Tousled in Toronto; or, What the Film Buff Saw
A dark cloud settled momentarily on my spirits, I admit, as the double-decker KLM 747 touched down at Toronto Airport and the born-again Christians sitting next to me - a Nigerian-Canadian mother and daughter - huddled close together to give thanks to God, then erupted in exultant hymn-singing. A feeling, I suppose, of ingratitude, both for the smooth (but dull) flight that had just brought me halfway round the world and the prospect of the two weeks to come : tousled and jet-lagged - and for what? Just to watch a bunch of films and go home again, without even the thrill of last year's first-time visit. My mood as I stepped off the plane was uncertain, with a definite tinge of surly impatience : same monstrously long line at Immigration ; same warm weather and wide-open sky ; same fresh peaches at the Farmers' Market, same Thai noodles and delicious mango salad at Spring Rolls on Yonge Street. Been here, done this.
Not exactly the same, of course - as festival-goers were reminded by the late start on September 11, a muted tribute to last year's terrorist-scarred edition, and the presence on the roster of films like THE GUYS and 11'09''01, trying to make sense of the WTC tragedy. I'd already promised myself I'd give anything 9/11-related a wide berth - on the simple theory that any event of that magnitude needs at least a decade's distance for proper perspective - and, based on the word from others, didn't regret my decision. Besides, there was so much else to keep track of : I saw 45 films (the rest may be found here), walked out of one (Fruit Chan's PUBLIC TOILET) and caught the 1977 coming-of-age drama WHO HAS SEEN THE WIND, yet barely skimmed the surface of what was available ; I also realised, just before the fourth or fifth film on Day 3, that my jadedness was melting away, to be replaced by an irrational exuberance - and realised too that festival-going is a very superior kind of drug, offering the light-headed euphoria without the passivity or loss of judgment. One shuts out the world, as one might on a beach holiday - no wonder last year's events felt so unreal, piercing our collective bubble - plunges into rampant escapism yet remains in control, both in choosing what to see and (most importantly) in talking and writing about it, shaping it to one's peculiar contours. Like the tree falling in the forest, films makes no sound until - and unless - someone hears them, that's to say evaluates them. (Do they still make a sound if the witness is deaf? But let's not go there.) Making sense, or trying to, is part of the process. Anything else - i.e. watching 45 films in 10 days for the buzz alone - would be like drinking just to get drunk. To be honest, I can do that at home...
Making sense isn't always easy, though, especially with a Fest so wide-ranging and abundant ; not only is it hard to find overall trends, but the mind, lost in a haze of movie-watching, starts to fixate on whatever happens to bob to the surface - however irrelevant. Thus, I recall that I saw two films (DIRTY PRETTY THINGS and SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE) featuring illicit trade in human organs, just as I saw three films - BAD GUY, UNKNOWN PLEASURES, LA VIE NOUVELLE - where someone gets repeatedly slapped across the face. Is this a trend? Or how about the fact of two separate films (OASIS is one, can't remember the other) where a character stands on a rooftop and carefully spits on the people below? Or two films - THE GOOD THIEF, LILYA 4-EVER - made by well-known Western directors, starring unknown young actresses from the former Soviet Union? What about the trend in films from South Korea for characters to sit around playing the scissors-paper-rock game (as they do in TURNING GATE and OASIS)? To quote a certain movie about movies : "Ordinarily we say anything you might remember could be helpful, but I'll be honest with you, Fink. That is not helpful".
Still, one possible trend (or just coincidence) seems worthy of quick mention - films focusing on a couple together, only without the Bergmanesque m.o. of dissecting their emotions or peering through to their inner souls : these were movies where the outside world was stylised or deliberately excluded, while the world of the couple was observed with naturalistic attention to detail - that tension being the sole apparent raison d'etre, since the films didn't really traffic in emotional revelation. It could seem a little pointless, as it does in CAMEL(S) (56) (dir., Park Ki-yong) Lee Dae-yeon, Park Myung-shin, a b&w two-hander in which a couple meet for the first time, make small talk, have sex, have noodles, talk some more then drive around, that being the entire movie. Or almost the entire movie, for it's also worth mentioning that the video-shot images are very beautiful - city neons, rain-slicked streets, lots of white light and cigarette smoke, a breathtaking shot of lights around the seafront on a foggy night - and director Park Ki-yong has the knack of burrowing deep into the moment while still holding on to the spectres hovering over his characters : the couple's chatter as they munch on their noodles is trivial table-talk but the way the scene plays out (an unbroken 5-minute-plus shot) makes you very aware of Time passing, and hopefully aware of the way Time keeps appearing in the narrative, rising up unbidden like Banquo's ghost. The couple talk of growing old - he admits he's starting to enjoy drinking alone as he gets older, she speaks of her mixed feelings at her 30th birthday, both elation and encroaching "heaviness" ; they talk of old girlfriends and boyfriends, talk of changes in the city around them, how that bridge used to be different years ago and so on. "For us, every day is exactly the same," says the man sadly - but the point is that Time doesn't stand still, even if their lives (and the film itself) do. Mirror-shots suggest alternate realities where the characters might break free, maybe see the world like the briefly-mentioned friend who travelled in his Jeep around Nepal, but the film ends on a note of despair, the lovers caught in their respective traps - nor is sex likely to change anything, the sex scene itself played in alienating long-shot with a black wall blocking out half the frame. "Can I call you again?" asks the man near the end, but she doesn't even answer. It's a frustrating film - but it has its own integrity.
Most or least substantial of the brief-encounter movies was perhaps FRIDAY NIGHT (65) (dir., Claire Denis) Valérie Lemercier, Vincent Lindon, depending on whether you value style or symbolic 'statements'. Denis - with the partial exception of BEAU TRAVAIL - has never really gone for the latter, her eternal micro-theme being rather the human ebb and flow of attraction and repulsion - most recently in TROUBLE EVERY DAY, where the pull of love brushed against the knowledge of impending disaster. This is very similar, as a female motorist stuck in a traffic jam picks up a hitch-hiker for a one-night stand : the film takes her POV, and pivots on her constant fear that he's either left her (she sees him in her mind, making love to another woman) or is about to - making for a pleasing kicker when she finally leaves him. It's a study of a fickle, permanently on-the-edge relationship - as implied by the title of CAMEL(S), the couple's togetherness is forever ambivalent - which is why it fits so beautifully that Denis adds a raft of playful touches, blurring the line between reality and fantasy (an anchovy suddenly twitches on our heroine's pizza ; the "s" on a "16 Valves" logo floats around for a while before re-attaching itself to the other letters) ; she's become a master at a kind of in-between cinema, crafting images that seduce with their smoothness yet also simmer with the constant threat of dissolution ('violence' would be overstating it : Denis films feel on the verge of imploding, not exploding). FRIDAY NIGHT pulses with stylised tension - in the sudden rifts in the fabric of reality or surprising shift to grainier film stock when the man (temporarily) takes charge, or just a shot like the camera rushing close to the back of a parked cab then jutting off sharply just before the moment of impact - leading some Denis fans to label it her masterpiece. I remain unconvinced, mostly because the style in itself seems inadequate, aestheticising the people as much as the situation - folds and mounds of flesh in CU (again), lovers making love in a confused jumble of images ; is that all there is? Much of it is set in a traffic jam, which may conceivably have you thinking WEEKEND ; in fact, R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" video is much more appropriate.
