Through the Mask

Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer); The Fall (Tarsem)

2006-09-09T19:55:00.000-07:00

Day 3

Ten Canoes

The great strength that comes from the inclusiveness of TIFF is that it opens the audience up to the experiences and cultures of an enormous diversity of peoples and places. This film from Australia gives us an intimate look at the lives of an Arnhem Land Aboriginal community.

This is not mere post-colonial exoticism. The extraordinary premise of this film is that its intended audience is not us, but the Aboriginal community itself, who helped de Heer put together his story. We are, as it were, eavesdropping on a tale told to someone else.

Even more originally, de Heer’s film develops as a Thousand-and One-Night series of stories, one contained within the other. We start with the present, flying over the Northern Australian setting as commented on by the detached, ironic voice of the famous Aboriginal actor, David Gulpilil. We then move into a distant past for which the film changes to black and white. Here the central story is told of an event in the even more distant past for which we go back into colour. The effect of this visual time-travel is to give us a sense of the rich depth and mystery of the past and of tradition achieved by oral cultures.

The main story is a simple parable recited by an old man during a goose hunt, on order to teach a younger son about the ways of the world. The way it is told cinematically is extremely sophisticated, but in no way pretentious, and there is enough earthy talk of sex, scatology, and the eternal difference between men and women to anchor everything in a real and human world. There is a witchdoctor and magic and strange customs, but not a scrap of mystification.

This is one of the important film of the Festival.

The Fall

This India/Uk/USA co-production is one of those films that you fall instantly in love with, in the way you fell in love with a certain story or film when you were a kid. It is a fairy tale that ultimately deals with the healing and enchanting powers of art and of film. Its fantastical humour and dazzling effects remind me of Satyajit Ray’s The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, which I saw once many years ago, and which the Cinematheque was going to show three years ago, but for some reason did not, alas.

The framing story takes place in a hospital in Los Angeles during the early days of film. Here a young stunt man, who has suffered a serious spinal injury while working on a “Western” befriends a young immigrant girl with a thick foreign accent. She has a badly broken arm, the result of having to go on a ladder to pick oranges with her immigrant family. The young man casually begins to improvise a story for the young girl, at first to pass the time, then in order to fulfil her urgent requests for more, and finally, in order to bribe her to obtain a bottle of morphine so that he can commit suicide.

Like all improvised stories, the young man’s fantasies are based on movie clichés, characters who are in the hospital, or events that occur at the request of the listener. As soon as the stories begin we are transported to fairytale locations in 23 different countries filmed with a dazzling virtuosity and beauty. Early on there is a sequence involving an elephant swimming in turquoise tropical waters that is as powerfully fantastic and dreamlike as anything in Fellini.

When the framing story threatens to become too sentimental, and the fairytale too disjointed and trivial, everything is held together by the performance of Cantinca Untaru whose artless, tomboyish directness has an indescribable freshness, utterly different from the calculating kids in Hollywood products. She is hilarious in a scene where she translates for her mother, providing her own interpretation when convenient, in an experience that must be familiar to so many immigrant children.

Often she achieves what mature actors spend a lifetime vainly seeking: total reality and truth. She gives the strange impression of helping Lee Pace, as the young man and the fairytale Zorroesque hero, give a deeply moving and sensitive performance. Without her, you feel, he would lack depth and become another pretty face in a sentimental situation.

As his suicidal feelings are cured by the girl’s urgings not to kill everyone off in his bitterness, we become aware that even apparently cheap magic has redemptive qualities. The film closes with the projection of a flickering, cheap silent movie, observed with wonder by all the adults and children in the hospital. The TIFF audience went wild at the end, and deservedly so. This is my best bet of the festival so far, with something to say that we film buffs are so desperate to hear.

2:37 (Murali K. Thalluri); Nouvelle Chance (Anne Fontaine)

2006-09-09T19:42:00.000-07:00

Day 2
September 2006

2:37

Where have you seen these before? Kids in a suburban high school (in Adelaide, Australia, in this case) containing The Jock Hero, The Bulimic Beauty, The Pregnant Maiden, The Just-out Gay, The Totallyscrewed-up One, The Handicapped, The Normal-on-the-outside-but-seething-on-the-inside, etc., etc., all in the context of a suicide. This is the overly familiar material that forms the basis of Murali K. Thalluri’s film.

Add copious borrowings from Gus Van Sant’s camera and editing technique in Elephant, and you would appear to have the fairly typical product of a very young director (and screenplay writer) who is still looking for his own cinematic language, and who can’t see outside the adolescent box where all troubles appear unique and no one’s seen the trouble’s you’ve seen except you. Back in Rebel Without a Causeland.

All that is partly true. But this Australian high school movie has such assurance, impact, and wonderful performances, you know from the start that you’re in the hands of a very promising director indeed.

The acting of the young cast is the greatest strength of this debut film. Even when the material strains credibility, which happens not infrequently, the cast makes the problems seem lighter than they would otherwise be. Such performances do not occur with a callow, talented youth at the wheel. Judged simply by his direction of the cast, Thalluri has a very promising career ahead of him.

