TIFF '08: Reeling in the afterglow, with reflections on Che, Mickey Rourke, Hoffman-Kaufman, JCVD and the wiry physique of Ben Kingsley

Lingering in film festival-land during the final days is much like being the last guest at a party after the beautiful people have left, your host has passed out in the backyard, and you’re sifting through the ashtrays from smokeable butts, bleary-eyed, waiting for dawn. The press office closes down, the hotel lobbies are being shampooed, the limo drivers start vacation. I swear I saw a tumbleweed tumble down Bay Street. It seems so desolate now, who’d have guessed only days before I was sharing an elevator with Ben Kingsley—who really is built like a ninja as it turns out.

Yet it was on the very last day of the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival—at which I saw exactly 33 movies—that I finally caught Darren Aranofsky’s The Wrestler, a very hot ticket and the only press and industry screening I couldn't get into for the crowds, the film which a week before enjoyed the coup of winning the Golden Lion at Venice, the very same festival where Aranofsky’s The Fountain was famously booed two years previous. The Wrestler was something of a disappointment though: the narrative, about spandex-clad lord of the ring reaching a very lonesome middle age, was formulaic, the dialogue flat, the visual style shockingly anonymous considering Aranofsky's history of hyper-cuts and histrionics. But Mickey Rourke, with his leathery flesh and damaged beauty, was indeed wonderful, the physical punishment wrought upon him impressively gruesome, and the real reason to see the movie anyway is the milieu under investigation, which yields tremendous riches of human strangeness. And yes, wrestling, it seems, is indeed fixed.

What wasn’t fixed was any pre-set notions of what would be the highlights of TIFF ’08. There weren’t as many new films from high-profile filmmakers, and of those that did arrive, some were less than startling, like the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading or Richard Linklater’s Me & Orson Welles, which was pleasantly corny, while others, like Steven Soderbergh’s four-hour Che, proved difficult for many. I saw Che in two parts, and was at once dazzled and mesmerized, entranced by the obsessive attention to detail. But I noted a quieter, wearier, and smaller audience for the second screening, perhaps because while ‘Part One,’ covering the Cuban revolution, functions as an instruction manual for fighting a successful armed uprising, ‘Part Two,’ covering Che Guevara (Benicio Del Toro, superb) in Bolivia, does it all over again but ends in failure and death. But this is visionary filmmaking. Exhausting? Absolutely—but exhilarating, too, in its intensity of focus. Soderbergh’s a rare artist who makes you truly believe in the continued possibilities of movies.

The turbulence and atrocities of Latin America informed several other TIFF selections, notably Pablo Larrian’s Tony Manero, which follows a 52-year-old Chilean guy weathering the terror of the Pinochet regime by endeavouring to becoming the titular protagonist from Saturday Night Fever. That he wants to be a fictional character is revealing: like something out of a Roberto Bolaño novel, Larrian’s antihero seems to have taken the violence around him as tacit consent to release his own repressed aberrant tendencies, all moral logic eroding under the weight of his absurd fantasy life. It might synopsize like a movie about dreams trumping dictatorship, but this is not the case: Tony Manero is deeply sinister stuff, concerning a very dark passage of recent history.

Gerardo Naranjo’s Voy a explotar is an altogether wilder tale of familial disintegration, class rot and teen rebellion, a very fun homage to Godard about a girl who meets a guy she says is both “invented and real,” a son of a Guanajuato congressman who harbours homicidal fantasies toward al authority figures. Unlike Che or Tony Manero, the film is set in the present and is not especially politicized, though the undercurrent of class difference and the streak of political corruption especially is impressive. The lovers on the run run away from home, only to camp out on the congressman's leaky roof, a delicious testament to the Mexican elite's willful ignorance regarding what goes on right under their own noses. And the public service video the parents watch about how to cope with a runaway child was surely the most entertaining movie within a movie in a festival with a hell of a lot of movies within movies.  

But enough with the Americas—on to Europe! I don’t think I saw anything more elegantly realized than Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums, which follows the delicate negotiations between a father (dashing Denis regular Alex Descas) and his adult daughter, cohabitants in a Paris apartment block. There are two sequences—one set in a trainyard, the other in a bar—built mainly around music and movement, that are sensuous, poetic, pleasingly aligned to the rhythms of everyday life and among the loveliest things I saw this TIFF. Yet much of the film is relatively straightforward, examining the trails of the working underclass and the knotty entanglements of urban life, something evident in both the film’s web of acquaintances and its metaphoric use of the public transit system. There’s also a scene involving a horse that, while so very brief, speaks volumes about the image-power of Denis’ singular cinema.

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys, like last year’s The Man From London, offers something pretty unusual: a modern noir delivered in a highly meditative style. It kind of reminded me of The Reckless Moment, but more overtly bleak and, you know, brooding. Spanish director Albert Serra’s Birdsong follows the three wisemen on their way to greet Jesus, a film comprised mostly of landscapes being traversed which won’t do it for many but does possess a certain velvety, chiaroscuro beauty and bone-dry humour. Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky is a nearly sublime character study, with the relentlessly cheerful Poppy (Sally Hawkins, terrific) encountering numerous fellow Londoners who challenge her to consider the hidden consequences of her flamboyant optimism. Mabrouk El Mechri’s majorly meta JCVD blurs the real and fictional Jean-Claude Van Damme as he’s held hostage in a Belgian bank heist, suffers tax problems and a child custody suit. He delivers this fucking crazy, half-coherent monologue that recalls Brando’s in Last Tango in Paris. I don’t think Mechri can cash all of the cheques he writes in this thing—It’s a comedy! It’s an action movie! It’s a Charlie Kaufman movie!—but it’s pretty fun.

