TIFF epic wrap up

Dear city of Toronto,

I would like to issue a formal apology for originally dismissing you as a shithole, wherein the only redeeming facet is making the dark of the movie theater more inviting, and thus a perfect, no-extraneous-distractions location for a film festival. This wrongheaded belief originated at the age of 9, in which I was briefly separated from my parents downtown, and in my callow age was unable to appreciate the virtues of a ‘cultural melting pot’, so to speak. That aspect, along with the ultra-convenient public transport, amazing range of secondhand stores, cheap halal food and street-vendor hotdogs, and several bars visited playing Simply Saucer, have made my last 10 days awesome, and that’s not even counting the movies. I greatly wish to again inhabit your environs in the near future.

Yours truly,

Ian

PS: If there is any way I can reimburse you, please send a sign. Otherwise, I will empty my fat coin pouch of pennies into a nearby sewer.

Aptly enough, the theme of reassessing long-held beliefs and prejudices is central to Meek’s Cutoff, the new film from Kelly Reichardt and probably the best film I’ve seen at the festival. Reichardt brings her spare, minimalist (drink once for every variation on those adjectives from hereon) approach to a period western set on the Oregon trail in 1845, as the members of a wagon team become increasingly wary of their leader’s directions and motives – Michelle Williams plays one of three wives of the men travelling, and the first to consider the possible guidance offered by a captive Indian along the way, as Meek’s promises prove increasingly empty.

Needless to say, this isn’t Dances With Wolves territory, and as pal Matt Ravier said, Reichardt’s is cinema is one of “asking the right questions rather than providing easy answers”. The ambiguities aren’t a lazy way of asking the audience to do the heavy lifting, but rather a perfect example of whittling the story down to its bone in order to enrich the core themes. In this case, it’s the importance of questioning conventional wisdom, and the choice of filming the plains in the boxy, 4:3 aspect ratio is the first immediate sign of counterintuitive thinking, undermining the traditional metaphysical connotations of the western vista and bringing the basic elements of the terrain – earth, sky, people – into sharper relief; perfect for the struggle for survival endured by the characters.

It’s as visually gorgeous as any classic Hollywood western, with Reichardt’s eye for the minute details of labor, and an ability to find ineffable poetry in the growing desperation looming large over the narratively spare proceedings. As the film reaches its haunting culmination of words and images, I found it impossible to shake off the doubts and predicaments of its characters, vocalised and unspoken – and it’s a testament to the strength of Reichardt and her cast that both are articulated equally effectively.

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Wonky leaders also figure in The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, a 3hr essay montage of largely context-free archival footage of the former Romanian Communist dictator, which I fully expected going in to be the cinematic equivalent of a raw dish of brussel sprouts. On the contrary, it’s enthrallingly propulsive throughout, and offers an excitingly fresh approach to documenting political history. Using the raw materials of this footage from newsreels and home movies, filmmaker Andrei Ujica fashions a sprawling and deeply subjective account where we see how Ceausescu saw himself during his reign. Through the absurdly endless focus on political pageantry, industry and blustery but ultimately inconsequential speeches, an epic scale portrait of hypocrisy and delusion emerges, and though it perhaps benefits from a more than cursory foreknowledge of the era’s history, even I the mugwump was in awe of the ingenuity of Ujica’s achievement.

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It feels necessary to talk about Leap Year and Curling together, since they’re both the kind of Minimalist Art Film About Alienation (MAFAA?) that are a dime a dozen at any major festival, the kind that almost make it too easy for festival programmers, and the kind that have experienced a wave of backlash started by Nick James’ recent ‘slow cinema’ scourge in Sight and Sound magazine (a backlash that found its own backlash in some corners). But hey, I’m a loner who eats that shit up, and both films are stellar examples of the paradigm; deeply felt and empathetic enough to immediately fend off charges of laziness or fraudulence that are often leveled toward the less sacred practitioners of this type of cinema (Reygadas and Ceylan, in particular).

