Toronto Dispatch. 8.

Aide-toi et le ciel t'aidera, translated as With a Little Help from Myself, is the latest film from François Dupeyron. It's a family drama, but not of the sort that the Disney folks would recognize. Dupeyron and his actors call it a comedy. You might also call it a banlieue film, a suburban film, since that's where it's set, but here we're talking about the working class suburbs of Paris. The film follows the Mousse family, who are black. "Follow" would be the right word here, because this film doesn't seem to have a beginning or an end. It's as if Dupeyron let us in on a certain period in the family's life, which will go on much longer, against what look like some major odds.

Aide-toi is not a documentary, although it looks like one much of the time. We enter the magnificently acted story as young pretty Christie is about to get married, yet as the wedding preparations are being made, father Georges reveals that he has gambled away the family's savings - not just the money for the wedding, but savings that were going to buy the Laundromat where his intrepid wife Sonia (Félicité Wouassi) works. So much for bootstrap entrepreneurship. After a fistfight over losing the cash with his teenage son Victor, Georges falls stone dead. The wedding goes on - this is a churchgoing family, although not one that Sarah Palin would be at home with - with Sonia forced to dance with her unsuspecting family and friends. In the meantime, she drops the body off at the apartment of an old Frenchman living in their housing project, played marvelously by Claude Rich. Georges is consigned to history as a no-good lout who abandoned his family. Given what he did with their money, this is entirely believable. And this is just the beginning.

Think of the comic and vulnerable sides of Anna Magnani in the 1950s, and Félicité Wouassi catches some of that in this portrait of managed family chaos in the endless blocks of public housing outside Paris. The camera hovers everywhere in the Mousse's apartment - kids get into trouble, bills go unpaid, a daughter gets pregnant, love creeps in here and there. These are the sorts of projects where youths whose families came from West Africa and Algeria burned cars and fought with cops. We don't see any of that or any of the other ghetto clichés (City of God, La Haine, in which Wouassi appeared, etc) that might be expected - the apartment is tastefully furnished, better than your typical lower middle-class flat. These characters are not stereotypes, and that's what keeps you guessing what will happen next. But we do see the family swelter through the heat wave of 2003. Without giving too much away, there's another death at those high temperatures that Dupeyron turns into comedy.

The reality we see here is too real for what we would expect from a reality show. While it's not a documentary, the script seems to have been distilled from lots of observation. Dupeyron makes sure that it's always dramatic, and never a descent into what the French call miserabilisme, no matter what the reality might actually be - here's a definition in French: tendance systématique à représenter la condition humaine sous ses aspects les plus misérables, i.e,  the tendancy to portray the human condition at its most impoverished. Like so many films in a festival the size of TIFF, this one seems to have missed much attention. What a shame.

Another one that came and went quietly in Toronto was O'Horten, Bent Hamer's discreetly wry look at a railroad engineer beginning his retirement. The film is lighter than About Schmidt, which Hamer says he's seen and admired - retirement here, in the few days that we of it, is more bedazzling than sobering, more absurd than tedious. Hamer's point of departure is the end of 40 years of driving a train back and forth between the same two stations. Odd Horten (Baard Owe, whom you may have seen in The Kingdom and other films by Lars von Trier) is the driver, hence the title, his name and first initial, which makes it sound Irish. Once the job ends, with an odd ritual from railroad co-workers - everything is odd, befitting the play on words - Odd goes looking for some old friends and finds them either absent or dead. So he simply goes where happenstance takes him. Odd takes it all in with a Kaurismäki-style deadpan and cinematographer John Christian Rosenlund echoes Owe's expression with long shots that dwell on ordinary spaces. Hamer holds these shots that extra second or two it takes to get across the numbness of a man of routine who hasn't experienced new for the last four decades.

