Week of September 20, 2006, Issue #570
FILM
So many films, it's TIFF to see them all
JOSEF BRAUN / josef@vueweekly.com
It’s Sunday in Toronto and tumbleweeds traverse the pavement at Bloor and Bay. The movie stars have evacuated, the autograph hounds have abandoned their posts, the ladies who run this previously frantic coffee shop stand zombie-like behind the counter with glazed, exhausted expressions.The 31st Toronto International Film Festival’s over, I’ve got a head cold from too many rainy rush lines, and now peruse various scraps of paper trying to piece together what happened to the last 10 blurry days of my life.
Okay, so it turns out I spent them watching movies, more movies than I normally see in a month. I also spent them simply trying to watch movies, since demand frequently exceeded supply—I tried to see Todd Field’s Little Children three times with no luck. If moviegoing is dying, you’d never guess it from the pushy throngs trying to see any and everything here during the last week and a half.
Surveying the list however, I realize that one of the most startling movies I saw wasn’t actually an official TIFF selection but a screening hastily arranged after the movie took the Golden Lion in Venice. Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life, a companion piece to his Dong (which was selected for TIFF), is an exquisite marriage of storytelling and documentary, encapsulating a phenomenon of enormous scale into intimate stories set within China’s massive Three Gorges Dam Project, which began construction in 1993 and is expected to be completed in 2009.
A man searches for an address, hoping to reunite with the wife and daughter he hasn’t seen for 16 years, only to discover that his former home is now underwater. Buildings collapse, bridges light up, thousands flee demolition while others demolish for meagre pay, little kids sing love songs, and a 2 000-year-old city is swallowed up by a man-made flood in the space of just two years. If ever there was a definitive example of site-specific filmmaking ...
Still Life is but the centrepiece of a major theme running through many of the films I saw this year, one of displacement. There’s Tsai Ming-liang’s beautiful I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, in which a homeless Chinese man wanders Malaysia and Paul Verhoven’s surprisingly good (and unsurprisingly sex-, violence- and degradation-stuffed) Black Book, which chronicles the adventures of a sort of Dutch Resistance Mata Hari during World War II. Pedro Costa’s tough-to-sit-through—but tremendously affecting—Colossal Youth, tells the story of members of a scattered and impoverished Portuguese family who are gradually relocated. These are three other examples of this new cinema of displacement. (Spike Lee’s Katrina aftermath doc When the Levees Broke also screened, but I missed it.)
The idea of home as a frail but needed thing is especially and uniquely present in Colossal Youth, as in every scene the fixed camera lets conversations and monologues play out between characters hunkering down in dimly-lit hovels or antiseptic, anonymous apartments. The beauty, mystery and meaning of this film creeps up on you at what might be called a deadly-slow pace, yet once it’s over, its hard to imagine it all unfolding any other way or taking up anything less than it’s two-and-half-hour running time.
A fifth notable example of this theme emerges in Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes, which aspires to tell the highly politicized stories (one of which involves, once again, the Three Gorges Dam Project) behind the nearly surreal images of worldwide industrial devastation found in the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. Manufactured Landscapes, tightly controlled to emphasize scale in Burtynsky’s work, might be this year’s most vital and illuminating documentary, yet I wonder if it won’t also limit readings of Burtynsky’s rich and multifaceted work to its environmental significance for many years to come.
The balance of my TIFF viewings often slide between disappointments and pleasant surprises: Alain Resnais’s well-mannered and ultra middle-brow Couers residing among the former and Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn and Darren Aranovsky’s The Fountain the latter.
Herzog’s dramatization of his own documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly was widely pegged as another bungled return to drama for the tireless German filmmaker, but aside from bookend scenes that reveal Herzog’s obvious discomfort with both celebratory endings and the straight-laced US military, Rescue Dawn makes an intriguing, curiously detailed companion piece to Dieter.
The Fountain, which you’ll be hearing more about soon, was booed at Venice and may very well flop in wide release, but trust me, while certain moments in this thing practically beg to made fun of (ie a silhouetted Hugh Jackman practicing New Age kung fu against the stars), this is a very ambitious and kind of fascinatingly awkward movie that attempts to visualize abstract spiritual notions and relay a love story almost entirely through metaphor. Sound iffy? Just see it and let me know what you think.
And maybe that’s the right note to close on. I still haven’t mentioned a lot of other notable titles—The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Red Road, Lights in the Dusk, Daratt among them—but with any luck it won’t be another 12 months before we can report on such films, films that will hopefully have a life beyond frenetic festivals and visit a theatre near you. V