Say what you like about BLISSFULLY YOURS (60) (dir., Apichatpong Weerasethakul) Kanokporn Tongaram, Min Oo, Jenjira Jansuda, at least it'll never be confused with a music video - especially the final scenes, as Time slows to a delicious crawl then finally stops altogether in what has to be a 3-minute shot of our heroine just ... doing ... nothing, gazing into space in the arms of her lover. This was the most intriguing of the brief-encounter films, gradually and deliberately shutting off the outside world to concentrate on a rural idyll, a lovers' tryst as they picnic on a riverbank ; the director (introduced as 'Joe') explained the film is about different people's concept of Time, which perhaps accounts for the first 45 minutes - irrelevant to the rest of it, but presumably there for contrast between 'real' and 'subjective' time. I also thought it was about constant renewal as the way of the world - skin flaking off and regenerated, babies being born, emigrants heading off to make new starts in new places - and love as a moment of stasis, a perfect bubble in the midst of Heraclitean flux (a frequent theme at this year's TIFF). No surprise that the final captions tell of changes in the characters' lives, or that hints are dropped of pain and sadness just below the placid surface - yet this is mostly the anti-CAMEL(S), romantically willing to make love triumph over Time (even though it knows that's impossible). Lovers feed and groom each other, gently interrupted by pastoral rustles and splashes ; don't know why I didn't like it more, actually, except perhaps for external factors - going in with wrong expectations (expecting something frantic and TEARS OF THE BLACK TIGER-ish) then sitting behind a large lady with incredibly frizzy hair in a theatre with dreadful sight-lines, so I had to keep craning to see the subtitles. Bonus points for a TV show called "The Dolphin Who Wanted To Die", obviously...
BLISSFULLY YOURS also ties in with another thing I noticed this year (obvious proviso : all these 'trends' are based not on the entire TIFF slate but merely the handful of movies I happened to see, and should be taken with the proverbial ton of salt). Watching the aforementioned WHO HAS SEEN THE WIND - not just set in 30s Saskatchewan but made a full 25 years ago, when that whole rural lifestyle was still within memory - I couldn't help but notice how unselfconscious it was about its small town in the middle of nowhere. Granted, WIND isn't an 'Art' film (or a very good one), being apparently an adaptation of a much-loved Canadian children's classic, but I still get the sense there used to be a strain of arthouse movie - from Olmi to Tarkovsky to MON ONCLE ANTOINE - that felt at home with Mother Nature, in a way we don't really get anymore (even BLISSFULLY YOURS posits its rural idyll as somehow separate from 'real' life).
It'd be one thing if Nature had simply disappeared from movies ; that would merely reflect how extremely urbanised the world has become in the past couple of decades. But, in this post-Kiarostami movie age, with self-consciously sere Iranian landscapes carefully designed to evoke an intricate mixture of awe and irony, it looks like Nature is making a comeback in all sorts of odd ways - most obviously as the urbanite's nightmare, Nature 'red in tooth and claw', overpowering one's senses, moral compass and (finally) Identity itself. It worked like a charm in THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, and works again in GERRY (74) (dir., Gus Van Sant) Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, which is basically BWP remade with the existential dread exposed (rather than camouflaged) and jerky video visuals replaced by magnificent wide-screen images. This is actually a very simple film, near-perfectly worked out till it drops a notch in the final stages : the first half is playful slacker comedy, with urbanites Damon and Affleck getting progressively lost in the desert even as they keep up a constant back-and-forth of sentence fragments and (hilarious) shaggy-dog argot ; it then makes a leap, daring you to stay with it (many in the audience shamefully didn't bother), turning melancholy and increasingly abstract, characters gradually becoming little more than shapes in the mountainous expanse of curves and colours. Lots of terrific compositions - my favourite being the travelling two-shot as they walk side-by-side in profile, faces seeming to compete for space within the frame - culminating in the dreamlike, unforgettable shot of our heroes (barely even human now) shuffling through an eerie blue dawn. That should also have been the ending - as the corresponding scenes were in SAFE and BLAIR WITCH PROJECT - though I'd also have been happy with an ironic return to the light-hearted first half, maybe some Beckettian punchline finding our heroes comically unchanged by their experience. Indeed, any smart ending would've been OK (corny as it sounds, I'd have quite liked the people in the car to ask Damon something like "So what's your name?", followed by a sharp cut to title and credits - though admittedly it didn't work too well in KEN PARK) ; instead, Van Sant makes it ever more portentous and doom-laden, maybe trying to prove that he was too inspired by Bela Tarr (all I've seen is DAMNATION, which didn't seem particularly similar), ending on a strained, thin note. Still among the best indies in ages, with special kudos to my big fat Greek compatriot, DP Haris Savides. Way to go, koumbare.
That's the way it went, Mother Nature-wise : leave the city and you find yourself in a lost world, where eternal verities either replenish (BLISSFULLY YOURS) or crush the spirit - or just look down in amusement at human folly, as the majestic Lapp landscape often seems to be doing in THE CUCKOO (63) (dir., Alexander Rogozhkin) Anni-Kristiina Juuso, Ville Haapasalo, Viktor Bychkov. The setting is WW2, where two wounded men - a Finn and a Soviet Russian - on opposite sides of the war find refuge in the hut of a young Lapp war-widow. Confusion reigns from the start, with Russian planes firing on Russians and the Finn in a misleading Nazi uniform ; he actually hates the war, but is unable to communicate that (or anything else) to the Russian, since none of the three people speak the others' language(s). The result is farce, with the three talking blithely at cross-purposes (implausibly but delightfully, they make no attempt to communicate via gestures or sign-language - just keep talking, each in his own world) ; a droll, pointed, humorously-acted Tower-of-Babel of a movie about the human tendency to War, it's spoiled slightly by a mystical climax, not because it's badly done but because its spectacular virtuosity seems to belong in a different movie - like JAPON (65) (dir., Carlos Reygadas) Alejandro Ferretis, Magdalena Flores, Carlos Reygadas Barquin, for instance, which was all about spectacular virtuosity (though also humorous, a point its naysayers seem to have missed).
