Toronto Dispatch. 3.

There are definitely many challenges when attending a film festival, albeit they are mostly joyous ones. When you are watching so many films back to back the mechanics of filmmaking - the performances, the script, the cinematography, the narrative, the sound design, the score, the set design, the costuming - really start to stand out. You try to find the things that make each film stand on its own rather than dissolve into a giant mix of movie mush.

When faced with big studio releases (or films with ambitions to be a big studio release) like Head in the Clouds, Ray, and Being Julia, you become hyper-aware of the high production value and the shortcomings that gloss covers up. Indeed, Charlize TheronRay, Taylor Hackford's Ray Charles biopic. Jamie Foxx does a good job in the intimidating role, but it's too bad the film's run time is a reel and a half too long and the supporting actors, namely the ones in the flashback scenes of Ray Charles's childhood in rural Florida, are directed to shoot fire from their eyes and shout their lines.

The main thing Ray has got going for it is its music (it opens with "What I Say" and the sequence in which the song is written and performed is gangbusters) and a couple of other films have some notable scores. Oliver Assayas's Clean does take place in a world where the musician Tricky is the last resort to help the main character get her son back, a feat which verges on the impossible, but it's got performances by Tricky and Metric and songs written by Mazzy Star and performed by Maggie Cheung (one colleague describes her voice as Marianne Faithfull-like.) The John Kerry documentary Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry closes with R.E.M.'s new song, "Around the Sun." Sally Potter, also an accomplished musician and lyricist as well as a film director, did some of the original music for her film Yes with long-time collaborator Fred Frith.

Yes, Potter's response to the 9/11 attacks by way of a love story between an Irish-American scientist and an exiled Lebanese surgeon, is also one of those films at the Toronto fest to challenge audiences with its structure. The dialogue is entirely in iambic pentameter. Other films less standard in structure have included the 24-meets-Belly gangster thriller Haven (the film, shot like a music video, jumps back and forth in time between a triad of character stories) and the claustrophobically shot, perhaps Le Fils inspired Keane. 

Todd Solondz's Palindromes, which is probably the most daring film structurally out of all that I've seen at the festival (and the most troubling). The story, which circles around the unsolvable umbrella issues of teen pregnancy, pro-life, pro-choice and religion, has its main protagonist Aviva played by six different actresses in any given scene. It's not an uninteresting device but, for me, it made it even harder to connect to the plight of Aviva. I've gotten in many an argument with fellow critics about Solondz's bleak worldview in his films, from Welcome to the Dollhouse to Storytelling, but I think Palindromes did me in. This one is pretty harsh.

Posted by dwhudson at September 17, 2004 2:27 PM