TIFF '10: Life after cinema

Over the course of the picture, Jorge Jellinek loses his job, gets a haircut, abandons his luggage, and impersonates a law professor—and that’s only in the movie’s second half. By the end a sort of transformation has taken place, a change has come over his face, and he seems lighter, like a new man, or at lest trying to be. It’s a wonderful performance, among the finest I’ve seen at the 35th Toronto International Film Festival, one that's unassuming yet rippling with comic grace. Jellinek is just a pleasure to watch. He walks as though trying not to move his torso. Before the haircut he seems to be wearing a wig. Without his nerd-to-the-marrow glasses he could perhaps be Alfred Molina. His character has spent 25 years working at a Montevideo cinematheque, which is now dying. Cracked vinyl covers the seats, each of which Jellinek personally inspects. The key to the vault of reels is secreted away in the DVD case for Ikiru. A donation campaign is underway yet it’s hard to imagine anyone’s pocketbooks being pried open from hearing a flamboyantly dull radio lecture on the finer points of developing one’s knowledge of cinema history—I wish they’d pitch in for no other reason than the promise of a Manoel de Oliveira retrospective. Shot in black and white, in 1.33 aspect ratio, with all it’s credits at the top, Federico Veiroj’s A Useful Life is nostalgically clothed and promises to be an homage to vanishing chambers of cherished cinematic discovery, something along the lines of Goodbye Dragon Inn. As far as that goes, it’s affectionate yet not all that sentimental. It’s actually about something else, and it’s very funny. At one point Jellinek is weeping on a bus when he spots someone looking at him, someone who looks suspiciously like a younger version of himself. That’s the turning point, I think. As Jellinek says in one of his recorded pleas for support, “You are both a witness and a participant…” That goes for life and the movies. I only hope that more people see this movie, in cinematheques, multiplexes, or otherwise. (Oddly enough I saw it at Jackman Hall, the theatre in the Art Gallery of Ontario, which the TIFF cinematheque called home until only a few weeks ago when they moved into their new digs.)

TIFF '09: "To exist clearly, and to do so without thinking about it..." Two films about beautiful and mysterious women

Okay, beautiful, mysterious, and wearing great shoes!

When Manoel de Oliveira’s Belle Toujours began making the rounds a few years ago it was met with a resurgence of interest in the world’s oldest filmmaker. The homage, or rather sequel, to Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour, in which Michel Piccoli revisits his role as Henri Husson, worked as an introduction to Oliveira’s work for an uninitiated generation of filmgoers. But its investment in its source material was at times as slight, or even superficial, as it was basically lovely. The appearance of his latest film, Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl, at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, as well as the Cinematheque Ontario’s upcoming Oliveira program is an encouraging sign that Belle Toujours wasn’t a mere one-off in terms of the 100-year-old auteur’s circulation. This new work, while featuring numerous similarities to Belle—including a framing device that might even be a very subtle homage to Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire—is arguably more indicative of the particularity and breadth of Oliveira’s aesthetic and thematic concerns. It’s also an absolute delight.


A young man begins to recount a tale of personal tumult to a woman on a train, who incidentally may be blind, given that she always seems to be staring blankly off to the side of the young man’s face. He speaks of a beautiful young woman whose figure he first found fondling a flamboyant oriental fan in the upstairs window across the street from his office. There is a seduction, buoyed by a harpist and the recitation of a poem by Pessoa. Somehow the girl responds and encourages him while remaining always distant and mysterious. The young man falls in love, but his uncle and employer won’t give their marriage this blessing, and the young man is without savings of his own. As the story unfolds with Oliveira’s characteristic economy, a great deal of pleasure is to be taken in the simple act of looking, through windows and doorways, through mirrors, at grand vistas of the city under sunlight and shadow. But Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl distrusts appearances just as it celebrates the undeniable pleasure appearances give. The eccentricities turn out to be perilous. And perhaps the woman on the train makes an ideal audience for the young man’s tale, since, if she is blind, she’s less likely to be seduced by the visible.


Equally mysterious to those around her, virtually all of whom adore her, is the titular character of Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, though the film makes her somewhat less so for those of us privy to Pippa’s inner world. Swaying between the present and the past, Miller, adapting her own novel, displays her almost singular gift for crafting portraits of women with secrets, with a quiet yet tremendous capacity for change and adventure, and who can act impulsively, even audaciously or cruelly, without apologies.


The present-tense Pippa is brilliantly portrayed by Robin Wright Penn, who does a remarkable job of containing herself around others while also exposing fragments of her true self for the camera alone. The way director and star collaborate here is a wonder in itself, as is the performance Miller gets out of the top-of-his-game Alan Arkin, here playing Pippa’s much older husband. But the film still suffers somewhat from the neglect of supporting characters—Winona Ryder’s part is a comic shambles, Maria Bello’s is gravely overwrought—and a glib finale that promises freedom without complication. It reaffirms that I’ll happily watch anything Miller does, but I’m still holding out for something from her that takes this refreshing approach to character and pushes it to its fullest extent. Watch for an odd little cameo from Princeton philosopher Cornell West.