Toronto. Conversation and postscript.

Gee: I was completely baffled by the Takeshi Miike film Big Bang Love, Juvenile A. It's a real set piece about two convicted murderers who meet in prison and one is found over the other's dead body. It also has Mexican pyramids, a space ship and tattoos that seem to disappear off of one of the character's skin.

I'm getting ahead of myself when I say it's the companion piece to Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain (which has a Mayan temple and a space-bound bubble rising to a dying star) but I think it is: it's got the same sort of mystical mumbo jumbo dry-walled around an impossible love story within a questioning of political conscience. I might have cut both films a break if I hadn't seen Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, which sets the bar pretty high for combining fantasy elements with interpersonal relationships and political climes. Pan's Labyrinth is the new guide post for phantasmic metaphor in filmmaking of this type.

Marlow: I'd go one further and claim that Lisandro Alonso's Fantasma operates in the same space, although without any of the special effects that dominate the other three. I suspect that some folks would disagree, since it finds the fantastic in the absolutely ordinary. It, Andrea Arnold's Red Road and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century are easily among the finest films that I was able to see at Toronto. I'd include Zidane: un portrait du XXème siècle but we were able to see that a few months prior to the festival.

Conversely, the Miike film and The Fountain were among the worst. It might be worth mentioning that Johnnie To's Exiled was the most entertaining of the two dozen films that I caught in the TIFF program (either there, at Telluride or elsewhere) and quite in contrast to his two Elections, also at the festival and similarly worth seeing. Exiled was a real throwback to the John Woo HK films of the late-1980s/early-1990s. Of course, if I'd seen Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, my "favorite" might be different.

Gee: Borat was a favorite of at least two critics I talked to. The festival seemed light on the comedy for the most part - I guess we don't feel like making funny films so much these days.

Marlow: Or, in the case of Severance, the inclination is to gravitate from comedy to horror and back.

Gee: I did catch the wedding send-up Confetti and For Your Consideration, which felt like Christopher Guest-lite (Is Hollywood too easy a send up? Can you even send up Hollywood anymore?) but was enjoyable after a day of grim film.

Speaking of grim, Toronto always gives us a chance compare actors against themselves. Parker Posey was in Consideration and Hal Hartley's sequel to Henry Fool, reprising her role as the title character in his latest, Fay Grim. The story picks up fourteen years later with Henry possibly dead and Fay scooting from New York to Paris to Turkey to try and find him. It's a Hal Hartley espionage film, complete with an explosion at the end. It's not quite a return to form, but Posey is an easy watch and pitch perfect with the Hartley patter.

James Urbaniak is back in his role as Simon Grim and he also appears in the hot button film of the festival, Death of a President. Honestly, his casting (along with Becky Ann Baker, aka the mom from Freaks and Geeks) as a forensic scientist questioning the evidence in this imagined documentary of President Bush's assassination, blew the illusion of the film for me. That and the way the film was made (too many narrative techniques in what is supposed to be "archival footage" and an ending that doesn't ring right to me). Some audience members applauded after the film and it won the FIRPESCI prize "for the audacity with which it distorts reality to reveal a larger truth." I'm not sure if a larger truth was revealed... I'm beginning to think the point of the film is that, at least policy-wise, it wouldn't make a difference whether Bush is president or not as long as Dick Cheney is in power.

Other multiple actor appearances include Martin Freeman in Confetti and Breaking and Entering, Jacinda Barrett in The Last Kiss and The Namesake, and the Three Gorges area of China in Jia Zhangke's Venice Golden Lion winner Still Life and the accompanying documentary Dong.

Marlow: Outside of multiple appearances by certain actors and locations, were you aware of any themes that coincidentally connected the various films? A certain dislike and/or distrust of the US of A was on evidence in DOAP, Day Night Day Night and The Prisoner, or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, among others. Granted, the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth provided the conceptual starting point for I Don't Want to Sleep Alone and Syndromes and a Century.

