An actress steps through the looking glass

En route to Zurich, where she’s to accept an award in his honour, Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) learns that her old mentor, the reclusive Swiss playwright Wilhelm Melchior, has died. Delivered bluntly to Maria by Val (Kristen Stewart), her personal assistant, a resourceful young American, the news contributes to the growing sense of things ending for Maria, or at least transitioning into something else. Maria is in the midst of a messy divorce. Despite the obvious incentives, she’s declining to reprise her role in a super hero movie. She may or may not be accepting a role in a London revival of Maloja Snake, the Melchoir play that made her famous, except that when she first did the play 25 years ago she was the young seductress; this time around she’s to play the opposing role, that of the middle-aged business woman seduced and shattered by the younger woman, who would now be played by ostensibly talented celebrity train wreck Jo-Ann (Chloë Grace Moretz). The high-concept casting is tantalizing, and the director is said to be brilliant, but Maria feels vulnerable. She’s tampering with her legacy, acknowledging her age in a viciously age-phobic industry, stepping through the looking glass.

Which is not so different from what Binoche is doing by playing Maria, a character very close to Binoche, written specifically for Binoche by writer/director Olivier Assayas, with whom the actress worked on 2008’s exquisite Summer Hours. Clouds of Sils Maria brims with such slippage, between real life and the movies, between the play Maria is working up the courage to act in and the fraught dynamic between Maria and Val, who retreat to Melchoir’s home in the spectacular, mountainous Sils Maria to run lines and debate the underlying values in conflict in the play. Is it better to be young and arrogant or mature and wise? Certain elements of Clouds recall Ingmar Bergman’s Persona—the borrowed country home, the imperious actress and the fresh-faced helper in psychic face-off—while Maloja Snake is itself inspired by Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. These touchstones, like Binoche and her own stature as a star, are just some of the things hovering in our shared culture that Assayas is responding to and sculpting into something unique, arresting and ultimately haunting. The film is so rife of gestures, ideas, events, subtle little moments in which something suddenly changes. I first saw it nine months ago and it lingered in my memory as an uncontainable thing. I just watched it for the second time and had that peculiar experience of revisiting a film and remembering that films unfold one scene at a time.

While retaining a rawness, post-Twilight Stewart gives a far more crafted performance as Val than in anything I’d seen her do—the twitching and fidgeting has been reduced to a minimum. Moretz too seems to be adopting another, more intriguing register with Assayas and company. Jo-Ann spills over with faux-stoned bad girl affectations when Maria watches her on trash TV shows, only to transform into a young artist longing to reinvent herself when she and Maria finally meet. Binoche is as inventive, bold, playful and as adverse to the slightest falsity as she’s ever been. Her Maria is mercurial, capable of exploding into withering laughter, aware of her power while also aware that her powers could fail her any moment. In the film’s first part she’s the epitome of glamour; in the second and third she cuts her hair and scrubs her face clean. She looks her age, I guess, with a new nakedness, as if to say, If I’m going to be the older woman, let’s get this over with. She’s also radiant, as I imagine she always will be. But radiance quiets with time, and the film’s final, quietly brutal scene leaves Maria in a place similar to its first scenes: we see a woman on the move, between things, figuring out what to do next, and how best to survive the journey.

              

TIFF '14: Emotional weather report

Clouds of Sils Maria

Breaking from its customary early September chill, Toronto finally took revenge on the polar vortex. The highs were in the 30s. I would have under any normal circumstance savoured the pristine skies and hot sun, but I spent those days happily lost in the clouds. Clouds of Sils Maria, to be precise. My best consecutive three hours in the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival included a relaxed, extensive interview over good coffee with the ever-engaged and engaging Olivier Assayas, Clouds’ writer and director, followed by a live, on-stage, career-surveying conversation between TIFF CEO and programmer Piers Handling and the luminous, fiercely intelligent Juliette Binoche, Clouds’ star and, to some extent, its subject. Clouds follows a successful French actress in middle age who accepts a role in a remount of the play that made her career. Except that where once she played the ingénue she’s now in the role of the older woman with whom the ingénue tumbles into a fiery erotic entanglement. Most of Clouds is set in a remote Alpine cottage where Binoche runs lines and runs into some eerily parallel relationship with her assistant, played a remarkably good Kristin Stewart. Elements of Persona hover over Clouds, but Assayas infuses the film with a strangeness and resonance entirely native to this particular story, its ghostly location, its lead actress and chief collaborator, and its sense of what it means to immerse oneself, at risk of losing oneself, in the liminal space between play and reality.

