Something unexpected has taken-up all the time I meant to write while here in Toronto: simply figuring out what the hell I’m going to get to see while here. With the New York Film Festival press screenings starting next week, I’m staying away from all of those big titles, trying to use my time on films I either need to cover for work and/or sound interesting. I also am simply observing different elements of how this Toronto International Film Festival is run: what we do similarly; what we do differently; etc.
I arrived here on Thursday, and over the past four days, I’ve been going to movies non-stop. Well, almost non-stop. I’ve spent a couple hours every night simply trying to figure out what to see the next day. Then, I’ve slept for roughly five hours, until last night when it all caught up to me and I slept through the three alarms I had set, missing the two films I had intended to get to Sunday morning.
No matter: I hope to find time to sit and discuss several of these titles, but for now, and in brief, here’s my Toronto-so-far rundown:
Thursday started with the Tony Gilroy-helmed Michael Clayton, which just proved to me that Gilroy is a better writer than director, and he’s not even that great a writer. Michael Clayton is a somewhat obvious film with major plot and logic holes. George Clooney gives a very good central performance, but Tilda Swinton is utterly wasted. Gilroy spends too much time trying to manufacture suspense when he would have done better simply focusing on telling a straightforward story.
After Michael Clayton, I went to the Michael Moore movie I had no idea existed: Captain Mike Across America, which follows Moore on his Slacker Tour of 2004 during which he went to 62 cities during the six weeks preceding the Presidential election with the hope of getting the youth vote out in order to win the White House for John Kerry. I’m a Moore fan, and although I find his films to be overly polemical, I generally consider him to be a talented filmmaker, even if solely utilizing the criteria of creating successful propoganda. But Captain Mike Across America is a huge disappointment, and not much more than a 90+ minute, self-congratulatory political commercial. What’s Moore’s purpose here? Likely to create a huge guilt trip for all those who didn’t vote or voted for Bush and now regret it. The end goal certainly is to make sure that the Democrats win the White House in 2008, a valiant and important objective, but couldn’t he have made a much more interesting film? One that truly examined what — even with the great success of his tour and rallies — still went wrong?
Friday was a very full day, but also one that found me so exhausted from two nights of too-little sleep that I wound up dozing-off or struggling to stay awake during every film of the day. I woke-up bright and early in order to get to Nadine labaki’s Caramel, an entertaining look at the lives of five women in Beirut. The film was apparently a big hit at Cannes this year; I found it not too much more than a pleasant diversion.
From there, I went to the Canadian documentary A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman. Dorfman is a successful author and essayist who wrote the play and later screenplay for Death and the Maiden. In the early ’70s, he worked with Chilean Socialist president Salvador Allende until a U.S.-backed military coup that was launched on Sept. 11, 1973. I didn’t stay for the entire film; it lost my interest relatively quickly before regaining and losing again. The film would be an interesting program on The History Channel or the like, but it seems to have a crisis of identity: is it a first-person historical document or a personal essay from a witness to history. The objective is apparent, but the result, unsuccessful.
I then saw a wonderful little French film called Dans la vie, which has been given the English title, Two Ladies. The story focuses on two Algerian-born women living in France — one Jewish, one Arab — who form a tight friendship when one comes to work for the other. They overcome much prejudice in their communities simply by interacting with each other. What Philippe Faucon’s film lacks in subtlety, it more than makes up for in clarity of purpose, emotion, lovable characters, and economy in storytelling.
I next sat down to Encarnación, an Argentinean film about an aging actress who refuses to grow-up. That’s actually an unfair and simplistic description for what is a genuinely touching and interesting film about female empowerment and following one’s own path. At the same time, the film seems somewhat confused as to its own intentions. On the one hand, this dynamic and exuberant woman who brings excitement into the monochromatic regular life of her 15-year-old niece is one of excitement and fun. But on the other hand, filmmaker Anahí Berneri explicitly shows that not all is well in this woman’s world and much, if not all, of her daily life and viewpoint is one of delusion – a world to which she no longer belongs and from which she should leave in order to finally grow-up.
