Cinema Scope TIFF 2011 Roundtable
Mark Peranson, Robert Koehler, Jason Anderson, Adam Nayman and John Semley hash out the best, worst and in-between of TIFF 2011.
September, 2011
TIFF Day 7: Century of Birthing / Dark Horse / The Invader / You’re Next
Century of Birthing (Lav Diaz, The Philippines)—Visions
By Christoph Huber
If you want the entire experience of the 68th Venice Film Festival bottled up into one grand (almost) six-hour marathon, surely there’s no better way than Lav Diaz’s Orizzonti sidebar closer, which was—as always seems to be the case with Venice screenings of the Filiipono director’s epics—screened on the penultimate night to glazed if welcoming eyes and already deformed bodies, only to emerge as the magisterial fusion of key strands of the festival: religion and faith (cf. films by Karmakar, Olmi, Ferrara and others), theatricality (Sokurov, Cronenberg, Polanski . . .), the attempt to overcome alienation (Lanthimos, Sono, German jr. etc.) and, not least, the role cinema plays—or should play—in all this (Naderi). (Only closeups of genitalia are conspicuously absent, if strongly implied.) Alternating stretches convey the stories of of a Chistian cult (led by Diaz axiom Joel Torre, sporting amazing wigwork) and its disintegration after the arrival of a photographer and of a (in many ways quite autobiographically conceived) filmmaker, who questions his work and his outlook in general as he struggles with an unfinished film. (“It’s existentialism,” he says in one of the many discussions with his lead actress, “It has no ending.”) Complicating matters are long excerpts from this project, presented in consumer-grade video, as seen on the director’s laptop, in stark contrast to the hi-def black and white of the main strands, which manages to evoke long past celluloid glories in its radiance. As usual, Diaz alternates long scenes of high intensity with generous, observant takes, producing a rich tapestry in which the main themes forcefully emerge as their poetic rhymes on different levels get more pronounced, while taking time to explore his subjects and their society with unusual complexity. Also, the cult’s hymn surely is the catchiest anthem around on the festival circuit.
TIFF Day 6: Goon / Killer Joe / Love and Bruises / Roman’s Circuit
Goon (Michael Dowse, Canada)—Special Presentations
By John Semley
A bloody ballet of hockey violence that, gracefully, never gets too balletic, Michael Dowse’s latest drops the gloves on neutered, toothless hock-u-dramas of the Score, Breakaway etc. variety. As brawler Doug “The Thug” Glatt, Seann William Scott further elbows his way out of typecast wincing douchebaggery, playing his bouncer-cum-hockey-brawler with a sublime, unruffled dopiness that defined his career best turn in David Wain’s Role Models. Doug’s real gift is his ability to take a punch, weathering flurries of hooks and uppercuts with grinning detachment: the picture of the tender(ized) meathead. As Doug’s rival and elder gladiator Ross “The Boss” Shea (humiliated in the wake of a recognizably McSorleyesque slash at another player’s skull), a grizzled, Export A-chuffing Liev Schreiber is similarly magnificent. Dowse’s direction is adroit, the action as brisk as the deployment of jerk-off jokes, homophobic snipes (though Doug’s brother is gay, equipping the script with its requisite escape hatch), and other doses of disposable, appropriately locker room-ish humour. This is the kind of brute, bad-mannered filmmaking that Dowse has always excelled in. Here, though, it serves a picture with more palpable commercial prospects, at least domestically: Goon is scrappy enough to take out the ne plus ultra of hockey cinema, George Roy Hill’s Slap Shot, in a raw fit of patricidal rage.
TIFF Day 5: Wavelengths
99 Clerkenwell Road
By Bart Testa
The Toronto International Film Festival’s experimental film series Wavelengths was begun by Cinematheque Ontario programmer Susan Oxtoby a decade ago as an outgrowth of her popular year-round Cinematheque series The Free Screen—and not of anything happening at TIFF itself, which has consistently displayed little interest in avant-garde films. Wavelengths continued with Oxtoby’s successor, Andréa Picard, who is now also about to depart the TIFF organization. I doubt that Wavelengths will long survive her leaving. The offspring of the Cinematheque’s more demanding programming spirit, and a separatist sidebar at the Festival—located safely away from the red carpets at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s 200-seat screening room, and attended by its own recurring capacity audience—Wavelengths is unlikely to find another champion in the new, glamourama Lightbox era now absorbing the whole TIFF operation.