above: Foxcatcher 

below: Maps to the Stars

It is not lost on me that that last bit also summarizes the experience of attending a major festival like TIFF. Movies-movies-movies, interviews, prepping interviews, movies-movies, the hunt for free drinks, the remoteness of sleep or a balanced meal. Head in the clouds. No complaints. I’ve seen a number of good bigger films coming soon to a theatre near you. Foxcatcher fuses keyword elements from director Bennett Miller’s earlier features, Capote and Moneyball. Depicting the fateful convergence of multi-millionaire John Eleuthère du Pont (Steve Carrel, with prosthetics) and Olympic wrestlers Mark (Channing Tatum) and Dave Schwartz (Mark Ruffalo), it’s a true-crime sports movie, a critique of American entitlement blanketed from frame one in absolute inescapable dread. Speaking of dread, I’ve also seen pabulum disguised as humanist social study: Men, Women & Children, Jason Reitman’s ensemble drama about suburban white people sex lives in something dressed like the digital age, is not good, and unfortunately it is not not-good in the sort of hypnotically appalling way that Labor Day was not-good, or, rather, bad. Alas. The title suggests that it’s “for everybody.” I’ve also beheld the weirdness that is David Cronenberg helming a Hollywood satire. Julianne Moore gives a truly gutsy performance as a popular actress panicking in middle age (yes, there’s a few this year, and why not?) and Cronenberg makes this odd choice of project fascinatingly his own, but the script feels out-dated and unfocused. Of course, I’m probably still going to watch it several times. It’s Cronenberg. He’s never not-interesting.

above: The Princess of France

below: Jauja

But a perfect day at TIFF still speaks to me in Spanish. Or whatever that shushy variation of castellano is that Argentines speak. And man, can they speak. Most especially if they’re in a Matías Piñeiro movie. This charismatic, prolific and rather ingenious young porteño crafts taut, fluidly photographed films packed with incredible aural and visual density. The Princess of France is his third film to deposit fragmented Shakespearean comedies into a contemporary Buenoes Aires full of young people talking about love and reading and art-making. There is a tremendous amount of kissing in this dizzyingly cryptic but utterly delightful spin on Love’s Labour’s Lost. There’s also soccer, Schumann, and dancing in the dark. No such mirthful activities are to be found in Jauja, Liverpool director Lisandro Alonso’s wonderfully creepy and visually stunning chronicle of a doomed Patagonian exploration undertaken by a 19th century Danish engineer---played by Viggo Mortensen! He gets lost in the wilds searching for his errant teenaged daughter and speaks excellent broken Spanish with a Danish accent.

The Duke of Burgundy

But lets get back to the monarchy. If The Princess is easily one of this festival’s best films, The Duke of Burgundy is not too far behind in the ranking. Berberian Sound Studio director Peter Strickland’s third feature is set in a world without men, a sly conceit that allows him to tell this tale of love-term love heightened then hampered by sadomasochism without the distraction of having to represent gender or homosexuality in a story that’s really about something else. Like Clouds, the film’s women interact with the mediating device of a kind of theatre, a script that dictates the narrative of their elaborate erotic fantasy life. The film generates suspense through the ambiguity of what’s scripted and what is, for lack of a better word, genuine. But to reduce The Duke of Burgundy to a story synopsis is to ignore what really animates Strickland’s fecund imagination. The film is rife with beguiling flurries of images of forests, lingerie and butterflies, with sounds of clocks, sighs, heavy heels on wood floors. It’s intoxicating, funny, bizarre, yet totally relatable. Yes, a love story, that evergreen of film types. 

Two Days, One Night

And then the weather turned. Midway through this year’s Toronto International Film Festival the rain came, the movie-interview-bad diet-scheduling nightmare-late party-general hustling regimen led to inevitable exhaustion and, in my case, a head cold. The temperature dropped 20 degrees in two days, but the cold that descended on Toronto and its thousands of cocktail dress-clad women was not enough to freeze out the big, bruised-heartedness of the Dardenne brothers’ Two Days, One Night, which finds Marion Cotillard, the Dardennes’ first movie star, marching doggedly under summer sun across Seraing, Belgium to convince her co-workers at a solar panel factory to give up their bonuses so she can keep her job. Brimming with sentiment yet fundamentally unsentimental, Two Days calls for but does not expect solidarity as it hurtles toward its inspired climax. 

above: Time Out of Mind

below: Heaven Knows What

Some of the underdogs represented at TIFF 2014 trumped Cotillard’s protagonist, who fears her family will be relegated to public housing, by not having housing at all! But while Cotillard-as-working class caused me not a momentary ripple of disbelief, it isn’t easy to get over the notion of Richard Gere as an alcoholic homeless man in Oren Moverman’s Critics’ Prize-winning Time Out of Mind. The hurdle is somewhat mitigated by Moverman’s choice to make virtually every cramped frame of his film a palimpsest of fences, bars, passing cars and other blurred foreground objects obscuring Gere. This shrewdly saturated mise en scène serves to remind of the invisibility of its central character, a non-entity with a hand out. I have all kinds of reservations, but the accrued loneliness of Time Out of Mind clung to me. The Safdie brothers’ Heaven Knows What is Time’s opposite: made with zero stars and little money, it follows a young homeless addict as she traipses New York, attempts suicide, gets high, screams and says “fuck” a lot. Its lead is, or was, a genuine homeless addict and author of the film’s source material. It’s an arresting film that goes nowhere. It feels fully derived from the real, though I’m not sure it gives the real anything back in return.

