Taken by the waves

To be truly alone, to prepare, travel, hurl oneself into prolonged isolation: we can reduce this to some stoic, masculine, perhaps inherently literary ideal—books, after all, are a way of being alone, while movies have traditionally brought people together—but there is something universal, even spiritual, in the pursuit of solitude. Somewhere, somehow, the protagonist of J.C. Chandor’s All is Lost resolved himself to such a pursuit. We meet him on a yacht in the Indian Ocean. He’s old but very fit, handsome, almost certainly affluent, clearly a skilled sailor. He exudes discipline. We might envy or admire his ability to fulfill his resolution to be alone. But solitude can come with a chilling price. The man’s punishment for trying to get away from the world might be to be banished from it forever, to die alone, unable to ask for consolation, much less help. A drifting shipping container has pierced his yacht’s hull. He wakes to find the cabin flooded, the onboard electrical system malfunctioning. He does not show panic—is panic something we only show when there’s someone to show it to? He doesn’t talk to himself. He takes care of business, scaling the mast, patching the hole, trying to repair the radio. Days pass. At one point he shaves—perhaps it helps to retain habits in a crisis. Is the man doomed, as the title implies? He’s played by Robert Redford, giving his most compelling performance, a one-man show, all action, no talk. But just because he’s Robert Redford doesn’t mean we get a happy ending. And All is Lost isn’t about endings. It’s a film of moments, each heightened by the knowledge that it could be the last.

I found Chandor’s debut, the corporate drama Margin Call, a little overrated, maybe because we were so hungry for a movie to talk about the financial crisis. But All is Lost, the antithesis of Margin Call in many regards, is extraordinary, a cinematic stunt, but one that’s captivating and teeming with unspoken meaning—save a brief opening voice-over, a curse, and a few garbled fragments transmitted on the dying radio, there is no dialogue. (An instructive to the makers of Gravity: you actually can tell an engaging story of survival without having to cram every scene with chatter.) What is the man’s name? What was his career? Does he have a family? Did he abandon them? Or they him? What brought him here? The questions are richer than any answers could be. In lieu of answers we watch, listen, and very quickly begin to find ourselves in that sinking ship. (One interesting link to Margin Call: the guilty shipping container is leaking shoes, an exceedingly subtle commentary on global economics. The affluent American is imperiled by a container carrying goods produced in developing countries by underpaid workers so as to better line the pockets of affluent Americans.)

Chandor sticks close to his man, even during sequences in which most directors would be tempted to cut away. The yacht does summersaults during a nocturnal tempest, and Chandor smartly films the entire sequence from inside the cabin, a small world turning upside-down. An image of Redford asleep in his hammock above the flooded cabin, personal items afloat in the soup, recalls Tarkovsky. As the film progresses, there are occasional shots of life below the surface—the world that threatens to consume the man. Alex Ebert’s score stays mostly level with the environmental sounds, only rarely surfacing to heighten mood when things get especially dire. I can’t say enough about the rare degree of rigour applied to this more or less mainstream movie. All is Lost prizes a truly immersive cinematic experience over cozy tropes. It asks only for the sort of attention one might apply to one’s own solitude. 

         

Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space

In the beginning there is only heavens and Earth, and, in truth, the beginning is about as good as Gravity ever gets. But that beginning, which is to say the 20 minutes or so that precede the launch of the film’s rather earthbound narrative, offers one of the most amazing sensory experiences you’ll have at the cinema for some time. We see stars and darkness, then swirling Earth, then people and hardware, everything eerily buoyed by zero-gravity. Soon we too feel weightless. Sinuous? Drifting? Attempts to describe the quality of the movement of Emmanuel Lubezki’s 3D camera, of the bodies and objects onscreen, strain our existing vocabulary.

“Life in space is impossible,” says the opening title card. Apparently shooting as though you’re in space ain’t so easy either. Director Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men) and his team of special effect geniuses spent four and a half years making Gravity. I lack the technical chops to explain how they did it. The story however, co-scripted by Cuarón and his son Jonás, is pretty simple, though it should have been even simpler. At first veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and newbie Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) are doing minor repairs to their spacecraft’s exterior. All we hear is breath and heartbeats and fuzzy conversations with Houston. A running joke has Matt beginning a sentence with “I have a bad feeling about this mission.” Until it’s no longer a joke. Space debris rips their ship apart and kills their colleagues. Untethered in the nothingness with oxygen supplies rapidly depleting, Matt and Ryan must find a shuttle to get them home ASAFP.

