Toronto Film Festival 2007

Yes, the festival is over and obviously I fell way behind. As I learned, festivaling saps up your energy, and so I'm now wrapping things up after the fact. So...

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11

Despite a drastic change in content and approach, love-it or hate-it reactions remain the constant in polarizing Mexican auteur Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light (Stellet licht), an austere portrait of an illicit love affair ripping apart the seams of a Dutch Mennonite family in rural Mexico. Dreyer has endlessly and rightly been invoked in nearly everything I’ve read regarding the film, and the film has been more or less painted as a crisis of faith (the IMDb plot synopsis: “a father’s faith in God is put to the test when he falls for another woman”), but I found it one of the most unapologetically secular films of faith I’ve ever come across—this is certainly a film from the perspective of one standing outside the faith looking in. Bergman in Winter Light mode this certainly is not, as God is invoked only once in the character’s everyday conversation, and in that instance the main character cuts his father off, chiding “speak to me as a man, not a preacher.” I suppose this is my own Mennonite background speaking, and even with any reservations on the details of how Mennonitism is portrayed in the film (I was surprised to find that the sense of community, in many ways the essence of the Mennonite tradition, is almost completely absent from the film until the very end) I don’t wish to convey the impression that the film is anything other than magnificent—a really striking achievement of style and an uncompromising aesthetic vision. It’s the type of film that seems to stretch out and elongate time—there are stretches that seemed to go on infinitely and I longed for the film to just finish—but walking out of the theater, blinking uncontrollably from the sudden blast of sunlight, I was shocked to realize that my breathing had become labored and the film had seemed to settle heavily in the pit of my stomach. I hadn’t expected it, but I was deeply moved.

Considering the frantic, queered-up nature of the film, I probably couldn’t have selected a film more different film to follow up Reygada’s spare tone poem that Kenneth Branagh’s update of Sleuth. But adjustment issues aside, Sleuth proved to be quite an enjoyable visceral ride, marked by some scintillating dialogue (Harold Pinter is responsible for the reworking of Schafter’s original text) and that undeniable pleasure of watching two actors hamming it up and visibly delighting in the opportunity to do so. Michael Caine, who played the role of the young man in the original 1972 version of the film, now plays the character originated by Laurence Olivier; Jude Law, now in his second role originated by Caine after 2004’s Alfie, is now the young man battling the older man in this psychological battle of wits. It’s nice to see that Branagh can indeed function outside of Shakespeare’s shadow, and the film is very confidently directed and sharply photographed. The most interesting element of the film remains the intentional homoeroticism (I don’t know how it could not have been) constantly simmering between the two men, though the film actually begins to sag when the topic is broached directly. A trifle but an appealing one, consumed easily though just as easily forgotten.

The evening ended with the French Canadian offering Contre toute espérance (Summit Circle), apparently the second installment of director Bernard Émond’s loose trilogy using Christian virtues as their overarching themes. This one is supposed to be about “hope,” though after watching the film, that seems a head-scratcher—the film seemed utterly devoid of hope. Overall this is a relentlessly dour little film that endlessly and thickly pours on the tragedy as we witness a kind, devoted and hardworking wife broken down by the cumulative effect of losing her job and watching her beloved husband’s decline as he is stricken by a series of debilitating strokes. Guylaine Tremblay’s central performance is admirable but aside from the extremely deliberate and controlled directoral style, there was very little about it that separated it from an above average TV movie (though Darren Hughes of Long Pauses does outline some of the film’s strong points, many of which I hadn’t considered).

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12

Tickets for El Pasado (The Past) were bought on the strength of Gael García Bernal’s acting talents and reputation for picking interesting projects to attach himself too. The film is a twisty tale about a wife who haunt her husband’s life after they decide to end their marriage, what initially seems to be an amicable separation begins to seem otherwise when she begins showing up in unexpected places and times in a seeming attempt to prevent him from moving on with the rest of his life. I was later found out that the film is the latest from legendary South American director Hector Babenco, the man behind such classics as Pixote and Kiss of the Spider Woman, which surprised me, considering how dull and plodding the film ends up being, particularly in the final third of the film where the complicated, nuanced criss-crossing of relationships and motives collapse in a tedious, exhausted heap. Bernal, who usually is able to shine in whatever the nature of the role, is strangely muted, or perhaps vaguely distant, which is a good way to characterize the entire film—after a while the film’s cyclical narrative seems so distanced from anything resembling real life that it becomes impossible to really care what ultimately happens to the characters. Disappointing.

