hana dreaming

TIFF wrap-up part 2: enduring images - in pairs

2011-09-24T13:45:00.020-05:00

It is already a full week since the festival has ended and I am still about four blog posts behind in my mind. Unfortunately, life has resumed, with its full entourage of obligations and commitments and time constraints and that precious privilege of time for reflection on movies has vanished. And yet, the images linger on and, as I predicted, films have shifted their priorities and importance. I have gained new appreciation for films I was originally less enthusiastic about. In a strange new development of this phenomenon, I find myself thinking about films in pairs, even if they were not viewed that way. Sometimes the movie themes or realities leant obvious comparisons, like the 'house arrest' theme I wrote about for The Lady and This is Not a Film. But these new pairs have more to do with images that have naturally come together in my mind. I'm sure there is a mystical or spiritual value that can be attached to this, but for now I am just letting it be and deciding to go with it. Here then, are four blogs conflated into one, and a list of enduring images - in pairs.

Young men weeping. Two films I have not yet written fully about have in some ways made the most progress in my thoughts - perhaps for that reason. John Shank's progressively dark The Last Winter (pictured at top), about a young man whose family farm in France begins to slide through his fingers when a barn fire destroys his last chances of success, contains some of the most haunting images I've carried with me in the time since. And it also contains the most deeply affecting scene of a person weeping. There is so much to be said about this beautiful film. It hangs and dwells in its silences and shadows and crept into my bones with its autumn palette of colours that glow brightly in the film's early scenes and become progressively brown and black as the film's hero loses ground. Anaïs Demoustier, who appeared also in the festival in Elles (see below), offers the young man love with quiet commitment but even this cannot sustain him. In a pivotal scene near the end of the film, he slides down the wall of a now empty shed and weeps over the loss of his cows. I still weep easily just calling it to mind. The Last Winter is an elegy in a way film rarely is now, not just to a way of life, but to a way of being-in-life. It is an ode to the farmer who experiences that life as a vocational call, and whose reason for life vanishes when it does. The long reflective silences and stark interiors assist in helping us feel the fullness of this tragedy, even as the young man himself holds on to every last piece of it that he can. The film's rhythm and tone is reminiscent of Carlos Reygada's Silent Light which also speaks about moral dilemmas through the emotional language of the land. I wish long life and North American distribution for this poem of a film.

Vocational call is the thematic heart of This Side of Resurrection which I saw on the first day and wrote about then. This first film by Portuguese director Joaquim Sapinho has perhaps gained the most ground in my post-festival reflections. I always liked it, but it was quite different from what I had hoped or expected it to be and I didn't quite recover from that at the time. Since then, however, it has taken hold of me more deeply - much the way Mia Hansen-Love's Le Père de mes Enfants did two years ago. Many images reside in me still of this story of a sister and brother grappling with the losses implied in the brother's agonizing decision to continue living in a monastery. It is his persistent faith that haunts me. I think we often imagine deep faith as that which comforts the believer. Sapinho's film shows how faith can be tormenting when it comes without the capacity for deepest commitment to it. The 20-something monk lives an alternate worldly life as a former surfer, whose daring and skill in the water sets us up to believe he can do anything. When he falls and plunges below the waves his hands come together in prayer as if the turbulence of that place finds affinity with the turbulence of his spiritual world. His sense of futility is measured in the degree to which he subjects himself to penitence. It is a penitence that is real and is never made graphic or sensationalist or raw by Sapinho but nonetheless troubles us, as it does the monastic community he lives with. When the young man weeps, his weeping comes from that place in believers that is so hard to explain, where darkness threatens to extinguish light altogether. The candle on the floor with its single flame holds the inspiration to endurance. I take This Side of Resurrection and The Last Winter with me from this festival, and the image of young men weeping in moments of profound desolation.

(post-in-progress. More coming!)

TIFF wrap-up part 1: enduring impressions

2011-09-16T22:09:00.016-05:00

My festival is over. But my enjoyment of the films is not: now comes some of the best time – the next couple of weeks when I pour over what I saw, or let the natural tidal sea of images wash up what has endured and remained. During the last number of years, it has been increasingly true that the films I thought were my favourites or the best eventually shift and make room for some other film that was in fact more impactful. There have been only a few exceptions to this: in the last five years I think only After the Wedding and Hadewijch and Incendies have retained their status at the top of my immediate best lists. Examples of films that I initially liked, but which moved up and up in my appreciation after reflection are Mia Hansen-Love's Le Père de mes Enfants, Dorothee van den Berghe's My Queen Karo and Susanne Bier's In a Better World. I can never predict how that will go, so here for now are a list of films that are swimming in my head. And why.

The kids are all right. Several films I saw at this year's TIFF focussed on the re-sourcefulness of children in overcoming their own circumstances. Of these I have already written about the Dardennes brothers' Kid With a Bike (see below) which remains a favourite. But I was also moved by I Wish, the latest film by master Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu kore-Eda. In this story, two brothers separated by divorce find a way to reunite when they follow up on an urban legend that a wish will come true when made at the place where two high-speed trains cross. Bringing friends along from their respective worlds, they meet in the geographic middle and together shout out their deepest desires while staring down into the nanoseconds of bullet trains meeting. The inevitability of disappointment in the silence that follows tugs at our hearts but just as in Nobody Knows and After Life, kore-Eda surprises us, not by a magic realist finish, but by allowing the children themselves to have confronted their own truths in the meantime. The journey, not the arrival, is what matters. I loved the use of camera language in this film. The young boy whose dog has died continues to check the bag in which he has carried the puppy's body after the 'wish', and in one very long shot, we see him do it yet again as he arrives home. That one shot might just be my favourite in the whole festival: kore-Eda seems to be saying that we continue to wish even after we know the truth is what it is. It is the desire for hope that is the most enduring human emotion.

The kids are not all right, and they know it. Canadian Philippe Falardeau's exquisite Monsieur Lazhar will remain one of my favourite films from this year's festival. Here the children in a grade-school class cope with the traumatic event that opens the film: the suicide of their teacher in their own classroom. Bachir Lazhar (Mohamed Fellag) is the Algerian immigrant who becomes their new teacher and he himself is also recovering from traumatic events. It is predictable that students and teacher learn from each other, but what is not at all foreseen is how subtly and honestly the film deals with grief at all ages. I would be hard-pressed to think of any other film I know that shows children dealing so truthfully with loss. The two young children most at the centre of the story (Sophie Nélisse and Émillen Neron) are the only two to have seen the deceased Martine before they could be protected from that horror. They give beautiful performances as children following very different trajectories of guilt and sadness. In an essay she reads to the class, young Alice says her school is beautiful because it is hers and because she has made a life there. But it is not beautiful because it now holds a death. In one of the most insightful moments, the essay asks why her school punishes violence in children, and yet a teacher's violence is left unadmonished. The rare complexity of expressed feeling and complicated silence have never been so lovingly rendered. This film is winning awards wherever it goes and is proving that Falardeau's two previous gems La moitié gauche du frigo and C'est pas moi, je le jure! were not accidents.

Home is where the heart is…. trapped. Two films I saw this past week were about people enduring house arrest for the sake of moral and democratic principle. The first of these, Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb's This is Not a Film is still troubling me, though I saw it on the very first night (and wrote a bit about it then). I had thought I would write a full blog on Iranian cinema and its changing direction and that may still come, but it seems to need to gestate some more. For now I will say that I continue to be deeply moved by watching Panahi move around his own condominium struggling to act out and explain for us the progress of the film he had hoped to make but which caused him to be first arrested, then detained and now imprisoned. (The imprisonment followed the period this film was made in. Panahi is still in prison and now Mirtahmasb has been detained and banned from filmmaking also.) As a result of these events, the film is a testament to creative bravery but it also brilliantly portrays the ordinary horror of living out a known future in the seeming routine of everyday life. Panahi gets up late and eats breakfast, goes through his day as anyone might, with a big difference - he can't move from where he is. We hear him talk with his lawyer who assures him imprisonment is inevitable - but the ban might be lifted. The absurdity registers: what good is a lifted ban on making movies if one is in prison? The movie's most poignant moments come as he walks through the opening sequence for us of his proposed film describing the confinement of his main heroine. The irony is not lost on him and he pauses, momentarily overcome with emotion. When, in the film's final moments, he follows a custodian out of the basement exit and walks almost to the gate under the cloak of night, the fellow warns him to be careful and go back. Beyond the gate, a fire is burning - and that is our last image: a fire that is blazing uncontrolled. The warning could be about being found outside his home, or it could be about the fire, we're not sure which. But the fire burning on could have many meanings: the fire of creativity; or the fire of political tyranny that destroys that which it should cherish.

Home is where the heart is…. separated from love. The events which led to the home imprisonment of Burma's elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi are now well known to the world. Though Suu Kyi was released in November 2010, she continues to live in the country that her father gave his life for. Luc Besson's film The Lady was written by Rebecca Frayn who began working on the project in the early 1990s after spending time in Burma. She sent it to Michelle Yeoh who then requested Besson. The addition of David Thewlis as Suu Kyi's English husband Michael Aris completes the casting and is critical to its strength. This film might also have been called Portrait of a Marriage - as the union despite separation of the central couple is the galvanizing energy of the screenplay and story. We are not really guided through the ins and outs of Burmese politics and this is wise, as they are too complex for us to follow. Instead, Besson and Frayn focus on the human drama. It is a brave choice as it runs the risk of being accused of western appropriation, instead of a complete celebration of an extraordinary Asian leader within her own context and world. But I support them in this choice: the film is shot in English and many scenes occur in the English home of Michael Aris making it unabashedly an English take on the story. I was deeply moved by Yeoh and Thewlis, whose deeply embedded respect for their characters seems to shine out of their skin. Yeoh is so lovely in this role - perfect even. Her poise, her demeanour, her natural strength and fiery commitment and her moments of great loss are so finely conveyed. As usual with Thewlis you just want to reach into the film and hug him. He has that affable quality in all his movies but never more so than here, where he is also trying to conceal it under the visage of solidarity to his wife's purpose. The film walks the line of romanticizing their relationship - and we sense that there must have been a much greater complexity and suffering than is shown. But at this point in time, with Suu Kyi still alive and Burma still in play, it seems a wholly fitting way to show the lives. If I had to pick a favourite image from this festival, it might be one of the many shots of Yeoh from behind with her hair filled with orchids. These flowers entwined in her hair served visually to underline a deeper and more enduring truth: that delicacy and strength, when they are combined, make the rarest form of beauty.

Gender, revisited. There was once a television film made of the memoir Portrait of a Marriage by Nigel Nicolson that starred Janet McTeer as his mother, Vita Sackville-West. It was the film that introduced me to McTeer who is possibly one of the world's most underappreciated actors. I found myself suddenly thinking of that performance when McTeer turned up gloriously in Rodrigo Garcia's Albert Nobbs, also starring Glenn Close. The film as a whole suffers somewhat from screenwriting gaffes (including characters who speak out loud to themselves) and a kind of over-direction in places, but when these two actresses are together, it soars. I loved the nuancing and careful sexual politic of the gender bending in the film. Both actors are playing women who are passing for men in a class-defined Irish society of the late 19th century. The two scenes where they each reveal their true gender to the other are worth the price of admission, but I was also moved by the scenes of their friendship outside the hotel where Nobbs (Close) works, in the home that Hubert (McTeer) has made with his lawful wife. This is a rare and beautifully rendered glimpse of what gay and transgendered life might have looked like in the 19th century. There is a wonderful naivete in the character of Albert Nobbs which Close bears out with tremendous acuity and care. She somehow retains her femininity while also convincing us as a waifish, repressed waiter. As she slowly conceives the idea of wooing a maid (Mia Wasikowska) to help her in a dream of opening her own shop, her worry about when to reveal the truth to the woman seems like a simple problem, and not the enormous question of ultimate realities that it seems to us. As always with Close, it is her face that haunts and hunts the truth of a scene, and Garcia seems to know to leave the camera long on her in key moments so that her preoccupied and emotional face registers across a room or up a staircase from where she sits in attendance on her guests. I was astonished by a scene later in the film in which McTeer and Close, now dressed as women, take a walk on the beach. It is a source of humour that their awkward uncertainty as women causes them to now appear like men in drag. It is a signature moment that speaks to the incredible craft of these two actors at the top of their form. I won't be surprised, however, if it is McTeer who ends up gaining the most plaudits as the movie goes forward. She nearly upstages and steals the film. There is no official website for this movie yet - and no trailer - and finding images of Janet McTeer in the movie is almost impossible. But I did find this small clip showing them together. Enjoy. (And I can't resist adding a great clip from Portrait of a Marriage - which is entirely available on youtube - here.) Great performances in good films.

elles sont belles

2011-09-12T12:32:00.019-05:00

Midway in the festival. How is that already possible? And yet I know this much time has passed because I cannot believe how much I miss my puppy hana. Teaching, participating in a class on film and faith and other work will prevent me from getting home to see her til the weekend. I try not to think about it. But I swear there are dogs in every film I've seen.

It is getting to the point where I am willing to see anything at the Lightbox, because it means not being at the Scotiabank. I can't abide it there any more and Sunday it was plagued by technical problems. The staff there are very nice but it is just not the right venue for Industry screenings. There is nothing about the space (despite their best efforts) to make it comfortable, accessible or appropriate for meetings, for conversation, or for even just hearing yourself. On Sunday, a long delay in the start for The Last Winter meant I got to enjoy conversations with interesting people, mostly programmers for other festivals. By the fourth day, we cut right to what we like and don't like, what we're still thinking about - what we now won't bother with seeing because of what we've heard. Despite the differences in taste and personal experience, there seems to be a common thread of understanding and witness - movies we know are good because we've heard that and enough people have said so are confirmed when one of us says "it's really good". Of course not everyone is on that vibe. Late on Saturday I had a frightening conversation with a sales rep in the women's room, whose personal assessment of Elles included adjectives and adverbs that made me wonder if I wasn't in the men's room of a race track.

And she was wrong about Elles. I have been thinking much about it and the two younger actresses who turn in fine performances have since crossed my path in other films. Malgoska Szumowska doesn't just turn her camera on the women in question, she invests in them. It is hard to describe this kind of loving intimacy in direction while retaining a clear, unromanticized view of the subject: women university students who sell their body, happily, to support their education. To say it is unromanticized is right, but Elles does walk the line between truth and a hazy self-imposed illusion carefully. The magazine writer played by Juliette Binoche doesn't quite know what to make of it: her questions are gentle and probing, unremitting and hard sometimes, but also gracious. They like her, sometimes a lot, and they unlock in her a reserve that we sense has built up through many years in a good but routine marriage. The more she gets to know them, the more her own caring is delicately evolved - so that her inquiries become gently laced with genuine wonder. It is a performance only she could pull off, and I say this aware of being the unabashed fan I am. Binoche isn't always well cast - and what I have come to understand is that the measure of her performance is a direct reflection of the quality of direction. Anthony Minghella once said that she needs to be given the truest elements, the truest environment and then she is the very best at what she does. I watch Binoche's face, her body, her choices, and I know immediately the quality of the director she is working with. I hesitate to say this because it sounds as if I am saying her performances require a director to be good. Not in the sense it may seem. She can always be very good. But her finer performances require a director who has conveyed the truth of the film to her and then she soars.

Szumowska seems to be that kind of director. (She is pictured above with Binoche on set of Elles.) Binoche is best in the early part of the film, as she wades through her own memory of the interviews (in which intimacies may have occurred that we never fully have confirmed) while juggling the demands of a husband and two boys. The family life is good and average in its conflicts and challenges. Everybody is trying here: no one's a cad. But she has happened into something that is unhinging her just a little. Even turning up the classical radio (exquisitely used in this film), the music seems to call out of her face a million thoughts and unexpressed feelings which we will see hinted at later in a smile, a laugh and a look of appreciation with one of the girls. Her playfulness is not just that, but joy, an unleashing of the heart. She is drawn to one of her subjects without much awareness of it, though in the rest of her Paris life we seem to be living out the natural consequences of her memory of it. In the specific moment where she may have crossed the line, Szumowska turns her camera deeply out of focus and hangs us there, with our subjects in the deep background, leaving us completely uncertain what has transpired. This is not Chloe, not a film about occasional dalliances. It works like lace and we stand in the small holes observing the world being woven around us.

Much later in the film, when Anne begins to break down, Binoche's performance falls a bit afoul of a screenplay that makes one or two small choices that don't work well. I said small, and they are small. The problem is that when you have an actress who is giving you truth in that kind of rarefied way, a bad choice reads larger than it normally would. The truth cracks a little and the character eventually behaves in ways that for me betrayed the delicacy of what we had seen.

Nonetheless, Elles survives in tact and is quietly breathtaking. Anaïs Demoustier and Joanna Kulig (who also appears in Woman in the Fifth and is quite possibly the film discovery of the year) give gorgeous performances as the two women Anne is most focussed on. Coming from very different worlds, their choices are the same, for much the same reasons. They live out the sensuous and the sexual with ease and comfort, conveying their enjoyment of having control of their lives which is the reason they have given Anne as to why they do it. But here is where Szumowska shows her deep instinct for craft. Having accepted the world of these women, we are set up to be surprised by it.

The sexuality in this film is quite unusual and will make many uncomfortable - not because it is too much or too little, too graphic or too frank, but because it just is what it is - all of the above and also believably compelling. It makes clear why someone would choose the work, and also why someone might become hooked on obtaining pleasure that way. Although the women remain largely unharmed, there is always an element of danger there. The one moment when we see it realized is like a shattering of glass. Control vanishes and perhaps was never completely there in the first place. The world changes suddenly, is awful and harrowing for moments, and then changes back again (which is how most trauma occurs perhaps). In a similar way, but not in any way related to this event, Anne tries to break or shatter her own routine and we saw that coming. This shattering is not about real danger though - and Szumowska is careful to show us the difference between the safe bourgeois world of Anne and the more hazy realities of the young women she has interviewed. The movie makes clear that the structure of her life can handle a brief shattering moment. The women she writes about may or may not be so lucky.

Remembering 9/11/01

2011-09-10T21:24:00.008-05:00

Each of us has a memory of where we were, of how we found out, of what happened next and how we spent the day. This evening, my beloved and I sat on my mother's darkened balcony and remembered our own experiences of it. The day was universal and also personal: when I first encountered the small cluster of people standing around a stock market monitor watching something near the subway entrance at Union Station, I had no idea that my own cousin's partner was in fact en route that very moment to a meeting in the South Tower, having flown to New York that morning from Chicago. I did not yet know anything about anyone, but as I drew into the group and as my eyes settled on the screen and I took in what I was looking at, an entire building crumbled and collapsed before my eyes. The group of well-heeled businessmen and women cried out in horror.

Eventually, I tore myself away and made my way to Bloor Street and the Varsity cinemas, still in a daze but vaguely continuing in the day because I wanted to stay near people. I entered a sea of distressed Industry reps all on phones, clustered again, this time around a series of candy counter monitors normally used to show movie trailers and now channeling a live feed of the unfolding nightmare. People wept, talked, tried desperately to get a hold of loved ones. I spent the next hour standing with the late Canadian actress Jackie Burroughs, whom I had once worked with but did not know well, as we shared tears and astonishment and tried to understand what was happening. The word came slowly that TIFF was shutting down for at least 24 hours out of respect to the many Americans present. During that period they would offer resources, support and assistance to as many of those guests affected as they could: I cannot imagine a more appropriate or thorough response made so spontaneously. My mind wandered to all kinds of people I knew and didn't know affected by the events. My cousin lived in New York and I tried hard to reach her all day. Word eventually came that she was fine, but then the story of my other cousin's partner slowly emerged. She had spent much of the day in a rented car trying to figure out what to do next, finally ending up at the family cottage in Connecticut where the family next door knew already they had lost a loved one to the events. Her story was repeated by the many thousands whose paths and lives were irrevocably changed.

Just the day before, I had attended a press conference for Richard Linklater's Waking Life. Staying behind to interview someone, I overheard a conversation between Linklater and a colleague. As they parted, one of them said to the other, "see you tomorrow in the Apple". I wondered where they were now.

This film festival often finds itself at a strange crossroads of political and cultural events. TIFF was minimally impacted by the tragedies of that day, but the artists who were present and those who weren't would eventually mine these realities in the works that would be showcased in the coming decade. From the omnibus 11'9"01 collection that appeared a year or two later to this year's The Love We Make by filmmakers Bradley Kaplan and Alfred Maysles, TIFF has helped to relate how the world lived out the realities of that day and the greater and more lasting impact it has had on communities even beyond the boundaries of New York, Washington and northeastern Pennsylvania. I will be remembering those whose lives were lost, and sending out a prayer that today's artists will continue to reflect on these and other vividly remembered acts and moments of horror, so that we might continue to learn, and continue to strive for a world in peace.

This is and is not film

2011-09-10T15:27:00.024-05:00

Midway on the Saturday and I have clocked 13 films. I just left the Guy Maddin, which turned out to be a violent and simple pastiche narrative - lacking the whimsy, lyricism and genuine mystery of his recent films like My Winnipeg and Saddest Music in the World and taking way too long to get to Isabella Rossellini. Or maybe I've already started to be tired. It has been a day of disappointments after a thrilling beginning with Albert Nobbs (review coming). I went in late and saw the middle 40 minutes of Jan Zabell's River Used to be a Man, and liked what I saw very much. The film is compellingly visual, with scant dialogue offering a quick view of what it would be like to be a contemporary individual set down with no resources in an African wetland, face to face with tribal communities living modern lives with traditional practices and beliefs. I left this to take in Rémi Bezançon's A Happy Event which had the single great draw for me of being the first film in ages featuring Josianne Balasko in a supporting role. Balasko, who came to fame in the 90s as the 'other woman' for Gerard Depardieu in Trop Belle Pour Toi went on to become a filmmaker herself - directing the fabulously funny indie hit Gazon Maudit about women who find love by accident when one shows up at the door of the other after her truck breaks down. Her next film that she also directed and starred in, Un Grand Cri D'amour, about fading actors who have separated as a couple but are brought back together in a play by a scheming manager, I still think of as one of the funniest films I've ever seen. Alas, in A Happy Event Balasko is fine, but a bit wasted for her comedic genius in a total of about 15 minutes of screen time. Though I liked the unglamorized look at motherhood the film took on, I regretted missing two other possibly exciting films.

The past two days have otherwise been incredibly good. I am still reflecting on Jafar Panahi's This is Not a Film, which was introduced in Thursday night's public screening by Cameron Bailey and Panahi's wife and daughter. The story of this filmmaker's detention and imprisonment are well-known, entirely because the film he submitted for approval for production was deemed seditious and was not only declined, but caused him to be detained. This has been the climate of Iranian filmmaking since the elections in 2009 - a very frightening reality. And yet at the same time - that country's cinema is going through an unquestionable shift into new and more specifically adult realities. (More coming in a separate blog review of This is Not a Film and Asghar Farhadi's A Separation.) Bailey told us that night that the film was smuggled out to Cannes on a flashdrive hidden in a loaf of bread. This is how dangerous it can be to make movies in some parts of the world. This is Not a Film collaborator Mojtaba Mirtahmasb was himself detained on his way to TIFF, arrested at Tehran airport and forbidden to leave the country. He too is now under ban.

Blogging in the Lightbox Canteen on Thursday night, I lost track of time and was late arriving at Joaquim Sapinho's This Side of Resurrection (pictured), a Portuguese film that looks at a young girl's struggle to understand her brother's decision to become a monk. I waited in line and did get in (when others left) at about the 20 minute mark and saw the remainder. This is a film I had much anticipated for its subject matter. The film takes on a monastic sensibility at all turns - absolutely every moment and gesture is reflective. The depiction of cloistered life stretched my sense of credibility, even as one who has stayed often in a Trappist monastery. It seemed unlikely to me that in a contemporary age monks sleep on bamboo mats and have only one candle on the floor for light. And yet, some research proved my suspicions wrong: the film was shot at Convent of the Capuchos in Sintra Nature Park in Portugal, and the picture I found and inserted here is from the actual convent, not the film. The film is sensuous in its depiction of the gorgeous Portuguese coastal beach and the symbiotic relationship both Ines and Rafael have with the ocean (which participates in family history as well). The film deals bravely and carefully takes on difficult areas like mortification of the flesh as penance - and does this very well. While not a practice I believe in, I thought its complexity was handled well. A film that has slowly grown has time has passed.

On Friday, I started the day with another top seed, Joseph Cedar's Footnote, an Israeli film about rivalry among father and son Judaism professors at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I can't begin to list the reasons why this film was high on my list. As a Biblical studies scholar myself I was a bit dismayed by some glaring inaccuracies in the use of terms of reference and the general vagueness about scholarly achievement caused the film to drop a notch of credibility for me. On the other hand, it is a moving tribute to a great Biblical theme: tribal and familial strife caused by pride and ambition. The film's subject is handled with humour and high style - and the narrative itself is treated like an academic research project, with details about characters and relationships typed out in bullet form paragraphs sometimes on the screen. I wished for some slightly more poignant moments of deeper and more inward reflective longing for relationship among the father and son (played by Shlomo Bar Aba and Lior Askenazi). Ashkenazi's character Uriel comes the closest - and his choices in the film are moving. I sense this one too will grow as time passes. Just incidentally, the central title premise of the film, that the father's greatest achievement is to be mentioned in a footnote in a great work written by someone else) seemed highly unlikely to me as being an accomplishment of such importance in a career otherwise illustrious enough to be worthy of an Israel prize. These kinds of things are good examples of the value of story editors…. ! Hmmm….