My Friday continued with Ploy, the tremendous new film from Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang, whose Last Life in the Universe played at Tribeca a few years ago. Ploy is a film I will certainly need to see again to completely wrap my head around. Pen-ek’s narrative — as it were — continuously fluctuates between a real and fantasy state, and throughout the film, he leaves us uncertain as to which is which. Ultimately, the film is an exploration of one couple’s relationship; one in which the participants seemed to have forgotten what it really means to love about and care for each other.
I wrapped-up my Friday with Korean filmmaker Im Kwon-taek’s Beyond the Years, part of Toronto’s “Masters” section. I actually found Beyond the Years quite unbearable, filled with an odd kind of melodrama and utterly ludicrous situations.
Saturday also started early with the Spanish family animated film Nocturna. A lovely fable in which a young boy afraid of the dark discovers that once everyone is asleep, the land of Nocturna comes to life in order to control the night — everything from the sound of crickets to that messy bedhead is intricately orchestrated. The film suffers from too extensive a period of exposition — if the first 30 minutes had been chopped in half, it would have seemed much tighter. But once the film does grab you, it’s hard to let it go, although it is most definitely intended for a very young audience, the story and characters are still fun and magical. The animation is also excellent and highly stylized.
After Nocturna, I went to check-out Just Buried, a romantic dark comedy that feels a lot like Northern Exposure meets Six Feet Under. The film stars the beautiful and talented Rose Byrne … and that’s about the only thing positive I have to say about it.
Nightwatching, the latest from the enigmatic Peter Greenaway, on the other hand is truly a piece of film art. Possibly one of Greenaway’s most accessible films in that it contains a relatively straightforward narrative, Nightwatching is a look at the story behind one of Rembrandt’s most famous works, “The Night Watch.” Visually, Nightwatching is truly a site to behold with the vast majority of its 140 minutes shot to recreate the mood, tone and contrast between shadow-and-light for which Rembrandt is most well-known. The staging is both highly theatrical — like much of Greenaway’s work — but also thoroughly cinematic. His storytelling may still lead to some moments of confusion, but the overall experience is fairly breathtaking.
With Your Permission came next on my docket. Danish actress and filmmaker Paprika Steen’s dark comedy has a great premise and lots of wonderful moments, but ultimately, it’s all set-up with no redeemable characters. I can’t remember the last time I sat through a film during which the first half was so enjoyable before the remainder completely fell apart, but that was my feeling as I walked out of With Your Permission.
As a big fan of Head-on, I was really hoping to get to Fatih Akin’s new film, The Edge of Heaven, but it was just one of several films I intended to get to on Friday and Saturday before, for one reason or another, not making it or not getting in. Instead, however, it enabled me to go see Chaotic Ana, the latest from Spanish filmmaker Julio Medem, best known for The Lovers of the Arctic Circle and Sex and Lucía. The first thing that must be said about Chaotic Ana is that its central performance by Manuela Vellás is absolutely breathtaking. This young and gorgeous actress has no other credits listed on IMDb, but hopefully we’ll be seeing a lot more of her. She fearlessly takes on the title role, and with a lesser performance, the entire film would potentially fall apart. If the film has any flaw, it comes at the end where the ultimate resolution seemed to step over the line of WTF? abstraction. Even so, Chaotic Ana is a fun ride, and one which hopefully lots of people will be able to take.
I was so exhausted after Chaotic Ana that I just returned to the hotel to sleep … and sleep … and sleep. I didn’t awaken until nearly Noon. I needed to go see American Venus at 2:30, but I thought I would try to catch a bit of the Danish Just Like Home first. I only got to see 15 minutes of Just Like Home, but I wish I had been able to see more. That became especially true when I actually sat through Canadian director Bruce Sweeney’s American Venus which was pretty terrible. With her role in HBO’s John From Cincinnati combined with her performance here, Rebecca De Mornay is apparently the new over-emotional crazy woman. At least in John the character fit. Here, she just makes no sense. It’s probably because American Venus is an attempt to look at the differences between those of us from the USA and the home-turf Canadians. This is a film which tries to portray America’s gun culture through one, frankly, psychotic and sociopathic woman who is comforted by the surprise she always gets from her handgun’s recoil. Shooting a gun, to De Mornay’s Celia, is quite simply an addiction, and when her overbearingness chases her daughter away, not only does she travel from Seattle to Vancouver to find her, but she has to try to find a gun to buy as well. The entire movie is ludicrous, but in no way more so than the very core of De Mornay’s character. And the eventual climax is simply laughable.
