Hey folks, Harry here with Art Snob and his wonderful commentary from this year's Toronto Film Festival. Finally we get word on MAX a film that dares to tell the story of the pre-political Hitler when all he was was a struggling ambitious artist. Sounds like the concept got turned into a fascinating feature film according to Art Snob... Here's a nice plate full of pics...
Art Snob, back from my second (Thu-Sat) saunter to the Toronto Film Festival. BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE got my final festival vote. A film that (a.) boldly challenges entrenched notions on both sides of a hotly-contested debate and (b.) holds up such an accurately-reflective mirror to American society as a whole is a film that Orson Welles could only DREAM of making. (Fun side game when watching it: see if you can spot where Welles’ visage appears.)
As for the best non-doc movie that I saw (I ddn’t see Festival winner WHALE RIDER): the winner is ..... DIRTY PRETTY THINGS by Stephen Frears. It isn’t often that a cutting-edge foreign director who’s taken a dip in Hollywood waters can ever get back to that “edge” that got him noticed by Hollywood in the first place, but it would seem that Audrey Tatou is a good-luck charm for a director attempting to perform such a feat. Festival winner AMELIE resurrected Jean-Pierre Jeunet from ALIEN RESURRECTION last year, and now, DPT makes for a supremely satisfying return to Frears’ glory year of 1987, when he came out with the “realLondon” back-to-back art house successes that were SAMMY AND ROSIE GET LAID and PRICK UP YOUR EARS. Frears was honored with a retrospective at the festival two years ago, and if tributes like these can provoke similar return-to-form efforts from other directors ..... I can sure suggest some names!
The only major cavil I have with this film is Tatou being cast as an illegally-working Turkish immigrant in London. Only the most culturally-illiterate of viewers could ever buy her as being Turkish (she only makes a token effort at the accent). But once you get past this minor annoyance, her performance is otherwise excellent and a savvy career choice. (Nothing like a trip to all-too-real London to avoid becoming over-identified with fantasyland Paris!)
The film deals with a compelling subject - the hand-to-mouth existence eked out by the huge numbers of illegal immigrants (and illegally-working immigrants) who do all of the bottom-rung work that nobody else wants to do in a teeming western metropolis. The lead character is a western-educated medical doctor who’s on the lam from a crime he was framed for in his homeland of Nigeria after his medical ethics clashed with the wishes of state authorities. This can only be a breakthrough performance for Chiwetel Ejiofor, who gives an amazingly compelling performance as a man known as Okwe on his two jobs -- a daytime cab driver and graveyard shift hotel desk clerk He tries to resist letting anyone know that he’s really a doctor, but his cab boss knows, and this forces him to maintain some low-level ties to the medical community. Some detective work at the hotel leads to him discovering a black-market operation in human organs being run by his hotel boss.
As you can probably surmise, another painful medical moment of truth looms in the doctor’s future following this discovery. I don’t want to spoil anything, but if you’ve ever been disappointed by a film where the payoff wasn’t worthy of the setup (and who hasn’t?), you can rest assured that DIRTY PRETTY THINGS is definitely NOT one of these cases. The final stages of the story arc are VERY reminiscent of a certain Hollywood classic, but I’ ll leave it to the professional critics to do the spoiling.
The casting of the movie is superb ..... the first question from the audience for Frears following the screening was “Where did you get all of those fantastic actors?,” which everyone seemed to think was a very worthy question. Besides Ejiofor and Tatou, there’s also Sergi Lopez in his first English language role (following previous French festival hits AN AFFAIR OF LOVE and WITH A FRIEND LIKE HARRY) as Okwe’s hotel boss. Oozing the kind of smarm that you love to hate, he’s great as a scoundrel who’s convinced himself that he’s doing everyone involved in his racket a favor. Sophie Oknonedo - known to legions of AICN’ers no doubt as the Wachati Princess from ACE VENTURA: WHEN NATURE CALLS -- provides some great comic relief to the often grim and tense proceedings. Add in more colorful extras than you’ d find in a Guy Ritchie movie to flesh out Steve Knight’s great script, and you’ve got a crowd-pleasing winner.
The presence of the Miramax banner put me on “tampering alert” when watching the movie, but all I saw was vintage Frears. And he says that this is HIS movie ..... “any mistakes you see on the screen are mine.” The film was well-placed in the “Masters” Program and is one to definitely be looking for in commercial release.