Speaking of Charlie Kaufman, I assume I'm not alone among Kaufman sympathizers in feeling I should probably see Synecdoche, NY again before I pursue any elaborate commentary. It's overwhelming,truly bizarre, and defies a glib summation. The film is certainly something you have to admire even when it's grinding you down. In fact, it's actually quite an amazing piece of work, singular in its aggrandizement of self pity, sprawling in its way, with Philip Seymour Hoffman's Kaufman stand-in suffering, often terribly amusingly so, through a life of misery, illness, disappointment and isolation, with only his never-ending play-in-progress, a colossal work of theatre that simulates Hoffman-Kaufman's sad life, as some sort of soul balm. I was perplexed; I was touched; I was entertained; I was bored; I was bummed; I was drained; but I want to see it all again. 

Like father, like son, like, could these two just get it over with and hug already?

Based on the poet Blake Morrison’s memoir of (nearly) the same name, When Did You Last See Your Father? should at least get a few extra points for never once in its duration leading us to believe it to be anything other than exactly what it is: a middlebrow tearjerker positively hell bent on getting two grown men to hug. Two Englishmen, no less. But what the hell. Hugging men aren’t so bad, you know, and most fathers that I’ve ever known really are this difficult to connect with, and, perhaps most importantly, with actors as strong as these it’s actually kind of a pleasure to be so shamelessly manipulated.

Alternating between a present-tense narrative that finds the 40ish Blake grappling with his father Arthur’s rapidly approaching death and flashbacks that show the child Blake struggling with Arthur’s always chipper verbal abuse (his nickname for his son is “fat head”), general neglect, barely concealed philandering, unnerving cheapness and baldly ingratiating ways, David Nicholls’ script works toward its catharsis through the steady building of Blake’s conflicting urges toward keeping a well-earned grudge and reconciling with an old man that everyone else seems to have been able to forgive. I haven’t read Morrison’s book, but it seems like Nicholls made some pretty sound selections of episodes to flesh out here, like the disastrous father-son camping trip that functions as a string of small betrayals while providing for a great deal of humour and character development. We learn enough about each of these guys over the course of the film to appreciate both of their perspectives regardless of how much we can sympathize with them.

Colin Firth and Jim Broadbent are in reality only 11-years apart, but Firth’s seething anger and general vitality set against Broadbent’s jowly expressiveness and decidedly old-fashioned charms go a long way toward forming a convincing generation gap. In fact they make a wonderful pair, one over-sensitive, the other gleefully oblivious, the both of them strikingly capable of casual cruelties. Broadbent kind of steals the show, making all the jokes and recklessly driving the scenes toward their necessary confrontations, but I found myself admiring Firth all the more for holding his own in spite of this. When Did You Last See Your Father? could have been deadly were some simpering, overbearingly earnest actor cast as Blake, but Firth makes no great show of his character’s resentment or self-assignation as the story’s token victim. His natural warmth makes for a lovely balance with Blake’s maturation into a sexual bully with a short fuse, a son who, however determined to do otherwise, is in danger of repeating his father’s worst mistakes, only without the fun.

If only director Anand Tucker (Hilary & Jackie) had the same light touch. His direction is fussy, suffocatingly tasteful, overly cutty and burdened with some creaky visual metaphors, especially his use of mirrors to impart the deeper similarities between father and son. I have to give Tucker credit however for not lingering over Arthur’s deathbed to soak up every last drop of pathos, something plenty of other directors would have leapt at the chance to do. The real guilty party with regards to bathetic overkill would have to be composer Barrington Pheloung, a Tucker regular, whose godawful score rushes ahead of the imagery, the actors, and us, to telegraph every last emotional cue in the film. The result is, of course, the reverse of what is presumably intended: we can’t actually feel as much because the music is too busy telling us what to feel instead of letting us find it. You might want to just sit back and pretend the music’s coming from the sound system of some annoying neighbour, and enjoy watching Firth, Broadbent, et al make the discoveries on their own.

TIFF '08: Kuroawa, Assayas, Kore-eda and others keep it all in the family

John Cale lives in a hippy commune in Patagonia. That’s really all I needed to know. A friend suggested I see Salamandra and, knowing full well of my special fondness for Cale and the Velvet Underground, he started his hard sell with the above item and I told him just to stop there. Cale’s brief, rather crazed appearances—chomping into glass, toying with a knife, singing in Spanish with a junkyard band, replete with a ragged chicken bone for percussion—comprise several of the highlights in Pablo Agüero’s feature debut, which follows a young single mother, freshly released from some sort of institution, as she uproots her six-year-old son from his established life with his grandmother and whisks him down to El Bolsón to live amongst the unwashed, the heavily bearded and the incense-drunk.

Agüero errs on the side of unimposing, his observational hand-held camera seeming to will precious little into action, counting on our connection to the protagonists, the boy in particular, and the rising absurdity of their deeply dubious attempts at roughing it in this cold, wet and largely unfriendly place to engage the viewer. The images frequently yield layers of metaphor, and the technique overall works well enough, though it’s difficult not to wonder if things couldn’t be pushed a lot farther, if the real hard work still to be done by Agüero wouldn’t involve driving his nervy, New-Agey, curly-haired mom past the point of mere constant nail-biting and deluded nattering. Still, an interesting, and certainly very sensitive picture that offers a glimpse at a most marginal life.