It’s difficult to put a finger on Manoel de Oliveira’s latest, Christopher Columbus: The Enigma, a film which isn’t enigmatic as much as elusive… what exactly was Oliveira attempting here? The short running time (a mere 70 minutes) means that the expository first half hour, about two young brothers immigrating from Portugal, is left extremely sketchy and vague, with not nearly enough time allowed to really invest in the characters or their situation. Soon we’re skipping decades, watching as one of the brothers becomes a doctor of medicine moonlighting as a scholar of Portuguese history, and subsequently he and his wife travel to Portugal to try and help confirm Christopher Columbus was born in Portugal and not Italy. Together they visit locations relevant to the theory, talking and gazing at monuments and relics from the past, and at this point the film becomes erudite, talky and rather abstract. And oddly, it was at this point I found I was beginning to enjoy the film more, especially as I began to recognize that in a seemingly innocuous manner Oliveira was exploring (or at least touching upon) many of the lingering issues that continue to plague the Portuguese national psyche. This film isn’t an exploration of the heritage of the famous explorer of the title; rather, it’s about a people group struggling to come to grips with their collective fall from grace, having plummeted from the privileged status of once being one of the two superpowers of the world to being what is reported as the poorest country in Western Europe. If the acting often comes off as stilted and flat the photography is luscious and framing impeccable, and there’s a loose, offhand vibe that I was starting to catch just as the film abruptly concludes. A very mixed bag, though not without some unexpected points of interest.

-jesse

SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO
Director: Takashi Miike

A frenetic loose re-working of Sergio Corbucci's seminal spaghetti Western classic Django, prolific Japanese auteur Takashi Miike’s newest film SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO (all in caps) is as ostentatious and outrageous as the title might imply. A cross-cultural death match between samurai action films of the 1970s and spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s, Miike pulls out all the stops and systematically dismantles two fine cinematic traditions, juicing them for all their pop culture sensibility.

A lone gunman wanders into a deserted ghost town, led by tales of a buried treasure hidden somewhere in the village. When he arrives, he finds the town decimated by two rival gangs—the Reds and the Whites—both in search of said treasure and permanently camped out on each side of the town. The villagers have mostly fled, been killed or enslaved by the gangs. Both gangs immediately try to recruit the new arrival to their respective side, but the enigmatic gunman has seen Yojimbo, so to speak, and will happily pair up with whichever side is prepared to offer him a larger cut of the treasure.

That’s all you really need to know about the plot, such as it is. Miike spins three tales, the War of the Roses in England, the Genpei War in Japan and a spaghetti western like a juggler, keeping all three afloat simultaneously at the expense of logic and common sense. This is an adventure, pure and simple, and the plot is a shifting superfluous thing, not to be taken seriously. This is a film about fun, the pure exuberant joy in reckless filmmaking, of being able to say, “Let’s give that guy a crossbow!” and not have to worry about the historical contexts or the logical fallacy, only on the inherent badassery of it.

Western audiences (the people, not the film genre) watching SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO might be a similar experiences of Japanese audiences going to see Tarantino’s Kill Bill, like a cross-cultural reversal of sorts. In both, you have a foreign pop-culture junkie (mis)appropriating a genre from another country, shoving it in the blender, and feeding it back to the country of origin. The end result, part homage, part utter retardation has little to do with the aforementioned genre, but is outrageously fascinating and entertaining all the same. This comparison is made all the more apparent by Miike casting Tarantino in SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO as a grizzled foreign gunslinger, a cute tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of Miike pandering to his North American audience and creative counterpart in crime.

