Week of September 19, 2007, Issue #622
FILM
All the best of the Toronto Film Fest
JOSEF BRAUN / josef@vueweekly.com
The 32nd Annual Toronto International Film Festival has now closed, and as I recover and assess I reflect on numerous amazing things I saw during those heady ten days. I saw Max Von Sydow speak with equal eloquence about his collaborations with Ingmar Bergman and his profound admiration for Strange Brew. I saw Paul Schrader and Lauren Bacall spontaneously entertain a crowd when a gala screening of The Walker broke down due to mis-ordered reels. I saw some lady nearly run over Brad Pitt. I saw Jonathan Rosenbaum nod off repeatedly during the new Jacques Rivette movie. I also saw nearly 30 films. Less than some I know, but what can I say, I like to eat.Many of the heavy-hitters from Cannes turned up and did not disappoint. The Coens’ No Country for Old Men, slated for November release, is indeed sumptuously spare, poetic, rooted in place, action and character, and easily their best in years. Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis bio-pic Control resonated beyond what I expected, while Palme d’Or-winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days confidently borrowed a page from the Dardennes’ book, following their female protagonist with dogged concentration as she goes about her risky business of facilitating a friend’s illegal abortion. (Both will screen during the Edmonton International Film Festival.)
Yet there were less-hyped Cannes selections at TIFF that deserve more attention. Based on Blake Nelson’s novel concerning a teen dealing with the aftermath of an accidental death, Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park might not wield the cultural heft of Elephant or Last Days, but it takes some of their most compelling techniques—as well as others from Van Sant’s early films—and makes something perhaps even better, more seductive, more persistently wondrous, and, as it happens, very funny. A love triangle set within a Mennonite community in Chihuahua, Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light likewise reaches a new height of maturity in both formal and emotional terms for the Battle in Heaven director, yet it has so far failed to find North American distribution, making cynics wonder if you can sell Reygadas’s particular form of meditative humanism without blow jobs.
Of I’m Not There, all I can say for now about Todd Haynes’s audaciously conceived bio-pic featuring diverse embodiments and interpretations of Bob Dylan is that some elements were absolutely captivating; others, despite undoubtedly good intentions, fell brutally flat, while certain key images have utterly stained my imagination—not unlike some Dylan songs I can think of. I want to see it again!
I also want to revisit Flight of the Red Balloon, just for the sheer pleasure. Hou Hsiao Hsien’s first film in French is characteristically elegant, light on narrative and flowing with fully realized characters and unassuming grace. Yet its tranquil tone is entertainingly thwarted by Juliet Binoche’s blonde, busty and brash Suzanne, whose chaotic personal life is tempered by the beautiful scenes in which she supplies voices to puppets.
Of the highly hyped world premieres, few felt as solidly built as Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises (opening this week in Edmonton), though Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was at least half a brilliant movie. Driven by this idea of a man so consumed with admiration for his hero that he must ultimately snuff out his life, there’s no limit to the film’s thematic richness, while the Albertan landscapes, Nick Cave score, warm cinematography and strong performances from Casey Affleck and Paul Schneider in particular reach for the sublime. Too bad Dominik had to make the proceedings so blithely protracted, with a momentum-killing succession of fade-to-blacks and a voice-over narration as incessantly superfluous as that of Little Children.
Like Silent Light, Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán’s Cochochi is also set in Chihuahua, and like at least two other of this year’s Mexican films—Gael García Bernal’s Déficit and Rodrigo Plá’s La Zona (neither of which I was able to catch, unfortunately)—it takes an interesting approach to class. Along the misty high plains a pair of indigenous kids manage to lose a horse taken without permission: the plot’s as simple as a neorealist classic, yet the film possesses a quiet, colourful charm of its own. The deserving winner of TIFF’s Discovery Award, Cochochi was indeed the most beguiling sleeper I came across.
Moving further south of the border—okay, much, much further south—Werner Herzog’s new documentary Encounters at the End of the World provided TIFF’s most arresting images. The title has a double meaning, as the film is set in Antarctica and inevitably concerns glacier reduction and its apocalyptic implications, though Herzog makes a point of saying that he was invited on an expedition “even though I refused to make another movie about penguins.” The images of impossibly vast ice and bizarre undersea life are unforgettable, yet, perhaps surprisingly, the film is really about people, specifically the various misfits from around the world who find each other in our planet’s most desolate outpost. It’s also among the funniest films I’ve seen in ages.
But the funniest? To my great pleasure, I saved it until last. My final Saturday screening at this year’s TIFF was of Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, a documentary even more subjectively pitched than Herzog’s, one unapologetically writhing with personal obsessions and marvelously concocted bullshit. A haunted, delirious portrait of Maddin’s hometown, the emphasis in My Winnipeg should definitely be on the “My.” Maddin facilitates absurd re-enactments from his childhood, mourns the loss of the Winnipeg Arena where he claims he was born, surveys streets named after prostitutes, nomadic sports museums and dilapidated theme parks inhabited by homeless Natives, all as a way of paying wry homage but also figuring out how he might be able to one day escape the city, a difficult task since Winnipeg is apparently both the world capital of nostalgia and sleepwalking. (Though word has it that Maddin is finally making the big move to The Big Smoke.)
There are still so many others I could tell you about—Bela Tarr’s film noir in slow motion; Julian Schnabel’s lovely, strange new film about a guy who’s completely paralyzed; Alexandr Sokurov’s tale of somebody’s grandma visiting a military outpost in Chechnya; this awesome scene in Emotional Arithmetic where Christopher Plummer and Max Von Sydow hunker over the kitchen table to eat leftovers and drink 50 in the dead of night—but I need to wrap this up for now. And with any luck, all of these films will be coming this way soon enough. V