Day One
Day One at the Toronto Film Festival is a little like the clearing of the throat
before an aria. It’s Thursday, a day before the blitz of festivalgoers arrive,
and though the press enjoys a full schedule, the first screening for the public
doesn’t start until the evening—and for both press and public, the
choices are pretty inconsequential. Nevertheless, I dutifully zipped through customs,
baggage claim, and currency exchange; took a manic cab ride to the hotel for check-in;
picked up my credentials; and arrived just under the wire…for a movie I
didn’t care for in the least. Festivals like this are a weird phenomenon:
You travel hundreds of miles and rush around frantically day-after-day to catch
movies that, in many cases, you wouldn’t scrape yourself off the couch to
see otherwise. It might seem irrational, but in a festival of over 300 films,
there’s always the threat of some elusive masterpiece that you would have
missed if you weren’t taking part in a sleepless, ass-busting 10-day marathon.
Needless to say, The
Piano Tuner Of Earthquakes is not that masterpiece. It’s
the second feature-length film directed by the Quay Brothers, an eccentric duo
that made their name on strange, disturbing stop-motion animated shorts, most
famously the Peter Gabriel video for “Sledgehammer.” I never saw their
first feature, the by-all-accounts interminable Institute Benjamenta,
but from the evidence at hand, what may seem intriguing and suggestive at five
minutes turns obscure and fussed-over at 100 minutes. What I could piece together
of the story sounds intriguing enough: An evil “doctor” abducts a
beautiful opera singer and takes her to some faraway lair to be the key player
in a special performance. The doctor also hires a famed piano tuner (who, in a
typically odd detail, hails from generations of tuners who were immaculately conceived),
not to tune pianos, but to calibrate a series of elaborately engineered machines
that will drive this performance. Unfortunately, the diabolical purpose of this
scheme is never revealed all that clearly, which leaves a lot of pregnant scenes
where characters speak in English as a second language. The images are immaculate
but stifling, hermetic, and ultimately narcotic: Many of the critics around me
were snoozing, and it took some Clockwork Orange-like eye-peeling for
me not to join them.
Things didn’t get too much better with L’Enfer
(Hell), the second (after Tom Tykwer’s Heaven) in a trilogy conceived
by the late Kryzstof Kieslowski before he had an opportunity to execute it. This
one is directed by Denis Tanovic, who made a splash a few years ago with his Balkans
drama No Man’s Land. A tale of three sisters whose present problems
with men are related to a past trauma involving their father, the film proves
yet again that nobody can do Kieslowski but Kieslowski; in other hands, those
twists of coincidence and fate seem either too cute, or, in this case, too mechanical.
Had the movie sustained the Hitchcockian chill of its final scene, it might have
been onto something.
After two disappointments right out of the gate—going by Noel’s TIFFstat,
I was worried that I’d be seeing 40-50 bad films this year—a pair
of comedies raised the bar considerably. If you’re unschooled in late-‘70s
Korean politics (as I am, I’ll humbly admit), it might be difficult to fully
understand the significance of The
President’s Last Bang, but I can see why it caused such
a stir in its home country. Imagine if JFK were reconfigured as a Dr.
Strangelove-esque political comedy, and you’ll get some idea of the
tone of this movie, which gets big laughs from the decadence and corruption that
riddled President Park Chung-hee and his inner circle. Like the recently released
South Korean gem Memories Of Murder, the film dares to take a grave subject—in Memories, it was the country’s first serial killer—and introduce
an often broad, bawdy comedic tone that’s daring for being so inappropriate.
Not much to say about the midnight movie, Sarah
Silverman: Jesus Is Magic, other than it’s a cut above
other stand-up concert movies. For one, Silverman is very funny. For two, the
film doesn’t open with the standard tack of interviewing all the excited
people entering the theater (“Margaret Cho is fa-bul-ous!,” et al.),
but with a scripted segment that builds anticipation for the show while getting
some laughs in the process. Like Noel, I’m not convinced that Silverman
is a particularly “relevant” comedian. She’s edgy and fearless
in drawing out racial and ethnic stereotypes or dropping bombs about sexuality,
but her observations never really engage with society in a meaningful way. At
the Q&A, someone compared her to Lenny Bruce, which I think is right and wrong:
She busts taboos just as aggressively, but she’s walking the path that he
and others already blazed. But big laughs nonetheless and Silverman’s teasing,
off-handed, bad-widdle-girl delivery gets the most out of every joke.