The premise is fine. It imbues Gravity with urgency, stakes and, well, gravity. What’s less appealing is the cliché expository chatter that comes along with saving Dr. Ryan; she’s got a psychic wound that dovetails all-too-neatly with her current dilemma. What’s truly irritating is Lord of the Rings composer Steven Price’s overbearing score, which keeps bombarding us long after the debris shower ends and reaches yet another crescendo at the drop of a helmet. That aforementioned title card notes how there’s no way for sound to travel in space. “I like the silence,” Ryan says in an early scene—well, so much for that! In short, by certain conventional standards Gravity can be disappointing. But Gravity is not a conventional film. It is flawed. It is also, in its way, transcendent.

         

TIFF' 13: Huddled together in the darkness

The Missing Picture

It is Monday morning. The September sun raised itself up via a lumbering crane shot over an overexposed Toronto shivering with cinema withdrawal—a Toronto as unseasonably chilly as Donald Rumsfeld’s smiling evil grandpa eyes, which twinkle eerily and often in Errol Morris’ The Unknown Known. The 38^th Toronto International Film Festival came to a close last night. Morris’ problematic, unmissable, semantically obsessed feature-length interview with the former Secretary of Defense was just one of several new works that, like the sadistic levels of air conditioning in most TIFF venues, left my teeth chattering and my soul on ice. Sometimes in a very good way.

Bastards

The best way? How about Claire Denis’ Bastards? This bleak masterpiece and true contemporary noir, with elements drawn from William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, follows a French naval captain as he absconds from his errant seaman’s life to move into a vast Paris apartment and plot revenge on a business tycoon he blames for the defiling of his niece, the collapse of his family’s business, and the suicide of his brother-in-law. Denis regulars (Vincent Lindon, Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin) help seal the film’s seductive doom, but it’s Chiara Mastroianni’s haunted, enigmatic performance as the tycoon’s wife that most perfectly captures Bastards’ choked air of desperation and inevitability. Nearly as good as Mastroianni—and not nearly as famous—is Leandra Leal as the femme fatale in Brazilian director Fernando Coimbra’s inventively structured kidnapping drama A Wolf at the Door, one of this year’s most welcome surprises.

You Are Here

Denis’ filmmaking is so sensual and intoxicating that, truthfully, Bastards didn’t leave me nearly as cold as, say, the ostensibly heartwarming but catastrophically misguided You Are Here, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s blunt stab at helming a movie. This fumbling, cynically conceived bromance that turns into a rom-com stars Owen Wilson as a womanizing weatherman and Zach Galifianakis as his nutjob buddy. It is bracingly unfunny, fussed-over and forced, with a ludicrous lovers’ resolution. You’ll have better luck buying into the romance in Spanish director Manuel Martín Cuenca’s drearily immaculate Caníbal, which is about—you guessed it—a cannibal. In love. Things don’t go so well. It’s hard to give a shit. But Granada looks gorgeous. Better yet, just watch Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive, which may be my favourite vampire movie ever. It's certainly the only one I know of that is mostly about aggravating in-laws coming to visit. I have a feeling you'll be reading a lot more about this one here fairly soon. 

Gravity 

Things lighten up, so to speak, with Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón’s 3D astronaut survival chamber drama in which Sandra Bullock and George Clooney get walloped with debris while floating in space and struggle to find safe haven while their oxygen supply plummets. The visuals and soundscapes are absolutely astounding: I have never seen such sequences, in which the camera’s trajectory is so disorientingly aligned to that of the objects and people drifting helplessly onscreen. The opening 20 minutes or so make you feel as if we could go anywhere. If only Stephen Prince’s score wasn’t so annoyingly overblown and the character development wasn’t so disappointingly earthbound.