In full parody mode, Miike seamlessly straps samurai swords to the sides of cowboys, melding two of the most testosterone-laden genres together in a no-holds-barred bloodbath, like Yojimbo versus the Man With No Name. To make things even stranger, all the actors perform their dialogue in phonetic English to outrageous results. Having Japanese actors miming in English, usually with horribly hammy delivery and outrageous enunciation gives the already surreal film an extra layer of absurd otherworldly alien activity, like dozens of test-tubed cloned William Shatners delivering their jilted dialogue en masse. It... is very… strange!

The odd thing about such an outrageous film premise is that SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO is surprisingly coherent, straightforward and enjoyable… three quantifiers not often applied in conjunction with a Miike film. But here, finally, is a film Miike could sell to a Western audience at large, doubly so if you slap a "Quentin Tarantino presents..." logo atop it. In truth, this bizarre hodge-podge of genres could only be pulled off by a director as dysfunctional and fascinating as Miike. But unlike past Miike offerings, a mainstream English audience might actually enjoy this film; or at the very least, not vomit and break out into tears en masse, the expected reaction to the average Miike film.

Though tamer by numerous levels of magnitude than his usual work, Takashi Miike still manages to cram in his esoteric touches here and there to make SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO worthy of his weirdness. From the castrated gunshot victims to the Shakespeare-quoting samurai to the mysterious coffin being pulled around throughout the town (fans of Django will know its contents), at no point do we forget who is directing this film. The difference here is, Miike clearly wants his audiences to enjoy this experience on a purely sensual level—he gives us explosions, gunfights, swordfights, every manner of action cliché run awry, and eschews on any deeper visceral explorations that hallmark his normal repertoire. This is pure surface level filmmaking at its most fun--simple plot, bad acting, outrageous action and violence, and nothing even remotely challenging about it. It goes no deeper. SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO does not challenge, or create controversy, expose anxiety in its audience. It simply is the ultimate expression of bubblegum pop-cultural cimena run awry.

This isn't Miike's best work by far, but the elements that hinder the film also make it one of his most enjoyable to audiences. By dropping the gore, the guts and the genitals, Takashi Miike has dummied things down for his audience somewhat, but in exchange, has produced the most straightforwardly enjoyable film of his recent career. You give a little, you get a little.

Verdict: 85/100

... in case you didn't know, because it's brought to you on R-A-D-I-O. Or P-O-D-C-A-S-T. (That's a paraphrase of Stan Freberg's theme song, by the way.)

Since Monday, Sept. 10, BBC 7 has been rerunning the Doctor Who audio dramas. They're running five days a week, but I'm not sure for how long. The shows appear on the BBC 7 Web site and stay for six days under the "Listen Again" feature:

www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7

You'll find a lot of good stuff there if you browse. They're also in the midst of a Groucho Marx tribute (see Sundays and Mondays).

Juno
Director: Jason Reitman

Following up his debut film Thank You For Smoking at the Toronto International Film Festival two years ago, Jason Reitman (son of prolific comedic director Ivan Reitman) returns with his sophomore effort, Juno, a quirky teen comedy about open adoption. So, he goes from tobacco lobbyists, right into teen pregnancy? You gotta give it to the guy, he likes a comedic challenge.

Like Knocked Up set a generation back with sixteen year-olds instead of thirty-somethings, Juno thrives on embarrassment and teenage ridiculousness to fuel its comedic flames; not in the style of a typical profanity-laden gross-out teen comedy, but one that utilizes wit and panache, quick alliterations and wordplay to achieve its laughs. By today’s filthy standards, it barely even curses, which is unexpectedly refreshing in a comedy. Imagine instead a John Hughes film on methamphetamines, the coming-of-age quirks and teen angst sped up to lucrative speeds to keep pace with the current generation. The end result is a surprisingly tender and romantic comedy full of acerbic wit, snappy dialogue, outrageous performances and a tour-de-force performance from young Canadian actress Ellen Page (Hard Candy).