JAPON is all about first-time auteur Carlos Reygadas regaling us with what-the-fuck moments : a black beetle scuttles about in CU, then slowly starts to stir as its rock is pockmarked by the first few drops of a rainstorm (did they somehow wait around for the rain to fall, keeping the beetle occupied? did someone stand above the insect with a watering-can, timing the drops precisely?) ; the final shot finds the camera on a wagon, windmilling through a series of 360-degree pans as it barrels through the aftermath of a train wreck - picking up meticulously-placed traces of death and destruction, finally coming to rest on a corpse's face. But JAPON is also the ultimate post-Kiarostami rural drama, undermining itself at every turn : a man leaves the city for the lost Mexican hinterland, planning (perhaps) to kill himself ; instead he finds (perhaps) something 'real', the old chestnut about country life being purer and simpler than its urban counterpart - a cliché even in the days of T.S. Eliot ("In the mountains, there you feel free"), though still espoused by the likes of CHOCOLAT and IL POSTINO. Except, of course, that the judge's speech about "simple people" is undercut with low comedy, the parade of innocent kids hard to reconcile with their dog-kicking ways and evident glee at the shagging horses, the grand epiphany (complete with helicopter shots) that might in theory have been the film's ending quickly followed by yet another shot of our hero trudging through the mud - and that's still not getting close to Reygadas' perverse, sophisticated worldview.
The key, I suspect, is that he comes across as a poet but is really a brutal, darkly comic humanist in Haneke mould, baiting his audience in audacious FUNNY GAMES manner, loving his characters for their pain and the pain he can put them through : of course our hero doesn't find a lost Arcadia, but he does find something - a dead horse with its entrails hanging out, a grotesque (yet tender) sexual interlude, a song sung tunelessly by an old peasant. Is the horse more 'real' for being so graphic? Is the song more 'real' for being sung tunelessly, i.e. non-professionally? Is the peasant more 'real' for breaking the fourth wall, grumbling that he's being underpaid by these movie people? Is the only 'real' comfort to be found in God and the Virgin Mary? ("Which do you prefer?" asks the old woman, as if talking of McDonald's and Burger King.) The film knows only that its hero starts off suicidal and ends up still alive, which is all the comfort anyone can hope for ; it bogs down pretty badly in the middle (though rumour had it we were shown a longer, earlier cut, the final print having been damaged en route to the Fest), but starts and finishes superbly - and the images are bracing, open space bisected by great gnarly trees. Talk about a Natural high...
Fact : I could never have gone to Toronto if it wasn't for the Internet. Not just because I'd never have started this site (which in turn led to my job at the "Mail", which in turn secured the Press pass for the Festival), but because I'd never have met that online community of fellow film buffs who make TIFF such a joy. Flying to Canada just to watch a bunch of movies is a little sad, and I must admit those few nights when movie-watching wasn't followed by relaxing and unwinding (mine's a Rickard's Red, however wan and insubstantial in comparison with European ales) felt a bit inadequate.
Festival discussions have the charged, obsessive quality of athletes after a big match - opinions bursting forth after a day of being held in check, everyone's experience slightly different, adding crazy shapes to the prism of the common experience. Why was Alex Fung so drawn to miserablism? How could Erik Gregersen adore BLUE, described by Charles Odell as "the most boring film about teenage Japanese schoolgirl lesbians possible" (which doesn't necessarily sound like a bad thing, but whatever)? Shelly Kraicer was oracular - if not necessarily reliable - on China and points East ; Mike D'Angelo once again won the Free-Thinker Award for finding more to like in little-hyped movies like THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS than the entire, much-ballyhooed Cannes slate (which he'd already seen). Jeremy Heilman, presumably high on speed, somehow managed to write a day-by-day Diary in between watching dozens of movies. Gabe Klinger, with his customary chutzpah, spotted Larry Clark gazing forlornly at the crowd of critics coming out of KEN PARK, introduced himself and got a one-hour exclusive, even managing to distract Mr. Clark long enough to avoid any offers of sexually-explicit leading roles in his next picture (Gabe Klinger is 20). And of course I'll be forever grateful to Scott Tobias (no, not really) for pointing out all the celebrity sightings I'd just missed ("You know who we just passed, right?...") - Dennis Quaid, Bruce Campbell and Elizabeth Berkley in a single 5-minute walk from Bloor Street to Cumberland on Day 3, not to mention Tony Shalhoub, Frederick Wiseman, Philip Seymour Hoffman and a bunch of others. TIFF, in addition to its other virtues, is a celebrity-whore's paradise.
Then there was Charles "Technical Difficulties" Francois, whose awe-inspiring cinephilia seems to have advanced to a frighteningly esoteric stage where he loves only talky French films and morally reprehensible Korean 'comedies' - though at least he's consistent, given that he liked JAPON and also liked BAD GUY (44) (dir., Kim Ki-duk) Cho Jae-hyun, Suh Won, Kim Yoon-tae, which does many of the same things. This one's also an audience-baiter, daring us to turn against its extravagantly 'bad' title-hero while preaching a message of moral relativism, constantly altering conceptions of 'good' and 'bad' (the thug who films hookers with hidden cameras turns out to be doing it only because he needs money for his father's cancer treatment ; the unfriendly madam turns out to be a victim herself). Much depends on whether or not you go for the 'sensitive killer' stereotype, which I've always found rather uninteresting : the indestructible hero is like a more extreme Korean version of Vin Diesel, a badass punk with a broken heart (though I also thought he had the plucked-chicken look of a young Dr. Evil) ; all he wants is to be the heroine's knight in shining armour, and he'll kill and maim to achieve that noble goal. It's a black comedy, all right, not without its pleasures - memorable image of a red-light street, hookers plying their wares outside their various shop-fronts - but desultory and seemingly endless, with mindless machismo and more face-slapping than you'll find outside a Three Stooges movie. One gets the impression of director Kim trying to have his cake and eat it too, wallowing in the random violence he claims to be satirising ; but maybe that's the point...
