Monday, September 15, 2008

TIFF '08: Reeling in the afterglow, with reflections on Che, Mickey Rourke, Hoffman-Kaufman, JCVD and the wiry physique of Ben Kingsley


Lingering in film festival-land during the final days is much like being the last guest at a party after the beautiful people have left, your host has passed out in the backyard, and you’re sifting through the ashtrays from smokeable butts, bleary-eyed, waiting for dawn. The press office closes down, the hotel lobbies are being shampooed, the limo drivers start vacation. I swear I saw a tumbleweed tumble down Bay Street. It seems so desolate now, who’d have guessed only days before I was sharing an elevator with Ben Kingsley—who really is built like a ninja as it turns out.

Yet it was on the very last day of the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival—at which I saw exactly 33 movies—that I finally caught Darren Aranofsky’s The Wrestler, a very hot ticket and the only press and industry screening I couldn't get into for the crowds, the film which a week before enjoyed the coup of winning the Golden Lion at Venice, the very same festival where Aranofsky’s The Fountain was famously booed two years previous. The Wrestler was something of a disappointment though: the narrative, about spandex-clad lord of the ring reaching a very lonesome middle age, was formulaic, the dialogue flat, the visual style shockingly anonymous considering Aranofsky's history of hyper-cuts and histrionics. But Mickey Rourke, with his leathery flesh and damaged beauty, was indeed wonderful, the physical punishment wrought upon him impressively gruesome, and the real reason to see the movie anyway is the milieu under investigation, which yields tremendous riches of human strangeness. And yes, wrestling, it seems, is indeed fixed.

What wasn’t fixed was any pre-set notions of what would be the highlights of TIFF ’08. There weren’t as many new films from high-profile filmmakers, and of those that did arrive, some were less than startling, like the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading or Richard Linklater’s Me & Orson Welles, which was pleasantly corny, while others, like Steven Soderbergh’s four-hour Che, proved difficult for many. I saw Che in two parts, and was at once dazzled and mesmerized, entranced by the obsessive attention to detail. But I noted a quieter, wearier, and smaller audience for the second screening, perhaps because while ‘Part One,’ covering the Cuban revolution, functions as an instruction manual for fighting a successful armed uprising, ‘Part Two,’ covering Che Guevara (Benicio Del Toro, superb) in Bolivia, does it all over again but ends in failure and death. But this is visionary filmmaking. Exhausting? Absolutely—but exhilarating, too, in its intensity of focus. Soderbergh’s a rare artist who makes you truly believe in the continued possibilities of movies.

The turbulence and atrocities of Latin America informed several other TIFF selections, notably Pablo Larrian’s Tony Manero, which follows a 52-year-old Chilean guy weathering the terror of the Pinochet regime by endeavouring to becoming the titular protagonist from Saturday Night Fever. That he wants to be a fictional character is revealing: like something out of a Roberto Bolaño novel, Larrian’s antihero seems to have taken the violence around him as tacit consent to release his own repressed aberrant tendencies, all moral logic eroding under the weight of his absurd fantasy life. It might synopsize like a movie about dreams trumping dictatorship, but this is not the case: Tony Manero is deeply sinister stuff, concerning a very dark passage of recent history.


Gerardo Naranjo’s Voy a explotar is an altogether wilder tale of familial disintegration, class rot and teen rebellion, a very fun homage to Godard about a girl who meets a guy she says is both “invented and real,” a son of a Guanajuato congressman who harbours homicidal fantasies toward al authority figures. Unlike Che or Tony Manero, the film is set in the present and is not especially politicized, though the undercurrent of class difference and the streak of political corruption especially is impressive. The lovers on the run run away from home, only to camp out on the congressman's leaky roof, a delicious testament to the Mexican elite's willful ignorance regarding what goes on right under their own noses. And the public service video the parents watch about how to cope with a runaway child was surely the most entertaining movie within a movie in a festival with a hell of a lot of movies within movies.  

But enough with the Americas—on to Europe! I don’t think I saw anything more elegantly realized than Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums, which follows the delicate negotiations between a father (dashing Denis regular Alex Descas) and his adult daughter, cohabitants in a Paris apartment block. There are two sequences—one set in a trainyard, the other in a bar—built mainly around music and movement, that are sensuous, poetic, pleasingly aligned to the rhythms of everyday life and among the loveliest things I saw this TIFF. Yet much of the film is relatively straightforward, examining the trails of the working underclass and the knotty entanglements of urban life, something evident in both the film’s web of acquaintances and its metaphoric use of the public transit system. There’s also a scene involving a horse that, while so very brief, speaks volumes about the image-power of Denis’ singular cinema.

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys, like last year’s The Man From London, offers something pretty unusual: a modern noir delivered in a highly meditative style. It kind of reminded me of The Reckless Moment, but more overtly bleak and, you know, brooding. Spanish director Albert Serra’s Birdsong follows the three wisemen on their way to greet Jesus, a film comprised mostly of landscapes being traversed which won’t do it for many but does possess a certain velvety, chiaroscuro beauty and bone-dry humour. Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky is a nearly sublime character study, with the relentlessly cheerful Poppy (Sally Hawkins, terrific) encountering numerous fellow Londoners who challenge her to consider the hidden consequences of her flamboyant optimism. Mabrouk El Mechri’s majorly meta JCVD blurs the real and fictional Jean-Claude Van Damme as he’s held hostage in a Belgian bank heist, suffers tax problems and a child custody suit. He delivers this fucking crazy, half-coherent monologue that recalls Brando’s in Last Tango in Paris. I don’t think Mechri can cash all of the cheques he writes in this thing—It’s a comedy! It’s an action movie! It’s a Charlie Kaufman movie!—but it’s pretty fun.

Speaking of Charlie Kaufman, I assume I'm not alone among Kaufman sympathizers in feeling I should probably see Synecdoche, NY again before I pursue any elaborate commentary. It's overwhelming,truly bizarre, and defies a glib summation. The film is certainly something you have to admire even when it's grinding you down. In fact, it's actually quite an amazing piece of work, singular in its aggrandizement of self pity, sprawling in its way, with Philip Seymour Hoffman's Kaufman stand-in suffering, often terribly amusingly so, through a life of misery, illness, disappointment and isolation, with only his never-ending play-in-progress, a colossal work of theatre that simulates Hoffman-Kaufman's sad life, as some sort of soul balm. I was perplexed; I was touched; I was entertained; I was bored; I was bummed; I was drained; but I want to see it all again. 

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