Blog From The Bench

Toronto Film Festival 2007

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 10

Saturday brought two screenings as well, both in the University of Toronto’s Isabelle Bader Theater. The first was Beyond the Years (Chun nyun hack), the 100th film from prolific (but previously unknown to me) South Korean director Im Kwon-taek. I had been seduced by the blue-tinted still included on the TIFF website (seen above) of two walking human figures dwarfed by massive, majestic rock formations in the distance that brought to mind Antonioni in L’Avventura mode, but the film was anything but, instead proving to be a rather conventional foray into nostalgic longing and regret. The story of a promising drummer who as a young man abandoned his sister, a singer, and their father, a master-musician and their vagabond lifestyle for a life of his own, the film keeps slipping back into sepia-toned flashbacks that catalogue the family’s downward spiral. All of the expected tragedies more or less show up, making the film tedious long before it should.

There’s also a significant cultural barrier in the film’s use of traditional Korean (I’m assuming it’s Korean) music throughout the film. I like to think that I can appreciate Asian music as much as a person with an untrained ear possibly can, but the constant showcasing of traditional performances not only stops the film dead in its tracks but becomes exceedingly tiresome (especially since the audience is asked to marvel over the singer’s skills, but I’m not able to detect much difference between the supposedly good singers and the bad ones). Another review I came across said that Beyond the Years lacks passion, and I think that’s probably where most of the film’s failure lies. A disappointment.

I met up with Ali a close internet friend who is covering the festival for The Film Experience Blog for a special presentation titled Mira Nair Presents: Four Views on AIDS. I really had no idea what I was walking into—I had selected it because I’m a fan of Nair’s work and my other option for that time slot was unavailable—but was expecting documentaries, most likely rather dour and didactic (but extremely honorable, of course). Much to my surprise, the films themselves proved to be nothing like I anticipated—inspired by her work on the 2002 omnibus film 11’09”01, Nair set out to harness Indian cinema’s remarkable and bountiful talent to help inform the public on the still rather taboo topic of HIV/AIDS. Though the stigma of being connected to a film dealing with this “concentrated epidemic” a number of initially enthusiastic stars and even major companies (Nair named Rolls Royce specifically) dropped out of the project, which at times seemed to threaten the project’s chance of ever coming to fruition.

Luckily, Nair and acclaimed Indian directors Santosh Sivan, Vishal Bharadwaj and Farhan Akhtar were all able to get their films made, films with the specific intention of being accessible and entertaining but beautifully made. Nair’s contribution, Migration, opens the presentation, and despite being filled with a number of striking images and starring Irfan Khan who did wonderful work for Nair in last year’s The Namesake, it ultimately succumbs to its turgid soap opera-ish “who’s sleeping with who” subject matter, not helped by a rather shill performance from Khan. But to its credit, Migration is the only film of the four to broach the issue of homosexuality in the spread of HIV, though it mostly done through implication.

The second contribution, Vishal Bharadwaj’s Blood Brothers, was probably my least favorite of the four. The story of a man who is mistakenly diagnosed with HIV and subsequently abandons his pregnant wife and son (the irony is that he works for a marketing department promoting condom use), it’s a tale of redemption and second chances, with a heavy-handed but well-meaning speech at its conclusion. The basic skeleton of an intriguing and potentially powerful story is clearly evident, but with just 20 minutes the film in the end falls rather flat.

Positive, the third contribution by Farhan Akhtar, was just the opposite—the film plods in the first minutes but slowly builds to a powerful, devastating crescendo by the time it concludes. Revolving around a university student who is being forced to chose between finishing his education and taking care of the AIDs-stricken father he feels has betrayed the family, it’s a moving vignette of forgiveness and the power of art—in this case photography—serving as a means of connection and emotional healing.

Santosh Sivan’s Prarambha, which concludes the omnibus, is clearly the most relentlessly crowd-pleasing, and also my favorite. It’s employs familiar road trip/initially indifferent adult who after a series of circumstances takes an abandoned child under their wing narratives and uses it as a showcase for a tremendously moving performance by a young boy with the biggest, most seductive sad brown eyes one can possibly imagine. It’s impossible not to root for the HIV-stricken boy as his bad fortunes are slowly reversed, and as the film's ending credits was received thunderous applause.

A panel including Nair, Bharadwaj, Akhtar and Ashok Alexander from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation (the organization that put up most of the money for the project) followed the films. Together they fielded questions from the audience and helped fill in some motivation behind the project, revealing among other things that the target audience for the film are Indian sex workers, as well as their hope to have several more films produced to be included for theatrical release in both India (because “80 minutes is considered a short film in India,” Nair deadpanned to audience laughter) and America. Nair & Co. took a big chance with this project—it could easily have come off as more well-meaning than artistically relevant—but more than not, they managed to walk the fine line of didacticism and art. I was impressed.

The evening ended by meeting up with my friend filmmaker Kevin Lee of Shooting Down Pictures and several fellow critics covering the festival for drinks, a fitting end for the day.

-jesse