I went to six films today, but I only sat through five. One was simply too unbearable, and combine that with the sweltering heat of that particular screening room, there was no way I could stick it out for more than 30 minutes, even though I had no other particular place to go. All-in-all, though, today was a pretty good day for film finds. Brief comments on Blind, Silent Resident, Garage, Dr. Plonk, Love Comes Lately and Glory to the Filmmaker follow:
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The day started well enough with Dutch actress Tamar van den Dop’s debut feature as a director: Blind. A powerful drama taking inspiration from Nordic fables as fairy tales, Blind depicts the relationship between a young man, Ruben, who lost his site as a boy and the reclusive woman, Marie, his invalid mother hires to read to him. Marie suffered emotional and physical scarring during her childhood, and now finds her only pleasures in books. Ruben, meanwhile, is angry and violent concerning his own predicament, and has chased away every caretaker his mother has hired. Reading for Ruben is the perfect position for her because she simply doesn’t want to be seen, covering mirrors in her room so she can’t even see herself. Van den Dop repeatedly questions the true nature of beauty, especially as Marie and Ruben fall in love with Ruben’s imagined vision of her quite unlike her true pale and white-haired features. the contrast between the stark Dutch landscape, blanketed in snow and all blues and greys with the colorful beauty Ruben sees in his mind is striking. Van den Dop has created a truly sensual film: one that explores sound, smell and touch vividly, even within a medium that is primarily visual. The one paradox, however, is that even as the pacing never felt too slow at any one moment, the entire film seems much longer than its 103 minutes. Regardless, Van den Dop is certainly a filmmaker to watch.
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I next went to see Silent Resident, a German film that seems to straddle a few different genres, but could primarily be described as a thriller with sci-fi elements. Coincidentally enough, like Blind, this film from director Christian Frosch also focuses on a young woman, Hannah, who seems to prefer books to people because, to paraphrase her, Books only give without wanting to take anything back. The film is set in a near-future city that strives for utopia and security but doesn’t seem to actually offer much of either. Frosch’s premise and storytelling moves along briskly providing much intrigue, but the whole film starts to fall apart in the second half. It enters David Lynch territory of the Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive variety, featuring an utter instability and shift in identity, but Frosch’s handling is messy at best. A thoroughly ambitious film, the end proves to be simply too confusing and hard-to-follow for me to consider it a success.
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I then took an (unintentional) long walk up University Ave. on my way to the Isabel Bader Theatre at the University of Toronto to see a screening of the Irish film Garage, the story of a lonely but simple man with a kind heart and a trusting soul. He works at a gas station in a rural Irish town, taking great pride in suggesting ideas to his boss such as moving a display rack of oil from inside to outside. There is a huge difference between ignorant and naive, stupid and simple, and in Garage, Josie is the embodiment of those latter adjectives. The film is often amusing before becoming somewhat heartbreaking and downright tragic with a powerful kick-in-the-gut to make you leave the theatre conflicted as to your immediate feelings. But what director Lenny Abrahamson does so well is portray — without judgment or pity but plenty of empathy — rural life in today’s Ireland.
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I next went looking for anything that started at the right time, and what I found was one of the most pleasant surprises for me so far at this year’s festival. Director Rolf de Heer’s Dr. Plonk is a new silent comedy, made and looking like the films of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, The Keystone Cops, etc. Telling the story of a scientist in 1907 Australia who discovers that the world will end in 2008. But since no one will believe his predictions, he decides to build a time machine so he can go to the future and bring back evidence. Not a lot needs to be said about Dr. Plonk: it is quite simply 84 minutes of hilarious fun, perfectly mimicking silent-era comedy. I really loved this film, and while I have no idea whether a distributor would take a chance on it considering its likely limited audience, if it happens to come to a festival or art house in your town, go see it. You won’t be sorry.
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I can’t say the same thing about Love Comes Lately, an English-language film from German director Jan Schütte. The film is an adaptation of three Isaac Beshevis Singer short stories, and somewhere in the writing process, something went horribly wrong. The dialogue is so horribly stilted and unnatural — I hesitate to blame it on English not being writer-director Schütte’s native language, but that certainly could be part of the problem. Regardless, I made it about 1/3 of the way through until, as mentioned earlier, the heat and mugginess of the screening room helped convince me to leave.
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At that point, I had just under two hours before Takeshi Kitano’s Glory to the Filmmaker! was scheduled to start, and I seriously thought about calling it quits for the evening. I’m happy I didn’t because Kitano’s film is certainly a sight to behold. A good sight? A bad sight? I’m not sure. A bizarre sight, most certainly. I’m still not sure what to make of Kitano’s film, which seems to exist in two distinctive halves. I can’t help but think of Glory to the Filmmaker! as a weird, overly self-aware version of Mel Brooks meets The Three Stooges packaged within a Sullivan’s Travels story and framework. The first half of the film finds Kitano paying comic homage to the filmmakers he admires who came before him while also skewering his own work and reputation. Kitano, most well-known for violent Japanese gangster films, has decided that he’s done with that genre, and wants to explore his abilities as a filmmaker with other kinds of stories, from Ozu-like family dramas to Hollywood-inspired sci-fi epics. Along the way, we see parts of these failed productions come to life before finally settling on one story that would take me all day to even attempt to describe with any kind of coherency. The film simply gets weirder and weirder, all the while ripping away the fourth wall of filmmaking and revealing much of the hidden production. The one main motif Kitano uses repeatedly throughout the film is a stand-in dummy. The dummy will simply appear in any scene in which Kitano is about to be attacked or he simply doesn’t want to be there to do the work. The other characters know that he is suddenly a doll, and call him on the fact, but that never changes the “reality.” Throughout the second half, Kitano repeatedly lifts scenes and sequences from other contemporary Japanese cinema in a completely absurd representation. Things just get more and more bizarre until a jaw-dropping sequence that gave me strange flashbacks of Ken Russel’s Lisztomania that somehow leads up to the entire planet facing destruction. ‘m not sure if Glory to the Filmmaker! works as a whole, but it’s certainly a fun ride.
Whew … two days left before I head back to New York on Thursday. The festival is so massive, I feel like even was I to stay for the full final three days, there would still be plenty that ‘d want to see but still miss. As it is, there are several titles that I won’t be able to get to because they don’t screen again — not for press & industry nor publicly — before I leave. Oh well .. I can’t worry about it. Onward and … onward.
Out of Focus 