit it, his regret, particularly in a moving scene with his ex-wife, Mark’s mother. Another high recommendation.

  • Earth and Ashes (2004)

    Earth and Ashes (2004)

    Dir. by Atiq Rahimi

    Days after his village is destroyed in a bombing raid, Dastaguir (Abdul Ghani) and his five-year-old grandson Yacine (Jawan Mard Homayoun) jump from the back of a pickup truck and take their seats at a desert crossroads, where they wait and wait for a ride to a nearby mine. Dastaguir is charged with the horrifying task of notifying his son that the young man’s wife and mother are dead and that his son, Yacine, is now deaf. Dastaguir is worried for his son’s sanity and is plagued by memories of his daughter-in-law’s shaming, which he was unable to prevent.

    As I stepped out of the theater, a woman beside me dismissed Earth and Ashes as an “Afghani Waiting for Godot“; I agree with the description but not the dismissal. Here, unlike Beckett’s play, the absurdity of the situation is grounded in a real historical moment. Earth and Ashes is not only an allegory for some vague existential crisis (though it is certainly also that); instead, the film reveals the human cost of a particular tragedy. By the time Dastaguir recounted the story of his village’s destruction to the fourth stranger, and after hearing yet one more weary soul beg God’s blessings for the dead, I began to experience something of the old man’s exhaustion and helplessness. To be frank, I was embarrassed by it — embarrassed to be sitting in an air conditioned movie theater while on vacation, taking “pleasure” from the suffering depicted on screen. (Doug and I had a great discussion afterwards about film tastes and political sensibilities, but I’ll save that one for another day.)

    Earth and Ashes is a jaw-droppingly beautiful film as well, shot on location in wide-angle 35mm (Scope?) and featuring countless elegant crane and tracking shots. In his introduction of the film, Rahimi recounted the risks he and his crew faced by shooting in Afghanistan, particularly because the film features female nudity. The landscape, he claimed, is critical to the story, and I would agree, even extending the concept to the landscapes of Afghani faces, young and old.

    Existentialism — to borrow momentarily from my acquaintance’s allusion to Godot — demands that we find some measure of hope in our suffering, that in our acceptance of life’s absurdity we are making some heroic gesture toward freedom. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus writes. Rahimi seems driven by a similar conviction. I’m going to cheat and borrow from Doug’s review:

    the final sequence of the film is comprised of a gradual focus: a man leaves a conversation, walks through the desert, becomes isolated, begins to sing. The image fades but his singing continues in darkness, a tribute to human dignity and its perseverance through time.

    Despite the hectic pace of the film festival, the audience sat quietly for two or three minutes in complete darkness, listening to the old man’s song. It plays like a benediction. Highly Recommended.

  • 10e Chambre, instants d’audiences (2004)

    10e Chambre, instants d’audiences (2004)

    Dir. by Raymond Depardon

    10e Chambre, instants d’audiences is 105 minutes of documentary footage shot within a French District courtroom. We watch as Madame Justice Michèle Bernard-Requin hears the cases brought against twelve defendants (culled from the 169 that Depardon originally shot). Most are there on misdemeanor offenses: drunk driving, petty theft, possession of a weapon, selling marijuana. And in nearly every case we watch the process from start to finish, from plea to verdict.

    During the screening of 10e Chambre, instants d’audiences, I was quite disappointed by the film, but even then I knew that my disappointment was with the audience rather than with the film itself. At the Sunday screening — and friends who saw it on Tuesday report a very different experience — 10e Chambre played as pure comedy. (One friend, a TIFF veteran, argues that crowds are different during the opening weekend, when more people dress up and come out to experience the festival itself rather than to see the films, and I think he might be right.)

    The idea of 10e Chambre as “comedy” is quite disturbing to me. And I’ve come to realize that that is partly Depardon’s point. He crafts the film so that our allegiances immediately fall to the side of the witty and cynical Judge, whose clever retorts to the first few defendants are, at times, well justified. But by the time we are laughing at a young man who is clearly under the influence of a narcotic while in the courtroom, the joke has gone on too long. We are now no longer well-heeled sophisticates at an international film festival; we are Middle Americans, smoking pot, watching Jerry Springer, and laughing at the poor clods who are too poorly educated, too economically burdened, too mentally incapacitated, or ( perhaps most damning of all) too dark-skinned to know any better.

