This should wrap up my quick takes on the films I watched at the Toronto International Film Festival. I fully intend to revisit several of these films at length in the future.

Bamako
One of the highlights of the Los Angeles Film Festival this summer was the revival screening of Abderrahmane Sissako’s Waiting for Happiness (2002), a beautifully elliptical film about a teenager drifting through a coastal Mauritanian town and encountering various local inhabitants. What I most appreciated about the film was its silence and ambiguity; what I most appreciate about Bamako, Sissako’s newest film, is its passionate voice. Through a sophisticated premise involving an open air trial (consisting of real life lawyers and judges) of the World Bank and IMF, Sissako invests the film with a rising sense of indignation and consequence. Although the rhetoric of some of the witnesses and lawyers borders on rote sloganeering, the importance of the oral tradition to African society can’t be overemphasized, and the speeches culminate in a fiery protest song delivered by an elderly man that is left untranslated, but firmly resonates through sheer conviction alone. Another highlight is Sissako’s satire of transnational entertainments that use third world countries as exotic backdrops: the imagined Death in Timbutktu clip (starring Danny Glover and Elia Suleiman) is a hilarious rebuke of Hollywood hegemony.

Times and Winds

In addition to Hamaca Paraguaya, my favorite discovery of the festival was this film, directed by Turkish filmmaker Reha Erdem (who studied in Paris); friends tell me his previous Oh Moon (1989), Run for Money (1999), and Korkuyorum Anne (2004) are also well worth seeing, and if the visual elegance and emotional potency of this film are any indication, I’m sure they’re right.

Times and Winds is set in a small Turkish mountain village on the sea, and the lives of the villagers are visually captured in stunning images that oscillate between tranquil stillness and dramatic movement (steadicams and helicopter shots are unexpectedly and creatively employed). The plot (elegantly structured around the five daily Muslim prayers) centers around three adolescents who face emotional difficulties: misunderstanding and severe parents, the mysteries of love and sexuality, and increasing responsibilities in the adult world. But the film develops poetically; it isn’t a point-by-point narrative so much as a continuing evolution of character and perspective. Erdem understands this milieu, and his empathy for the struggles of the youth in light of generations-old familial dysfunction is honest and deeply felt. (I was partially reminded of Terence Davies’ formally aggressive ruminations on youthful pain and memory.) Bolstered by a lush, dramatic score by Arvo P‰rt, the film is an engrossing look at the emotional terrain of youth, and its vivid setting and sublime compositions give it a timeless, magisterial resonance. Definitely a filmmaker to watch.

Woman on the Beach

Having seen all of Hong Sang-soo’s work except for his debut (The Day the Pig Fell Into the Well), I was prepared for this film’s clever, self-referential structure, layers of Rohmerian coincidence and intrigue, and numerous scenes of lovemaking and inebriation. What I didn’t expect was its whimsical spin on these elements and its almost demure restraint; I’m tempted to describe the film as Hong’s most charming and warm work to date, but I hasten to emphasize the psychological depth and tragic notes beneath its surface.

By sheer coincidence, it’s also the only film of the festival I saw twice, due to an unexpected opening in my schedule. But I was completely won over by the film’s infectious spirit and teasing conundrums, and leaped at the opportunity to revisit it.

An art film director vacations on Shinduri beach, accompanied by an assistant collaborator and his girlfriend, and a romantic triangle soon forms. Rather than a tug-of-war between personalities, however, Hong is interested in exploring a theme he initiated with A Tale of Cinema–the ideals and expectations we place upon people and our genuine inability to cope when they are trespassed.

As in his previous film, Hong utilizes a zoom lens, which–like established personalities–sometimes makes unexpected movements in an otherwise static routine. (Each of his stationary shots are carefully framed with an auteur’s eye.) In many of Hong’s films, relationships come across as fatalistic compromises, but this film celebrates the potential wisdom and joy to be found in even short-lived connections, and it’s an observant delight from beginning to end.

Khadak (The Colour of Water)

About halfway through the festival, it occurred to me that I only had tickets for established auteur works or films that had strong word-of-mouth, so I decided to take a couple chances on unknowns; this film was a shot in the dark, and it proved to be a very good choice. Apparently, it just won the Lion of the Future award (best first feature) at Venice, and it’s such a bold and original work invoking Mongolian myth, culture, and politics, I hope it continues to garner accolades.

