TIFF '12: True stories of people and animals

Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica

Hotel rooms and bars, coffee shops and offices, street corners and many different screening rooms. In long lines. Every once on a while, at my desk. Here and there, in my own warm bed. It was a good TIFF for ol’ JB, busy, largely free of the runaround, free booze, too much coffee, too little food, movies movies movies, including several very good ones, some of which will make their way toward the regular sorts of cinemas, many of which will recede into the vast film festival fog. In that former, happy category, keep your eyes peeled for an expansive post here in phantom country about something we like to call Tabu, from Portugal’s Miguel Gomes. In that latter, frustrating category, a great discovery for me was a character study entitled One Upon a Time Was I, Veronica, from another Gomes, this one a Brazilian named Marcello. It’s a sensual, wise film I knew nothing about going in. Its eponymous heroine (Hermila Guedes) is a young doctor who lives with her ailing dad, whom she loves—seemingly to the exclusion of others; the film belongs in that small niche of sensitive, complicated films about fathers and daughters, a niche which also includes Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums and Ozu’s Late Spring. Veronica has good friends, loves to swim and to dance. She has an active, often fulfilling sex life, vividly captured in several memorable scenes, often full of laughter and happy fumbling, but she feels no great urge to get serious with anyone. Using a handheld recording device she undertakes some amateur self-analysis; she conceives of a movie of her life where she gets a happy ending of her own idiosyncratic design. Refusing to force any artificial resolutions upon Veronica, Gomes helps her find that ending, which became only more satisfying to me the more I thought about it in the hours and days afterward.

Something in the Air

More likely to garner a proper theatrical run in the near future—one would hope, anyway—is Something in the Air (Après mai). Set in the early ’70s, the latest from Olivier Assayas, the prolific writer-director of Irma Vep, Summer Hours and Carlos, is an autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young dissident, trying to forge a political identity while struggling to come to terms with a calling as suspiciously bourgeois as painting (Assayas’ métier before he got into cinema). The film moves fluidly from one extended scene to another, through demonstrations, nocturnal vandalizing, ideological powwows, travels abroad, brushes with mysticism and drugs, trysts with likeminded lovers, hellos and farewells with sundry friends, art classes and film sets. Elegant and inquisitive, rich with period detail, Assayas keeps just the right distance at all times, never judging his characters, however young and zealous, never over-emphasizing a single scene to give us a false sense of sudden realization: self-discovery is an ongoing process, and Something in the Air simply lets us drift along with its teenage protagonist for a while, long enough to sense the great changes that occur both in his own psyche and in that of an entire generation trying to make sense of the world in the wake of that titular turning point of May, 1968.

Ginger and Rosa

Sally Potter’s Ginger and Rosa takes a somewhat similar tack, tracing the collapse of a friendship between two teenage Londoners in the early ’60s, one of whom (Elle Fanning) becomes increasingly devoted to the cause of nuclear disarmament, the other (Alice Englert) to finding some bohemian-traditonally domestic hybrid life with her best friend’s handsome writer father (Alessandro Nivola). The film ends rather too neatly, but the lead-up is utterly engrossing, and the supporting cast, which includes Timothy Spall, Annette Benning and Christina Hendricks, is marvelous.

Post Tenebrus Lux

Family life may seem wildly fraught in Ginger and Rosa, but those aspiring adolescent radicals and their lusty, misguided dads ain’t got nothing on the violent, neglectful, doomed patriarchs of Mexican writer/director Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux. Like Something in the Air and Ginger and Rosa, the film is very much grounded in autobiography, though when refracted through the prism of Reygadas’ (often beveled) lens, personal memories and anxieties blend with fantasies and dreams, visions of radiant demons carrying toolboxes (a archetypical fatherly accessory if ever there was one) and spectacular acts of self-destruction. There’s little in the chronologically amorphous Post Tenebras Lux that lends itself to easy synopsizing; let’s just say that the young family at its center, living in beautiful rural Morelos, move through a series of crises both banal and mythic: the sexual dissatisfactions of life after kids, substance abuse, betrayals, attempted thefts, and petty acts of revenge. The kids are played by Reygadas’ own children, and give some of the most natural and mesmerizing performances I’ve seen this year from humans. (See below for non-humans.) Just watch that gorgeous, eerie opening bit, where little Rut, just old enough to walk, scurries through a dusky valley where all sorts of livestock get restless and the sky darkens and thunders. Tenebras, indeed.