Still, Charles liked it (Brian De Palma, also in attendance, was reputed to have liked it too), which was really all that mattered - sparking off debate, even if it mostly consisted of stunned interlocutors shaking their heads and sputtering "You liked it?". The downside of watching movies as a group is of course groupthink - always a danger, especially with the more unfashionable stuff. I stood pretty much alone on PHONE BOOTH (72) (dir., Joel Schumacher) Colin Farrell, Forest Whitaker, Katie Holmes, Radha Mitchell, a thoroughly enjoyable thriller written by Larry Cohen as another of his high-concept B-movies, shot by Matthew Libatique in his trademark hard, pushed-up colours (skin tones seem to positively glow) and directed at a lively clip by Joel Schumacher, who seems to be improving in his old age - or at least choosing smaller-scale projects, thus checking his bombastic tendencies. He also seems to have found a belated Muse in Colin Farrell, who's in every scene as a modern-day Sidney Falco (from SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS), a fast-talking publicist forced to get in touch with himself - "Who Do You Think You Are?" asks a sign in a shop window near the end - by a psycho with a conscience. Some were put off by the moralism but it's surely just a lark, a genre staple from Old Hollywood days when amoral charmers were allowed to entertain us as long as they became Better People by the end - not to mention that the hero is obviously conceived as a cartoon (he's a publicist, fer Chrissakes). Others found the combustible New York ambience - NAKED CITY opening, sassy dialogue for pimps and ho's - dated and unreal, though most of those same people then embraced RAISING VICTOR VARGAS (55) (dir., Peter Sollett) Victor Rasuk, Judy Marte, Melonie Diaz, Altagracia Guzman, Silvestre Rasuk - which makes no sense at all, unless the post-9/11 NYC has become even kinder and gentler than I thought.
This was the other film where I stood alone, albeit on the opposite side of the fence ; not sure why, exactly, though I think my hackles were raised by the introduction from Festival programmer B. Ruby Rich, who instructed us to "Prepare to fall in love with this movie!" (I'll decide when and where to fall in love, thanks B.). It is very loveable, a crowd-pleasing tale of teenage puppy-love on the Lower East Side ; also incredibly clean-cut and wholesome, especially compared to the New Black Cinema of the early 90s and edgy Latino equivalents (e.g. I LIKE IT LIKE THAT), its peppy eagerness-to-please closer to the airbrushed juvenile delinquents of WEST SIDE STORY. One scene finds Victor's matriarchal grandma marching him off to a social worker, insisting he's a bad influence on the rest of the family. Has he committed any crimes? asks the puzzled case-worker. No, of course not. Well, has he done anything ... sexual? No, nothing like that. 'Stop wasting my time then,' says the social worker - or at least should have said in this viewer's mind, the scene illustrating how bewilderingly tame the rest of it is. Not that it isn't refreshing to see life in the 'hood stripped of the usual guns-and-gangs grotesquerie, but the film is so painfully sincere about family values it seems tailored less to real life than the emerging (and conservative) middle-class Latino audience. Loose summer vibe nonetheless, and the kids are fun, Victor soft as mush beneath the macho surface ("You ain't never been with a man till you been with me") - even if you get the sense they've been encouraged to 'perform', like the precocious tykes on schtick-laden sitcoms.
VICTOR VARGAS was one of those cases where the audience's obvious enjoyment ended up getting on my nerves (I distinctly remember looking round at some point, thinking "What the hell is so funny?"). It happens sometimes, the dirty little secret of film-watching being how susceptible you are to external factors ; isn't that the point of Midnight Madness, where a stoked young audience gathers to whoop it up and cheerfully ignore the flaws of genre (mostly horror and sci-fi) pics? General consensus was that this year's MM was sub-par, borne out by the fact that the best of the three I saw was the least Midnight Madness-ish - namely BUBBA HO-TEP (65) (dir., Don Coscarelli) Bruce Campbell, Ossie Davis, Ella Joyce, a very poor monster movie but a funny and affecting film about getting old (as in PHANTASM, the only other Coscarelli I've seen, low-tech charm is the major virtue). Our ageing hero is the King himself, Elvis Presley, now in his 70s (don't ask) and stuck in a nursing-home being raided by a flesh-sucking Egyptian mummy : "Is there finally and truly anything to Life other than food, shit and sex?" he ponders sadly as the film begins - but ends up finding meaning to his crushed existence by killing the monster, helped by Ossie Davis as a fellow inmate who claims to be JFK (!). The film is full of jokes, mostly sexual and scatological, from the mummy first identified via hieroglyphic graffiti on the toilet wall - "Cleopatra Does The Nasty" - to our hero's pecker giving "a flutter like a pigeon having a heart attack" and the use of Elvis trademarks like the famous glasses and mumbled "Thankyouverymuch" - but the old-age theme is taken seriously, making for a poignant drama with a brace of fine performances. Not sure what the Midnight Madness crowd thought (having seen it at a later screening), but I suspect the low-key sweetness didn't go down very well ; maybe they should change the name to Midnight Melancholia...
Which of course brings us to Mike Leigh, and whatever the collective noun is for online film buffs - Alex Fung, Scott Tobias, Omar Odeh, Victor Morton, myself - sitting in the third row of a sold-out Uptown, joining the crowd in paying court to the bearded British wizard. Those same Torontonians who barely turned their heads at Denzel and Salma walking in their midst - "That's why the stars like Toronto," mused a DJ on the easy-rock station that dragged me out of bed every morning ; "Because we really don't bug them, do we?" - now went happily apeshit, applauding till the good Mr. Leigh had to plead with them to pipe down. All this before they'd even seen ALL OR NOTHING (71) (dir., Mike Leigh) Timothy Spall, Lesley Manville, Ruth Sheen, James Corden, which is very much a Mike-Leigh-doing-his-thing movie, re-exploring the unhappy families of MEANTIME and LIFE IS SWEET to prove, at its best, that no-one else can work so consistently at this level of emotional intensity. Leigh himself, in the Q&A, reckoned the film works because it's "not calculated to release emotions in an easy way" - which, alas, is rubbish, for his style has always been manipulative, exaggerating unhappiness and belligerence so that any glimmer of joy or tenderness then becomes unbearably moving. ALL OR NOTHING is a bit of a con-trick - but a very effective one, with Timothy Spall doing a variation on his SECRETS AND LIES character (a taxi driver this time, once again coming into contact with all kinds of people), keeping the world at bay through a series of comforting platitudes ("life's too short", "take no notice") no-one believes, least of all himself. "I feel like an old tree that's got no water," he sobs in the extended - and cathartic - climax, and the film earns its tears, if only for being so skilful ; Leigh as usual dwells on the minutiae, everyday dilemmas sometimes moral (should a cabbie charge an elderly passenger for a two-minute ride?), sometimes not (should we get a takeaway?), and populates the fringes with a range of eccentrics, painting in bold strokes as he cross-cuts between a character having a heart attack and the ramblings of a cartoonish Frenchwoman. Why does he do it? Maybe because of Spall's speech about "the fickle finger of Fate", the way you never know if your actions will end up doing good or harm ; order lies next door to disaster - just as, by the same token, every tragic drama takes place side-by-side with uproarious comedy (and vice versa). To quote another mordant - yet compassionate - observer of the human condition : "That's the way it crumbles, cookie-wise"...