Made by Belgian documentary filmmakers, it’s a visually stunning and expressionistic work that tells the story of a young shepherd who has to vacate plague-ridden steppes with his mother and grandfather and emigrate to a mining town; the radical change in lifestyle prompts a rebellious spirit in the youth intensified by his epileptic and/or shamanistic experiences that ultimately provokes a revolution. The film was shot on location, beautifully capturing the vast, frigid, landscape and monumental, communist architecture, following its enigmatic characters and situations with equal commitment to reality and fantasy.

Earlier this year, I saw another film set in Mongolia, Season of the Horse, that dramatized the plight of nomads forced to relocate to urban areas due to increasing commercialization of the land, and while it, too, captured the beauty of the landscape, its structure and aesthetic conceptions were decidedly less ambitious than this. Khadak tells an unabashedly Mongolian story and makes little concessions to Western narrative conventions; ultimately it’s much more effective because of it.

Colossal Youth

Pedro Costa’s film was one of the most absorbing and memorable films of the festival, but it’s also the finale to a trilogy (beautifully detailed by James Quandt in the latest issue of Artforum) about a Lisbon shantytown whose previous installments I’ve yet to see, Ossos (1997) and In Vanda’s Room (2000). As a result of this (and the fact that the final reel was mistakenly subtitled in French), I felt perpetually one step behind the film, but its soulful beauty, vividly naturalistic performances, and complex juxtapositions make it the TIFF film I’m most eager to see again. (I hope to receive the DVD of Ossos next week, so save this space.)

I’ll close my TIFF coverage by noting two genuine disappointments, Day Night Day Night and Red Road. Both films demonstrated adept handheld camerawork (almost certainly inspired by the Dardennes) that balanced seemingly random details with tantalizing hints and encroaching documentary realism (a brief shot in Red Road of the reflection of a lava lamp in a window overlooking a city is startling in its beauty), but both films use their suspense in manipulative ways I’m not convinced have anything to offer beyond their own immediate pleasures. Day Night Day Night has much in common with Santosh Sivan’s The Terrorist (1998), including its existential rumination on the obsessional preparations of a would-be suicide bomber. Frustratingly, the film is strictly focused on its plot–there are no psychological complexities or political nuance, for example–and ultimately, it’s difficult not to feel subjected to an empty exercise in style. Red Road is being touted as the best film from the UK in years, but it seems equally schematic despite the naturalistic energy it channels into its story of another obsessed and enigmatic protagonist. I’m hesitant to divulge much about the plot since the vast bulk of the film largely seeks to obscure its central drama. Unfortunately, when the crisis is finally revealed, the plot seems both prosaic and distracting from the film’s ultimate thematic concerns; it then tries to realign the film in the last twenty minutes, causing a bizarre shift in tone and a resolution that seems far too hastened. This, despite several strong performances and admittedly engrossing camerawork.

I’m back in Los Angeles, but I’ll be posting the rest of my TIFF impressions this week. Including The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, these are the documentaries I screened:

Manufactured Landscapes

This film introduced me to the work of Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian large-scale photographer whose primary subject is industrial wastelands. From massive technological vistas to mountains of debris to oily vistas stretching off into the horizon, Burtynsky’s photos are startling in their scope and dystopian detail.

The film also provided my first look at one of the unexpected motifs at the festival this year, the Three Gorges Dam project in China, the largest dam in the world that has destroyed a dozen cities and displaced over a million people, a technological and sociological juggernaut that would resurface in Jia Zhang-ke’s Dong and Still Life, as well as Gianni Amelio’s The Missing Star.

Much of the film depicts Burtynsky working in various locales, sometimes mirroring his compositions but zooming in or out to offer a sense of scale. While ostensibly remaining apolitical, the film’s monumental sense of anonymous mechanization and environmental ruination is at times overwhelming, in part because of the effective rhythm established with the editing and haunting electronic score. It’s more meditative than informational, but I found it absorbing and provocative.