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” so goes the famous opening sentence of Anna Karenina. Salamandra is just one of many films showing at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival that deal in some compelling manner with the grand old theme of family life, a theme that when applied to drama hardly requires the word ‘dysfunctional’ to be placed before it. Happy or unhappy, TIFF ’08 sees a number of families struggle to realize some fresh level of self-knowledge both for its parts and as a whole. And I think the finest—and funniest—example of this that I’ve managed to see came from one of the festival’s most pleasant surprises, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata.

Kurosawa is most famous for his distinctively brooding and image-centered horror films, such as Cure (1997), Charisma (00), Pulse (01), and my personal favourite, the über-creepy Séance (01). As far as I’m aware, Tokyo Sonata marks Kurosawa’s first stab at comedy, and I have to wonder if it isn’t in fact his real calling. His horror films are smart, infectious and remarkably chilling, but they can also be overly ponderous and, in the case of Pulse in particular, simply over-long and limpid. It’s difficult to describe just what a refreshing about-face this new film signals without simply seeing it for yourself. Yet it occurs to me that the film does actually have something in common with Cure: where the characters in the older film are afflicted with a disease that drives them to kill, the protagonists in this new film seem to be afflicted with one that makes them crazy to start their lives over—even the little kid.

The downsizing of Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa), the result of his company’s outsourcing to cheaper China, is the catalyst. He goes home that night and begins the familiar charade, not telling his wife and children what’s happened and instead putting on the suit and pretending to go to work everyday. He mostly hangs out at the library and eats his lunch with the homeless. He meets another unemployed businessman who goes so far as to set his phone to ring every hour so can feign business calls in public—even though there’s usually no one around he could possible need to impress. It sounds pathetic, yet it actually impresses Ryuhei deeply. Ryuhei spends most of the movie looking like his head’s about to blow up, and I guess he can’t help but admire the other man’s mood-management.

We soon see that all three male members of the Sasaki clan are deceiving the family for their individual reasons, the quiet 12-year-old Kenji (Kai Inowaki) being the most sympathetic. When he’s suddenly struck one day by the lulling sounds emanating from a suburban piano class, Kenji asks his parents if he can take lessons and is brutishly denied by his newly emasculated dad, so he goes in secret, using his lunch money to pay. Meanwhile his remote older brother is secretly joining the US military just as they decide to send more troops to Iraq, and his over-burdened and under-loved mother is slowly descending into quiet desperation, nearing bottom and its accompanying implosion.

There are characteristically elegant, beautifully composed sequences here, such as the opening, in which papers blow through the empty house during a storm, or the moving finale, which manifests the title as something more than just an homage to Ozu’s classic. But much of Tokyo Sonata is sharply focused on clear, concise storytelling, terrifically goofy comic interplay, and steady character development, each strand of the narrative building to the point where there is a synchronicity of panic boiling over. It goes on for a while, but is never less than diverting and propulsive. There are moments of utter cruelty and hopelessness, yet Kurosawa somehow pulls things together in such a way that the film finally finds itself lighting upon a coda of redemption and new awakening.

If Ozu can be traced in the title and broad themes of Tokyo Sonata, from the intermediary landscape shots on down, he’s positively haunting virtually every aspect of Still Walking, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest, a heartfelt, often solemn, but still vivid, sensual, lovingly detailed and warm depiction of familial differences amongst adult children and their elderly parents, most of them irreconcilable. Centered quite simply around a family reunion, this is the sort of movie where no viewer can fail to recognize some fragment of their personal experiences. Kore-eda’s film was inspired by stories he was told by his own mother in the months before she died, and his story is very much informed by the absence of a key family member.

This same sort of near-palpable absence is equally essential to Oliver Assayas’ Summer Hours, which finds three adult and nearly estranged siblings—played by the impressive trio of Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling and Jérémie Renier—negotiating their way through what seems an inevitable complete break with the past after the death of their mother, wonderfully played by Edith Scob, the striking actress who many years ago starred as the titular victim of Eyes Without a Face (60). Marred only by a few unneeded scenes of bathetic weeping, Assayas’ survey of the increasingly rapid erosion of artifacts that bind us to our families and our collective history is at times positively biting and all-too resonant. But the film is also brimming with humour and, with its special, loving attention to its younger supporting characters, is equally invested in nurturing a sense of regeneration.

Okay, one last film before I sign off here, and one which brings us back full circle to Latin America. Dioses is Josué Méndez’s second feature, and reveals a genuinely propositive sense of camera placement and movement. Concerning an upper-class Peruvian family that includes a father, a teenage daughter and son, and the father’s new girlfriend—a dead ringer for Halle Berry, should that grad your attention—Méndez takes a series of more or less conventional dilemmas—a party girl with an unwanted pregnancy; an angry young man sick with his sinking into bourgeois rot and in love with his sister; a gold-digger painfully ashamed of her indigenous background—and frames them in such a way that we’re often able to re-examine our assumptions. Ménez has a knack with these slow zooms out and back in he uses, his juxtaposing of music and image in seemingly contradictory ways, and his fun game of having characters move in and out of frame from unexpected places.