All we are sa-a-ay-ing / Is give films a chance ... Nothing but a mass sing-a-long could've drowned out the chorus of seats hitting back-rests at the Press screening of LA VIE NOUVELLE (61) (dir., Philippe Grandrieux) Anna Mouglalis, Zack Knighton, Marc Barbé ; "I think this is going to be too weird for me," said the journo on my left not five minutes into it - and walked out, followed by more than half the audience. She was right about the weirdness, but still - it's only 90 minutes of your life, y'know? The film is like Abel Ferrara-flavoured avant-garde, almost wordless and basically plotless (something about an Eastern European prostitute loved by a young American) - and intermittently hypnotic, especially the opening as we shakily approach a zombie-like crowd on a dimly-lit promontory (a hill? a beach?), ending in close-up as they stare back unblinkingly - then again, and again. Eerie stuff, and matched by occasional shots in the rest of it - a Lynchian song in a nightclub, a negative-filmed image of a woman crawling around on all fours, an urban-desolate landscape, a ghostly face, dogs in a cage, an out-of-focus shape rushing towards the camera, shaky-cam creeping slowly to an open window with the city in the distance, urged on by an unsettling soundtrack. Does indeed get tiresome by the end, but for much of its length I just couldn't take my eyes off it. Shame on the audience of impatient hacks - and my sympathy to the publicist hanging around outside the theatre, trying in vain to arrange Grandrieux interviews with shell-shocked survivors.
Shame also on the patronising critics who despise IRREVERSIBLE (81) (dir., Gaspar Noé) Vincent Cassel, Monica Belucci, Albert Dupontel - not for their opinion, to which (of course) they're fully entitled, but for the way they conspicuously belittle the film, waving it away like a bad smell. It's a mirror-image to the response that greeted EYES WIDE SHUT a couple of years ago, where you got the feeling critics couldn't wait to get away from this silly film which so obviously didn't work - never mind that it was just as obviously ambitious and defiantly original. Noé's panoramic Grand Statement may indeed be silly, but the least you'd expect is that critics would respect its lofty aims and plough through it, explaining why they find it shallow ; there's certainly a lot of stuff to plough through.
What exactly is IRREVERSIBLE? It is, as US Weekly critic Andrew Johnston - sitting beside me at the screening - put it, "A trip". It's a shocker, an emotional rollercoaster and a glimpse into the mind of a misanthropic visionary (one is reminded of the Shaw quote about despairing of mankind even while heartily loving every Tom, Dick and Harry - only in reverse). It's also a film you shouldn't read too much about if you haven't seen it (so stop reading now). It contains the single most visceral scene I've ever been unfortunate enough to watch in a theatre - you could feel the audience shudder as one - but also wraps its simple revenge plot (Vincent Cassel obsessed with finding the man who raped his girlfriend) around a 2001-style meditation on Life, the Universe and Everything. It's as rich in talking-points as any film this year - yet here, for instance, is James Quandt in "CinemaScope" : "Noé fancies himself a Bergson de la boue, inverting his narrative so that we are forced to experience the tragic tow, and toll, of time. (I certainly did, but that was because I was checking my watch)". Insert rim-shot here. Or : "IRREVERSIBLE seems to have temporality on its wee mind". Well, yes. I mean, obviously. Why use "seems" like that - why phrase it so dismissively, unless to score cheap brownie-points? It drives me nuts.
Anyway. IRREVERSIBLE is indeed about Time - starting in the land after Death, when Time has wiped away any vestige of morality : "There are no bad deeds," we're informed. "Just deeds". It then moves back through the trauma of Death itself, back through a life dominated by the twin forces of sex and power, finally back to innocence, then birth, then the land before that - an abstract realm of light and transcendence (and Beethoven's Seventh), like the Star Child in 2001 (a poster for that film gives the game away, though I personally doubt I'd have gotten there without it). Parallel to that, however, runs another strand - even more explicitly Kubrickian - charting the journey from animalistic savagery to civilised behaviour : the two together make up Noé's grim worldview (Life as a process of moral wearing-down, starting in purity, ending in degradation) - yet the reverse chronology also offers hope, at least in the abstract. As in Tim Blake Nelson's EYE OF GOD a few years ago, the Time-shuffling becomes a safety valve, offering a way to tell a story that would just be too unbearably bleak without it (Cassel doesn't even manage his "B-movie revenge crap", killing the wrong guy) : as with all lives, the story qua story goes from birth to death - but we see the opposite, death (d)evolving into life. If we could only manage to look back at where we started from, it laments, instead of looking forward all the time to our inevitable end - maybe we could somehow reverse the damage. Then again, what about that title?...
There's more, which I haven't quite worked out - but the basics work so well it's a fair bet the particulars will too. [Second viewing confirmed that they do ; here's how.] But what about the charges laid against the film - notably the charge of homophobia? Some of that is fair : it's true that Noé - who, I suspect, shares more of the worldview of his I STAND ALONE anti-hero than he lets on - sets the degradation scenes in a gay bar and the innocent opening in what Mr. Quandt calls "a bosky heterosexual paradise". But 'The Rectum' isn't just a gay bar but a place of confused sexuality, full of in-betweens and shadowy characters (not to mention a wildly oscillating camera that barely allows us to get our bearings), just as the opening isn't necessarily heterosexual so much as idyllic and easily intelligible (childbirth angle and Monica Belucci aside, the girlfriend could just as easily have been a boyfriend within the narrative) ; bringing up a gay vs. straight opposition is misleading here - more a contrast between corruption and simplicity - as it is to claim that the rapist is simply (and oxymoronically) gay. It may well be true that Noé's politics are reactionary : any opposition between confusion (bad) and purity (good) has unsettling overtones, not to mention that the film's message is quite literally regressive. Yet there's so much vision here, so much powerful image-making, such accomplished use of the medium, such a sad, romantic sensibility (reaching for a tranquil Eden that's forever lost). You can't dismiss it. It's not right.