Blindsight

I saw this film on a whim–I thoroughly enjoyed director Lucy Walker’s previous The Devil’s Playground (2002), an examination of Amish culture and the rumspringer tradition. But while that film probed the psychological complexities of rebellious youth questioning their religious values, this is a much more conventional celebration of blind Tibetan teens and the dedicated activists who hike them up the Himalayas. Not that the subject isn’t a worthy one, and if you want a picturesque dose of the indomitable human spirit (or cute kids, at least), this film will likely satisfy you. I even like the dominant message of the film, emphasized in several ways, that the real value of the expedition lies in the kids’ journey and teamwork rather than their destination–the imposing 23,000 foot Lhakpa Ri summit on the north side of Mount Everest. But there are no surprises in this straightforward telling, and the kids largely remain appealing icons rather than compelling personalities. The adults in the film emphasize the importance of submitting their skills and passions in the service of the kids and not vice versa, but the film often seems more interested in the dream team logistics than the little people involved.

Dong

Like Manufactured Lanscapes, Jia Zhang-ke’s 66-minute film visits the Three Gorges Dam (the town of Fengjie) through the eyes of an artist documenting life in the rubble. The lively Liu Xiao-dong has been called one of Chinaís leading figurative painters, and on the basis of the highly sensitive and detailed portraiture seen in the film, I’m willing to accept that claim. Yet this is no simple overview of an artist–there is no narration or biography, and Liu is reduced to providing a few sound bites about his work. Instead, Jia uses Liu as an inspirational starting point for his own exploration of the people and landscape, slowly panning over the Yangtze, crumbling buildings, and figures crawling over the ruins, endowing the chaotic setting with unexpected nuances of cohesion and tension. The second half of the film is set in Bangkok, where Liu and Jia continue their shared study of figures and setting. It’s a rich examination, and it’s easy to see why it was the impetus for Still Life; both films shed light on one another, offering stereoscopic depth with their two-pronged vantage points of fiction and non-fiction.

Remembering Arthur

I discovered the work of experimental filmmaker Arthur Lipsett earlier this year and have since been fascinated by his creativity and tragic life story. An auteur of the collage film, Lipsett was lost in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the National Film Board in the ’60s and ’70s, which gave many filmmakers a chance to work but insisted they follow standard operating procedures in order to secure funding and equipment for their projects. (One interviewee in the film additionally suggests that the NFB really only had room for “one Artist,” and that spot was already filled by Norman McLaren.) Lipsett became a virtual celebrity with his Academy Award-winning short, Very Nice, Very Nice (1961), but his unorthodox production methods (such as submitting photo collages on poster board rather than traditional storyboards) helped to perpetually marginalize himself until his mental health deteriorated in the ’70s; he eventually took his own life in 1986.

Martin Lavut’s biography of Lipsett is reasonably informative, but it inevitably seems both too close to its subject and curiously superficial. It would make an excellent addition to a much-needed DVD set of Lipsett’s work. But the documentary is cut too quickly, stringing together a sentence or two from one talking head to another, creating a breathless feel that is almost tiring. (George Lucas offers five seconds at the beginning: “In terms of understanding the power of sound and picture relationships, there’s no one better than Arthur Lipsett.” Next.) Perhaps Lavut saw this fast cutting as a tribute to Lipsett’s montage artistry, but I found it frustrating. Problematic, too, is the film’s almost sole reliance on Lipsett’s inner circle of acquaintances (Tanya Tree, Christopher Nutter, Ryan Larkin), of which many–particularly Lipsett’s onetime girlfriend Judith Sandiford–recount his eccentric behavior through a haze of friendship, love and pain, making the film more confessional than critical. I would’ve appreciated more insight into Lipsett’s complex relationship with the NFB or stronger voices from the aesthetic arena rather than this compilation of personal anecdotes. Definitely engaging, but hardly the final word on this most enigmatic of filmmakers.