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The most talked-about performance at the festival was no doubt Roger Ebert’s hissy-fit in the lobby of the Varsity Theater over being excluded from an overbooked screening of a movie in favor of lesser mortals who arrived earlier. But the most mesmerizing performance had to be by Noah Taylor in his controversial turn as a 30-year-old Adolf Hitler in respected screenwriter Menno Meyjes’ first chance to direct his own work, MAX. Even with a makeup job to make him look gaunt, pallid and unappealing, you still can’t take your eyes off of him. This fascinating movie - dealing with how Hitler in the post WWI Munich of 1918 almost went down a completely different career path - had the audience completely transfixed for the duration. NOBODY got up to answer the call of nature, and this has been a long-standing Hollywood measure as to how engrossing a work is.
John Cusack is also excellent in the title role, playing a Jewish German war veteran who lost his arm in the war, but was able to return home to a loving wife & family and use his personal wealth to begin a thriving art gallery. Noticing how this Hitler guy has a passion that there could be a market for if only he could find some way to get it onto canvas, Max encourages him to experiment with schools of painting that seem a better fit for his temperament than the ones he’s decided to limit himself to. Unfortunately, Hitler’s real talent seems to be for a then-new form of performance art known as “propaganda.”
Even though you KNOW how things are going to turn out, the equilibrium between the forces pulling Hitler in both directions and the incredible “what might have been” fascination factor keep you thoroughly engaged throughout. Taylor’s performance is too hot a potato to ever earn any awards recognition, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a great one to add to his increasingly-impressive oeuvre (THE YEAR MY VOICE BROKE, FLIRTING, SHINE, ALMOST FAMOUS and VANILLA SKY among them). Thanks to Canada’s Lions Gate Films for once again having the cojones to produce a daring work that Hollywood won’t touch.
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I couldn’t get over all of the directors who had Q & A settings at movies I attended. Among them: Frears, Mike Leigh, Phillip Noyce, Michael Moore, Tom Tykwer, Paul Schrader, Patrice Leconte, and Gaspar Noe. But as entertaining as they were (especially Leconte), the most interesting anecdotes were from two directors presenting “behind the scenes” movies of a quite different sort.
One of these films was THE SWEATBOX, a documentary about the tortuous process behind the making of Disney’s THE EMPEROR’S NEW GROOVE (originally envisioned as a South American successor to THE LION KING to be named EMPIRE OF THE SUN). Part of Sting’s contract to do the soundtrack for that film was that he be allowed to make a documentary film about the process, to be produced (and co-directed) by his wife, Trudie Styler. What’s been captured here is a very revealing look behind the scenes that’s fascinating for both Disney fans and detractors (yours truly being a card-carrying member of the latter group) alike. You really get a look at the inner workings of the Disney animation process (especially the storyline committee process) that isn’t just another in-house P.R. puff-piece, with plenty of visual substantiation for Disney Animation Studios being known in the biz as “the gayest place on earth”
Co-director John Paul Davidson (who obviously did most of the work - he made 52 intercontinental flights over the course of the filming) said he was delighted to see the film with an audience for the first time and discover how many laughs he didn’t know were there. He elicited one himself when someone asked him why there was only a brief glimpse of Michael Eisner in the film. He said that when he asked to film Eisner at one of the several test screenings for EMPEROR, his Disney hosts went into a panic. “NO! If he finds out you’re making this film he might stop it!”
The other film was SEX IS COMEDY from France’s cinematic bad girl herself, Catherine Berillat. Her previous movie, FAT GIRL played at the festival last year, and was then promptly banned in Ontario. This film is a drama about the making of a film remarkably like that one, centering around the same key sex scene and featuring the same young actress, Roxanne Mesquida. As “movie” movies go, it’s not exactly Fellini’s 8-1/2, but it’s still light years ahead of Steven Soderbergh’s pretentious dud, FULL FRONTAL. You can tell that writer-director Breillat put a lot of her personal experiences into the surrogate character played by “La Femme Nikita” Anne Parillaud, The day-to-day problems that she has to contend with are very believable.
Besides the problem of getting the two young leads in her film - who don’t like each other at all - to actually agree to do the nude sex scene, there’s also the problem of mechanics. Specifically: getting the male lead fitted with a prosthetic erect penis that looks like the real thing and can actually be used for a penetration scene. It was revealed in the Q & A that followed that such a device costs $25.000 (although I’m not sure whether this is in Canadian or US dollars). Breillat commented that this was the reason why she cast porn star Rocco Siffredi for a key sex scene in her film ROMANCE - his "erection on demand" prowess enabled her to avoid the expense and hassle of going the artificial route.