Any kind of plot synopsis would act as a spoiler, so it’s enough to say that the movie is constructed as a thriller—in this case a whodunit where the victim is the suicide discovered at the start. This traditional framework gives the film its tension, but it also leads to some glib manipulations of character for the sake of increasing suspense, and of course, the obligatory surprise ending.

All the same, this is an impressive effort. In spite of its Van Sant borrowings, the film has a humanistic warmth and generosity of spirit that is completely absent in the icy work of the more famous director.

Nouvelle Chance

This is a comic “Let’s Put On a Play” piece of French choux pastry worthwhile mainly for the moving and radiant appearance of the 89-year-old Danielle Darrieux as a former operetta and musical star, now retired in an old people’s home. Looking charming in a black egret-feather boa her singing of a cabaret song at the end generates more electricity than could be managed by contemporary singers old enough to be her great-granddaughters.

There is some ironic and elegantly witty banter in the French style (the screenplay is by the director). But the film is more interested in developing vignettes based on the personae of the various actors—not of course known in Canada—so that it tends to drift away from what might once have been a plot. This is all very charming, wry and spontaneous (France’s former Socialist Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, makes a slightly sinister guest appearance.) Three quarters of the way through, however, we seem to lose the plot altogether as if several crucial pages of the script got lost during filming, and it stops as if it has simply run out of time.

The Magic Flute Directed by Kenneth Branagh

2006-09-07T19:23:00.000-07:00

Day One, Movie One

The conventions of opera are not the same as those of cinema. That’s so obvious, it hardly needs stating. What is not so obvious is how you can translate these differences from one to the other and make the final language mean something. There are only a few ways available. The most familiar is to use a documentary format: simply making a filmed record of a live performance. In this case the audience knows it is watching a performance in a theatre; that the singers are really singing, the orchestra really playing, and an audience really watching.

As soon as you take this documentary aspect away the problems begin. You know the singers aren’t singing but lip-synching, there are no signs of an orchestra—in fact, given the conventions of cinema, you tend to think of the musicians as being background music and not an integral part of developing the story and inner lives of the characters. A close-up of a performer singing an aria is not a very aesthetic experience: a wobbling tongue, distended lips and a dancing glottis emphasise the inherent artificiality and absurdity of opera. The naturalistic medium of film immediately raises the question: why the hell are these people singing?

Ingmar Bergman’s film of Mozart’s opera got around the problem from the start by first emphasising the theatricality of the work. It opens an eighteenth-century wing-and-shutter theatre with an obviously artificial stage dragon, and the three ladies descending in a machine.

Branagh looks for inspiration in Terry Gilliam and the cinematically familiar world of The Wizard of Oz. It’s perfectly acceptable that these people should be singing because this is a fantasy. At the same time he manages to bring out the serious side of the opera by setting the story in the trenches and mud of the First World War, although this is more a nightmarish transformation than a realistic parallel.

The struggle between the forces of good and evil—the Queen of the Night and Sarastro—therefore has a strong contemporary impact. While that makes for “relevance,” it often makes the obscurity of Mozart’s symbolism even more obscure, and sometimes even absurd—such as the Trial by Water, which has overtones of Titanic. Sarastro doesn’t utter Masonic mumbo-jumbo and becomes a kind of healer/Gandalf/builder. His followers are building a shiny city on a hill. Unfortunately the architecture is strongly suggestive of Albert Speer’s Nazi triumphalism.

Branagh will probably be up for the Somme Award for Going Over the Top. The special effects provided by the digital wizardry of Roger Lanser are often beautiful, but tend to go too far: the Queen of the Night loses her ominous qualities by turning into a kind of Tinkerbell while singing the stratospheric stabbing notes of her famous aria.

This production works best when making the most Mozart’s folksy humour. Benjamin Jay Davis is delightful as Papageno. And Stephen Fry’s cheeky and witty English translation is one of the great strengths of the film. (Papageno eyeing a noose when in a suicidal mood: “I can cure this awful feeling/and hang myself right from the ceiling.”) The lovers can be very sappy, but in this case they are also saved by the humour. The Canadian tenor Joseph Kaiser is a tall dark and handsome Tamino with a resonant tenor, although it is, of course, impossible to know whether it would meet the challenges of a theatre. All the same, he turns an often drippy character into a touching young man.

Kenneth Branagh has always tried to be a populist in his films of the classics. In his Shakespeare this often came pretty close to fawning and sentimentality. Here there is real magic and delight. The Magic Flute, The Movie, is accessible and has something to say without being mushy. It respects Mozart without being at all reverential. It does not strike a powerful new note in the cinematic presentation of opera, but its appeal to a general public through beautiful sights and sounds is not something to be sniffed at.

