September 18-24, 2003
movies
Fables of the Reconstruction
 Remember this Elephant: Gus van Sant's mesmerizing Columbine piece was a highlight of the Toronto International Film Festival.  |
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Toronto’s films try to pick up the pieces.
Reviewing a film festival is a little like trying to assemble an incomplete jigsaw puzzle; you might end up with a sketchy idea of the whole, or one near-complete section and a whole lot of empty space. With 339 films, this yearís Toronto International Film Festival had even more pieces than most, and with only 10 days to sample the festivalís wares -- not to mention a front-loaded schedule that crammed press screenings of many of the most anticipated films into competing opening-weekend slots -- the best that can emerge is a pixilated snapshot.
Still, through some combination of accident and design, a pattern seems to emerge. For me, things clicked into place on day three, the festival's first Saturday, as I was watching Gus Van Sant's Elephant. Transparently, if not explicitly, based on the shootings at Columbine High School, Van Sant's eerily calm film follows a handful of students around a high school in his hometown of Portland -- literally follows them, the camera often tracking behind them for minutes at a time as they walk through the halls, silent except for the occasional exchanged pleasantry. Shifting perspective dozens of times, Elephant folds back on itself, replaying the same moments over and over, like a detective looking for clues that still refuse to present themselves. (In one brilliant twist, a meeting between two characters is replayed from each character's point of view, then from that of a third, belonging to someone we didn't even know was present, implicating us in her social invisibility.) When the killers find their way into the story, it's not as harbingers of doom (you don't need any encouragement to dread what you know is coming), but as two more students with their own unheard stories. Asked why he treated his incipient murderers the same as their victims, Van Sant said simply, "They're all just kids."
A similar combination of empathy and forensics gave birth to Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold. In his words, Panahi, the Iranian director of The Circle, became "obsessed" with a news item he'd read about a man who killed a jewelry store owner, then himself, during a botched robbery. Crimson Gold opens with that robbery, filmed in one excruciatingly unbroken shot, then rewinds several months to find out how a sad bear of a pizza delivery man becomes a violent criminal. Like Elephant, Crimson Gold relies on nonprofessional actors -- Panahi found his lead actor at a local pizzeria -- and lets the indignity of its protagonist's life come upon us slowly. In one devastating sequence, he's immobilized by police who are staking out an illicit party; unable to leave the street below, he distributes the pizzas he's come to deliver equally among police and their captives. In another, he's invited into the palatial apartment of a rich man who's just had a fight with his girlfriend; when the girlfriend calls back unexpectedly, the faux camaraderie dissolves, and the delivery man, in his tattered coveralls, is left to wander silently through endless rooms filled with all the things he'll never have. Panahi's empathy is more theoretical than Van Sant's -- you don't feel the aching certainty that he could have been any one of the movie's characters -- but his desire to make sense of the senseless is just as acute.
Wherever you turned, it seemed like Toronto's movies were about picking up the pieces -- luckily, not always as literally as In the Cut, Jane Campion's risibly pretentious genre yarn, which finds Mark Ruffalo's detective collecting body parts in a serial killer's wake, and still finding time to stick his tongue in Meg Ryan's secret places. (Put this on the poster: It does for detective thrillers what Hulk did for superhero flicks.) 21 Grams, Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu's follow-up to Amores Perros, leaves the puzzling to the audience; the film's shattered narrative, which eventually brings together a bereaved mother (Naomi Watts), a transplant recipient (Sean Penn) and a born-again ex-con (Benicio Del Toro), flashes backward and forward with dizzying aplomb, allowing us to dread the approach of cataclysms we've already seen. Stunningly raw performances from Watts and Melissa Leo (the latter certain to be eclipsed by Watts' cover-girl nimbus) provide an anchor for the film's structural flights of fantasy.