Sixteen year-old hipster Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) has a problem. After a night of exploration with her dorky boyfriend Bleeker (Michael Cera, Superbad) she winds up pregnant and completely unprepared as to what to do. She considers an abortion, but gets freaked out and decides to give the kid up in an open adoption instead. Except that she isn't about to give her baby up to dorks—she might be totally unprepared for motherhood, but she has standards, after all. Though a newspaper ad, she meets a young yuppie couple, Vanessa (Jennifer Garner, Elektra) and Mark (Jason Bateman, Arrested Development) looking to adopt a baby. Mark has mixed feelings about being a father, but Juno thinks she's found the perfect couple—Mark has great taste in music and bad horror films, just like her. But as her body begins to burst outwards, high school becomes a surreal experience, and she still needs to come to terms with her feelings for Bleeker.

For his sophomore film, director Jason Reitman has laid to rest any doubts about his cinematic and comedic talents behind the camera. The man has talent, a clear vision about his own voice as a director beyond the shadow of his father. He will be one to watch down the road. As for the cast, Page is perfectly attuned to Juno MacGuff and brings the character to life as one of the most charming and lovable comedic heroines put to screen in recent memory, a role that, having seen her in person at TIFF, seems in perfect harmony with her own natural, slightly spastic personality. In terms of acting and casting, Juno makes superb use of its talent base. Young Michael Cera is making himself a nice, lucrative career as the awkward, nerdy-but-loveable goof, a role here perfectly suited to his talents. Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman and Allison Janney all hold their own against the youngsters, the latter in particular knocking the crowd out with her dialogue.

From start to finish, Juno is outlandishly hilarious, balancing between cockle-warming family drama and zany teen comedy, diving deeply into the uncharted comedic waters of open adoption and teen pregnancy with steady resolve. At no point is the film exploitative; it treats the subject with a quirky blend of respect and sarcasm, pushing no agenda of any kind and avoiding any of the more “Lifetime Movie of the Week” plot points one might expect, given the film’s subject matter. After all, this is Juno, a sixteen year-old art-rock girl in a small town who listens to the The Stooges and The Moldy Peaches, plays the guitar, flips the bird to convention and makes every single male under the age of thirty fall madly in love with her wit and charm. Imagine a Daniel Clowes comic stripped of all the awkwardness and borderline cruelty to its protagonists, like a feel-good version of Ghost World.

The screenplay is spectacular, doubly so coming from a first-time writer. Dialogue is witty, fast and hilarious, with the kind of polished banter that practiced scribes struggle with for years to achieve in their work. Young blogger turned stripper turned author Diablo Cody is a natural, having given birth to wonderful, fully articulated and realized characters that are as eccentric as they are lovable. As a screenwriter, her voice feels fresh and new, an outsider’s take on how a Hollywood comedy should be, and it tore through the crowd like a chainsaw. People were tumbling from out of their chairs, split sides everywhere. The banter flows out like a torrential river, perfectly timed and riotous. As comedies go, Juno is as solid as they come.

I had to really rack my brain to find fault with Juno. Literally, the film got a standing ovation, and deserved every second of it. So here goes. Being a screenplay from a first-time writer, Juno is at times guilty of doing what all first-time screenplays ultimately do: cramming too much into too few pages. A subplot with Jason Bateman’s character struggling with his maturity paralleling that of Juno eats up an awful lot of screen time, probably more than it should. The two characters bond over their similar qualms about growing up—her, a sixteen year-old entering maturity too fast, him a thirty year-old refusing to mature at all—but his anxieties are perhaps best left for another film. You know; a film about a slacker Generation X-guy who must face his fear of maturity and childbirth. (Sound familiar? I already compared the two movies earlier. It starts with a “K”.) Worse, this subplot dalliance occurs at the exclusion of Bleeker’s character, who essentially vanishes for the entire second act. A minor criticism, this—after all, Bateman is perfectly cast in the role, and the sequences are laced with pop-culture goodness and great music. Still, in a film that feels so perfect and original in ever other way, Juno feels like it wanders off topic on this small point ever-so-slightly, like the tiniest unbalanced section of weight on an otherwise perfectly spinning comedic wheel.