The inevitable, questionable actions in the midst of war were well noted in Bruno Dumont's Flandres and Laurent Herbiet's Mon Colonel, a satisfying first-time feature directorial effort written by Costa-Gavras and produced by the Dardenne brothers. I suppose that you could even claim a thread of youthful discovery from Guy Maddin's latest, Brand Upon the Brain! and Alexis Dos Santos's Glue. Or its opposite, Belle toujours, a case of "mature discovery" in an homage to Belle du jour 38 years later.

Gee: Theme-wise, yes, there were links. Ideas and images were literally taken from other works (or in addition to other works?) and put into others. Dong and Still Life shared shots that appear in both films, which made the experience of watching the narrative film much richer for me (I saw the documentary first) in terms of what the film was saying about urban development. James Longley's documentary short Sari's Mother was crafted from footage he shot while making the feature length Iraq in Fragments - was it a story that didn't make it into the final feature doc?

Marlow: From what I understand, yes.

Gee: Jem Cohen had three films in the festival, the shorts Blessed Are the Dreams of Men, NYC Weights and Measures and Build a Broken Mousetrap. Though Mousetrap was essentially a concert documentary of the band The Ex, it incorporated footage from the 2004 Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden (which was happening at the same time), various shots in front of a New York City electronics store and construction cranes littering the skyline. The short films all incorporate cityscapes and city scenes with people sleeping on trains as the scenery whizzes by in Blessed, and a ticker tape parade visually stimulating us in a quite different way in this post-9/11 age in NYC. These themes, of having a constant political backdrop in your neighborhood, catching a few blissful moments of sleep-induced ignorance of the outside world, reexamining the image (where paper flying through the air once meant celebration, it now also means disaster) and gentrification seemed to run deep with everything from the epic Babel to the slow-burning I Don't Want to Sleep Alone to the improbable Breaking and Entering.

Marlow: Volver, which screened at both Telluride and Toronto, could easily fit on that list as well. What Almodóvar effortlessly achieves with coincidence, Minghella squanders. He is not among the most subtle of directors, clearly. The kindest word that I have for Breaking and Entering is that, between this and The Departed, the talented Vera Farmiga appears to be getting a more substantial per-film pay-day. Of course, she had to suffer through a relatively thankless part, a slight step forward (or a side-step) from her role in Running Scared.

Gee: In the world of audio, Kurt Cobain About a Son created its entire narrative voice from over 25 hours of interviews with Cobain, initially for Michael Azerrad's 1993 book Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. The film is quite an experience in itself. What did you think of it?

Marlow: I wager that I'm too close to the subject matter. I lived in Seattle for a decade and spent a few years of undergraduate study in Olympia, two of the three locations. I have an emotional connection to these images that would likely be lost on most people. Besides, it was as if they borrowed my music collection to make the soundtrack! I was ultimately impressed with their choices. I could say the same for most of the documentaries that were there. Remembering Arthur, about the unfortunately little-known-outside-of-Canada NFB filmmaker Arthur Lipsett. I wasn't all that familiar with him myself, outside of the brilliant Very Nice Very Nice, until an ATA/Other Cinema mini-retrospective in March of this year. I don't believe you can consider Zidane as a documentary, exactly.

Gee: Possibly not, but it definitely documented something. I get interesting reactions when I describe Zidane to people. Many think the idea of filming 17 angles of our generation's greatest soccer player over the course of one match is intriguing. It truly does "document" a person at an event. It's somewhat fetishistic, but that's a lot of film in general, not just this single focus on one person. Reactions have ranged from slight disagreement to total enthusiasm. The thing I like about it is the way it shows just how good Zidane is - even though the soccer action is mostly at the other end of the field (and we never see it). I also liked how the supporting "characters" (Beckham, Ronaldo, the whole Real Madrid club) barely register in the frame. I don't know if a talking head doc or a verite-style doc could do the same thing. Between Zidane and Cobain, with its painterly compositions of the three cities Cobain lived in, these docs are presenting a new way to experience hearing a subject's voice and seeing a subject's actions, which I can appreciate.