Continuing with the Toronto International Film Festival ’06 coverage…

Offside

Jafar Panahi–known for his controversial and hard-hitting dramas The Circle and Crimson Gold–has crafted his most vibrantly energetic and entertaining film to date, without compromising his social vision one iota. Various young Iranian women individually attempt to sneak into the 2005 World Cup qualification tournament between Iran and Bahrain but are arrested and detained because of an Islamic convention that only allows men to attend sporting events. (Ostensibly, the fear is that women might be exposed to harsh language.) What proceeds is a film shot with great immediacy with a handheld camera that largely documents the hilarious and heated repartee between the women and their guards; the fact that it’s a highly patriotic film is part of its subversive brilliance–its characters are not dissenters, but rabid fans as equally committed to the sporting cause as the next person. Their only “fault”–as suggested by one prisoner–was to be born female.

Panahi’s camera captures the chaotic energy of a crowded bus in the early scenes and follows the course of events that befalls one woman in particular in something approaching real time. Arrested and pulled to the side of the game, the women (and the viewers) are prevented from watching the game, but can glean portions of it through occasional commentary and opportunistic glimpses. Much of the film takes place in an isolated, cordoned-off back alley of the arena, yet it never feels visually monotonous, and the cheering masses repeatedly enter the plot in inopportune (or is it opportune?) moments to enact unintended but small scale political revolution.

The film will be released on DVD in the UK on September 18, and I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

Coeurs

I’ve yet to catch up with Alain Resnais’ former picture, Not On the Lips (2003), a surprise, CÈsar-winning, mainstream hit for the octogenarian auteur, but his latest film suggests he’s having fun with his newfound popularity. Playing earnestly within the conventions of a staid, modern melodrama in ways comparable (perhaps) to Cronenberg’s poker-faced evisceration of the action thriller in A History of Violence, the film’s drabness will likely shock those expecting a boldly experimental work. On its surface, it’s a mawkish ensemble film about photogenic bourgeoisie searching for happiness in modern day Paris, but rumbling beneath the surface–largely in the form of stiflingly chic interiors and an idealized and anonymous Paris of closed spaces and immaculate disconnection–is a cutting commentary on petty fantasies and distracting passions. The film’s banality of beauty is oppressive–Resnais reuses his “snowing” transitional motif from L’Amour ‡ mort (1984) so often it becomes dirgeful. Still, self-aware subversion of dumb cinematic convention is not exactly my favorite genre, and though I appreciated Resnais’ subtlety and apparent intentions, this wasn’t a particularly fun film to sit through.

Hamaca Paraguaya

This minimalist film from Paraguay–its first in three decades–was pathetically dismissed by The Hollywood Reporter as “tedious” and “aesthetically primitive” (the paper suggests only relatives of the filmmakers would be willing to pay to see it) but it’s easily among the most intensely beautiful and moving films I’ve seen all week. With perhaps a dozen or so stationary camera setups and (by my count) 31 cuts, the film constructs a meditation on time, memory, and loss worthy of the Left Bank filmmakers.

Last summer, I visited the midwest (where I was raised), and arriving at my hotel in the evening, the first thing I did was sit in the grass on the edge of the parking lot at the edge of a dense forest and watched the fireflies (nonexistent in the states I’ve lived in the past 15 years) and listened to the myriad crickets, cicadas, and other insects chirping away in the humid night. A wealth of childhood memories flashed before me in that moment, and it’s one I will cherish for years to come.

Filmmaker Paz Encina understands that moment, and her film recreates it with stunning sensitivity. An elderly couple walk into the jungle, set up a hammock, and proceed to “converse” about the dog barking in the distance, the impending rain, and most of all, their absent son, who has gone off to war and never returned. The scene is shot in true Bazinian depth of focus and duration–his recipe for cinematically grappling with the ambiguities of reality–and Encina adds another bold formal device: although the couple’s dialogue corresponds with their actions, their lips never move (thus the conversation occurs both in and out of time, overflowing its confines). They share a life of hardship, hope, and survival, and this is a moment of rest and idle connection in a land they know in equally intimate measures. At once quotidian as well as sacred, the moment’s quiet depth of feeling is shattering; the cinematic beauty, unstinting. This film doesn’t have much of a chance at distribution, but it wholly deserves it.

Still Life

Fresh out of the Venice Film Festival with a Golden Lion, Jia Zhang-ke’s feature companion piece to his documentary Dong (which I’ll be screening on Saturday) was a last-minute surprise addition to TIFF that had cinephiles buzzing. And it actually delivered: the film is a profound, multi-layered dramatic examination of the irretrievability of the past.