Ditto LILYA 4-EVER (56) (dir., Lukas Moodysson) Oksana Akinshina, Artiom Bogucharskij, Elina Benenson - another experiment, albeit not so successful. This was the anti-VICTOR VARGAS, relentlessly downbeat as it charts the miserable life of a perky Russian teen, and duly berated for its crude, one-damn-thing-after-another melodrama - except that it's too crude, making fans of Moodysson's previous work wonder as to his motives. Surely the director of the great SHOW ME LOVE knows it's a cliché when Lilya's mother leaves her, the car driving off in slow-motion (in slow-motion!) and soundtrack hijacked by weepy strings? Or when Lilya's rare moment of joy is illustrated by a visit to a fairground and ride on the bumper-cars (soundtrack featuring a snatch of cheesy 80s pop hit "Forever Young")? What's going on, I suspect, is an attempt at totally objective storytelling, privileging the subject over the film-maker - not the starkness of Bresson or ROSETTA (echoed by the opening scene), which is still an imposition in terms of style, but a film that faithfully follows the curve of a character's life, rising into filmic shorthand (slo-mo, pop songs) when she finds a moment of emotional intensity (think of it as a story told for children : 'Lilya is happy' ; 'Lilya is sad'). The structure bears this out, starting off with Lilya walking down the street and flashing back to the events that brought her there : let me take a person off the street, Moodysson seems to be saying, and explain their situation for you. Trouble is, the film should've ended when it comes full-circle - when the opening shot is repeated - but dribbles on to a silly and unnecessary ending, and a lot of the detail (e.g. the bit where the title appears) is just feeble ; all in all, a failed change of direction - but it's good to see Moodysson trying. Even when he's just trying the patience...
"The first morning saw us up at 6, breakfasted and back in bed at 7," recalls Groucho as intrepid Captain Spaulding in ANIMAL CRACKERS ; "This was our routine for the first three months". Toronto wasn't much like that. Films typically kicked off at 8.30 or 9 a.m. - meaning a 7.45-ish wake-up call - then ran on till midnight, which was when the socialising began in earnest ; had Toronto bars not stopped serving at 2 a.m., I suspect I'd have gotten no sleep at all for the duration. As it was, 4 hours was average, 5 a luxury, 6 a miracle ; unsurprisingly, the first few days were do-able, the middle few mastered with adrenaline and high-energy snacks, the final one or two a constant battle against drooping eyelids - not so much when the film was good (I was utterly enthralled by THE SON, seen on Day 9) but definitely getting in the way when energy had to be summoned up for a listless movie.
DOLLS (46) (dir., Takeshi Kitano) Miho Kanno, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Tatsuya Mihashi, for instance, was a problem - though I felt a little better about almost dozing off at the latest Kitano when I later heard it being variously described as "Dulls" and "Dollzzz". In fact, I probably liked it more than most people, though it was easily my most torturous Festival experience, battling sleep and personal discomfort - and finding little solace in the plot, which is three separate stories with a common theme. All three deal with love borne of feelings of guilt and regret (a young man tries to help the fiancée he jilted for money ; an old yakuza gets back in touch with the woman he abandoned years before), linked by the image of the 'bound beggars', a man and woman wandering the land bound together by a rope - which saves their lives in the wondrous final shot, caught on a tree-branch when they tumble over a cliff (leaving them suspended over the abyss, looking like two angels with a single pair of wings). There are other very pretty images, from snowy landscapes to a field of cherry-blossom - the film takes place over the course of a year - plus masks and plastic windmills and kitschy plaster angels, and a house that looks a bit like a dollhouse (human beings are dolls, at the mercy of larger forces ; only connection can make us stronger). Alternately heavy and coy, which is not my idea of a good movie - but I'm just glad to have made it to the end, really...
That said, sleep-deprivation wasn't really a problem : speaking as someone who falls to pieces in ordinary non-Festival life if I drop below 6 hours for a couple of nights, I was actually amazed at my lucidity. Maybe it's that film-watching activates a different part of the brain, or even - what the hell, I'll say it - that it's so much more exciting than daily life, but exhaustion barely got in the way of enjoyment at the good films, and even non-enjoyment at the bad films. I'm confident in saying I disliked OASIS (37) (dir., Lee Chang-dong) Sol Kyung-gu, Moon So-ri, for instance, even though I saw it on my last full day, and even though it won awards in Venice (and even though I liked PEPPERMINT CANDY, from the same team). This isn't necessarily a 'bad' film but I've always been put off by the notion of the handicapped trailing clouds of magic, somehow privy to a spiritual clarity denied 'normal' people (which is why I loathe THE EIGHTH DAY, and incidentally why I love THE IDIOTS) ; director Lee goes all-out with the lyricism, our heroine's childlike gaze turning spots of light into butterflies and her affliction magically (though of course metaphorically) vanishing when she dances with our hero. The two of them invent cutesy nicknames for each other - she calls him "General", he calls her "Your Highness" - and create a small oasis for themselves out of sight of a cruel, callous world ; stuck in a traffic jam, they get out and dance in the street. I stayed awake, but found it heavy going ; then again, my favourite scene was probably the one where the General tries to rape Her Highness, so I'm obviously too warped and unfeeling for this kind of thing.
Only once did lack of sleep really interfere. There is one film I saw in Toronto which I definitely plan to see again, just to make sure I'm not grievously underrating FEMME FATALE (60) (63 - second viewing) (dir., Brian De Palma) Antonio Banderas, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Peter Coyote, Gregg Henry, named by one and all as the cinephile director's 'return to form' - which is strange, since he's never really stopped making the same movie, visual conjuror's tricks thinly held together by perfunctory plots. This one is even more perfunctory - written, in what may have been an error of judgment, by the man himself - and obviously likes it that way : those who complain that the opening heist is implausible clearly missed the part where a fellow crook 'explains' the plan to our heroine in a way-too-fast, barely-comprehensible jumble of jargon and code-words (translation : don't worry overmuch about the plot, film fans). That opening set-piece, set around the Cannes Film Festival, is in fact irresistible - does Régis Wargnier realise he's being sent up when kinetic mayhem gives way to a screen credit reading "Un Film de Régis Wargnier"? - as is the final section, when the plot is revealed ... but no, I shouldn't. What bogs it down are the bits in between - which is where my lack of sleep may be entering the picture, for I definitely switched off for a while somewhere between the audacious use of split-screen (one half CU, the other zooming out from that same CU) and Antonio Banderas' shamefully funny queen-routine. The result I found enjoyable rather than exhilarating, and I think it's fair to say De Palma never really nails the titular reference to 'noir' - he kicks off with DOUBLE INDEMNITY, and we do get the odd bit of 40s-style louvred light, but he mostly does his usual faux-Hitchcockery (voyeurism, lookalike blonde and brunette) and visual athleticism ; he's incorrigible, but what can you do? If films were food, De Palma would be dessert - dubious nutritional value, and you feel a little sick if you take too much of it, but still the highlight of any balanced meal. Or at least the guilty pleasure...