The process of watching a movie is odd to begin with. In its mechanics, you're paying a fair amount of money to sit in a row of chairs and stare at a wall for a couple of hours... but magic happens when the images moving in front of you are funny, transporting, revealing, surreal.

When you're at the Toronto International Film Festival as press and industry, things are even odder than a Saturday evening at the movies.  Each screening is like opening night - there is a lot of energy in the line to get in, every seat is packed and people are bristling. Folks working on their fourth film of the day are sucking down coffee rather than munching on popcorn. We're all wearing identical lanyards and badges around our necks. There are more cell phones glowing in the theater before the lights dim than at these rock and roll concerts kids go to these days.

After the first four days of the festival, these become regular, everyday images and routines. Sometimes, in this wacky arena, there are stranger moments in and out of the theater.

Take for instance, the gala world premiere screening of Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain! This silent, black-and-white story about a mysterious orphanage, a brother and sister and the teen detective that divides their affections, played to a packed house and was backed by members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, three foley artists, a castrato, and a narrator (this time Maddin regular Louis Negin - Isabella Rossellini will have the honors when the film mounts at the New York Film Festival.) It had that signature Maddin quirkiness, humor and expressionistic jump cut style. It's full of the stuff that people say alienates "general" audiences, but this audience laughed at every beat and delighted at the old-timey ways of generating sound and music for a silent movie.

I didn't think anything could top an evening like that, but when I met with Maddin the next morning for an interview, I was greeted at the hotel suite by a large armed guard with a large assault rifle in hand. It was puzzling and a little unnerving until Maddin and I asked what the deal was... and then we saw the jewelry on loan (for red carpet events) displayed in the corner. Maddin then launched into a true account of a jewel thief and grisly murderer in his hometown of Winnipeg that sounded like something straight out of one of his films. My interview questions seemed paltry at best after such a lead in, but I did get to talk to him about Brain! and the other film he has in the festival. Nude Caboose is his latest short film, shot entirely with a cell phone. It's a three-minute film that took two hours to make and lists four writers in its credits. "And here I was following around a naked woman with a cell phone pointed at her," he described, holding my tape recorder up at around ass level.

Next odd encounter: I was eating dinner with a fellow film reviewer and, as we were comparing the day's movie fare (All the King's Men? Looks like they delayed its release for all the reasons we feared), and we started to reminisce about Tsai Ming-Liang's The Wayward Cloud, which we both saw together last year and were suitably traumatized by (in a good way). I got up from the table and headed for the front door to make a phone call when I was stopped short in my tracks. Outside was a man crouched over a busted open watermelon; he scooped out the flesh with his bare hands and was eating it as fast as he could. Now anyone who's seen The Wayward Cloud can attest to how freaky it would be to see such a thing right after invoking Tsai Ming-Liang. I don't suspect I will see any mattresses floating on lakes later (although maybe if I trek over to Lake Ontario I might be surprised) but if I did, the images and messages in this year's entry, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, would help keep me from freaking out. They might actually soothe me.

In Sleep Alone, a group of men have found a discarded mattress and are hauling it across town. Meanwhile, a young man (played by Tsai regular Lee Kang-Sheng) is beat up by a gang of con artists and passes out in front of the mattress haulers. One of them takes him in and nurses him back to health on the mattress he has carefully cleaned and nested up. In the same building, a paralyzed man (also played by Lee) is cared for by a young woman (Chen Shiang-chyi). Once she and the now healthy man meet, an odd love triangle/quadrangle/quint-tangle ensues between them, the paralyzed boy, the boy's mother and the mattress hauler. The last image of three of the characters sleeping on the mattress is one of the more uplifting endings of Tsai's films. Make no mistake though - the world he creates here is still on the brink of crumbling, from an abandoned, half-built cement tower to a choking haze that permeates the city. People may find love and comfort in I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, but it sure looks weird.

Posted by dwhudson at September 20, 2006 6:08 AM