Day Two
With Day One out of the way, the auteur parade began in earnest with Lars Von
Trier’s Manderlay,
the second after Dogville in a proposed (and now aborted) trilogy about
America. With Bryce Dallas Howard replacing Nicole Kidman as Grace, Willem Dafoe
replacing James Caan as her father, John Hurt returning as narrator, and many
Dogville cast members recast in new roles for extra confusion, the film goes back
to the well with diminished results. The action again takes place on a vast sound-stage
with chalked-in buildings and landmarks, and again attempts to reveal the hypocrisies
of Yankee democracy. Here, Grace comes across a Southern city in which slavery
is still practiced a good 70 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. With daddy’s
gangsters along as enforcers, Grace forcibly liberates the slaves and naively
attempts to introduce the concept of a free society. This being a Von Trier film,
things don’t go terribly well for Grace or the former slaves, who are anything
but grateful for her actions on their behalf.
In many ways, Manderlay may be more inflammatory than Dogville:
Basically, Von Trier implies that the slave system, while brutal and oppressive
and undignifying, may be preferable to the perverse form of “democracy”
that replaced it. In his view, the promise of democracy for blacks is a whopping
lie that continues to be perpetuated, because the system doesn’t offer any
real opportunities for social advancement. Given that this point has just been
enforced in New Orleans, where the almost uniformly black and poor population
was left to rot in the flood waters, Von Trier’s extreme cynicism would
appear to be right on target. And yet it’s clear why he’s stopping
at #2 in the trilogy, because Dogville makes many of the same arguments
(in that case, how democracy applies to the immigrant experience) in exactly the
same stylistic fashion, so the element of surprise is gone.
Not much to say about Neil Jordan’s Breakfast
On Pluto, his second Patrick McCabe adaptation after The
Butcher Boy, and a much lighter and less substantial effort, though it does
delve occasionally into The Troubles. With Cillian Murphy cast as a blessed-out
Irish transvestite, the film follows his self-destructive (yet strangely optimistic)
quest to find the mother who orphaned him as a baby. Those who aren’t open
to the idea of red-breasted robins occasionally commenting on the action in translated
chirps are probably ill-suited to withstand the quirkiness that follows, but Jordan
handles it deftly and sweetly, and some of the individual episodes—especially
one involving Jordan regular Stephen Rea as a melancholy magician who takes Murphy
on as his assistant—are really affecting.
After some minor pleasures and disappointments, the festival finally delivered its
first great movie with Brokeback Mountain, a beautiful adaptation of
Annie Proulx’s great short story about gay cowboys in Wyoming. Turning a
short story into a 130-minute movie may seem like an indulgence, but it accomplishes
what all adaptations should aim to do: Retain the spirit of the source material
while offering a new experience altogether. Director Ang Lee works at a patient,
deliberate pace that captures the passing of time in way that Proulx’s story
inherently couldn’t: As the years continue to elapse—and both men
get tangled up in dutiful marriages with children—the film grows progressively
more heartbreaking as their future dims. In that respect, Brokeback Mountain
deserves a place next to great movies like The Age Of Innocence, In
The Mood For Love, and Far From Heaven, all about passions extinguished
by societal codes that can’t accommodate them. Like those movies, the characters
rarely articulate how they feel about each other, which those rare moments when
they do register like a sock in the gut. This is the movie of the year for me
so far.
As if to bring some cruel balance to the universe, Brokeback Mountain
was followed by the crushing disappointment of Cameron Crowe’s new movie Elizabethtown,
which calls to mind Krusty The Clown’s protestations when the network threatens
to makes cuts to his show: “It’s the tightest three hours and 20 minutes
in show business!” This is Crowe’s Heaven’s Gate: Given the
full resources of a major studio at his disposal, he’s invested himself
so completely in the project that he refuses to make the tough decisions that
would have made the film better. In short, he’s fallen in love with every
frame of his movie, and the effect is incredibly wearying after awhile, especially
in a final act that yawns into infinity. All of which isn’t to say that
there are great things here, such as an all-night conversation between Orlando
Bloom and Kirsten Dunst bottles the excitement of connecting deeply with someone
for the first time. But Crowe needed another set of eyes to locate the shapely
movie that lurks in this epic unloading of personal baggage.
And speaking of unloading baggage, I apologize for the gratuitous length of this
first blog entry. Expect more drive-by criticism in the days ahead.