FESTIVAL ROUNDUP



 

The Toronto International Film Festival

Until I start to settle in after a day or so, I forget the sensation of helplessness that can permeate every waking moment – and many dreaming moments – while attending a film festival. I have been going to these things for years yet I still forget the net effect of all the logistical improbabilities, the stir of egos and agendas and the fever of "right-place, wrong-time."

The serendipity giveth, but disorganization can taketh away.

Still, it's a good discombobulation, immersing yourself, losing track of time, the days of the week, taking on the rhythms of a foreign city, even if only the clean-scrubbed, genially multiethnic streets of Toronto with everyone's schedules and agendas cascading against your own. But after ten days, you wonder if the notes will make sense. You wonder if the sheaf of business cards will make sense. You wonder if you will make sense.

Larry Clark's Another Day in Paradise.

At the right festival, on the right day, you will run only into those who genuinely love movies: critics, filmmakers, bookers, buffs. Hoarse, you shout louder. Even as specialized exhibition dies an uncelebrated death around the globe and subtitled movies seldom make any waves on these shores, there are over 350 larger-scale examples of these events worldwide, almost as many as there are days in the year. Most public screenings sold out and festival director Piers Handling reported over $1.9 million Canadian in box office revenue.

Hour to hour, with so many features and shorts to forage through in both public and press performances, all plans are tentative. Time splinters, often literally. After watching Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance, a documentary portrait of the ill-fated polymath who made only three other features after co-directing (with Nicolas Roeg) the time-and-genre shattering Performance, I met a 29-year-old director from New Zealand, there with a punchy Martin Donovan-starring thriller called Heaven. As with his first feature, The Ugly, Reynolds exhibits a post-Pulp Fiction knack for fracturing time. He explained that he grew up in his family’s movie house, projecting movies, repeatedly watching reels out of sequence, often constructing the narrative from shards or out of sequence. This is how his mind works now.

Thematic anarchy of a similar stripe rages in your head when you watch the lush, distilled beauty of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai, portraying life in a turn-of-the-century brothel in extended single-take tableaux; followed quickly by Peter Berg’s manic, moralizing Very Bad Things, a very black comedy that threatens to crush its viewers as it crushes its characters. You might wander from Another Day in Paradise, Larry Clark’s enervated follow-up to Kids, with Melanie Griffith and James Woods starring as grifter-addicts in ’70s Oklahoma; to I'm Losing You, the first feature from novelist-screenwriter Bruce Wagner, an elegiac portrait of death and death in L.A. For those who know the cynical swagger of earlier work like Wild Palms, it’s a fine surprise that Wagner shares with his patron, David Cronenberg, an epiphany-ridden sense of loss, mourning and the hope of reconciliation.

Galas and avant-premieres at film festivals have increasingly taken the place of the contemporary platform, offering distributors the opportunity for glitzy exposure for new product without paying for a theater’s overhead and for advertising costs. While many festivals gain from this, Toronto’s roster of glorified sneaks included Waking Ned Devine, Life is Beautiful, Elizabeth, Little Voice, The Red Violin, and Maya Angelou’s directorial debut, Down In The Delta. Down at the bottom, there were a few clunkers, such as Permanent Midnight, boasting only a simmeringly scuzzy performance by Ben Stiller as a worthless Hollywood sitcom-writer and heroin addict; the dreary Kenneth Branagh-Helena Bonham Carter vehicle, Theory of Flight; and yet another example of why Mika Kaurismaki is not the filmmaker that his brother, Aki, is, the achingly misjudged not-a-comedy L.A. Without a Map.

They call it a festival, a place to come to celebrate, even worship, or for some, maybe just to glom the credentials to get into a Tom Cruise press conference. Publicists join you at the open bar, peering toward the liquor, asking what you’ve seen, what you’re going to see of theirs. Journalists you know are also looking for pointers toward their burgeoning thematic analysis: The Family Sucks; Martin Donovan: God or Just Omnipresent?; and this year’s winner, hands down, Cruelty, Eh? I’m usually suspicious of "trend" overviews, particularly when your eyes are fiercely darting about for a source of caffeine. (I’ll go with the scientific surveys, though: Many movies this year ran only 75 to 95 minutes, with even an Angelopoulos and a Hou Hsiao-hsien just topping two hours.) The perspectives come first from the luck of parallel inspiration by filmmakers and producers, then the fortuitousness of finance, and finally the happenstance of what you manage to sample in the bazaar of 243 films in only ten short days. (Or, you rely "knowingly" on the gossip and buzz of colleagues, murmuring plaudits and ix-nays with the guiltless dismissal of a Roman Emperor, a Siskel, an Ebert.)