TIFF Day 4: Elles / Hanaan / The Last Gladiators / Porfirio / Wuthering Heights
Elles (Malgoska Szumowska, France/Poland/Germany)—Special Presentations
By Sergio Baldini
In Elles, a female journalist from the woman’s magazine Elle (played by Juliette Binoche, whose presence reinforces the sub-Hanekean tenor of the film) is investigating student prostitution. She interviews two young women, one French, one Polish, living in Paris, who have turned to hooking to finance their education. Listening to their accounts of paid sexual encounters, the journalist is disturbed by their sometimes shocking nature, and by the two girls’ uninhibited sexuality. This in turn makes her aware of her humdrum bourgeois life with a husband and child, which has extinguished her sex life, both real and fantasized. Such a synopsis sounds trite and full of clichés—and indeed it faithfully reflects the nature of Malgoska Szumowska’s film, which has all the insight of an article in a woman’s magazine. (Say, for example, Elle). The mise en scène matches the project’s stupidity and dullness, and culminates in an uninspired ending: a business dinner organized by the journalist’s husband, haunted by phantoms of her interviewees’ clients (Szumowska rashly referencing Buñuel here). Rather than suffer this pretentious failure, you’d be better off seeing Emmanuelle Bercot’s excellent Mes chères études, a film on the same subject made for television in 2010.
TIFF Day 3: Goodbye First Love / Habibi / Hotel Swooni / Into the Abyss / Restoration
Goodbye First Love (Mia Hansen-Løve, France/Germany)—Contemporary World Cinema
By Jay Kuehner
Young love, Paris 1999. Surprisingly, there is no moratorium on the subject among French directors, not even the youthful Mia Hansen-Løve, who at 30 has three films to her credit that exhibit maturity beyond her years. Loosely autobiographical, Goodbye First Love is no exception to the genre, but perhaps deceptively so. The contours are easily recognizable: young Camille (Lola Creton) falls for older boy-on-a-bike Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), their affair culminating in a summer idyll at her parents’ country house. The ever-itinerant Sullivan goes off travelling in South America, leaving hopelessly romantic Camille hostage to her mailbox, naturally melancholic and increasingly desperate. Four years on, Camille appears to have healed the wound, her hair trimmed into a Seberg cut, trying out for jobs with Air France, and “discovering” her passion for architecture (perhaps an attempt to imaginatively rebuild the empty house in which her first love contained her), albeit a passion abetted by the seduction of recognition by an older teacher, with whom she soon develops a practical but less romantic relationship.
TIFF Day 2: Arirang / This Is Not a Film / Almayer’s Folly / The Descendants / Generation P / The River Used to Be a Man / Shame / The Snows of Kilimanjaro / Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale
Arirang (Kim Ki Duk, South Korea)—Real to Reel
This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Iran)—Masters
By Mark Peranson
An amateurishly shot “self-interrogation,” the Cannes Un Certain Regard-winning film Arirang is cannon fodder for the enemies of director Kim Ki Duk, and of those the director rightly claims there are many; there should be even more after Arirang sees the light. For three years, the filmmaker has been living in self-imposed exile inside a tent squeezed into a tiny cabin. This is, in short, what we see director Kim Ki Duk doing for the better part of Arirang: washing himself, making food, eating food out of a dog bowl, talking to his cat, doing nothing, brushing his hair, watching TV, stoking the fire, roasting and eating nuts, staring into the distance, brushing his teeth, drinking soju, doing nothing, operating a backhoe, making espresso, eating a tomato, and ceaselessly bitching like there’s no tomorrow. And, how could I forget, singing.
For it seems that “director Kim Ki Duk”—as he addresses himself on occasion—has been experiencing something like a “director’s block” for the last three years, his exile stemming from a combination of a John Landis complex following the near-death of an actor on the set of Dream (2008), and being stabbed in the back by a former assistant. Like I care. Unlike the banned Jafar Panahi, Kim’s retreat from filmmaking is ultimately a luxury; yet spurred on by the need to explain this gap to his many fans, Kim films himself on his consumer Canon Mark II digital camera to understand himself “as a director and as a human being.” Much insufferable bloviation ensues about how he became a world-famous film director (even in Israel!), how he wants to work in different countries, how he misses film festivals—all of them!—as they gave him a chance to be understood in Korea, where otherwise he’d just be a box-office failure.
