Toronto capsules — Day 9

The wife that might have been

VINCERE (Marco Bellocchio, Italy, 7)

This film leaves no doubt about the reason for the Vatican’s sex rules … man, you do NOT want to get involved with those Italian chicks: they are murder if you cross them. In fact it even suggests a little-known cause of history. I’d wager that the reason Mussolini had to become dictator of Italy was that that was the only way to get this woman Ida Dalser, who claimed Mussolini married her and fathered their son, out of his hair (and if you’re wondering about Il Duce’s hair …)

More seriously, I was really taken by what was (vjm sheepishly turns red) my first exposure to veteran Italian director Marco Bellocchio, whom Pauline Kael was mentioning in the 60s in the same breath as Bertolucci and Fellini. And now that I’ve seen this, I’m even more embarrassed. I realize Bellocchio isn’t of the same generation as Paolo Sorrentino, but I was reminded of Bilge Ebiri’s piece in New York magazine on Sorrentino as world cinema savior, because Bellocchio’s movie has the stylistic boldness and density that what Bilge calls The Cinema of Lack … well, lacks. Speaking of Italian national characteristics, Bellocchio’s editing and scoring have an operatic grandness and an emotional and sensual appeal that were really like a jolt of caffeine for a 830am show at a Festival of Lack.

Like a true theatrical virtuoso, Bellocchio gives his stylistic flourishes a quick and obvious but-never-stated meaning (Fellini is the master of this). In this case, it’s particularly apropos since fascism invented the modern art of politics as theater — a point Bellocchio makes by having fights break out at film screenings. As another example, a then-socialist Mussolini looks out on rioters in a piazza, only he’s just gotten out of bed and is naked. Dalser comes to wrap a blanket around him, for understandable reasons, but suddenly and before our eyes, it becomes a toga and before our eyes is born the idea of Mussolini as Roman emperor ruling over Mare Nostrum. The divinization of the state gets symbolized by a hospital visit to a wounded savior Mussolini. Similarly Bellocchio never tells us, though it’s clear to anyone with two eyes, that Dalser fell in love with Benito the Leftist, and clings to a memory of him even as he becomes more remote, both politically (as Italian fascism moves right and then allies with Nazi Germany) and personally (as he leaves her completely to asylums). Bellocchio underlines this by having Mussolini no longer be played by Filippo Timi but using only the Real Thing in archival footage — as if her private memory we were sharing must recede to the public man.

But man … that Italian woman. For all his stylistic bravado, director Bellocchio got the show stolen by actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Mrs. First Mussolini. Mike’s description of her from Cannes as “ferile” doesn’t do her justice — she’s obsessive and will not be denied, even in the face of sound prudential advice about going-along. It’s not simply grand yelling scenes, but the way Mezzogiorno’s body, gestures and words seem coiled even in relatively routine scenes. And then when she watches a certain silent classic, her tears are both salty and acidic. Indeed, looking back on my notes while writing this capsule, I’m thinking I may have underrated VINCERE.

The comedy that might have been

THE TIME THAT REMAINS (Elia Suleiman, Palestine, 4)

I seriously considered not going to this film, because Suleiman signed the “Boycott the Festival” manifesto over the Tel Aviv program. I decided against it — “that would make me as bad as him,” basically, but you’ll have to take my word that this is not a “revenge” grade. I got the ticket in the first place because I really liked most of DIVINE INTERVENTION and thus unsurprisingly genuinely did not care for this film, largely because it’s simply not terribly funny. And not because war or occupation are somehow not joking subjects or can’t provide the makings of comedy, whether in Suleiman’s hands or anyone else’s; indeed, DIVINE INTERVENTION showed otherwise. Instead, we get sequences like the 1948 hunt for Suleiman’s father — he was a bombmaker — that are played like straight-up manhunt scenes involving Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones (though paced and timed way too loosey-goosey if we’re meant to take them as perils).

TIME gets better as it goes along, but it only once or twice really lets loose into the deadpan, absurdist, Tati/Keaton vein — what I value Suleiman for. Consider two details: (1) the still I lead this review with, which is an Arab-school choir that won a contest by singing Israel’s national songs. OK … but the scene doesn’t go beyond the premise. It doesn’t build or shade or develop, instead it just continues with the initial irony. (2) The neighbor of the Suleimans, who douses himself with gasoline and threatens suicide until Suleiman’s father comes by to calmly grab the matches out of his hands, in the manner one might grab them from a child. Again, it’s repeated two or three times, but doesn’t develop from one repetition to the next. Suleiman just doesn’t find new riffs for the chords he’s playing. Some of the scenes are funny — a tank gun; or Palestinian rioters and Israeli soldiers exchanging fire, viewed from on high in extreme long shot, only to stop when a woman with a baby walks through. But not enough.

TIME is also, I think, too personal for its own good, putting at its center flashbacks through the life story of Suleiman’s parents since the 1948 “Catastrophe” (that’s the very establishment of Israel itself, not its occupation of the West Bank, BTW). And also his own life as he grows up, played by several different actors at various ages, until played by Suleiman himself in present day. It’s not as bad as IRENE — it consists of well-taken photographs, e.g. But like the Cavalier, however meaningful it is to Suleiman, he hasn’t given *US* a reason to care unless we already walk in sympathetic to the Palestinian-Arab mythos of the last 60 years (which I very decidedly am not). There was one moment I flatly did not believe, when Suleiman as a boy was dressed down as a teacher who wanted to know “Who told you America is colonialist?” Given that this took place no later than 1969, if it really happened, it would indicates that international leftism/Marxism (which would provide the space from which to say such a thing then) is the prime influence on Suleiman, not Palestinian nationalism, which would not have provided such a space then since the US wasn’t Israel’s prime armer until the early 70s (indeed, it was the US siding with the USSR against Israel, France and Britain that forced the pullback on the 1956 Suez invasion)

The film that might have been, part 1

I AM NOT YOUR FRIEND (Gyorgy Palfi, Hungary, 4)

And I am not your fan, Gyorgi … in this film anyway. Unlike HUKKLE and TAXIDERMIA, which, even if you don’t like them (and the latter IS dislikable), are hard to forget, this Palfi movie is utterly routine festival filler not even worth hating and his direction really lacks flavor. I will probably have wholly forgotten the details of this film in a month, except for what I write now (even a week later, they’re mostly evaporated from my mind and I really haven’t too much to say).

It wasn’t always that way though. I thoroughly enjoyed the start of FRIEND, which uses the same “what’s really a TV show gets presented as if it were the start of our movie” gimmick as Brian DePalma’s SISTERS, only it lasts for much longer (10-12 mins, I’d guess) and the content of the shows have nothing in common. Here it’s a show about kindergarten-age kids at school interacting called “I Will Not Be Your Friend,” and the kids’ performances are spectacularly naturalistic and also realistic — they spend considerable time declaring who is and isn’t one another’s friends. And when the closing credits rolled, I began to think “huh,” and then the film explains itself — it’s a TV show made by one of the characters.

For a while too, I thought FRIEND itself would have an intriguing hook — it begins with one character, who leads to an event and another couple of characters that the film then starts following until another event introduces us to new characters, etc. — think Linklater’s SLACKER or Bunuel’s PHANTOM OF LIBERTY. But it turns out this is just introducing into a circle of connections that Palfi keeps bringing us back to continue the individual stories (some of the characters know each other; others don’t), like CRASH: PORT OF CALL, BUDAPEST. The stories concern romantic and sexual alignments and some petty crime, but are completely unremarkable, except for one, involving a death faked as a joke. It also leaves the kindergarten beginning behind, except for the jejune parallel that these adults act like children.

The film that might have been, part 2

L’ENFER DE HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea, France, 6)

I wish I could bottle the lengthy conversation I had after this documentary about a film-that-didn’t-happen, defending it against Josh Rothkopf of Time Out New York and Rob Nelson of Variety, both of whom liked L’ENFER much less than I did (and my grade is only a good-but-flawed “6”). I agree that it’s thin on details (for example, it doesn’t even mention once that Claude Chabrol later made a film based on Clouzot’s script) and there’s a lot of interesting critical and contextual matters that Josh and Rob think it ignores (I’d say “leaves implicit” and “trusts you to get it”).

Consider one subject: Alfred Hitchcock. The British and French masters have often been linked critically and there was a kind of one-upmanship/rivalry between the two of them. For example, Hitchcock’s VERTIGO and Clouzot’s DIABOLIQUE were based on books by the same pair of French authors. Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac even wrote the book that became VERTIGO with Hitchcock in mind while DIABOLIQUE was being filmed.¹ I believe the word “Hitchcock” is never mentioned in the film despite the obvious ways the footage from Clouzot planned film (also titled L’ENFER, or INFERNO²) clearly borrowed from Hitchcock. But I didn’t think the film needed to spell that out — it was perfectly clear to me. The first words in my viewing notes refer to the images in Clouzot’s footage with “push Hitchcockian subjectivity to the pathological” and “Stewart’s dream in VERTIGO to end of all reason.” And the L’ENFER score, when it’s not sultry jazz, tips Bromberg’s knowledge to us by stylistically resembling Hitchcock’s favorite composer, Bernard Herrmann (“Not in the film, not in the film. You’re not on the screen explaining all this,” Rob was rebutting me then).

Consider another: the footage and the production history. Even those of us who like L’ENFER acknowledge that the film really only successfully serves as an excuse to see the footage Clouzot shot in 1964, but which had been sitting in film cans since, the property of Clouzot’s widow and unseen by outsiders. (And Bromberg told the exact same cliffhanger-tease at my screening as at Mike’s about persuading Mrs. Clouzot on the elevator, saying the film would finish the story — which it doesn’t. And all three of us were annoyed by that.) But the footage — just “wow.” It makes you weak in the knees and turns your legs to jelly thinking about what was in Clouzot’s head. The film’s story was about a husband’s pathological jealousy, which was going to be in black-and-white, with his fantasies about his wife (to have been played by Romy Schneider) shot in expressionist color, with filters, superimposed-images and surrealist touches. L’ENFER says Clouzot went wild with these shooting tests, mostly of Schneider, and his self-indulgence threw INFERNO off schedule almost right away and persuaded the money men (Americans who had given him carte blanche) to pull the plug after leading man Serge Reggiani walked off the set and Clouzot had a heart attack. L’ENFER gives no reason given why Clouzot, who already had completed a dozen films, would suddenly turn into such a putz, constantly reshooting the same scene.

But again, I think the reason is perfectly clear from the INFERNO footage, though L’ENFER never says it directly — that Clouzot had fallen in love (or at least lust or obsession) with the Austrian-born Schneider, not a great thespian but a stunningly-gorgeous, iconic camera-object (imagine if Renee Zellweger ever opened her eyes). Throughout the INFERNO footage, and you can really get a sense of what I’m talking about from the trailer, it’s plain as day that she is being directed to seduce the camera — looking back into its eyes, giving it come-hither looks. And the shots are blatantly sexual — Schneider licking water off a transparency, blowing smoke into her nostrils, pursing her wide mouth and licking her lips, looking into the lens for what I will simply call the “iris shot” (Mike was taken by it too). I understand that there’s a perfectly good story-related reason for shooting Schneider this way — she’s acting out the husband’s jealous fantasies. But Clouzot’s sinking his efforts into this footage, shooting way more than he could ever use or needed for tests, surely shows that he became seduced himself. Indeed, since Clouzot was becoming obsessed with Schneider while Hitchcock was making THE BIRDS and MARNIE — there’s even more career parallels than we might have thought.
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¹ It’s hard not to read Hitchcock’s theory about Surprise vs. Suspense as a rebuke of DIABOLIQUE, one of the greatest “last-scene surprise twist” movies ever. And as a defense of Hitch’s own decision to ignore Boileau and Narcejac’s making Judy’s identity a last-page “reveal,” instead feeding the knowledge to the audience shortly after Judy is introduced.
² For clarity’s sake, I’ll refer to Clouzot’s film as INFERNO and Bromberg and Medrea’s as L’ENFER.

The life that might have been

MR. NOBODY (Jaco Van Dormael, Canada/France, 2)

Imagine if Alain Resnais’ SMOKING/NO SMOKING had intercut its two realities, been told from a perspective of Arditi or Azema at age 118, not given any sense of the true gimmick, copped out on the central act of the film’s universe, and had one-tenth of Resnais formal chops. Doesn’t sound awesome, you say? Well … MR. NOBODY isn’t even that good.

The film’s main body, the hoary premise is an interviewer asks the 118-year-old Nemo Nobody to tell his life story and the film then flashes back through three possible lives that it insists for a time all happened, based on a key decision made by the hero as a boy. We know something isn’t quite right because motifs bleed through all three — a drowning death, dreaming the other ones, etc. The three “pasts” are wildly uneven — in one, he marries a manic depressive and Sarah Polley manages to give the one performance that interests, though I’m not sure it’s the right one for this movie (it’s certainly “manic”). In another, he marries an Asian woman and lives like a king — and that’s about as much as we learn. The quarreling scenes are shrill and over-the-top — though they made me appreciate those in I KILLED MY MOTHER even more. And in a perfect illustration of Polanski-era movie morals, bopping your stepsister is basically used as a joke.

Surprisingly, the world of the narrator at 118 is very different than ours since everybody is immortal and the narrator is the last mortal about to die, only on live TV. An intriguing world and premise, you say? Why, yes … except what would be the point, since the film chucks it away by turning that whole world into a red herring, and a pretty unbelievable and over-elaborate one at that. Why should this character see the world’s future this way? How is it supposed to have come about? Perspicacity at age 10? Reflection of some personal issue? But who cares about that kind of logic — I certainly wouldn’t if MR. NOBODY were in any way exciting, involving, insightful or in any way engaged my emotions (my viewing notes say at one point, after the line “my life was cast in cement with airbags and seatbelts,” “I am now so [effing] bored”).

