Toronto Dispatch. 5.

Cock and Bull

Adapting novels for the screen has been only one of the unofficial themes of this year's Toronto International Film Festival, but it may be the dominant one in this eclectic festival. On the basis of what I've seen, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, Michael Winterbottom's retelling of Laurence Sterne's 1760 novel, is far and away the best of these many adaptations. Let's be clearer about it. It's the best film that I've seen at the festival.

If you've ever read Tristram Shandy, or tried to read it, you know that the shifting, interrupted, self-undermining story is near-impossible to turn into a feature film, especially a commercial feature film that tends to call for a comprehensible linear story.

Or is it so hard? In turning the notion of an adaptation into the story of making a film of a screenplay about the novel, with every banal or noble layer of moviemaking butting its way in to complicate and compromise what looked like a simple retelling of the story, Winterbottom has honored Tristram Shandy. The film laughs at the notion that there's a pure story, a pure love or a pure anything, prying that notion apart in every frame.

Tristram Shandy has a Dogme look that we've seen before in Winterbottom's films. Think of 9 Songs. There's also a Dogme attitude - which is also a Laurence Sterne attitude, thank you very much - that rules are arbitrary, made to be broken, even if they're your rules, and that the things that break them are often spontaneous or trivial and just as often outside any filmmaker's control.

You see all this in what is also backstage comedy in he best of that tradition, set in a century-old country house where the film is being shot and Charles I is said to have slept "before he was beheaded." (Bear in mind that Charles I was a 17th century monarch. Details, details, Sterne and Winterbottom might say.) Actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon vie like teenagers in the two principle roles. Rather than duel, the rivals taunt each other obliquely, or when they've had a few drinks, less obliquely. Besides juggling this competition, Coogan (who plays the actor Coogan and Tristram) has a wife and a new baby on the set. Family complicates the lust that he has for a cute assistant who can be reached amorously if you know how to tap into her obsession with Fassbinder. That's just one tendril in the film, which includes, a la Sterne, much more stop-and-start talking about what is to be done than it shows people actually doing anything. Most of it is shot (perhaps all of it) with a tactile hand-held camera, which follows a character, documentary-style, until the lens is distracted or until a door is closed. If Laurence Sterne showed us that something resembling attention deficit disorder is at the root of human observation, then Michael Winterbottom has created a visual equivalent for that. In other words, if you want to understand something, look at its opposite(s), then procrastinate, and then give up. That's one of the lessons of Sterne's novel: never assume that the novel or film or essay that you produce will ever contain the richness of the world that it seeks to show.

Laurence Sterne didn't even identify himself as the author of Tristram Shandy when it was published. He paid his own money to publish the book,  a surprisingly bawdy story to come from the pen of a parson. Or maybe people just didn't know parsons. In any case, it turned him into a star. Michael Winterbottom should be commended for making such a wise and funny film. After the press screening, which was packed to capacity, a distributor who admires Winterbottom asked me whether I thought the film was too "smart" to reach an audience and make any money. I hope not, but like everything else in the world of Laurence Sterne (or in Winterbottom's effort to create an equivalent), this adaptation carries its own negation.

Japonismes

You couldn't find a more different film from Tristram Shandy than Drawing Restraint 9 by Matthew Barney. Solemn and ritualized, it's an extravagance that tries hard to convince you that it's understated. It will probably be praised by Barney's army of admirers and might even earn him some new ones. That's a shame.

Barney's mostly-silent latest film is structured around a visit to a whaling ship by a bearded Barney and his companion, Björk, who is dressed like a sprite from a Fragonard painting. Björk wrote much of the music in the film, and her homeland, Iceland, is one of the few nations that opposes worldwide bans on whaling. Japan is another. It's hard to know what Barney is thinking, but he seems to view whaling as an honorable tradition, just as he aestheticizes everything that he depicts in Japan.

After a colorful procession to an oil refinery at a harbor on Nagasaki Bay, we see a sculpture made from petroleum jelly and we see the Occidental Guests, as Björk and Barney are called, arrive on a state-of-the-art whaling vessel. (Was this a product placement?) We get a slow Barney-esque tour, and then the guests are bathed and shorn (worshipfully, of course), and dressed in huge furs (here the emperor has lots of clothes) and offered tea at a ceremony on board. It is only then that we hear our stars speak in this silent movie. Let's just say that it's far from Delphic.

