The last 48 hours are a bit of a blur. A full day of movies on Wednesday that ended in total exhaustion, followed by the intent of one final screening Thursday morning that just didn’t happen because I was too damn tired. I wish I had actually planned to stay at least one or even two more days to observe some more public screening activity: the Toronto folks have their shit down, if I do say so myself, although I also discovered that, as much as it may be hard for some New Yorkers and Tribeca attendees to believe, we do a much better (or at least comparatable) job than I even thought we did. Toronto has one edge over Tribeca: Canadians, in general, seem to be much calmer and not as complaint-happy as Americans, and Torontonians (is that right?) are certainly not as aggressive as New Yorkers. Plus, they seem to be better trained to get to places on time. I’m just saying ….
Anyway, aside from hopefully getting some individual more detailed review posts, tomorrow I’ll do my own version of a Toronto wrap. For now, however, here’s the rundown of my last day doing a lot of sitting in dark rooms watching flickering light. So, after the jump, To Love Someone, Chacun son cinéma, L’Amour caché, Very Young Girls and Vixelle.
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I got my act together, woke-up at 7:45 and headed over to the Cumberland Cinemas for a 9 AM public screening of To Love Someone, a really interesting, moving and thoroughly depressing Swedish film featuring a set of tremendous and complicated performances. I think the film cops out on itself a bit at the end in an attempt to not be so predictable, but instead it just loses a bit of credibility by creating a bit of an eye-rolling moment. But the simple premise which tries to explore without necessarily explaining why a battered woman might go back to her abuser when he’s doing his best to avoid her and fear is not her motivation to return but also not a strong enough one to keep her away is genuinely fascinating, and director Åke Sandgren treats the subject with tremendous sensitivity. It’s a very powerful movie that fits into this large group of titles I really liked but didn’t necessarily love at the festival.
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The English title means To Each His Own Cinema, and its full French title is Chacun son cinéma ou Ce petit coup au coeur quand la lumière s’éteint et que le film commence. The idea? The Cannes Film Festival, in honor of its 60th Anniversary, asked 33 filmmakers to each create a three-minute short film that in some way expresses his/her love of cinema. I’m not actually sure that watching all of these films in a row is the best way to see them, but regardless, that’s how they were presented here, and they certainly are a fascinating collection. Not all are memorable, and several aren’t even enjoyable, but at three minutes per, there’s not too much about which to complain. I had a few definite favorites, however, with David Cronenberg’s At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the last Cinema in the World is utterly fantastic, as is the Coen Brothers’ World Cinema. I also thoroughly enjoyed Nanni Moretti’s Diaro di uno Spettatore, Roman Polanski’s Cinéma Erotique, Walter Salles’ A 8 944 km de Cannes, Lars von Trier’s Occupations, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Anna Takeshi Kitano’s One Fine Day and Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dans le Noir.
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The day started to catch-up to me as I entered the next screening, a film I really wanted to see called L’Amour caché, starring the great Isabelle Huppert as well as Greta Scacchi. I don’t think I can totally judge this film because I found myself struggling to pay attention and stay awake through at least 20 minutes of the middle, but I hesitate to say it’s the fault of the film itself. Huppert is absolutely riveting as usual in — as hard as this may be to believe let alone say — one of the most complex roles she has likely ever played: a mother with not only no maternal instinct but a lingering post-partem depression (that has lingered for 23 years!) in which she simultaneously feels utterly inadequate as a mother and an almost total hatred for the daughter she gave birth to. It is a fascinating and tragic story from beginning to end, and I hope I get the chance to see it again to give it a fairer shake.
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I wish my mid-afternoon blood-sugar decline had happened during the following film instead. Very Young Girls is yet another example of a documentary with a great subject matter that suffers from its filmmaking. In fact, in a way, this film made me angry but for all the wrong reasons: not because the subject matter and lives of these young girls has been so terrible, but because the true impact of their stories is done a disservice by a disorganized, unfocused documentary that goes from pure talking-head, conventional, uninspiring storytelling to a simple public service announcement highlighting an organization called GEMS that helps teenage prostitutes get off the streets and change their lives. On the one hand, I hope this film gets seen because the stories it tries to tell should be more widely known and exposed. The film’s primary subject — Rachel Lloyd, the founder and head of GEMS — near the end of the film mentions, while accepting an award, that people in the US are very concerned about children trapped in the sex and slave trades in the Third World, yet we ignore the fact that a large number of the streetwalking prostitutes controlled by abusive pimps are between 12 and 16 years old. That’s criminal, and I don’t mean in the basic law-breaking way. I just wish Very Young Girls was a better film.
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I spent the next several hours walking with my 30 pound bag on back. I swung by several of the larger premiere venues on the way to meet a friend for drinks, probably covering a good six-to-10 miles over the course of the day. I swung by the Married Life premiere just to see how one of their bigger venues worked, and having totally forgotten which movie Married Life was, found myself pleasantly surprised to see Rachel McAdams walk her gorgeous self into the theater. Now, I’m not one for fashion critiques, but her kind of puffy skirt? No no no.
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After drinks, I headed back to the theaters with the intention of seeing two more films, both in the “Midnight Madness” section. I really wanted to see Takashi Miike’s SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO, but it wasn’t starting until 11:30 PM, so I had time for something else. Besides, I kind of needed to go see Vexille which was screening first at 9:30. I didn’t make it all the way through Vexille. It certainly wasn’t a horrible film, but I didn’t love it, and after such a long day, I was fried. Staying through the Miike film would have kept me out until nearly 2 AM, I still needed to pack and do some other stuff back at the hotel, and there was a very small chance I was going to try to get to a 9 AM screening before we left for the airport at around 11:30. (Yeah, that didn’t happen, but whatever.) Vexille, strangele enough, I think would work much better as a big budget, live-action, special-effects laden, high concept movie than it does in its current animated incarnation. The film just isn’t tight enough. You don’t really know or understand fully what is going on for about an hour, and then there’s still nearly another hour left. I might have enjoyed it more had it been much tighter. I also just didn’t enjoy the animation that much. The film looks more like a video game than a movie. Is that a bad thing? I don’t know … but I discovered that I didn’t love it so much. But again, I would love to see someone option the story and turn it into a big-budget actioner.
So instead, I went back to the hotel, ate quickly, did some reading and crashed. Hard. I didn’t really sleep well the entire week I was there, so I’m more than excited to hop in my own bed tonight. A recap and wrap tomorrow …
Out of Focus 