Leap Year, a Mexican production directed by Aussie ex-pat Michael Rowe immediately brings to mind Chantal Akerman’s seminal 70’s studies of feminine solitude in Je, tu, ille, elle and Jeanne Dielman; Rowe adopts a fixed frame approach nearly identical to the latter to examine the loneliness of a woman holed up in her apartment, using increasingly aberrant carnal relationships with anonymous men as the only relief from the tedium and loneliness of her daily routine. Rowe’s concerns are more explicitly humanist than Akerman’s politicised formalism, and the film is both deeply sad and admirably non-exploitative in its frank and explicit depiction of sexuality. It’s miraculously never maudlin either, with the stationary long-takes allowing scenes to organically teeter from misery to wry comedy without any feeling of tonal whiplash. It’s altogether a remarkable balancing act, and one of the most assured first features in recent memory.

Quebec’s Denis Côte has a reputation as one of Canada’s most adventurous and challenging auteurs, and the fact that Curling is his ‘warm and accessible’ breakthrough speaks a lot to that status. Early on, when a certain plot mystery was introduced, I knew that the film was going to leave it hanging, and found myself at odds with the film. But gradually Côte’s interest with the interpersonal relationships of the people inhabiting his bleakly anonymous spaces (real life father and daughter play the same here) become apparent, and any cynical feeling of a filmmaker playing into the hands of a coterie disappeared by the ending’s hard-earned note of hope.

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Disappointments of the festival came from the Asian contingent of my viewing slate. Sion Sono’s Love Exposure was one of my favorites of last year, announcing him as the kind of special-case filmmaker who I always want to get behind – punk-ish, steadfastly disregarding conventions and past traditions, and in no way out to win approval from cultural tastemakers. Cold Fish, his latest, seems to exist to offend every sensibility imaginable, but manages to only be tediously abrasive. The film’s treatment of women seems more pointed than on first glance – Like the Crank films, Sono seems to be amping up the objectification and violence towards women to a satirically unpleasant degree. But Neveldine & Taylor’s abrasiveness came at the expense of Hollywood action films, while Sono seems to be going for something closer to the capitalist critique and common-man plight of Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons. But he’s no R.W.F., and anything resembling incisive commentary is drowned out by the shrill unpleasantness and ridiculous overlength (2.5 hours!).

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Also underwhelming was Hong Sang-Soo’s Oki’s Movie, which despite a semi-intriguing structural play, might represent the moment where his concerns (mainly boorish, shitfaced men and the women that elude them), no longer concern me. And I’ll trust that the clumsily didactic and dramatically inert The Ditch, a fictional recreation of a little-known chapter in recent Chinese history involving the mistreatments of miners, is in no way representative of the quality acclaimed documentarian Wang Bing’s prior work. His visual sense is undeniable, and the tactile depiction of physical suffering is vivid, but the effect is just spoiled by any time a ‘character’ opens their mouth.

I’m a big fan of the small sampling Jerzy Skolimowski’s filmography I’ve been privy to, but Essential Killing is a clumsy attempt at telling the story of an escaped Taliban prisoner (Vincent Gallo (!!) while avoiding sermonising and/or polemics. It’s the ‘physical over the political’ (ala Hunger, to name a recent example), but the presence of cartoon US military types and generic Islam flashbacks undermine the film’s attempt at prolonged experiential immersion, though an acceptably tense action-survival flick lies at the film’s core.

Gallo won the best actor prize at Venice for his dialogue-free performance, which is impressive enough once you get over the innate problem of his miscasting (Galloban?). His third outing as director, also hot from Venice (where it was roundly panned), Promises Written in Water evokes something like a Philippe Garrel movie starring irritable monosyllabic simpletons, but like his prior two features, it’s all somehow incredibly touching in a dumb, embarrassingly private sort of way. Gallo is after honest feelings at all costs, which informs the formal choices in some exciting ways; the use of a rehearsal footage of repeated line readings results in one of the most weirdly funny scenes in recently memory. Best of all is the cartoon gangster type that shows up midfilm without context for one brief scene and never again, offering one last job that Gallo quickly refuses. It’s hard not to think of the scene as his own wry eff-you to the legions of placeholder Tarantino/Ritchie knockoffs that Gallo’s films have stood in stark opposition toward since Buffalo ’66 in ‘98.