The way Méndez conveys Diego’s inner anguish in particular is frequently tender, perverse and hilarious all at once, cutting to Diego’s amusing permanent scowl at inspired moments. The treatment of Eliza on the other hand can feel trite, especially in the very cutty scene that finds her rehearsing inane comments to make when around her new coven of snobby middle-ages wives, but the performance of Maricielo Effio, which shifts in subtle ways, goes a long way to gaining our sympathies. She’s the bridge between the worlds of wealth and poverty in Peru that Méndez seems very keen on imparting upon us, though the handful of scenes with the servants are some of the most telling of all. These women, always present and rarely visible, are in their way members of the family themselves, interlopers into a realm of elitism that, as its portrayed here, seems on the brisk of collapse under its own dead weight.

Righteous Kill: cop buddies bugger the better sex subplot

Righteous Kill was written by Russell Gewirtz, the same guy who wrote Inside Man. Like the earlier movie, this serial killer thriller and rabidly macho buddy cop caper bristles with conflicted ambitions toward making something that’s both smart and base, a genre work for the sleaze hungry and the beard-strokers alike. It’s a tough gambit, especially without a director of Spike Lee’s shrewd audacity and style to help pull it off, but I’m actually impressed how relatively well it works, even if it all inevitably evaporates under the heat of its own sketchy conceit.

From the start we’re encouraged to see verge-of-retirement hard-ass homicide detectives Cowan (Robert De Niro) and Fisk (Al Pacino) as platonic lovers of unyielding fidelity. They literally shoot their loads side by each at the firing range, cheer each other on during cop baseball games, sing each other’s praises to anyone who’ll listen, even parrot each other’s deflective one-liners when separately grilled by the NYPD shrink. When early on the corny looking faux-CCTV video footage of Cowan confessing to going on an extended vigilante killing spree begins its piecemeal interjections into the drama proper we know that these old pals will follow each other to the precipice of destruction. It’s only a question of whether one will follow the other right over the edge.

The economy of characters in Gewirtz’s script is itself a source of dynamicism, keeping his leads surrounded by numerous closely-watching potential adversaries nearly all of the time: the younger detectives Riley (Donnie Wahlberg) and Perez (John Leguizamo), who begin to suspect that the “poetry killer” of various local scumbags must be a cop; the amiable but stern Lieutenant Hingus (Brain Dennehy, a highly welcome face, and one that’s aged into an uncannily resemblance to Milan Kundera), who has a good poker face but seems all too aware he’s got a loose cannon on his hands; and crime scene investigator Karen (Carla Gugino, a highly welcome everything), a girl who likes her sex extremely rough and is currently being obliged by Cowan, their proximity giving her access to his private life if not quite his inner life.

Director Jon Avnet, whose long resume includes jobs as, um, diverse as Fried Green Tomatoes and 88 Minutes, gets down to the grunt work from the get-go, keeping the camera whizzing around and the cuts a-flying like Tony Scott on auto-pilot. He’s hardly the most sensitive filmmaker, but he keeps things moving—whether they want to move or not. With this fidgety style, he can’t quite perform the subtle slight-of-hand Gewirtz’s script is crying out for, and to be fair I’m not sure anyone could. The big reversal is telegraphed pretty far in advance and once you catch on to what’s really happening in Righteous Kill you may or may not want to bother sticking with it—the movie slowly becomes about the clever reversal itself instead of the meatier themes of loyalty and justice it lays claims to.

More disappointing for me is the neglect of the Karen character. The most interesting thing in The Score was Robert De Niro’s girlfriend, played by the sorrowfully underused Angela Bassett. Likewise, the most interesting thing in Righteous Kill is easily De Niro’s relationship with Gugino, an enormously delicate negotiation of trust, sex and maybe, just maybe, love, or something like it. Gugino brings tremendous texture, sass and dignity to a character that, far from being a conventional love interest, could have been difficult or impossible for the audience to identify with. This being De Niro’s movie, it’s just as important that her character has the potential to tell us a lot about Cowan. It’s a shame then that her Karen gets more or less brushed aside as the film hurtles toward its big, sloppy, scenery-chewing climax.

Counter Intelligence: Burn After Reading probes deep into dumbness

Book-ended with zooms in and out of Washington from outer space and scenes in windowless rooms and hallways somewhere deep within CIA headquarters full of essentially hapless, incoherent, bumbling government employees casually making life and death decisions, Burn After Reading isn’t exactly what you might call satire. The ostentatious placement of the nest of American intelligence in what’s made to feel here like the centre of the universe might give us reason to panic if writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen were very interested in learning something about how the CIA works, or even had anything to say about it, however broadly critical. But this isn’t that sort of movie, which may be all for the best. What we get instead is the Coens at their most disposable and slaphappy, a characteristic jumble of wacky characters, reversals, and milieus as you’d likely find in any feature film.

Like so much of what we encounter in Burn After Reading, Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) feels like a creature of urban myth, the embodiment of a tabloid headline: LONELY SUBURBAN TRAINER SELL GOV’T SECRETS TO FUND NEW BODY, FACE. The lynchpin of this gleefully labyrinthine narrative, Linda’s failed attempts to cover her multi-tiered cosmetic surgery by credit card overdraft alone promises to be redeemed when her co-worker Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) takes it upon himself to blackmail a recently fired CIA Balkans expert named Ozzie Cox (John Malkovich) after a disc containing what’s either Cox’s memoirs or financial data or both is accidentally left behind in Hardboides, the gym where Linda and Chad work and work out, a locale doubtlessly named in honour of the 1984 “sexy comedy.”

