Hey folks, Harry here... Il Matto here is a man after my own heart... one that dreams everyday was a festival day... 5 films a day... good, bad... the point being they were something living on a 2-d slab of white spilling soul and dialogue and life into the room for an audience to embrace. Ahhhh... the festival... Personally, I never feel happier running AICN than during a film festival... At my end, the mail comes... the enthusiasm of discovery again and again... a film to herald from... Iran, China, Canada and here in the U.S.A. Films I hadn't heard of, titles to write down, to share with others... Trailers to search for, Dvds to remember... It is the most exciting of times for a film geek like me. God I love this job...
Well, I arrived in Toronto Saturday to find out I got tickets to all 28 of my choices. I'm writing these reports on the run at an internet cafe between films, so there probably will be lots of typos. This is my seventh trip here in the last nine years. If the festival lasted 52 weeks a year and I could get up and go to five screenings a day every day I would be a happy man. There is nothin cooler than seeing hundreds of people lined up to get into a theater at 8:30 in the morning.
CRIMSON GOLD
First up was Crimson Gold" the fourth film by Iranian director, Jafar Panahi. His first was "The White Balloon", which was an art house hit in the states in 95. He's been to Toronto with his next three movies, and I've seen all of them here: "The Mirror", about a young girl trying to get home alone from school, "The Circle", about a series of female ex-cons, in a hostile environment, just trying to have a smoke, and now a film about a gentle man, bloated from cortisone, who kills a jeweler and himself in the first awsome scene, and them goes back to tell the last week leading up to this event. It's not so much what he does, as what goes on around him. Panahi is personally concerned with social issues (he won't cut his films to satisfy government censors, so the last two never got shown in Iran and he had to smuggle prints out to France to get them shown elsewhere), so we see much of police intervention in personal lives, and the demeaning role women play in theis society. But this movie is not polemic, it is most of all a portrait of quiet guy who seethes below the surface. Most enjoyable.
MY LIFE WITHOUT ME
Next was "My Life Without Me", from Spanish director Isabel Coixet, filmed in Vancouver, about a 23 year old mother of two who learns she has cancer bad, with a couple of month's to live. She decide not to get treatment or tell her her husband (Scott Speedman), daughters, mother (Debbie Harry), or workmate (Amanda Plummer), so as to save them the grief of the hospital, and also to give her a chance to maybe take a lover (Mark Ruffalo). So even though this has the potential to be a movie of the week type weepy, with Sarah Polley, who I've found is usually only in good movies, in the lead, I figured it would escape the cliches. Well, it doesn't for the most part. And her being a cleaning woman living in a trailor is handled in a demeaning way. Their is a good turn by Maria de Medeiros (Anais Nin in "Henry and June", "Pulp Fiction) as a braided hairdresser.
LOVE, SEX AND EATING THE BONES
I had to see "Love, Sex, and Eating the Bones" (dir. Sudz Sutherland) on the title alone. It's a Canadian romantic comedy. Michael (Hill Harper, the only actor in the movie known to me) is a photographer who makes his living as a security guard, and is the best customer Pornucopia, his local adult video store, has. He meets Jasmine, an executive at a marketing firm, who has been celibate for the last two years. Things warm up between them, but he can't perform. He can only do it alone while watching his favorite porn star, and fantisizing that she is in the room with him. This makes for a bumpy relationship, which is exacerbated by Jasmine's roommate/cousin Peaches, who doesn't like Michael at all. You know everything is going to work out in the end. Not a great film, but it has some laughs. I imagine if it gets a distributor in the states, it could be popular despite Michael's obsession.
ZHOU YU'S TRAIN
Gong Li may be the most beautiful woman in the world. "Zhou Yu's Train" may be the most sensuous movie around (I don't think I've been aroused like this since I saw Ursula Andress walk out of the water in "Dr. No" when I was 14), despite only a few seconds of lovemaking. Watch Gong Li smoke a cigarette in slow motion. See Gong Li run after a train in slow motion. Zhou Yu paints porcelin. Chen Qing (Tony Leung) is a librarian who writes poetry. The meet and fall in love. She takes a train to his town twice a week. He writes poetry about and for her. There love is both rational and irrational. She befriends veterinarian Zhang Qiang (Sun Honglei), an unreasonable voice of reason, who may love her too. Each touch and caress jumps off the screen. A gorgeous movie with a gorgeous star, who still looks to be in her early twenties. At the Q&A after the screening, she stood about five feet from me. What a thrill.
We'll talk again,
Il Matto