I was angriest at the film’s final reveal, which had me madly scribbling “cop out, cop out” in my book. Nemo’s parents are divorcing and he has to decide whether he lives with his mother or his father. A wrenching decision obviously, and it eventually winds up playing the structural role that smoking a cigarette does in the Resnais films. But right after having told us a few minutes earlier that “every path in life is the right one” (a crock, but set that aside), Nemo decides that no path should be followed. He knows now (illogically if the 118-year-old’s future was all in the 10-year-old’s head … but again, never mind) what his life will be like under the various scenarios of whether he takes a train (i.e., goes with his departing mother) or stays at the platform (i.e., remains with his father). Only rather than do either of those things, Nemo simply runs off the platform. Are we supposed to believe this means he didn’t live with either parent? Or is it just a self-indulgent whine, refusing to make a choice between bad options (and in a divorce, “mom” and “dad” are your exclusive options) as if such refusal isn’t itself a choice or as if somehow refusing to acknowledge Hobson’s choices when they happen magically wishes them away. It basically reduces the film “the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind,” only not written by Shakespeare and having no consequences.

Toronto capsules — Day 8

MICMACS (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France, 8)

I don’t mean this as a slam when I say that you shouldn’t really need to see this movie to predict your reaction. MICMACS is as “typical” a movie for its director as any film I saw at the festival — it does exactly what Jeunet does: the Rube Goldberg devices, the elaborate scams, the weird characters, the obsession with junk, the baroque set design, the elaborate camera stunts, his stock company in the major supporting roles (Dominique Pinon, Yolande Moreau, Andre Dussollier and several actors whose faces but not names I recognized), the central role of fantasy, a genial tone of comic unreality, and impossible coincidences and planning. At the center this time, there’s a better actor and comic than Audrey Tautou — Dany Boon plays the hero Bazil, who lost his father to one weapons-maker and has lodged in his head a bullet made by another. Suitable for a comic down-and-out, Boon plays the role with a lot of Chaplin touches — a silent dance, fussy gestures, a happy-go-lucky attitude even when homeless.

Yet that confident prediction of mine, at least among my pals, didn’t pan out — several disliked this film while saying they liked AMELIE just fine or a lot. There ARE differences with AMELIE and they don’t favor this film; there’s less emotional heft in Bazil’s schemes than Amelie’s, there’s no character-as-director subtext, and the new film is less self-critical of its hero. The plot of MICMACS has a different spirit entirely: Amelie wanted to spread happiness while avoiding her own, while the motley crew that surrounds Bazil executes a revenge scheme against the arms dealers and brings down the companies. Thus MICMACS can come across as the most-discordant part of AMELIE — the attack on the greengrocer who bullies the mentally-slow boy — stretched out to the whole film.

So some of the dislike I do get, and obviously I agree that MICMACS is not as good (AMELIE is a “10” and decade-best contender). Still, I find “what Jeunet does” to be hugely entertaining even if he’s only spinning his wheels. Scenes like the airport arrest of the African smugglers (the “Jeunet is a racist” crowd will have some fun again) are so absurdly, impossibly overplotted and elaborate that this elaborateness makes them funny. Then there’s all the little touches and curlicues like “it’s salvaged gear, it can’t be perfected”; the way the heads of the two arms companies eat shrimp — different ways, both equal caricature; and the Sergio Leone homage at the end (though it might have been a mistake to introduce pictures of real human suffering in a confectionery film like this). But most of all … I got Jeunet’s autograph while the closing credits were rolling — recognizing him and finding the MICMACS page in the 400-page Guidebook while the theater was still dark.

I KILLED MY MOTHER (Xavier Dolan, Canada, 7)

These are the words, starting from top: "Framing very ... 2 shots or ones at edges"; "single shots are centered symmetrically"; "sets look like sets"; "pictures hang ... couch ... pictures not above them when stand"

The director of this film has some learning to do. His framing is often amateurish and clumsy — either perfectly symmetrical or ostentatiously asymmetrical. And heck if I can understand the reality of a shot where people are standing, but above both the couch and the pictures hanging from the wall that still extends higher than they do (the image to the right is an actual shot of the notes I took watching the film; translation from my scribble is in the caption).

The director of this film is 19 years old. It is *scary* that I’m criticizing I KILLED MY MOTHER at this level of achievement

Now don’t get me wrong … I’m not giving this film an affirmative-action grade or judging it “for a student film.” Nor did I simply “find fault” to set up a joke. The 7-grade is based on the same scale as I judged every other film in this fest, and I stand by my words that Dolan’s direction is sometimes clumsy. But that first graf is the equivalent of saying of a high-school basketball phenom that his 3-point shot is erratic when he’s closely guarded — it’s true, and something that will have to get better. But. Still. I KILLED MY MOTHER is so well-written and acted, so emotionally honest and complex, and so clearly the achieved work of a super-talented auteur that these stumbles don’t hurt the film that much and they don’t matter at all when looking at the grand scheme of things — Dolan is scary good. The best “young first director” comparison I can think of is Steven Soderbergh’s debut film SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE — another low-budget, realistic, talky, psychologically-bloody relationship movie. And Soderbergh was an old fart of 26 when he blew away the Cannes Film Festival with *his* debut film.

Despite the title, no mother is killed during this movie — an early scene has the son (played by Dolan himself) lie about his mother being dead to avoid having to interview her for a class assignment (a later one shows a short-story school assignment with that title, but no hint of what it contains). Instead this is about a tempestuous relationship between a divorced mother and her (secretly gay) high-school junior son. Right from the very first scene, we sense Dolan’s ability to write cleanly and we see the strength of performances by him and the awesome Anne Dorval as his mother. The scene is basically a single take of the two sniping at each other as she drives him to school, and all the dynamics of the long-worn argument between two people who’ve had this out before — they fight about nothing in particular, then about very specific things, irrelevant events from the past are brought up, attacks and rebuttals based on role (“you’re supposed to be the mother here”). And then he gets out of the car and the mother says “have a nice day.” Put that starkly in a review, it sounds like a laugh line to the audience or an ironic “eff you” to the other character. But not in context, not one little bit — it’s too sincere and genuine. It’s more like the embodiment of “can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em” (contained also in both the opening maxim from De Maupassant and the film’s closing image). That’s the relationship between mother and son as they go through a year of him hiding his boyfriend (and her finding out much earlier than she lets on), being sent to boarding school, playing off the father, him coming home one night drunk to tell her how much he really loves her, etc.

Nor is I KILLED MY MOTHER all plain-vanilla “couples fighting in the kitchen” — there’s also intercalary moments, slo-motion flights of imagination that remind one of the “Yumeji’s Theme” moments from Wong’s IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (even the music is similar). It never gets LA PIANISTE-style pathological, but the film is taken into new territory by two late scenes. One involves the mother on the phone to the school authorities (an applause-producing scene everywhere it’s played, though I found it pandering), the other has the son being driven by his boyfriend. In different ways, each character indicates that he’s become so accustomed to the relationship between them and its dynamic that they even act it out when around others.

VIDEOCRACY (Erik Gandini, Sweden, 2)

After this thin documentary, an ahistoric diatribe how stupid and pandering Italian TV put the man who runs it, Silvio Berlusconi, into political power, I stuck around for the Q-and-A because I had to ask the director something he clearly, based on the film, hadn’t thought through. This is how I put it, best I can recall:

I really think one thing your film doesn’t seem to address is the particulars. It seems to say that media power simplistically gets replicated into political power (“TV and power are one and the same here,” it says). But if that’s the case, why isn’t Ted Turner president of the U.S., Rupert Murdoch the prime minister of Australia, Conrad Black the prime minister of Canada. Nor is the larger-than-life tycoon as a public figure a new or unique type, either other men in Italy or men elsewhere (I had in mind men like Donald Trump or Richard Branson, though I didn’t name any). Why *this* man and why *this* country, now? I didn’t get any sense of that.

Gandini was clearly caught off guard, and he replied by saying “that’s a very good question.” He repeated that, before saying “I don’t know the answer,” before giving the audience-flattering answer that “perhaps it’s because people in countries like yours don’t let it happen, you’re vigilant.” Which is, of course, no answer at all … why couldn’t these other men I named have narcotized their political cultures with bread and circuses sex and celebrity, something Gandini has to believe (based on this film) Berlusconi is the only person ever to have thought of doing.

VIDEOCRACY had me suspicious about its intellectual suppleness very quickly, in a scene where it’s stated as a fact that a TV mogul can make anyone a star (I know the history of show business too well to believe that; as Samuel Goldwyn put it: “God makes the stars, it’s up to the producers to find them”). The film lost my trust completely when someone said of Berlusconi, “he has given himself immunity from prosecution.” Well, yes and no. Someone in the film later confirmed (“you go into politics and you can’t go to jail”) what I happened to know — that Italian law immunizes many top officials during their terms of office. And that is unremarkable comparatively, as came up during the Year of Monica in the US — the remedy against presidential criminality is removal from office by Congress; only then can a president be prosecuted. Very shortly after that, the film had me in total intellectual rebellion when it mentioned Berlusconi’s media holdings — “the only three commercial channels, when you add State TV to that, he owns 90 percent of the TV audience,” says the narrator. You don’t have to know crap about Italian politics to see the problem — Berlusconi only has even theoretical control over state broadcaster RAI when he is prime minister. Which both begs the question of how he acquired RAI (i.e., became prime minister) in the first place, but also leaves you scratching your head about what happens to RAI when the other party is in power. If you think monopoly ownership of media is a problem, it’s probably quite bad enough that one man owns all three commercial networks (the Wikipedia article on Berlusconi says they add up to 50 percent of the TV audience; presumably RAI has 40 percent), but Gandini couldn’t resist gilding the lily in such a patently dishonest way.

Did I mention “the other party”? Well … VIDEOCRACY forgot to. Really, the more I thought about this film, the more one-dimensional and overdetermined it became, and not because I’m an expert on the ins and outs of Italian politics. But I know enough to know that Berlusconi has been voted in and out of office several times over the past 15 years — something you would not know from this movie. Nor would you likely think it even possible, since VIDEOCRACY paints Italy as if it were some banana republic or oriental despotism under one-man rule or one-party elections. There’s also absolutely no context or even much sense of history (the basic dates of what happened when are not provided and the distinction between state and private TV is not kept clear). Again, you would not know from this movie that before Berlusconi’s entry into politics, Italy already had both really cheesy television (see GINGER & FRED) and the most corrupt, incestuous and insider-backscratch politics in Europe (see IL DIVO). Indeed, between IL DIVO, about an uncharismatic puppetmaster conservative PM (bad … corrupt), and VIDEOCRACY, about a charismatic media star conservative PM (bad … vulgar), I get the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” feeling. Which is made particularly aggravating by the whole film’s self-righteous leftist undercurrent about the vulgarity of the masses, underlined at the Q-and-A by the director himself saying, close as I can recall, “the left tries to think in terms of ideas and logic, and it doesn’t work, because Berlusconi thinks in terms of images and emotions” (a thesis this film refutes decisively by itself).

Like a good Marxist, Gandini simplistically conflates media ownership with politically-biased content, as if that were axiomatic. But in the one moment we see of Berlusconi himself actually speaking, he says critics of his media holdings “obviously have never turned on Italian TV. The outlets I own are among my toughest critics.” Plausible, given what I know about the US and British media. Is it false? Can’t really tell from this film because we never get any actual content analysis to rebut Berlusconi’s claim (if I were cynical, I would say the filmmaker deemed it unworthy of rebuttal). The closest VIDEOCRACY comes is someone saying entertainment shows are pre-empted or end quicker if Berlusconi has a TV appearance (this happens in the US too, and last I looked Obama doesn’t own CBS). And there is one unforgivable moment right after Berlusconi’s words that one might also mistake for a rebuttal — an admittedly ridiculous campaign-commercial song praising him to the skies. Well, OK … other than getting laughs from hipster audiences at the cheesy lyrics (“Thank God that Silvio exists”) and the Up with People style, what does that prove? Was this shown as regular programming or an ad “purchased” for free?; the film doesn’t say. At face value, it merely proves the utterly jejune fact that Berlusconi’s stations air his campaign spots, as if somehow they shouldn’t. Again, comparative analysis — US networks are forbidden by law from turning down ads from presidential candidates if they are paid the going ad rate, and barred from editing their content. And Obama still doesn’t own CBS.

SYMBOL (Hitoshi Matsumoto, Japan, 7)

In the blue corner ... wearing existentialist girly-color and -pattern pajamas like the Japanese-segment hero ...

How to describe this very weird mostly-comedy? I tried on Mike “The Myth of Sisyphus as done in the style of a Japanese game show,” which is probably the best you can do in a phrase, though that doesn’t get across that for about 2/3 of SYMBOL’s length, about half of it is set in the world of Mexican wrestling. Indeed, in the only iPhone pic I took worth publishing, this is how Midnight Madness programmer Colin Geddes introduced the film — Matsumoto sent him the two parts of the costume to wear as apology for not being in Toronto since it was the week of SYMBOL’s commercial release in Japan.

The main body of SYMBOL (and eventually the entirety) focuses on a man in a white room, played by Matsumoto, a big comedy star in Japan. We don’t know why he’s there, nor does he — only that angels appear on his walls, sticking out like bas-reliefs, and then recede, leaving only their baby-boy-parts visible. When he presses down on one, he gets something, either useful or not, possibly helpful in getting out of the box (or not). He’s like a rat in a cage, only he’s a man, so he can figure out things a bit better. A bit. There’s basically no dialog (who is there to talk to?), which gives this segment a kind of Tatiesque quality of a man and objects he can’t handle. Only unlike Tati, Matsumoto frequently flies into reactions I can only describe as “Japanese game show,” which is never not funny when contrasted against the degree-zero style of the setting, premise and dialog. Some of the jokes are fairly obvious — he loses track of what button does what, and so he only gets soy sauce after he’s eaten his sushi — but it’s the anticipation and timing that are funny. SYMBOL eventually becomes more obviously like a Japanese game show, an escape-from-the-room so you can go up to the next level premise, like Donkey Kong. And at two or three points, the film “breaks” and gives us a TV-style preview detailing what Matsumoto will do as he smiles confidently on the full-screen chyron as if his plan to get out of the room were a game-show stunt or something on “It’s a Knockout.”