Politics? Oh no! Not to worry, folks - this will almost certainly be the shortest chapter, mainly concerned with pointing out the relative absence of political films at this year's TIFF. The word is slippery, of course, and as wide-ranging as you care to make it, but I'm talking here primarily of films about current affairs, looking at the state of the world in 2002. (30 years ago, the Palme D'Or at Cannes went to THE MATTEI AFFAIR and THE WORKING CLASS GOES TO PARADISE, both Left-leaning examinations of life in 70s Italy ; this year's Palme went to THE PIANIST, a film about the Holocaust. It's not the same.) You'd think film-makers would be lining up to give their opinions, with all the recent upheavals - yet in fact films about politics were vastly outnumbered by films about teenagers, and about on a par with films about heists.
There were times, it's true, when politics appeared on the fringes - awkwardly so in the two Chinese films I saw (CHICKEN POETS and UNKNOWN PLEASURES), both at their weakest when firing off predictable salvos at venal Chinese capitalism. But the US, for instance, offered only films about 9/11 - which, after all, was a year ago. Since then, a war of destruction or liberation (depending who you talk to) has been fought, and another one is now on the cards ; the T-word (Terrorism, for the uninitiated) has been used to pass all kinds of laws throughout the world vastly extending state powers, invoked to curtail civil liberties and exploited by some Third World governments (notably Charles Taylor of Liberia) as a licence to act against opponents. The world is probably closer now to Orwellian reality - from increased centralisation of power to the concept of a 'permanent war' against terror - than at any time since Orwell wrote "1984". Surely all this is worth a film or two?
Hopefully the drought is just a transitional phase - and besides, it's not as if political film-makers have vanished altogether. Michael Moore's BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE (the hottest ticket in town, and one I was unable to get into) isn't quite about the state of the world, but Moore obviously has the right idea - as does Elia Suleiman, whose DIVINE INTERVENTION (68) (dir., Elia Suleiman) Elia Suleiman, Manal Khader, Nayef Fahoum Daher was both more direct than its Middle Eastern stablemate, Amos Gitai's KEDMA (a film about the founding of Israel, with obvious resonance for modern-day Israelis), and deceptively indirect and allusive. Suleiman, a Palestinian based in Paris, structures the film as a series of Nazareth-set sketches, the first half especially made in deadpan Tati / Iosseliani style with the camera at a distance and effective use of offscreen space (a group of men seen beating some poor bastard lying on the ground, only for the 'victim' to be revealed as a garden snake). Some of the sketches are just goofy, like the man who likes to say the word "six" as often as possible ; others are presumably for local consumption, like the mystifying gag about a hospital where everyone chain-smokes ; almost all, however, are based around violence - simmering in the background and increasingly in the foreground as the film goes on, as though Suleiman felt he had to prove his commitment to the cause, lest he be accused of long-distance dilettantism. The film gets increasingly angry and subjective, moving from the elegantly dry first half to a more explicit final section : an Arafat balloon floating over Israeli territory (surely not a RED BALLOON reference?!) would be merely humorous in itself, but the fact that it's launched by our hero turns it into something more political, as if asserting his right over the land ; a bit where an Israeli cop harasses motorists seems surprisingly harsh (and not very funny) ; and the climactic sketch, with a Palestinian ninja superhero (complete with MATRIX-style moves) making mincemeat of Israeli sharp-shooters, comes off both inspired and a little jaw-dropping, as if daring you to say where comedy ends and wish-fulfilment fantasy begins. As a rueful overview of an obviously very bad situation, the film couldn't be bettered, but Suleiman himself - looking on sadly with his big soulful eyes - is a little annoying, and the pressure-cooker image at the very end is something we could all have lived without. Still, for all the flaws, I'll be surprised if one or both of "Cahiers" and "Positif" don't put this on their Top Ten lists - though I'm curious to see how it'll play in the US ; if indeed it does.
You know the trouble with film festivals? There's too much going on. You know the trouble with films? Same thing - too much information. When you watch a play, the stage itself makes a physical boundary ; when you read a book, the words form a structure, simply in the sense that what hasn't been written can't (by definition) be part of the book ; when you play a videogame, you know you're watching an accretion of digital bytes, each of them put there for a reason.
Only films, I think, contain so much irrelevant information. In order to tell a story, the film-maker is forced to create a world several times bigger and more varied than the story he (or she) has to tell. Sometimes the location is better than the movie (staying with this year's TIFF slate, I watched most of THE QUIET AMERICAN for the setting rather than the story or characters) ; sometimes it's a minor character taking over one's experience of the film (I'm haunted by that perky hospital patient in ALL OR NOTHING, who bragged he never went to bed before 10 ; whatever happened to that guy?) ; sometimes a glimpse of life as it used to be lived at a certain time and place, totally unrelated to the main story. Always it's a question of a world being created, full of things outside the film-maker's control.
Was it ever thus? I don't think so. When you watch an Old Hollywood movie, the sets are clearly sets and the extras are extras : everything in the frame is a lot more crafted and accounted-for. Wasn't that the big dividing-line between classical and modern cinema - loss of control, or at least its illusion? Wasn't that the point in Nouvelle Vague films or something like THE COOL WORLD, that sense of liberation - deliberately including all the irrelevant stuff, all the footage in cafés and street corners and just hanging out, all the 'dead' time we never got before? Even watching those films, though, you know they were shooting with a cumbersome camera and limited film-stock : they could pretend to range far and wide, but still needed to plan their shots pretty carefully if they weren't to run out of time. Now, on the other hand, we have video - probably the single most significant 'trend' at Toronto - and the sky really is the limit ; anyone with a DV-cam and portable battery unit can make a film including ... well, everything. They can film whole lifetimes in 24-hour segments if they want. The irrelevant-information factor is, at least potentially, off the charts.
Why am I rambling on like this? Because it seems to me that films - or at least the arthouse sliver seen at places like TIFF - are gradually turning inwards, away from grand visions to a Cinema of the Moment. Maybe it's a sign of the times : world affairs are a lot more jumbled now than they were in simple, bipolar Cold War days, hence (perhaps) no more detailed studies of political situations ; gender roles are a lot more blurred, sensibilities more easily offended, hence (perhaps) no more Bergman-style dissections of a marriage ; film-and-video itself has become a monster, able to encompass too much, hence (perhaps) a backlash into minituarism - treasuring the moment rather than the overwhelming whole. Whatever the case, it often seemed like film-makers (Cronenberg, Moodysson, the Dardennes, Gus Van Sant) were deliberately paring down this year, and films (IRREVERSIBLE being the most obvious example) were being punished for daring to 'think big'.