The Look of Silence

While we’re getting real, let me tell you about the greatest nonfiction film at TIFF, which may be the greatest nonfiction film of 2014, and is certainly part of one of the greatest nonfiction cinema projects of this century. Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence is a companion piece to last year’s The Act of Killing, but where that film explored Indonesia’s legacy of violence by getting intimate with those who did the killing in the anti-communist purges of the 1960s, this new film, an immersive study in reconciliation, fear and forgiveness, focuses on the victims, in particular one man, Adi, whose brother was mutilated and murdered. Adi is an optometrist and pays visits on his neighbours, some of them directly involved in the killing. He tests their eyes as well as their willingness to recognize their own heinous acts. Adi was at the screening I attended. I think the gravity of what he’s done with Oppenheimer must have hit him in a new way while watching the film with an audience of stunned foreigners. He was unable to even speak during the Q&A. This man’s courage is unbelievable moving to me. Oppenheimer’s achievement with these films will be discussed for many years to come.

above: Pasolini

below: Manglehorn

A very different sort of true story gets a curious workout in Abel Ferrera’s gorgeously photographed Pasolini, which stars Willem Dafoe as the late Italian polymath and cinematic provocateur. The film follows Pasolini on the final days of his life, which ended in brutal murder. The film also realizes fragments of two projects Pasolini would have made had he lived, and this aspect of Pasolini is a lot goofier. Maybe not as goofy as the streetdancers or the mime or the Harmony Korine-run massage parlour in David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn, but Manglehorn is supposed to be kinda goofy. Let’s call it a work of goofy beauty, a tale of longing and confusion in old age, featuring a brilliant, endlessly inventive central performance from Al Pacino as a Texan locksmith slipping into dementia. Pacino also slips into dementia and is also brilliant and inventive in Barry Levinson’s The Humbling, but that movie is a goddamned mess and a gross misreading of the Philip Roth source novel.

above: Sand Dollards

below: Goodbye to Language

The Japanese protagonist of Korean comic maestro Hong Sang-soo’s Hill of Freedom spends much of the film reading a book about the nature of time, probably not aware that as he waits to meet an elusive Korean woman he is himself in a strange, wonderful, chronology-defying little movie about the nature of time. Time weights heavily on Geraldine Chaplin in Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas’ excellent Sand Dollars, which finds Chaplin’s wealthy sextagenarian tourist falling perilously in love with a very young and lovely woman in the Dominican Republic. Time can be read and revered in the centuries-old architecture visited and pondered in La Sapienza, French director Eugène Green’s stirring story of remarriage. Lastly, time is chopped up, toyed with, stacked and elongated in Goodbye to Language, the enduringly iconoclastic Jean-Luc Godard’s clipped, playful 3D extravaganza. It was my last screening of TIFF 2014. To my surprise, it seemed every other person I know in Toronto was there and eager to discuss and laugh and decompress afterward, a reminder that for all the pomp, red carpets and tiresome Oscar buzz, film festivals are at their best when they serve to create communities of people who cherish cinema as a shared experience.   

                                    

Living Colours

Liberté, égalité, fraternité. The ideals that constitute the motto of the French Republic are as fraught with practical multiplicity as they are flush with abstract purity. Whether applied to political or personal spheres, the desirability of these ideals, the degree to which we genuinely seek out and uphold them, is mired in second guesses, ambivalences and inexplicable gestures. Do we really want to be free, equal, brotherly?

Devised and scripted by Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski and the Polish writer, lawyer and politician Krzysztof Piesiewicz, the Three Colours Trilogy was the art-house event of the 1990s. It remains one of cinema’s most complete and ambitious directorial statements: emotionally resonant and formally provocative, philosophically rich and unspeakably beautiful, a paragon of collaboration and yet quintessentially auteurist. It uses France’s motto as its conceptual foundation, yet the ways those ideals are explored in Blue (1993), White (1994) and Red (1994) are counterintuitive or obscure. Which is to say, in keeping with human nature, the trilogy’s subject. “All three films are about people who have some sort of intuition or sensibility, who have gut feelings,” Kieślowski once said. They may be more thematic than narrative, but these are stories driven by action, by impulse, not by words or intellect. You won’t watch these films and immediately suss out the characters’ motivations. That’s one of the reasons I find them endlessly watchable. 