This next moment is a typical TIFF experience for me: scanning the schedule to find the cinema number of the next film, my eyes fell on another slot with a director's name whom I love: Mia Hansen-Love. I had somehow missed the directing credit when reviewing this film for my roster of picks and the story of failed first love didn't otherwise make the cut. However, running with all my bags, I was able to get into the film about five minutes underway and see Goodbye First Love (Un Amour de Jeunesse). Two years ago, Hansen-Love's Le Père de mes Enfants became possibly my favourite film of that year - a moving homage to the many indie film developers in the world who suffer personal financial ruin for the sake of the art they believe in. It was a beautiful debut feature (read my review here and forgive the broken picture links - I need to fix those). Goodbye First Love is a gentle follow-up but carries forward similar themes of uncontrollable depression and sadness that come out of one's own inability to reconcile lost dreams. The two young leads, Lola Créton and Sebastian Urzendowsky are luminescent as the torn lovers - whose passion cannot outrun their immaturity and unreadiness for full relationship. Even years again when they meet up, the same problems exist, though we sense in the manner of a Before Sunrise/Before Sunset, that the story is not over for these two even at its conclusion. Some loves just simply last forever.

The French dynamic duo known as the Dardennes brothers seem to have developed a unique capacity for shining light on the horrific collateral damage caused by average and casual failures of moral responsibility. In Kid with a Bike (pictured at top), which I also saw Friday, they have told the story entirely through the eyes of a child, in a way that is reminiscent of the early masterpieces of the great Iranian filmmakers like Makhmalbaf, Kiarostami and Panahi. The difference with this film is that the focus has shifted from their usual pessimistic portrait of contemporary apathy. Instead, we have here a fable of enduring goodness in the face of failed and redeeming love. Cyril, the young boy whose father doesn't want him, falls easily into the hands of predators and redeemers alike. We ache for him and hang in suspense in the great way of movies, waiting to see who will win. The ins and outs of that narrative don't seem to matter: it is a character drama where the young hero, against all odds, must choose the right path himself. It is a brutal cliff-hanger as a youngster is a youngster despite how good they are at heart. Damage is pervasive when pain is as searing as that experienced by this character, and yet this is a film marked by transcendence. The ubiquitous bike becomes a metaphor of Cyril's dilemma: always on the verge of being stolen, its continued partnership with our hero somehow encourages us to believe that all shall be well. See the film and find out for yourselves. Of all the Dardennes films, this is my favourite to date.

I ended Friday with the first Wavelengths programme, meeting up with a friend and former student. I spend so much of my festival alone (meeting and seeing people around the festival, but in screenings alone) that it was a real pleasure to have that company and to talk about the films afterward. I never tire of singing the praises of programmer Andréa Picard but what other programmer walks the rush line counting heads to see how many can get in and then has to prove her credentials to the volunteers as she tries to re-enter the theatre? Her modest introductions are entirely about serving the filmmakers, most of whom she tells us, have been deeply impacted by the shutting down of major film processing houses like Soho in London. The theme of the evening was Analogue Arcadia - and these filmmakers are mourning (in spirit if not always directly in theme) what they experience as the slow death of film stock. My friend Sofia had some great observations about the way in which this programme championed the relationships of art as finite finished work separated or somehow in static relationship to its creators. Tacita Dean's Edwin Parker seemed to evince this as we observe the master artist Cy Twombly in average moments of uncertainty completely unrelated to artistic practice while around him sit half-finished and finished pieces of sculpture and paintings. For much of part of this film an empty 19th century frame (startling similar to one around a family portrait that is in my living room) sits astride the artist who has his back to it. Dean makes these casual observations all the time simply by letting the camera rest on the subjects in relationship to space. The rest of the films had much to say about space that no longer has function, from Nick Collns' Loutra/Baths, set in abandoned Roman baths in England to the empty shop in Sophie Michael's 99 Clerkenwell Road to Ben Rivers plating factory in Sack Barrow. Joshua Bonnetta's American Colour is what Sofia called an 'ode to Kodachrome' - in an ingenious shuffling of coloured panels that in his words prepares us for the saturated look of the images shot on its fading stock. While I enjoyed all these films, I was most impacted by the shortest one, Raya Martin's one minute Ars Colonia (pictured here) which offered hand-coloured animations of a conquistador who survives war. Perhaps this is the note I wanted most to reflect on, a tiny bell of hope that resonated vibrantly amid the sadness.

Where Do We Go Now?

2011-09-09T13:24:00.005-05:00

Yesterday turned out to be a five film day. I put the review of Pina to bed at 2:30 am so the rest of the films had to wait - but that is a good thing. Movies, like good food and wine, need time to savour and reflect on them - an increasingly rarer tradition in film criticism. Arriving at the second theatre yesterday, I ran into an entourage exiting the cinemas - that turned out to be Roger Ebert and his wife surrounded by a number of support people from TIFF. For many years in many ways the presence of this giant critic at TIFF irritated me beyond words. I can recount at least two experiences I had of him at P & I screenings that left lasting negative impressions: one involved a ranting that went on at TIfF volunteers because he was being turned away from a full house. Another occurred when I overheard him describing how he had influenced a major studio into changing the ending of a controversial film. These bad impressions fought with an otherwise fairly simpatico sensibility with him about movies themselves - we often agree on likes and dislikes. I have never actually met him and that's important to say. However, in the recent events of his life, and in the courage he has shown, there is no question that his whole manner and demeanour (in TIFF terms) have changed. I was moved by seeing him accepting assistance and gracious to those around him. So far this festival has invited me to 'reframe' some of my prejudices about places and people!

My second film of the day yesterday was Nadine Labaki's Where do we go now? I loved her first film Caramel, and there is no question that this lovely Lebanese actor and director is a wonderful new voice in Middle Eastern cinema. Where Caramel confined most of its storytelling to a women's salon, the new film seems to explode into the country itself, locating its narrative in a small unnamed village in a remote area cut off by a destroyed bridge that links it to the world of conflict. Its isolation means that its Christian and Muslim inhabitants can get away with living in relative peace and harmony. Magic realist or metaphysical moments (blood appearing in a baptismal font for example), seem likely to set off ancient tribal feuding instincts. These unexplained incidents, however, act as catalysts to the efforts of the local priest and imam who conspire and collude to help each other. Though they are important figures, just as with Caramel, Where Do We Go Now? belongs to the women, whose single purpose in life is to prevent the kind of war and chaos that has claimed so many of their loved ones.

Labaki navigates this territory with appropriate gravity but also with a tremendous amount of humour and fun. The feminism of her work is so deeply implicit and is so clearly at its heart that it seems obvious to mention it. These women empower each other, gift each other, mourn with each other and in the end come up with an ingenious solution that only they could pull off. Nadine Labaki appears in the film as the owner of the small cafe at the centre of the village who seems to be in love with a man who loves her. Though they are prevented from coming together by their differing faith traditions, they seem to manage ways to communicate with each other their feelings. One of the things I loved about this film was the way that it avoided all kinds of predictable story traps - one of them which might have been to resolve or conclude this love affair. Labaki could have followed many tangential and traditional story arcs to complete or fulfill in the classic sense the patterns of narrative we have come to expect. Her strength is that she resists doing so. Life is not so conclusive and yet this story remains fulfilling. The focus is not on her character or on any one character: the focus is on the community of women and how they work to sustain the spirit of peace and love that undergirds both their faith traditions. They do it from a place of faith, but in complete solidarity with each other. There is a Fellini-esque bit of surrealism when a travelling band of Russian burlesque dancers is co-opted by the women into the village to distract the men from fighting: even these women are eventually drawn into the plan.

Labaki seems to delight in the behaviour of this incredible community of women: the opening sequence where they move toward the communal graveyard, half-singing and dancing, is perhaps the most iconic image the film offers us of its heart. Coming right after having seen Pina, this sequence made me feel like I had never left, and that somehow the spirit of Wuppertal had landed in Lebanon. This often happens in the TIFF experience, where the themes and moods of one film blend into another.

pina dreaming

2011-09-09T00:26:00.004-05:00

Arriving in the Industry pick-up centre this morning at the Hyatt Regency on King, I was surprised at how full it already was, as people (many arriving directly from Venice) trailed suitcases and suitbags - too anxious to get their package to check in first. It seemed impossible to me that a cliché was the very first piece of dialogue I overheard: "I'm Jack. We met in Cannes I think."

It has been an exciting first day. But before I get to that, I have to I start my TIFF blogging with an apology. For the last few years I have been ranting about the Lightbox - its corporate leadweight on the festival, the way it symbolizes the increasingly corporate profie of TIFF that has changed it from an alternative art-house salon into a marketplace. But now that I am attending movies in it, I have to say that it is a great screening house. The cinemas are ideal movie spaces - and it only takes a quick walk up the street to the loathsome Scotiabank to feel the gratitude deepen. TIFF's P & I screenings are split this year between the Scotiabank multiplex and the Lightbox. The LB screens are exquisite (and my first film was made all the richer by its cinema space). The building also contains the feeling of "museum" in a way that is entirely appropriate. I will have to get used to the many suspended walkways and glass railings that feed my vertigo, but the building works and is a pleasure to be in.

My first screening was Wim Wenders' Pina, and it was thrilling to be handed my 3D glasses. Waiting for the lights to go down I listened in on a conversation behind me: two men talking about Lars Von Trier's Melancholia which they had just seen. I had hoped so much to arrive in time today for that screening, but couldn't manage it. I learned much however from their intelligent, insightful discussion which included relating it to von Trier's wider work.

Pina's gorgeous lines are borne out of Wim Wenders ability to adopt Bausch's eye for the inspiration born of environment, from an industrial complex to open mountain side to the graceful gliding of the monorail through Wuppertal like a dancer itself. The decision for 3-D works, though I wasn't sure at first. 3-D offers a separation of space that feels like CGI and takes a while to adjust to as having been generated in true action. The advantage here is that it simulates the way we experience dance in the theatre and Wenders seems to intuit that - with shots that play with the concept of a theatrical 'house' - where the heads of those like us are visible in the frame watching the dance. And yet in many other ways the film seeks to break the fourth wall. It made me think of the work of my friend and Canadian filmmaker Moze Mossanen who has been doing this since the 1980s with his films about dance. I can't wait for Moze to see this film and assess the 3D aspect. Which wall are we breaking with the third dimension? It seems to be about depth of field and there are moments when the dancers seem to be coming right toward us. There is a layering of the theatrical sets that also works well.

Wenders' respect for Bausch is perhaps the most moving thing about Pina. It is an homage, from one German master to another, speaking across forms but with a tremendous amount of suspended ego. Their styles seem to blend. When Pina Bausch died two years ago, I wrote a piece on her then. (Go here to read it.) I wrote there about Café Muller and how haunting it is to watch Bausch perform it. Wenders uses that footage of her performance in a wonderful way, nestling it in the centre of a sequence that approaches the piece through the reminiscences of her collaborators, who then perform the work again. The film seeks to lift its participants' voices out of the body by allowing us to simply watch them, as we hear their voice. It is a clever device. In the end it is the dances themselves which transfix the image and memory of Pina in our hearts. Lovingly performed by an otherwise sorrowful company, still adjusting to her departure, they lift out of even three dimensions into a weightless undefinable reality.

Like Christmas Eve

2011-09-07T22:37:00.004-05:00

I came back from my island idyll (which was fantastic) and before I knew it, August had turned into September and now here we are at this night like Christmas Eve, the night before it all begins. The final list of new titles announced in connection with the Masters and Discovery line-ups held many many last-minute riches. Rather than preview these, I will wait to review them in the coming days.

Tomorrow, first day holds some of my strongest bets. Very excited to be seeing Wim Wenders' Pina.

The "Final List" Draft 1, while waiting on Discovery and Masters

2011-08-20T19:22:00.016-05:00

On Tuesday, the final slate of remaining film programming will be announced by TIFF and I will be on a cottage island. These two things are facts. Therefore, I will have to wait until next weekend to touch base with what has emerged. While I will be very happy to be where I am going, I will have not-a-small desire for random WIFI, especially when I realize that I am also missing out on having the Industry-Public combined screening schedule, frankly one of the greatest rewards of having this pass. It is invaluable for being able to plan when to avoid certain screening rooms because of likely crushing crowds, and when also to run to those same venues for that last possible screening of that film that was a top seed.

So I cannot possibly put together a final "list" because we are still waiting on Discovery and most of Masters. Assuming there will be some late-breaking heavy-hitters among them, I am going to list only 33 of what will eventually be (next weekend) the top 50 picks. (Yeah, I know - those Wavelengths and Short Cuts Canada entries look like five and four - meaning nine screenings, not 2!) The ranking is entirely subjective --- and is not a reflection of what I think will be the "best" films. They are just the most anticipated. And they are linked to the TIFF online page. I'm hoping that the full programme book descriptions will also land on these linked pages on Tuesday, as they have in years past. Don't let us down, TIFF!

Elles
Pina
Where Do We Go Now?
This is Not a Film
This Side of Resurrection
Cardboard Village
The Lady
Wavelengths 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
A Simple Life (pictured)
Martha Marcy May Marlene
In My Mother's Arms
Last Days in Jerusalem
Lipstikka
Monsieur Lazhare
Keyhole
Pink Ribbons Inc.
In Darkness
Last Call at the Oasis
Footnote
Oslo, August 31
Woman in the Fifth
Albert Nobbs
Chicken with Plums
The Deep Blue Sea
Tyrannosaur
Short Cuts Canada 2, 4, 5, 6
Romeo Eleven
A Separation
Story of Film
Wetlands
Wuthering Heights
Future Lasts Forever
Last Winter

More next week!

Almost there: CWC, Wavelengths, Future Projections, Visions and some Galas and Special Presentations

2011-08-16T18:52:00.040-05:00

One of my most excited moments in Festival prep comes with the announcement of the Wavelengths line-up, which often includes the smaller masterpieces of the masters of many genres of filmmaking, besides just the experimental genre. The wit of programmer Andréa Picard is part of why she is one of TIFF's best programmers. Consider this example, in the description of Wavelengths Programme 1: "As celluloid threatens to disappear altogether, Wavelengths launches with a celebratory and elegiac programme comprised of doomed desire, vanishing worlds and a love of analogue." Alongside Wavelengths, TIFF made significant programming annoucements including all the Visions and Future Projectons titles, as well as some additional selections in the Galas and Special Presentations. Here is a rundown.

Wavelengths
(Films are grouped by TIFF into five screenings)
WL1: Analogue Arcadia (wins the programme title of the year award) As usual, the curating of the Wavelengths programmes brings forward a nuanced sensibility for the ways in which films speak to each other across form and format. I am drawn to all seven shorts in this first night of screenings: Loutra/Baths - Nick Collins' "mesmerizing study" of an ancient Roman bath; Edwin Parker, Tacita Dean's portrait of Cy Twombly, one of my most favourte contemporary aritsts (pictured above). Renowned Vietnamese filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who was discovered and launched at TIFF during this past decade with remarkable feature films, offers Empire, a "beguiling miniature of an enchanted grotto". Also looking forward to Joshua Bonnetta's American Colour about the glories and demise of Kodachrome film stock."Vibrant ecology" is featured in the next of Rose Lowder's bouquet series: Bouquets 11-20. The North African bosphorous is conveyed in Jonathan Schwartz' Preface to Red. T. Marie (whom I always find exciting) is back with Optra Field VII-IX, described by the alliterating Picard as "pixel paintings for perceiving perception, and moiré to the max."

WL2: James Benning's Twenty Cigarettes is about the same pack of ciggies being shared by twenty people from around the world. That's enough smoking to make up its own entire screening night!

WL3: Serial Rhythms
Nine films participate in this series. Of these, highlights include legendary Canadian visual artist Joyce Wieland offering Sailboat, a "vaguely ominous haiku on the high waters." Similarly, John Pride's Sea Series #10 looks like it considers visually the way we perceive oceans after disasters like Fukushima. Alina Rudnitskaya's I Will Forget This Day is a black & white meditation on waiting. This film may be a good example of the crossover values of Wavelengths and Visions, especially as Picard this year takes over the entire Visions programming (including Future Projections, assessed below).

WL4: Space is the Place
Six films participate in this screening slot, including Mark Lewis' Black Mirror at the National Gallery which experiments with Dutch landscape painting and the interacting roles of camera, mirror and artist. Blair Williams' Coorow-Latham Road (pictured) takes on Google Streetview and its ways of conveying perception of space. Austria, Algeria and Japan are the settings of three remaining films by Ute Aurand, Neil Beloufa and Eriko Sonodo.

WL5: The Return/Aberration of Light
This final programme focusses on only two films. A master of the form, Nathaniel Dorsky's The Return meditates on life and memory. In Aberration of Light: Dark Chamber Disclosure, Sandra Gibson, Luis Recoder and composer Olivia Block collaborate on an "improvised live cinema performance." Not sure just yet what that will entail but is worth trying on spec.

Future Projections
As a teacher of film and new media, the Future Projections programme offers a terrific richness of ways to see the increasingly indelible blend of these two forms of expression. This year's slate shows much possibility for provocative critical thinking. Here are some highlights:

Of the 11 programmed events, none will be more controversial than that of Mr. Brainwash, the film documentarian and Banksy sidekick turned modern visual artist. Exit Through the Gift Shop takes a satiric look at MB's opus, often criticized as well by others for its slapdash, unconceptually developed forms. I am not sure what the programmers are up to here, but a first glance at his pervasive presence might suggest that the marketing end of TIFF (increasingly aggressive and in danger of trivializing that which TIFF seeks to preserve, the 'essence' of cinema) may have had some input here. MB is apparently going to assist in the fall curation of the Grace Kelly retrospective in a "unique" way, and his spray cans will be outside RTH. This feels to me like marketing and exploitation of the media presence MB has enjoyed since the film came out. And his installation, which remains untitled (not surprising given how last minute his work is according to ETGS) has been defined so far as only "multiple piece". There's a big "we'll see' next to all this, in my mind. The installation will be at Gallery One, 121 Scollard.

Much more exciting fare awaits in Peter Lynch's Buffalo Days, which looks at how European colonization impacted the Native North American aesthetic sensibility, in a video and environmental sound installation. At the ROM's Institute of Contemporary Culture, 100 Queens Park.

James Franco and Gus Van Sant's Memories of Idaho, is essentially two films presented sequentially that reflect back on the making of My Own Private Idaho as a seminal moment in Van Sant's career and life. The films are entitled My Own Private River and Idaho, one focussing on River Pheonix and the other a Super 8 tribute to his original conception for the film. To be screened at TIFF Lightbox.

Some Canadian artists come into the foreground in these installations with impressive projects.
David Rokeby's Plot Against Time will show, in the words of the press release, "gannets swooping off the coast of Newfoundland. Brilliantly suggesting abstract-expressionist precedents from Whistler to Pollock, Plot Against Time’s interest in kinesis is as sociological and technological as it is philosophical and painterly." I couldn't have said it better myself. At the Drake Hotel, 1150 Queen West. Nicholas and Sheila Pye (whose film The Encounter is also being screened in the Short Cuts Canada programme) will present Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board, inspired by the children's game. At Birch Libralato, 129 Tecumseth. Eve Sussman/Rufus Corporation's whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir (2009-2011) takes its cue from 'paranoic sci-fi noir' and particularly Tarkovsky and Godard. At the NFB Mediatheque 150 John.

American photographer Gregory Crewdson's Sanctuary roams the empty ruins of the great Cinecitta studios where Fellini and Scorcese and others have shot films. At CONTACT gallery, 80 Spadina. UK Director Duane Hopkins' Sunday takes us back to the West Midlands of his chldhood in what is promised to "capture the ennui, sadness and beauty of isolated adolescence in painterly tones and colors that recall the British Romantics, while twinning and reconceptualizing his landscapes to evoke the brooding, twitchy surrealism of the ever-encroaching contemporary world." At MOCCA, 952 Queen West. Ben Rivers' Slow Action takes four real locations and imagines them as futuristic communities. At TPW, 56 Ossington. And David Lamelas' Time as Activity (Buenos Aires) meditates on how we conceive time while looking at the landmark Plaza Congreso in Buenos Aires. It is billed as having "tranquil elegance, economy and ostensible simplicity". Programmers are unendingly adept at this kind of prose!

Of all the installations, however, I am most drawn to and excited by Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatzky's Road Movie, which looks at Palestinian life in the West Bank in a six-sided installation at O'Born Contemporary, 51 Wolseley. (pictured)

Visions
The last of the three programmes grouped under the heading "Visions" is the actual Visions programme itself. Of the 20 titles announced here, here are my picks. Looking very much forward to Joaquim Sapinho's This Side of Resurrection (pictured), which looks at "sibling love and faith" when a young woman discovers that the brother she thought was backpacking around the world has in fact become a monk. Helvecio Marins Jr. Clarissa Campolina's Swirl profiles an 80 year old woman tackling the ultimate questions in life after the death of her husband in the beautiful landscape of northern Brazil. I want to be excited about Jan Zabell's The River Used to be a Man, but the description has a vagueness that worries me, despite my interest in its themes of 'divination, memory and traditional belief'. It is perhaps the 'existential fog' of the main character that sounds like this work may be more puzzling than satisfying. Similarly, Debbie Tucker Green's Random about a Black British woman on a day of family violence, sounds like it has a powerful premise, but its monologue structure has me cautious. The "shot entirely in long shot" is equally a caution about Ruben Östlund's Play, which is "based on an actual incident in Gothenburg where a group of black kids manipulated other teenagers, mostly from "ethnic" backgrounds, into surrendering their valuables", but here I am more willing to take the risk. You see how subjective film selection is!

Matias Mayer's The Last Christeros offers a theme of enduring commitment to Christian faith that appeals to me, even if the story and landscape otherwise don't. Christian themes also lace Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr.'s Fable of the Fish, which examines the mixture of belief systems that constitues the faith life of many Filipinos. Also from the Phillippines and also dealing in part with contemporary Christianity is Lav Diaz's Century of Birthing which follows two stories, one a filmmaker's attempt to complete his work, and the other an Evangelical leader's challenges in a rural region. Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhäusler, all German filmmakers, participate in a three-part film series, each with the preliminary title Dreileben which follows an escaped murderer from three different angles. From the country that gave us Run Lola Run.

Galas
To the already much discussed line-up of galas, is added Christophe Honoré's Beloved (pictured) with Chiara Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve. It presents a mother/daughter adventure in love from the 1960s to the present day. I confess I will take this in if I can, at the very least to quietly enjoy the divine loveliness of the two leading ladies. Tanya Wexler's Hysteria starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Hugh Dancy about the invention of the vibrator looks like it could either be eccentric and frivolous or funny and pithy - though of course it may also be neither! Page Eight, David Hare's latest film focuses on a British agent who faces down the compromises of the government, with Rachel Weisz in tow. (Is there a film being released in 2011 that does not have Rachel Weisz? She seems to be everywhere, including at least three films at TIFF.) Jennifer Hudson takes the title role in Darrell Roodt's film Winnie which tells the story of Winnie Mandela, with Terrence Howard.

Special Presentations
Emmano Olmi's Cardboard Village is about a deconsecrated church and the new missional purpose it fulfills when immigrants find sanctuary within it. Very much looking forward to this. Nathan Morlando's Edwin Boyd about Canada's notorious bank robber set in post-war Toronto stars Scott Speedman. Gianni Amello's First Man recovers the steps of a French Algerian returning to his childhood home in this adaptation from a work-in-progress of Albert Camus before his death. Much ballyhoo will be made of the new Bollywood romance by Pankaj Kapur, Mausam, starring Sonam Kapoor and Shahid Kapur. Australian novelist Julia Leigh has made an adaptation of Sleeping Beauty which looks like an interesting contemporary adaptation that comments on some of the inherent preconceptions of the well-known fairy tale. And Emanuelle Crialese's Terraferma takes place in that southern part of Sicily that has seen a huge influx of North African immigrants.

However, of all the announced new SPs, most compelling to me is Agnieszka Holland's In Darkness, about holocaust Jews hiding in Polish sewer systems. Though she has made a number of films now about this era, her sharply observed sense of human drama offers always a fresh take. Equally exciting is Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights which looks to be brave and bold as only this Scottish auteur can be. Unknown cast and stark imagery are hallmarks of her work and would seem by the photographic evidence in full effect here.

Finally, in the I Need to Revisit a First Response Department: George Clooney's Ides of March now looks more fun than I thought it would be, with supporting actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Marisa Tomei offering likely opportunity for nuanced comedy and all around strong performances.
Coming soon: revised Top 50 film list.

Canada First, Short Cuts Canada and the rest of the Canadian programming line-up

2011-08-09T10:51:00.017-05:00

When TIFF did away with the old Perspective Canada programme some time ago, they told us it was because Canadian cinema had come into its own and therefore could be integrated fully into all other programming. When many (including myself) protested that the festival must continue to underwrite and promote Canadian talent, as the only real venue for such widescale distribution exposure available, they consoled us by offering us two specialty mini-programs: Canada First and Short Cuts Canada. It is arguable that the festival has never lost sight of the Canadian short film and that most young filmmakers have found their greatest TIFF break through that format. On the other hand, the success of the feature film in this festival is still open to interpretation. Last year, the Canada First pickings were very low numbers. Though this year's CF will showcase 7 first features (there were truly only seven worth showing?) and 43 shorts, a further 19 films will be added to the Galas, Masters, Special Presentations and other programmes, joining Cronenberg's Dangerous Method and Polley's Take This Waltz, already previously announced. The idea of a fuller integration of the films into the programming seems to be happening, but I am not sure that focussing only on first features works as an idea to nurture domestic talent. I maintain that the Canadian film industry, and international film community, could benefit from a more exclusively showcased roster of Canadian films, in which masters and newcomers shine alongside each other in a clearer portrait of what this country has to offer.