Then Barney and Björk fall in love, as I'm told in the press notes, which I'm relying on here because I couldn't tell what led to their union in a pool of water or what the emotions were behind it. Their "love" has a sort of Last Tango suddenness, and then it falls into decomposition (real decomposition), which sure looks like the negation of anything Japanese. There's a his-and-her sushi scene that's a crescendo to this sequence which I won't say any more about besides, "If you love me, then eat me." Just enjoy it and laugh out loud. If you have another response, see a doctor.

Drawing Restraint 9 has enough unintentional humor to sustain its length of two hours and twenty minutes. It's ponderous and pretentious, but those may be its winning assets. That's been the case in the past for Barney, who is the most successful cross-marketed artist out there in a contemporary market that just keeps growing. As a filmmaker, he seems to understand editing and production design, and he knows how to create a false sense of majesty that appeals to an audience seeking to be awed by something grand. Someone sitting behind me at the screening said, "How does he get away with this?" I could only respond that Barney's dealer, Barbara Gladstone, is the producer of this film that looks as if it cost a lot of money to make. Barney gets away with this because this and almost everything else he does makes money for someone.

Back to the Present

Back for a moment to the political films of the festival. One that reminds you of the officially-condoned horrors of the recent past, and focuses your attention on present horrors, is October 17, 1961 a French film whose name comes from the date of a police massacre of Algerians demonstrating in Paris. Up to 200 unarmed demonstrators may have been gunned down by French police on that evening. Bodies were hard to count because many were thrown into the Seine. Alain Tasma and a team of historians have tried to reconstruct the events, from the point of view of Algerian activists, French sympathizers and the police. The production design takes you back well enough to the time, seen through a narrow frame, since Paris has undergone so many ill-conceived facelifts since then. There's no reference to what was happening in cinema then, which was the emergence of the Nouvelle Vague. This isn't about cinema, as critics of its flat image will surely point out. It's about history and honesty.

The strength of this drama is in the facts (which were never the subject of an official inquest, nor covered much in the press), and in the fine acting that resurrects the tension of the time.

It was a time when partisans for an independent Algeria (the FLN, or National Liberation Front) gunned down French politicians, and when Algerians on the street were beaten and killed with impunity by police. The demonstrators which police attacked at different locations in Paris were part of an unarmed march which was called just as the French and the FLN were about to announce a cease-fire. Whether it was good judgment to call a demonstration at the time is one question to answer. (Alas, since then, Algerians have a lot more questions to answer.) Whether shooting any demonstrators (and drowning them or leaving others unattended to die) could be justified is much larger question.

The French only began probing the massacres thirty years after they happened, when the then-Interior Minister, Maurice Papon, was facing trial for crimes against humanity which he was charged with committing as a Vichy French official during the Nazi Occupation. (Papon is in prison now.) Papon's anti-Algerian policies came to light while prosecutors were looking at his work at the behest of the Nazis. World War II isn't discussed in the film, but Algerians crammed into buses by French cops look like Jews headed toward the camps. No one who sees the film will miss the similarity.

And no one will miss the references to the present. Despite being French citizens, North Africans are taunted and humiliated by police and often beaten. The shacks where they live are cramped and squalid. Their leaders are not saints, however. They know that casualties can help reduce the enemy's appetite for war, and they are willing to sacrifice some of their own people. They are also willing to sacrifice French lives, even though many of those French may have been just as innocent. "That's the nature of war; it's not the worst who die," says one FLN chief.

Anything French, from any political perspective, seems to have been poisoned for the American public by the corrosive rhetoric of the Bush administration. In fact, I assumed that the public was so predisposed to think of the French as wine-drinking sniffers of perfume that the very notion of the sissy French being physically capable of brutality was implausible to Americans (I say this as someone named D'Arcy) - I assumed there would be no US market for such a film. But then there's the Guantanamo/Abu Ghraib angle to October 17, 1961. It's not a precise equivalent of prisoners bound, beaten, degraded and sometimes killed while in custody, although there is quite a bit of that. It's the fact of torture being used as an instrument, and then denied, in the face of irrefutable evidence, some of which is simply destroyed in the film before the press can see it. Officials are shown drafting their responses in official-ese, what the French call the "langue de bois," the wooden tongue. You'll be struck by how little the tone of those pronouncements have changed. (Tasma doesn't need to mention these parallels to the present. They're too obvious. You'll see more institutional aversion to the truth soon in Good Night, and Good Luck.)

The tone of October 17 can be on the earnest side - although not too earnest, as in some recent Bertrand Tavernier films in which Tavernier has moral grievances to redress and his hand is too heavy. Earnest is forgivable here. It took more than 30 years for these events to come to light. Tasma and his team have made a valuable contribution. The film opens in France later this month.

Posted by dwhudson at September 14, 2005 10:11 AM