September 23-29, 2004

movies

Missing Links

GETTING IN TOUCH: Zhao Tao in Jia Zhang-ke's The World, a highlight of the Toronto Film Festival.

In search of a theme at Toronto 2004.

by Sam Adams

The film festivalgoer goes not just in search of movies—those seen far enough in advance of the folks at home to secure months of bragging rights, those which must be grasped at like soap bubbles before they vanish into the whirlpool of non-distribution—but a theme. Elusive and sometimes illusory, the right theme knits together the inchoate experience of cramming several dozen movies into the space of a week, dashing breathlessly from theater to theater, pausing only long enough to stock up on bottled water and pre-made sandwiches. At the Toronto International Film Festival, an hour squandered is a movie half-missed, and with 328 films to choose from, you were doomed in advance to miss most of them.

Past years' themes have presented themselves clearly, largely on the strength of a common thread stretching itself between the handful of films which emerge from the crush as the year's best. (The best and the worst always stand out; it's in the indistinct middle that things tend to blur.) But this year, in part because so many movies were very good without quite being great, the common threads were everywhere and nowhere, a tangled knot of half-satisfying overlaps. Though David O. Russell's I Huckabees (which will be driving typesetters nuts through mid-October) loses steam in its last few reels, its focus on a pair of "existential detectives" (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) who teach their clients that everything is connected to everything else began to seem almost prophetic—as did the exasperation of the environmental activist (Jason Schwartzman) and firefighter (Mark Wahlberg) who struggle to cope with their newfound consciousness. If everything is connected to everything else, then doesn't that make those connections meaningless—and isn't that the same as not being connected at all?

Then it struck me, like a flashback to college English: The absence of a theme was itself a theme. The centenary of Yasujiro Ozu, the godfather of narrative ellipsis, set the stage for a festival whose best films were as much defined by what they left out as what they put in. Start with the two explicit Ozu tributes: Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Café Lumière and Abbas Kiarostami's Five. Even by Hou's astringent standards, his tribute to Ozu is markedly reserved, as much about the quality of light filtering through layers of semi-transparent screens as the story of a young Japanese journalist who returns from Taiwan to tell her parents she is pregnant. Almost abstract in its refusal of plot, the film only begins to yield its secrets on a second viewing, though the beauty of its textures is apparent from its second shot. (Equally confounding, and even more ravishing, is Claire Denis' L'Intrus, which sticks shards of spy-thriller plot into an almost totally impressionistic tale.) Continuing to embrace digital video, Kiarostami's Five is a wittily restricted series of five long takes, each purporting to offer a slice of unmediated seaside reality. The poignancy with which a piece of driftwood bobs in the surf, eventually splitting in two like a mother abandoning her child, contrasts markedly with the humans who rush across the boardwalk in the film's second shot, their outlines blurring slightly against the geometric backdrop of a metal railing. Though it's more likely to be seen in art galleries than movie theaters, Five has flashes of deadpan humor; the strutting ducks of its fourth part can only be a parody of the humans' movement in its second.

Restriction of a more agonizing kind characterizes Keane, the first movie in six years from director Lodge H. Kerrigan (Claire Dolan, Clean, Shaven). Though most chose to take it as a straightforward story of a desperate father (a searing Damian Lewis) unhinged by his daughter's kidnapping, the film's unrelenting focus on its main character, not to mention his obvious mental illness, leaves open the possibility that his past life, daughter and all, is no more than a delusion, and that the young mother and daughter he befriends are less a replacement of something he lost than a fulfillment of his fantasy. Either way, Keane is one long cringe, a study in unrelieved tension ratcheted up by Lewis' wire-tight performance.

As cringes go, though, there's no beating Todd Solondz's Palindromes, which features a chorus of line-dancing disabled children as ooky as anything since Freaks. As always, the discomfort in Solondz's films comes from the ambiguity of the director's presence: Does he want us to laugh at those kids? Or is it only our own depraved minds that would even consider it? With a half-dozen wildly different actresses cast in the role of a baby-crazy preteen, Palindromes is a fairy tale the Grimms would have been proud of, complete with unlikely forest encounters and surprise appearances (most notably the older brother of Welcome to the Dollhouse's Dawn Wiener, whose funeral opens the movie). So intent on alienating his audience he actually lets an ant crawl across the screen at one point, Solondz creates a masterful dynamic of alienation and repulsion, a car-crash course in abortion rights as impossible to ignore as it is to like.

