Week of September 22, 2005, Issue #518
FILM
Festival expressed
By JOSEF BRAUN
For a hopeless movie nut who’s never attended a major festival, losing
your cherry at the Toronto International Film Festival can be an overwhelming
experience. This feeling is exacerbated by being an ambitious film critic with
no press credentials or official access to any of the benefits accreditation
brings (i.e. contact info for the multitude of filmmakers you’re hungry
just to share the same air with, much less interview), and the experience can
be somewhat tormenting. Making the most of it comes down to financing and perseverance.
Luckily, I had both.
On festival eve, with a wad of my generous publisher’s cash nestled in
my pocket, I woke in the wee hours for whatever tickets I could seize. Surprisingly,
after three hours in line, I snatched up most of my wish list, probably because
I avoided Oscar contenders and movie stars. I went after the visionaries, international
filmmakers whose work doesn’t always get widely seen but who keep the
medium fresh, dangerous, playful, honest and strange. This strategy occasionally
disappointed, but even at it’s worst, the thrill of seeing what we reductively
label as “arthouse” fare being watched and debated in sold-out 1200-seat
theatres was reward enough.
Perhaps the worst is the place to start. Though I missed Lars von Trier’s
Manderlay, I did see Dear Wendy, the biggest turd the Danish provocateur has
squeezed out yet, though it was ushered into the world by his Dogma 95 movement
co-conspirator Thomas Vinterberg. This ostensible cautionary tale about innocent
kids fetishizing guns takes the same lame potshots at American culture that
littered Dogville, but manages to be even more shallow and utterly lacking in
any internal logic. Set in some imaginary Southern town, it pointlessly exploits
racial stereotypes and clumsily mixes metaphors. It made my blood boil, but,
in retrospect, was no surprise.
What was surprising was how shapeless Takeshi Kitano’s Takeshis’
was, amounting to little more than a meandering variety show/vanity piece that
realizes the fantasies and rehashes the greatest hits of the Japanese icon.
There was no end to amusing sight gags and gutbusting non-sequiturs—and
that’s the problem. But while it’s easy to forgive Kitano a bum
experiment, it’s much harder to digest L’Enfer, the second part
of a trilogy conceived by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski and longtime writing
partner Krzysztof Piesiewicz. Only Piesiewicz is credited with the screenplay,
but this tastefully-made nasty family drama—where everyone’s damaged
in perfect compliment to everyone else and we wait patiently for the predictable
Big Secret that ruined their lives to reveal itself—was nonetheless so
dismally distant from the genius spirit of their legendary partnership that
I wanted to write letters of condolence to Kieslowski’s heirs.
But depressing as Piesiewicz’s stab at solo screenwriting was, rock star
Nick Cave’s debut script blossomed into one the festival’s marvels.
I was impressed after finally seeing John Hillcoat’s rarely-screened 1988
prison flick Ghosts...of the Civil Dead, which was followed by a Q&A with
Hillcoat and Cave, who did music, a small role and some minimal writing for
the film. (I may not have snared an interview with Cave, but I did get to chat
with him and admire his new handlebar moustache up close.) Hillcoat’s
The Proposition however, written exclusively by Cave, takes Ghosts...of the
Civil Undead’s severity and political pulse to another level while proving
itself the most revelatory western since Dead Man. Set in the 1880s Australian
outback, it traces a colonial nightmare through acts of savagery within race,
class and family. Hillcoat’s vision is simultaneously schematic and compassionate,
strong performances from Ray Winstone and Emily Watson complicate the tale’s
moral geometry and the score, by Cave and Dirty Three/Bad Seeds violinist Warren
Ellis, is absolutely haunting.
Similarly elegant and brutal was Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance,
the second film in his Revenge Trilogy (the first is finally seeing regular
release in the coming weeks). Passing resemblances to Kill Bill aside, Park’s
seductive talent for snowing us with rapid montage, colourful spectacle, black
humour and wildly elliptical narrative is tempered by his cunning sense for
when to slow down and focus chillingly on themes of vigilantism, the perpetuation
of violence and guilt.
Guilt may just be the unseen character in Michael Haneke’s Caché
(which will also be screened at the upcoming Edmonton International Film Festival),
his scarily absorbing anti-thriller about a Parisian couple (Daniel Auteuil
and Juliette Binoche) under surveillance. (Like The Proposition, Caché
deals with unpleasant colonial memories.) Haneke’s long takes unnerve
brilliantly, but his most delicate trick is his total denial of privileged information:
we see everything but are no better equipped to decode the film’s secret.
Not that this diminishes power; on the contrary, when the credits rolled, I
heard several hundred spines shake off a shiver.
Tsai Ming-liang’s The Wayward Cloud springs between minimalist comedy
and delirious musical sequences that illuminate a love story between a girl
and a porn star in the midst of a water shortage in Taipei. Fluids are of the
essence, and everything comes to a head, so to speak, in the film’s truly
audacious and bizarrely touching finale. To warm up fans, Tsai screened the
charming 1961 Grace Cheng musical The Wild, Wild Rose, presumably a genuine
source of inspiration but in no way an indication of the watermelon sex and
vaginal spelunking to come. During Q&As for both films, Tsai just beamed
his broad Buddha smile and gave nothing away. I find it tremendously endearing
that this guy seems to have no idea how weird he is.
All of these films (and some I’ll be covering in upcoming articles) impressed
me with complex narratives and bold styles, yet curiously, the two that linger
with me most are the most deceptively simple. Do lucky numbers mean anything?
Because Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times should be the film to finally bring
him a broader audience. Stripped down with a composer’s sensibility to
only those images and words that evoke the most essential feelings and ideas,
these three stories of love’s labours, set in 1966, 1911 and 2005, each
using the same actors yet distinct formal constraints meant to emphasize distinct
aspects of the emotional journeys, were the most exquisitely rendered at this
year’s festival.
No film was more beautiful than Three Times, but none told a story with less
artifice and more integrity than the Dardenne brothers’ tough, compassionate,
Palme d’Or-winning L’Enfant (also to be screened in Edmonton), which
oddly feels like a comedy as it unobtrusively follows a young Parisian petty
fence who just can’t do anything right—especially care for a child.
The Dardenne’s demand we hold on and not give up on this guy, but they
never cheat us with false resolutions either. L’Enfant was as unflashy
as can be, yet amidst all the glamour and red carpets of the festival, they
reached the collective heart of an audience like no one else. V