That said, here's what looks promising in Canada First. A quick glance at these titles underlines an eternal truth about Canadian cinema: Quebec is where it's at. This is due in no small way to the greater esteem homegrown movies hold in their host province, and the greater funding resources available therein.

In this regard, Quebec director Anne Émond is a good example of a young filmmaker who cut her teeth in Short Cuts Canada, where her beautiful Sophie Lavoie was chosen one of the year's Top Ten in 2009. She returns with her first feature Nuit #1, a raw look at the one-night stand in all its compelling excitement and its complexity. Similarly, Guy Édoin has been impressing critics and filmgoers alike with his shorts trilogy, shown entirely at TIFF during recent years. He now brings forward Wetlands, a coming-of-age story shot entirely on his own farm in the Eastern townships. Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky take a "lyrical and unsettling" look at seniors and those living with disabilities in Patron Saints. It's described as being "laced with black humour" which could mean it avoids the subtleties of joy and suffering, or delights in them. We'll see which. I am more inclined, however, toward Ivan Grbovic's Romeo Eleven, which also looks at disability in a young man in Montreal's Lebanese community. Finally, Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas offer us another coming-of-age tale, Amy George, this time set in Toronto's Riverdale. Lewis and Thomas are also listed as producers, writers, cinematographers and editors, underlining the 'home grown auteur' aspect of many first films. The two films I have not discussed, Simon Davidson's The Odds and Sheldon Larry's Leave it on the Floor fill out the remainder of the seven films.

Although the Short Cuts Canada programme is impossible to preview in its entirety, there are an unusually high number of promising entries this year. On my "short" list are Nicholas Pye's The Encounter, Matthew Rankin's Tabula Rasa, Sophie Goyette's La Ronde, Mike Maryniuk and John Scoles' The Yodeling Farmer, Alain Fournier's The Weight of Emptiness, Raha Shirazi's Water, Amaud Brisebois and Francis Leclerc's Trotteur, Miranda de Pencier's Throat Song, Mark Slutsky's Sorry, Rabbi, Xstine Cook and Jesse Gouchey's Spirit of the Bluebird, Phillippe Baylaucq's Ora, Mathieu Tremblay's Of Events, Ryan Flowers and Lisa Pham's No Words Came Down, Pedro Pires' Hope, Isaac Cravit's Good Boy, Kako sam Zapalio and Simona Bolivara's The Fuse: Or How I Burned Simon Bolivar and Chelsea McMullan's Derailments.

Of the remaining features filling out the other programming, there are a number of gems.

Again the French- Canadian fare seems the most compelling, with one exception. Guy Maddin is back, with his luminous muse Isabella Rossellini in Keyhole (pictured at top), a film whose narrative defies one-liners and so it should be with this master Canadian filmmaker. This moves into my top ten.

Since 1988, I have called Léa Pool my favourite Canadian filmmaker but it's not often I get to wax about her work as her films are fewer and farther between these days. The wonderful Maman est chez le coiffeur of a few years ago was exciting evidence that this wonderful Swiss-born director still has much to tell us. This year she offers her second documentary, Pink Ribbons (pictured above) which takes on the beast cancer fundraising "industry", and looks at some of its politics. Like the films of Thomas Riedelsheimer, you can count on this not being an average doc. This comes into the Top Fifteen for me.

It's wonderful to have another film by Phillippe Falardeau, whose C'est pas moi, je le jure was one of the critical favourites of the 2008 festival. He returns with Monsieur Lazhar, the story of an Algerian immigrant whose own tragic life story is raised when he is hired to take over a classroom of students grieving their teacher. Jean-Marc Vallée's Cafe de Flore follows a double narrative, one in Paris in 1969 involving the mother of a child with Down Syndrome, the other in contemporary Montreal as a DJ undergoes divorce. We will have to see the film to know how the lives intersect.

In the English language fare, Mike Clattenburg's Afghan Luke tells the story of a Canadian journalist searching out unseemly practices among soldiers fighting in Iraq. Bollywood meets Canada's national sport in Robert Lieberman's Breakaway, as an Indo-Canadian breaks many cultural taboos to become a national hockey player. Randall Cole's 388 Arletta Avenue bears such a descriptive similarity to Michael Haneke's Caché that is hard to imagine how it could be different enough to be interesting. A couple are under surveillance 24 hours a day, leading to manipulative and dangerous game-playing. It's nice to see that Eric Peterson and John Gray's Billy Bishop Goes to War has been brought to the screen from its long theatrical success by Barbara Willis Sweete. The ubiquitous Julian Richings, appearing in at least 3 films in the festival so far, is part of a cast filling out Bruce MacDonald's Hard Core Logo II, which follows up on the first film by pursuing a singer who claims to be channeling the spirit of Joe Dick. Predictably, the Canadian Open Vault selection this year is therefore Hard Core Logo I. I'm not a fan of this genre of movie, but there is no denying MacDonald's contribution to English language Canadian cinema.

(Longer) short list so far

2011-08-06T08:41:00.013-05:00

110 films have been announced to date, still not quite a third of the full slate of the festival (even keeping in mind that a good 60 - 70 of the remaining titles are likely to be shorts). The entire Contemporary World Cinema has not yet been released - which usually accounts for the lion's share of programming. Wavelengths, the rest of Special Presentations and Masters, Discovery, Visions, all of the Canadian programming including Short Cuts Canada, and the event programmes Mavericks and Future Projections are all yet to come.

That said, here is my (longer) shortlist so far. You will find summary descriptions in the three posts below.

Elles
Pina
This is Not a Film
Where Do We Go Now?
The Lady
In My Mother's Arms
Last Call at the Oasis
The Woman in the Fifth (pictured above)
Chicken with Plums
Albert Nobbs
Samsara
Simple Life
The Deep Blue Sea
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Oslo, August 31
Coriolanus
Habemus Papam
Tyrannosaur
Happy Event
Fatherland
Dangerous Method
The Oranges
Love and Bruises
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Trishna
Sarah Palin: You Betcha
Peace, Love and Misunderstanding
Gerhard Richter: Painting
Ten Year
Take this Waltz
Eye of the Storm
The Artist
11 Flowers
The Better Life
Anonymous
Crane World

I keep finding things I've missed along the way that look promising or fun pinch hit runners (ie, when scheduling precludes an A list pick). Of these I put at the top, Butter, the Hugh Jackman, Olivia Wilde comedy by Jim Field Smith, about the "hostile, high-stakes world of competitive butter carving". Another great tagline!

TIFF '11: Docs and Buenos Aires

2011-08-04T22:55:00.013-05:00

Without question, the two most exciting films named this past Tuesday did not belong to any of the programmes being released that day, but instead are two more in the Masters line-up still largely yet to come. Of these, I am thrilled that TIFF will give me the opportunity to see Wim Wenders biopic of German dance theatre genius Pina Bausch, in Pina. It boggles my mind to imagine the one aesthetic being brought to bear on the other but I am certain only pleasure awaits, especially since the film takes the excerpted dance works into the outdoor environment of Wuppertal, the town in Germany where Bausch's company lived and worked. A tremendously exciting entry. Equally compelling will be Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb's poignantly titled This is Not a Film which made me cry when I first saw it, alongside the first filmmaker's name. As most people are aware, Panahi has been under house arrest and banned from filmmaking in Iran for almost two years because of that country's disapproval of the subject matter of his films, which often break the taboo on showing adult relations and political realities in very powerful ways. Assisted here by Mirtahmasb, he has nonetheless brought another project into the world which both chronicles his own house arrest and profiles the current realities of Iranian cinema. These two films soar to the top of my list as absolute musts.

There are programmes that define the festival-goer. Among these, Midnight Madness offers a chance to live out the violent and surreal in sophisticated ways in films made by often master story tellers. Alas, however, it is not for me. I'm more of a Wavelengths girl myself - a programme which is usually the first out of the gate in the announcements, since its experimental and avant-garde context speaks perhaps to the smallest number of interested people. The festival press office doesn't create much buzz of suspense around what programer Andréa Picard has done each year, despite that her programme is held highly within the festival staff itself, and I often devote an entire blogpost to it.

Similarly, Vanguard, the edgy new programme that emerged in this last decade, offers films that challenge us to go outside our comfort zone. But aside from a handful that I have loved, I tend to find the real 'edginess' elsewhere. Comfort zones exist as much in our expectations of cinema as in the content of films. I find The Tree of Life one of the edgiest films in recent times, because it defies almost all North American film conventions, pushing the poetic over the linear, the timeless over the sequential narrative, the impressionistic over the progressively logical. That is a very brave film in my mind, cast into the world without the director's presence anywhere nearby to lend a helping hand in understanding it. That said, this year's speight of Vanguard films do hold promising entries.

First of these is a film which at first glance strangely echoes events of recent weeks entitled Oslo, 31. August by Norwegian director Joachim Trier. A closer look, however, reveals a much more thoughtful and less violent film which chronicles a day in the life of a young drifter eerily named Anders as he attempts to reconcile his own past mistakes and future possibilities in a single night of encountering friends in the nation's capital. Lou Ye's Love and Bruises, has a title that hints at the crises in store for a young Chinese woman who falls in with a French youth in the suburbs when she moves to Paris. This newest work from a fascinating Chinese filmmaker may have interesting things to say about gender and sexuality when they are both located and dislocated from culture and community. Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio offers a story set in the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami affecting that country last year, with The Year of the Tiger. A convict is both freed by these events and left to face their consequences to his own life.

Otherwise, of the films announced on Tuesday in the Vanguards, Midnight Madness, TIFF Kids, City to City and Real to Reel programmes, my remaining picks cull from the last two. The city being featured in this year's festival is Buenos Aires, likely to be a much less controversial choice than last year's Tel Aviv. The uniquely Argentinian street performance culture of Murga is featured in Alison Murray's Caprichosos de San Telmo which looks at the multi-cultural aspect of this new form. Pablo Trapero's Crane World looks interesting, about a man whose life as a crane operator in the city's construction industry promises a very different take on the city from its glamourized music and café traditions. Santiago Mitre's The Student is billed as a thriller set in the crumbling world of the University of Buenos Aires and uses a corrupt student political life as a model for the larger world around it. My strongest bet in this programme, however, is Nicolás Prividera's Fatherland, which explores the more recent history of Argentina through the voices of writers that emerge from Buenos Aires' Recoleta Cemetery.

In recent years, I have found the Real to Reel programming very disappointing, perhaps reflecting a trend in less innovative work being made. I am thrilled to be much more optimistic this year as emerging voices of the documentary form like Jessica Yu run alongside old festival favourites like Nick Broomfield. Broomfield's latest chronicles the obvious in Sarah Palin: You Betcha and there is much to look forward to and be on guard for here. I find Broomfield's style very strongly prejudiced (more so than even Michael Moore) without much room for nuance, but then it will be hard to resist seeing that brought to bear on the famous Tina Fey-mimicked politician. I'm not sure if I will make it through all of Mark Cousins' The Story of Film: an Odyssey which pulls together 15 hours of compiled footage on the history of film and includes rare and important interviews and clips from the films that have helped shape our film consciousness, around the world, - but I want to and should. Gary Hustwit's Urbanized completes his trilogy that observes the way cities integrate the innovative design of their leading architects and planners. Costa Botes has made a film about one man's attempt to save Eskimo dogs from extinction through private breeding and care in The Last Dogs of Winter. Corinna Belz's portrait of the famous artist in Gerhard Richter Painting sounds like it might be a poetic reflection not only the artist but on the paintings themselves and is billed as increasing our understanding of "the art of seeing". Jonathan Demme's I'm Carolyn Parker: the Good, the Mad and the Beautiful profiles a woman whose younger years in the civil rights movement gave her the voice and strength needed to lead the movement for the rights of those affected by Hurricane Katrina to return to their homes and rebuild when city officials had deemed it too dangerous and impossible. In a similar theme to Tree of Life, Ron Fricke's Samsara is a "non-verbal, guided meditation that spans the globe on a journey of the soul." I'm game for that journey.

My two top picks in this category, however, are Atia Al Daradji and Mohamed Al Daradji's In My Mother's Arms and Jessica Yu's Last Call at the Oasis. The former profiles Hasham, a man who rescued 32 children from warzones and has cared for them, who nonetheless is forced to find new lodgings with them when threatened with eviction. A rare opportunity to see behind the scenes on the Iraqi side of this ongoing war, it promises an important reality check on the true picture of civilian casualties caused by it. Jessica Yu's film explores how North Americans stay oblivious to the profound water crisis soon to affect us all.

Already some second thoughts

2011-07-28T07:55:00.012-05:00

It's been two days since the big TIFF announcement of the first slate and I already have shifting thoughts.

First off, there were some I missed altogether. The always-wonderful Nanni Moretti returns with a comedic look at the Vatican called Habemus Papam. Ever since this Italian master got on his Vespa in the 1990s and began exploring Italy as a way of finding his own heart, I have been riding sidecar. A Happy Event looks like a gentle comedy from director Rémi Bezançon that is hardly breaking new ground but might offer quiet memorable moments. It's been so long since there's been a film from Fred Schepisi, whose Russia House I loved in the early 90s. Charlotte Rampling takes the lead in Eye of the Storm about a woman facing end of life decisions, surrounded by an A+ list of Aussies that includes Judy Davis and Geoffrey Rush. These all come onto my longer short-list.

Some films that I didn't even bother to include in my "worth seeing but I won't likely" list earlier, have come more into view now. This includes Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive, about a stuntdriver drawn into a heist, starring Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan. My interest stems from realizing that the screenwriter is Hossein Amini whose gorgeous adaptations of Jude and Wings of the Dove previously bode well here. I also failed to mention Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz (pictured above) starring Michelle Williams, Seth Rogan and Sarah Silverman, the next feature from the Canadian actress whose beautiful Away From Her was such an impressive hit of the 2006 festival. Polley has once again written the screenplay for the film. The story, which looks at a woman torn by her husband and a man she has recently met, sounds like it could be a reworking of Marie-Jo et ses deux amours, by Robert Guédiguian, which was a favourite film for me of the 2002 festival. If Take this Waltz has half the simplicity and subtle intimacy of that film, it will be wonderful indeed.

Like Crazy, Drake Doremus' film about two college kids who fall madly in love and then must test that commitment while living in separate cities - sounds much to me like the novel Raymond and Hannah by Canadian Stephen Marche, which someone should please please make a movie of. It will likely slide quickly off my list but is there for now. On the other hand, Ten Year, about a high school reunion, is written and directed by Jamie Linden, whose screenplay for Dear John was subtle and nuanced.

TIFF'11 First programming announcements: highlights and lowlights

2011-07-26T08:47:00.067-05:00

Coming online this morning to start preparing for TIFF's first programming press conference, I found two films already pre-announced by Cameron Bailey on Twitter: Luc Besson's The Lady, about Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi starring Michelle Yeoh and David Thewlis, and another Michael Winterbottom Hardy adaptation, Trishna which sets the classic Tess of the D'Urbervilles in India and stars Freida Pinto. Besson's film was made largely in secret until recently when images from the film began to emerge. Yeoh seems a wise and interesting choice to play the extraordinary Burmese revolutionary.

It seems to be the year that biopics focus on relationships. Viggo Mortensen and Keira Knightley star in David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method which explores the relationship between Freud and Jung that gave birth to psychoanalysis. Madonna weighs in with W.E., her own version of the already much-explored marriage of Wallis Simpson and Edward VII, though this one offers a parallel modern story of a married woman and a Russian security officer. Roland Emmerich's Anonymous hits a raw nerve for me: the film puts forward the Earl of Oxford theory about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. My own father spent his whole life pursuing the dilemma of this authorship (since we all know that the vast opus could not have been penned by that illiterate actor from Stratford) and believed a different WS to be the true literary voice - another Earl, William Stanley, the 6th Earl of Derby. But I likely won't let that stand in the way of seeing Rhys Ifans and Vanessa Redgrave take on the Bard.

I want to be excited about Alexander Payne's The Descendents, but the trailer leaves me cold. I hate when I can hear a bad script already in just that two minute preview. Trailers can be disasters for films because they tend to pull out the emotional line of a movie without any of its surrounding nuance. When the high points hinge on dialogue like "Dad, you just don't get it. Mom was cheating on you," I want to run.

In this vein, there are films bound to be very worth seeing but which I won't likely go for because I'm just not drawn enough to the subject matter, like Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher)'s We Need to Talk About Kevin, starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly, about a woman whose son has an inclination toward evil. There is already considerable buzz around Coppola's Twixt, that bridges present and past Woody Allen-style (see Midnight in Paris) about a mystery writer who becomes involved with local ghosts. Almodovar's latest, The Skin I Live In about a plastic surgeon-inventor of skin tissue makes me nauseously cautious in advance, despite the genius of this filmmaker. However, on the guilty pleasures front, I probably will take in Jane Fonda as an aging hippie in Peace, Love and Misunderstanding, despite that awful title and my gut fear that the Bruce Beresford film may be a bit too treacly. Still trying to decide about seeing Lars von Trier's Melancholia. I have been so turned off by his recent work, though I hear this hearkens back to the brilliance of Breaking the Waves. We'll see. I am similarly uncertain about Fernando Meirelles' 360, a thriller starring Jude Law, Rachel Weisz and Anthony Hopkins about "sexual relationships that transgress social boundaries", not an entirely new concept. Jonathan Levine's 50/50 is being billed as a 'cancer comedy' but I'm not sure I can have those two things go together at the moment. Jeff Who Lives at Home by newcomer brothers Jay and Mark Duplass could be a breakthrough hit with its average-day come-mystical experience storyline of a man who heads out on an errand for his mother and encounters life-changing events. Finally, I'm sure George Clooney's Ides of March will be another accomplished piece from that actor-director, but I'm so bored with US political election story movies that I will likely pass. I am quite willing to realize later that I was stupid about all of these pre-assumptions, but right now they're firmly in place. Many will be excited about Todd Solondz' latest Dark Horse, and I might get in this one - that will be a scheduling call.

The Real Front-runners.
So what am I excited about? Lots. A few years ago Pawil Pawlikoski released an edgey girl-romance called My Summer of Love. It was an immediate hit among festival press and industry. This year he's back with The Woman in the Fifth starring Kristin Scott Thomas about an American writer (Ethan Hawke), who moves to Paris to be closer to his daughter, and befriends Thomas while working as a security guard. (Another security guard - see Madonna's W.E. above.) Nadine Labaki (Caramel) seeks to explore the tensions of the middle east in unusual ways and returns this year with Where Do We Go Now? billed as a dramedy-musical about women in a small Lebanese village who are trying to bridge the gaps between Muslims and Christians. I'm sold on that production shot (above) alone. Tyrannosaur, Paddy Considine's film about a man whose down and out life is revitalized by a woman's Christian convictions features Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman, actors you can count on to draw convincing emotions from scripts. A film by Ann Hui is always worth cheering for, and so I am all up for A Simple Life, about the relationship between a young man and an (elderly) family servant said to be "handled with exquisite affection and grace". Equally worth following is the always enlivening Lasse Hallstrom, whose Salmon Fishing in the Yemen stars Ewen MacGregor as a scientist doing exactly that. I will see anything with Allison Janney in it, and therefore I have already selected Julian Farino's The Oranges which no one knows much about yet, though how can you go wrong with a cast that also includes Hugh Laurie, Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt? I'm drawn to Wang Xiaoshuai's 11 Flowers about a young boy and an outlaw in the cultural revolution, based on Wang's own life. Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene about a woman reassimilating into life with her family after escaping a cult could be either histrionic or subtle and nuanced, but I'm pinning my hopes on the comparisons already made by some to the early Malick. (More on Malick in a coming post on the extraordinary Tree of Life.)

Three films beginning with the letter A all look promising: The Artist, Americano and Albert Nobbs. The Artist by Michel Hazanavicius is that strange rare thing: a silent film. Set in the pre-sound era, it tells the story of a an actor trying to move into 'talkies'. Chaplin's daughter Géraldine Chaplin co-stars with Selma Hayek and Chiara Mastroianni in Mathieu Demy's Americano about a frenchman dealing with his deceased mother's estate in California. Rodrigo Garcia directs Glenn Close as a woman passing as a male butler in 19th century Ireland in Albert Nobbs. I am already moved by the images of Close I've seen from the film.

A Juliette Binoche film always rockets to the top of my list - and so I will see Elles, by Malgoska Szumanowska, a Polish filmmaker looking at female students who turn to prostitution to finance their university studies. Equally high-rated will be Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis)'s new film Chicken With Plums about a man's attempt to replace his violin as the great love of his life. Terence Davies returns with (another) post-WWII drama, The Deep Blue Sea, featuring Rachel Weisz and I love this master's work too much to miss it. Ralph Fiennes is bringing Shakespeare's seldom-done Coriolanus to film - and I will need to attend if only to hear this fine actor do the famous "Mother, Mother, what have you done!" speech. Cédric Kahn's A Better Life is about "Paris' cutthroat restaurant world", which is a tag-line too good to resist.

More to come!

TIFF 11: a new year

2011-07-10T16:49:00.003-05:00

So, yeah. I never did write about last year's movies. And now the next season is here and I am vowing right here, right now, to do better. And I'm raring to go.... except that there is nothing to report. The festival is releasing its programming info later and later every year. It's mid-July and we have nothing. Nary a single programme announced. In the meantime, I will write about some other things on my mind. Like, ohhh... Terrence Malick's gorgeous Tree of Life.

TIFF 10: My List

2010-09-04T08:55:00.029-05:00

I will certainly not be able to see all of these! But this is my "short" list. Check back often, as it will likely change a number of times before the 9th, and even afterwards.

(Alphabetically)

*indicates Wavelengths short

##indicates Short Cuts Canada short

*# indicates City to City (Istanbul) short

(not all titles in a shorts program are listed here, just the ones I am mostly attending for)

This list also does not include the Future Projections installations.

However, it does include one Mavericks session.

Africa United (Gardner-Paterson)
- I know I said I wouldn't but I probably will

All About Love (Hui)

Another Year (Leigh)

Anything You Want (Manas)

Aubade (Dorsky) *

Biutiful (Inarritu)

Black Swan (Aronofsky)

The Call (Pasetto)

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Herzog)

Champagne (Olson) ##

Cinematographie (Fleischmann) *

Colour Field Films 1 and 2 (Brookshire) *

Compline (Dorsky)*

Concorso di bellezza fra bambini a Torino *

Confessions (Nakashima)

The Debt (Madden)

Deep In the Woods (Jacquot)

Dhobi Ghat (Rao)

Distant (Ceylan)

Eggcellent (Sokol) ##

Everything Must Go (Rush)

Film Socialism (Godard)

The Four Times (Frammartino)

The First Grader (Chadwick)

Genpin (Kawase)

Green Crayons (Radwanski) ##

Home for Christmas (Hamer)

I Am Slave (Range)

The Illusionist (Chomet)

In a Better World (Bier)

Incendies (Villeneuve)

k.364 A Journey by Train (Gordon)

Life, Above All (Schmitz)

Love Crime (Corneau)

Made in Dagenham (Cole)

Mamma Gógó (Fridriksson)

The Matchmaker (Nesher)

Mavericks: Ken Loach and Paul Laverty

Miral (Schnabel)

Moscow 11:19:31 (Nyman)

Mourning for Anna (Martin)

Neds (Mullan)

Never Let Me Go (Romanek)

Nostalgia for the Light (Guzmán)

Of Gods and Men (Beauvois)

On Thin Ice (Kaygun) *#

Ouverture (Becks) *

Pastourelle (Dorsky) *

The Piano in a Factory (Meng)

The Place In Between (Bouyain)

Poetry (Lee)

The Poll Diaries (Kraus)

Potiche (Ozon)

Precious Life (Eldar)

Roses à Crédit (Gitai)

Route Irish (Loach)

Sandcastle (Junfeng)

Sarah's Key (Paquet-Brenner)

The Sleeping Beauty (Breillat)

Sophie Lavoie (Émond) ##

The Sound of Mumbai: A Musical (McCarthy)

- with great trepidation

Tamara Drewe (Frears)

Tears of Gaza (Lokkeberg)

That Girl in Yellow Boots (Kashyap)

Three (Tykwer)

Trigger (MacDonald)

The Trip (Winterbottom)

Uncle Boonmee.... (Weerasethakul)

Water Lilies (Marie) *

The Way (Estevez)

When My Child Is Born (Guo/Ke)

Woman Waiting (Bourges) ##

You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (Allen)

Zephyr (Bas)

TIFF 10: Random Favourites

2010-08-29T15:40:00.000-05:00

A great sadness for me in this year’s festival is no new film with Juliette Binoche! I had hoped that Kiarostami’s Copie Certifié would land at TIFF but no. Instead, however, I get to enjoy two films with Kristin Scott Thomas, whose work of late has been extraordinary (thinking especially of Il y a longtemps que je t’aime). Alain Corneau's Love Crimes unfortunately looks like a French version of the cable show Damages. I have greater hopes for Sarah’s Key, directed by Gilles Pacquet Brenner, which is the story of a journalist whose investigation into a holocaust round-up profoundly influences her own life.

