Toronto’s economy suffered a blow
this week with the first half of the Toronto Film festival. Sales of
pay-per-view porn declined dramatically in hotel rooms as visiting press and
industry delegates were treated gratis to a never-ending flow of explicit sex
on the festival screens.
Okay, just kidding, but there was
quite a lot of it. Lukas Moodysson’s much-anticipated A Hole in My Heart has a
great premise: a teenager is tormented by the porn film his father is making
just outside his room in their tiny apartment. But once the situation has been
laid out as squalid and depressing (right away, graphically and brutally), and
the hatred and anguish of the principals involved has been established (ditto),
there is nowhere else to go. Moodysson spins his wheels for a grueling 98
minutes, driving his points home on an escalating scale of shock and chopping
up the videoed chaos with gimmicks ranging from the interesting to the tired.
Isabella Huppert stars in Ma mรจre as a
mother who leads her son, via a chosen girl or two, down the path of sexual
kinks. That path, of course, ultimately leads to herself, and to their doom.
It’s a testament to the film that the incest — hardly new to the world of
film, much less French film — is so disturbing and transgressive when it
comes.
The various
characters’ addiction to extremity is explored in a far less stagnant way than
in A Hole in My Heart. In that film,
the problem is societal, and the roots of the characters’ addiction to
extremity read like case-study backgrounds. In Ma mรจre, the reasons depend on the person, are emotional and
philosophical, and tend to evolve. The film is not perfect, but a great ending
redeems the few flaws.
Michael
Winterbottom decided to make a fiction film with graphic, non-faked sex, but
forgot to do anything else with it. 9 Songs is instead content to chart
the course of the dissolution of a relationship, apparently for the sake of
those who have never lived it for themselves. What is it with films like this
and We Don’t Live Here Anymore?From now on, let’s have a story as
well, OK?
The sex is
broken up with either clichรฉs and inane profundities or drab, useless footage
of British guitar bands performing live. Had the titular songs been laid over
the sex and minor arguments they might have had some resonance, as though these
were the songs that defined these points in their lives. But no, five minutes
of unsexy sex, five minutes of the Super Furry Animals. Even at just over an
hour, the film is a chore.
I didn’t
catch the fourth film with lots of graphic sex, but I did catch Neve Campbell
naked and using a detachable showerhead in the non-recommended fashion in James
Toback’s When Will I Be Loved?Toback
has concocted a male fantasy of a story, added a pointless mix of low-level
celebrities appearing as themselves, and directed everybody as though they were
not so much real people as mouthpieces for his latest notions about what makes
us tick.
Fred Weller is just okay as the
boyfriend who sets Campbell’s character up with an old media mogul for a fat
chunk of change, but he does own the film’s one brief shining moment, a
hustler’s monologue which recalls another Toback film. It is, however, at that
moment that we realize he is otherwise no Robert Downey, Jr., and this is no Two Girls and a Guy. The whole thing is as thin and facile as the art
Campbell’s character dallies with when not exploring her sexuality.
Human Touch, the latest film from Paul Cox, shares a similar storyline
and affinity for bad art — lots of it. Bad art is everywhere you look in this
film, as is sex (or as the film likes to call it, “human touch”). A woman who
no longer wants to have sex with her husband starts posing for an older man,
and when he makes a donation to her favorite worthy cause, she allows even more
(sort of a crunchy granola Indecent
Proposal).
Precious in
its conceits and infatuated with its own mumbo-jumbo, Human Touch shows not quite enough of a deft touch considering the
audience I saw it with thought it was supposed to be funny that the husband
slips something in the wife’s tea so that he can rape her while she sleeps. Or
maybe it was supposed to be funny, and the film is worse than I thought.
Strangely, the hottest sex so far
contains no nudity and occurs between Laura Linney and Topher Grace, which is
not something I even thought I would want to see. P.S. is the story of a college admissions administrator who
receives an application from a young man with the same name as her one true
love from high school, a boy who died at the time and whom she has never quite
gotten over. Oh yeah, and he also looks just like him, talks like him, and
paints like him.
The film charmingly treats the
freakiness of this as not quite worth freaking out about, but doesn’t give it
short shrift, either. A fantastic performance from Linney and a good handful of
comic moments do battle with the film’s cheesy chick-flick tendencies, but the
whole thing comes out decently enough.
That’s enough sex for you — next
week, the violence.
This article appears in Sep 15-21, 2004.