There’s actually some sexy comedy, or at least sex-related comedy, to be found in Burn After Reading as well, what with the twitchy, ever-smiling US Marshall and semi-discreet pussyhound Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) banging both Cox’s humourless doctor wife (Tilda Swinton) and, eventually, Linda. Though he’s shooting his load left and right, he proudly declares more than once in the film that he’s never had to fire his weapon even once in over 20 years of service, an ominous detail made more ominous by other little details fussed over by the Coens, like the painting of a rifle hanging from the bathroom wall beside Harry as he fusses over his beard in the mirror. We are, naturally, just waiting for that gun to go off, and when it does things quickly turn—as they often do in Coen Brothers movie—from silly and perplexing to morbid and perverse.

You could say that Clooney’s gotten a bit of a raw deal with the Coens, starring in O Brother Where Art Thou?, Intolerable Cruelty and now this, not a one of them being amongst the finest films in the brothers’ prolific body of work. But Clooney’s uncanny knack for stylized comedy isn’t often utilized elsewhere, and hey, at least Burn After Reading is better than The Ladykillers. And as shallow as Harry is, at least he gives Clooney some diverting business to attend to—not a claim you could make about Ozzie, who only lets Malkovich, looking eerily rubbery and gray, blow a major gasket in scene after scene, or Chad, a character that’s largely about synthetic mock-necks, frosted tips and forwarding the plot in any way possible and probably not very well cast, though Pitt for all his limitations looks like he’s having some fun, especially when rocking the treadmill. McDormand, for her part, seems to always come closest to striking the best balance between emotional realism and utter mania.

But perhaps the bigger concern here is whether or not the Coens were even sure they were making a comedy. You could argue that several of the Coens’ movies are genre hybrids—though not as many as you’d think—but the problem isn’t whether or not we can identify the genre but whether or not we feel as though we should bother investing any feelings in the characters. For all the hi-jinx, the air of paranoia and intrigue peppered throughout the film—and soaking Carter Burwell’s deliberately boilerplate score—compels us to try and generate some deeper interest in Linda, Chad, Ozzie and Harry, or at least their high-stake plights, as does the numerous subplots of romance and longing, such as that between Linda and her lovestruck boss (Richard Jenkins). But whatever emotions are built up in the film’s first two-thirds make the abrupt, goof-off ending feel that much more like a slap in face for even caring. My advice would be not to bother caring, but still see the movie. It’s pretty slight, adds up to very little, but nonetheless features enough inspired non-sequiters to entertain.

The Moviegoer: Walker Percy's great novel blurs, complicates and poeticizes the American dream life

Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, first published in 1961 and set in New Orleans, begins with protagonist Binx Bolling visiting his aunt. She gives him some bad news, and his internal response to this is conveyed to us, unencumbered by what would seem to be required exposition, through his first-person narration:

“She squeezed me tighter than ever. ‘Scotty is dead. Now it’s up to you. It’s going to be difficult for you but I know you’re going to act like a soldier.’ This was true. I could easily act like a solider. Was that all I had to do?

“It reminds me of a movie I saw last month out by Lake Pontchartrain…”

No information about who Scotty even is gets in the way of this, and the description of the experience of going to the movie near Lake Pontchartrain is much longer and more evocative—more important—than Binx’s grave meeting with the family member to which he’s closest. The unnamed movie is about an amnesiac who loses his whole life as it once was, but then starts a new one which actually seems pretty good. But Binx is just as interested in recalling his conversation with the proprietor of the cinema afterwards, because Binx, avid moviegoer that he is, cannot even enter a theatre until he knows something about the theatre itself or the people who operate it. Like a guy who can’t eat in a restaurant until he’s shook hands with the cooks, his experience of the movies is obsessively holistic, not a plunge into the fictive world on screen but a sought-after sense of awareness that can only be summoned up by taking in both the movie and his place within it as viewer:

“…it was here in Tivoli that I first discovered place and time, tasted it like okra. It was during a rerelease of Red River a couple of years ago that I became aware of the first faint stirrings of curiosity about the particular seat I sat in, the lady in the ticket booth… As Montgomery Clift was whipping John Wayne in a fist fight, an absurd scene, I made a mark on my seat arm with my thumbnail. Where, I wondered, will this particular piece of wood be twenty years from now, 543 years from now?”

There’s another fascinating moment where Binx describes going to a screening of Panic in the Streets, which was filmed on location in New Orleans, and recognizing the very street outside the theatre on screen. This experience grants Binx’s home place a sense of “certification.” By seeing a movie which shows his neighbourhood, it becomes possible “to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.”

I’d first heard of The Moviegoer while reading The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer’s wonderfully associative book about photography published just a few years ago. Dyer proposes that Binx sees the world, specifically its objects, as though through William Eggleston’s camera, citing a moment in The Moviegoer where Binx is getting dressed one morning and is arrested by a sudden awareness of the objects he’s placing in his pockets. As a Southerner approaching his 30th birthday, a man whose sole talent, by his own admittance, is making money—or as he puts it, “selling mutual funds to widows and dagos”—a man who even when speaking to the reader in this private, interior voice, describes himself, rather hilariously, as someone deeply pleased by acts of perfect conformity, Binx’s sole access to his soul’s true yearnings arises only from such moments as the ones in the theatre in Tivoli or when he fills his pockets with items, moments during which some hidden light is cast upon the mundane, filling it with some glowing presence. These moments, he tells us, remind him of something he calls “the search,” something that first struck him when he was injured years ago somewhere in “the Orient,” something which “anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.” An everydayness Binx, in his schizophrenic manner, is carefully cultivating.