Several years back, I saw a Canadian film about lost seigneuries in Quebec, shot with a gorgeous stillness by Catherine Martin. Martin has returned this year with Trois Temps avant la mort d'Anna (Mourning for Anna), about a woman coping with the loss of a child who was a promising violinist.

Deep in the Woods bears all the signs of a Benoît Jacquot film, with its characters following uncontrollable forces and propelled to likely catastrophe, but once again I am opting for the filmmaker not the movie write-up.

Once upon a time, not very long ago at all, the Festival had a marvelous programme called “Dialogues: Talking with Pictures”. It has vanished, but instead we seem to have something very similar: “Essential Cinema In-Person Events”. Okay. Well, what’s the difference? The difference is that the films being screened are not chosen by directors who have films in the festival. The films are culled from the Essential 100 list of films that the festival and its industry patrons helped generate last year. The presenters may, or may not, have new films in the festival themselves, and/or are re-screening old favourites. And it all happens after TIFF is done. While there is much to applaud in this idea, it’s disappointing to lose the Dialogues program, only because there was always a vital electricity to the older series, with the combined excitement of a filmmaker’s current work juxtaposed (in a larger context) with the works that influenced them. Now we are slave to some list that has been created, which is controversial in its inclusions and exclusions as lists always are.

That said, however, there are many “In-Person Events” that will be too compelling to miss. I hesitate to mention first Walter Murch’s introduction to Acopalypse Now Redux only because this filmmaking legend has already written and spoken much on his reorganization of the Coppola masterpiece. But then again, this is a man who is never not-interesting. Watch out also for his speech on the “State of Cinema”, which imagines what would have happened if film had been invented one hundred years earlier, scheduled as a post-TIFF event on October 10th. I will likely attend “A Night in Nashville” with Michael Murphy and Jacob Tierney.

The standout events in this series will be Molly Haskell, the first feminist to assess women in cinema from both an academic and an accessibly populist perspective, as she introduces Maurice Pialat’s à Nos Amours. And wild horses and natural disasters could not detain me from Isabella Rossellini introducing her father’s Voyage to Italy alongside her own work shown in previous festivals, including the cult-hit Green Porno.

TIFF 10 round-up of previews: Masters & Special Presentations

2010-08-29T15:26:00.005-05:00

The Masters programming has now been rounded out with the addition of ten new films to those noted in previous posts. Of these, Film Socialism, Jean-Luc Godard’s attempt to grapple with a meaningless world “in three movements” will be interesting, since grappling with the meaning of Jean-Luc Godard films is a perplex task for many. But I will certainly see it. Poetry by Lee Chang-dong about a woman in the early stages of Alzheimer’s mixed with a “disturbing take on juvenile violence” has me worried, but this master is always worth taking in. Each year, the indefatiguable Amos Gitai has something to offer us and each year I go – it’s just a festival priority now. This year, Roses à Crédit continues a fascination with historical drama and is set in WWII and after France. Ken Loach is back with a film that sounds like one of his most socially critical yet: Route Irish about abuses during the Iraqi war. Who can resist a Catherine Breillat feature – even when she fails, she’s fascinating. The Sleeping Beauty, about a girl’s coming of age is said to also have “breathtaking cinematography”. Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira is similarly prone to success and failure, but like Loach, you gotta go because how many more can this octagenarian possibly turn out. The Strange Case of Angelica sounds like his most metaphysical yet.

Over in Special Presentations, besides the frontrunners mentioned in previous blogs, I am certain to see Dan Rush's Everything Must Go, in part because I loved Will Farrell in Stranger than Fiction and in part because my friend Kara production designed it. (This picture is a great preview of her work!) Mike Leigh’s Another Year got my attention, about a dysfunctional group of people who confide in a perfectly happy older couple. Mike Leigh is one of the few filmmakers who are still able to think in complete ideas about characters, rather than character traits: so characters are seen right through to their inevitable conclusions, sometimes in every painful step. I am also curious about Clint Eastwood’s, Hereafter, which sounds very Babel-like in its focus on random stories around the globe joined by themes of death and spirituality. There is, however, only one screening of this film – period. No P & I screenings are listed at the moment. So it may be impossible to see. I probably won’t be able to resist Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Jack Goes Boating about New York couples or John Turturro’s Passione, a musical romp through Napoli. I still miss the fact that his Romance and Cigarettes of recent years was never properly released on this continent. Ditto Woody Allen’s You Will Meet A Tall, Dark Stranger, only because it is such a wonderful pleasure to see a largely underappreciated and unknown character actress like Gemma Jones, have an entire Woody Allen film built around her.

TIFF 10 Preview: Contemporary World Cinema

2010-08-29T15:13:00.007-05:00

The oldest programme, and arguably the backbone of this festival, is its survey of Contemporary World Cinema, a daunting mandate but one it often admirably lives up to. 45 titles were announced here, making film descriptions one-liners at best, but even a single sentence can convey excitement. Africa United by Debs Gardner-Paterson might be the feel-good find of the year, or a moving story of three boys who dream of attending world cup football. I will likely pass, but I predict this one to be a festival favourite. On my list from this programme will be some truly exciting stuff. A new film by Hong Kong feminist filmmaker Ann Hui is a cause for celebration: All About Love takes a look at queer family life in Hong Kong, a first for that cinema.

Justin Chadwick’s The First Grader again has the potential for sentimental agenda, as the story of a man in his 80s who joins a first grade class in Kenya, but something tells me it will rise above that.

I have loved Fest favorite Bent Hamer’s previous films such as Kitchen Stories, so I will look forward to his offbeat humour brought to bear on Christmas in Norway in Home for Christmas. Gabriel Range’s I Am Slave looks at London’s slave trade. Aktan Arym Kubat’s The Light Thief looks promising, as the story of an electrician who steals electricity to assist poor people in a small village. Avi Nesher’s The Matchmaker takes us to 1960’s Haifa, and a young man’s encounters with a holocaust survivor into brokering marriages. Mama Gógó is Fridrik Thor Fridricksson’s film about his relationship with his ailing mother, set in Iceland. Ever since I saw Peter Mullan in Ken Loach’s My Name is Joe, I have appreciated him as an actor. Now he’s a director as well, returning to TIFF with another feature, Neds, about a Non-Educated Delinquent in 1970’s Glasgow. Xavier Beauvois’ Of Gods and Men looks at the real life confrontation between Trappist monks and unknown assailants who viciously murdered them in mid-90’s Algeria. German director Tom Tykwer, whose work has made him one of my favourite directors, returns with Three a story of a Berlin couple who both have affairs with the same man.

TIFF 10 Preview: Discovery, Visions & Vanguard

2010-08-29T15:06:00.005-05:00

Every few years the festival attempts to get back down to the innovation and avant-garde promotion that was one of its founding principles. These programs do so well and bring so many new interesting talents to light that they quickly feel mainstream, and so a new program must be invented. Discovery was the first of these, then Visions, then Vanguard. It’s now almost impossible to see a real discernible difference in the three.

The Discovery programme, according to the press release, is for ‘up and coming’ and ‘new and emerging’ filmmakers, but these certainly populate the other categories as well. Of these, what caught my eye was Zhang Meng’s The Piano in a Factory, the story of a man’s attempt to win custody of his daughter by building her a piano; and Sarah Bouyain’s The Place In Between, a dual story of two European and African women seeking answers to questions of personal history, through voyages abroad. Sometimes trends emerge that seem interesting: Argentina is offering us two films about two women coming together to confront the past and/or stare down the future. Delfina Castagnino’s What I Most Want and Stefano Pasetto’s The Call both focus on road journeys, with The Call looking like an Argentinian Thelma and Louise. Argentina seems just generally noticeable in this programme, a trend that might be worth paying attention to.

The Visions and Vanguard programmes were announced in the same press release, just underscoring further their similar focus. Officially, Visions represent films that “push the boundaries and challenge mainstream filmmaking” while Vanguard is for those who are young and “irreverent, always on the cutting edge.” Difference? My case rests.

That said, there are some real treats here. Numbers in titles mark the notables: in Visions, k.364 A Journey By Train by British helmer Douglas Gordon, has possibly the shortest feature film description: “Two musicians return to a haunted landscape and play the concerto of their lives” (that’s it!) but it’s enough for me to be interested. Michael Nyman’s Moscow 11:19:31 is in fact a short film about how music intervenes when the ability to speak fails. Vincent Gallo’s Promises Written in Water is shot in black and white and is about the trials of devotion to a promise made. None of these sounds like they push the boundaries of mainstream cinema, but worth looking for nonetheless.

In Vanguard, things do sound indeed much more challenging and gritty, but the grit tends to the gorey, horror and/or psychosexual, meaning some of them might just as easily have been programmed into Midnight Madness. I will, however, try hard to see Tetsuya Nakashima’s Confessions which has been drawing attention. It is the story of a teacher’s attempt to have vengeance on two of her own students who are are responsible for the death of her daughter.

TIFF 10 Preview: City to City - Istanbul!

2010-08-29T14:53:00.004-05:00

The City to City programme last year became an unlikely hotbed of controversy with its focus on Tel Aviv, which some festival filmmakers and viewers believed to be inappropriate in a year that held the attacks on Gaza. (For my own response to the controversy, see my blog post here.) This year’s city, Istanbul, promises to be much less scandalous, though perhaps more exotic and will allow a terrific opportunity to catch up with Turkish cinema. Of these I am drawn to Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s new film, Distant which is billed as an “exploration of existential heartache”. Trust me that it is the filmmaker I am following on this one, not the synopsis! The really exciting entries in this programme are the entire slate of Turkish short films, which are a fascinating mix of experimental and narrative dramas told in a wide variety of creative forms.

TIFF 10 Preview: Canada First and Short Cuts Canada!

2010-08-29T14:04:00.006-05:00

The programme used to be called Perspective Canada, and it was exactly that: a cross-section of Canadian perspectives on Canadian story, with an increasingly diverse collection of filmmakers and filmmaker origins adding to those perspectives. Then it was cut and a series of smaller programmes were created. The selection of home-grown product seems to shrink as each year passes, while every indication exists to prove that the actual quantity and quality of production only increases in this country. (See Playback for instance). TIFF would like us to believe that more Canadian films are actually present in the festival - spread out across the other programming categories and that this is good news – and I agree, it is. But the focus on Canadians trying to break into an international pool of talent should still be a very valuable and important goal of this festival. TIFF has lost its commitment to new and emerging Canadian artists and prefers those artists to be already mainstream before it offers support. What is up with that? This festival has given birth to many now world-renowned artists (Jeremy Podeswa, Atom Egoyan, Léa Pool, Patricia Rozema, and even David Cronenberg owes a thing or two to TiFF).

This year, TIFF has programmed a shocking six films in its Canada First programme, a categorty that presents first features by Canadian filmmakers. I have trouble believing there were only six worthy submissions this year: why a cap on this category!? Of the six, I find myself most interested in Katrin Bowen’s Amazon Falls, only because anything that discourages young people from moving with a dream to Los Angeles I would love to endorse. Daniel Cockburn’s eclectically multi-storied You Are Here offers a chance to see the late Tracy Wright in one of her last roles, although you can also see her in Bruce MacDonald’s Trigger, about a female rock’n roll duo who reunite a dozen years after the bust-up of their band.

A more likely place to find the filmmakers of tomorrow is in the Short Cuts Canada programme offering more than 40 shorts. Like Wavelengths, it is broken into programmes of 6 or 8 shorts each, offering a wide and impressive variety of formats and genres. I have quite often really enjoyed at least one slate of films in this category. Trying to see specific films is often hard to do because of these random groupings (they lack the thematic thinking that is found in Wavelengths). Best to just pick a collection that works with your schedule and enjoy. There are always at least two or three that stay memorable. This is the category where I first found the work of Helen Lee, whom I have followed as she moved into feature filmmaking since. I will say, however, that I have noted the following: Champagne, On the Way to the Sea, La Métropolitaine, Green Crayons, Eggcellent, Sophie Lavoie (by Anne Émond), The Trenches and Woman Waiting. Which means I’m probably looking at Programmes 3, 4 and 5.

Elsewhere in the Canadian programming, in other categories, is Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies. The story of twins who go to the middle east to understand their mother’s death, it promises to be a welcome return of this French-Canadian master.

TIFF 10 Preview: Mavericks

2010-08-29T13:55:00.006-05:00

On the whole, the Mavericks sessions this year lack the ‘cutting edge’ sensibility and controversy of times past and seem likely glorified talk show format encounters, with a nod to creative process. There are some exceptions. The only one that interests me is the Ken Loach/Paul Laverty discussion of the use of privatized soldiers in Iraq, as part of an overall trend in wargame planning. Moderated by Michael Moore, the chance to see veteran social justice filmmaker Loach and Moore have conversation is worth the outing alone. Both men are rarely seen in a more congenial conversational mode, and both men have a spirituality that feeds their sense of social justice that is quiet and private but makes its presence felt in their work. Loach must be in his late 70s by now and these opportunities will only get rare. The session with Apichatpong Weerasethakul would also draw my attention except that I fear this will mostly be a lovefest for a man who is (justifiably) the darling of the indie exhibition world and will not offer any real insights into craft or process. The blockbuster Mavericks session will be Bill Gates, being interviewed by An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim. One of those gigs that could be penetrating and insightful, or a non-profit infomercial. We’ll see.

TIFF 10 Preview: Hot Wavelengths and Lacklustre Real to Reel

2010-08-04T13:07:00.023-05:00

Gee, just a month til opening night (okay five weeks), and most of the programming yet to be announced. To last week's line-up of Galas, Special Presentations and some Masters, today TIFF released Wavelengths and the lion's share of Real to Reel. Readers of this blog (and apparently you exist) know that Wavelengths is one of my favourite programs. The ingenuity, diversity and creativity of programmer Andréa Picard continues with this year's announced films.

The genre 'experimental film' is so murky and undefined that it can allow for a wonderfully wide range of thematic groupings, as Picard testifies to year after year. Her instinct is such that the programs inevitably do what programs should: allow the works to inform each other. It is such an interesting thing for me how programming like this actually achieves what many omnibus films (like Paris Je T'Aime) built around a common theme, try to do and fail.

Here then is a profile of the six Wavelengths programmes, taken from Picard's Press Release notes:
"Wavelengths 1: Soul of the City: As the pace of the contemporary urban experience grows faster and the world becomes increasingly fractured, artists are documenting the vestiges and layers revealed in flux; global updates on the city symphony." This collection of seven shorts set to open the series includes Nishikawa's Tokyo-Ebisu, "a 16mm in-camera patchwork constructed from multiple viewpoints from the platforms of Tokyo’s busiest railway line, Yamanote, and a masking technique which exposes 1/30th of a frame 30 times in order to capture an image of spectral apparitions." So... that's Kabuki/Noh meets Tom Tykwer...?

Wavelengths 2 is themed 'Plein Air': "As with painting, natural light and colour are inexhaustible sources of inspiration for film and video artists, whose plein-air shooting radically transforms our scenic views, offering a stirring ephemerality and, in some cases, a poignant intimacy." This program looks so good that I couldn't pick one to feature and so I'm including the whole write-up.
"In Vincent Grenier’s Burning Bush (Canada/U.S.A.), a virtuosic use of video sets a burning bush alight with crimson colour and spiritual flight. Kaleidoscopic colour, parenting and art-making coalesce in John Price’s domestic life frieze Home Movie (домашнее кино) (Canada), an extended portrait of his children captured with an old Russian 35mm camera and a variety of expired film stock. Ouverture (Canada/France) [pictured at top] by Christopher Becks is a serene, yet kinetic in-camera meditation on an old barn in Normandy. Philipp Fleischmann’s Cinematographie (Austria) reinvents the filmstrip by way of an astonishing 360 degree camera obscura construction, which allows for a continuous image to emerge like a scroll. Recently blown-up to 16mm from its original super 8mm, Helga Fanderl’s intimate triptych, Blow-Ups: Portrait, Tea Time, Red Curtain (Germany) is a tender depiction of a love affair. Anne Truitt, Working (U.S.A.) is a portrait of the Minimalist painter and sculptor elegantly observed by Jem Cohen. Madison Brookshire’s Color Films 1 & 2 (U.S.A.) close the programme with winsome wavelength compositions of light."

Wavelengths 3: Ruhr is devoted entirely James Benning's environmental chronicle of the Ruhr Valley in Germany and includes a 1 hour single shot!

Wavelengths 4: Pastourelle will be a must for me, focussing on the gorgeous images of Nathaniel Dorsky. This series has a slightly spiritual bent, featuring the trio Compline, Aubade and Pastourelle. "Compline is the final film Dorsky was able to shoot on Kodachrome, his preferred and longtime-used film stock. Aubade, which is a poem evoking daybreak, signals a new beginning, with his shooting on colour negative. Glimpses of Paris – the abstraction of its flickering neon signs, the elegance of its views - appear in both Aubade and Pastourelle, the latter presented here as a World Premiere." T. Marie's Water Lilies is a perfect way to end this program.

Wavelengths 5 is called Blue Mantle and will speak in a strange way to my acadenic interests, as it is focussed on oceans and seas as a 'mythic source of life' and 'legendary call to death'. Here is a brilliant example of how subtle and sublime Picard's programming is. These three shorts wind up this programme: "Rebecca Meyers’ blue mantle (U.S.A.) is an ode to the ocean, intercutting between the mesmeric sea with its glistening, beckoning waters and various representations of the deep. Meyers crafts an ambitious treatise buoyed by the breadth of its cast. The apocalyptic sublime of J. M. W. Turner’s 1840 masterpiece The Slave Ship, with its fiery conflagration and strewn debris amid wild waters, is the source for T. Marie’s time-based pixel painting-film Slaveship (U.S.A.). A languorous, searing abstraction with a hot palette updates the classic scene in reference to today’s skewed social hierarchy and the selling of human life. Hell Roaring Creek (U.S.A.) is the latest film by experimental anthropologist Lucien Castaign-Taylor, co-director of Sweetgrass. A static camera records the coming of day as a shepherd leads his flock of sheep across the titular stream in a prismatic, painterly pastoral."

Finally, Wavelengths 6: Coming Attractions is perhaps the most exciting and plays into one of the early classes I will be teaching in my new course at Humber this fall. Looking comparatively at early silent era films and contemporary experimental shorts, here again we have an example of sophisticated programming: "Peter Tscherkassky's Coming Attractions (Austria) is a sly, sartorial comedy masterfully mining the relationship between early cinema and the avant-garde, by way of fifties era advertising. With references to Méliès, Lumières, Cocteau, Léger, Chomette, the film playfully explores cinema's subliminal possibilities using an impressive arsenal of techniques like solarization, optical printing and multiple exposures. Completing the evening’s attractions is a selection from EYE Film Institute Netherlands’ Bits and Pieces project (Netherlands), which restores and compiles “anonymous, unidentified or otherwise interesting fragments”, saving them from oblivion for our viewing pleasure. The archival prints will be presented with live piano accompaniment by William O’Meara."

Cannot wait!!!

Meanwhile, in the same day, TIFF announced the bulk of Real to Reel, and as excited as I was by Wavelengths, I am disappointed in this slate. Of these, the only one that caught my eye turned out not to be Real to Reel, but a late announced Masters entry (but still a documentary): Patricio Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light. "In Chile's Atacama Desert, astronomers peer deep into the cosmos in search for answers concerning the origins of life. Nearby, a group of women sift through the sand searching for body parts of loved ones, dumped unceremoniously by Pinochet’s regime. Master filmmaker Patricio Guzmán contemplates the paradox of their quests." I think that sounds fantastic.

I will say that I am intrigued by Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog's look at the Chauvet caves in Southern France, where no one has ever shot. This could be absolutely enchanting, or tedious, depending on which version of Herzog is in play. Naomi Kawase's Genpin, a look at a birthing clinic in Japan and the bond between mother and child with a gynecologist who has been practicing for 40 years, could also be fine.

Otherwise, the R to R line-up is mostly an unappealing fare of stuff including boxers and the man who brought down the Governor of New York in a sex scandal. And who knows what to make of the Indian film The Sound of Mumbai: A Musical (Sarah McCarthy), documenting a production of the Sound of Music among Mumbai street children. This is one of those times when you have to trust the Festival that there will be more going on here than the late-night child sponsorship infomercial spoof that springs to mind. (Is there such a thing? I have no idea. But there could be!)

More to come.... (TIFF also announced one more Gala a profile of Bruce Springsteen with a title too long to copy in here and another Masters add-in, Jorgen Leth's Erotic Man.)

TIFF programming: early favourites

2010-07-27T10:29:00.020-05:00

TIFF has finally (!) made its first spate of programming announcements, releasing the Galas line-up and a substantial part of Special Presentations and Masters. Here are my early favorites!

Top seed from this batch:
Susanne Bier's new film, In a Better World (pictured). Although very reminiscent in description of After the Wedding, that actually speaks for it! I'm always drawn to films by this fantastically thoughtful filmmaker.
"The story traces elements from a refugee camp in Africa to the grey humdrum of everyday life in a Danish provincial town. The lives of two Danish families cross each other, and an extraordinary but risky friendship comes into bud. But loneliness, frailty and sorrow lie in wait. Soon, friendship transforms into a dangerous alliance and a breathtaking pursuit in which life is at stake."

One of the most poetic filmmakers to emerge in recent times gives us a poetic spin on an impossible reality. Very excited about Julian Schnabel's Miral:
"From the director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Before Night Falls and Basquiat, comes Miral, the visceral, first-person diary of a young girl growing up in East Jerusalem as she confronts the effects of occupation and war in every corner of her life. Schnabel pieces together momentary fragments of Miral’s world – how she was formed, who influenced her, all that she experiences in her tumultuous early years – to create a raw, moving, poetic portrait of a woman whose small, personal story is inextricably woven into the bigger history unfolding all around her."

Close followers:
Anything by Alejandra Gonzalez Inarittu will have my attention. I loved Babel and most of what this director has done. Biutiful looks very promsing.
"This is a story of a man in free fall. On the road to redemption, darkness lights his way. Connected with the afterlife, Uxbal is a tragic hero and father of two who's sensing the danger of death. He struggles with a tainted reality and a fate that works against him in order to forgive, for love, and forever. The film stars Javier Bardem."

I remember so well seeing Tran Ahn Hung's gorgeous Scent of the Green Papaya at the festival many years ago - and have been faithful to this filmmaker since. His latest, Norwegian Wood, sounds gorgeous.
"Adapted from Haruki Murakami's bestselling novel. Watanabe, a quiet and serious college student, becomes deeply devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman with whom he shares the tragedy of their best friend’s death. When Naoko suddenly disappears, Midori, an outgoing, vivacious and supremely self-confident girl marches into Watanabe's life. The film stars Kenichi Matsuyama, Rinko Kikuchi and Kiko Mizuhara."

Good to see Michael Winterbottom taking on something light for a change, instead of the heady, intense fare he's had of late. Returning to native soil, The Trip promises to be a fun piece and - hey, a character study! What a novelty!
"Follow two good friends in this hilarious road movie as they embark on a tour of the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales of Northern England, eating, chatting and driving each other crazy. The film stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon."

The description of Darren Aronofsky's latest, Black Swan, made me laugh out loud: it's hard to imagine Natalie Portman as a psychotic ballet dancer but I won't miss it. Reminiscent of that three-hanky classic from the 80s with Anne Bancroft and Shirley Maclaine, The Turning Point.
"A psychological thriller set in the world of New York City ballet, Black Swan stars Natalie Portman as Nina, a featured dancer who finds herself locked in a web of competitive intrigue with a new rival at the company. Black Swan takes a thrilling and at times terrifying journey through the psyche of a young ballerina whose starring role as the duplicitous swan queen turns out to be a part for which she becomes frighteningly perfect. Black Swan also stars Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey and Winona Ryder."

Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine has been much bally-hooed already and had my interest a while back:
"Blue Valentine is the story of love found and love lost, told in past and present moments in time. Flooded with romantic memories of their courtship, Dean and Cindy use one night to try and save their failing marriage. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams star in this honest portrait of a relationship on the rocks."

Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist may offer another glimpse of the more reflective and mystical style emerging in French cinema.
"From the director of The Triplets Of Belleville comes a film of grace and unique beauty. Working from a never-produced script written by Jacques Tati for his daughter, Chomet tells the story of a magician who was pushed aside by rock and roll, yet finds one young girl who appreciates his magic. The film stars Jean-Claude Donda and Eilidh Rankin."

Although this looks a little frighteningly like a French film version of Damages, I will follow Kristin Scott Thomas into any world any time - and here's hoping that Love Crime will be a more interesting ride than that other awful series.
"Dangerous Liaisons meets Working Girl in this deliciously caustic tale of office politics. Starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier as mentor and ingénue, Love Crime is a remorseless clash of two competing egos."

General Interest (so may drop off the list as the month unfolds):

A new woman Indian filmmaker always catches my interest - as I remember that Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay was one of the very first directors I saw at the film festival in 1988. Anurag Kashyap's The Girl in Yellow Boots, also attempts to capture the complexities of survival in contemporary Mumbai.
"Ruth is searching for her father – a man she hardly knew but cannot forget. Desperation drives her to work without a permit, at a massage parlour, where she gives ‘happy endings’ to unfulfilled men. Torn between several schisms, Mumbai becomes the backdrop for Ruth's quest as she struggles to find her independence and space even as she is sucked deeper into the labyrinthine politics of the city's underbelly."