Unfortunately, the Mexican segment with which this is intercut is terribly conventional — schmuck dad prepares for big match — especially when compared to the wacked-out Japanese one. Worse, it isn’t really very funny — the Fallacy of the Vulgar Nun¹ is out in spades and the acting is atrocious. When you find out what the two segments have in common … how to say this vaguely to avoid spoilers … it makes the Mexican segment too long for what it basically becomes — a punchline to the Japanese story. And then … again vague … we get other segments around the world illustrating the same point that ARE timed more appropriately. Now that Mexican punchline IS inventive and absolutely hilarious, both in itself and in its sheer wtf-is-THAT-what-all-this-has-been-about-ness. But as Milton would say … “the ratio of length to payoff is too big.”

The film continues in a much-less funny mythopoetic vein as Matsumoto “advances” up the game’s stages. Dan Owen suggested to me a blasphemous take on man becoming God, which I couldn’t quite rebut, except to say that it’s less funny than the Camus-like futility of the early parts. But then we get Part 3, after Part 1 (The Education) and Part 2 (The Implementation), only this one is called “The Future” — and it’s back to the brilliant deadpan.
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¹ That is, “showing a nun or priest do things like curse, drink, smoke, discuss bodily fluids or drive recklessly is not inherently funny,” cf. “Fallacy of the Vulgar Granny.”

Toronto grades — Days 9/10

Day 9
VINCERE (Marco Bellocchio, Italy, 7)
THE TIME THAT REMAINS (Elia Suleiman, Palestine, 4)
I AM NOT YOUR FRIEND (Gyorgy Palfi, Hungary, 4)
L’ENFER DE HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea, France, 6)
MR. NOBODY (Jaco Van Dormael, France, 2)

Day 10 (now THIS is what a Festival Day should be like — even Noe’s failure is an experience I won’t forget)
POLICE, ADJECTIVE (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania, 8)
AIR DOLL (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, 7)
HADEWIJCH (Bruno Dumont, France, 9)
ENTER THE VOID (Gaspar Noe, France, 4 — though really an 8 for style and 0 for content)
ONG BAK 2: THE BEGINNING (Tony Jaa and Panna Rittikrai, Thailand, 5)

Toronto capsules — Day 7

PARTIR (Catherine Corsini, France, 4)

The script for this adultery drama feels like the work of a high-school girl in her Feminist Creative Writing Collective — consciousness raising and denunciation of men and marriage, but with plenty of Sergi Lopez topless and other forms of adolescent sentimentality. Lopez’s character — a manual laborer working on a home-expansion project for bourgeoise Kristin Scott Thomas — even says he’s not surprised she fell for him “after spending all day with a hunk like me.” There’s even a scene, I am not kidding, of the two lovers — both married — naked in a sun-dappled field of waist-high grains and grasses … spreading some fertilizer.

Obviously such portrayals risk upholding the patriarchy, so every other element in the story has to contribute to wymyn’s lib, and the decks must be stacked for that purpose. And heck … Jayne Mansfield wasn’t as stacked as this movie’s deck. KST’s husband is a complete jerk — rude and patronizing to her, no good in bed but insists on getting it when he wants it (KST looks as bored in bed as I was in the theater). His interest in sex is purely patriarchal territory-marking. When she first tells him she’s fallen in love with another man, the only questions he asks is whether they had had sex and details/elaboration therein. And if you have seen a movie or two in your life, you know that after KST has asked for divorce, when she, Lopez, her son and his daughter pull into a gas station and KST goes to fill up, there’s gonna be some credit card issues. I know it reads like I’m making fun of the actors, but to be fair, they’re both quite appealing and do what they can with this script (unlike Yves Attal as the husband, who is given nothing but a set of hate lines).

This is a French movie about adultery and so “Madame Bovary” inevitably comes to mind, but Emma commits suicide, and we can’t have that in Our Enlightened Time. PARTIR strikes a blow for feminism by having this adultress kill her husband rather than herself. I’m sure the teacher beamed with pride as she congratulated the script and gave it an A for undermining Flaubert’s patriarchal ending.

SCHEHEREZADE, TELL ME A STORY (Yousry Nasrallah, Egypt, 5)

As feminist morality tales go, this one is actually kind of okay. The title tells you you’re going to see some form of the basic “Tales of the 1001 Nights,” though not any of the famous stories — Ali Baba, Sinbad, Aladdin, etc. Instead of a slave/concubine who every night must keep the Sultan’s interest in the next night’s story in order to avoid beheading, “Scheherezade” is a talk-show host on Egyptian TV who is being encouraged to avoid politics, the better for her husband’s career. So she does Oprah-like stories of the lives of ordinary Egyptian women, and finds out that that is no way to avoid politics.

As I say, it’s a better film than I expected and some of “Scheherezade’s” stories have elemental power and don’t fall into the trap of some recent Iranian films of portraying women as if ignorant of social rules. For example, the story of three sisters being used by the same man ends with one of the three women taking over the situation. In another, a woman unfurls a banner accusing a Cabinet minister of dishonoring her (this sequence also has the bloodiest portrayal of an abortion I have ever seen). The TV show isn’t relied on too much but director Nasrallah shoots it with some inventiveness, using tropes from talk shows themselves — stuff like monitor-created split screens between host and guest (I don’t remember how popular or widely seen it was, but the style reminded of Lauren Hutton’s late-night interview show from the mid-1990s.) “Scheherezade” also becomes part of the story, in a way I saw coming but only because I know the dramatic framing device of “1001 Nights,” the situation the original Scheherezade faced. If you don’t, it might pack a wallop. This is nothing more than OK festival filler … but the way this festival has been going, I’ll take it.

LEAVES OF GRASS (Tim Blake Nelson, USA, 2)

Serves one useful function — proving what a genius Quentin Tarantino is and how people who criticize the “movieness” of his movies are missing the key role that postmodern style plays in his work — it’s not just movie-nerd immaturity.

At least I think that. And I’m certain that unless Tim Blake Nelson was trying for some Tarantinoesque mix of comedy and ultraviolence, I have no frackin idea what he was trying for. For the first hour, LEAVES OF GRASS is an innocuous (and not terribly funny, to me) comedy about mismatched identical-twin brothers, both played by Edward Norton. The concept is higher than (insert punchline when you read on) — one’s a buttoned-down Classics professor about to get a Harvard appointment; the other a tattooed hick who applies his IQ (actually higher) to developing and building the world’s most-sophisticated hydroponic pot-growing farm. The prof gets called back to Oklahoma, and there ensue switcheroos and resentments over abandoning hippie-mom (Susan Sarandon), the family and “plain foke lahk uss.” You can imagine Rob Schneider or Adam Sandler in this movie, and though Norton is an incomparably better actor who actually manages to create two persons, there’s only so much even he can do with this hackneyed material.

And then things get serious — way too serious for a featherweight sitcom. Talking vaguely to minimize spoilitude — the drug-dealer brother tries to fix some business in Tulsa and a violent shootout occurs in which several people are killed. There are two more violent scenes, one a multiple-death shootout and another involving a metal-tipped arrow impaling someone’s body (the 3rd movie with such a scene at this TIFF). And we’re not talking cartoon Bugs Bunny violence — this is serious 80s-Stallone cop-show stuff and we see gaping wounds, etc. Oh … and did I mention that swastikas get painted on a synagogue? And that they were done backwards (ho ho ho … aren’t they STOOPID in Oklahoma). Now I believe that any subject is appropriate for a movie — in the right movie. Stuff like this does not belong in the same movie as hayseed jokes like a TV anchorman saying on camera that “police are not sure whether the backward swastikas indicate a hate crime or, rather more implausibly, that Hindus were involved.”

How does this very ill-conceived film shine light on Tarantino? Because he can get away with a mixture of loopy comedy, shocking and gory violence, and a smart-aleck tone toward taboos (like … ahem … Jews during WW2) because nobody could mistake his movies as being (directly) about the real world. His movies and his characters are fundamentally based on movies QT has seen and those his characters have seen. The stylization makes it hard to take offense at anything “real” and makes it plain that his movies are about discourse. And while LEAVES is a comedy based on an unlikely premise, the film is made and acted in a naturalistic, straightforward way that indicates that we’re supposed to, at least provisionally, suspend disbelief and take this movie as somehow reflecting the real world. In which case, this is the offensive garbage in my opinion.

MOTHER (Bong Joon-ho, South Korea, 9)

Thank you, Mr. Bong Joon-ho for single-handedly redeeming what looked like it would be another crap day. As I write this with only the last-day Midnight showing to go, MOTHER remains the best film of the festival for me. And, like Bong’s MEMORIES OF MURDER and THE HOST, it’s a film that I think could find a decent and appreciative audience among ordinary American filmgoers. It’s an approachable, straightforward narrative in a conventional genre — like MEMORIES, it’s a crime-investigation story, though the two incompetent detectives are replaced by a crusading, slightly dotty woman out to prove her son’s innocence in the death of a local teenage girl (it’s practically a Korean version of a Perry Mason or an episode of “Murder, She Wrote”). It’s also funny at times, has a gallery of interesting supporting players and like the best crime movies is ultimately about more than whodunnit.

The central role is played by Kim Hae-ja, apparently the Harriet Nelson / June Cleaver of Korea. She’s maternal, faithful, slightly weird and never less than absolutely convincing, even when the story has her character cross some lines in defense of her son (he’s mentally slow and flies into a rage when anyone calls him “retard”). As a measure of how good she is, she comes across that way even for those like myself whose knowledge of her Korean TV persona is strictly second-hand. It’s her mannerisms, her worrywart quality and her total focus on her boy and his cause, even when he doesn’t want to pursue it. In other words — the perfect mother.

Bong handles the genre material expertly — he makes work suspense scenes like the mother hiding in the closet on an evidence hunt while watching the person she suspects of murdering the teenage girl prepares to seduce (rape? kill?) another girl. Even a scene as commonplace as the detectives dismissing Mother’s latest evidence find becomes new in his hands — there’s no berating her nor her triumphant declaration of having solved the case, just a video of someone doing something with her lips, then a technician coming in and saying mournfully “do you really want us to do a DNA test on this? Anyone can see it’s lipstick.” He really earns the last scene (this is not a spoiler), of people dancing on a bus viewed from outside as the sun sets and their shapes mere black shadows pulsing against the sky. Given the three scenes that have preceded it, including a chilling, heartbreaking one in which the mother and son are finally completely united, the bus image felt like the truest cinematic depiction of [a certain emotional phenomenon] I’ve ever seen.

LE REFUGE (Francois Ozon, France, 3)

And I should gave a crap about this selfish, flighty, passive-aggressive using bitch because … ??? I know some of my very favorite movies have dislikeable protagonists, but this movie isn’t about that nor does it even acknowledge the natural reaction to a smackhead slut who tries to seduce the gay brother of the baby-daddy who fatally OD’d alongside her and who keeps the baby largely to spite that family only to abandon the newborn in the hospital with the brother and flee on the Paris metro. And it’s not as though the film really has anything other than her to be about — the vast middle portion of the film is like an Eric Rohmer film of her on August “vacances.” A character study is in real trouble if you spend every second of it wanting to punch the protagonist in the face, and the film doesn’t manifest any realization of that.

Um … I guess that last graf’s got spoilers, but I don’t care. Indeed, the ending is exactly where Ozon makes it undeniable how rotten this film’s soul is. He ends the film by having her read aloud on the soundtrack from the note she left at the hospital, while she looks into the camera. Occasionally, Ozon cuts back to the brother, and he’s not angry as a normal person would be. The note’s self-justifying tripe is read in a meant-to-be-sympathetic pleading tone — “I’m not ready to be a mother … You and the baby are the two most precious things in the world to me.” Both visually and orally, the end of this film is an apologia — no doubt about it. And I spit on it.

Toronto grades — Day 8

MICMACS (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France, 8)
I KILLED MY MOTHER (Xavier Dolan, Canada, 7)
VIDEOCRACY (Erik Gandini, Sweden, 2 — ha ha, good one, Noel. Revenge for DETROIT METAL CITY last year?)
SYMBOL (Hitoshi Matsumoto, Japan, 7)

Toronto capsules — Day 6

THE WARRIOR AND THE WOLF (Tian Zhuang-zhuang, China, 5)

Let me  blunt and say that Tian has never been much of a storyteller, even when he’s got incredibly dramatic material. Now let me be honest and admit that as a result I tend to admire his films more than I really love any of them — I much prefer Zhang Yimou’s TO LIVE to Tian’s similar THE BLUE KITE (I have not seen HORSE THIEF though). Here is an effort at a period wuxia film that starts with two Chinese Empire commanders in the Western nomadic regions that reminds one of Wong’s ASHES OF TIME in having jumbled-about chronology that mostly just confuses. Between that, the several title cards that bridge major narrative developments and a fairly complete lack of emotional involvement in the characters — this film is doing well even to get a 5/Variety-mixed from me.

As I said about VALHALLA RISING, if you accept these limitations and acknowledge that THE WARRIOR & THE WOLF does not have much in the way of story values despite having the form of a narrative, then you’re freer to enjoy what the film is — a gorgeous-looking, episodic mythopoetic tone poem (test comparison: what do you think of FELLINI SATYRICON?). The cinematography is awe-inspiring in a negative denial kind of way. Nominally a color film, much of WARRIOR, especially the battle scenes, looks like black-and-white shot through a blue-silver filter, making the warriors appear like shadow puppets. Practically the first color to pop off the screen is an orange fireball. So thoroughly has Tian drained primary colors from his palette that the blood flows onto the parched Gobi Desert floor already a kind of black-brown. I also liked how Tian handled the animal part of the story. Speaking vaguely to avoid second-act spoilers … he gets involved with someone in a manner that invokes an ancient curse that both will becomes wolves. I have it written in my notes “the only place this now has to go is to make them both wolves.” And that’s exactly what Tian does, producing easily the film’s most-memorable image — an enormous sandstorm personified as a gang of wolves burying the Emperor’s army … really. It’d be destined for all-time fame if the fanboys could sit through the rest of this admittedly often-tedious film. It’s that fawesome.