Bestiare

Of the Canadian titles I caught, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (yet another fascinating, formally engaged, autobiographical work) and Peter Mettler’s smart but deeply groovy hypno-essay film about the nature of time, The End of Time, are both strong works that will be dealt with in this here country soon enough. But my favourite Canadian film this TIFF? Bestiare, from Quebec’s ever-inventive Denis Côté, auteur of Carcasses and Curling. As the streets of downtown Toronto were stampeded by fans, stargazers and nut-jobs clamouring like wild beasts for a closer view of, say, Shia Leboeuf, I was tucked away in Lightbox, delighted and mesmerized by the many animals on display in Côté’s observational, but also witty, playful, maybe political (but probably not), quietly provocative and beautifully crafted study of four seasons of life at the Hemingford Parc Safari zoo. For all the big stars striding the red carpets in expensive clothes over the last week and a half, I confess that I was most drawn toward the hairy ones, the four-legged ones, the odorous ones, the inarticulate yet inherently cinematic stars that graced Bestiare. Here’s hoping you get a chance to see them yourself soon. 

Ain't no life nowhere...

The Man in question is David Bowie, extremely famous several times over by then, yet still arguably about as close to a space alien as a famous person can get. He falls to Honeyville, New Mexico, which is, strictly speaking, Earth, though it certainly seems like one of Western civilization’s weirder outposts. The film’s director is the great Nicolas Roeg, who already had a masterpiece or three under his belt (Performance, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now), as well as some substantial industry cred and star magnetism, despite the fact that his films were audaciously adventurous with form and occasionally baffling in content. (This was the 1970s.) So don’t look too surprised if The Man Who Fell to Earth leaves you feeling a little lost in space. It is indeed far out. Some might say too far. Every time Rip Torn turns up in the film he has this look on his face that seems to say, “What the fuck am I doing here?” It’s a fair question.

Soft-spoken, elfin-bodied Thomas Jerome Newton (Bowie) turns up one day with flaming orange hair, a British passport and a handful of enormously valuable patents. He finds himself a good patent lawyer (Buck Henry) and a brilliant scientific consultant (Torn) and starts up a massive global communications corporation—but what he really wants is just water, a glass here, an ocean there. His home planet has been suffering a massive drought, his own family is dying from lack of H₂O, and he’s heard that Earth is swimming in the stuff. So he sets up shop, trying to develop a long-term project. Really, really long-term. People around him get old as it goes along. He takes up with a chambermaid (Candy Clark). He settles in, makes himself a life on Earth, develops a dependency on the booze. But does he ever really become one of us? Can he? Would he want to?

Plot and backstory are both far clearer in Walter Tevis’ eponymous source novel than they are in Roeg’s film, which was scripted by Paul Mayersberg. What Roeg seems primarily interested in with The Man Who Fell to Earth is Newton’s prolonged fish-out-of-water experience of our world, which through Newton’s eyes looks far weirder and more sinister than anything glimpsed in the brief flashbacks to Newton’s extraterrestrial, dune-traversing past. Though not quite as overtly, apocalyptically condemning a portrait of the modern materialist world as what was on display in Walkabout, the television culture, abuse of alcohol, gun accessibility, general ugliness and casual consumerism on display in this film is, in its way, pretty alienating. But then so is the insistent vagueness of the dialogue. (“What are they like, your children?” “They’re like children. Exactly like children.”) So is the poor man’s Pink Floyd soundtrack. And so is the film’s meandering nature. So much of what made Roeg’s previous films (and some of his later ones) so sensorially rich can be found in the colours, montage, sound design and inspired ellipses of The Man Who Fell to Earth—no one else could have made it. Yet it lacks the urgency, the sustained energy and, more satirical than genuinely insightful, the depth those other films have. Still very much worth a visit, this Man may leave you longing for other, warmer planets. 

TIFF '12: Sound and visions

I’m walking down a very long, almost intestinal, amber-lit, fully carpeted, labyrinthine corridor in Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York Hotel, built in 1929, though there’s been some sort of hotel on that site since 1843. (“…you’ve always been here, Mr. Torrance.”) It’s an old place by Canadian standards, creaky, trance-inducing, seemingly out of time while you wander its quietest, windowless passages. And an ideal place to meet with Rodney Ascher and Tim Kirk, director and producer, respectively, of Room 237, the new essay film that explores a multitude of deep readings, some verging on conspiracy theories, of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The film is very fun, nerdy and obsessive, ridiculous and compelling; in some ways feels to me like a parody of film criticism at its most niggling and caffeinated. The film made a big splash at Sundance and Cannes and is now a major highlight at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, which as I finally sit down to write something on it is just a few days from closing.