This tension between perfecting conformity and feeling the grip of “the search” reminded me not of a movie but of another book… about movies. James Harvey’s Movie Love in the Fifties, a somewhat loghorrretic but in many ways deeply satisfying study of precisely what the title implies, draws us into the psychology of the postwar American dream life, where the props of reality took on more cinematic qualities. He describes military training in the 50s this way:
“…the traditional sort of ‘war games’ they put us through in basic training, with gas masks and bayonets and live ammo going off just above our heads, felt like some historical re-enactment, as unreal as playing cowboys and Indians again…”

Harvey zeroes in on the strange dialogue between the faux-optimism of postwar ideology and the movies, American movies, the ostensible propagandic vehicles of this ideology.

Binx, presumably, given this un-articulated experience in “the Orient,” has actually been a solider, yet it’s revealing that he reassures us that for his aunt he can “act like a soldier.” Did the movies teach him how? I finally got around to reading The Moviegoer this past week because I thought it would be a good thing to read while in the thick of the Toronto International Film Festival, where I annually immerse myself in what is surely an unhealthy deluge of movies. It’s interesting, then, to find Percy’s book, so exacting in its invoking of sense of place—far ahead of the academic study of the phenomena—is very much about the way that movies are not just escapism, nor, obviously, just a source of knowledge and understanding of self and the world, but are somehow both at once. There are moments in the novel when Binx makes it sound like he goes to the movies to idle away the hours between work, dating his secretaries or socializing pleasantly with his family. Yet it seems that the movies in their subliminal way are cumulatively conspiring against such pacification—they are thrusting him back into “the search.” And for this reason, The Moviegoer may just be required reading for all of us addicted to the hovering rectangle of light.

Written on the body: the generous frankness, smoky pensiveness and silent articulation of Jacques Nolot's Before I Forget

A curious thing about Jacques Nolot’s Before I Forget (Avant que j'oublie): the title implies urgency, yet the film, now on DVD from Strand Releasing, is anything but. The writer/director/actor’s presence throughout seems to be perpetually fixed upon a point of pause, of consideration, we suppose, a cigarette burning away between his fingers like some substitute hourglass to mark time, his largely immobile face betraying no inner call to action. He says at one point that he wants nothing, which doesn’t entirely ring true, but the calming of desire, or at least its complication by age, illness and the small rewards of reflection, certainly appears to have marked this character in some irreversible way. Right up until the final moments, even when he’s radically altered his appearance, his capacity to linger is tremendous.

But then exactly what sort of task is it that Nolot’s Pierre—another variation on the other Pierres Nolot has portrayed in his previous three films, Manège (1986), Hinterland (98) and Porn Theatre (02)—needs to perform in advance of memory’s erosion? With his emotions rarely manifesting in any flamboyant or dramatic manner, what do we really know of the inner life of this guy?

We know he’s around 60, and his health is so-so. He takes pills that he says interfere with his ability to orgasm, and an early scene follows him as he wakes in the dead of night to be sick. We learn later that he’s been HIV-positive for more than 20 years. He makes a habit of hiring young men for sex. In his very particular deadpan, he tells a cop through his building’s intercom system that his lover has left him and that he’s very sad. He bears an exceedingly French moustache that he says he wouldn’t dare shave off, a sign of vanity, or at least a stubbornness about his image, that can be gauged against the sobering effects of time on his body, which we see naked—naked in a way that bodies rarely are in movies—for prolonged periods, especially the pronounced paunch he cloaks with baggy suits. He visits a few friends, other gay men of a certain age, with similarly lonely lives, and he visits a shrink, speaking frankly to all of them. He keeps his dead father’s barbershop in a corner of his Paris apartment. He spends a great deal of time at his desk, trying to write, but distracted by the past. An old lover of his is dying, and he’s to inherit money.

We witness Pierre frequently in moments of monetary transaction. Well, we witness Pierre paying others to be more precise: the young hustlers, the shrink, the cashier at the grocery we see him visit in a striking sequence that cuts between his grocery shopping with the auctioning off of his old lover’s valuable art collection. He lives modestly, yet there is a special emphasis in this rigorously observational, unobtrusive movie on the funds he expends. The diminishing savings, the diminishing desires, the body in quiet, gradual decline: as things fall apart, Before I Forget makes no effort to wring the situation for high emotions of any kind, yet it presents a visually rich, meditative, narratively loose but strangely cohesive experience. It’s about the tasks that fill up a person’s days, and the weight that some of the simplest tasks assume when we take a moment to stop and really see them.

So eventually, those mysterious things, the ones that Pierre is trying to do something with before they’re forgotten, feel like the accumulation of ordinary—or, well, ordinary for some of us anyway—things that define a life as much as the prized memories of outstanding events. All of it falls under the scrutiny of Pierre’s pen. And it’s as though the real testimony winds up being not the things Pierre writes but those that Nolot allows us to see unfold. There is an awful lot of talk about the past here, but the way the past is reconsidered is very much a present tense drama. Nolot is living it for us onscreen, doing as little as possible, which is to say exactly what it needed and nothing more. It’s a full, generous performance because it’s so un-forced, and because the camera is likewise so steady and unwavering. Many great filmmakers over the years have used the real, unbroken passage of time in interesting ways that usually heighten our corporeal experience of movie-watching, but Nolot’s use of it here is to shed light on the corporeal experience his own body is undertaking, a body that has so much memory written right there on its surface for us to see.