THE INFORMANT! (Steven Soderbergh, USA, 8)

OK … I’m awake now. After days of slogging through some bad films and fairly esoteric films that are sometimes worthy or even great but nevertheless more nutritious than fun … thank you, Steven Soderbergh for showing “here’s how it’s done” to the art-damaged crowd. There are better films at this festival, but I’m confident in saying there’s none that’s this purely entertaining. It’s also a return to form and pattern for Soderbergh — following up this spring’s quite good but arty and somewhat-offputting THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE with a straight-up funny comedy caper like this. This has been the pattern of Soderbergh’s career — whirlwind productivity alternating between arty films (experiments with digital video, tributes to Tarkovsky, etc.) and crowd-pleasing commercial films (the OCEAN movies and Clooney vehicles), sometimes in the same year. In 2009, he did it again, and both films are strong.

THE INFORMANT! bears a superficial resemblance to such corporate-espionage crusader films as THE INSIDER and THE FIRM and is a kissing cousin to Soderbergh’s own ERIN BROCKOVICH (from hexavalent chromium to ADM price-fixing), Only Soderbergh takes the risk, as the trailer shows, of making the film mostly as a comedy, having Matt Damon play the whistleblower as kinda stupid and foolish, comparing himself to characters in corporate-espionage movies, and doing things like looking to see whether he can spot the hidden camera thatthe FBI has planted at a meeting that’s about to begin. And if you know the real-life story he’s telling, there’s more than stupidity and narcissism to sully the hero. Damon is a perfect choice not only because who he generally is ensures instant audience identification before the rug pulling can begin (Soderbergh clearly learned from Hitchcock about the importance of casting a good-looking, charming star in this sort of film) — but he’s also got a boyishness that makes the mustache here a funny affectation and a hint that all’s not well upstairs and he’s got puppy-dog, eager-to-please mannerisms that make credible his belief in his objectively-wack schemes (among other things, he thinks that bringing down the top people at ADM will let him inherit the throne by default).

Soderbergh also directs the film, how does one say it … like a mofo, deliberately tarting the film up beyond reason, with ironic score choices like jazzy 70s TV-cop-show riffs, portentous and thus funnily-pretentious title cards (my favorite: “Tokyo” written in English characters but in the Japanese vertical layout). He also takes the risk of giving Damon a lot of voiceover, but it really works and isn’t a crutch because there’s almost no exposition in it — it’s all a stream of consciousness self-commentary that goes off in bizarre directions (like convincing himself that the TV networks have to rig the World Series to get the ratings, “and I’m not paranoid — that’s just what The Man has made you think”) or just goofball things that only a well-educated dolt could say (“why would anyone call someone Regina — it’s the capital of Saskatchewan”). I doubt Soderbergh’s personal politics are conservative, but THE INFORMANT! takes the anti-business cliches of the corporate thriller, follows them for a while, but in much greater detail undermines the hero as, among other things a criminal greedhead (“we have eight cars and three have never been used,” Damon’s wife says, in a hardship-pleading way, no less) and an inveterate liar. And here’s the part that really should please Starboard types — Damon justifies it all to himself throughout, the the bitter end and even after, by calling himself “the good guy” and comparing himself to Tom Cruise in THE FIRM — a brave truthteller being crushed by The Man. You will not see a movie this year that takes the piss out of Hollywood’s self-righteous anti-business discourse than this one. And few that are more plainly enjoyable.

THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL, NEW ORLEANS (Werner Herzog, USA, 8)

When introducing the movie, Herzog said he needed to goose Nicolas Cage’s performance up a bit, or “as we say in German, he had to turn the pig loose.” To produce all the ham that’s in Cage’s performance, he probably had to turn three or four pigs loose. It’s so hammy, the movie can’t be shown in Israel. It’s so over-the-top that they’re not gonna bother with the pole vault at the next Olympics — the IOC just mailed Cage the gold. Spinal Tap hasn’t invented an amplifier with numbers that go high enough … I’m running out of jokes here, but what else can I do. Cage’s performance as a corrupt drug-snorting cop trying to solve a massacre in post-Katrina New Orleans is so deliriously over-the-top that it simply defies overt description. Consider the phrase “your boy ‘g’.” That is nothing on the computer screen, but Cage gets laughs with it every time. Trust me.

And Cage’s performance IS the movie — if you go with it, THE BAD LIEUTENANT is one of the funniest, most purely entertaining effed-up movies you’ll ever see. If not or if it were in 99.99999 percent of movies ever made, it may be the worst performance ever. But this is a movie where Cage cuts off a nursing-home patient’s oxygen machine while he’s high on crack to get her nurse to spill some info, and he leaves by telling the old woman, “think of your grandkids, you’re sucking up their inheritance. People like you make me sick — you’re the fucking reason this country is going down the drain.” This is a movie where Cage has a lucky crack pipe. This is a movie where Cage says “whatever I take is prescription, except for heroin.” This is a movie where Cage emerges from behind a door — using his electric shaver. If Cage shows even the slightest restraint, the movie falls apart on its absurd and thin storyline and lack of interesting supporting characters.

But Herzog has the right absurdly over-the-top and unbelievable story — at the end, everything just works itself out as if by magic, a magic so overt (about four characters walk up to Cage’s desk one right after the other to announce that plot threads have been suddenly tied up) that you can be confident that you’re living with the movie not at it. The movie had everybody at the Ryerson audience howling with laughter, and Dan Owen told me that he looked several times at Herzog, who has gotten more restrained performances from Klaus Kinski, sitting in his seat during the screening. According to Dan, who had a perfect sightline, Herzog had a big grin on his face through the whole thing, rather than going “vie ist everybody laffing … stop laffing … I am zuh aussor, I outrank you.” At one point, Cage says “shoot him, his soul’s still dancing,” and Herzog thoughtfully provided us with someone breakdancing next to the body. Oh, this movie is deliberate, and Cage’s performance is deliberate — no doubt about it. Indeed, breaking into helpless giggles several times while writing this capsule and reviewing my notes, I’m thinking I may have underrated it.

TALES FROM THE GOLDEN AGE (Cristian Mungiu / Ioana Uricaru / Hanno Hofer / Razvan Marculescu / Constantin Popescu; Romania) average: 6.6
Directors not specifically matched to the shorts: “The Legend of the Official Visit” — 8; “The Legend of the Party Photographer” — 7; “The Legend of the Chicken Drivers” — 4; “The Legend of the Greedy Policeman” — 6; “The Legend of the Air Sellers” — 8

It isn’t easy to write cleanly about an omnibus film. And even harder when none of the films are identified by their directors in the credits (or anywhere else) and when the film is being shown digitally, the order of its five shorts jumbled randomly. I’ve have identified the titles of the five and the order in which I saw them — Your Mileage Will Vary. I think this order works though and I’d recommend the distributors use that one because the weakest is in the middle and the strongest two came first and last. Noel and Mike, even though they liked the film less than I, were in general agreement about which pieces were the best and weakest.

The films are all set during the Communist Ceaucescu-era and tell stories that apparently were popular black-humor urban legends in Romania at the time. The “what we did then” premise and the comic tone would give the films a nostalgic feel if the stories weren’t so pitch-black (they went over like gangbusters with the large Romanian contingent at the theater). All also have closing title cards that (except for #3 — “Chicken Drivers”) try to one-up or give a “capper” to the story — “it is also a legend that —.” If you’ve seen some of the Polish and Czech films of the 60s — early Polanski, early Forman, Menzel — this is very much in that vein. Again the third one aside, they’re also very well done — sharp and funny throughout, not just the setup to a “Twilight Zone” recoding punchline, though the biggest laugh in the movie is the punchline to #1 (“Official Visit”) which also works as a metaphor for Communism itself and how it survived — speaking vaguely: everyone was on board.

Only the fifth (“Air Sellers”) really makes much of an effort for thematic heft and/or heart beyond the black humor though, making explicit cinematic reference to BONNIE AND CLYDE and how this couple at the center, who also fell in love during their time as criminal scammers and first bonded over a stolen car, were engaging in the only form of rebellious theft open to them in 80s Romania rather than 30s Texas. The scam itself is so absurd and thus funny that you can hardly believe they’re getting away with it. And like Bonnie and Clyde at the end … well … again, something like that, adjusted into 80s Romanian. Even the other films are not simply kicking a 20-year-old dead dog, as someone (I forget who) has suggested. Both at least #1 and #2 (“The Party Photographer”) are about petty officialdom and arbitrary orders and the length to which subordinates go to obey them and to adapt to them — something that exists in all corporate entities (admittedly, some more than others, government more than most, and “actually existing socialism” most of all). For personal reasons, #2 also appealed to me because it’s set at a newspaper and has the line “stop the presses!” actually an obsolete phrase.

Easily the least successful is #3 for several reasons — it’s the least funny and most earnest (among other things it has the only sincere title card about the hardships of Communist Romania), it has the least-venal protagonist (ironically Vlad Ivanov, the ruthless abortionist from 4 MONTHS, who most definitely should not stare into space or be photographed from behind in a hangdog pose), and it’s the only one whose end aims for happy rather than mordant.

Toronto capsules — Day 5

A SERIOUS MAN (Coen Brothers, USA, 1)

After the happy accident of BURN AFTER READING, the Coen Brothers are back to their usual comic form with another snarky cartoon minstrel show, a contemptuous put-up job that looks down on its characters and the caricatured world they inhabit for no discernable reason, and here manages to add “profoundly stupid and borderline blasphemous.” Very early in my viewing notes (the previous scrawls refer to the next-door neighbors going hunting), I have it written “why am I so not liking this.” And on a few day’s reflection, I realized it was because of the tonal and plot resemblances to my all-time least favorite Coens’ film, O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU (the overdone minstrelsy, ending with a natural disaster that has theological implications), and the way that the central character, a Job figure, was too put upon for anything resembling believability, sense or even funny stylization — every person around him is one-note and played in an extremely shrill chord. And the Coens’ baroque writing and directing style manages to turn it all up to about 12.

The contempt oozes off the screen — the first thing we learn about a certain character is that he gets pus drained from his neck regularly (and sure enough, guess what he’s doing on first viewing); the daughter does nothing but complain about bathrooms but in a way that doesn’t want the bathroom just the complaint; one of the very first things we see is a doctor smoking (cue audience laughter, prompted by how the Coens have him play the scene); there are two Asian characters that had me thinking “you know, maybe Ryan was right about FARGO”; the next-door neighbor just glowers suspiciously and do nothing but act “Minnesota caricature” like deer on the car roof on Hunting Day (but with none of the sense they had in FARGO); there’s an enormous lecture-room blackboard filled to the edge with equations  “proving” the uncertainty principle that is 20-feet high (i.e. unusable); when the son walks into a family dinner, they are all slurping soup loudly (what Americans do that). Basically, I just wanted everyone on the screen to stfu.

Then we get to the film’s attempt at profundity, in telling a Job-like story set among late-60s Minnesota Jews, which manages to make Woody Allen look like a sage and almost makes me want to convert to Judaism so I’d have the right to spit on the Coens for dishonoring “our people.” There’s nothing wrong with the concept — the Job problem and the apparent absence of God will be with us forever — but the execution and resolution indicate the Coens just can’t turn off the snark. One rabbi tells the Job-hero a parable about a Jewish dentist so absurd in its premise (Hebrew characters carved into the inside of a Gentile’s teeth) that you can’t take seriously the supposed moral of the story (“try helping people, it can’t hurt”; and that the dentist eventually stopped looking). Another rabbi tells him “God doesn’t owe us answers, the obligation goes the other way,” which is warmer and in fact the final answer the Old Testament Job gets, but the Coens indicate they don’t take it seriously by having their “Job” essentially repeat the initial question. We also get a different and IMHO the real answer  to the “Job/theodicy” problem, where the hero’s brother flees to Canada with “Job’s” help and tells “Job” tearfully as he departs that God has given him nothing, but given “Job” everything. Or more colloquially, “the grass is always greener”; or more Christianly, we all bear the Cross but only feel our own). But then the Coens piss on that by having the Christian family next door shoot the two while hunting “great son … there’s another Jew, get him” and having it all turn out to be a dream. The film concludes but upping the blasphemy quotient by having the son’s go through his Bar Mitzvah ceremony through a drug haze and then getting to meet a hugely profound rabbi that won’t speak to the father, only to have the rabbi recite Jefferson Airplane lyrics to him (“when the truth is found to be a lie” … hmmm), and conclude “just be a good boy.” As anything that any serious man would say, “be a good boy” is profoundly stupid. Any serious man knows that this is one ginormous question-beg — it presupposes the actual answers religion and philosophy provide and which are the points in dispute — “what *is* good” and “*why* be good.” In the Coens hands, 5,000 years of Jewish thought gets reduced to a fortune cookie.

GET LOW (Aaron Schneider, USA, 3)

It’s bad enough that a film is bad. But how can a writer-director making his debut produce something this staid, this calcified, this “late period“? Dan walked out and Jason and I both nodded off for a bit (neither of us missed anything; the film is that transparent and obvious). It’s a classic valedictory tale — old man sees death, and decides he wants to attend his own funeral and hear all the bad things people had to say about and then have his own say too (wanting to avoid a bad eulogy was the moral George learned in an episode of “The Jeffersons”). The minute you see Robert Duvall as an ornery old cusser who shoots visitors you know there’s gotta be some hidden wound, some secret heartbreak, some injustice at the heart of his ostracism. And when an old woman from the past comes into town from years away, whaddya wanna bet she has some connection with the old tiger and that he’ll turn into a pussycat around her (though there has to be a time of trial and quarrel before the cathartic revelation). The physical plant is well-reproduced and Duvall is never not good — but the direction lacks flavor, and the script is made of mediocre — basically an Identikit movie, made of plots and characters pasted in from other movies.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED (J Blakeson, Britain, 9)

To be perfectly honest, I fear I may be overrating this, as I had just seen two dogs in a row and hadn’t been having a good festival. And it is definitely in my aesthetic wheelhouse: plotty, tight, tension-filled and largely following the classic Aristotelian unities — TAPE meets A SIMPLE PLAN, I quickly IM’d a friend. The first words in my notes are “grabs you right away,” with a scene of two men shopping for a bunch of stuff, cut as quickly and methodically as their shopping. Then they set up shop and it quickly becomes clear that what they’re doing is setting up a kidnap plan, converting a van and an apartment into the perfect crime scene — buying yards of soundproofing material and then stapling it over every inch of the walls. The plan is as methodically worked out as the film itself; the film’s and plan’s styles are spare, but direct and blunt.