Museum Hours

Room 237 is essentially constructed from a combination of intricate visual montage, music and voice-over, which, at least in terms of form, makes the experience of it not entirely dissimilar to that of some other notable TIFF ’12 titles, such as Miguel Gomes’ selectively soundtracked Tabu, a gorgeous, spellbinding film that’s at once a work of romantic cinema and a critique of romantic cinema, or Jem Cohen’s lovely Museum Hours, with its many moving passages of voice-over monologue from a Viennese museum guard who befriends Montrealer Mary Margaret O’Hara, in town to visit a comatose cousin, or Sophie Fiennes’ The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, which once again deposits sweaty Slovenian critical theorist Slavoj Žižek into myriad movies and lets him talk and talk and talk, or Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, which even more than Tree of Life feels like a fluid palimpsest of collective memories: I know there were some scenes of actual dialogue in the film, but the overall impression it left me with was one of a stream of internal voices asking questions, images of fingers brushing walls, trees, objects and bodies, of landscapes and music and drifting emotional states. It’s a good thing, I think, that Malick is working more steadily these days, making more films with more manageable runtimes (ie: under two hours), so that every new Malick movie is less of a monumental cinema event, so that something like To the Wonder can simply be regarded as another step in this singular director’s path, part of a larger whole, an ongoing exploration. Flawed or not, I’d still rather enter into any of Malick’s cinema spaces than I would watch most normal movies.

Berberian Sound Studio

Heightening tension between sound and image feels to me like a running theme this year. In Peter Strickland’s wonderfully paranoid and funny, eerie and elegantly crafted Berberian Sound Studio Toby Jones plays a late ’70s sound mixer who travels to Rome to work on a trashy Giallo film and gradually seems to be sucked into some wormhole hybrid of the fictive aural realm he’s cutting and pasting together and his own personal world of quiet English despair. In Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves, Snow White is transferred to the milieu of bullfighting in 1920s Spain, rendered as a black and white, silent melodrama brimming with bold music, some of it flamenco-inspired, all of it totally overcooked. Every scene is belaboured; Berger makes a self-congratulatory meal of every variation on the familiar tale; for all its ostensible large-scale emotions Blancenieves feels like an utterly academic formalist exercise, a parade of impeccably shot and edited clichés. The final scenes are almost great, until a single teardrop contaminates everything with faux ambiguity and supposed depth.

Death in the family

It’s all about family in the end, so let’s talk about the family first. Chris (Emile Hirsch) is a young man with big, bad ideas and even bigger, badder debts to some very dangerous men. He’s cursed with a father so dumb that by comparison he assumes he must be a genius. That father, Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), seems perpetually cowed by life. Ansel likes long underwear and monster truck rallies and shitty beer. He has a beautiful little moment when he enters the greasy spoon where Sharla (Gina Gershon), his wife, works: while scanning the room he spots a beer bottle abandoned by a previous customer with a finger of suds remaining in the bottom, and he swigs it. Sharla is a piece of work, a slattern schemer on the smallest of scales but armed with a road-tested, outsized sex appeal. She enters the film bush-first—a first for non-pornographic American cinema?—and when the rest of her gradually makes it into the frame she’s all erect nipples, big hair in curlers and mascara seemingly applied by Tammy Faye Baker’s personal make-up artist. Much later she will be charged with a task involving a drumstick that really needs to be seen to be understood.

Then there’s Dottie (Juno Temple), still a nymphette at 20, a kewpie doll busting at the seams, with a savant-like air yet far more observant than she gets credit for. She is an object of unnerving fantasies for Chris and of strange desire for the final member of our makeshift clan. Killer Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a detective and contract killer from Dallas. He comes to this Texas backwater to assassinate Chris and Dottie’s coke-dealing mother, Ansel’s first wife, a character never seen but much reviled. When it turns out that Chris can’t come up with payment for the matricidal hit, Joe takes Dottie as collateral. He’s not so much pure-lusty as entranced; he recognizes something in her. Like Humbert Humbert, Joe seems drawn to Dottie as a way to recapture the innocent bliss of pubescent sexual awakening. Ansel doesn’t mind any of this, as though pimping and parenting are second cousins. “Might just do her some good,” he muses.

The net ingredients for Killer Joe, the second of Pullitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts’ stage works to be adapted for the screen by William Friedkin (the first was Bug, a marvelous manic showcase for Michael Shannon), are about as lurid and tabloid-like as any going. The characters range from eerie to appalling to manifestations of some hot’n’sizzly kind of primal evil. And you can never take your eyes off of them and, provided you have the stomach for this grade of soot-black humour, they are funny as all hell. The sharply constructed story, which could be seen as a tract on the perils of inbreeding, feels like Sam Shepard channeling Jim Thompson, the direction is bracing and nasty, but also weirdly clean and to-the-point, the performances are across the board fully committed, emboldened by outrageousness, figures from Greek tragedy mired in the murk of the Southern gothic grotesque. Again, depending on your tastes, Killer Joe is either a must-see or must-avoid. Either way you’ll probably want to shower after. And steer clear of deep-fried chicken for a while.