TIFF Notes

2006-09-05T10:30:00.000-07:00

The Nature of Buzz

"The Festival Circuit" seems to be a term that’s used for the process of generating buzz without having to do too much advertising. To me it has overtones of a tired old trooper schlepping from one gig to another. The schlepping increases as the trooper gets older and has more and more problems.

Volver, for example, has had its North American premiere at Telluride, but has been playing in Europe for months. Obviously it doesn't have problems, but still needs to find ways of announcing its presence. Several other films at Telluride have beaten Toronto to the draw, which detracts a little from our feeling of exclusivity. Little Children generated a lot of buzz at Telluride, some of it negative (its length), but mostly good. It has also generated a lot of heated discussion apparently, which is always better than a stony silence. I notice that these and several other films are also going to New York. And Candy, the junkie film with Heath Ledger, is still in the festival pipeline even though it first emerged in Berlin. Maybe disributors are not hovering eagerly enough about the hive.

But how effective is Toronto buzz? Two years ago the New Zealand film, In My Father's House, directed by Brad McGann got a tremendous reception. At my performance the audience went wild. Then it seems to have slipped into a distrubution limbo from which it may never emerge. And the buzz, of course, has got fainter and fainter. This happens to many films at the festival which you would like to have seen by family and friends, but which disappear down a great black hole, never even to emerge on DVD. Distributors' neglect, as we all know, isn't necessarily connected to lack of quality.

Perhaps when the Film Centre is finished the Festival Group may find ways to recirculate these popular but unclaimed orphans.

By the way, the young actress who was so shattering in In My Father's House, Emily Barclay, is appearing this year in the Oz film Suburban Mayhem. She is reportedly equally electrifying.

2006-09-04T09:51:00.000-07:00

Sunday, September 03, 2006
TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FEST
The Daytime Pass

After the better part of an exhausting day figuring out our picks, the moment we passholders await with fear and trembling has just been made a little less trembly. This year the result of the lottery was sent to me today by e-mail. There was no indication which bin was drawn first, but that is of no concern, since we managed to get the 25 films we asked for.

That doesn’t mean of course that the lottery element has disappeared, because many of the films have yet to reveal themselves as worthy of the hype in the Big Fat Book, the main inspiration of lightning decisions. Past experience has shown that the connection between the description and the film itself can be very tenuous.

My rule of thumb is to treat the “Visions” section very gingerly. If you come across something like “…new film is a goulash of bodily fluids and perversity, a nearly unclassifiable visceral feast for the senses,” or “a new kind of meditative storytelling,” or “the characters have a brazen, grimy materiality that is almost bestial,” my visceral reaction is to avoid these films at all costs, being especially careful not to make them my second selection. And NO films ever about junkies, even if they have Heath Ledger in them.

Apart from that, my basic desire is to see as many films from as many different countries as possible, although adjectives like “bleak,” “honest,” and “challenging” may give pause. The Festival’s coverage of World Cinema is without equal and always generates a euphoric feeling of connectedness and hope. A documentary or two is also required, as well as some sort of costume drama.

I try to avoid all films that look as if they will soon have a general release. This year I’ve made one exception with Todd Field’s Little Children, in the first place because I read Tom Perotta’s novel a year or so ago and admired it very much. And in the second place because like many festival-goers, I always catch a tiny whiff of star-fucking in the air that is hard to ignore. As well as Todd Field, I’m secretly hoping that the divine Jennifer Connoly will turn up for the Q & A… Seeing this back-to-back with the Australian Suburban Mayhem should be quite an experience.

On a more serious level, I’m very much looking forward to seeing Patrick Wilson’s performance in Little Children. In my view he is one of the most promising actors around and needs to be seen more often. On film he’s subtle and intense. Watch him more than hold his own against Al Pacino as Joe Pitt in Angels in America. On stage, where I saw him in Barefoot in the Park on Broadway, he was bursting with energy, wit and invention. In the theatre his performing is not filmic, and in film he’s not stagy. He’s a real actor and not just a “star” like Brad Pitt. Leading men with that kind of versatility and presence are hard to find.

Talking to others, I find that there’s always a widespread frustration about the late appearance of buzz in the media. You have to make up your mind about 25 films based on almost no information, although I did find some comments on the internet useful after a lengthy Googling session. Obviously some movies develop a reputation as they trail from one festival to another and a comment like “Do not see this film AT ALL COSTS!!!!” is quite persuasive.

Although I wish they wouldn’t have to be, your choices are also determined by the location of the theatres. I remember a hysterical trip last year trying to get from the Cumberland to the Paramount in ten minutes, and failing, then having a confrontation with an usher about not being allowed to enter. It’s a pity you have to skip promising films because of problem locations, but it's hard to see how that can be solved any time soon. The feeling that there are many theatres filled to the brim with audiences gives the Toronto festival its unique exhilaration.

In spite of a few flies in the ointment, the festival generates such an atmosphere of artistic and social vitality that even a so-so movie about teenage angst in Outer Mongolia may appear to have redeeming features.

posted by Dan Maskman 12:38 PM