The film is set in the ancient Yangtze river town of Fengjie that has been perpetually obliterated and relocated to make way for extensive flooding brought about by the world’s largest hydroelectric project, the Three Gorges Dam (featured extensively in the documentary Manufactured Landscapes). Authorities have been destroying and moving the town to higher ground for years; the move continues by stages with tremendous, if chaotic and imperfect, public relations efforts, demolishing buildings, scattering families, and importing hundreds of low-wage laborers.

Jia’s characters wander this desolate landscape every bit as destitute and crumbling as Berlin in Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero while attempting to reconnect with family members–or at least contact and reorient themselves, but it’s a formidable task. As the waters rise and buildings vaporize, history and identity are equally obliterated (workers offhandedly mention finding Han dynasty artifacts in the rubble), leaving a foreboding and alien landscape (humorously suggested with unexpected motifs throughout the film). Jia never loses site of the emotional posture of his protagonists, yet consistently works in a series of marvelous and subtle touches, such as the woman searching the city who perpetually refills her water bottle–but only a few inches at a time, as if frightened of the destructive implications of too much water. It’s a rich, inventive film that will reward repeat viewings.

TIFF has been a fine, blustery week, with temperatures hovering in the 60s with occasional showers. After the heat records in Los Angeles this summer, this feels like paradise, and standing in line at midnight for The Host in a torrential downpour with lighting crashing around us was an atmospheric high point of the festival. The films and company have been terrific–I’ve only seen one movie I ultimately disliked, and so far I’ve seen about 20 of them (not including the Wavelengths program of shorts).

Here are my impressions of the films, which I hope to add in six- or seven-film increments over the next few days, although I fully expect to write about my favorites more in depth after seeing them again sometime down the road.

As usual, I’ve done a bit of last minute schedule-rearranging, and added/dropped a couple of films from my initial plan. The biggest surprise this week was the festival’s last minute addition of Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life to the program. Woo-hoo!

The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema

Sophie Fiennes’ playfully philosophical documentary was the perfect way to begin the festival, with film theorist and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek plowing his way through the (often sexual) subtexts in films by Hitchcock, Lynch, Tarkovsky, and many others. For those who have seen last year’s Zizek! documentary (recently released on DVD), Zizek’s infectious mixture of Slavic passion, humor, and the gift of gab won’t come as any surprise, and the film is definitely compulsive viewing for cinephiles.

I’m not aware of other films that unapologetically showcase wall-to-wall Theory–and for that I’m grateful–but, however, I must admit that Zizek’s ruminations on the sexual ideal or the Mother Figure reminded me so much of my university theory classes from fifteen years ago that I wondered if it wasn’t all a bit dated. I don’t reckon it would be easy to make post-theory formalism as juicy a subject as Lacanian subtext (picture David Bordwell armed with a stopwatch standing in front of a wall diagram of camera movements and shot lists). But maybe it attests to how fun Fiennes’ movie is that I wish there was more of its kind representing the broad spectrum of cinematic ideas previously relegated to the classroom. Bravo.

Ten Canoes

Sometimes a cinephile’s imagination can be a quagmire. I thoroughly enjoyed Rolf de Heer’s new film, set in Aboriginal Australia–it’s an engrossing ethnographic drama performed by non-actors, beautifully shot in alternating color and black and white; it contains wall-to-wall narration in English that mirrors and diverges from the visuals in interesting ways, and the dialogue spoken by the characters was unsubtitled. Aha! I thought. So many ethnographic films compromise their subjects by spoon feeding the viewer with text translation, but de Heer’s film presents the Ganalbingu dialect on its own terms, forcing the viewer to engage the words almost musically, grappling with their ambiguity and inflections as a real traveller might. I had to rush out of the film, so I couldn’t stay for the Q&A, but I spent the next couple days thinking about this ingenious narrative technique.

Saturday night, however, I discovered TIFF had exhibited a faulty print–de Heer had subtitled the film and was outraged by the lack of subtitles at our screening. (I’ve been told I missed a lot of good penis and fart jokes.) My film theory crumbled.

