Vancouver Dispatch. 2.

If there is a Cinemateque in movie-lovers heaven, it's probably a lot like the newly completed Vancouver International Film Centre. Built to host year-round film programming, the 175-seat screening room has a rake like a coliseum, first class seats that feel like the seats of command and a screen that fills the vast front wall and mats off each film with a pair of thick black frames that slide to the chosen aspect ratio and seems to capture the image and hold it there on the screen for its running time. In short, it was created to make each screening feel like it was there for you. I felt an electric charge as the frame slid open to scope dimensions for its inaugural public screening.

Of course, the film itself, Claire Denis's elliptical and obtuse The Intruder, may have some part in that charge. To be honest, I'm still not sure what the film is about, but if I may quote a fellow critic during a post-screening conversation, "Sense is overrated." It's a typically and engagingly sensual drama that may be a spy thriller, a tale of redemption or the fever dream of a heart patient haunted by his paternal failures of the past. What I mean by sensual has less to do with sex (though there is that, with gloriously unglamorous bodies and imperfect flesh tangled up in pleasure) than with the simple texture of experience. When a character tramps through a forest, wades through the surf or brushes the flesh of another, you can almost feel the sensation through her vibrant color, her caressing camera and her unique rhythms. Michel Subor, with his hard, tight face etched with years and mane of white hair, is an aging wolf who has left the herd for a solitary existence, or so it seems from the first images as he wanders through the wilds with his dogs (and sets the feral pack of a nearby compound barking ferociously whenever he approaches). But he's still cunning and ruthless, as we see when he makes quick work of an intruder on his land. He may be a Russian spy, he certainly needs a heart transplant and he apparently has the clout and the money to buy a black market heart and head out on a globe-trotting odyssey to find a son he abandoned years ago. It can't all be "real," but Denis isn't letting on how much is fantasy, how much guilty visions as he deals with the transplant, and how much his own physical quest, perhaps because the entire drama bubbles up from his regrets and his sins, remembered as he gets a new lease on life. The question he faces is: at what cost?

Michael Haneke won the Best Director prize at Cannes for Caché, which played as a Special Presentation at VIFF and confirmed his status as one of the world's most provocative filmmakers. Ostensibly a thriller, the film plays at fears even more insidious than direct threats of violence. French intellectual book critic and TV host Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) are terrorized by a series of videotapes that simply show their home under surveillance - the tapes come wrapped in children's crayon drawings and blood. Those disturbing images don't appear to be threats, at least not overtly, but they trigger something buried deep in Georges's memory, something that stirs up his guilt, which he deals with by turning aggressive, protective and righteously outraged. Haneke's brilliant use of video recalls his earliest films, but with a more sophisticated execution. It disrupts our identification and makes our gaze uneasy as the point of view is constantly shifted. Meanwhile, a subtext of angry youth and its defiant challenge to parents slowly bubbles up through the film, while a disturbing reality of race and class relations are exposed not merely in Georges's every confrontation, but in his very sense of entitlement. But at the heart of the film is a defiant ambiguity that leaves the audience either grasping at clues and jumping to conclusions, just as Georges does (making us complicit in the actions that lead to shocking consequences) or sitting back with a film that defiantly refuses closure with a final shot that echoes the surveillance-style framing that defines the veiled threats of the videos. We're watching you, we're told, but whose gaze is it?

The most impressive of the "Dragons and Tigers" competition films (limited to first and second-time directors) that I had the opportunity to see was Shin Song-Il is Lost (South Korea). Shot on DV, mostly in black and white, with turns to color (notably in the surreal third act), it is the tale of a Christian orphanage with a warped headmistress who preaches a twisted interpretation of Christianity (appetite is a punishment, eating a sin and starvation a form of devotion) ostensibly to save money (her appetite doesn't seem affected) and possibly to bend young wills. Thus the opening scenes have a Buñuelian undercurrent as kids sneak Choco Pies and cartons of milk into bathroom stalls to secretly scarf them down, while the intently religious Song-Il starves himself for days until he has visions of angels. Though hardly an example of realism, the black-and-white naturalism and the performances of the kids create a normalized viewfinder and give the film a tone more weird and unsettling than satirical. What follows, however, becomes increasingly surreal and impressionistic, as if filtered through the starved brain of the obsessively fasting Song-Il. Shin Jane gives it all an undercurrent of unsettling humor, which makes the ordeal bearable, even as the young minds are warped by this heretical, horrible teaching until they rebel in a chapter out of Jean Vigo.

Posted by dwhudson at October 11, 2005 2:27 PM