ALICE CREED basically a one-set, three-handed stage play (actually two sets — the action goes somewhere else, though just as enclosed and claustrophobic as the apartment, for the climax) between two kidnappers, jail mates out to commit the perfect crime and retire on the millions in ransom money, and their victim, who starts out (as she should … sorry, feminists) as basically an object, albeit a loud and uncooperative one but then becomes an agent and by the end, the drama’s fulcrum. Like TAPE, though with less nauseating handheld-in-an-enclosed-space camerawork, ALICE CREED is about two men competing for the loyalty of one woman. But it’s more than that , though I have to talk vaguely because the movie’s greatest pleasure is the twists and turns of its plot. ALICE CREED is also about the viewers’ loyalties and identification too — like most crime movies, it starts with the abstract criminal plan and thus with the criminals, then shifts ID to the victim when he becomes concretized. But what happens when the three begin to interact is that she becomes less sympathetic on a couple of counts and some reveals about events of the past recode what we see.

I can talk about the actors though — all three superb in their different ways. As the kidnappers, Eddie Marsan (whom I saw two people in line away from me later in the festival) and Martin Compston are well-cast and look right — Marsan’s weaselly face and aggressive manner, and Compston’s fresh-faced but wannabe-tough guy establish the dominant and recessive partnership right away even before some of the reveals. Compston has the same Glaswegian wit I loved from SWEET SIXTEEN (my favorite line in the movie: “wit can ah say; mah shite disnae stink”). So when a certain ironic event happens (it involves a bullet) and Compston collapses onto the floor and laughs in gallows irony, it actually works because of who he is, despite what I said re BIG DIG about not liking onscreen laughter. As for Marsan, he is capable of being more threatening than he was in Leigh’s HAPPY GO LUCKY without as much spittle. The title role is played by Gemma Arterton, and it’s impossible to say on this basis whether she can act with any subtlety — she only really is required to do two things and both in very high registers of terror — plead and be angry. But she does deliver. Literally.

SOUL KITCHEN (Fatih Akin, Germany, 6)

This may sound like damning with faint praise, but SOUL KITCHEN is basically the world’s greatest 12-inch-single remix of episodes of “Alice” — which is both its strength and its limitation. The film even invites the comparison — I don’t know how consciously; it’s also the style of blaxploitation — by having the credit style and opening music conspicuously come from the 1970s. Seriously, this story about a Greek’s effort to run a restaurant in Hamburg so resembled “Alice” in the multiple character-plot strands that I began mentally ticking off real “Alice” episodes — Mel losing the restaurant in a poker game; Mel wanting to get out of the business and sell the diner, leaving Alice, Flo and Vera out in the cold; Mel being incapacitated by a back injury; the women learning to cook without Mel around; Mel hiring a new chef to upscale the menu; a private party wrecks the diner; threats to close the diner by health inspectors. Every one of those is an actual episode from “Alice,” plus such recurring themes as Flo’s romantic issues, a dessert made with an aphrodisiac, the motley crew taking on The Man and so on.

But as I say, I mostly mean this as praise, if limiting praise. SOUL KITCHEN knows it is derivative and sitcommy and has as much fun with its “remix” as you can expect with such a movie. The upscaling chef is a comic delight, and I wish there had been more of him particularly — we’re introduced to him at another restaurant refusing to heat gazpacho as a blasphemy against his cooking and he has a way of expressing himself with knives. The movie’s best scene involves him taking a simple diner-fried meal and before the owner’s eyes, repackaging just a fraction of it as haute cuisine that’ll sell for 45 euros (mixing mayo and ketchup was the capper). And don’t worry — everything turns out happily in the end, even after I wrote in my notes “this is basically a movie of defeat.” The film also works as “food porn” — luxuriating in the sight of banquets and meals being prepared and whatnot. Speaking of sex, the thread about a food aphrodisiac is the essential plot behind LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE, a Mexican film from the early-90s that was one of the biggest foreign-language hits ever. And make no mistake, this movie also is a crowd-pleaser (I’ve overheard three strangers in lines or in audiences saying it was their favorite film of the festival. If SOUL KITCHEN is handled correctly by the right distributor, it will be (not “could be”; “will be”) the biggest foreign-language hit of whatever year it comes out.

MY DOG TULIP (Paul & Sandra Fierlinger, USA, 3)

A couple of years ago, an estrangement began (there were later causes too) between myself and a Christian critic over the announcement that ZOO, based on a notorious fatal case of horse sexual abuse, would play at Sundance. I defended the notion that one could make a worthwhile film about excessive or obsessive love between humans and animals (not necessarily that Robinson Devor did make one — we were all operating in a critical vacuum, a key part of why I saw his post as sheer demagoguery). One of the films I cited was WE THINK THE WORLD OF YOU, based on a J.R. Ackerley novel about a man’s dog whom his gay lover comes to see as representing him while he serves a prison term. So I was excited at the possibility of a film from another Ackerley novel on a similar topic. MY DOG TULIP is also set in post-war Britain, and also centers on an Alsatian and on its relationship with the owner, the narrator of the film. Christopher Plummer narrates very well, but in a way that’s too dry, charming and witty for the film’s eventual own good — more on that anon.

The animation was interesting in a low-tech kind of way; the drawing is resolutely two-dimensional and keeps the look of paper-and-pencil sketches (though it was actually entirely done on computers with no actual trees having to give their lives for this project). Indeed, the look is even more radically stripped down to a schoolboyish few lines on lined-paper for the several “imagination” scenes. The style is resolutely that of early 20th century Britain, appropriate to the setting, and reminding me also of the illustration style of the British kids books I had as a boy — Paddington Bear, Puffin editions of Milne or Edward Lear.

But what an unclean experience. The content of the two works really left me irked, and a programmer buddy told me his wife also loved WE THINK THE WORLD OF YOU and sought out this book on that basis, and had the exact same reaction — that it’s nothing more than a very adolescent obsession with bodily functions. You could imagine Beavis and Butt-head being asked to write about owning a dog and producing something like this. Most of the movie (and I assume the book too), and I’m not exaggerating when I say “most,” centers on rituals surrounding peeing, crapping and mating — mostly the dog’s and the narrator’s fascination thereat, though we’re helpfully told of the epiphany of Tulip becoming as interested in his human urine. Nor is it simply the story, it’s also details in the drawing like showing a randy maid with two large curves under her chest or showing Tulip (a female) with eight such curves (the drawing is sufficiently stylized and low-tech that realism is no excuse). And when the narrator described using Vaseline to facilitate Tulip’s receiving the attention of a male Alsatian, I pretty much checked out of the movie. Not necessarily because of crassness or crudeness, because MY DOG TULIP isn’t exactly either — I am not an easily offended person and I might have enjoyed a bawdily-toned openly X-rated cartoon like FRITZ THE CAT.  But because the dry narration and understated animation, when combined with a schoolchild’s focus on clinical discussions of sex and waste, frankly creeped me out. Because the people making it are not schoolchildren. The book/film have the aura, not of watching a porn movie, but of looking at a flasher walk down the street waiting to strike or of sitting on the lap of an old man in a raincoat. You just feel more weirded out the more charming and apparently-witty the descriptions become, like how the subject of an unsuccessful effort to mate Tulip “is one that requires no further enlarging upon.” Enlarging? Huh-huh, huh-huh. Yeah … hehehehe … He said “enlarge.”

Toronto grades — Day 7

PARTIR (Catherine Corsini, France, 4)
SCHEHEREZADE, TELL ME A STORY (Yousry Nasrallah, Egypt, 5)
LEAVES OF GRASS (Tim Blake Nelson, USA, 2)
MOTHER (Bong Joon-ho, South Korea, 9)
LE REFUGE (Francois Ozon, France, 3)

Toronto grades — Day 6

Now this is the kind of day a film festival should be:

THE WARRIOR AND THE WOLF (Tian Zhuangzhuang, China, 5)
THE INFORMANT! (Steven Soderbergh, USA, 8)
THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL, NEW ORLEANS (Werner Herzog, USA, 8)
TALES FROM THE GOLDEN AGE (Cristian Mungiu / Ioana Uricaru / Hanno Hofer / Razvan Marculescu / Constantin Popescu; Romania) average: 6.6, directors not specifically matched to the shorts
“The Legend of the Official Visit” — 8
“The Legend of the Party Photographer” — 7
“The Legend of the Chicken Drivers” — 4
“The Legend of the Greedy Policeman” — 6
“The Legend of the Air Sellers” — 8

Toronto capsules — Day 4

DORIAN GRAY (Oliver Parker, Britain, 4)

A few years ago, I gave Skandie points to Oliver Parker for the script of THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, even though I had said everything that he did to the play was a mistake. When someone took me to task for this (my memory tells me Noel Murray or Donna Bowman), I said “the category is ‘best script,’ not ‘best adaptation job.’ Parker was working with the greatest comic play ever written in English, and most of that is intact and it’s thus one of the year’s best scripts.” Here, Parker has done something VERY different. Not only is every change he made to an Oscar Wilde work again a mistake, but there’s an overarching vision change and some major additions to the novel. In other words, he finally succeeded in truly effing it up.

What Parker has done is make “The Picture of Dorian Gray” as a pretty straight-up horror movie — complete with creepy, portentous score, lengthy zooms up to doors that a character is about to open not knowing what lies behind it, shrouding a piano as if it were a coffin. The novel’s eponymous picture not only ages and gets disfigured, but even has maggots crawling out of it, and comes to life and roars off the canvas in partial 3-D when threatened. And if DORIAN GRAY’S NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET sounds like a good idea for a movie, Parker pulls it off, I guess. I know that the novel has its gothic elements, but pushing those elements into this territory just make the whole work come across as trivial — underplayed or ignored are such minor matters in the novel as the poisonous French book (probably Huysmans) and decadence, and Wilde’s critique of them.

Parker also added, for Rebecca Miller I assume, the character of a daughter to Lord Henry whom Dorian maybe kinda falls in love with when he returns to London after 25 years of debauchery on the continent (the scene of Dorian’s return to a society party where everyone else has suddenly aged decades since our last view of them, but he still looks like Ben Barnes, is one of the few things that work in the movie). But I suspect adding the daughter character allowed the audience to root for Colin Firth at the end, contrary to the novel, where he’s the devil in a  Faust template. It also permitted a final suspense-action showdown — because we all know Oscar Wilde needs that — involving Dorian, Henry and her fighting over a key to the attic where the painting is kept. And again, what this costs the film, by giving Dorian a different set of motives near the end, is downplaying one of the novel’s most important but least fashionable themes — the repentance arc.

VALHALLA RISING (Nicolas Winding Refn, Denmark/Britain, 6)

Like a Chinese movie I saw earlier today, this is very much an “it is what it is” take on the film. If you go in expecting a Norse saga, VALHALLA delivers that, for both good and ill. Refn composes images of windswept braes and crags, complete with dirt and wind and fog. The film largely takes place in northern Scotland and it looks right (if not exactly “good” … these aren’t pretty images at all). The music is funereal electronica, which is dramatic and appropriate, but also a bit offputting as music. The dialog is also as spare, declamatory and stylized (though not “eloquent” or exactly “quotable”) as an ancient saga — my favorite example: “We claimed this land in the name of Our Lord” / “How did we do that?” I must add that I found a Norse saga in which the Christians among the Vikings all speak in Scottish accents to be a little odd, though I eventually accepted the idea once I realized the film’s early scenes are set in Scotland (I walked in a few minutes late).

There’s also plenty of violence and an invincible hero at the center of it. He’s called One-Eye and played basically without dialogue by Mads Mikkelsen from Refn’s PUSHER trilogy, though he’s probably best known as the villain Le Chiffre in CASINO ROYALE. VALHALLA basically tells his story which begins with him, as in the still I used, as an enslaved gladiator-type fighter who, while chained to the pole, still took on two not-thus-constrained champions of a rival chieftain, and killed them both. He’s too dangerous to ever be freed, so he has to fight this way. The still is also typical of the film’s image style — lots of shots of heroic men framed against the sky or the mountains. A lengthy central sequence involves One-Eye helping several Christian Vikings on a quest to retake the Holy Land, only the entire journey the ship is surrounded by fog and it’s not obvious where they’re going — there’s a Hitchcockian LIFEBOAT quality in the dynamic among the seven or eight men in the boat, including a little boy One-Eye has adopted (or is it vice versa) and has made clear he doesn’t want harmed.

There’s a Herzogian quality to the last third of the film — to say more about what film would say too much I think. It’s not a great movie by any means — TIFF bud Dan Owen found it tedious — but it does deliver the goods if you want a chilly windswept Norse saga of heroes on a quest.

THE ROAD (John Hillcoat, USA, 7)

This is also the story of people on a quest, though it couldn’t be more different from VALHALLA RISING. In this tension-filled picaresque, there isn’t really a destination that makes sense; the father-and-son team in a post-apocalyptic world are headed for the sea, though it’s not clear why getting to the sea would provide either refuge or easier food. It also has more on its mind — man in the Hobbesian state of nature, the lengths to which parents go to protect their children, and the nature of conscience.

It’s a heady brew all right, though THE ROAD seems more popular among people who haven’t read the Cormac McCarthy novel (which number includes me). Perhaps that’s because besides losing the prose style (voiceover simply doesn’t suffice), you also lose the suspense and the gnawing discomfort of a world where death lies around every corner. It’s not clear what exactly has happened — why civilization has collapsed and we’re basically dealing with the last few men on earth — but the film lays on the details efficiently and deftly. Money is ignored (what does “exchange” mean outside the context of civilization); the need to avoid cannibals makes suicide a sufficient likelihood for a father to show his son how to point the gun into his mouth properly.

Still all the talk within the film aside, and also leaving aside the utterly bleak landscapes with the barely-recognizable shadow of what was once civilization, I was surprised how little violence and how few gang-cannibal appearances there actually are, which is the entree into the first theme I was surprised by — the difference in the moral views of the father and the son, which are almost the opposite of what I expected. In one scene, the father finds an old can of Coke that survived years in a long-abandoned machine — apparently, the boy, who looks about 8, has never drank a soda and in another scene, dad observes that “you must think I come from another world,” meaning the civilized world we know. In other words, this “state of nature” world is all the son knows. And yet, it is the father who has the savage morals that Hobbes described as rational in the state of nature, while it is the son who thinks exactly as Hobbes predicted he should not.