Fortunately, Australia has officially submitted the film to the Oscars, which means I will almost certainly get to see it again at the Palm Springs film fest in a few months. Stay tuned…

12:08 East of Bucharest

Corneliu Porumboiu’s film is a modestly wry social examination of the contemporary media and the Romanian revolutionary events of December 1998. It is framed with glorious shots of Bucharest at dawn and dusk and the kind of affectionately dreary social observation that Cristi Puiu raised to the level of art in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. Various discontented characters eventually meet on a television show to commemorate the revolution but proceed to wreak havoc with the media’s desire to package history in a neat, tidy box of self-flattering rhetoric. The humor is well-observed and the truths that emerge are deserving of reflection. I enjoyed this film and while it wasn’t one of the towering achievements of the festival, it marks an auspicious debut and signals a filmmaker to watch.

Requiem

I haven’t seen the recent Hollywood version of this true story about a religious young woman prone to epileptic seizures and the belief that she’s possessed by demons, but I’m a fan of director Hans Christian Schmidt’s previous Distant Lights (Lichter)–a gripping ensemble film about individual and culture clashes set on the Oder river between Germany and Poland–and this film presents its potentially lurid subject matter with equally admirable psychological complexity and naturalism. Sandra H¸ller has won several European awards for her performance; at times, her struggle is fiercely interiorized (reminding me of a similar effect in Dreyer’s Vampyr) and times uncompromisingly physical. In fact, I was reminded of Dreyer on several occasions, given the film’s ambiguous attitude toward potentially destructive religious authority and potentially life-giving spirit, yet–as in Day of Wrath–certain elements complicate even those labels. It’s a film of numerous paradoxes, and one so aware of–and accommodating to–them that it might even drift into academicism if it weren’t for the its steady emphasis on its protagonist’s emotional state from start to finish, fashioning an intense and compelling meditation on early adulthood, the tensions between mysticism and modernity, and much, much more.

Climates

About the only negative comments I’ve heard regarding Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest–apart from those offended or confounded by its minimalist poetry–is that it’s not as good as Distant. That may be true, but at this level of visual and aural artistry, I’m not going to quibble. Ceylan’s previous films (Cocoon, Kasaba, Clouds of May, and Distant) all tell a thematically interconnected story of life flowing from one generation to the next, and while this film doesn’t apparently continue that examination, it suggests a different kind of autobiography: Ceylan and his wife play the lead roles in a story about a fractured relationship slowly coming apart. Amazingly, both performances are superbly wrought examples of understated ambiguity and nuance, save for one extended scene of physical confrontation choreographed in a single disturbing shot. What makes the film so effective is the way it communicates the relational dissolution almost uniquely through Antonioniesque compositional suggestion and a highly crafted soundtrack rather than expository dialogue or plot events. This is a film fraught with tension in which almost nothing happens: a quiet dinner, a lazy afternoon at the beach, a conversation in a van–all are atmospherically transformed into various shifting climates of yearning, antagonism, and despair, rarely articulated but consistently devastating.

The Host

Yes, it has a cool monster–a creature of slimy, malformed absurdity–and several astonishing visual moments. (Unfortunately, most of these can be seen in the trailer.) Bong Joon-ho’s horror film about an aquatic creature terrorizing Seoul is well-timed and efficient, and having once cruised the Han River myself, I can attest to its authentic use of locations. Seeing the film at midnight with hundreds of rabid fans who had just spent the last hour or more lined up in the rain generated heady excitement, where every sentence uttered by the presenter was interrupted by raucous applause.

But unfortunately, I simply couldn’t emotionally connect with this film at all. Like several other Korean blockbusters of late (Save the Green Planet comes to mind), it’s layered with such easily digestible irony and self-ridicule that it undercut all my attempts at genuine emotional investment. Ostensibly the drama revolves around a dysfunctional family, but their grief is played for laughs and it’s difficult to discern who is more inhuman–the lumbering, amphibious beast or the slacker protagonist whose major ambition is to steal a tentacle of smoked squid when no one is looking. The film is an effective roller coaster, but I kept wishing the obnoxious characters and condescending tone would fade into the background so I could simply admire the creative CGI.