Let us pick up where we
left off last week at the 27th Toronto International Film Festival, which came
to a close September 14. As with last week’s round-up, release dates, where
available, appear in parentheses.
Day Five (Fractured Family Tales)
A Leave
It To Beaver feel these films had not. Moonlight Mile (November 4) is about
the odd relationship between a young man (Jake Gyllenhaal) and the parents of
his fiancรฉe (Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon). That might not sound too
strange, but the fiancรฉe died right after the wedding invitations were sent.
Even weirder, the story is loosely based on something that actually happened to
writer-director Brad Silberling (he was engaged to TV star Rebecca Schaeffer
when she was murdered), and as a result, the film feels very, very real. Bruce
Beresford’s Evelyn (limited release on December 3) also depicts true-life
events, portraying the legal plight of the perpetually unemployed Desmond Doyle
(Pierce Brosnan) and his attempts to gain custody of his three children after
his wife takes off with another man (back in ’50s Dublin, you needed approval
from both parents to rescue your kids
from the evil nuns that ran the county’s orphanages).
Laurel
Canyon (spring 2003), Lisa Cholodenko’s disappointing follow-up to High Art, tells a dull story about a
recently engaged couple (Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale playing Yanks) who
move into what is supposed to be his record-producer mother’s empty house in
Los Angeles. When they get there, however, Mom (Frances McDormand) is still
there — she hasn’t finished recording her latest project, or frolicking with
the leader of that band (Alessandro Nivola). The latest Dogme picture is Open
Hearts (spring 2003), a damaging tale of a woman (Dogme staple Paprika
Steen) who accidentally kills a man with her car and then prods her doctor
husband (Mads Mikkelsen) to strike up a friendship with the dead man’s fiancรฉe
(Sonja Richter). Of course, they begin to have an affair, which rips the
doctor’s family apart.
Day Six (World Cup)
Sports flicks are generally formulaic
messes, but the festival offered two welcome exceptions about the planet’s most
popular sport. First up was Shaolin Soccer (spring 2003), a
brilliant fusion of the typical sports-movie clichรฉs with the acrobatic,
high-wire martial arts of Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Writer-director-star Stephen Chow is no stranger to
blending odd genres (he also made The God
of Cookery) or getting huge laughs, and he doesn’t disappoint here. Bend
It Like Beckham (April 2, limited), already a monster hit in the UK,
does some genre-bending of its own. It’s about a young David-Beckham-obsessed
Indian woman named Jess (Parminder K. Nagra) who finds herself caught between a
potential career playing professional footie and the traditional beliefs of her
Indian family, who are about to marry off Jess’s older sister (Archie Panjabi).
Think of it as My Big Fat Indian Wedding,
only with soccer. The audience named it their third favorite film of the festival
(Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine was second, while New Zealand’s tiny Whale
Rider shocked everyone by taking the top People’s Choice award).
Day Seven (The First Anniversary)
Thankfully, there weren’t any terrorist
attacks interrupting this year’s festival, but the events of 9/11 still loomed
large. The festival contained two films specifically about the September
atrocities. Jim Simpson’s The Guys, which is based on Anne
Nelson’s popular Tribeca play, is about a fire captain (Anthony LaPaglia) who
contacts a writer (Sigourney Weaver) to help him craft the many, many eulogies
he will be expected to give over the next few weeks. That picture was almost
overshadowed by the storm of controversy stirred up by 11’09″01, a
French-financed (hence the backwards date) series of shorts, each running 11
minutes and nine seconds and made by one of 11 of the world’s finest filmmakers
(including Amos Gitaรฏ, Shohei Imamura, Sean Penn, and Mira Nair). Some were
reported to have expressed very un-American sentiments, but that wasn’t the
case at all. Most compared the 9/11 attacks to lesser-publicized events with
higher body counts that happened elsewhere in the world, like Ken Loach’s look
at the September 11 (1973) US-backed coup of Peru’s government, and Danis
Tanovic’s reminder of another painful 11th — the massacre at Srebrnica in
July 1995. One short is even a comedy: Idrissa Ouedraogo’s funny story about a
group of kids who think they’ve found Osama bin Laden and dream up ways to
spend the $25 million reward. But the most devastating piece came courtesy of Amores Perros‘ Alejandro Gonzรกlez
Iรฑรกrritu, who used a black screen, Arab chanting, television sound bites, and
split-second flashes of doomed WTC jumpers to send chills down even the most
jaded of spines.