I next spent half-an-hour watching the first segment of Indian director Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Four Women. I wish I had been able to stay to see the rest as Gopalakrishnan’s “The Prostitute” was really interesting in its use of simple storytelling to present complicated themes. But instead, I had to make my way to a different theater for my first public screening and rush line experience.
And that experience was with Grant Gee’s new documentary Joy Division about the seminal Manchester-based New Wave band that only made two albums before the tragic suicide of frontman Ian Curtis (whose life is also being presented in another Toronto feature, Control, which happens to open at Film Forum in New York in just a few weeks). Gee’s film is quite uneven: those who are Joy Division fans and have a basis of knowledge about the band and, especially, its music will thoroughly enjoy the film, but I don’t know if they’ll discover anything revelatory within its contents. Meanwhile, those who don’t know much about the band will likely be thoroughly confused throughout the first third as the basic how-they-formed and other origin information is sped through in a very confusing manner. Complicating matters is Gee’s attempt to present this band biodoc as a film about Manchester’s continuous and circular rise and fall and rise and fall as a major industrial city. The idea of using Joy Division as a symbol for all of Manchester is placed front-and-center at the beginning and end of the movie, but utterly abandoned throughout the center 85%. Not that this is a problem: the audience is not coming to see a documentary about Manchester. I don’t believe Gee was being disingenuous in this attempt, but if his goal was to do a story about Manchester, he failed. And in presenting the story of Joy Division, he did significantly better, but not necessarily good enough.
I next went to check-out Haitian director Michelange Quay’s Eat, For This Is My Body, a fascinating collage of images exploring race, politics, and culture in Haiti. Unfortunately, I again had to leave after about an hour to get to a screening I had to see, but I must also admit that I was a bit surprised to be as riveted as I was to most of Quay’s film, a thoroughly experimental, plodding and contemplative piece without any real characters (at least, in the three-dimensional personality sense) or narrative. I’d be very interested in seeing the rest of Quay’s film, although I’m not sure I would say I actually “liked” it.
I didn’t feel too bad about leaving Eat early, however, because the next film is certainly one of my absolute favorites of the festival so far. Erik Nietzsche The Early Years is a semi-autobiographical comic account of Danish director Lars von Trier’s time in film school. Von Trier wrote the script — credited to his alter-ego Erik Nietzsche — but the film was directed by long-time editor Jacob Thuesen. Hysterical, insightful and thoroughly entertaining, the film is also a compelling look at the growth and maturation of not just an artist but a man … a man who finds his spine and asserts himself into greatness.
Having slept so late, I was wide-awake enough for one more film, and I have been dying to see Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe since I first heard about it. I’m a big fan of Taymor’s, and Across the Universe is a great example of why. But as breathtaking as much of the film and many of its brilliant visual moments and sequences may be, I think ultimately it is a failure; certainly one which may become a favorite of stoners and a perpetual Midnight Movie selection, but a failure nonetheless. A tremendously impressive failure, too — a movie that I can’t actually say I enjoyed from start-to-finish, but one which I would encourage people to see in a theater, on a big screen, with great sound rather than via DVD on their home TVs. I’m still letting Across the Universe settle, and in light of the similarities with Romance & Cigarettes, which just opened on Friday at Film Forum, I have a lot to say. But right now, it’s about 3 AM, and with a full day of movies ahead of me — again! — it’s time for me to sleep, so those notes will have to wait for another time.
Out of Focus 
I’m sure it won’t come as a big surprise, but I am dying to see the Taymor film. I actually haven’t liked any of her films, but you know my weakness for musicals — especially ones that have Bono playing a character from a Beatles song. Nuff said.
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