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Another festival keeper (with the best soundtrack I heard during the fest): LILYA 4-EVER. This was a film that I saw on the first leg of my trip, and it was still lingering when I returned. It’s a very compelling work from Sweden’s Lukas Moodyson (who directed my 1999 festival fav, SHOW ME LOVE), blemished only by some cheesy F/X towards the end. (I can’t elaborate without a major spoiler, but you’ll know what I’m talking about when you see it.)
The story involves a pretty 16 year old girl living with her single mom in Russia. She’s cheery and living fairly comfortably by Russian standards when you first see her following an ominous “portent” scene at the start. Her mother’s hooked an American mate via the Internet who’s taking her back to the States. Lilya thinks she’s going along for the ride, and basks in th e envy of her friends, including a 12-year old neighbor boy wise beyond his years. When it turns out that she’s NOT initially along for the ride, that her caretaker aunt is only interested in taking over her comfortable apartment and shoving her into a hovel, that her mother has officially abandoned her, that she’s rejected and harassed by her classmates following a rumor that a supposed-friend spread to save her own reputation - she suddenly finds herself having to deal with some harsh realities that she’s totally unprepared for. The younger boy is pretty much fending for himself as well, the result of regular beatings from his father, and the two form a mutual support group. Once again, Moodyson proves himself a master at working with young talent.
The story is almost like a reverse fairy tale intended to burst the bubble on overly-optimistic tales of plucky heroines who prevail in the end. Even at her most destitute, Lilya can still believe in Prince Charming, whereas her younger-but-wiser companion will have no part of such naiveté. Eventually finding herself an illegal immigrant to Sweden with a fate that makes Audrey Tatou’s London lot in DIRTY PRETTY THINGS look like a Club Med getaway, LILYA 4-EVER is a powerful moral fable with lessons to teach and a note of optimism at the end.
If ONLY it wasn’t for the distraction of those cheesy F/X! Hopefully digital technology can correct this flaw sometime in the future (to Moodyson ’s satisfaction, of course), and the film can become a fully-realized masterpiece.
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There was plenty of stuff of exhibit the fest that I like to deem “Blockbuster Plutonium” due to the certainty that it will never be available intact at your local “we’ll decide what’s suitable for your viewing” video chain store. The most toxic of all was Gaspar Noe’s notorious IRREVERSIBLE, with real-life couple Vincent Cassell and Monica Bellucci.
The movie premiered at Cannes last May, and made headlines by giving rise to a large number of walkouts. No such case this time - the people in attendance KNEW what they were in for, whereas the Cannes attendees did not. The film deals with the violent rape of Bellucci’s character and Cassel’s driven, same-night search to find the rapist and exact revenge. The story is told backwards in fairly evenly-spaced chapters, and although Noe admits that MEMENTO was an influence, the film doesn’t feel derivative (BETRAYAL used the backwards technique long before MEMENTO anyway). Noe says that he felt that knowing the ultimate fate of the characters involved would make them more compelling in the earlier (later) stages of the story, and I would say that this is indeed the case.
The central notoriety of the film is a nine-minute rape scene involving Bellucci, and while this is tough to watch (especially the final minute), the scene involving the vengeance - which involves the repeated pummeling of a man’s face with the bottom of a fire extinguisher - is even tougher. This film is definitely not for the faint of heart, but if you make it past the rape scene, things get a lot sunnier from that point on. (Bonus for pervs: all the Monica scenery you could ask for in a bedroom romp scene between her and Cassell.)
The picture also stabilizes as the film goes along. The film was shot on 16mm stock, digitized, and then manipulated endlessly. One thing that makes the violence in the latter stages of the story (i.e., the earlier stages of the film) a little easier to take is that the scenes are herky-jerky in a way that would make THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT look like it was filmed with a Steadicam.
I don’t know if I’m into determinism to the extent that Noe is, but he lays out an interesting concept here - not just a provocation -- and you certainly care more and more for the protagonists as you discover what kind of people they are, all the time knowing that they can’t avoid what lies ahead for them. It’s definitely got a LOT more artistic legitimacy than the most notorious festival entry in recent years - BAISE MOI - but between this and I STAND ALONE, I would say that Noe should definitely try lightening up a bit.
BTW, the film picked up distribution during the festival. If you’re interested in checking this film out, as with MAX, you have Canada’s Lions Gate Films to thank.
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Another year, another great festival that stands as an oasis to cineastes parched by the mainstream conformity of the local Cineplex. Many thanks to all of the organizers and volunteers who make it all possible. My fondest wish for 2003: a "Midnight Madness" special titled, BATTLE ROYALE 2: THE CLASS OF VOLCANO HIGH.