A less ostentatious swap is at the heart of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady, a lush but formally rigorous film which turns a romance between a soldier and a country boy into a hunt for a mythical tiger. A few critics have furrowed their brows at the movie's midpoint shift (augured by a second set of titles), but read as post-breakup angst, the soldier's hunt for the evanescent beast makes perfect emotional sense (especially since the "tiger" is mostly played by his ex-boyfriend, stripped naked and covered with henna scribblings). Shot in near-darkness and nearly devoid of dialogue—except that provided by a talking monkey—Tropical Malady offered the festival's most engaging nonverbal storytelling, making its absence felt.

The converse of all those missing links might have been a tendency towards too-muchness, perhaps most evident in Jonathan Caouette's battering Tarnation, an autobiographical essay-film which conveys his nightmare childhood with a blizzard of iMovie effects and booming, if sometimes oddly chosen, music. (My notes at one point read: "Wichita Lineman?") Barely more fictional was The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, Asia Argento's adaptation of J.T. Leroy's childhood-from-hell novel. Casting herself as the battery-acid-blond mother, with an accent somewhere between Daisy Mae and Sophia Loren, Argento sneers like the ghost of Elvis, and the movie splinters around her. An audience costumed a la Argento ate it up, no doubt having worn out their Scarlet Diva DVDs, but Argento's poetic-grotesque seems like a sop to adolescent minds of all ages. (You know you're in trouble when she cites Gummo as a major influence.) The movie has a nerve-jangling effectiveness, but considering how often Argento and Leroy used the word "beautiful" in the post-screening Q&A, you'd think they could have included a few non-uglyish moments.

While excess sank the limp anthology film Eros (a passable Wong Kar-wai, a Soderbergh doodle, and a sadly risible Antonioni), it enlivened new films from Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman. Alongside two old shorts, Varda's Cinévardaphoto features a new portrait of "collector-curator-installation artist" Ydessa Hendeles, whose collection of photographs of teddy bears and their owners numbers in the thousands. Rather than curiosity or kitsch, Varda finds a map of the world in Hendeles' collection, stringing together playful narratives from unrelated portraits while pondering the relation of Hendeles' obsession with her background as the child of Holocaust survivors.

Akerman's Demain on déménage (Tomorrow We Move) is a virtual sequel to her The Man With the Suitcase, replacing near-wordless slapstick with a tumble of language, and herself with doppelganger Sylvie Testud (marvelous, as ever). Trying to churn out an erotic novel for quick cash, Testud furiously scribbles stray phrases in a battered notebook, while downstairs her mother teaches piano and fills the kitchen with smoke. No sooner have they moved in than Testud decides she needs to find a new place, but as potential buyers flood their apartment, cracks begin to show in the farcical facade, as when her real estate agent remarks that the smell of a freshly fumigated apartment reminds him of the Polish death camps. A perhaps deliberately overlong farce, Demain nearly goes from enchanting to exasperating, but Akerman relieves the tension with a few well-placed pauses and, of course, a song.

Perhaps the quest for common ground is a fool's errand; the closer we get, the more our differences show. At least, that's the sense you get from Jia Zhang-ke's magnificent The World, his first film not to be banned in his native China. Set in a Beijing amusement park where the world's major cities are recreated as pintsize sets—a tour guide approvingly notes that their Manhattan still has its Twin Towers—Jia's expansive but intimate film focuses on the troubled relationship between a security guard and a chorus girl, but as much as Hou's Millennium Mambo (with which it shares a critical contribution by Taiwanese techno composer Lim Giong), The World is about young people trying to define themselves in the age of globalization. The world may seem like their playground, shrunken by cell phones and the Internet and encircled by a convenient monorail, but The World observes that regional differences persist: provincial accents, or intra-Chinese racism. Shot on ravishing high-definition video that puts Collateral to shame, The World is at once macro- and microscopic, The Big Picture in a series of snapshots. Which, in a way, makes it a metaphor for film festivals themselves.