TIFF Day 1: City to City: Buenos Aires / The Boy Who Was a King / Duch: Master of the Forges of Hell / Hard Core Logo II / Hors Satan / The Last Christeros / Lipstikka / A Mysterious World / Nuit #1 / The Other Side of Sleep / Restless / The Sword Identity / We Need to Talk About Kevin
Cinema Scope 48 Preview: City Sisters: Buenos Aires in the Spotlight at TIFF
By Quintín
One of my town’s most remarkable landmarks is a really awful globe made of concrete that sits on Main Street. It was donated by the local Rotary Club in association with some California branch of the institution. The reason for the existence of what charitably can be called “a statue” is that my town is called San Clemente, like the California resort of 60,000 where Richard Nixon established his summer residence. San Clemente, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina, is also a resort, only smaller (15,000) and much poorer, but still a dotted line joins the two places, considered to be ciudades hermanas.
I thought about this curiosity when I learned that this year the Toronto International Film Festival chose Buenos Aires to be its de facto sister city for the City to City program. In principle, it smelled as paternalistic as the Rotary fiasco. But after reading the essay in the festival’s catalogue, I concluded it was somehow worse.
TIFF Countdown -1: Low Life / 388 Arletta Avenue / Back to Stay / Elena / The Forgiveness of Blood / Good Bye / Gypsy / Leave It On the Floor / Mr. Tree / The Patron Saints / Sleeping Beauty / Smuggler / Take This Waltz / Volcano / Whores’ Glory
Cinema Scope 48 Preview: Low Life (Nicolas Klotz & Elisabeth Perceval, France)—Special Presentations
By Andréa Picard
“Two types of film: those that employ the resources of the theatre (actors, directors, etc…) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create.” —Robert Bresson, Notes sur le Cinématographe
“Art is like a fire; it is born out of what it burns.”—Jean-Luc Godard, JLG/JLG
Mining the proverbial depths of despair is a romantic mainstay of artistic production, period. In the cinema, Béla Tarr has mastered miserabilism (for better and for worse) and as much as we want and expect another great film from the dour Hungarian, The Turin Horse does appear to be a likely last outing in a “Where do we go from here?” equation. That Nietzsche served as fodder makes Tarr’s last film pronouncement all the more believable, accompanied by howling winds strong enough to annihilate society as a whole and a single boiled potato for our meagre Last Supper. Yet, pessimism by way of contemporary philosophy (itself of the pessimistic persuasion) is more of a French specialty, especially when contemporaneity is wracked with repressive guilt and the spectres of a sodden history, the trespasses of the Occupation never distant. An interesting comparative study could be made between Godard’s Film socialisme (2010), with its veneer of essayistic opacity and its playful irreverence toward its own enjeux, and Nicolas Klotz and Elizabeth Perceval’s Low Life, a stylized, neo-gothic nocturne with traces of trance and a healthy dose of soixante-huitard nostalgia. The former has a significant cameo by Alain Badiou, while the latter quotes him and a host of other philosophers and writers in a pseudo-Nouvelle Vague (1990) literariness of fragmented, floating citations and abstracted monologues.
TIFF Countdown -2: Martha Marcy May Marlene / Afghan Luke / ALPS / The Artist / Beauty / Fable of the Fish / First Position / The Ides of March / Kill List / Le Havre / The Loneliest Planet / Page Eight / Pina / Play / A Separation / Sons of Norway / The Student / Tyrannosaur
Cinema Scope 48 Preview: Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin, US)—Special Presentations
By Andrew Tracy
If “indie-ness” conveys a certain generic intimation unto itself, some of the most celebrated recent independent films have also strategically adopted broader generic tactics, usually related to violence. As sensation, whether shockingly enacted or tautly withheld, has started to become an ever more important element for independents to attract the necessary attention, this has naturally led to a focus on ever more extreme situations to supply those jolts, from the feudin’ and fightin’ Southern revenge ballad of Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories (2007) to the less estimable Winter’s Bone (2010), where its backwoods Nancy Drew encounters threats of rape, murder, and mutilation. Of course, unfamiliar worlds and familiar worlds made strange—an intense specificity of region, character, tone—have traditionally been independent cinema’s raison d’être; but even with the worthy films in this vein, one begins to suspect that the setting is more pretext than source, less lived reality than ready-made scenario.