Fear and Loathing made wistful: Gibney's Gonzo a timid tribute to Thompson (the gentleman ordering up a round of vodka, eight-balls and ammo below)

It would clearly be unwise to expect a gonzo approach to a documentary about the daddy of gonzo journalism. Applying such flights of rambling conjecture, digression, lamentation and outright hallucination as were the benchmarks of Hunter S. Thompson’s distinctive prose to most non-fiction movies of any kind would be inadvisable—unless perhaps they were supplied by Thompson himself. Alas, Thompson’s been dead these three years, and his best work was a good three decades behind him in any case.

But you still have to wonder if the good doctor, a counterculture hero, a lefty with right wing tastes who once represented the very best spirit of Rolling Stone, a container of more drugs than Keith Richards, and author of such iconoclastic works of oddly eloquent political commentary as Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, doesn’t deserve a portrait more provocative, or at least more questioning in spirit than the one delivered by Alex Gibney, director of Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Gibney’s Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson may have no lack of great anecdotes and archival material to feed upon, not to mention a head-spinning array of new interviews with ex-wives and ex-US Presidents, but the liveliness of the subject matter and commentary it inspires can’t quite make up for what’s basically a safe, conventional delivery.

“He was my friend. He never paid his rent, broke up my marriage, and taught my children to smoke pot.” Now, if that’s not a tribute… It comes from Thomson’s neighbour and landlord, and it does, for the record, come with a nostalgic smile. Those who knew and loved Thompson tend to feel conflicted about the style of both Thompson’s life and his death, which came from the barrel of one of the author’s many guns one night in his kitchen in 2005, while his family relaxed in the next room. He always said he’d do it that way, and no one seemed too shocked, but it made you question the relationship between bravado and cowardice, an intersection lorded over by Hemingway. “We need his voice now more and than ever,” is something said several times in Gonzo, yet not as many times as admittances that the guy was on auto-pilot for ages, isolated, paranoid, all-too akin to his caricature in the Doonesbury comics, and getting drunk with the likes of Pat Buchanan for god's sake. As Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner puts it, in the end Thompson was “hostage to his own persona.”

Gonzo focuses, naturally, on the good years, the 60s and 70s, when like everybody Thompson went off his rocker and yet actually had some hope. He was handsome, daring, gainfully employed and listened to. He even advocated presidential candidates, invented drugs for their opponents to be addicted to, and ran for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado. He legitimized fringe sensibilities in political discourse. But Gibney frames it all like a greatest hits package, replete with predictable, hokey-jokey use of period pop songs and insertions of deeply mannered readings of Thompson’s work by Johnny Depp, who for all his warm intentions just does not get the ribald tone at all.

Ascension, nostalgia, illusion and transcendence: Eclipse offers a pair of remarkable films from the forgotten Soviet era master Larisa Shepitko

Larisa Shepitko was born in 1939 in the Ukrainian city of Artemovsk. She attended the Moscow Film School and studied under the great Alexandr Dovzhenko, director of Arsenal (1928) and Earth (30), but being an all-too-apt pupil, and part of what would prove an iconoclastic generation of Soviet filmmakers, she would not uphold or even reconfigure the traditions of her mentor so much as follow his example as an innovator and exacting aesthete, developing an utterly distinctive voice, one that would seek poetic methods of externalizing internal, individual transformations rather than, in accordance with official Soviet ideology, speak for the glory of a people.

Wings (66), one of two films in Eclipse’s new no-frills Shepitko box, begins with an image of pedestrians moving in several directions on a village street. This image of public life, at first inexplicably strange, seemingly slightly distorted, somehow alienating, is revealed as something literally separate from the quiet, tidy world we’re entering when a figure suddenly enters the frame and moves toward us, the camera tracking backwards to show that the crowds are on the opposite side of a window from him. The figure is a bespectacled, anonymous tailor, unimportant to the rest of our story, but his duty in this first scene in emblematic: he’s measuring Nadezhda Petrukhina (Maya Bulgakova) for her power suit.

A decorated World War II fighter pilot, Nadezhda is being costumed for her new role as director of a provincial trade school, her severe new threads rendering her androgynous and angular. The job is intended as a reward for her heroism yet it quickly finds her uncomfortably trying to fit into the role of an authority figure over a generation for whom her past means little. The sense of falseness associated with her position is echoed throughout Wings with several theatrical or illusory scenes in which key elements disconnect: a soundless speech on a TV; firemen apparently running toward but in fact only running through a drill; two middle-aged women in an empty café reminiscing for their lost youth over beer and plates of meat, who begin to sing and waltz together, until it is revealed that a crowd of men with arched brows are observing from just outside the café windows, and the women embarrassedly separate and smooth out their clothing. So much of this place Nadezhda inhabits seems to exist as simulation.

Nadezhda will frequently be seen attempting, with barely contained desperation, to strike a tone of merriment amongst her colleagues, family and townsfolk, but one of the only scenes in which she seems to truly feel herself is one where she’s essentially alone. She stands in the street as it begins to rain and the other villagers all run for shelter. She gazes toward the newly vacant horizon and her point-of-view seems to lift off, taking her into the dampened sky and into an episode of helpless nostalgia for the days when she flew fighter planes and was so in love with a fellow pilot whose death she witnessed from her own cockpit. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking scene, emotionally matched only by the film’s finale, where an act of panicked escape becomes something transcendent.

These themes of transcendence and flight are inherit in the very title of the other film in Eclipse’s Shepitko box, The Ascent (76), set in 1942 Belarus, where starved and weary Soviet partisans are on the run from Nazi invaders, in a landscape so seized by winter that only the barren, inky, crooked foliage breaks up the grey-whiteness that’s seemingly melded earth and sky. The film follows two of the partisans eventually captured by the Nazis, Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) and Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin), sent out to forage for food. Sotnikov, who already seems the physically weaker of the pair, is badly injured, yet as their plight worsens and they, along with three other locals, are set to be executed, Sotnikov unearths some immense inner resolve, devises a plan to become a sort of martyr, and little by little seems to glow, becoming increasingly beatific as he nears his own death.