Quirky, charmingly off-beat and heartwarming, Juno is a rousing success from top to bottom, and a phenomenal sophomore effort for Reitman. If there is a more enjoyable and hilarious film at the Toronto Film Festival this year, I probably won’t get to see it. Alarmingly, Juno is set for only a limited release in December, but this is but a temporary situation, I assure you. Thus far, reviews for Juno are universally glowing, and once the buzz picks up, Juno is going to landslide audiences, mark my words.

Juno effortless chalks itself up as one of the best comedies of the year. Teenage pregnancy should always be this funny.

Verdict: 95/100

Toronto Film Festival 2007

Time, time, where does it go?

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 09

I knew I had to see Starting Out in the Evening from the moment it first came to my attention—I’m a sucker for the “aging, obscure artist takes talented youngster under wing” subgenre (and yes, that does mean I quite like Van Sant’s Finding Forrester). The film stars Frank Langella (the 1979 version of Dracula) as Leonard Schiller, a once-acclaimed novelist who has since fallen into obscurity and Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under) as Heather, a zealous graduate student who has decided to use her Masters Thesis to singlehandedly revive his reputation in the literary world, as well as Lili Taylor as Schiller’s indecisive daughter and Adrian Lester as her longtime beau. Though a tad conventional in direction, look and narrative style, the film is overall quite good and very nicely acted—unsurprising considering the cast—and the film is a generally thoughtful parallel exploration of coming to grips with the residue of disappointments accumulated over a lifetime as well as a poignant portrait of witnessing the toppling of a literary idol (which can be devastating for us Lit majors).

When introducing the film director and co-writer Andrew Wagner broke down on stage for what seemed like an endless minute or so, prompting the elderly man next to me to comment “someone must have died.” Not so, we would come to find out, Wagner was merely announcing that Langella was in the audience and would be joining him after the film for the Q&A (which was greeted with thunderous applause from the predominantly grey-haired audience). Upon reflection, Wagner’s tears hits to the heart of my nagging issue with the film—Starting Out in the Evening is so preoccupied with lovingly depicting the twilight years and so overwhelmingly enamored with Langella’s presence that it ultimately throws the film off-balance, shedding an unnecessarily harsh and unflattering light on youth, particularly its vivacity and ambitiousness. Maybe I am overly sensitive because in this stage of my life I strongly identify with Ambrose’s Heather, but it was something that marred what overall proved to be a very good viewing experience.

Later that evening I found myself near the end of a line of hundreds of people that wrapped around the block Ryerson Theatre is situated on—my first indication that this was probably not the relatively low-profile French film I had thought I had bought tickets for. My suspicion kept growing as I saw all the photographers with waiting cameras as I walked into the entrance of the theater and took my a seat near the front of the theater. When the lights went down and it was finally revealed to me what I was sitting down to watching, Sigourney Weaver’s new film, The Girl in the Park, I was horrified. Or perhaps that’s an overstatement—but my heart certainly sank as writer/director David Auburn took the stage and introduced Weaver and costar Kate Bosworth who were quickly paraded onstage for a hand wave before exiting the stage and the lights went down.

In his introductory remarks Auburn remarked that he wanted to make a film dealing with trauma, but not the traumatic event itself, but what happens many years down the road. And that’s literally what he did in his film. The story of a mother and aspiring jazz singer (Weaver) who is never able to recover from having her young daughter being kidnapped in a nearby park while her back is momentarily turned, the story picks up sixteen years later (as the subtitle clearly lets us know), revealing Weaver to be a shell of the vibrant woman she once was, literally having abandoned her husband and son many years before. But things begin to change when she begins to help a young hooker (Bosworth)…and then irrationally begins to believe that it is her long-lost daughter.