I don't know Kiran Rao, but this description of Dhobi Ghat caught my attention instinctively. And my instinct has paid off over the years!
"In the teeming metropolis of Mumbai, four people separated by class and language are drawn together in compelling relationships. Shai, an affluent investment banker on a sabbatical, strikes up an unusual friendship with Munna, a young and beautiful laundry boy with ambitions of being a Bollywood actor, and has a brief dalliance with Arun, a gifted painter. As they slip away from familiar moorings and drift closer together, the city finds its way into the crevices of their inner worlds."

Steven Silver's The Bang Bang Club takes a look at an important moment in South African history...
"The Bang Bang Club was the name given to four young photographers, Greg Marinovich, Kevin Carter, Ken Oosterbroek and Joao Silva, whose photographs captured the final bloody days of white rule in South Africa and the final demise of apartheid. The film tells the remarkable and sometimes harrowing story of these young men – and the extraordinary extremes they went to in order to capture their pictures. The film stars Ryan Phillippe, Malin Akerman, Taylor Kitsch, Neels Van Jaarsveld and Frank Rautenbach."

Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go features two British actresses in much demand but with very different styles and screen presences. I'm curious enough to see how it works:
"Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley) spent their childhood at a seemingly idyllic boarding school. When they leave the shelter of the school, the terrible truth of their fate is revealed and they must confront the deep feelings of love, jealousy and betrayal that threaten to pull them apart."

I will likely try to see Casino Jack just because I so enjoy watching Kevin Spacey get in the headspace of a complex villain.
"Based on a true story, Kevin Spacey stars as Jack Abramoff, the former high-powered lobbyist whose bribery schemes and fraudulent dealings with Indian casinos ultimately landed him in prison, and stunned the world. It remains the biggest scandal to hit Washington, D.C. since Watergate. The film also stars Barry Pepper, Kelly Preston, Rachelle Lefevre and Jon Lovitz."

Emilio Estevez' The Way makes me a little nervous - I'm wondering how he will handle the religious aspect of this - but Martin Sheen's deep faith may assist in a story that otherwise sounds intriguing.
"Martin Sheen plays Tom, an American doctor who comes to St. Jean Pied de Port, France to collect the remains of his adult son, killed in the Pyrenees in a storm while walking The Camino de Santiago. Driven by his profound sadness and desire to understand his son better, Tom decides to embark on the historical pilgrimage. Along the way he learns what it means to be a citizen of the world again and discovers the difference between “The life we live and the life we choose.”

Stephen Frears is such an intelligent filmmaker, if an uneven one. Tamara Drewe sounds like a lot of fun.
"Based on Posy Simmonds’ beloved graphic novel. When Tamara Drewe returns to the village of her youth, life for the locals is thrown upside down. Tamara – once an ugly duckling – has been transformed and is now a minor celebrity. As infatuations, jealousies, love affairs and career ambitions collide among the inhabitants of the neighbouring farmsteads, Tamara sets a contemporary comedy of manners into play."

Criterion Collection Project 2; Faith in Film Project 1: Diary of a Country Priest

2010-07-11T10:30:00.013-05:00

Diary of a Country Priest
Robert Bresson, 1951, France
Criterion Number 222

Robert Bresson's luminous Diary of a Country Priest is the first film in an adjunct series of pieces I'd like to write on the portrayal of faith in film. Sometimes these will overlap the Criterion collection, sometimes not. This one does.

The 'simplest and most significant secrets' are the transparent thoughts of the Curé d'Ambricourt (Claude Laydu), a newly ordained priest who writes daily in his journal about the world of his calling. Lacking in both confidence and body strength, suffering from an illness not identified til late in the film, he leans against the walls of his spare rooms, fasting on wine-soaked bread and withering in the heat and stifling society. His crises are many: surrounded by a disaffected community steeped in mysterious intrigue, he is scorned often and made to feel superfluous and meaningless, a role he seems too ready to accept. So why do we care?

In her gorgeous essay, Spiritual Style in the films of Robert Bresson, Susan Sontag identifies Bresson as a 'reflective' filmmaker, belonging to a contemplative tradition that is not understood and which therefore has caused Bresson's work to languish largely unappreciated. The reflective or contemplative tradition in film, she says, stands in opposition to art which is emotionally immediate and accessible.

This is an excellent place to begin writing about faith in film, for if a film cannot be reflective, how does it find its faith-filled center? How does a film about faith resist being cold, as Bresson's films too often were seen to be in North America, without also succumbing to a sentimentalism or a desire for complete endings in which transformations are absolute. The thing I love about Journal d'un curé de campagne is how closely it models what it means to be a person of deep commitment to faith life, a commitment that is often filled with more darkness and doubt than rarefied inspiration and joy. The curé struggles not just with heat and illness, but with the demons within his own heart, and his journalling is the only activity that ties that inner torment to his physical being in the world. The struggle within this world is modelled in the slow pacing of narrative in the film. As Sontag writes, reflective art "postpones easy gratification". We can feel relieved at the appearance of an older wiser curé who fills our hero with warnings and strange encouragements - because he seems at least to be alive within his vocation, to have figured it out, to be plodding along. Our man is not nearly as clever.

Here, the fluid, almost motionless face of Claude Laydu is essential to Bresson's vision. His face is reminiscent of what Roland Barthes described in an essay on Garbo, as the neutrality onto which we can project almost any emotion. The camera lingers on his reactions more than on his actions: he is constantly in a state of receiving people, information, advice. His capacity for reception stands in ironic contrast to his own pursuit of God: like many gifted men and women of faith professions, he agonizes in prayer, longs to feel God, has moments of certain abandonment and clear visitation. He is unable to receive God cleanly into his heart and mind.

In the mission of priests lies the key to their own salvation. As the curé becomes more connected and involved with his constituents, he feels God more keenly, even as others find him intrusive and dismiss him. It is a transformative experience for the audience when we first see him smile, see his neutral face fill in with signs of fulfilment. The centerpiece scene of the film is a scene in which he guides a woman haunted by the death of a child into emotional freedom. It is an exquisite exchange of two people talking at a raw level rare in films before or since about what it means to surrender something to God, to submit pain to a higher power. The principle is hardly new; it's the first step for alcoholics and addicts, the first part of any taking of vows in vocational life. But it is rarely portrayed with a submission equal to that which it portrays. The woman hangs tight to her bitterness and disillusion, argues her way expertly around pastoral care and yet the unmoveable peace of the curé's commitment to her, neither conversionary nor evangelical, becomes impossible to resist. Falling to her knees, her surrender is a simple thing, not a heartbreaking dramatic climax.

I am someone who normally hates voiceover continuous subjective narration. In reading Sontag's essay, I understood why it did not bother me here. The very reason I feel it normally doesn't work is here the reason for its success: it does not further the action, it repeats it or doubles it. We hear the priest explain events and then see them, or more effectively, we see the events and then have him explain them. The doubling creates a rhythm that is almost liturgical, like the repetition of psalms or scriptural phrases or well-known hymns.

In the end, the curé cannot ultimately live in the world of his kind of success. When he is unable to break an angry child from her own commitment to sin, he resigns himself. His body submits to the creeping illness but we suspect that his mind might have done so too, given the chance. Instead, the deterioration of the body and his failure with the child allows the kind of release we saw in the bereaved mother: he surrenders more and more to the grace of his own enduring commitment. His death is not one of winning or losing but of resting comfortably in his own skin, aware of the light in his heart and reunited with it.

Criterion Collection Project 1: Claire's Knee

2010-06-26T12:09:00.026-05:00

Claire's Knee
Eric Rohmer, 1970, France
Criterion Number 342 (no. 5 of the collected Six Moral Tales)

Nothing conjures summer quite like an Eric Rohmer film, and so I start my journey here with the master of the ethical fable, and one of my favourite filmmakers. This fifth in Rohmer's Moral Tales series, le genou de Claire laces together themes of fidelity and desire so delicately that the slightest shift in the cool breeze of the Alpine lac d'Annecy might throw it all awry. The French/Swiss border lake north of Grenoble serves as a spectacular backdrop to the unwinding of the personal intrigue of Jerôme, a man just slightly past his prime, flirting with ideas of continuing the promiscuity of his past on the eve of his marriage. As always with Rohmer, seasoned actors mix with newcomers and the pace sets itself. Title cards tell of the passing of days and feel like chapter headings of a lazy summer book, the kind we bring to the beach and read only a page of each day (in the idyllic holiday).

As in all his movies, Rohmer's ironic take on relationships stays firmly grounded in an almost intractable sense of the natural order of things, which includes in his world a belief that fixed and committed relationships work best. With this destination in mind, he enjoys putting his characters through distraction and disaffection, tumbling them in and out of almost-bed with one another, while they sort out where their hearts are leading them. His are character-driven films, in which the camera discovers with us the inevitable truths to be revealed. There is no way to predict the course of narrative in his tales. Not because they are spellbinding and full of clever twists, but precisely because they are not. Rohmer is the master of the anti-climax, but one which feels like a relief and a release.

Jerôme is guided by Aurore (played by Aurora Cornu), a novelist searching for inspiration who volunteers him to 'experiment' a contrived situation of love by getting him to appear to return the love of a young girl. He does so, and since he has no genuine desire for her, regrets himself. Things change when he first feels desire for her sister (by marriage), Claire. Confronted with Claire's knee while she is up a ladder, he feels a twinge of that which the novelist had hoped to inspire elsewhere.

Jerôme does not pursue Claire so much as pursue an idea about wanting Claire. The idea is what taunts him, not the woman herself. When circumstance leads them both into a scenario for possible romance, the action of putting his hand on Claire's knee becomes transformative for Jerôme. Believing himself to be ridding the girl of a terrible boyfriend, his fidelity of purpose supplants his desire and he feels an almost altruistic happiness. The movie's final scene makes clear the irony of this conceit, but no one cares. The characters end up where they belong and integrity is in tact.

A mainstay of a Rohmer film is that the hero/ine is never in love with the right person. In this film, the transitory love of youth is personified in the disingenuos performance of Béatrice Romand who plays Laura, a 16 year old girl in a sort of Nabokovian state of transition into nubile sexuality, in love with Jerôme but much too smart to move there too quickly. Instead, she talks to him about it, while lying in his arms on a mountainous hillside. People talk in Rohmer films, more than they do, and it astonishes me therefore that I like them so much. But the talk in these films is a spiritual journeying, a kind of voyage of self that is pragmatic and distancing but also captures the essence of how love works. The nearest equivalent I can think of is Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset.

In the end, the characters' own blasé approach to relationships guides them best. Rohmer loves the subtle ways in which youthful hearts shift direction and yet he also refuses to see that as capricious or fanciful. These are deeply felt dalliances, even if the gold evenings of the Côte d'Azur wash them in romantic light.

Summer 2010 Criterion Project

2010-06-25T19:50:00.007-05:00

The time has come for me to begin a project I've longed dreamed of, which is to watch and review as many of the films in the Criterion collection as I can in a summer season. Tonight I stood in front of the three long shelves that house that collection in the amazing Gen-X Video store in uptown Waterloo and began making a list. The primary goal is to watch films that I have not actually seen, but always wished I had. And yet, as my fingers thumbed the fat and slim spines of the colour-coded titles, I realized I would not be able to resist also talking about movies I've always loved.

The Criterion Collection, as many know, began in the 1980s as a way of bringing art house titles to a brand new home video market. They have since survived not only many changes in ownership and direction, but also many transformations of video viewing media technology, from laserdisc to DVD to blu-ray and most recently, pay-per-view download. I have always been a bit unclear as to why and how the titles are chosen. Surveying the list, there is no doubt in my mind that some of the decision making has been esoteric, representing only the idiosyncratic passions of one of Criterion's founders. There are also titles very noticeably missing - great, great films that deserve this chance at preservation and veneration. There is nothing, for instance, from the silent era, no Murnau, no Vidor, not even the better-knowns Griffith or Chaplin. And in other cases, a filmmaker has been observed, but the choice of film is surprising. Faced with the opus of Krysztof Kieslowski, for instance, the Collection favours only La Double Vie de Veronique, a wonderful film, but not his best. It's clear that the CC is trying to avoid a kind of AFI "top 100", preferring instead to focus on films whose path to glory has been controversial or shall we say... subtle, and/or holding up now renowned films that once upon a time seemed destined to gather dust in vaults.

I'm excited about this. So is my hana, who always gets a treat when she visits Gen-X and thus has many smiling nights ahead!
First review by tomorrow night!

hadewijch

2009-10-30T20:57:00.018-05:00

It has taken me more than six weeks to shake the dust out of my soul that was left by seeing Hadewijch, the Bruno Dumont film that screened at TIFF in September and won the FIPRESCI critics prize there. It is a good year when there's a film that offers me something both immensely personal and beyond personal, touching something at the core of my spirit and causing it to linger there, unshakeably entrenched. I missed the first two screenings of this film and caught it on its third, relieved that I was going to fit it in after all. Within minutes of settling in the theatre, this story of a theology student whose passionate faith leads her into mysticism and danger, had lodged itself within me.

From an objective point of view, Hadewijch can be appreciated as a formal departure from the kinds of movies that get made these days about people of faith. It lacks something important, an anticipated axis. We keep thinking we know where the filmmaker is headed, or where he's coming from, and then we don't. But the film is not into surprises or twist turns for their own sake, or in order to manipulate us. This is a deeply felt and deeply considered portrait of the profound moments of affirmation and detachment, loss and catastrophic separation, joy and redemption that accompany being in love with God.

Celine (a breathtaking Julie Sokolowski) is a 20-something theology student and postulant at a convent called Hadewijch as the movie begins. The allusions to the 13th century Christian mystic who was known by that name begin here, and like Hadewijch of Antwerp, Celine never seems to be fully accepted into cloistered life, but neither does she belong to the bourgeois family she grew up in either. When she is sent out by the mothers superior to try her way in the world, she is spiritually homeless, subject to the vagaries of contemporary life. The long contemplatively shot opening sequence of the film that leads to this decision allows us to feel keenly her contemplative commitment and be afraid for the transition. The film takes its time to establish it: there is no rush into narrative, no desire to set up important details. Instead, Dumont takes pains to introduce Celine and her life in the real time of a mystic, in which whispered prayers lean out of the darkness of a room toward the Crucifix on the wall, and the penitence is real. After she is dismissed, the image of Celine running through the woods to a small chapel grate in order to pray, is our first hint at the emotional journey ahead.

There is nothing unusual about the scenes of Celine's piety. She feeds her food ration to the birds and prays long and hard, just as we have seen other religious figures do in other movies. What we have not known or seen on film (to my knowledge) is what happens when that spirit loses its structure and enters into a contemporary world in which there is absolutely no real place for it. Back in Paris, Celine's depth of faith collides almost immediately with the lure of rebellion. Falling in with a young Muslim man named Yassine (Yassine Salihine), she rides on the back of his bike and feels the presence of danger almost like an ecstatic drug. She is hesitant and uncertain, doesn't want to participate, and yet goes willingly. This is an astonishingly accurate portrayal of what blind and deep faith are like. Blind faith does not resist all temptation. Blind faith is most vulnerable to it, since it believes itself to be most immune from it.

Into this reality, comes a young charismatic man named Nassir (Karl Sarafidis), the brother of the motorcycle driving youth. The older brother is as committed to Islam as Celine is to Christianity. They pray together in his family's small flat, with deep respect for each other's traditions. The radical activism of Nassir's faith begins to inhabit Celine in carefully crafted scenes of mutual religious instruction. Another surprising aspect of this film is its deep respect for a Christian vocation to chastity. (And where are you ever going to see that?) The Muslim characters Nassir and Yassine understand and accept Celine's commitment to Jesus as his lover and his bride. It is not easy for Yassine, but he ultimately gets it. These are not easy concepts, but the encounters allow us to respect the language each character offers the other. The centrifugal axis of it is the same: they all love God.

The anti-narrative movement and pacing of this film provide a perfect mirror to the journey of our heroine. We linger exactly as we should in the mystical transcendent experience she has in two radically different musical moments. The first is at an outdoor rock concert she attends with Yassine. The music defies a genre: both atonal and punkish, it is mostly about sound, a sound that perhaps may have been meant to represent a mystical sphere of vision and spiritual ecstasy. Celine rests in it with apparent ease and grooves gently, her eternally girlish face more and more transported. The scene is repeated in a church where she has gone in to pray. A young group of musicians are rehearsing baroque music. She listens with the same rapt experience of being inside the music.

As the film starts to take a formal narrative turn, and Celine's choices and decisions start to have consequence, a critical sequence occurs in which Nassir takes her to a middle eastern country that is never named. There she witnesses the senseless injustice of a violent-laden oppression of peoples, eternally in the crossfire of religious politics. Her witness of suffering there leads her too quickly to conclusions of meaning: deepest faith is always prepared to act radically in the name of justice. The line between ecstatic faith experience and catastrophic behaviour requires tremendous control to navigate: even Jesus overturned tables in the Temple and began cracking a whip. As the film careens into its final moments, we are both certain and wary of what is coming.

Throughout the movie, the story moves occasionally and unexplainably to follow a young man through his daily life. The connections seem remote: he is a roofer at the convent where Hadewijch/Celine started out. His movement in and out of prison, conversations with his mother, confessions of desire for better life seem only innocuous markers, and not signs of any deeper sense of purpose. We have no idea why we are even being asked to invest in this character at all. But just as our heroine has fully understood the weight of her faith and its impact on the world, he is there for her in a wholly unexpected, wholly spiritual way. The moment of redemption that then occurs has nothing at all to do with the sensuality present in this picture, which conveys a completely false message about this film when viewed out of context. The baptism of Hadewijch is neither the beginning nor the end of her journey, but a stop on the way of her mystical transformation, a living water out of which all things rise that truly want to know the face of God.

people's choice: 1 right, 2 wrong

2009-09-19T12:21:00.004-05:00

Well, I didn't quite get the doc or the Midnight Madness awards right, but for the third year in a row I correctly called the main People's Choice Award: 20 minutes ago Precious was named winner. The MM award went to The Loved Ones (Daybreaker was a runner up) and the Doc award went to The Topp Twins (another film I wish I'd seen).

random notes

2009-09-18T18:43:00.005-05:00

Well, the reviews are taking more reflection this year! And I have seen less films than I normally would - all of which is fine. But as I continue to work on my review/essays - which seem to be as much personal journeyings as reviews - a few random notes.

Around about this time, I am able to predict what the People's Choice Award will be. Since that will likely be announced tomorrow, and since they've added two categories, I will anticipate what I think it will be. Last year, I guessed Slumdog Millionaire correctly early on. My guesses are based on Press & Industry buzz and some reportage on public screenings. In the Midnight Madness category, it would be difficult to see anything winning over Jennifer's Body - but if so, maybe Bitch Slap. The TIFF inside blogger taps JB and Daybreakers. In the doc category, I sure noticed that the Daniel Ellsberg Pentagon doc (which I wanted to see and didn't) was getting a lot of traffic in the Press Video library. But I would bet more likely on the Colony, the beekeeping doc, or a more uplifting piece like Google Baby and/or Sunshine Boy. In the main category, I don't know how the star turnout for Precious can possibly not upstage everything else in the way of public appeal, though the movie itself is emotionally tough going. Festival goers don't generally shy away from that, however, if Eastern Promises, Slumdog and Hotel Rwanda are anything to go by. Generally, features which will be in mainstream release don't win this award. (Though those films do go on to mainstream release!) Hard call, but I'm sticking with Oprah.

In other notes, I found the whole Tel Aviv movies controversy this week immensely depressing. Having read all the pros and cons, all the protests of all kinds in all directions, I am mostly just sad that a cinema which is finally coming into its own (Israeli cinema), lost an opportunity to be observed in its own unique voice and contribution because of political realities. I find myself wondering why there aren't more Native Americans protesting the presence of Canadian and American films in the festival, since by showcasing same, TiFF is supporting the cultural oppression of North American aboriginal societies. (I'm quite serious, a case could be made for this.) Or why the Tamils of Toronto did not rise up against the screening of three Sri Lankan films in this year's festival.

The screening of movies in discourse with each other is how a public forms its own opinions and educates itself. It is not the moral obligation of the Toronto film festival to present contrasting sides of an issue but to show well-made films which allow dialogue to exist which can allow for a rich exchange of meaning. If the festival had chosen Ramallah as the city to focus on, there would have been no controversy - and is that truly fair to the situation? Though I am not Jewish, I am a student of the Abrahamic faiths, and while I hated this year's Israeli invasion of Palestine, I could never clearly identify a morally superior outcome in this struggle. It's a brutal, no-win situation. Why can't we talk about that? instead of worrying about what the presence of these films "says". Removing films and signing petitions are political gestures as strident as whatever the festival has done by creating this programme. I have tried, and fail to see how there has been a political agenda on the part of the festival by creating the City to City programme and choosing Tel Aviv to kick it off. The festival has been a vanguard showcase of films which do NOT speak positively of Israel, like last year's Waltz With Bashir. Lebanon, hardly a pro-Israeli film, was also screened this year. An art festival should reflect the tensions of the world and not live in them.

So Shana Tova to my Jewish friends. And may this year bring peace in Palestine.

tiff: cairo time

2009-09-14T21:51:00.018-05:00

I have a framed print of a painting by Raul Dufy which I used to hang over my writing desk. It is a view through an open hotel window out onto a Riviera beach curling away in the distance. Inside the room are a few plush chairs and a big vase of flowers. It always seemed to me to invite imaginative experience: what has happened in this room? and why is it that the sloping coastline makes the room seem even more empty?

There is a scene in Ruba Nadda's Cairo Time that felt immediately to me like I was inside that Dufy painting, though the location is now Cairo. After having spent a lot of time together in a mutually growing attraction that is soulful as much as physical, Juliette (Patricia Clarkson) invites Tareq (Alexander Siddig) up to her suite. This is it, the audience thinks, the moment of the seduction. He stands on the balcony looking on to the coastal scene while she stands inside just out of his view, pouring a drink and unable to join him. She looks at him and retreats, starts to go, and doesn't. He finally wanders in, approaches her, she shies away and then draws closer. It is agonizing. But instead of a kiss or some such submission, the characters choose something else. And hooray!, there is no dialogue.

Perhaps I have just been in too many fraughtly similar situations myself, but this scene captured all that I liked about what I saw of Cairo Time. Scheduling allowed me to catch only the last 50 minutes, but I confess that unlike many people, I actually enjoy coming in on a movie and seeing how well it works from that point on, how much I can pick up, how much I am missing. I loved the pacing of what I saw, and particularly the care taken to evoke the spiritual world of the city. There are long takes that allow us to wallow in the environment as the character does. The haunting sounds of the minaret and the echoes inside the mosque resonate the transitions our character is experiencing. Her life is slowing down and the movie does that too. Into the space that emerges comes someone whom we sense will never be her lover, or shouldn't be, but the possibility haunts us, and them, as they each fill the void of something missing. I loved Patricia Clarkson's delicate walk between the conservative businesswoman and the woman discerning where her soul lies at the moment. The ending, which I appreciated though it may disappoint some, leaves us with the clear feeling that it is perhaps not the final ending. In a sense that ending has only begun.

day 3: eyes wide open; partir

2009-09-13T10:08:00.014-05:00

The Orthodox Jewish world of Eyes Wide Open could have been set in any other place than its story locus of Jerusalem, for we never see a single recognizable sign of the city at the heart of three religious traditions. And yet everything Jerusalem represents to a traditional Jewish man is keenly felt and observed in this stirring and deeply affecting story of two men who fall in love in contemporary Israel.

Haim Tabakman makes his feature film debut with this testament to the crossroads of passion and faith. The story is hardly new: we have seen many many instances of forbidden love playing itself out in inevitable story arcs. Avoiding the predictable is the true challenge of this kind of tale and somehow Tabakman manages to do it, by staying close to the dilemma of character: Aaron, the butcher whose story is told in the film, sees his passionate attachment to Ezri, the young drifter whom he takes under his wing and allows to sleep in the upstairs storeroom, as a challenge by God. "You are a masterpiece" he says to his lover when same is still just his apprentice but the mutual attraction has been made clear to them both. In a theological exercise among rabbis in a study group, Aaron explains that that which is most challenging to us - is also something we enjoy. A faithful person takes on what is hard in order to embrace the task of remaining close to God. What Aaron does not anticipate in his journey, is that embracing the challenge can also be a way to finding the beauty of God's creation.

And Yeshiva-expelled Ezri is a beautiful man indeed: it is not hard to understand why anyone would resist him. His soulful search for truth, and his passionate understanding of his true self walk hand in hand with his unquestionable identity as a good (at heart) Jewish man. Yet he never appears to experience the crisis of identity that Aaron has over his own nature. He accepts both equally: he is Jewish, he is gay; and he equally accepts the hardship ahead of him. In some ways, he more realistically embodies Aaron's theological value than Aaron, who is too steeped in the cultural traditions of family and community life to be able to free himself accordingly. When the predictable confrontation occurs near the end of the film between Aaron and his rabbi, we hear him say, "I was dead. And now I'm alive." Living out the Jewish law (which is unforgiving on this issue) had shut down his most vital self without his even knowing it. Living out his love for Ezri wakes up that which can never be allowed to truly live openly, if the law is the only guide for life.

Tabakman walks this line carefully, without ever slipping into perspectives that might make it easier for the audience: the evil religious authorities, the innocent lovers. Both sides are complex in this drama. We feel slightly uncomfortable about the lovemaking that occurs in the room where Aaron's father has only recently died, but at the same time, those love scenes are some of the most tenderly and caringly observed expressions of love we would want to see in a film (while not particularly graphic). Lying in each other's arms, their beauty as lovers is not lost on us either - the sense that they absolutely belong together. The open spring in a desolate landscape, in which they first recognize their attraction for each other (in a non-sexual scene) is both the context and the conclusion of this love story. The spring of life, which both heals and renews, represents eternal spirituality, which lives on in love, as in life.