Under the Skin

Yet, just when you’ve recovered from Cuarón’s extraterrestrial traipsing, life on Earth suddenly seems exotic all over again in Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer’s hypnotic science-fiction in which Scarlett Johansson’s lovely body is inhabited by an ebony alien stalking horny young men in Scotland before eventually getting stalked herself. A substantial portion of the film was made without the participants’ knowledge: Glazer put Johansson in a black wig and a white van and had her drive around and try to pick up unsuspecting Glaswegians. Presumably these guys figured out they were in a movie by the time she led them into a dark house where they stripped down and slipped into some obsidian interstellar goo from which they never emerge. Anthropological and austere, Under the Skin is an intentionally alienating experience for much of the first two-thirds, before its central character goes incrementally native and places herself in danger. All dialogue is virtually incidental and much of Johansson’s performance is designed to remain remote, but the film isn’t anywhere near as baffling as some reports have made it out to be. It is a hugely inventive story about a stranger in a strange land and the perils of empathy.

Night Moves

One more hostile intruder: who’s that guy Jake Gyllenhaal’s stalking in Enemy? Why, it’s Jake Gyllenhaal! Quebec director Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of José Saramago’s novel The Double is perversely withholding and surprisingly effective. It makes Toronto look like nothing but high-rises and freeways, the perfect backdrop for this tale of a lonely professor who spots his doppelgänger playing a bit part in a movie and decides that there can be only one. TIFF 2013’s other doppelgänger movie—double doppelgänger!—which is actually titled The Double, stars Jesse Eisenberg. I didn’t see it. Figured if I was going to get stuck with two of somebody I’d rather it be Gyllenhaal. I got a good dose of Eisenberg’s chronic slouching in Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves, which also stars Peter Sarsgaard and Dakota Fanning and concerns an eco-terrorist plot that goes awry. Eisenberg gets on my nerves but he fits the role. The film is very good, if not quite the revelation of Meek’s Cutoff.

Stray Dogs

Festivals at their best remind us that cinema is meant to be a collective experience, so let’s embrace a few films about families—most of which, oddly enough, were part of Wavelengths, the experimentally minded and most dependable program at TIFF. A candidate for this year’s single best film, Tsai Ming Liang’s Stray Dogs—said to be the Malay-Taiwanese auteur’s last(!)—follows a family of three scraping by on the streets of Taipei. It is another masterwork of sumptuous tableaux laden with intense, burgeoning emotion and frequently accented with quietly mischievous humour.

The Strange Little Cat

Swiss director Ramon Zürcher’s beguiling feature debut The Strange Little Cat limits its scope to the preparation and execution of a simple family dinner, yet is full of clamorous life, seemingly normal until some cryptic comment or event intrudes before slipping away again. It may be the weirdest most seemingly normal movie I’ve ever seen. Cambodian documentarian Rithy Panh’s autobiographical The Missing Picture meanwhile attempts to chronicle a childhood spent pining for something the rest of us would consider normal. Panh was 11 when the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh and sent Panh’s family to a work camp. Panh wanted to tell the story of his adolescence through pictures, but because the visual documents of this era are almost entirely composed of propaganda, Panh decided to render his memories through elaborate claymation sequences.

     

12 Years a Slave

      

Running out of space here, so let me leave you with two favourite moments at TIFF ’13:

1. Toward the end of Hunger and Shame director Steve McQueen’s surprisingly conventional—but still totally grueling—12 Years a Slave, there is an odd scene in which the film’s star, Chiwetel Ejiofor, appears on screen in close-up, very still, and for a surprisingly long time. The previously rapt, reverent audience suddenly became very noisy when some asshole’s cellphone went off, and looking up at Ejiofor’s enormous head, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was waiting for everyone to shut up.

A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness

2. My last film of TIFF ’13 was the tripartite A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, by Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, another Wavelengths title. The film begins almost documentary-like, examining life at a Estonian commune, then follows musician Robert A.A. Lowe as he finds tranquility in the Finnish wilderness, then roams a gig in a small club performed by Lowe’s heavily made-up Finnish black metal outfit. The camera movement as sinewy and lovely as the music is crushing, harsh and, at times, a little silly. The final moments are perfect: Lowe exits the stage before the band even finishes, immediately and efficiently sets about wiping off his white make-up, puts on his coat and goes out the back door. I love this ending because. It is an eloquent reminder that this is all a show, that the darkness still looms, but that we can cast cinematic spells, use thunderous moments of art to keep it at bay, before shaking it off, going back out into the open air and getting on with the rest of it all.