In such scenes as the old man played by Robert Duvall, the thief near the end, the little boy in the town (was he real?) — it is the son who displays the milk of human kindness, the more-trusting nature, the lack of what Hobbes calls “diffidence” (that is, uncertainty about others’ intentions is reason to assume the worst, because the cost to oneself of guessing wrong is thereby minimized). In contrast, it is the father who acts with pre-emptive violence, and takes the slightest risk as reason to move on — most particularly in the one idyllic scene the movie has, when the pair come across a time-capsule island of food, shelter, hot water and other creature comforts (conservatives will appreciate the exact nature of this idyll). Dad hears, or thinks he hears people and a dog — and immediately abandons the place because “we’re not safe here.” But then, that’s can be viewed also as the responsibility of being parent — paranoia about anything that might harm your child, even if it probably won’t, because “I’d never forgive myself if I let anything happen to you,” a view shared by approximately 0.0000000001% of the children in question in human history. Also, perhaps knowing what has been lost with the end of civilization, as the father does and the son does not (“this is called shampoo,” he says), makes one more jealous about preserving the little one does have, while having spent your whole life scavenging for the equivalent of M&M pieces under the couch has made that your normal. On this take, THE ROAD would be saying that what Nietzsche mocked as slave morality is actually natural and even pre-cognitive — at several points in their quarrels, dad says “why do you wanna do X” and the son would say “I just do” — while it is experience and history that lead to other values.

The film has flaws — primarily an overly sentimental mickey-mouse score during the last reel, most especially the next-to-last scene, where it’s so spectacularly inappropriate that I was reminded of some of those South Korean movies. And I’m not sure how well it might stand up to a second viewing, given how central how unexpected-threat is to the narrative tension. But I enjoyed it more than I expected given the mediocre buzz.

BIG DIG (Ephraim Kishon, Israel, 1969, 8)

Really glad that this was the City-to-City film I chose to see — BIG DIG (also known as BLAUMLICH CANAL) not only is an utterly apolitical film (there was no mention at all of the fuss surrounding the program), but also an expertly-done vaudevillian farce of a kind that we rarely sees today and I doubt we could see because the preconditions for it don’t exist.

In the tradition of classic farce, it begins with a single illogical, unlikely event — in this case a man escapes from the insane asylum, steals a jackhammer and at dawn one day starts tearing up Tel Aviv’s busiest intersection. And then it follows the repercussions with perfect logic — through a large and uniformly excellent cast of pettifogging bureaucrats, glory-hogging bureaucrats, glory-hogging politicians, election-obsessed politicians, martinet policemen, mindless manual laborers, townsfolk who take advantage of the situation, townsfolk who are hurt by the situation (including newlyweds who just want peace and quiet for … well … you know), demanding fathers-in-law, sexy secretaries who can’t type, and more.

Like THE ROAD, the end doesn’t quite come off. Or rather, it’s a perfect capper, but instead of “and here’s what Tel Aviv did with this impossible situation” as a short punchline, BIG DIG tries to make it into a new sequence, and it just goes on too long, Plus I really don’t like for comedies to have the characters laugh onscreen at the last joke (though this one actually is quite funny it still comes across as self-congratulatory). But there’s too much to like hear to complain. Several wonderful montages are cut like I like — quick, direct and blunt — a tea-drinking meeting, a phone call to the national government, a sabotage plan being carried out. Other scenes take a single idea and push it into insanity. For example, Transportation Department flunkey Ziegler — eager to gain a promotion, impress his fiancee and prospective father-in-law, and protect his boss like Smithers does Burns — tries to sneak into a rival department to steal some plans. He sneaks in dressed like a movie private eye, only to find that the department doesn’t exactly react to him as expected.

The key is the performances. Starting with Bomba Tzur as the asylum inmate, the cast all know how to handle farcical acting and situations. Tzur combines the body and gait of Zero Mostel with the innocent viciousness of fellow mute Harpo Marx. In one scene, the neighborhood families explain to an Israeli court the noises they have to put up with, and the six or seven perfprmers — all middle-aged or old — each start repeating a sound of some major piece of equipment until they all blend into a fugue of city noise as convincing (and therefore funny) as the real thing. One can’t help think of the major role Jews have historically had in vaudeville and theater, and then in later standup comedy throughout Europe and the U.S. (though I’ve been told in several different contexts that Israeli culture is very different from diaspora Jewish culture). And then one wonders (well, I do anyway), where are the performers with the training and experience necessary to do this kind of material today? And where could anyone develop such chops in a world where live theater is weaker than ever, vaudeville is dead, and TV is being de-sitcomized in favor of reality TV and other non-performed shows?

Toronto grades — Day 5

Putting up an early version of this to get word out on a change of schedule, an unexpected find and what will be my least favorite film of the festival, unless I’m trapped in my own version of Job.

A SERIOUS MAN (Coen Brothers, USA, 1)
GET LOW (Aaron Schneider, USA, 3)
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED (J Blakeson, Britain, 9)
SOUL KITCHEN (Fatih Akin, Germany, 6)
MY DOG TULIP (Paul & Sandra Fierlinger, USA, 3)

Toronto capsules — day 3

VISION (Margaretha Von Trotta, Germany, 2009) — 4

Downgraded from my initial reaction because looking over my notes, it was clear that there wasn’t very much right about the movie — there just was nothing wrong with it in the way I had feared. VISION is a respectful (in one sense) if ultimately too respectful (in another) biopic of the medieval abbess, mystic and musician. The first sense of respectful is that it takes religious vows, visions and authority seriously and doesn’t overplay the ways that Church matters relate to politics and personality. I’m too inexpert in the specific history to say if there was hanky-panky in the details, but it felt like a seriously historical work with just one or two relatively mild hat-tips to Our Much More Enlightened Time, primarily an excessive interest in corporal mortification.

One shoe I was particularly happy not to see drop was the L-word. I can’t speak to the details but particular attachment between individuals has always been a potential problem in religious communities, a point of which they are well aware and know to strive against. That becomes an issue between Hildegarde and an aristocratic family’s daughter — on both tends at different times. And the film handles that plot thread without sexualizing it even subtextually.

But at the end of the day there just isn’t terribly much to recommend in this movie. There’s practically nothing about Hildegarde’s music, and she’s only the earliest known female composer in the Western canon. There isn’t much about Hildegarde’s visions — they’re described a few times but neither concretized nor dissected in any theological detail either for interest or uniqueness. Perhaps the film’s low point is a denunciation of Hildegarde’s visions that just comes across as Partriarchy Being Mean to the Girl (I remember listening to her descriptions of the visions and I could see some potential red flags — along with reasonable defenses).

But really what hurt the film most is the inherent problems that biopics that attempt to cover long periods inevitable have. Event B must follow Event A because it happened that way, not because it is dramatically interesting. You get all the “This Is Your Life” scenes that are mere ground-covering, included because they happened, as if Von Trotta were substitute-hosting Medieval Week for Eamonn Andrews. There’s elements of a great story here but it all gets rushed (the ending is particularly abrupt and matter-hanging). I think first of the quarrel over moving the nuns to a new cloister away from the monks — on the evidence here, that could have made an interesting film all by itself. As it is, it’s just a too-quick lick and a promise.

MY TEHRAN FOR SALE (Granaz Moussavi, Australia/Iran, 2)

And I’m not buying it. A high grade for this movie would just be the equivalent of turning your Twitter avatar green or wearing some awareness ribbon (if any colors are left). This is the sort of “relevant” “political” movie that festival audiences eat up, and it actually does succeed in not being terrible early on — the first scene in particular, even though it’s cutting between three sites, could have passed for a documentary and is deftly edited (the first cut in particular is quite violent). But it quickly settles into its mode — didactic and pandering to left-liberal Westerners’ conceptions of themselves. Here’s a typical snatch of dialog, between the female main character and her Australian-citizen boyfriend — both Iranians by birth an ethnicity; “I didn’t realize Tehran was so big” … “it was different during the war, there were air raid sirens while the world looked the other way.” There’s some silly attempts to parallel Australian immigration/refugee authorities and the Iranian theocrats, and aesthetically, the film isn’t much to look at — some scenes look like video mudslides without the apparent excuse of having to shoot guerrilla-style in a hostile country (I actually DON’T know the film’s production history though).

Then we get to the movie’s central character, a female author/dancer/artist who comes across as engineered to win our approval in the West. But to put it brutally, if I were Ahmadinejad or the mullahs, I’d appreciate this movie being the face of Iranian opposition. If you wish to argue that Western influence will lead to shacking-up, drug use, AIDS, casual abortion, bad pretentious modern dance, and music that makes Joe Cocker sound tuneful and euphonic — this movie will confirm that. And at the end, instead of the woman’s patriotism being affirmed in a way that undermines the regime (the comparisons with Panahi’s OFFSIDE are crushing in every conceivable way, but that one most of all), we get her listening on her iPod to the Iranian equivalent of Complaint Rock (“I see no green fields if hope in this waste land”) and a series of guttural screams at Tehran from a hill.

IRENE (Alain Cavalier, France, 3)

To anyone who thinks that Von Trier making a depression-therapy movie was too personal and self-justifying to produce a work for public view: I invite you to look at this movie, but as a critical compare-contrast exercise (obviously not because it’s really a good movie). You feel kinda guilty dumping on IRENE or a movie like it because it’s so obviously so personal for the filmmaker. Upon the death of his mother, Cavalier looks through some old papers and comes across his diaries from the 1971 and 72, the year surrounding the death of his wife. This film is the resutling tribute to her. That’s sacred ground. And if I were a friend of Cavalier and he had made IRENE as a private exercise, I’d feel compelled to pull my punches if we watched it together (and I might have an objectively different reaction too). But I’m not and he didn’t.

The basic first-degree problem with IRENE is that it looks awful. Even by video standards, it looks awful — muddy, unlit, blurry, unfocused. In one phrase, just incompetent — you would never guess from IRENE that it was made by a successful director with more than a dozen features under his belt, who has worked with Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli, and who had one of his films placed on the Vatican list of Significant Films. Even apart from that, nothing much is added by the jumbled essayistic structure, or by the camera’s usual subjective narrator POV with Cavalier giving a near-constant first-person voiceover, or by Cavalier’s repeated filming of himself and/or himself-shooting. This film really made me appreciate more in retrospect a personal essay film that I saw here last year, Agnes Varda’s LES PLAGES D’AGNES. Where Varda’s self-absorption was charming, self-aware and often quite funny, here I found the self-display actively aggravating. We see a breakout of shingles on his body (why); we get some fairly descriptive descriptions of how Irene acted in bed (I’m a big boy, but I just cringed); and the voiceover is often little more than musing aloud and sometimes is quite literally nothing but repetition of the image. At one point we come across a door that says push, and the voiceover, in French but subtitled for extra redundancy, says “door says ‘push.’ And so push I do” as the door opens and the camera goes through … I am not exaggerating.

In fairness the film does get better as it goes along, focusing more on Irene and less on Cavalier — we get more of a sense of who she was, why he loved her (and sometimes didn’t), more about the ups and downs of their marriage. The last line brings the movie back to the beginning and ties up that Cavalier learned about two women, not just one, while making this movie. In the best scene in the film, Cavalier describes a memory of laying his head on her lap, both naked. At that point, he shows Irene’s face for the first time in the movie, as part of a photo he took of her and the family dog, the animal sick and just a few days from death. In that photo, the dog is resting his head in the same position on her lap that Cavalier mentions being in himself. And Irene is wearing on her face the same expression Cavalier remembered seeing from that same position himself. It was a frog-in-throat moment and almost made up for the descriptions of her orgasm technique. Almost.

THE WHITE RIBBON (Michael Haneke, Austria/Germany, 4)

Al Pacino finally won a best actor Oscar for SCENT OF A WOMAN; Carol Reed finally won a best director Oscar for OLIVER!; Kate Winslet finally won a best actress Oscar for THE READER. And this year Michael Haneke finally won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival.

I take no pleasure in writing that Michael Haneke — one of my cinematic gods, a man for whom I reserved a spot on my Skandies decade Top 10 films, the man I casually refer to as the world’s greatest pure director — has made a mistake. THE WHITE RIBBON is overlong, overcooked and overt in the service of some ideas that are quite stupid. Apart from being in German, from a certain moralism and from looking glorious in black-and-white — there is no internal reason to think Michael Haneke made this movie. There’s some real headscratcher choices — this movie has the first European 1910s Semitic-looking teacher whose father is a tailor and doesn’t (that I recall) go to church — but nobody thinks to ask whether he’s Jewish. There’s a couple of particularly atrocious play-to-the-audience juxtapose edits midway through the film that killed its chances with me — one from hitting a sour music note to a pig grunting; the other from a boy’s embarrassed confession of self-abuse to the sounds of joyful fornication involving one of the town’s society pillars.

There is none of Haneke’s formally chilly style, no distinctive [gasp!] moments like the rewind button in FUNNY GAMES, Majid’s final cut on CACHE, or Benny making a video in … There’s even, as if to remind us, the killing of an animal — but it’s offscreen and telegraphed from the far side of Danzig rather than shot and edited a la Haneke. There’s even a plausible audience identification figure, and he (I am not kidding) has a voiceover to encourage us to identify with him? Is there no limit, even in the age of “Scrooge McDuck is really sexy”? Further, the moralism in the film is directed entirely at (some of) the onscreen characters — there’s nothing discomforting either in implicating the audience either directly (in FUNNY GAMES and the metacinematic material on other films) or indirectly through judgment of plausible onscreen proxies. These characters are all Germans from 100 years ago — it’s too safe to sniff at them, but that’s all we can really do.