Partir, the film I saw next, is Catherine Corsini's attempt to deal with exactly the same dilemma but this time among a man and a woman from different social states. Kristen Scott Thomas plays the wife of a prominent businessman and politician in Nimes, who falls in love with the Spanish builder who is renovating her home to include the office where she will resume her practice of physiotherapy. She is a woman also at a crossroads, who needs to return to a sense of self somehow lost as she raised her two now-teenaged children. An accident gives birth to their romance.

Corsini handles this passion with affecting truth: as with Eyes Wide Open, we completely understand why these two people are together, even while their entire lives surrounding them both, do not easily allow this relationship. Suzanne and Ivan(Sergi Lopez) are drawn together through unquestionable desire, but as the film's progressive challenges to their relationship bring them into ever more perilous circumstances, the film avoids the cliche of that lust crumbling and instead gives an interesting portrait of two people deepening their love and reasons for attachment. They become more committed to each other in the best sense, as their lives unwind, than they were at the start. Each has become a better person in loving the other even as they are slowly driven to desperate acts.

In the press notes for this film, Kristen Scott Thomas describes her reasons for taking the movie, which included working with Corsini, and cinematographer Agnes Godard. She also thought the story described the stories of people she knew. Recently divorced herself when she shot the film, it continues a journey of recent films in which she explores and deepens a range of expressive emotion we have only seen controlled and hinted at til now. Last year's extraordinary Il y a longtemps que je t'aime offered her a chance to showcase that hybrid ability: controlled surface, brewing emotion. In Partir, she moves from one to the other, instead of playing both at the same time. It is a lesser performance than last year's but she is no less fascinating to watch as she continues to exercise and develop her own gifts. There are moments in which she has breathtaking mastery of her craft, such as when she attempts to sell her own jewellery to women in a gas station, in order to raise the cash to get her and her new family home.

The problem with the film comes in its scenario - the ending does not work and utterly fails the film. It takes the nuance of desperation in character to a particular choice that seems both unrealistic and disproving of the very development of self-understanding that has also occurred by then. It is not only disappointing, it brought bad laughter in the screening I was in, which until then had seemed to be going well. There are uneven places elsewhere in the movie as well, but a strong ending would have allowed me to dismiss those concerns. Instead, it only highlighted them, even while I was mesmerized by the leading lady.

day two: my queen karo; le pere de mes enfants

2009-09-11T22:33:00.015-05:00

Fathers who are complexly damaging from the midst of being also gentle and loving, was the theme of the only two films I could see on Friday. (I was required to be at an all day meeting.) In Dorothee van den Berghe's My Queen Karo, the father is a 1970s free love revolutionary, who drags his wife and child from Belgium to live in a commune in Amsterdam "where anything is possible". Mia Hansen-Love's lovely Le Pere de mes Enfants, features a father/film producer who loves his children but can't climb out of a professional world that is closing in on him. Both men adore their children, lavishing affection and kind attention in ways any child could dream of. And in both films, the children end up utterly abandoned.

My Queen Karo does an amazing job of evoking the spirit of the 70s with its hangover 60s radical emotions. As someone who lived through this era and was indelibly marked by artists who lived in this milieu I could not believe how truthful it felt. Young Karo lives with her mother and father and about a dozen other people as squatters in an upstairs flat of doubtful quality, even if they were paying rent for it. No walls are aloud and everyone is privy to everyone else's world. Karo's mother is a Belgian seamstress who makes costumes for an opera company. The fact that she earns a living and secretly pays the Landlord rent is a source of great fear and moral uncertainty for young Karo, who knows her father would be devastated. When Dad brings home another woman to join their life, a woman he is clearly nuts about, Karo's intellectual dilemmas are deepened by her own emotional pain and fear. The little hedgehog she found in their immigration travels and has adopted as a pet becomes a symbol of her fear and discontent. Putting it in an icetray with water, she puts it in the freezer to stay protected "until things are better".

There are so many gorgeous images in this film that capture the spirit of childhood while remaining anchored in the confusing world of adults. Karo rides behind her mother on her bicycle, arms around her waist, enjoying the play of sunlight on her face and closing her eyes, then nuzzling into her mother's back to smell her. I was reminded of how relatively easy it is for children to find what they need, however they can. A friendship with a downstairs tenant leads Karo to start swimming, a venture she takes on with her own sense of discipline and commitment, never bothered by the distances and tasks of learning or the fierce encouragement of her coach. Sometimes when she looks up, the commune family are there to cheer her on, but on the day of her big diploma test, it is a struggle to free herself from the chaos of their declining lives to get there on time. Her expressive face as she swings freely inside the house (no-walls does have some advantages!) points to the moments of happiness that no other child could dream of. In the film's final shot, Karo uses her swimming skills to dive in to the canal and rescue her mother's costume mannequin, alive with colourful 19th century silks and bodices. The underwater image of her 'rescuing' the life sized form just as she was taught to in her class, captured how important it is to serve the artist in one's self.

Le Pere de mes Enfants is a richly told and deeply moving story of one family's decline in the face of an attempt by one man to be just exactly that kind of artist. Gregoire is the kind of producer that the art house film industry owes its life to. Committed to making movies that develop important filmmakers and thematic ideas, his small production house slowly pays the price and his world sinks ever more deeply into debt, even as his excitement and enthusiasm for projects he has invested in lives on unabaited. In the first half of this beautiful movie, we follow him around his daily life in and out of the office, getting all of the hints of both his passion and his impending pain. His family life is rich and wonderful: his gorgeous wife and three beautiful girls take vacations of meaning, to explore Romanesque chapels or see the colours of the mosaics of Ravenna. A very gentle Christian theme weaves its way through these scenes. In some ways Gregoire is giving his family the very tools they will need to survive his death before he himself even understands fully that he must die. When the awful event has occurred, we watch the devastating impact it has on these very people, and his wife's attempt to keep his legacy alive and somehow save his work is a brilliant testament to the various ways devotion works both during and after our involvement with loved ones. The performances are all breathtaking. Watching the journey of pain lived out by the eldest daughter (who had seemed the least interested in her Dad) was particularly poignant for me (and the actors are real-life father and daughter Louis-Do and Alice de Lencquesaing. Chiara Caselli has a lovely understated presence in this film as Sylvia, his wife. There is a scene in which she is being driven to the set of one of the films after Gregoire's death. The driver, a woman, is talking on a cell phone in Swedish with tension and anger about things we never hear translated. Meanwhile, Sylvia stares out the window in her own agony, eyes uncontrollably filling. The many arguments we saw earlier in the film among the married couple are a source of pain to her now for different reasons, even as she is being reminded of them.

Having read that the movie was based on the life of prolific French producer Humbert Balsan, I found myself wondering who the 'real life' equivalents of some of the characters were. I had already tapped 'Stig', a Swedish auteur who is described by another producer in the film as a 'psychopath', as likely to be a version of Danish helmer Lars von Trier, and that was before I had read that Balsan, who was found dead in his office in 2005, happened to be producing Lars von Trier's Mandalay at the time. Like Balsan, Mia Hanson-Love started out as an actor.

These two gorgeous movies continue a theme for me so far of wonderful new films by female directors: an accident, not a constructed choice. But a happy one.

tiff day 1: she, a chinese; bright star; vision

2009-09-10T21:27:00.033-05:00

Three very different women filmmakers, each at a specific place in her life work, kicked off my 2009 TIFF today. All three directors take on the multifaceted complexities of love: love of self, love of God and love of another. Margarethe von Trotte (Vision), the veteran German filmmaker who has also acted in movies by her countryman and fellow legends Volker Schlondorff and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, is experiencing twilight years of her own mature 'vision'. Xiaolu Guo, making her TIFF debut with a drama that was my first festival screening of the year (She, a Chinese) is a relative newcomer in the west. And Aussie Jane Campion, whose career started in the 1980s with the instant arthouse iconic hit Sweetie (also being screened this year in the Dialogues programme) has added to an always-interesting, if critically up and down career, with a gorgeously shot and emotionally rich new film about the relationship between John Keats and Fanny Brawne (Bright Star). Though not always even, all three were bright stars indeed.

The opening of Vision shows a group of faithful fanatics huddled in a church, counting down the arrival of the first millenium and the presumed end of the world. (Sound familiar?) In the wake of the sun that rises as usual the following day, a miraculous child is born: Hildegard, who would later become the great mystic, known in association with the cloistered Benedictine order she founded in Bingen, Germany in the 11th century. This choice of how to start the film gives much away in the filmmaking perspective: the movie is as much about the repercussions of ecstatic experience than about Hildegard herself. Von Trotte seems to want to tell this 'based on' story with many different brushstrokes, always favoring Hildegard's humanity over her spiritual wisdom. The many scenes of her acting boldly and against the establishment certainly establish her strength and religious politic, but the more controversial aspects of her nature float a bit uncertainly in the absence of real spiritual presence in the character. Instead of creating depth, the many brushstrokes become jarring. I longed to feel the unique and profound 'indwelling' in Hildegard (played by Barbara Sukowa). On the other hand, I very much liked some of the relationships of the film, and in particular the ambiguous and complex relationship between Hildegard and her adopted novice-daughter Richardis (Hannah Herzsprung). When the latter is torn away from her to become abbess in her own cloister, the news is greeted like the separation of lovers. It is only here that the film successfully conveys how profoundly stirring any kind of love can become when it is entwined with the divine.

Meanwhile, a thousand years later, a girl is born in a village in China and there is absolutely nothing special marked out for her at all. Instead, she lives a dull life of seemingly endless lack of opportunity and promise. Xiaolu Guo transforms this truth, however, by focussing not so much on Li Mei's (Huang Lu) innocence but on her restlessness and her beauty, despite her averageness. A series of boyfriends, young, middle aged and even older men offer her at the very least kindness and at the most love and she loses them all through this quality of restlessness. The one man she most loves (who has the very western name Spikey), dies in her arms. Having lived most of her life within the five miles of her village, when the cacoon is broken it breaks big: she immigrates first to the big city, then to England. But even this far away from home she cannot "settle". Listening to her boyfriend's IPod throughout the film, she escapes her own often very harsh reality. At the same time, Guo's astonishingly insightful eye never allows us to judge her. After seeing her go through scene after scene wearing the same skeleton t-shirt, there is a sudden resonance when she takes work in England as a human model in medical school - and the teacher draws on her naked body the things beneath her skin that cannot be seen. It is a wonderful allegory for how the others in her life attempt to draw out of her all that cannot be seen in our heroine. Love feels impossible, especially played out in front of a vastly ugly industrial landscape. The old and new China are never far from each other. A man leads a cow past a dump filled with electronics parts and a bulldozer plowing through it.

As a quick aside, both Guo and von Trotte coincidentally used the same strange camera movement: a continuous take pan back and forth between characters who are in dialogue. It works well in situations of tension, like when Spikey asks Mei to hit him to test his strength. But an unusual convention to see twice in one day!

Jane Campion's gorgeous, lyrical and emotionally evocative Bright Star is easily one of her best films to date and already likely to place high in my final festival favorites. Working in 19th century milieu is hardly new to this creator of Portrait of a Lady and The Piano. Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw are compelling as the young (and how young they do seem) Fanny Brawne and John Keats, the poet. I want to herald Campion for championing the non-sexual but hugely sensual qualities that passionate love can also have, especially in this era. The kisses, when they finally occur, are gentle touches of the lips, but they hold magic all the same. (In Vision, everyone greets everyone with kisses on the lips - a surprisingly jarring practice to observe, though common in the time.) The pacing serves this piece so well - as we literally watch the slow drop off the cliff of two people in love. The drop is into their own deep attachment, not anything more sordid, desperate or dramatic. Money issues stand in the way of these lovers, and an overbearing poet-friend, Mr. Brown (played by Paul Schneider) who sees Fanny as too-shallow for his intellectual mate. Those two details are enough to prevent the truest possible union from fulfilling itself. Mr. Brown is wrong: Fanny's instinctive intelligence about poetry and her plain way of speaking are exactly what the young writer needs. The movie allows their deepening affection to grow in silent moments each is on her/his own, when the dance of even a wind-driven curtain can seem to embody all that is growing in the heart of the character. The character arcs are subtly but keenly drawn: Fanny's confidence and delight in her own enormous design and sewing skill completely charms us, as it does him, in the first moments of the film, but by the end of the film love has transformed her intelligence, style and wit into a fully-rounded young woman. The movie also contains my favourite dialogue of the day. In presenting herself early on to Keats in one of her new outfits, she boasts that she is wearing the "first triple-layer mushroom collar in the county". His reaction, both disarmed and completely drawn to her, is to say, "you mean like the one behind you?" Amazed that someone else could be wearing her creation, she wheels to see who it is and finds her own image in a mirror. It is a moment that completely captures the elegance and wit of this film.

There was just one hitch with this screening: the fourth reel was spliced on backwards so that the end played out suddenly upside down and sounding like underwater dialogue. It took ages to alert the projection booth but the problem could not be fixed while sitting there. (What a shame, since this was the only scheduled Industry screening to a room full of critics.) So at some point I need to see the last ten minutes. It made no difference. The first 110 were glorious.

my (long long) shortlist

2009-08-29T07:00:00.080-05:00

Having waded through the pool of press releases this summer and critical responses to other festivals and markets this year, here is my long list (alphabetically) - soon to be reduced to an actual short list. For ease of reference, each of these movies is linked to the relevant festival page and it's all in alphabetical order. These are my top 96 films. Asterisks indicate films that are in my top 25 picks. [NB note: September 10th: Italicized entries indicate a film seen/review underway.]

Adrift. Bui Thac Chuyen's film observes an aimless young couple's encounter with social mores and their own needs, in contemporary Vietnam.
Ahead of Time. Ruth Gruber, the world's youngest Ph.D. at age 20, is now 97 and has spent a lifetime helping to raise awareness to Jewish cultural experience in Europe and America. Her life is profiled in this film by Bob Richman.*
Applause. Danish actress Paprika Steen stars in Martin Pieter Zandvliet's first dramatic feature.
The Art of the Steal. Don Argott's documentary examines how the Barnes collection of Impressionist art was wrested from its home in Pennsylvania after the death of the collector.
Bare Essence of Life. Sotoko Yokohama's film is about a mentally challenged young farmer who falls in love with a girl from Tokyo.
Beyond the Circle. Golam Rabbany Biplob directs this Bangladeshi tale of a man whose music takes him from the rural north to the big city of Dhaka.
Blessed. Australian Ana Kokkinos looks at the lives of seven children and their respective mothers and the uneasy relationships among them.
The Boys are Back. Scott Hicks' story of a bereaved single father coping with parenthood is his first film back in Australian since Shine.
Bran Nue Dae. The hit aboriginal musical hits the big screen in this adaptation by Australian Rachel Perkins.
A Brand New Life. Ounie Lecomte's movie about a little girl who is abandoned by her father so he can form a new life has been a favourite of mine since Cannes.*
Bright Star. Jane Campion's latest film is a portrait of the poet John Keats and his relationship to Fanny Brawne.*
Broken Embraces. Almodovar's latest film will likely be my first festival screening. It is the story of an aging blind screenwriter forced to face unresolved past life decisions.*
Cairo Time. Canadian Ruba Nadda's latest feature stars Patricia Clarkson as a woman who befriends an Egyptian man while waiting for her husband.*
Capitalism: A Love Story. The world of financially-melting down corporate America is under the lens of Michael Moore's 20th anniversary pic.
Carmel. Amos Gitai's films, which I do not miss each year, are always complexly nuanced tales of Israeli/Jewish identity. This very personal addition allows Gitai a chance to reflect on having a child who is a soldier.*
Chloe. Atom Egoyan's feature may be better known at the moment for being the movie Liam Neeson was making when Natasha Richardson died. However, that will soon change, as Neeson and Julianne Moore are said to give career-best performances in this film based on a film by Anne Fontaine in which a woman seeks to test her husband by secretly setting him up with another woman.
Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. A favourite actor of mine, Mads Mikkelson, stars with Anna Mouglalis in this look at the intersection of two famous lives, made by Dutch helmer, Jan Kounen.
Colony. Carter Gunn and Ross McDonnell profile a family dealing with 'colony collapse disorder', the disintegration and decline of bee colonies, and its impact on agrarian economy.
Cooking With Stella. The best of Deepa Mehta's Water are on hand for brother Dilip Mehta's feature about a New Delhi diplomat's cook whose life is turned upside down by the arrival of new residents.
Creation. Jon Amiel's psychological emotional portrait of Charles Darwin.
La Danse - Le Ballet de l'Opera de Paris. This Mavericks presentation screening of Frederick Wiseman's documentary on the famous Parisian ballet company will include a discussion with the master afterward.
The Day God Walked Away. Philippe van Leeuw revisits the Rwanda genocide of the 90s through the harrowing story of one woman.
The Day Will Come. German filmmaker Susanne Schneider's film shows how one woman's family is disrupted forever by the appearance of a woman from her past.
La Donation. Quebec helmer Bernard Emond's tale of a Montreal doctor who takes over a country practice and finds deeper meaning in what she does.
Dorian Gray. British filmmaker Oliver Parker directs Colin Firth in this adaptation of the Oscar Wilde novel.
Down for Life. Set in South-Central L.A., this film by Alan Jacobs tells the story of a Latina girl gang leader, striving to be free of the gangs and become a writer.
Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl. Manuel de Oliveiro's luscious look at thwarted love in 19th century Portugal.
An Education. Lone Scherfig, one of my favourite Danes, returns with this tale of teenaged life in London in the 1960s.*
L'Enfer de Henri-Georges Cluozot. Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea profile the great filmmaker and his unfinished final projet, L'Enfer.
Eyes Wide Open. Haim Tabakman caused a stir in Cannes with this sensitive portrait of two Orthodox Jewish men in love.*
Face. Taiwanese festival favorite Tsai ming-liang returns with another one of his mystical magical fantasies, this time about a director making a movie at the Louvre, based on the Salome legend.
Fish Tank. Andrea Arnold's film about a tough, working class British teenager has also been a favorite of mine for this festival since it debuted at Cannes.*
Five Hours From Paris. Leon Prudovsky's first feature brings together an unlikely couple in this romantic comedy from Israel.
Gigante. A romantic comedy from Adrian Biniez about an overweight close-circuit tv security guard who falls for a cleaning woman in a supermarket.
Glorious 39. Bill Nighy and Julie Christie are two reasons to take in Stephen Poliakoff's drama about war-time England.
Good Hair. Jeff Stilson's doc about the African-American 'do' with Chris Rock narrating, promises to be fun.
Green Days. A new feature by the youngest of the brilliant Makhmalbaf women (Hana) appears to have come in over the transom: there is not even a full write-up yet on the website, but some good pictures.*
Hadewijch. I have very high hopes for Bruno Dumont's profile of a contemporary theology student who falls in love with an Islamic fundamentalist in Paris.*
The Happiest Girl in the World. Romania's Radu Jude's comedy focusses on a teenager who wins a car and finds herself the target of family manipulation.
Heiran. Shalizeh Arefpour's feature debut observes the repercussions of young love in modern day Tehran, when same is not endorsed by family.
Les Herbes Folles. Legendary filmmaker Alain Resnais' tale of two people who meet over a lost wallet.
I Am Love. A Milanese family empire slowly unwinds as the patriarch announces his plans for his family in this feature from Italian Luca Guadagnino.
I, Don Giovanni. Anything by Carlos Saura, the Argentinian master of dance on film, is a must. But this playful profile of Mozart's librettist is a top seed for me.*
Jean Charles. Henrique Goldman looks at the life of a Brazilian immigrant to London, as same is impacted by the terrorist events of July, 2005.
Kelin. Ermek Tursunov's film profiles a young woman torn between a true love and a husband she has come to love. Boasting absolutely no dialogue, it is yet another film from the emerging cinema of Kazakhstan.
Life During Wartime. Allison Janney is reason enough for me to make Todd Solondz' latest film about a woman whose ex-husband is released from jail at the very moment she is remarrying, a very top seed.*
London River. Rachid Bouchareb examines the intertwined lives of two parents during the London bombings of 2005. Starring Brenda Blethyn.*
Lourdes. Jessica Hausner's third feature film observes a physically and emotionally challenged young woman as she visits the famous shrine.*
Max Manus. I will probably see Espen Sandberg and Joachim Roenning's movie about the famous WWII resistance fighter, for its Scandinavian context.
Melody for a Street Organ. Two Russian children, orphaned by the death of their mother, search for their father in this film by Kira Muratova.
Men on the Bridge. A true-to-life fiction about three men whose lives intersect on the Bosphorous Bridge in Istanbul, by Azli Osge.
The Men Who Stare at Goats. Grant Heslov's all-star cast film is based on a true story about a troop of psychic soldiers.
Micmacs a tire-larigot. Few will be able to resist Jean-Pierre Jeunet's comedy about a man who falls in with an ex-con.
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Although I was a new teen at the time, this controversy in the 70s led me into an obssession on Watergate, and the birth of my political consciousness. Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith's doc looks at the man often forgotten in those anals of history.
My Queen Karo. Belgian filmmaker Dorothée van den Berghe offers a coming of age tale set in a 'free love' community in Amsterdam in the 70s.
My Dog Tulip. As a puppy parent, this animated tale of a man befriending a German shepherd by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger, is a high contender.
My Tehran for Sale. Granaz Moussani's first feature looks at youth in Iran. Made under political constraints by an Iranian-Australian.
My Year Without Sex. This title might have indicated the journallings of a young would-be femme fatale, but Sarah Watt's film is something better: the profile of an Australian woman who, after suffering an aneurysm, finds friendship with an equally-in-crisis clergywoman in trying to recover.
Once Upon a Time Proletarian: 12 Tales of a Country. Xiaolu Guo's other film in this festival is a poetic meditation on the lives of 12 average Chinese workers.
Ondine. Neil Jordan goes home to Ireland in his latest feature, a magic realist story of a man and his daughter whose lives are turned around by a 'woman from the sea'.
Partir. Catherine Corsini's story of a mid-life love affair starring Kristin Scott Thomas is another high-ranker for me.*
Le Pere de Mes Enfants. French actress Mia Hansen-Love turns to directing in this family drama equivalent of Run Lola Run. A family's disintegration is shown first from the father's point of view, then the mother's.*
Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands. Peter Mettler takes an Edward Burtynsky-style look at the controversial energy project. Likely to be this year's Manufactured Landscapes.
La Pivellina. Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel's film looks at an Italian Roman trailer park family and how their lives are turned upside down by the sudden appearance of an abandoned two year old.
Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire. That long-winded title has been as much of a deterrent for me as the overhyped festival appearance of Oprah Winfrey, but there is a lot to hope for in viewing the trailer for this second feature from Lee Daniels.
Same Same But Different. German Helmer Detlev Buck's film is a youthful love story set in Cambodia.
Samson and Delilah. Warwick Thornton's first feature chronicles the friendship of two Australian aboriginal teens who are both outsiders.
The Search. Pema Tseden's journey through small villages of Tibet searching for singers to play characters in a Tibetan opera, is a film within a film.
She, a Chinese. Guo Xiaolu has two films in this year's festival and both are on this list. The write-up for this film describes the story of a woman told "using short, lyrical captions or silent, beautifully composed snapshots of landscapes."*
Short Cuts Canada 2. This collection of short films by young Canadian filmmakers (and veterans like Guy Maddin) looks to be the most promising of the five programmes.
A Single Man. Tom Ford brings together Colin Firth and Julianne Moore (both here with other films as well) in a story of a gay college professor coping with the death of his partner.
Solitary Man. I normally am not a fan of Michael Douglas but Brian Koppleman and David Levien's film also co-stars Susan Sarandon and is said to have a tight script.
Soul Kitchen. Fatih Akin's Edge of Heaven was a major discovery of recent TIFFs. His latest is the saga of a young German chef sorting out his bad life luck.
Sparrows. This projection, accompanied by live piano music, features Mary Pickford in one of her most popular roles as a Louisiana girl raising neglecting children on a baby farm. Directed by William Beaudine, it was originally released in 1926.
Spring Fever. This taboo-breaking feature took years to make in China where director Lou Ye has been under a five year ban since his film Summer Palace. It is the story of two men in love and the jealous wife who observes.
St. Louis Blues. Hard to resist Dyana Gaye's Senegalese road trip musical that uses French songs of the 1960s.
The Sunshine Boy. Fridrik Thor Fridriksson's documentary follows an Icelandic woman seeking ways to communicate with her severely autistic son.
The Time That Remains. This semi-biographic film by Elia Suleiman, divided into four historical episodes, portrays the daily life of Palestinians in 1948 who were considered a minority, even in their homeland.
The Topp Twins. Leanne Pooley's doc looks at this popular lesbian, country and western singing New Zealand twin performing duo.
The Trotsky. With its all-star Canadian cast and mixture of styles, Jacob Tierney's film about a young man who believes he is Trotsky could be the best Canadian feature this year.
The Unloved. Actress Samantha Morton turns to directing in this film based on her own childhood experiences growing up in the social services system in England.
Vincere. Marco Bellochio directs this profile of Benito Mussolini's formational years and passionate relationships before becoming Il Duce.
Vision. Margarethe von Trotte's much anticipated depiction of the medieval spiritualist Hildegard of Bingen.*
Wavelengths 1: Titans. George Méliès’ playful and eccentric spirit hovers throughout Wavelengths’s opening programme.
Wavelengths 2: Pro Agri An appreciation for nature and its untold mysteries.
Wavelengths 3: Let Each One Go Where He May. A celebration of Chicago-based filmmaker Ben Russell.
Wavelengths 4: In Comparison. Observation is the main modus operandi of these films.
Wavelengths 5: Une Catastrophe. From agitprop to poetry, personal expressions of historical and collective memory confront spectres from the past throughout this programme.
Wavelengths 6: Flash Point Camera. Art and experience partake in these films about the passage of time.
What's Your Raashee? Ashutosh Gowariker's romantic comedy about a man who has to find a bride in 12 days is likely to be the best of the Indian/Bollywood fare this year.
Whip It. If I end up seeing Drew Barrymore's first feature about roller derbying women, it will likely be for Ellen Page and Marcia Gay Harden and a bit of respite from more serious fare.
White Material. Isabelle Huppert starts in Claire Denis' African tale of a French woman plantation owner threatened by civil war.
The White Ribbon. European auteur Michael Haneke explores events in a small village on the eve of World War I. Winner of the Palme d'Or.*
The White Sheik. Neil Jordan introduces Fellini's first feature, a romantic comedy about a honeymooning couple in Rome.
The Window. Buddhadeb Dasgupta's morality tale looks at how one man's gesture to repair a school window leads to complex political and personal trouble.
Women Without Men. Shirin Neshat looks at the lives of five Muslim women in Tehran in the 1950s.*
The Young Victoria. Canadian Jean-Marc Vallee directs an all-star British cast in this depiction of the early years of the famous monarch.

a slimmer trimmer TIFF

2009-08-27T20:44:00.006-05:00

Now that all of the programming has been announced, I have some gleanings on the overall movement of the festival. A shifting of the tide that I have suspected for some time, has started to be visible. If I could ballpark it I would say that the festival is investing in a major piece of real estate that will embody it as a cultural institution, precisely at the moment that it is starting to slide a notch or two in its significance as a public festival, though its importance as a sales market is still high.