That's not to make it sound like Toronto was an unmitigated gloom-fest. Even in dealing with grief, some films found the strength to be lighthearted. Though doomed from the start, Keith Gordon's big-screen The Singing Detective, adapted from the celebrated miniseries by author Dennis Potter before his death, manages a few moments of song-fueled transcendence before succumbing to the inevitable comparisons. Striking a far happier note was Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World, which features Isabella Rossellini as a legless beer baron who hosts a contest to discover the titular tunes, hoping that more tears will equal more beers. Featuring a beautifully modulated turn by Kid in the Hall Mark McKinney as a Canadian posing as an American (boo! hiss!), the film climaxes with a confrontation between McKinney's Broadway producer and his long-lost brother (Maddin regular Ross McMillan), who's similarly incognito as a Serbian calling himself Gavrillo the Great. McKinney stages a variety of gay production numbers inspired by America's ills ("Abolition Blues" and the like), while his brother, clad in black, saws away at his cello, using Serbia's guilt for the Great War to channel his sorrow over the loss of his wife and son. Set, and not just time-wise, in the Great Depression, Saddest Music comes down to a battle between modes of expression: whether grief is best papered over or poured out. As an arch, if guilty, stylist, Maddin's winner is foreordained, but Saddest Music shows traces of a very un-Maddin-like sincerity, enough to expand his audience beyond his current tiny sliver to a slightly less tiny sliver.
Would that such self-consciousness should afflict Lars von Trier. Though the charges of anti-Americanism that followed Dogville from Cannes proved unfounded -- if he was aiming at America, he missed -- Trier's Brechtian parable (stage-drawn lines instead of sets, a heroine named Grace) quickly turns into yet another unbroken downhill slide, an essay on human nature from a director who willfully misunderstands it. Though Nicole Kidman's turn as Grace might be more "brave" from a career standpoint, Robert Benton's otherwise unexceptional adaptation of Philip Roth's The Human Stain gives her more to chew on. No wonder Kidman disowned plans to appear in Trier's "trilogy about America" soon after he goaded her to announce them.
Returning to the world of problems not invented by Lars von Trier, three festival entries looked in on the recent history of Afghanistan. Directed by Siddiq Barmak, who fled the Taliban's rule and has recently returned to head fledgling Afghan Film, Osama is set during the Taliban period, and follows a young girl who poses as a boy to find work. Though somewhat single-minded, it's a sincere and powerful critique. Samira Makhmalbaf's At Five in the Afternoon, feted at Cannes, has more striking imagery but far less clear objectives. Taking its title from a William Carlos Williams poem (repeated three times in the course of the movie), Makhmalbaf's film, which involves, among other things, a woman who wants to be the first female president of Afghanistan, plays like a series of static set pieces that never congeal. Either, though, is better than Michael Winterbottom's In This World, a saggingly earnest look at the plight of Afghan refugees that might as well be called The Plight of Afghan Refugees. Taking care to explain (and explain) its subject to non-Arab audiences, In This World pummels the audience with its lack of faith in them. What about the plight of patronized audiences?
In a festival where even camels were moved to tears (in the beautiful documentary The Story of the Weeping Camel), the purest expression of loss, not surprisingly, came from Taiwan's Tsai Ming-liang, whose Good Bye, Dragon Inn bids a dry farewell to a bygone age of cinema, a fitting choice for a week that saw the last screenings at the cavernous Uptown. Set in the same crumbling movie palace seen in Tsai's What Time Is it There?, the film features only a dozen lines of dialogue, and little in the way of action, unless you count the swordplay in view on the theater's screen, where King Hu's martial arts classic, Dragon Inn (1966), plays throughout. The rationale for Tsai's approach isn't revealed until the last reel, which deprives the film of the flawless emotional clarity of What Time ; even the generally receptive Toronto audience (they dug The Brown Bunny) seemed more chilled than thrilled. But the sheer beauty of Tsai's compositions -- no one can give you more to look at in a seemingly empty shot -- is a welcome rebuke to the gaudy trappings of most of what passes for film art. If, to steal a line from King Lear, our present subject is grief, Good Bye, Dragon Inn might serve as a reminder that we should mourn losses small as well as large, those little bits of humanity that slip away daily if we don't keep watch. Otherwise, we fall apart.
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