What happened? I didn’t mean those opening comparisons simply to be snide about “career awards.” All three, plus THE WHITE RIBBON, whatever else may be said of them are clearly awards-bait movies/performances. Although it isn’t in fact, THE WHITE RIBBON feels like a literary adaptation and is certainly Haneke’s attempt at a Tradition of Quality movie. It’s also about Germans with material that invites, both from within the film and from the auteur himself, dissection as a Nazism allegory — they love that in Europe, and heck, it might even bring Haneke to the Oscars (this is Oscar bait on ‘roids if Austria or Germany should choose to submit it).

Which brings me to the other problem with this movie — a huge one. THE WHITE RIBBON is fundamentally pushing a really dangerous and self-righteous historiographical error — hindsight teleology. This is a popular (because comforting) error in the study of German history — to view German history as a set of logically-aimed events paving the way, inevitably or inexorably, toward the Third Reich, as if that was Germany’s historic telos. Yes, Nazism was historically conditioned and came about when it did because fortuna was favorable. But it is arrant nonsense, Herr Doktor Haneke, to give us corporal punishment of children, distant fathers, small-town gossip (what 1970s French tyranny was having its seeds sewn in LE CORBEAU), anti-masturbation obsession (I wish I were kidding), child viciousness towards the handicapped, men who tire of their concubines, attacks on cabbage patches (this stupid film even TELLS us there’s a doggerel verse for when it happens, i.e., it’s a historic commonplace) and authoritarian education of which Paolo Freire would disapprove — to give us all this as precursors of Nazism or (vjm rolls his eyes) terrorism. Those things you show, Herr Haneke, were all quite present all across Europe and the Western world, and in every case but one, Nazism wasn’t the result. And then to set it all on the eve of World War One makes it double pferdscheisse, Michael, because there were too many and much larger intervening events to put much historical stock in the trifles you present. If World War I had gone differently, Nazism as a mass movement doesn’t even make sense. If, during that war, some Tommy’s bullet had zigged rather than zagged near an unknown German corporal, well … Some form of German fascism would have formed, of course, and it might even have taken power at some point (thanks to minor things like the reparations burden, the French Ruhr invasion, the Great Depression). But without a charismatic demigod with millennialist ideas and a certifiable mental illness, there is no reason to believe it would have been any nastier, either to Germany or its neighbors, than were the fascist regimes of Argentina, Spain, Portugal or Italy.

WILD GRASS (Alain Resnais, France, 8)

Dear Piers Handling:
Did you actually see this movie before writing in your description “Although the film is light, comedic and frothy, it is never silly”? If you did, could you please provide an example of a movie you DO think is silly along with some idea of why you think it is so? Cuz see, this may be the silliest (and I really do mean that in a good way) film I have ever seen. This is a movie where a woman calls the police to tell a stalker to lay off after he’s slashed her tires (and thoughtfully left a note), and then calls the stalker *herself.* This is a movie where a title card reads “The End” as a couple kiss and the score swells to a crescendo … and then the movie continues with the same characters and others for another 4-5 minutes (I’m guessing). This is a movie where a stalker meets his victim’s coworker and they have sex practically right away. This is a movie that ends with a total impenetrable non sequitur, after a transportation accident that’s not shown and where the only reaction shot belongs to someone worried about state regulations and identifying marks. WILD GRASS starts out with an image of grass popping through concrete, discontinuously and unpredictably and returns to that image to explain its narrative structure. It could not more clearly set itself up and play itself out as a surrealist-dada prank movie, where illogic is followed with increasing rigor until by the end, it’s absolute … silliness to no other end.

Dear Mike D’Angelo:
Your review from Cannes indicates that you totally got this movie and even its bases for going the way it did. So why the perplexity? If you didn’t find the film’s increasing bizarrerie funny, that’s fine — there’s nothing to say. But the film sets up its illogical logic fairly and clearly (you even use the “Dada” word yourself), and follows through on it as it grows increasingly detached from reality (as I think I explain in the letter to Piers). It’s kinda like how in SMOKING/NO SMOKING, Resnais made two scenarios starting with the opposite overt acts of the title until, the butterfly wings having grown into a hurricane, the same set of characters are in completely different realities. You even got the subtext about Resnais pointing out how bizarre the behavior in romantic comedies really is — in fact the more I think about it, the more I think Resnais is taking the piss out of the American romcom. So substitute PLAUSIBLE and ROMCOM for SMOKING and NO SMOKING, and see this film as NO SMOKING alone. It’s the same idea really. And the last shot is the perfect capper — it has to be from a character never before seen, saying something that doesn’t make sense as referring to anything in the movie, and doesn’t make a whole lotta sense per se. It’s the only place the movie had left to go.

Dear Jeremy Heilman:
Maybe our laughter was feeding off each other’s (happens at comedies), but it sounded to me like we were enjoying WILD GRASS more than anyone in the theater. That can’t be. Surely we weren’t the only ones to notice how finely modulated between sanity and insanity, and between id and superego, are the performances by expert farceurs Sabine Azema and Andre Dussollier. Surely we’re not the only people to swoon at Eric Gautheir’s gorgeous cinematography — his splashes of color and pools of anti-realistic light, and all the crazy dentist montages, etc. Surely we’re not the people who can be tickled to death by a movie that doesn’t go exactly where you know it’s going in the first 10 minutes. Surely we’re not the only persons never sure whether you’re laughing at gags or jokes per se but at the cleverness of a film’s sheer inventive illogic. Surely.

Toronto grades — Day 4

MASS (Jesus Christ, from East to West, from age to age, 10)
DORIAN GRAY (Oliver Parker, Britain, 4)
VALHALLA RISING (Nicolas Winding Refn, Denmark/Britain, 6)
THE ROAD (John Hillcoat, USA, 7)
BIG DIG (Ephesim Kishon, Israel, 8)

Toronto capsules — Day 2

LIKE YOU KNOW IT ALL (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 5)

I’ve only seen four Hong films and he’s starting to come across to me as a specialist — a man who knows more and more about less and less. Which is often fine with me (see Tsai capsule next), except that I didn’t get any sense from this movie of what was the take-away — why am I watching THIS set of variations, THIS riff off the familiar Hong chord. We have a bifurcated story, the second half repeating the first, centering on a self-centered jerk male. Only here he’s a commercially unsuccessful film director, and that gives the film snap for a while — the first half is set at a festival where he’s (lackadaisically) judging, and the second on a lecture to a film class at his old college (equally lazy). Hong’s stylistic chops — a less rigorous variant of the master-shot style, with judicious use of pans and zooms — are there, and the film is often quite funny, albeit less so than NIGHT AND DAY, about the protagonist’s cluelessness. There’s an uncomfortably hilarious scene that becomes twice as funny when Hong reveals it’s a dream. But the story collapses too much into self-indulgence that feels like autobiography and edging some into exhibitionism. There’s no real payoff other than “this guy’s a dick” and “wow, he sure seems like a Hong selfportrait.”

FACE (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France, 8)

A return to form for Tsai in my opinion, though I understand why it got critically savaged at Cannes — I can see a French reaction of “how impertinent” to a movie where a Taiwanese bids his own country farewell, tries to assimilate himself into French cinema, and implies that the greats of French cinema are without honor in their own country. Ironically, a buddy I talked to that day said, not prompted by this movie, that French youth today know about their country’s cinematic past, but not its present — ‘you mention Desplechin or Assayas or Chereau, and they draw a blank.”) To reverse INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, France is no longer a country where they respect great film artists. Fanny Ardant is first seen trapped behind metal gates and then at a graveyard; Jean-Pierre Leaud is a sleeping bum at that same graveyard; there us a scene where Ardant, Nathalie Baye and Jeanne Moreau appear at a banquet without knowing who invited them, just the three of them there, and nothing happening; and another actress obsessively black-tapes first her window and then her mirror, shutting out the world and then herself until there are just two tiny dots of light on the black screen (and then these are methodically taped over). Tsai also indicates an intent to leave Taiwan behind by returning to the family of his last half-French movie WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? — fish tank and all. That 2002 film started with the death of alter-ego Lee Kang-sheng’s father, and here Tsai kills off the mother. In addition, the musical numbers in this movie are now European, and Tsai tries to graft himself onto French cinema in other ways — Ardant reads a book on Truffaut sitting next to the mourning portrait of the mother; Leaud and Lee have a conversation of nothing but auteur names as a bird flips between the two men’s fingers; and Mathieu Amalric has a typically awkward Tsaiesque gay scene with Lee.

The film is a bit too long IMHO. The first hour is incredibly funny — Lee Kang-sheng vs. a water faucet is never not hilarious. But the second half drags with some material that just seems weird, though not in ways unfamiliar to Tsai devotees (I can’t imagine this movie appealing to any but his current fans — it’s too hermetic and self-involved). You have a woman making out with Lee through plastic tarp and covered with tomatoes, Lee looking at a lesbian three-way while trapped in a bathtub, a man with a face completely bandaged over except for the nostrils, and a dead woman reappearing to eat fruit. And if you ever wanted to see Fanny Ardant lug around a stuffed deer head, you may never get another chance.

Tsai also updates his signature style somewhat, as if trying to adapt to the jazzier, more free-form French New Wave style — though understand that every statement that follows in this graf is strictly relative — this is still Asian Master Shot style. *But* … Tsai’s shot length is shorter in this movie than it ever has been; he actually tracks his camera for the first time I think ever (though there’s a break-the-4th-wall joke in that shot); he pans slightly two or three times; and he does a lot more with exposures, misleading angles, mirrors, complex image composition, multiple layers and internal framing, and other camera tricks than he usually does. For the man who practically defines Degree Zero style, this is a very loosely styled movie.

Alas it ends unhappily (and this is not a spoiler) … the last shot returns to the scene of the last shot of WHAT TIME? That earlier movie got the biggest animal laugh ever … a fish hits the high point of the comic-anticipation arc. This time, by the end, there’s only Tsai trying helplessly to get Lee to have a deer hit its cue.

IF I KNEW WHAT YOU SAID (Mike Escareal Sandejas, Philippines, 3)

After a morning with Hong and Tsai, I thought I might want something light and frothy. I decided a musical might be fun, and I’ve never seen a Filipino movie of any kind (sorry, Froilan). Alas, there are standards even for froth and this film is just amateurish in every way. I understand that quick shooting on video is SOP in the Philippines. But there have been a few advances in the technical state of video in recent years; this film looks like video ca. 2000, i.e., looks like ass. (Except when it looks like recent Michael Mann night scenes, albeit without thematic or aesthetic point and still mystifying when the other scenes all have that blurry-mud background.) As for the music and dancing … let’s just say Bollywood isn’t anxiously looking over its shoulder. Heck, Disney theme parks aren’t looking over their shoulder … though perhaps they should because the closest aesthetic comparison I can make to this movie is a Disney afternoon series — about a tamely delinquent teenage girl sent to a deaf camp to avoid school expulsion and she falls for the clean-scrubbed deaf boy who heads up the dance troupe. The pop music is cotton candy but played straight as the stuff of rebellion; the dancing is a lot of people moving around and moving their limbs around. The “author’s message” scene is even made literal — the deaf school’s headmaster appears on a TV talk show and a clip has him say how wonderful and capable deaf people are. Nobody is ever in danger — even in the two gang scenes, one of which is just a short chase, and the other just brings to mind one of the commercials playing before the films at Toronto: “They dance. They fight. They dance-fight.”

SAWASDEE BANGKOK (several directors, Thailand, avg. 5)

Sightseeing (Wisit Pasanatieng, 7)
Ok Makham (Kongdej Jaturanrasamee, 4)
Silence (Pan-ek Ratanaruang, 4)

Of the three shorts in this omnibus feature I think I have a right to judge, only one of them really works. (I had to take an inconvenient call and missed the last 6 or 8 minutes of Bangkok Blues by Aditya Assarat, so to be fair I’m ignoring it officially, though it wasn’t impressing me to that point.) But it’s hard to hate even the two that don’t work because in an omnibus, if one piece is sucking, you know it’ll end soon and so you can’t really resent it. Bangkok’s Thai name (an unwriteable thing that makes “Apichatpong Weerasethakul” look like “Joe”) include the moniker “City of Angels” and that’s the common thread uniting all three shorts, though only the Wisit is explicit about it. He tells us up front that his story about a guardian angel watching over a blind homeless girl who lives under a bridge and has never seen Bangkok. The lead actress overplays it a bit — her character is blind from birth, but she acts like a sighted person trying to find his glasses in a dark room. But the angel describes a fairy-tale city far from the real world — this segment, to quote Blanche DuBois, is for those who don’t want realism, but want magic. And eventually she does see Bangkok as the magic city the angel describes. It’s a lovely sad magic-realist tragedy. The other two have the same basic problem of being “Twilight Zone” episodes. Each involves a chance encounter — between a prostitute and a country boy in the Kongdej and a party girl and a homeless bum in the Pan-ek. Each is barely believable as it’s running — the former a low-rent version of BEFORE SUNRISE, the latter featuring a caricature of a rich nightclubber (both include awkward references to a 2006 coup attempt that add up to zero combined effect). And then both have a major character turn out to be a ghost or disappearing angel of some kind (the Kongdej is explicit about this and this makes it slightly the better of the two; the Pan-ek less so). But in neither case does The Prestige add or deepen anything. The endings both felt tacked-on, as if reaching for the uncanny and only grasping the undercooked.

DOGTOOTH (Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece, 7)

Now THIS one, on the other hand, pushes “uncanny” about as far as it can go, with superb formal control and weirdly effective zombie performances from a kind of Bizarroworld (the elder sister is particularly fine). But I’m afraid I do insist on having some idea of what’s on a film’s mind. Don’t get me wrong, I heartily recommend this movie and it’s a pleasure(?) to watch from moment to moment. This is one of the best-made movies at this festival — of that I am morally certain. Lanthimos has Haneke’s formal control, Scorsese’s knack for the sudden violent gesture and Lynch’s way with taking absolute weirdness at face value. He sets up this hermetically sealed world of a family that has lived its entire lives behind a wall, with only the father ever venturing outside. The children know the world of their home, and the outside world only as the threats described to them by the parents. It’s like Bunuel’s THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL crossed with Shyamalan’s THE VILLAGE.

