Blog From The Bench

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