There was a truism in the 19th century art business that winter scenes don't sell, even by the finest of the Impressionists - this film is shot entirely in the winter. The other mantra is that old characters don't sell, either. Hamer, who produced, kept his budget low, around $4 million, and said that he promised his friends that he'd never make a film about old people again. It's a promise that he does not intend to keep: "I find it so interesting - to have actors like this is one thing - but also to tell a story about lived life. It represents so much more than just a situation of being a retired person and to be old. Usually you see these films referring to two years ahead of the main character and two minutes behind him."

O'Horten, which premiered at Cannes, is the story of a life that has not been mythologized. El Greco, on the other hand, Iannis Smaragdis's Greek/French/English bio-pic about the Greek painter who found fame in Spain, is a sumptuously costumed period saga, which begins with the young - and handsome - painter's early days in Crete, where the occupying Venetians have declared war on Cretan patriots. So we have young Domenikos Theotokopoulos (Nick Ashdon) branded as a rebel. He then goes to the metropol, Venice, where he chafes at studying with Titian, played as a grey-bearded sage by Sotiris Moustakas. Things aren't all bad. He has a passionate love affair, and learns a bit from the Old Master, whose reproduced work is shown in abundance. When a priest takes to his work, and informs him that Spain is where he should be working. Domenikos takes off for Toledo, where he becomes El Greco, and, with the help of lots of daggers, bodices, inquisitorial clergy, sex and remarkably modern fits of passion from the artist about the constraints placed on him and his work, a legend is born. The twist in the story comes when the priest who had admired his painting, Nino de Guevara (Juan Diego Botto), is promoted to head the dreaded Inquisition, and the cleric's apprehensions about executing anyone who doesn't fit the standard model of piety are overcome by his taste for power. The director and screenwriter must have seen The Agony and the Ecstasy and Pollock.

Of course, this is all meant to be taking place between 1541 and 1614 (surprisingly close to the dates of Shakespeare, 1564 - 1616), when artists, particularly those who painted the rich and powerful and decorated their buildings, worked almost entirely on commission, as El Greco certainly did. Romantic independence came later, although Velázquez, a generation younger, did start painting ordinary people in Spain. Let's not assume that anybody wasted too much time or money here on historical accuracy.

The film crescendos with El Greco's appearance before the Inquisition with the mother of his illegitimate child (among the many accusations is the charge that he is not married to her); this takes us to the Galileo model in the Hollywood formula - the creative spirit who must be true either to himself or to the authorities of an oppressive state. As many a studio head would put it, give the people what they want. According to Variety, some 650,000 people have gone to see the film in Greece so far. Watch for it on television in the US.

Set in the present, Lost Song is anything but lavish. And it's on the margins of French-Canadian cinema; its director, Rodrigue Jean, is an Acadian from New Brunswick. Everything about his drama of a young married couple is spare - the story, the cast, the setting and the expression of emotions. Elisabeth (singer Suzie LeBlanc) and overworked husband Patrick (Patrick Goyette) have just had a baby, and have moved to what they hope will be a low-stress lakeside cottage where they can be helped by Patrick's mother, Louise, while Elisabeth prepares for her next vocal recital. But the sleep-deprived couple's baby cries incessantly, and he won't breast-feed, and Elisabeth starts hearing things in the crawlspace above that she thinks are animals - "les bêtes, les bêtes," she tries to explain. There's a slim headstrong girl in a house nearby, Naomi, whom the lonely Elisabeth befriends, but Jean's script doesn't fall into anything so easy as an affair that Patrick might have with her. Instead, he takes us into Elisabeth's growing and haunting post-partem anxiety. Naturally, the helpless baby is the victim, utterly at the mercy of another victim, his mother. By the end, the film that could have been a minimalist portrait of depression, with Elisabeth staring numbly at the four walls of her room, becomes a thriller. You're gripped as Elizabeth wanders through the woods, prey to the next mis-step. Rodrique Jean's deftly composed drama does not take the easy way out.

- David D'Arcy

Posted by dwhudson at September 15, 2008 6:12 AM