Day Eight (Fabulous Femmes)
The ladies were living large again
today, but none more so than the brilliant cast of Franรงois Ozon’s 8
Women (September 20, limited). Sure, the premise — a party, a murder,
and finger-pointing between the guests and servants — sounds a lot like the
snooze-fest that was Gosford Park,
but Ozon is far too smart to bog viewers down with three dozen characters that
are impossible to tell apart. Not only that, it’s also a campy musical, and the
eight roles he does create are brought to life by the cream of French cinema
— Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Danielle Darrieux, Fanny Ardant,
Virginie Ledoyen, and Emmanuelle Bรฉart, among others. As fun as it was to
watch, it looked even more fun to make (I’m hoping the DVD will have outtakes).
Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters won the Golden Lion award at the Venice
festival, which ran just before Toronto’s started, and nabbed the Discovery
Award here. It’s an overwhelming look at three young Irish girls whose families
place them in one of the many Catholic-church-run Magdalene Homes for
unforgivable discretions like being too flirtatious or getting raped by your
cousin. On the surface, the film sounds like one of those Nun Revenge stories
(like we just saw in Evelyn), but
Mullan’s direction and the haunting performances by the three young women make
it incredibly tough to watch. While My Mother’s Smile doesn’t boast a
strong female lead, one woman does make her presence felt throughout the entire
film. It’s about an atheist painter (Sergio Castellitto), who finds out his
late mother may be made a saint by the Catholic church.
There
were also a handful of movies about people who are forced to leave their
homelands for various reasons. Agnieszka Holland’s Julie Walking Home is
about a Canadian couple (Miranda Otto and William Fichtner, both not Canadian)
who take their cancer-stricken son to Europe so he can get treatment from a
Polish faith healer (Lothaire Bluteau, who is Canadian). City of Ghosts, Matt Dillon’s directorial debut, depicts a con
man (Dillon) fleeing the US to find his boss (James Caan) in Vietnam, while the
violent Aussie comedy Dirty Deeds portrays the misfortunes
of a pair of American hoodlums (John Goodman and Felix Williamson) as they try
to strong-arm their way into the business of slot machines in Sydney. As per
Australian decree, Deeds also stars
Sam Neill, Bryan Brown and Toni Collette.
Day Nine (Wanderlust)
Today featured even more people who
can’t stay put. The best of the lot (and possibly the best of this festival) is
Jim Sheridan’s tentatively titled In America (April 16, limited), a
truly heartwarming story about an Irish family moving to New York City. The
script is brilliant, carefully avoiding the schmaltz usually found in other
uplifting pictures; and the performances, especially from the two kids (played
by real-life sisters Sarah and Emma Bolger), are dazzling. The only downside is
that some may write it off as another Mystical Negro Shows Whitey The Way film
(like The Green Mile and The Legend of Bagger Vance), as there is
a thread involving Djimon Hounsou forging an unusual relationship with the kids
and their parents (Samantha Morton and Paddy Constantine).
Robert
Duvall unspooled The Apostle in
Toronto several years ago, but he should keep Assassination Tango in
the can. It’s about a New York hitman sent to Argentina to kill, but who
instead learns to dance. Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things (April 11,
limited) features two characters that have left their homes for London — Okwe
(Chiwetel Ejiofor) was a doctor in Nigeria, but is now a cabbie and a bellhop,
while Amรฉlie‘s Audrey Tautou plays a
Turkish virgin who cleans rooms in the same hotel. It’s an unconventional
romance, complete with organ stealing.
Day Ten (Fatale Finale)
The festival ended in style, with Brian
DePalma’s Double Indemnity update Femme
Fatale (November 8) throwing everyone for a loop (it’s almost this
year’s version of Mulholland Drive).
Adam Sandler dazzled in his dramatic turn in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk
Love (October 18), and Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami showed how much
you can do with so little in 10, a film made with a digital
camera mounted on the dashboard of a car. The festival’s other controversial entry,
Gaspar Noรฉ’s Irreversible (spring 2003), was far more stunning than it was
contentious (viewers abandoned it en masse at Cannes). Like Memento, its story is told backwards,
and its centerpiece features a brutal anal rape and beating that sends the end
(meaning the beginning) into what I can only describe as a dizzying trip
through a catacomb of depravity in which the camera never stops moving,
tilting, and panning (Noรฉ apparently treats the camera like a hot potato).
There isn’t much that causes me to turn my head away in disgust (although
Denzel Washington’s Antwone Fisher [December 20] did it for different reasons), but
Irreversible made it happen twice.
Interested in raw, unedited movie
ramblings from Jon? Visit his site, Planet Sick-Boy, at www.sick-boy.com, or
listen to him on WBER’s Friday Morning Show.
This article appears in Sep 18-24, 2002.
