Toronto Dispatch. 4.

Toronto Anniversaries

I have spent September 11 at the Toronto International Film Festival every year since the September 11, 2001 attack. I was in Toronto then, too, working on a story for National Public Radio about the French film, Le Pacte des Loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf), which couldn't have been farther from what I saw when I turned on the television set that morning.

Since then, at least some of the films at Toronto have tried to make sense of the world after 9/11, whether they explore the prospect of a world with a single superpower or ask whether that superpower is really making any progress in the war on terror it's declared. That's only logical at a festival that shows documentaries that are intended, at least in part, to expand on the picture of the world that we get from everyday journalism.

The Fires of Hell

This year, the post-9/11 world has been addressed in The Smell of Paradise, a film by two Polish filmmakers, Mariusz Pilis and Marcin Mamon, about the global Islamic Jihad that we are told exists beyond and apart from Al Qaeda. The finished film had its world premiere here yesterday. It's not going to make anyone who sees it feel much safer.

The filmmakers begin their journey through outposts of Islamic militancy in Afghanistan, where an aid official warns them, when they start shooting their film after the US invasion, that they are crazy to travel the six hours on the dangerous main road from Kabul to Kandahar; and they certainly shouldn't in one vehicle, which is just what they do. They visit Kandahar, the city where the Taliban first formed, and then Heart, the ancient town in eastern Afghanistan where a mullah has proclaimed himself "leader of all the faithful." Even though US troops are nearby, his supporters throng through the streets, blocking all traffic.

The "smell of paradise" in the title is the promise of eternal life that fuels the absolutist theology and the antipathy toward the West of Chechen leaders whom we find exiled in Doha (Qatar) and hidden high in the Caucasus. They are not fighting for conquest, we are told by men who have been killed since the footage was shot, but out of revenge for crimes against their faith. Their tone is never inflammatory, but subdued and understated. Afghan tribal leaders who agree to speak to the filmmakers near the Pakistani border where Osama bin Laden is said to be hiding tell them that they can't understand how the US hopes to win a war that seems to consist of jailing young men and bombing villages. How indeed, you wonder.

The conversations with spiritual leaders who play political roles are a sampling of influential opinion that may not be systematic. We don't hear from urban people, from secular Chechens or Afghans, or from any women. What we do hear unremittingly is that the world is divided between friend and foe, between "democracy" (as represented by the US and Europe) and the word of God. We also hear from the Chechen leader Shamil Basayev that he has a nuclear weapon that he plans to detonate in a major city. That was before he disappeared three years ago. Another leader tells us that "those who stray from the path will enter the fires of hell."

These are not buried impulses that emerge in spasms, such as in David Cronenberg's The History of Violence (a clever melodrama, also at Toronto, in which the buried past takes its revenge) - these are leaders themselves, looking the filmmakers in the eye and promising what could be an apocalypse. The Smell of Paradise is not melodrama; it's the promise of extreme drama.

The film is more than just talking heads; it's also uncompromising, unforgiving landscape - the stark expanses of Afghanistan and the nearly inaccessible mountains of Chechnya and Dagestan. The same aid official who tells the filmmakers not to drive to Kandahar also warns them not to be charmed by the landscape. Like so many warnings, this one isn't heeded.

Bear in mind that even the road from Kabul to Kandahar can't be defended (nor can the road from Baghdad to the airport), and then think of fighting a war to subdue these vast territories (especially now, at a time when the US can't seem to subdue Louisiana.)

You can view The Smell of Paradise skeptically. Perhaps the filmmakers, given rare access and a rare determination to do these interviews face-to-face,  gave too much credence to the threat of a world war that's really intended not to destroy the West, but just to scare it enough to break its will. Insurgencies use this tactic all the time. It worked in Vietnam.

But perhaps something else is going on. On this anniversary of 9/11, what we are seeing on the screen is not a memorial, but a set of prophecies. Maybe the men on the screen mean exactly what they say.

Rockudrama, Rockumentary

Walk the Line, directed by James Mangold, looks at country music's troubled Man in Black, Johnny Cash, and at Cash's journey from a cold upbringing to his rise to stardom, to his marathon courting of June Carter, with lots of pills and booze fueling the trip. Joaquin Phoenix as Cash comes as close as you probably can without plastic surgery to the rivet-eyed look of the man. The music can be rousing, especially in the early years when Cash played the same circuits as Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis - the production design also completes the period picture - think of Ray, then think of a country music equivalent which must have made the rounds of yard sales all over Nashville. Yet it's the script and its cookbook psychology that fall short here. Cash's older idealized brother dies after a sawmill accident, his father scorns him, and he craves the approval he never gets. Get the picture? There you have it, except for a spirited performance by Reese Witherspoon as June Carter - a funny and tender pro on the stage. Here's a chance to see her at her best. It's hard to know if there's a new generation of Johnny Cash fans out there, but we have to assume that they would expect more from this biopic. For those who didn't know Cash all that well, Witherspoon may save the show. I saw Walk the Line in a tiny screening room, not the best point from which to evaluate how well a film like this will eventually play. We'll know more when the film plays to larger audiences.

The mockumentary / rockumentary of the week could well be Brothers of the Head, which finds the roots of punk rock in Siamese twins. (Didn't we all know that?) Imagine a meeting where this was proposed. It's not just preposterous; it's also logistically impossible to make. Well, they made it. Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (Lost in La Mancha) adapted the film from the novel by Brian Aldiss. Our heroes, played by Luke Treadaway and Harry Treadaway, are attached by a slab of skin at the chest and share a liver - "Pectoral Link"? - and, in case you haven't guessed, it's as much about the attraction and intimacy between the twins as it is about the music. (I can just imagine the first junket question: "Can you talk about how you guys 'bonded' on the set?") The production design is stylish and appropriately rusticated, befitting a period of pop music now thirty years old. The wry script by Tony Grisoni, full of allusions to Spinal Tap that I'll assume are intentional, is much easier to follow than his scenario for Terry Gilliam's entropic Tideland, which also premiered at the festival. Brothers of the Head is also likely to reach an audience. I can foresee this movie renting over and over again.

Posted by dwhudson at September 12, 2005 7:24 AM