    10e Chambre began to open up for me when my friend Girish described that laughter as a Rorschach Test. What do we laugh at? How do we choose where to direct our derision? And why do we often side with those in authority? Depardon shoots each of the defendants from the same static, low-angle position, giving us a perspective of the criminal that is similar (metaphorically speaking) to the Judge’s: he or she is a disembodied head, divorced from context or backstory, who is offered only a few moments to justify his or her behavior. The opportunity to judge them is impossibly seductive, as my audience proved, and Depardon invites us to do so by not revealing the verdicts of the final cases. I have no doubt how most in that theater would have ruled.

    As a side note, one of my friends who attended the Tuesday screening reports that one or two members of that audience also felt the need to laugh throughout much of the film. Not surprisingly, the social pressure of being the lone voice laughing in a hushed room led them to suppress that urge during the last half hour. The analogy to being a lone voice of dissent, whether in an important public discourse or, say, a jury room, is fascinating. This will be a wonderful film to teach.

  • 3-Iron (2004)

    3-Iron (2004)

    Dir. by Kim Ki-duk

    Jae Hee plays Tae-suk, a young man who breaks into homes, prepares meals, bathes and naps, then repays the homeowner’s generosity by performing small acts of kindness: washing clothes, repairing broken electronics, and the like. While squatting in the most opulent of his many homes, Tae-suk discovers that he is not alone. Sun-hwa (Lee Seung-yun), a former model, is trapped there by her husband, bruised and beaten. Tae-suk rescues her, and the two become accomplices and lovers, moving from house to house in complete silence, never speaking even a word to one another.

    The description of 3-Iron in the TIFF catalog begins with the following quote from Kim:

    All of us are empty houses, waiting anxiously for somebody to unlock and liberate us….

    It’s the perfect synopsis of 3-Iron, a fable for our times. Each house that Tae-suk enters acts as an embodiment of its absent owner, and with time and repetition we in the audience begin to anticipate the sameness of it all — the conventions, the status symbols, the stuff. Even Sun-hwa, when we first meet her, is property, and the joy of watching 3-Iron comes from seeing her beauty emerge along with her individualized identity. The bruises on her face fade as she gains confidence and as her fate becomes more tightly bound to Tae-suk’s.

    3-Iron is one of the films that I saw at TIFF that I feel could benefit from some trimming, and I’ll be curious to see if the cut that showed at Toronto is the same version released in the West. (3-Iron was picked up for distribution soon after its first screening.) The film gets its title from the golf club that Tae-suk and several other characters use to enact vengeance upon one another, and while it makes for a nice metaphor (what better symbol to show the divide between the haves and have-nots?), several of the more violent sequences created frustrating tonal shifts and pacing problems, particularly an odd scene that takes place in an underground parking garage, which could be cut completely.

    Otherwise, though, I quite liked 3-Iron. The final act of the film shows Tae-suk alone in a prison cell, where he seems to transform slowly into a ghost. The sequences are just stunning to look at, and they’re cut together with a real grace. Again, like a fable, there’s something almost magical about the prison scenes, and they contain some of the images that have lingered longest in my imagination. Not a perfect film, but one that I will look forward to revisiting.

  • 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.)

  • My Summer of Love

    My Summer of Love

    Dir. by Pawel Pawlikowski

    Mona (Natalie Press), a working-class girl who runs the local pub with her brother, meets Tamsin (Emily Blunt), a wealthy trouble-maker who has returned home to the family estate after being expelled from boarding school. Bored and lonely, they find comfort in their relationship, though, as becomes increasingly obvious, that relationship is built from lies and games. In the final act, those lies unravel, and Mona, we are led to believe, finds new strength and independence from having survived the experience.

    My Summer of Love received a lot of “buzz,” as they say, in Toronto, and I would guess that most of it was generated by Press’s performance, which is a lot of fun to watch. I can’t recall another character quite like Mona. She has the potential to become that loathsome stereotype, the “blue collar girl with a heart of gold who will teach the rich people how to really experience life,” but Mona is too world-weary and cynical to buy into such a lie. She’s learned to protect herself with sarcasm and irony, so when she does drop her guard, when she does allow some vulnerability, the betrayals by Tasmin and her brother wound all the more deeply.

    During his Q&A, Pawlikowski said that he was drawn to this story because he is interested in characters who are seeking transcendence, whether through love or sex or religion. His response points to my great frustration with the film, which is that he seems to equate the three and is deeply suspicious of the real value to be found in any of them. As J. Robert Parks told me after the screening, it’s terribly annoying when a filmmaker expects us to find victory and personal triumph in a cliche.