Repeatedly, Lanthimos grabs us with some weird detail of the spell this father has cast over the family and how it works because the simplest of questions presupposes knowledge the three children don’t have — for example, the planes they see up in the sky often crash into their yard, only as toy planes the size of what is seen in the sky by the children (now, really young adults — there’s some fairly explicit sexual rituals). If you don’t know or have explained perspective or geometry, why should you not believe that those are the same planes? Also, there are little details that the director doesn’t explain because it would be redundant and he trusts us to pick them up — for example, there is an out-of-nowhere stabbing among the siblings that is handled as if it were a scraped knee (I got one of those walking back to my hotel after the film). Then later, bandages start showing up without explanation. And sometimes, Lanthimos pointedly doesn’t go for the obvious even when he seems to set it up — for example, we see one of the girls mutilate her dolls with scissors. Later, she is clipping the father’s toenails and frankly I was waiting for the other toe … er, shoe to drop (Lanthimos even gooses us by having the father say “be careful of the little toe.”)

There is not a flaw in the execution here except for how the films ends and what it means. I will be vague about the ending but let’s just say a serious rupture takes place and the film just ends without even broaching the consequences, either for that person or others in the movie. Further, nowhere do we ever get any idea of what motivated this — who are these people and why did at least the father and mother set things up this way: are they religious types fleeing secular decadence, hippy paranoids fleeing the black helicopters, commune-ists sealing out bourgeois influence. Is it a metaphor for a religious theocracy like Iran or a commie satrapy like North Korea. There is no data on which any critical speculation could even possibly reflect anything other than the critic’s pre-existing prejudices. Still … I’d be happy to look at this movie again or even reconsider my grade resight-unseen if someone can explain to me persuasively what it all means.

Toronto grades — Days 2/3

(Update: May as well get the first crushing disappointment out of the way early.)

Day 2
LIKE YOU KNOW IT ALL (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 5)
FACE (Tsai Ming-liang, France/Taiwan, 8)
IF I KNEW WHAT YOU SAID (Mike Escareal Sandejas, Philippines, 3)
SUWASDEE BANGKOK (omnibus, Thailand, 5 average; Wisit, 7; Kongdej, 4; Pan-ek, 4)
DOGTOOTH (Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece, 7)

Day 3
VISION (Margaretha Von Trotta, Germany, 5)
MY TEHRAN FOR SALE (Granaz Moussavi, Australia/Iran, 2)
IRENE (Alain Cavalier, France, 3)
THE WHITE RIBBON (Michael Haneke, Austria, 4)
LES HERBES FOLLES (Alain Resnais, France, 8)

Toronto capsules — Day 1

AN EDUCATION (Lone Scherfig, Britain, 3)

If the title A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION hadn’t already been taken, they should have given it to this movie. It’s a surefire contender for an Audience Award, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. Every carica…er character is one-dimensional and all the points are well spelled out. As is obvious from the title and my Flaubert joke, it’s in the form of a Bildungsroman, only it really isn’t — its values are those of self-indulgent anti-Bildung for most of its length — the parents are stupid easily-fooled bourgeouis, the teacher is a repressed antisexual tyrant, the headmistress is an anti-Semite (why, Emma … why?). And when you’re rich, sophisticated and handsome and travel to West End jazz clubs and Paris, then minor things like cradle-robbing, theft, grifting and race-baiting real-estate scams can be overlooked. And I don’t know about you, but when I have illicit affairs with 16-year-old girls and are driving her around in my car, I always leave letters addressed to me and my wife in the glove box next to our favorite cigarettes. To make matters worse, the film doubles down on its characters’ self-indulgence with its own self-indulgence — a shameless and anti-believable last five minutes that undo every possible consequence, restore the status quo ante the start of the movie and thus leave the film with essentially having had no stakes whatsoever. It’s the equivalent of pushing a reset button as though life comes with one. Ick. And I hope Sally Hawkins was well-compensated for her unwritten one-scene turn as Wronged Wife, accessorized beautifully with a Victim Son.

ANTICHRIST (Lars Von Trier, Denmark, 9)

Hypnotic. If I had to write a one-word review of this film, that would be the one. I knew this film would live up to my expectations in a scene where therapist husband Willem Dafoe says “close your eyes … and imagine” to wife Charlotte Gainsbourg, who is going mad with grief over the death of their son. I closed my eyes too and sank into my chair too, and it was as if Lars was semi-hypnotizing me too.

Lost in all the controversy and misogyny charges and countercharges is that quality of the film — its superb formal control casts a spell over you and plays you like a piano through one of the most radical tone shifts in movie history (it’s a structural kissing cousin to the great Japanese movie AUDITION). Von Trier made this film as a way of struggling with his own depression (more on that anon) and every frame looks it. The hypnosis effects (and dream effects) are legion — slow motion, fog shrouded scenes, silent scenes, scenes repeated, talking animals, obviously symbolic details like an animal still-birth. One thing Von Trier does several times to great effect is to repeat an image though first in a stylized mythopoetic dream style, then second in a more realistic mode (think a bridge or “She” lying on the grass), usually to underline the gap between the beauty of theory and reason on the one hand and the much messier, dirtier experience of actual embodied beings. Even people who don’t like this film acknowledge that it’s made masterfully.

It starts out with a black-and-white overture — shot like a perfume ad but so as to establish an impossibly idyllic state of innocence, shattered by the boy’s death. Then we see scenes of Defoe trying to help Gainsbourg “work things through” in scenes of psychological gamesmanship, like an Ingmar Bergman chamber drama involving a therapist and patient (you can easily imagine this part of the film recast with Gunnar Bjornstrand and Harriet Anderson). Only what’s really happening (as Von Trier repeatedly foreshadows) is a slow burn into the unrepressed id of a horror-movie third act. But what’s remarkable in retrospect is how many horror tropes Von Trier used even before the notorious “torture porn” scenes. It’s all done with such gravitas and style though that comparisons with trash like the SAW movies couldn’t be more misplaced — Brakhage-like nightmare forests that look like jagged shapes wailing guttural despair from the center of the universe; expressionist sound design (you’ll never hear acorns quite the same way again) with portentous music and anti-realistic sound effects resonating in space as if the film were itself own echo chamber; and several heart-in-the-mouth “Boo!” moments (the fox, the pyramid, the washtub). Unlike horror trash, this isn’t done to entertain: you really get the sense that Von Trier means it all (the audience I saw this film with was rapt and nobody stirred during the credits). And through the slow catatonia of the first part and the violence of the second, wants the audience to share his experience of depression. Which is why only an idiot would criticize the last part of this movie is either too violent or illogical — that IS the logic of depression; the repercussions have to go too far and have to be randomly inflicted on self and other.

But does it wind up meaning anything? I think it does and I think the title both is and isn’t misleading. It certainly doesn’t refer to the biblical figure from Revelation. Nor does it (as I was kind of expecting) really play as a straightforward hell portrait — there’s no reason for the two-sided dynamic between the couple, e.g. What I’m leaning toward instead, I think, is that this film is merely a raw production of Von Trier’s inner depressive state, which in theological terms would be Gnosticism — that creation (the world) is evil, the work of the devil. Von Trier has an impish reputation, but I think (as someone who’s felt really a soul connection with Von Trier since seeing BREAKING THE WAVES in 1996, just a few years after my his conversion and my confirmation) — that he’s really being more honest and blunt than he lets on. That he uses his Biggest Asshole in the World persona as a way to say what he thinks and duck it at the same time. This really is as simple as a depression movie — a portrait of how the world looks from the black pit. As someone who’s suffered from depression (to one degree or another, with varying levels of knowledge thereof) for most of his life, I can say with authority that it’s very easy when you’re in the utter depths to see the world itself as evil, irredeemable, hellish and write it all off. It’s also very easy to see your therapist or therapy as the cause of it all (that’s probably, ultimately, why I stopped going). And, to judge from this film, Von Trier clearly has no use for therapists — Defoe plays He as a self-centered, unethical, controlling jerk. Yet despite the personal connection I had with the material, I wasn’t as *moved* by it as I thought I should have been. The film doesn’t have a character like DOGVILLE’s Grace or WAVES’ Bess. It therefore resists emotional involvement because “identification” in the usual sense is impossible — the only two people in it are a dick and a nut.

Toronto Day 1 grades

AN EDUCATION (Lone Scherfig, Britain, 2009) — 3
ANTICHRIST (Lars Von Trier, Denmark, 2009) — 9

Toronto’s ugly side

I suppose I should say something about the political controversy roiling the film festival — the boycott over the inaugural City-to-City program featuring films from and about Tel Aviv.

Canadian filmmaker John Greyson has pulled his film COVERED from the festival, and a group of about 50 celebrities, artists and “activists” ranging from Jane Fonda and Danny Glover to Slavoj Zizek and Naomi Klein signed “The Toronto Declaration” objecting to the City-to-City prorgam. Their public letter denounced Israel as an “apartheid regime” and called the program a whitewash.

My Toronto schedule

OK … it is September and that means time for Victor’s Insane Annual Vacation. Got my results from the lottery earlier today, and it was … sweeeet. I am nearly certain I got all my first choices, and I know I got everything I feared I might not: a notorious Lars Von Trier film on the first night (there’s few screenings Thursday evening and so they always fill up early), the high-profile Cannes winner by Michael Haneke, and films by Hollywood/Toronto auteur royalty like the Coen Brothers, Steven Soderbergh and Atom Egoyan.

I was surprised how many films with apparent religious themes there were this year, and I scored tickets to several that looked like they could be interesting — AGORA, VISION, HADEWIJCH — despite the TIFF Guidebook’s best efforts to chase me away (which it succeeded in doing so with LOURDES: check out this walkoff and ask yourself if the equivalent contempt toward another group would pass muster in the Sensitive Socialist Republic of Canuckistan). I manfully resisted the Charles Darwin biopic (titled CREATION no less), and I wrote off Michael Moore sometime before the premiere of FAHRENHEIT 9/11. But what would a festival devoted to the finest in the art of the cinema be without a Russ Meyer homage called (I am not kidding) BITCH SLAP.

Anyway, here is my schedule, always subject to change if good buzz elsewhere, particularly from Telluride and Venice, requires. And to drops from tiredness and/or poor buzz.

Thu, 10 Sept
600 Ryerson AN EDUCATION (Lone Sherfig, Britain)
900 Ryerson ANTICHRIST (Lars Von Trier, Denmark)

Fri, 11 Sept
915 Scotia1 LIKE YOU KNOW IT ALL (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
1230 Scotia1 FACE (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France)
330 AMC7 IF I KNEW WHAT YOU SAID (Mike Escareal Sandejas, Philippines)
515 AMC2 SAWASDEE BANGKOK (Wisit Sasanatieng / Aditya Assara / Kongdej Jaturanrasame / Pen-ek Ratanaruang; Thailand)
945 Scotia1 DOGTOOTH (Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece)

Sat, 12 Sept
915 Scotia1 VISION (Margarethe von Trotta, Germany)
1145 AMC7 MY TEHRAN FOR SALE (Granaz Moussavi, Australia/Iran)
230 AMC4 IRENE (Alain Cavalier, France)
515 Scotia1 THE WHITE RIBBON (Michael Haneke, Austria)
900 Scotia1 LES HERBES FOLLES (Alain Resnais, France)

Sun, 13 Sept
1230 WinterGarden DORIAN GRAY (Oliver Parker, Britain)
230 Ryerson VALHALLA RISING (Nicolas Winding Refn, Denmark)
530 Ryerson THE ROAD (John Hillcoat, USA)
930 Varsity4 BIG DIG (Ephraim Kishon, Israel, 1969)

Mon, 14 Sept
900 Scotia1 A SERIOUS MAN (Coen Brothers, USA)
noon Ryerson GET LOW (Aaron Schneider, USA)
215 Scotia1 THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED (J Blakeson, USA)
500 Scotia1 AGORA (Alejandro Amenabar, Spain)
900 Varsity2 MY DOG TULIP (Paul & Sandra Fierlinger, USA)
midnight Ryerson BITCH SLAP (Rick Jacobson, USA)

Tue, 15 Sept
1100 Elgin CHLOE (Atom Egoyan, Canada)
100 Scotia3 THE WARRIOR AND THE WOLF (Tian Zhuangzhuang, China)
300 Ryerson THE INFORMANT! (Steven Soderbergh, USA)
600 Ryerson BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS (Werner Herzog, USA)
845 AMC3 TALES FROM THE GOLDEN AGE (Cristian Mungiu / Ioana Uricaru / Hanno Hofer / Razvan Marculescu / Constantin Popescu; Romania)

Wed, 16 Sept
945 Scotia2 PARTIR (Catherine Corsini, France)
1215 Scotia2 SCHEHEREZADE, TELL ME A STORY (Yousry Nasrallah, Egypt)
400 WinterGarden LEAVES OF GRASS (Tim Blake Nelson, USA)
600 Elgin MOTHER (Bong Joon-ho, South Korea)
900 Ryerson LE REFUGE (Francois Ozon, France)

Thu, 17 Sept
900 Scotia1 THE DAMNED UNITED (Tom Hooper, Britain)
noon Ryerson MICMACS (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France)
345 Scotia2 I KILLED MY MOTHER (Xavier Dolan, Canada)
530 Varsity8 MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE (Werner Herzog, USA)
745 Bader ECCENTRICITIES OF A BLOND HAIR GIRL (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)
midnight Ryerson SYMBOL (Hitoshi Matsumoto, Japan)

Fri, 18 Sept
830 Scotia2 VINCERE (Marco Bellocchio, Italy)
130 Scotia2 THE TIME THAT REMAINS (Elia Suleiman, Palestine)
400 Cumberland1 I AM NOT YOUR FRIEND (Gyorgy Palfi, Hungary)
615 Varsity4 L’ENFER DE HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea, France)
900 Ryerson MR. NOBODY (Jaco Van Dormael, France)

Sat, 19 Sept
900 Varsity4 POLICE, ADJECTIVE (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania)
1230 Scotia4 AIR DOLL (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan)
400 WinterGarden HADEWIJCH (Bruno Dumont, France)
700 AMC9 ENTER THE VOID (Gaspar Noe, France)
midnight Ryerson ONG BAK 2: THE BEGINNING (Tony Jaa and Panna Rittikrai, Thailand)