But another consensus racing about the festival is that a lot of veteran and mid-career filmmakers are marking time, demonstrating scintillating craft without making major breakthroughs. In other words, masters vamping. Shohei Imamura’s wild Dr. Akagi, a portrait of a World War II-era country doctor obsessed with liver disease, was alternately hilarious and moving, but didn’t excite many. The same went for John Boorman’s crackerjack Irish crime drama, The General, perhaps one of his most personal and best; and Aprile, probably the least likable and most annoying of Nanni Moretti’s work that I’ve seen; this Italian narcissist makes Woody Allen look like your favorite uncle. Toying with boundaries of autobiography, Moretti’s idiot-pedant character wears out its arm-waving, black-bearded welcome only a few minutes into the movie. Whether fiction or nonfiction, I don’t care about any of the quandaries Moretti shoehorns into his film.

Other filmmakers with sturdy work included Olivier Assayas with Late August, Early September, capably juggling the mournful thoughts of a clutch of intellectuals facing the early death of one of their own; Benoit Jacquot with School of Flesh (L’ Ecole de la Chair), a forthright melodrama about industrialist Isabelle Huppert making a sexual contract with a young hustler; Theo Angelopoulos’ visually ravishing Eternity and a Day; Bernardo Bertolucci’s sleekly shot anecdote, Besieged; Ken Loach’s wailingly performed My Name Is Joe; and Manoel de Oliveira’s Anxiety (Inquietitude), which the prolific Portuguese seems to lack completely at the young age of 92.

While John Waters’ Pecker posits a personal utopia of a meeting of the New York art world and Baltimore rough trade, Goran Paskaljevic’s Powder Keg circles around the streets of Belgrade in one long dark, night, filling the screen with a masterful mix of sentimentality, rage, nihilism and finally tenderness. Killing, killers and deadly habits litter many of the other pictures: the numbingly obtuse French sex-killer experimental feature, Sombre; Gaspar Noé’s gasp-inducing, rivetingly dark mind-of-a-serial-killer story, I Stand Alone (Seul Contre Tous); and Scott Ziehl’s compelling Los Angeles-paramedics-on-smack wallow, Broken Vessels. Then there are those films that seek peace in death: the spare tragedy of Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan; After Life, Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s magisterial, assured follow-up to Maborosi; and Don McKellar’s Last Night, the camera wandering through the streets of a desiccated Toronto on the night the world will end, picking up characters yet steadily paced toward midnight.

You want to escape into something more life-affirming: a shock for many viewers was Wes Anderson’s quirky Rushmore, a fresh, assured comedy that obliterates the memory of his tepid debut, Bottle Rocket. Newcomer Jason Schwartzman is priceless as a prep-school teenager, a potential Rupert Pupkin, perhaps an Albert Schweitzer, but more likely a William Jefferson Clinton (in just about every fashion). Or perhaps the exuberant Vittorio Storaro-shot dance sequences of Carlos Saura's Tango; or the hush and murmur of Michael Almereyda’s tranquil latterday mummy tale, Trance, aided immeasurably by an acute Simon Fisher Turner score. A critical hit was Erick Zonca’s Dream Life of Angels, a story that starts as if another close-in look at confused teenage girls, which culminates as a rich, almost mystical story of how some of us grow and others do not. Or Run Lola Run, a tiny story bursting with vitality, color and the comedy of the endless potential of life.

And all kinds of potential are encapsulated in one vignette: the fiery, unvarnished performance by Christine Harnos in Julie Lynch’s Getting Off, as a confused, promiscuous New York woman is matched by a sign at its premiere party, "Cash Bar – When we’re Miramax, it’ll be free."

The prizes included the Air Canada People’s Choice Award, which went to Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful followed by Fox Searchlight's likable showcase for hammy oldsters, Waking Ned Devine and Sony Pictures Classics's Central Station, an emotional, gorgeously produced portrait of an old woman and a young boy's growing bond in a road movie set in contemporary Brazil. The 740 journalists on hand voted Todd Solondz’s Happiness the Metro Media Award, followed by Life Is Beautiful, and Central Station. The New Canadian Cinema Award for Best Canadian First Feature, with a CDN$15,000 prize from Toronto television station CityTV went to Don McKellar, who contributed to six features during the festival.

The great Italian directors, Vittorio and Paolo Taviani, into their sixties, were on hand with their beautifully mounted pair of Pirandello adaptations, You Laughed (Tu Ridi). Was there a difference between a young man's cinema and an old man’s cinema, I ask?

"The cinema," Paolo says, saying the word in Italian, "The chee-NAH-mah will never die." There are always several films each year that will make you realize that. But cinema changes, just as we all must change, and we must realize that the qualities of new movies will not be the same as those of the old movies that caused us to love films.

"There’s at least one movie like that each year, always," Vittorio says. Paolo’s hands gesture wildly. Many more, he insists. But all it takes is one.

We smiled.



 
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© 2005 Filmmaker Magazine