The Ascent is a very grim film that does not flatter human nature, but it is inspiring in its lyricism, strange development of tension and paradoxical equation of escape with surrender. Music is seldom used, but when it is it makes for eloquent, nearly dream-like passages. The almost hallucinatory, not to mention Christian mystical tone that envelops the story as Sotnikov’s face takes on a more iconic light in Shepitko's consistently remarkably close-ups, aligns it to the contemporary work of Tarkovsky, films like Andrei Rublev (69) and Solaris (72), as does the use of Tarkovsky regular Anatoli Solonitsyn, appearing here in the very enigmatic role of a Russian interrogator working for the Nazis.

Shepitko would doubtlessly have gone on to further establish herself as among the greatest filmmakers of the late Soviet era and beyond, but sadly, The Ascent would be her last film. She was killed in 1979 along with four of her collaborators while scouting locations for her next project Farewell to Matyora. The film was later completed by Elem Klimov, her husband, the director of another masterful war film, Come and See (85).

The atrocity exhibition: Standard Operating Procedure finds Errol Morris immersed in the labyrinth of awful images

With its unprecedented access to key participants in the crimes committed against Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, its multitude of images of violence and humiliation both real and staged, and, maybe most of all, its prodding of one hell of an ugly scar on America’s visage, Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, first released last spring, hasn’t proved to be the feel good movie of the year. It is however among the most vital: confrontational, grotesque, divisive, fascinating, smart, beautifully crafted and—here’s the catch—more generative of questions than answers.

Elegiacally scored by Danny Elfman and vividly shot by Robert Chappell and frequent Scorsese collaborator Robert Richardson, S.O.P. alternates between the wide view and the uncomfortably intimate, between the familiar evidence and the unseen, sometimes contradictory details, between the state and the individual, with all roads leading back to a handful of hours a few years ago during which some largely un-remembered men were at the mercy of a handful of US officers taking the objectification of the ostensible enemy to a diabolically juvenile extreme. I can’t quite believe it, but I actually went to see Morris’ “non-fiction horror film” twice in a single week when it had its Canadian premiere at Hot Docs. Yet I still feel there is much to learn from it.

The case file opens with letters sent home to a spouse, speaking fearfully about the escalation of aberrant behaviour at the prison, about the poker face required to go along with things. These letters are from Sabrina Harman, the “thumbs-up” girl, whose pixie-smiling poker face graces a great many of the most appalling images. Soon after we begin to hear of a romance from one of Sabrina’s colleagues, who talks about how love makes you blind, especially when you’re only 20, a woman in this man’s army, and the man you’re in love with is a charismatic superior. This testimony comes from Lynndie England, that slight, demonic-looking girl holding a leash, a hooded, beaten prisoner on the other end of it. If she’s not one of the real culprits, than who is?

It is expected that political documentaries utilize journalistic sources in building their visual narrative, and there is some of that here, but S.O.P. is a movie about snapshots, hundreds of them, taken by numerous cameras, mostly by those who would gain the least from their existence: the criminals. In S.O.P. no single image remains trustworthy—what we don’t see often contradicts our assumptions about what we do—but there is embedded in this project a hunch that some sort of truth might be found in the collected photos as a whole.

While Morris, who finally won an Oscar for The Fog of War a few years back, is certainly among the world’s most prominent documentary filmmakers, his characteristic mise en scène—the lovingly aestheticized reenactments, the talking heads which seem less interrogated than given an open mic, the highly selective inclusion and paced delivery of context—continues to be debated for its moral scrutiny. It is of course these very aspects of Morris’ work, both the approach and the debates it incites, that make his work so deeply engaging. Filmmakers like Werner Herzog may push journalistic/objectivist norms even farther, but it’s Morris who applies these techniques not to marginal figures but subjects as volatile as American war crimes and the death penalty.

David Edelstein’s very good review of S.O.P. for New York Magazine ends with these questions: “Special Agent Brent Pack, who analyzed the photos and sent many of Morris’s subjects to military prison, says, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ Okay, maybe. But which words? Whose words?” To which I could only reply, “Exactly!” Though it’s considered over and over throughout S.O.P., Morris’ core thesis about the relationship between accountability and evidence is in an odd way overshadowed by the monstrous events investigated here. Hardly used as a tool for deception, Morris’ particular approach very much emphasizes the slipperiness of images, the fathomless layers of subjectivity and spin inherit in any act of photographic or cinematographic documentation—not to mention the ways in which such images are thereafter delivered, re-framed and viewed by an audience.

Morris, who was once a private investigator, has made the process of investigation itself a dominant theme in his work, and his recent essays for The New York Times on what truths can be gleaned from the extant photographs from the Crimean War has placed him in a small group of major intellectuals, Susan Sontag among them, who’ve made the dissection of photographs crucial to their body of ideas. In this sense he is a sort of poet of doubt, drawn toward subjects that might otherwise seem easy to gloss over. With Abu Ghraib he has perhaps found his ultimate subject, a catastrophe made more labyrinthine instead of less so for the proliferation of data surrounding it, and the best sort of proof that our age of seemingly infinite images and all-seeing technology is not to be mistaken for one of greater knowledge or certainty.