Not that lack of scope means lack of depth or emotional impact, of course - a point borne out by THE SON (78) (dir., Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne) Olivier Gourmet, Morgan Marinne, which was the most perfect film I saw in Toronto (so perfect in fact that I have little to say about it). This was also the only film that ended when I could've sworn it still had half-an-hour or more to go - the reverse was usually the case, films droning on long after they'd made their point - which is a tribute to the Dardennes' fluidity in telling their simple (but satisfying) tale. That the hero is a carpenter, hence an obvious Jesus figure, seems to have been bypassed in most of the reviews I've read, possibly because it seems reductive to call this a parable of Christian forgiveness - but that's what it is, as well as a pointed companion-piece to IN THE BEDROOM and a really incredible piece of film-making. How do the Dardennes get such perfect performances from young non-actors? How does their focus-puller manage to be so dexterous, changing focus as the drama dictates even as the hand-held camera follows the actors (apparently) aimlessly? Stripped down for action, often in real-time with natural sounds, THE SON is simply - as befits the strong religious undertones - immaculate. [Brief second-viewing comments here.]
That's not all there is, though ; staying in the Moment isn't necessarily about being minimalist - it's more about control, building a bio-dome world unaffected by the random confusion of the world outside. It's the opposite of the all-inclusive jumble promised by video - even when in fact shot on video, as with RUSSIAN ARK (76) (64 - second viewing) (dir., Alexandr Sokurov) Sergey Dreiden, Maria Kuznetsova, Leonid Mozgovoy. Everyone knows what a breathtaking stunt this is, shot in a single 96-minute take through the Hermitage in St. Petersburg (though obviously tweaked with post-production digital effects, notably the gorgeous final shot), just as they know about the leaps across Time, and implicit statement on the timeless value of Art, and Sokurov's unabashed, underlying nationalism - a history of Russia itself, too long in thrall to Europe, finally moving forward after centuries of "copies" and 80 years of Communism ("And now?" asks our affable guide ; "Who knows?"). What they don't know, or don't always say, is how the film works : superficially it seems a strange project for arch-minimalist Sokurov - such a grand, centuries-spanning epic - yet in fact it's as rigorously controlled as his earlier films (there's no irrelevant information here). Everything works just-so, the one-take roving camera making for a startling intimacy with each shifting moment.
Meaning what, exactly? Let me explain. Usually, when we watch a film, there are three things simultaneously in our mind : what's happening now, what happened before and what (we think) will happen in the future. It's an illusion of omniscience : we're watching Z live his life, but we also know that X and Y from the previous scenes are somewhere living their lives, and we know the three are somehow related (or will be as the film goes on). RUSSIAN ARK doesn't work that way. Once X's scene is over, he disappears, to be replaced by Y, and so on and so forth. Omniscience is lost, replaced by a kind of augmented here-and-now ; all that matters is each shifting frame, focusing attention sharply on each restless moment. Encounters with Catherine the Great and Nicholas II, a strange woman speaking to the paintings then doing a little dance, a teen (played by the kid from LAST RESORT) puzzled by an icon of Peter and Paul, finally the spectacular ball with its cast of hundreds - each comes before us like a moment in Time, valuable and (of course) fleeting. "Am I expected to play a role?" asks the offscreen narrator ; for the audience, the answer is yes - live each moment to the fullest. It'll never come again.
[All of which remains true after a second viewing - but knowing where the film is going kills precisely that sense of living in the moment, and the lack of a human element behind the technical wizardry becomes more apparent. Still impressive, but seemed a little thin (even a little dull) this time round.]
All of the above connects (more or less) with HAPPY HERE AND NOW (61) (dir., Michael Almereyda) Liane Balaban, Karl Geary, Ally Sheedy, David Arquette, not the best film I saw in Toronto but among the most intriguing. This is Michael Almereyda, he of Pixelvision and the spiffed-up, revolutionary HAMLET, making a film about - what, exactly? "A thriller about the Internet," claimed the Festival program, which would seem to fit the director's technology-friendly sensibility. "The need for a new way of seeing," added many critics, taking their cue from the film's final image (an eye-patch coming off, followed by a CU of the open eye itself). Mostly, it's true, the film just seems to dodder along, typically spouting bits of philosophy followed by a righteous R&B track ; most of the fun lies in peripheral pleasures, like a dog named Carl (Carl Barks, geddit?), the sad story of the "Russian death ship", the precise amount paid by Thomas Jefferson in the Louisiana Purchase, bands called MC Tracheotomy and Three Now Four, and dialogue exchanges like the following : "You're not a fireman, are you?" "Well ... Metaphorically, maybe".
Yet the ideas are intriguing, starting with the ways in which the Internet modifies Identity - characters cyber-talk via 'avatars', a visual equivalent of the newsgroup handle - and what that does for communication ; it's the future, claims Arquette's aspiring-filmmaker character, no barriers, just "people talking" - but not as themselves, nor does Arquette turn out to know what he's doing with the new technology (the ubiquitous DV-cam). Could it be Identity is more precious than we think, not so easily traded? The film invokes Heraclitus (Life as flux and fire, constantly changing) and Pascal asking "what would change if I disappeared?" ; why, in the immensity of Time and space, do we each occupy this precise allotment of here-and-now? Technology can change our way of seeing - also invoked is Nikolai Tesla, who found a way of slowing down light - but surely mustn't change who we are (looking for a lost hard-drive, one character wonders why the owner of said hard-drive would want to "erase herself" that way) ; the film's presiding spirit is perhaps New Orleans bluesman Ernie K-Doe, who makes his self (or at least his persona) indistinguishable from his art. It's still rather mystifying on a narrative level, and not that much clearer intellectually, but the message seemed (to me) one of caution more than anything. In the glorious and illimitable video age, don't let Identity be blurred in hi-tech marvels and grand designs. Don't forget the self. Don't forget the here-and-now.
45 films later, it's a message I can happily endorse. For me, the TIFF Experience was plenteous, super-abundant, somewhat overwhelming. So many films in such a short time - on Day 2 I was full, on Day 5 I was starting to lose track, on Day 9 I was jumbled, turned around, barely aware of what I'd seen. And so many friends, a whole mini-community, and so many stories to absorb, so many images, and so much stuff to think about later - and this vast Report, which is already way more convoluted than I ever intended. After a while, making sense of it all becomes impossible, kind of like those film-makers struggling to make sense of an over-complicated world. Why, after all, does it matter? Why pretend to make this sweeping statement, or discover this-and-that idea when the moment is really all that counts? Can it ever change the way I felt, watching DOLLS or IRREVERSIBLE? At the end of it all, sated on the movies and companionship (and the Rickard's Red), I think I can honestly say : let it all dissolve. Let the films bleed into each other, let my mind go blank. Let the future feed upon the moment, like the wild dogs at the end of LA VIE NOUVELLE. Let it all go wrong. I was happy here and now.
Am I going back next year? I hope so...
Theo Panayides, 2002