Explosive youth

Ginger (Elle Fanning) and Rosa (Alice Englert) were born with dawn of the bomb—on August 9, 1945, their mothers side by side in labour in some London hospital just as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were being decimated—and thus born into a dread-draped world that would thereafter seem always about to end. We meet them proper 17 years later, and when you’re 17 the world is always about to end. Which makes you cling to that one comrade who knows the score, understands the good fight and the woozy exhilaration of adolescent desperation, righteousness and possibility. The girls are best friends. They giggle a lot, dress alike, groom in tandem, hitchhike together and scan the culture for paths to higher meaning and purpose. Ginger, the more disciplined of the two, joins the anti-nuclear protest movement, and may become a writer. Near the film’s end, after much tumult, her father, Roland (Alessandro Nivola), asks Ginger what she’s working on. “A poem,” she replies. “About the future.” Ginger & Rosa, the latest film from veteran English filmmaker Sally Potter (Orlando, Yes), is a coming-of-age story set in roughly the same heady period as Potter’s own youth. It is Potter’s poem about the past.

And it is a highly subjective view of that past. Ginger & Rosa adheres closely to its titular characters’ perspectives—Ginger’s most especially, since she emerges as the film’s protagonist—in the sense that people and politics and places come to us with the sort of texture and tone we might expect from an exceptionally smart and passionate teenager, but a teenager nonetheless. Ginger is lovingly imbued with nuance, complicated feelings and resonant contradictions, and Fanning, who is actually significantly younger than the role, and who was recently so wonderful in Somewhere, is nothing short of a revelation here. While many of the adults, embodied by actors as talented and intelligent as Timothy Spall, Oliver Platt, Annette Bening and Christina Hendricks, conform more closely to mere ideas of adults: tweedy, intellectual radical role models on the one hand, a martyr-parent on the other. Roland, interestingly, is a notable exception. Interesting because he’s also the most irresponsible and flawed, the key factor in the how the story suddenly pivots and Ginger’s already frail sense of domestic stability snaps completely. Roland is charming, pretentious, frustrated, inspiring, loving in his way and appalling in his way—the adult most like a teenager. He weeps over Schubert. He moves into a cramped apartment at one point, claiming that there is “a poetry in small spaces.”

And the film’s poetry, too, is in the smaller narrative spaces it inhabits. As Potter hurls us into the high and contrived drama of the final act, Ginger & Rosa loses something of its emotional precision and often exquisite sense of place and time, but in its earlier scenes, which seem unconcerned with momentum, are almost moment-for-moment captivating and transporting, deftly dressed, photographed, and edited to a spare but sensual rhythm. Like Olivier Assayas’ recent semi-autobiographical masterpiece Something in the Air, Ginger & Rosa gives us a window into a time when the question of balancing the personal and political was boggling and urgent. That it explores this question through the story of two young women, and does so sensitively and strikingly, makes it that much rarer among coming-of-age films, and immensely valuable. 

                   

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.