One of the latest press releases lists titles available for acquisition, ie those movies that are yet to be picked up for distribution. It is an astonishingly long list. The list can be viewed two ways: either that producers have held off until Toronto to showcase their movies in hopes of making a better deal, or that more of the likely sellable product has in fact already been picked up at earlier festivals.

The late positioning of this festival in the year, has always struck me as something working against it. (Though I am not advocating changing that.) Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and Venice (and many others of note) have all gone before Toronto in the calendar year. This offers the festival a chance to watch the trends and to pick up only the best, but increasingly the most interesting films have had significant exposure before getting to us. Many critics do not attend the most popular TIFF screenings, even in their industry projections, because they have already seen the films elsewhere and formed their judgments of them. The very thing that promotes Toronto as a venue for selling movies, ie the great audience responses, is also that which is increasingly distanced from the decision makers themselves. Do the industry reps and critics attend those public screenings to see the responses? I'm sure many do. I also know many don't.

This is not a spectacular year for TIFF in terms of names, or even glamour-drenched openings. Despite a studded star list of guests, there is a really notable lack of exciting premieres this year. The most intriguing European films have already been seen elsewhere. Should we therefore start to despair the future of this fest?

No. The festival's greatest tradition, which is to showcase international titles that would never otherwise see the light of North American day (despite prizes elsewhere), continues in great strength. The quality of these lesser known films, from Shirin Neshat's Women Without Men (pictured at top), to Jessica Hausner's Lourdes to Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch promises to be very high. Although New York follows us and will pick up many of these films, Toronto is where they will be seen by the most people and find the greatest chance of distribution.

The discerning TIFF-goer, must look to that TIFF solid core of international medium to low budget features to find the raison d'etre of the festival alive and well. Contemporary World Cinema, Special Presentations, Vanguard, Discovery, all hold the real gems. Along with important venues like the Wavelengths programme, they speak to the average and avid art film buff, who will do anything to be in Toronto that first real week of September. Get out the highlighters!

julia & .... well, julia

2009-08-15T01:10:00.024-05:00

When I was a young girl in the 70s, visiting my grandparents in Philadelphia, some part of every day was spent watching Julia Child on television. My grandmother sat on the blue sofa at the back of the front room and knitted while she watched, pausing sometimes in the middle of stitches, to pay closer attention. My grandmother herself had spent some time at the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris. Later, her passion for Julia shared the stage with an equal fondness for Jacques Pepin, whose 'appy coooking' became as much a favorite expression for Grandma, as 'bon appetit' had been.

If she had lived past 2001, my grandmother would have been 98 on August 7th, which was, coincidentally, the release date of Julie & Julia, Nora Ephron's uneven but entertaining adaptation of Julia Child's memoir and Julie Powell's blog of the year she spent making all of the recipes in Child's opus, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Today, August 15th, is Julia Child's birthday - she was just a year younger than my grandmother. Like Julia Child and Julie Powell, these two women had nothing in common except their passion for cooking. Julia Child introduced french cuisine to average Americans like my grandmother, and she also radically altered the palette and technique of American restaurant kitchens (something the movie does not get into). The next big wave would be the move to more natural and local eating, but even the goddesses of that movement, like Alice Waters, were in debt to the doyenne of beurre blanc.

The jubilant, buoyant and even bouncing congeniality of Julia Child is brought wonderfully to life by Meryl Streep who has a chance in this film to showcase her often underserved comedic talent in a role which allows humour to grow out of character, instead of character circumstance. An actor at this advanced stage of her own development must look carefully to find the roles that will actually stretch her. Though the character of Julia Child is not plunging or even very dramatic, the role gives Streep the opportunity to control her often-noted capacity for mannered acting into something in which manner is entirely called for, since the mannered gestures of Julia Child are infamous. Streep captures that manner and because it is so effortless, is then able to play with the resonances of deeper feeling - heroically so, since emotion is oddly missing from this film. Situations are set up to convey emotion theoretically but not much of it actually happens. Therefore Streep's careful lines and nuancing make all the difference to this film. When she chooses to allow the occasional penetrating insight into her portrayal of Child, it is within the frame of comedic experience. A scene in which she learns by letter of her sister's pregnancy for instance, provides a spontaneous context for her own losses (she was childless) within an intention of happiness at the news. It is a brilliant example of Streep's gifts for knife-edge dynamics. And though it's played for its comedy, the audience gets the chance to register the note about her character.

As Child's long-devoted husband Paul, Stanley Tucci is perfect, as only he can be. His own comedic timing is different from Streep's - a little more playful and nuanced - but he manages to convey in soft strokes his identities as Mr. Julia, on the one hand, and as a government officer whose career is dwindling, on the other. Even more perfect is Jane Lynch, in a short turn as Child's sister Dorothy. A hugely underappreciated character actor, Lynch made it seem as if these were indeed two women cut of the same pate brisee... her entrance and the subsequent restaurant scene with Streep and Tucci is one of the best sequences in the film. Frances Sternhagen as cookbook legend Irma Rombauer and Linda Emond as Simone Beck, Child's cookbook collaborator, give lovely supportive performances.

In her currently running blog on the making of her book and story into the movie, Julie Powell confesses that she has seen the movie six times and still cringes at the parts about herself. I haven't read her original Julia blog, but I'm with her. The film tries to convey a fairy tale American success story in the parlaying of her cooking blog into a hit book. There is much mention of Julia Child having "saved her" from drowning and lifting her sense of self-esteem. Even as much of the current blog as I read tonight when I got home did not convince me that much has changed. She seems incredibly self-deprecating and almost an eerily objective witness to her own public transformation, rather than someone appreciating it from a place of solid emotional growth.

Perhaps this is part of why the emotional journey of Julie Powell in the film is never convincing. A substantial part of the blame can be laid on Ephron's mediocre and disappointing screenplay. She is so much better than this script. Having seen a preview before the film of the next Streep movie, It's Complicated, I found myself daydreaming about what this movie might have been like if Nancy Meyers had made it. Meyers has a genuine gift for comedy as a filmmaker and her own writing never clunks in its transfer to the screen. Something's Gotta Give works entirely because its heavy romanticism is very self-conscious and even pokes fun at itself. This is the central flaw of Ephron's movie: it takes itself way too seriously (while never engaging more than surface emotion.) There is a lot of 'faux depth' in the Powell storyline. Even in the Child sequences, when there is confusion and setback around the publication of the cookbook, the script is laced with oneliners like "your book will change the world". When Stanley Tucci says it, he is able to give it a lovely playful quality that allows us to accept that wretched line. The modern story is not nearly able to pull the same thing off.

An attempt is made to link the two stories through the common elements of challenge, like rejection and peer pressure. These are never really convincing - they seem arbitrary and obvious. For this reason the film feels much longer than it should be. Without a real dramatic tension, it just seems to drift.

Amy Adams tries hard to make her role deeper than it is, but not even a fine actor like her can pull it off. While Meryl Streep, on the other hand, refines her plunging instincts to be sure and not make Julia seem deeper than she actually was. The irony of this is important and entirely measures the screenplay. Neither actress should have had to work so hard.

There is a moment when Julie's husband gives her a string of good fake pearls for her birthday. Julie rips off the necklace she is wearing to put on the new one. We then cut to Julia wearing actual pearls. It is a transition that says it all about mastering the art of anything. If the movie had simply stayed with the French story, we might have been dining on boeuf bourgignonne, without ever needing to reach for the Tums.

finally!

2009-07-29T11:06:00.009-05:00

In the fortnight (there's a word that needs to come back into common useage) since my last post, there have finally been some solid programming announcements. TIFF has now released a substantial list of films being presented in the Wavelengths, Midnight Madness, Vanguard, and Discovery programmes as well as the lion's share of Special Presentations and Galas. Wavelengths and Midnight Madness represent two (closer than you'd think) ends of the TIFF spectrum: from the art house to the horror house. Both have a finite number of possibilities, like the Dialogues category (in which filmmakers show movies that have influenced them and talk about why - not yet announced for this year) so it makes sense that they are announced first.

Readers of this blog in past years will know that I am a huge fan of the Wavelengths series, which presents gifted artists in the experimental and avant-garde scenes to an international audience. It is such an important venue in this way, one of the true 'maverick' programmes left in the festival unaffected by market and distribution politics. (It actually seems as if every time TIFF becomes aware of this lapse or gap in their programming, they add a new area to get it back. Vanguard, Discovery and even in its day Midnight Madness were/are all meant to be the cutting edge of the festival. But often these films have now come from somewhere else first, whether Cannes, Berlin or even Sundance. The premium on true world premieres is becoming compromised as years go by but that's for another post!) This year, the "City to City" programme is the new nuanced, 'vanguard' film viewing genre.

I always try to get to all of the Wavelengths screenings. As a sample I offer Wavelengths 1, the opening night programme, featuring T. Marie's 010101 (pictured above), described by the most articulate programmer in the festival, Andrea Picard, as "an incredibly meticulous digital painting, offering one minute, one second and one frame of shimmering and breathtaking beauty through its diaphanous and forever-changing palette." It is programmed with a cornucopia of films looking at artistic manipulation of form, from Heinz Emigholz' Two Projects by Friedrich Kiesler (the Viennese architect), to Klaus Lutz' Titan, which reflects on the filmmaker as voyager, to Ernie Gehr's Waterfront Follies, which observes Brooklyn Harbour as it is "interrupted by the flow of human interaction." Be sure to check out this always exciting programme, usually screening only in the first weekend.

What else surfaces? Well more of those Cannes hopefuls have dropped in. Ounie Lecomte's A Brand New Life (see post below) has now been slated and Susanne Schneider's The Day Will Come (pictured), the story of a woman facing the daughter she gave up thirty years ago to do terrorist underground work in Germany. Though I did not mention Schneider's film in my Cannes post, it did originate there.

The documentaries, split up among Real to Reel and the other programmes, also offer the usual possible riches. Michael Moore will weigh in with Capitalism, a voyage into American financial markets. There is no end to the brave bullying of this true maverick, whom I will never forget strolling down the aisle at his very first TIFF appearance twenty years ago. Don Argott's The Art of the Steal looks at what happened to the Barnes collection of impressionist art once the collector himself died.

I'm not the gal to guide anyone through Midnight Madness, but Rick Jacobsen's Bitch Slap (pictured) has caught my eye, since I loved the work of this helmer in the vintage Xena television series and the movie looks to be a campy take on the sexploitation classics. Jennifer's Body will be the undoubted draw in this category, as Juno sensation Diablo Cody returns with a script directed by Karyn Kusama and featuring the ubiquitous Megan Fox. Whether I will actually get to either of these - we will see.

From this end of feminism to a perhaps more socially observant one, if I could pick two films from the recent releases that most excite me, they would be Shirin Neshat's Women Without Men, which looks at the lives of four Iranian women during the summer of 1953, and An Education (pictured at top), the always wonderful Lone Scherfig's take on suburban teenaged life in 1960s London.

Still... despite these riches, there is much more programming to come. Up next will likely be the Canada First list (my prediction!). It is already being announced much later than usual, perhaps because a non-Canadian film is opening the Festival for the first time in quite some time. Stay tuned.

PS: It is now a day later, and I see from the TIFF home page that the Canadian programming is indeed slated for August 4th.

slow TIFF summer

2009-07-16T22:20:00.006-05:00

Wow! Is it ever a slow-TIFF PR summer! I don't think I can recall this little in the way of programming information, so close to the festival itself. After nothing since June 23, on Tuesday the Festival released the bulk of Galas and a handful of Special Presentations. Only 47 films have been announced to date, including opening night film, Jon Amiel's Creation. What is going on? By now we should know much more, even considering the "week late" factor (the festival feeling like it's starting a week later than usual).

However, from my earlier Cannes review, it is good to see Jane Campion's Bright Star enter the field. Of the remainder, the most intriguing for me is Rachid Bouchareb's London River, featuring the always-wonderful Brenda Blethyn, about a man and a woman who come together to find their children in the aftermath of the London bombings of 2005. Catherine Corsini's Partir also catches my eye, featuring the once-again very hot Kristin Scott Thomas (pictured at top). Scott Hicks' The Boys are Back, featuring Clive Owens, takes on men, and particularly fathers, coping with grieving sons.

Hopefully, this dearth of programming info will end in a blaze of announcements. I expected some more to be released today (it's mid-July!), but things should ramp up soon. One new feature TIFF has introduced that helps to make up for the wait, is the release of multiple images for each film already announced and temporary descriptions that have some weight. It's nice for us TIFF bloggers to have some choice now as we go shopping for images to populate our posts! (Click on the pictures here to go there and see more....)

pina dreaming

2009-07-08T10:30:00.009-05:00

Once, when I was a teenager, immersed in acting lessons and still unable to give up ballet, despite an upper body that had filled out and a patrician second toe that made pointe work impossible, I went to see Pina Bausch's Wuppertal Dance Theatre. I still remember the piece I saw: there were leaves and dirt on the floor that the performers slid on and smeared each other with. At one point there was a kind of cakewalk in which the dancers followed each other single file while making a beautiful repetitive arm and hand gesture that spoke to my childish heart. The music of that little cakewalk I still remember, all these years later. It is a complete unit of melody which, like the dance, repeats itself over and over. I don't know why my brain has held on to it, but it has.

In the week or so since Pina Bausch died, that melody has been haunting me. I have plunged into a sea of youtube, dailymotion and other video sites, trying to determine what must have been the piece that I saw. The leaves and dirt point to Rite of Spring, the early monumental work that took on Stravinsky with a kind of existential, almost reluctant spirituality, thwarted by a downward spiral of human emotion. The dates for that project (mid-70s) jive as well. I watched segments from it with amazement and new appreciation, but the gorgeous Stravinsky was wrong for the work I saw. The music I remember is extremely playful. Like the music of a jewel box, it is a tune a child could pick up and hum for days. And I remember it being a briefer work - a short piece.

As I continued my search, I was reminded of Pina Bausch's exclusive and devoted relationship to the classical choral music repertoire. In an era when her North American spiritual cousin Twyla Tharp was criss-crossing the landscape of western musical tradition with her works, Bausch stayed remarkably loyal to the classical choral forms. Her passion for Gluck allowed for her beautifully layered Orphee et Eurydice (pictured above). Though in later years she experimented with African and Asian themes and rhythm, she was most at home with the European canon, both classical and contemporary, and leaning toward opera in new and revitalized ballet interpretations of such legendary works as Bartok's Bluebeard.

Since I was not often able to see her work live, the video journey has led to yearnings and regrets for missed opportunities. Of these, Cafe Muller sticks out, and watching her lifelong collaborator, the amazing Dominique Mercy in Ein Trauerspiel, set to one of my favourite piano works by Schubert (the piano trio in E flat). Kontakthof with its somewhat oversimplified message of sexism is still a raw, powerful piece and I would be curious about its echos in memory for me of a youthful feminist zeal. But if I could snap my fingers and see anything in the next minute, it would undoubtedly be Vollmond, the very recent work which is an extraordinary celebration and lamentation in water. It would have been not only affecting, but hugely impressionable to me. Watch a trailer from youtube and you'll see what I mean.

I still haven't figured out what was the work I saw back in my teens. But my journey also took me to one of my favorite films, and one of my earliest encounters with international cinema, Fellini's E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On). In that movie, Bausch plays a blind princess on a 19th century ocean voyage with other nobility. In the scene I remember, she recounts the colours produced by the sounds of people's voices. It's one of the few times we the world heard the actual voice of Pina Bausch in a performance context. Watch her and note how her lovely character, at first glance the most colourless and dowdiest person at the table, becomes by the end of the scene the most transcendently compelling.

Her face then, and especially in recent years, looked a bit like Virginia Woolf, another hero of mine. There is the same intelligent brow and slightly sunken cheeks, smallish eyes that somehow still dance with liveliness. The face is expressive, like Martha Graham's. It causes me to imagine how the face would have leant itself to the body when she performed her own works. In that regard, perhaps nothing is more iconically vivid as a farewell image of Pina Bausch than the white-draped sylphanic and diaphonous black and white scenes from Cafe Muller. In them, she is almost a dream incarnation of herself, even while rooted in the rough and tumble hard-edged and very earthbound choreography of the men who fight and fall around her in the cafe. That footage is available in many places online, but watch it here in this French tv version where the quality is best. It starts at minute 2:27 but the documenary profile, if you understand french, is a good setup. We are so lucky that we have that sequence to watch so that we can always remember this goddess of the underground as the moving spirit that she was, rooted in earth and leaves but equally and eternally buoyant.

TIFF 09: first programming announcements

2009-07-01T09:37:00.019-05:00

In my post below, I spoke of films to look for at TIFF that have originated at Cannes. Two of those have now been announced: Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank, and Haim Tabakman's Eyes Wide Open. I discussed earlier the reasons why these two films have captured my interest. Other previously festival-exposed films of this year announced by TIFF for September include Tsai Ming-Liang's Visage (Face) which has been named in the Visions series. I can't say I have really understood this director's vision, nor have I ever sat through an entire feature. But I am likely to see this one, if anything for its portrait of artistic process and the fact that it features Fanny Ardant (pictured). Jessica Hausner's Lourdes interests me for a bevy of personal reasons, though I am otherwise unfamiliar with her.

Those one-liners that the Festival releases with these announcements (until the programme book descriptions are ready later in August) are often frustratingly banale or really usefully insightful teasers. One falling into the latter category for me is the description of Asli Ozge's Men on the Bridge (pictured here): "The stories of three men working at the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul are told by the original characters, in this mosaic depicting real persons exposing their lives and aspirations." I have no idea what that will amount to but it sounds intriguing!

One of the most exciting developments is the introduction of a brand new programme: City to City. Films will profile a particular metropolis every year. TIFF 09 is focussing on Tel Aviv in honour of that city's centennary in 2009. A great start, as the festival has left largely unrepresented of late Israeli cinema. The films of this country usually come in under the rubric of the Masters programmes where noted filmmakers like Amos Gitai show their latest works. The fact that there are enough new films to support an entire programme is exciting to me. The films themselves have not yet been announced.

The first press releases have now begun to dribble in and with them the Festival season begins. Don't know if it's true, but everything has seemed a bit "late" this year. Still no opening night film announced for instance, but there is much already to cheer for - summed up by the Festival's "Customer Service Improvements" press release. Last year's festival was steeped in public discontent in the wake of a ramped up corporate privilege scheme (no doubt tied in part to how Bell Lightbox has changed the financial dependency of the festival on its sponsors). The good news is - they listened. This year some of the dropped privileges for public passholders have been restored. The festival is now offering repeat Gala Screenings to ticket package-holders. And the Elgin has been given back to the public in a mix of public and industry/corporate screenings. Single ticket sales will be available well in advance of the beginning of the Festival now and and the advance review process window for early balloting of ticket choices has increased to a week. Check out the TIFF site to find out more - the 09 site is now officially launched.In the past, I was allowed two public screenings per day in addition to the Industry screenings, but unfortunately, my budget required me to opt for the Industry pass without the festival tickets this year. But I will be watching closely what happens with the public festival as well. More to come!

cannes: what to look for in toronto

2009-05-28T21:44:00.009-05:00

You can talk about Sundance and Berlin, but the biggest crop of films to be anticipated at TIFF usually originates in Cannes. As the spring slides into summer and the earliest press releases for TIFF start to trickle forward, the question then becomes whether these sought after movies will make it to Toronto - or be scooped by Venice. With the French festival now down, I have my wish list all ready.

Ounie Lecomte's A Brand New Life (pictured above) is high on that list. From a first time filmmaker, this Korean story of a child whose life is forever changed when her stepmother puts her up for adoption on a whim, could well be the Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days (which rocked the 07 Cannes festival and which I reviewed then) of this year's film crop.

Bright Star is Jane Campion's meditation on the short life of poet John Keats. With its gorgeous pallette and reserved performances, it is already being called her finest film ever. I hope this means it is a throwback to her earliest and in my mind her best work in films like An Angel at My Table. An exciting contender.

I am intrigued always by the work of Michael Haneke, whose film Cache I reviewed in 2005 and whose Code Inconnu I remember vividly for its moments of sudden everyday despair. The White Ribbon which won the Grand Prix and the FIPRESCI journalists prize this year at Cannes looks at autocratic rule in families on the eve of World War I where the inhuman connections found in the home foreshadow the battlefields to come.

Haim Tabakman's Eyes Wide Open takes a look at homosexuality in Orthodox Jewish Jerusalem. This subject was dealt with in Avi Nesher's The Secrets, but that was about young girls. This film about two butchers is much more daring in its pursuit of the subject matter and has already been apparently banned in some communities. While "being banned" can be a badge of honour that sometimes disguises a mediocre film, this subtle story is likely to be a much talked about critical hit.

Hugely exciting for me is Andrea Arnold's follow-up feature to her brilliant Red Road (reviewed in 2006) with Fish Tank, which co-won the Jury prize. Arnold follows in the tradition of Ken Loach with gritty social realism and by casting a non-professional actor (Katie Jarvis) in the lead role. And speaking of Ken Loach, his Looking for Eric, a comedy about a depressed middle-aged postman, is looking to be on my list of Toronto hopefuls. I never miss a film by this master.

Speaking of masters, Lars von Trier (Antichrist) and Quentin Tarentino (Inglourious Basterds) both premiered films that were much anticipated and ultimately received with either controversy or disappointment or both. I will not likely pursue either of these films, though I respect and admire these filmmakers. And I am sad to have no interest at all in Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, based on a feeling of 'been there, seen that' about the subject matter. But when it comes to returning genius, always genuinely exciting to me is a new film by Pedro Almodovar. Although Abrazos Rotas (Broken Embraces) appears to have been met mostly with disappointment, I will not miss it. Elia Suleiman's The Time that Remains has had unexpected buzz - this film based on the diaries of Suleiman's father is being billed as a "deadpan Palestinian comedy".

Out of competition there were some other possible gems. I loved Robert Guediguian's Marijo et ses deux amours in 2002. This year Guediguian is offering a World War II drama about the French resistance called Army of Crime. Actress Fanny Ardant, whom I've long loved, has a debut feature, Ashes and Blood that I will be eager to see. I will also be headed to Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, Jan Kounen's biopic of the two cultural icons who fell hard for each other before their respective careers took them in geographic and psychologically opposite directions. The movie features gorgeous Mads Mikkelson, who starred in my 2006 TIFF favorite After the Wedding.

I've received and renewed my Industry pass invitation so the run-up to TIFF 09 is officially launched. More to come!

the white countess

2009-05-10T09:20:00.007-05:00

Those who have seen the Shanghai and Hongkong films of Wong kar-wai, have likely been appreciating, without knowing it, the colour palette of cinematographer Chris Doyle, an Englishman working in China, and a diviner of eras as no other cameraman. He deserves his own post, but I am still hanging on Natasha. In my pursuit of a greater appreciation of her work, I have been dabbling in her films, all of which teach me how utterly underrated this actor has been, by me and by the world, and how sad that I myself am only gaining the full knowledge of this as a result of her death. She was incredibly gifted and while I still stand behind my fondness for her in The Parent Trap (see earlier post), there are so many other riches.