The opening sequence of Blue is nearly Hitchockian in its cumulative suspense: a close-up of a tire rumbling along a freeway, another of a metallic blue candy wrapper being held out a car window by a child’s hand, another of an engine cable leaking fluid. We see the child’s face in this sequence, which leads up to an accident, but never those of the adults in the car. When sometime after the accident Julie (Juliette Binoche) wakes in hospital, she’s informed of her husband and child’s death by a doctor who we see exclusively as a reflection in Julie’s eye, a shot whose virtuosity cannot overwhelm its usefulness. It’s a way of developing a bond with Julie that’s somehow both intimate and relegated to the surface—we see via her eye, not through it.   

Morbid though it may be, Blue considers Julie’s double-loss as a platform for freedom. Her husband was a famous composer. Without family obligations or financial concerns, she’s suddenly, truly free. She evades mourning, doesn’t dwell over photos or headstones, leaves her luxurious country estate for a modest apartment in Paris’ rue Mouffetard. She starts over, consoled by solitude and ordinary daily pleasures. But her husband left behind an unfinished piece, a major commission meant to celebrate the unification of Europe. It was long suspected that Julie was heavily involved in her husband’s work, and the piece, fragments of which have been found by a journalist, will be finished with or without her. We hear those fragments, in actuality composed by Kieślowski collaborator Zbigniew Preisner. They are marked by weighty rests, echoing the film’s idiosyncratic fades-to-black, which mark not the passage of time but something like Julie’s internal pauses. But Blue is also characterized by flutters and gradations: light is always dappled, refracted or corrugated, quietly tumultuous. The film ends with an unexpected, extraordinary act of generosity. Perhaps giving something away becomes Julie’s real route to freedom.

Though not much played for laughs, White is structured like an anxious comedy. Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski, star of Kieślowski’s Dekalog 10), a Polish hairdresser, begins the film stranded in Paris with no money, no home, no passport and, worst of all, no wife. The lovely, cruel Dominique (Julie Delpy) divorces him. Her rationale: Karol’s failure to consummate their marriage. Something about this life—emigration? expectations?—has rendered Karol impotent. But he meets a fellow countryman while playing ‘The last Sunday, tomorrow we’ll part,’ an old Polish favourite, on his comb in the Paris metro. The men hatch an absurd plan to get Karol back home, where he reunites with his brother, delves into crime and real estate, starts a successful business in the newly capitalist-friendly Warsaw, saves a man from suicide, fakes his own death, and, little by little, devises an exceedingly elaborate revenge on Dominique. Or is it a reconciliation? Both possible outcomes suggest an interesting reading of the notion of equality. White is goofy, busy, playful, shot through with sex problems and bleakly amusing contrasts between the economic health of European nations, yet its final scene, recalling Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), finds Karol and Dominique separated, confined in their disparate ways, yet communicating through invented signals, and it is perhaps the most eloquent, mysterious and moving single moment in Three Colours.

The most tightly aesthetically controlled film in the trilogy, Red is filled with red things: an awning, a door, a sweater, a Jeep, a bowling ball, even a bowling alley. Red is love, hate, danger. Colour isn’t a special effect in Red but, as in the films of Antonioni or Tarkovsky, it is what’s in front of the camera; it is objects punctured with significance, and Kieślowski places a magpie’s attention to attractive, enigmatic, often luminous things. Attractive, enigmatic and luminous could also describe Valentine (Irène Jacob, star of Kieślowski’s 1991 masterpiece The Double Life of Veronique), a student, dancer and model living in Geneva. An accident involving a pregnant dog leads to an acquaintance with Kern (Jean-Louis Trintignant) a retired judge who has become, in keeping with a number of Kieślowski characters, a chronic voyeur. Fraternity: these two will forge an unusual friendship. Were one of them born either decades earlier or later, they could have made a vibrant couple. Nevertheless, each gains something essential from the other.

Red ends with reports of a ferry’s catastrophic capsizing. There are only seven survivors—six of whom are central characters from the trilogy, two per film. This has been interpreted as coincidence—Kieślowski had an obsession with chance to rival novelist Paul Auster’s—but I prefer to think of it as the reverse: the stories conveyed in Blue, White and Red don’t converge in that ferry accident but rather stem from it. Those six could have been another six and Kieślowski would have told their stories instead. Sadly, Three Colours marked the end of Kieślowski’s story. He announced his retirement from filmmaking after Red and was not to survive another two years. He directed over two-dozen documentaries, a dozen features, and a legendary television series. He died during open-heart surgery at a Polish hospital in 1996. He was 54.