    I was also frustrated because My Summer of Love has the potential to offer an insightful portrait of a Christian struggling with the consequences of his new-found faith, but, again, the film instead reduces him to cliche. Mona’s brother Phil (Paddy Considine) has become an evangelical while in prison and has exercised his faith by closing the family pub and turning it into a meeting hall for Bible studies and prayer. I was especially touched by one scene in which Mona comes to Phil, needing comfort, needing to talk to the brother who is now her only family. He hugs her, rocks her in his arms, then begins to pray over her. It’s a moment I’ve experienced too many times in my own life — a Christian, acting with the very best intentions, falls back on old routines, praying for God’s help instead of looking that person in the eye, speaking directly to them, and doing something to meet their needs.

    Considine was also there for the Q&A, and he mentioned how much he valued and respected the friendships he had made with evangelicals while researching the role, and it shows in his performance, which is quite good. But Pawlikowski’s script is bound too tightly to a banal narrative arc that demands Phil’s faith be superficial. He will inevitably be seduced by Tasmin, inevitably revert to his violent ways, inevitably forsake his Bible study friends. We get one final glimpse of him near the end of the film, his face in his hands, which, I suppose, is intended to suggest his “struggle” and the possibility of redemption, but it’s too little, too late. I quite liked the film for the first hour because the characters continually surprised me, which made the by-the-numbers finale all the more disappointing.

  • Nobody Knows (2004)

    Nobody Knows (2004)

    Dir. by Hirokazu Kore-eda

    After Life is one of my favorite films of the past five years, so for that reason alone, I was very much looking forward to Kore-eda’s latest, Nobody Knows, the story of four young siblings whose mother abandons them to find work in another city. Unfortunately, because of a few wrong turns and some confusion regarding the location of my tickets, I missed the first hour of the film and will, therefore, keep my comments brief.

    I entered the theater just as the oldest child, Chunan (played by Yuya Yagira, winner of the best actor prize at Cannes), comes to realize that their mother will not be returning. We watch as they adapt to life alone: washing their clothes in the park, collecting day-old food from the back doors of neighborhood stores, searching for discarded change in pay phones and vending machines.

    Kore-eda shoots the exteriors from a great distance, using long lenses that flatten the depth of field. Doing so allows his young actors to move naturally, freed from the close presence of camera and crew. There is nothing self-conscious or “actorly” in their performances, which lends added weight to the inevitable tragedy of their situation.

    Nobody Knows ends, not surprisingly, in a freeze frame, the most obvious but certainly not only allusion to The 400 Blows. Like Truffaut’s film, Kore-eda’s demands that we sympathize with its young protagonist and judge the adults and the systems that have failed them. I have some problems with the film but will reserve judgment until after seeing it in its entirety. I would imagine that it will find relatively wide distribution.

  • TIFF Film Schedule

    TIFF Film Schedule

    I’ve put in my ticket requests for the Toronto Film Festival. By choosing to fly in on the 11th and out on the 18th, I’ll be missing two of my most highly anticipated films, Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, which will be introduced by Chantal Akerman and which I’ve always wanted to see on the big screen, and Godard’s latest, Notre Musique. I used my 30th and final ticket request for the Bresson anyway. Who knows? Maybe I can catch a later flight.

    I had to make a few compromises because of scheduling conflicts, but if I get into half of my first choices (second choices are in brackets), it will be quite a week. Getting to finally meet a few old friends will be fun, too.

    Saturday 9/11

    Sunday 9/12

    Monday 9/13

    Tuesday 9/14

    Wednesday 9/15

    Thursday 9/16

    Friday 9/17

    Saturday 9/18

  • TIFF

    I’ve purchased my airfare. Any advice for a first-time visitor to the Toronto International Film Festival?

  • More from Toronto

    In his on-going reportage from the Toronto film festival, J. Robert Parks has posted a full-length review of Tsai’s Good Bye, Dragon Inn. Especially given the lukewarm response to Twentynine Palms, this has now officially become my most highly-anticipated film of the year. Parks offers ample spoilers from the film, but anyone who watches Tsai for his plots has already missed the point. This bit from the review has left me down-right giddy with anticipation:

    And this brings us to Tsai’s central point: that one type of character is just as worthy as another type and, therefore, one type of story is just as worthy as another. In that, Good Bye, Dragon Inn becomes a powerful defense for the kind of movies Tsai makes, films in which marginalized characters struggle with apparently banal difficulties. They’re not superheroes, they’re not martial artists, they’re not saving the world. And yet they are worthy of our attention. In East Asian cinema, which has become dominated by the martial arts and horror genres, this is an incredibly bold assertion.