More recently, I have been absorbed by The White Countess, a film which has an astonishing amount of layered meaning going on within performances and within the construction of the thematic development of the film itself. Richardson plays an exiled Russian countess who does taxi turns in a shabby dance hall to support her also-exiled family. Written by Kazuo Ichiguro with lovely touches of humour and spare splashes of narrative (wisely never allowing 'story' to be driving), this Merchant Ivory production might easily have succumbed to a burdensome fancifulness of context: Shanghai in the between-the-wars melting pot of the 1930s, where deposed Russian nobility live and work side by side with Jewish merchants escaping rising anti-Semitism in Europe. However, the lushness of cinematographer Chris Doyle's visual style, and the patiently detailed direction of James Ivory keep the film in a kind of trance-like combination of realism and dreamworld.

They are ably assisted by Redgrave royalty as the burnished victims of Bolshevism: besides Richardson herself, Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave play members of the Countess' extended family, people whose delusion and despair have turned them into rather nasty, or simply saddened people. (Though it is unquestionably Natasha's movie, both Redgraves earn their keep with a memorable scene each: Lynn in a turn of exquisite cruelty as she explains to Richardson why she will be left behind in the exodus from Shanghai that ends the film; and Vanessa in a moment where she offers Richardson a 'soft' pillow for her to sleep on after a hard night's work.)

Ralph Fiennes plays an American survivor of equally tragic circumstances, made blind by an accident that killed someone close to him. Once a 'diplomatist', he is now a wealthy man-about-town, drowning his losses in alcohol and dreaming of his own big bar/nightclub. Circumstances introduce him to the countess, whom he later positions as the 'centerpiece' of this new bar. The two have a wonderfully unconsummated but loaded relationship: deeply mutually respectful and kind, while also frustratingly unfulfilled, simply because of how dissipated they are by their own losses. What a wonderful diversion from more typical boy-meets-girl scenarios of most North American films. The need of Fiennes' 'Mr. Jackson' to keep everything anonymous between them, slowly wears thin as he himself falls hopelessly in love with his club's leading lady. His unrecognized passion is revealed in sudden fits of possessive temper, when he bounces from his bar characters who are relatively benign in the corrupt scheme of this world, merely for having offended Sofia's honour.

Richardson's Sofia remains aloof throughout, as if she herself is one of the battered boats our characters escape on in the film's final sequence with a faded but unfettered elegance. She is amazing in this film. There is a brooding in the eyes that reveals the deepest pain, even while showing pleasure in simple joys. It is as if the pleasure and the momentary pain go hand in hand. It is a remarkably observed detail of character that flows right out of a desire (expressed in the movie's commentary) for nuancing a Russian sensibility. Having written about Russians myself, and known a few, this is exactly the quality worth striving for. It means that a character's deep sadness and equally her capacity for happiness are never in dispute. One scene which captures this duality with absolute brilliance occurs when someone from her old world in Russia, now himself reduced to bussing bottles and clearing tables, recognizes the countess in the club. Approaching her with the utmost respect, he reminds her of their childhood times together playing tennis. The slow recognition on her face, the movement through beats of uncertainty to amazement, to joy, to tragic sadness again as he kisses her hand to leave, are breathtaking. The brimming brooding eyes as he moves away speak vividly to all of her losses. It is a master class of "beat" work!

The character who ultimately unites our two lost souls is Katya, the daughter of the countess, whose bright alertness to her world makes her an easy pawn in her family's dynamics but also enables her to be freed from them in the end. Played by Madeleine Daly, her red-headed narrow face seems a more likely offshoot of Grushenka, played by Madeleine Potter, the countess' sister-in-law, who is childless and tries hard to drive wedges between mother and daughter. Katya walks through all the worlds of this film: though never seen in the nightclub, she does meet up with and befriend the Fiennes character, and reminds him of his own lost child. She also provides a tie to the other social world of this film which is a family of Jewish immigrants to Shanghai, whose children are a more natural source of companionship for her than her strange family. This exposure helps give her a worldliness that fully ennobles one of the last shots of the film, as she stands staring off the prow of a ship into her own future.

This image at left comes from that same last scene. It represents one of the few moments of near-happiness and transcendence that exists in this film. Our tragedy-sodden characters only find solace with each other through another tragedy, which is the end of the world as they were living it. This is often how it is in life: it often does take the utter decimation of the static place in which we have cemented ourselves, to push us forward, kick us out of the trenches of our own pain. On a boat bound for Macao our characters huddle in the mist and listen to the sounds of a forlorn but hopeful trumpet, now free of the baggage of what was, and off on a new voyage.

risponditemi natasha

2009-04-06T02:39:00.015-05:00

Some time in the last week or so, the Globe and Mail created a strange but moving hybrid video of both the audio of the 911 calls surrounding Natasha's injury, with the photographs of her funeral. This paper seems to have ridden a particular wave of journalistic success on this story, which they are proud to tell you. An editor missed the obvious error of two hospitals both being exactly 88 km from the place of origin. (Mont Tremblant to Sainte-Agathe is actually only 40 km). Watching this odd narrative "film" made out of a newsmedia story took me to a new place of consideration in my obsession (which alas continues unabated).

I found myself suddenly thinking of the Montreal omnibus film, Montreal vu par...., six meditations on Montreal by Canadian filmmakers. One of these is called Risponditemi, by Lea Pool. This hauntingly beautiful short film takes place in an ambulance as a woman is transported from a car crash site to a hospital. During the ride, in her semi-conscious state, she relives her own life in flashes and pieces. Simultaneously we see the skyline of Montreal in a blue-black early dawnish light running over her head, as if the roof of the ambulance had been removed and this was the woman's point of view.

In that film, sound and image recount small bits of emotionally saturated memory, being drawn from a body and soul in crisis, as it tumbles into death or tries to knit itself back into recovery. The voices of the perimedics, working in both English and French, run in the background of the images, and overtop the ambulance footage itself.

*************

Natasha Richardson spoke fluent French. She attended the Lycee Francais in London as a young woman. In The Parent Trap, there is a scene in which she is on the phone speaking with a Parisian client in French that is not only flawless, but which is a brilliant imitation of the sound of Parisian women. I have no doubt in my mind that Natasha was speaking French wherever she could in Mont Tremblant. But did she understand the French she heard? The 911 tapes are filled with Quebecois accents not easy for an unseasoned ear, even a fluent one. In the ride from Mont Tremblant to the first hospital in Sainte Agathe, the medic tells the hospital that she is "verbal", responding to questions, but unable to answer them. I find myself stuck on this. Was she unable to respond because she did not know? or because she was trying to say it in French? (Even semi-conscious, the mind makes strange choices.) They likely spoke to her in English, but there would have been strong accents. Is there a difference between 'verbal' but disoriented, and 'unable' to say something? If she could speak at all, what might she have said, or wanted to say? Her vital signs at that point were still strongly within life's grasp. It was her brain that was slipping.

*************

In Rispondetemi, the noise of the inside of the ambulance is contrasted with the eery quiet and calm of the passing city. There are no faces there, no signs of life, only buidings and light and silence. The injured woman appears to "hear" that silence, even from deep within her own unconsciousness, her own reverie. The ghosts of memory are invested in their own time and space, listless and in limbo, impossible to sever from the experience, even while the body is in deep crisis. Is this the moment when the soul and a body are parted? Through the dreams? Through memory?

*************

An hour and a half after Natasha arrived at Sainte-Agathe, she was back in an ambulance en route to Sacre-Coeur in Montreal. Let's be blunt. From 5:55 pm to 6:38 pm on Monday, March 16, she was submitting to the loss of her brain life. Sirens were on, lights were flashing. The ambulance reached 138 km per hour. (Not particularly fast for an emergency vehicle when you stop and think about it.) A race was on that had already been lost. The rest of the story, its timing, its truths, is known only to the family, which is as it should be.

*************

Lea Pool is one of Canada's very best filmmakers. Her intuitive and emotionally poetic lens is one of the finest personal visual styles I have ever seen or known in the cinema. In the same sextet of short films with Risponditemi, there was another film, by Atom Egoyan. Atom, much better known to film audiences, is also an exceptional Canadian filmmaker. He was making his film Chloe, starring Liam Neeson, when Natasha fell. I don't know where Liam joined Natasha's journey, whether he made it to Sainte-Agathe or was only at Sacre-Coeur. Perhaps he was in the ambulance from 5:55 to 6:38. Most certainly he spent most of the next day in the Montreal hospital, before flying his wife to New York city. That day was St. Patrick's day, by the way, not a small day for an Irishman in normal times.

It is strange when the obsession of one's psyche crosses paths with the imaginative world of one's own private cinematic cache. I have taught Risponditemi. I have given it to students and clients and colleagues. It is for me a brilliant short film, which captures with very little spoken word an emotional truthfulness of what it means to be a body and soul on the edge of life, on the edge of death. At the end of Pool's film, the ambulance arrives at the Montreal hospital and a medic is heard to say, in French, "she's going to be okay". 'Risponditemi' is Italian. it means "reply to me". Reply. Be more than verbal. Be alive.

lovely natasha

2009-03-25T18:21:00.045-05:00

I know this is a grim way back into a blog I've left languishing for six months, but I want to write about the death of Natasha Richardson, in order to understand why it's preoccupying me so. At a glance, it might seem to be a classic version of realising what you liked after you lose it. This lovely actress has been around and I've always appreciated her, but never given her much thought or credit. That seems odd to me now. I was lucky enough to see Richardson and Liam Neeson in their legendary early 90s production of Anna Christie on Broadway. That ticket was a crazy fluke for me, as the production had a hugely limited run and was sold out inside of a breath. It was the production in which they fell in love. The chemistry was so charged and present, that any time they left the stage you found yourself wondering what they were up to behind scenes with much greater absorption than watching the remaining action. They were amazing: brittle and beautiful, truthful, sexy, brilliant, and achingly affected by each other.

Apart from that, however, I haven't really thought much about Natasha Richardson. I think more often of her mother. Perhaps because Vanessa Redgrave has played an enormous role in the development of some of my sensibilities: my understanding of what it means to be an actor, what it means to be a political activist. I remember for instance, reading an article, perhaps in the Anna Christie playbill, in which Natasha Richardson said her mother had asked her if she knew what was in Anna's suitcase (which sits on stage for most of the play). Vanessa was a part of the movie Julia, which impacted me hugely as a young woman. Then there are Blow-Up and Isadora, equally memorable times in the cinema. I've seen Vanessa a number of times on Broadway also, in Orpheus Descending, for instance, and Vita and Virginia.

It is this latter that brings Natasha more closely to mind. It has happened a few times, where I have found myself seated near to celebrities at shows, and one such time was at one of my viewings (I think I saw it three or four times) of Vita and Virginia. Natasha Richardson was sitting forward from me and to the left on an aisle seat. I can still see her impressed, slightly glowing face in profile, upturned to the stage. She was pregnant at the time. I remember thinking how lovely she was, even as she rose awkwardly at the play's end. She had a luminous smile.

But even this is not enough to explain the shock-like obssession I have had about her death: trolling endlessly online for news items, through Google News, through other algorhythmic search systems. Mostly it is the same footage, the same printed matter, recycled over and over. I should have given up once the funeral was done - the same images and information has been making me nauseous with boredom. You know you're at the obssession stage when the inaccurate naming of family members in pictures makes you so agitated you consider letters to editors. Time to get a grip!

By coincidence, I had just recently watched Evening, one of her last films, in which she plays the daughter to a dying mother played by Vanessa Redgrave. In some interview footage I found, she remarks on the poignancy of having had the chance to play opposite her mother - how she had asked Michael Cunningham to write a scene for them since it wasn't likely to happen again. The implication was clearly that Vanessa might be gone before such an opportunity would come again. In the scene in question, Redgrave lies mostly asleep and semi-conscious, while Natasha's character revisits the past with new understanding in a short monologue. It is one of the best moments in the film because of Richardson's engaging naturalism, strangely missing elsewhere. The apex of the scene comes when she says "I want you back", with very gently understated emotion. Redgrave's character stirs momentarily, smiles at her, then drifts off again. It's one of the few well-written scenes in a film filled with A-list actors serving underwritten characters, directed with disappointing mediocrity. (The film is rescued by the last minute presence of Meryl Streep. Until this point it was being held together singlehandedly by Toni Collette, who is often left to hold the emotional line of a film. Why is that?) Natasha's character is so badly underwritten, that you feel anguish for her in most of the film as she attempts to lift it into some kind of life. Then, in this added-in scene, a scene she requested, she accomplishes more in a few brushstrokes than the rest of the cast does in whole scenes. She manages it mostly just by being disingenuously effervescent, honest and lovely. It seems likely these moments were closest to herself.

I want this to end. This increasing obssession. This youtube trawling and blogsurfing fixation. (Even though these trawls produce prize pictures like this one of mother and daughter.) This imagination of the grief of Liam Neeson. (Two days ago while driving, I counted out loud all the places of his grief the man endured in one week). I don't need this: there is much going on in my life, plenty to think about. I need to move this along, get it out of my head. It's a simple tragedy after all, no greater, no worse than any other out there that occurs to someone I don't know. And there are tragedies occurring to people I do know. Only Sunday I spent a heartbreaking hour with friends whose own daughter is dying. I have grieved and prayed on that one also - perhaps fixating on Natasha is helping me cope with their dreadful pain.

Perhaps I am appalled at the stupidity of the death, how someone's life can be so easily ended by such a small, ridiculous fall. It does not properly fit into useful drama or narratives about celebrity death either. These sorts of public tragedies usually occur from perilous plunges off cliffs or terrible tragic crashes. A simple slip on the slopes, a minor banging of the head that everyone assessed at the time to be surpassable, this is not how the script for such a death should be written. If it were in a screenplay I had in front of me, I'd send the scene back to the writer and say, 'I kind of like the non-drama of this, but it seems highly unlikely'. There is no credibility to this death, no satisfactory catastrophe. (Satisfactory in the sense of making sense of it all - there is nothing satisfactory about this death. This death is terrible.)

Perhaps it was the fact that it happened a year to the day of the death of Anthony Minghella. I wrote about him, then too. That's a crazy coincidence. Again, if it were in the script - I would send it back. It's the kind of coincidence that peppers Slumdog Millionaire and which I have criticized in that film. There is no direct relationship between these two people except the date of their death. However, there are less than six degrees of separation between their careers, their nationalities, their age, and their untimely deaths. Minghella's death also hit me hard. Before him, I can't think of one that got to me so, until I reach Kieslowski in the mid-90s. That's a long time.

I have been watching Natasha act, in movies I happen to have, that I bought not particularly for her but which I happen to own. I also went out in a low moment the other day and rented The Parent Trap, since I had a vague sense of having been quite crushy on Natasha in that film when I saw it once on a plane. Until that time, I think I believed that there was a slight quality of something forced in her acting - a reaching for meaning in her characters that didn't seem wholly natural. And then too, she just always seemed too "nice" to be a great actor. I remember being appalled at the idea of casting her as Sally Bowles in Sam Mendes' legendary Broadway Cabaret, since Liza Minnelli had been a venerated icon for me of that role and she seemed way too British and classy to be playing Sally. I was shamed by critics, awards and audiences everywhere. I didn't get to see it. I wish I had, as now the Youtube excerpts are quite compelling. I do remember seeing her in her early gruesome roles, like Gothic, Handmaid's Tale and Patty Hearst. I was obssessed with Patty Hearst at the time and again I remember thinking, "she's too pure, too good". But more recently I've changed my mind. More recently I've decided that it is this very goodness that makes her so compelling. And what's wrong with goodness anyway? Why can't we celebrate it again?

It was when I went back to The Parent Trap on a recent night that I suddenly found myself in tears. It ain't award-winning stuff. Hardly what she might have chosen for her own epitaph. But her performance in that film is perfect: it is exactly what it needs to be, no more, no less, and it is a very charming, nuanced, understated, lovely reading of a fairly standardized character. The crush was born anew.

Neeson is an actor I've always liked. The funeral scene from Love Actually is now just plain haunting, as is the footage of Redgrave from Year of Magical Thinking. It is odd to go from 'footage' and 'film' to the real life living out of unexpected nightmares. I so respect the quiet Irish machismo with which Neeson has handled this terribly personal nightmare, publicly. Managing smiles and waves - not submitting for a second to the diva-esque grotesquery of open public grieving. There is a rawness in the face that makes clear the suffering behind the smiles. Don't believe for a minute those People magazine preview pieces that quote Blaine Trump (of all people) saying that the family is 'moving on' and 'doing fine'. I found right away that the most reliable source on this whole story has been the Irish press, who are following Neeson. Of course they are. I knew I had finally found a unique perspective when I discovered the headline, "Neeson's wife mourned". Yes, you read that right. Where Blaine says life is moving on, the Irish Herald quotes Liam's sister as saying he is devastated and inconsolable and another source recounts how Vanessa is still trying to understand why her daughter was skiing. She hates to ski - why was she on a ski slope? These seem much more likely responses to me. The picture that most moves me from the funeral is a long shot of Redgrave and Neeson at the cemetery that originated in the Guardian and was picked up by others only after they had made attempts to blow it up beyond any possibility of preserving a sense of spontanaiety to it. The Irish and UK response have been the best on this thing.

I suppose I will just have to get over it. Maybe I'll wake up tomorrow and it will be gone. I hope so, because there is much I should be doing with my time otherwise. To help myself along, I have been running two scenes from The Parent Trap over and over. This repeat viewing is remarkable for me, since both scenes have the too-easy-pleasure and predictable writing that I normally loathe, a quality of emotion that sits on the edge of genuine engagement, despite leaving no cliche left unturned, no moment of possible sincerity slightly unbruised by manipulative direction. I confess, however, I have always been an easy victim for these Meyers-Shyer films, despite how I feel about them critically (Baby Boom and Somethings Gotta Give come to mind, for instance, as some of my favourite "lite" viewing, though the latter is only Meyers - an important distinction as she is by far the better half of that duo). In the first of these two scenes, Dennis Quaid attempts to reunite with Richardson over a dusty old bottle of wine, and in the other, they successfully do reunite, owing to the wiliness of their daughters. Despite all odds, everyone does fine in the scenes (they are all good actors after all), but she is just so stirringly beautiful, so genuinely perfect, especially in that definitively Hollywood moment of 'happily ever after' kissing, that I am flushed with new emotion each time. I am generally not this kind of outrageous sentimentalist, but nonetheless I leave you with these two scenes which another Youtube addict has kindly cropped together into one clip. Of these two, the second is a scene in which two people get to restore a life to what it should have been. A life which will be full of impossible problems, but built on a love which never seems to die. It's a dream we can continue to carry for Natasha.

you saw it here first!

2008-09-13T13:14:00.005-05:00

Slumdog Millionaire was just announced as the People's Choice Award winner.

people's choice award prediction

2008-09-13T09:01:00.003-05:00

More movie reviews coming, but in the meantime, I thought I would post a prediction in advance of TIFF's announcement later today of the People's Choice Award. From all the buzz of the week, even in the press room, it seems destined to be Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire! This rags-to-riches story (which I did not see) seems to have tapped critics and public alike. Let's see if I'm right!

kanchivaram; easy virtue; gigantic

2008-09-10T20:35:00.009-05:00

I took two days away from the festival to do laundry, start classes and see hana my puppy, but now I am back in swing. Once again, the day was led by a strong film - I started with Priyadarshan's Kanchivaram, about a silk weaver who promises his newborn daughter that she will wear silk on her wedding day. The working conditions among South India's weavers in the 1940s is such that no weaver can ever afford to actually weave silk for themselves. The high religious value of the culture to be married and to die in silk prompts the weavers to resent their fate. Tamil film star Prakah Raj looks a bit too flush, too full on the bones and healthy to be convincing physically for his role as the region's most prize weaver who steals silk to fulfill his promise to his daughter. However, his performance is delightful and moving, weaving past and present together (the movie is told largely through flashbacks) with stark contrasts in temperament and mood. This film is gorgeously shot; one of those wonderful festival experiences where you leave the cinema feeling as if you have tasted the food and can still feel the rain on your skin. Subtitled "a communist confession", the film also portrays the post-Gandhi rise of communism in South Asia as the weavers come together to improve their lot and Vengadam takes on their charge.

The only thing that is easy about watching Stephan Elliott's Easy Virtue, is gazing on the beauty of the cast. Jessica Biel, Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth glide through this very breezy adaptation of the Noel Coward play and give it their best, but even they cannot save this frothy piece from looking and feeling like an art nouveau tour of English aristocracy. I am a huge fan of Scott Thomas, and its worth saying that even playing a thankless role, she can be electrifying. No one, and I say this categorically, can say as much as she does with an eyebrow! As the profoundly bitchy matriarch of a well-heeled family coping with the marriage of its prodigal son to an American "with a past", she manages to smile through all of her barbs in a way that conveys an inner pain and underlying loss, even while she is wholly unlikeable. That's just the quality of the person playing the role. Colin Firth, as the jaded father, has his usual moments of depth but he is not given much to work with here. The story really belongs to Biel, as the American newlywed caught in a vipers' den, trying to survive. It is hard to bring such superficial material to the screen - Coward is meant to be done without any real looking beneath the surface. An Oscar Wilde comedy can support that, but not a Coward one. Like Faubourg 36, the other film I saw set in the same era and with high production values, the director gets in the way of the material by being too much in love with what they are doing. The result is gag after gag, one-liner after one-liner that fizzles immediately after its sting more often than nought, because the camera is in the wrong place.

The similarity in directing styles was not the only noticeable comparison for me about Easy Virtue and Faubourg 36. Both films were screened at the Elgin. Today again, the theatre was empty and the audiences less enthusiastic. It became clear to me that not only is this theatre now the purvue of the donors; they are also being fed some of the pablum of this festival: easy to digest and without much depth. Is the festival not only ripping off its passholders - but also spoon-feeding its donors only movies it thinks they will enjoy? End of mini-rant 2!

Small, but memorable star turns have been one of the hallmarks of my festival so far. I mentioned Catherine Keener in Genova, and there are two that made me smile in Matt Aselton's Gigantic: Ed Asner and Jane Alexander. I guess it dates me to say "I remember when..." about these actors but great to know that they are still as strong as ever. I have always loved Jane Alexander - since first seeing her wonderful supporting performance in All the President's Men. I was working as an usher in Famous Players Theatres in those teenaged days, and saw that movie many many many times. I always made sure I was in the house for the scene in which her bookkeeper character reveals some of the first top secrets of Watergate to an anxious Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford. In Gigantic, Asner and Alexander are perfectly cast as the parents of our hero Brian, played by Paul Dano. Dano is one of those actors, like Michael Cera, who has enjoyed sudden focussed interest because of recent work in large films: in this case Little Miss Sunshine and There Will Be Blood. He is a very compelling actor through very minimalist, naturalist style. He is joined here by broader comedy actress Zooey Deschanel as the unfulfilled daughter of a wealthy entrepreneur (played with glee by John Goodman) who comes to pick up a bed her father has bought. Like, Lovely, Still, I didn't have much expectation going into this, but also like that film, was surprised. The screenplay is too arch, too highly stylized, with everyone sounding the same and swearing exactly the same way and reaching too hard in places to be offbeat and quirky. Yet somehow, largely through the engaging performances of our leads and supporting cast, and assured direction, the film is unexpectedly moving. Brian's lifelong dream to adopt a baby from China starts out as a gag and becomes a way to finding the heart of the film.

unmistaken child; lovely, still

2008-09-08T18:35:00.004-05:00

It feels like a wonderful expression of the cultural mix of our world that an Israeli filmmaker has made a movie about Tibetan monks searching for a reincarnated master. Unmistaken Child, is a beautiful essay in the complexities of buddhist tradition, without having to get out a dictionary of world religions. Lama Konchog, a venerated lama has died and Tenzin Zopa, his disciple of 21 years, is grief-stricken. Finding a footprint in the ashes of the great master's funeral pyre, along with several pearls, the lamas and rinpoches of Zopa's monastery believe the master to be intending reincarnation. The disciple is put in charge of the search, one he doesn't feel worthy of. Thus begins this wonderful film. As Zopa travels through the communities of his home Tsum Valley, he carries the rosaries of the late master and asks each baby he encounters, "do you recognize this?" Just as we are wondering how such a divination could ever occur in a child just one year old, the magic begins. A fascinating aspect of this film is also its depiction of what happens to a child, once they have been recognized as a 'Rinpoche' (reincarnated master). Shot over four years, we watch this child grow slowly and gain a greater confidence in the knowledge of who he is. But I was most moved of all by the beautiful attention and caring patience of Tenzin Zopa himself, who lavishes the love of a disciple who sees clearly his deceased master in the eyes of the child. One such moment comes when he sits the child on his knee at the mountain retreat where he himself first met Konchog, and tells the boy all about their first encounter, when he himself was a boy. Rain on the windows of the residence of the Dalai Lama, the lush foliage of the valley, the beautiful smile of the disciple are images that won't leave me soon.

I went into Nik Fackler's Lovely, Still with very little expectation and was pleasantly surprised. Featuring Martin Landau and Ellen Burstyn, it tells the story of a man and woman who meet up late in life and fall very quickly in love, only to leave us, and each other, with the feeling they have done all this before. There have been a number of movies lately, and fine ones too, that have attempted to deal with Alzheimer's Disease: Sarah Polley's Away From Her comes quickly to mind. In Lovely, Still, the drama takes on the disease completely within the world of the one living it - so that all of the surprises of understanding come for us at the same time as for our hero. It is a wise choice, and allows us to feel the highs that the Landau character experiences in being in love, without sensing something amiss. When he starts to become paranoid about her absence, reality slowly shifts in for us. It is material which could have been trite or overbearing, but Fackler handles it with sensitivity and great confidence for a first feature.