It’s really stunning that it is none other than David Auburn, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his universally hailed Proof, at the helm of this mess. Actually, the film isn’t bad so much as painfully average. Granted, this is Auburn’s directoral debut, but the biggest disappointment is in the screenplay itself which parades out every tired cliché and plot twist one would expect from a film dealing with a parent’s post-kidnapping experiences. Here now is the scene where Weaver goes to a playground and begins chatting with children until the police are called in by eagle-eyed mothers, here is the scene where Weaver strokes her daughter’s photograph as the music swoons in an outpouring of emotion. And everything is tinted in blues and grays so it must mean that Weaver’s life is a depressing mess; now that the image has changed to gold tones things much be looking up for her. Bosworth, an actress I generally dislike, actually gives some life to her flighty character; Weaver employs essentially the same weary expression throughout the entire film. Largely wasted are talented supporting actors Allessandro Nivola (so good in Junebug), Keri Russell and character actor David Rasche.

I really don’t know what I was thinking—in my rush at the ticket counter I must have gotten this title mixed up with Dans la vie and Dans la vie de Sylvie (either which I would have liked to see), or maybe it was lingering memories of the lovely film The Girl in the Park from a few years ago. Regardless, Girl in the Park is getting awful buzz her at the festival, though on star power alone it will probably make its way to American theaters at some point.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10

Monday actually kicked off with an afternoon showing—my latest start yet, and with a film that I had seen before, no less. The film is Czech New Wave classic Closely Watched Trains, the winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1966, which was being presented by director Ken Loach (The Wind that Shakes the Barley) as part of TIFF’s “Dialogues” series. I had sent he film years ago but jumped at the opportunity to see it on a large screen (and besides, I had the time slot open).

I won’t go into much detail, but needless to say I had nearly forgotten how wonderful this film really is, marked by a sly, racy comedic sensibility (“it seems very Czech to me,” Loach commented) and subtle but exceedingly graceful direction. More or less the story of a young dispatcher’s apprentice at a local train station, the film slowly transforms into a coming-of-age story as we watch the film's protagonist as he clumsily attempts to navigate the world of women and sexual pleasure that he has just recently started to become aware of. But for all the acutely observed moments and sequences of daily life at the slow rural station there’s also a thread of social and political awareness that runs through the entire film before it overtakes the entire film during the unforgettable climax. Unfortunately I was only stayed for a few minutes to listen Loach’s articulate thoughts on the film—at the last minute scored tickets to one of my most anticipated films of the festival, and had to rush to get to the theater on time.

One of my favorite types of film are lush and ornate costume dramas that have a naughty side to them. Needless to say, director Catherine Breillat’s reputation preceded her and along with the very positive reviews that came out of Cannes I couldn’t wait to see Une vielle maîtresse (The Old Mistress), which I initially hadn’t been able to get tickets for. Breillat, who suffered a massive stroke last year and is still extremely frail, introduced the films, and even if she was sometimes hard to understand (her physical ailments slurred a heavy French accent) I did catch a few quips on how she wanted an actor as beautiful as Alain Delon in her film, and extremely poignantly, her description on how escaping into the world of making movies is an escape from her physical reality.

The film, much to my relief, was everything that I had hoped for. Visually sumptuous (Breillet had mentioned that she had been particularly inspired by the paintings of Manet and Delacroix), the film never lets the sheer beauty of the period Parisian locations or opulent costumes weigh down the story or shield the sexual heat. Starring fiery courtesan Asia Argento and newcomer Fu’ad Ait Aattou as the rakish eligible bachelor she has kept under her sexual spell for a decade, the film first deals with their tumultuous relationship and how it later threatens to prevent Ryno’s marriage to the sweet, innocent and extremely wealthy young woman he has since fallen in love with. The impossibly gorgeous pairing of Argento and Aattou—hers an earthy, erotic beauty, his this marble-smooth perfection of a Michelangelo statue—fuels the film and provides it its heat, and as a result the film manages to dance the precarious line between feeling faithful to a past point in history yet showing an awareness of current sexual sensibilities. Not a film for all tastes—there were more than a handful of walkouts—but this could very well be my favorite film of the festival so far.

-jesse