TIFF08—Home Away From Home

Here in Toronto, I call the stretch on Bay Street between the Variety screening rooms at the Manulife Center and the press offices at Sutton Place the “Hey, how’s it goin’?” Corridor, made all the more pleasant and familiar by the presence of nearly the entire San Francisco press corps. I see more folks here from San Francisco than I do in San Francisco! The Toronto International Film Festival is our home away from home.

Here on behalf of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, I spotted Jesse Hawthorne Ficks early on and we compared notes about what we were intending to see. Unlike his SFBG cohort Cheryl Eddy, who he asserts doesn’t bother with watching anything she’s not interested in, Jesse allows himself to watch films he’s fully expecting to hate. Case in point: infuriated by Olivier Assayas’s last venture Boarding Gate, Jesse is expecting to equally detest Assayas’s Summer Hours. Cheryl, on the other hand, though watching the films that interest her, still hasn’t seen one that’s fully excited her, particularly noting JCVD which she thought was going to be phenomenal and … well … wasn’t.

In the same vein, I bumped into Dennis Harvey rushing off to see an early morning screening of Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla. Though not reviewing the film for Variety, he couldn’t resist his “morbid interest” to check the film out.

It’s always fascinating to watch our festival programmers sizing up the new films. Chi-hui Yang, keeping cool in his short Summer haircut, sincerely hopes he can bring San Francisco So Yong Kim’s Treeless Mountain for next year’s Asian American. Dead Channels’ Bruce Fletcher’s high hopes for Vinyan were dashed by the film’s lame final act. He called me over for "twobeer" to help him drown his sorrows. Naturally I helped him out. I always grin ear to ear when I see our Vanity Fair darling Graham Leggat, sporting a foxy new goatee, and singing praises for Ed Harris’s directorial western Appaloosa. I’m anticipating he’ll score that for next year’s SF International.

I took Jonathan Marlow out to lunch at my current Thai fave rave Spring Rolls to celebrate not only his recent marriage to Hannah Eaves (she’s keeping her name though I encourage hyphenation; Hannah Eaves-Marlow has a ring to it, don’t you think?); but, also to celebrate his being appointed Executive Director of the San Francisco Cinemateque. He’ll be bringing San Francisco some of Toronto’s Wavelengths fare. Aside from experimental cinema, he felt Jerzy Skolimowsi’s Four Nights With Anna was three nights too long.

Sure she’s scheduling for Seattle and Palm Springs, but Anita Monga is quintessential San Francisco and always will be for me. I caught her coming out of the Mexican comedy Voy A Explotar, whose teenage antics simply struck her as immature. Her recommendation was Kore-eda's Still Walking, which she found thematically similar to Claire Denis's 35 Shots of Rum. I saw Pam Grady rushing through the lobby looking miserable from undoubtedly one too many interviews and spotted Meredith Brody and Susan Oxtoby chatting it up as if it were just another evening at the Pacific Film Archive.

There’s a lot more San Franciscans here, and not only in the press corps. Carole Rutherford and I keep sending emails like ships passing in the night and, hopefully, I'll run into her soon. Are you missing us back home?

TIFF08—Serbis

"Mama's putting on some war paint for a little bit of combat / You ask the reason / You gotta fight for your freedom / sometimes every day / in every way..."—Laura Nyro.

Brillante Mendoza's Serbis (Service) joins the dilapidated narratives of Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn and Jacques Nolot's La Chatte à deux têtes (Porn Theatre), wherein the architecture of better days succumbs to poverty's desperate (and sometimes comic) immoralities and perversities. It's a labyrinthine sojourn that serves as an allegorical deconstruction of contemporary Philippines where the family unit is tentatively held together by strong women and constantly threatened by weak men. Three generations of women preen in front of mirrors, applying lipstick, hoping to use wiles to inspire if not govern their men who—despite the best feminine intentions—squander away the family’s resources leading the theatre to ruin.

The Pineda family operate a run-down movie house—ironically named The Family, no less—which shows daily sexy double-feature films. While they endure each other's sins and vices, the matriarch, Nanay Flor, receives a long-awaited court decision on the bigamy case filed against her estranged husband. Though not entirely successful in its imitative critique, Serbis does an adequate job of showing that sex sells everything even if real sex is not quite as sexy as cinematic sex. When push comes to shove, however, it's the antics in the darkened theater of Serbis that burn up the screen (registered in a literal coda). My favorite scene: a goat runs loose in the theatre aisles, mocking the saturnalia.

Movie Jungle offers an expanded (spoilerish!) synopsis. At The Greencine Daily, Dave Hudson gathers the critical response from Cannes08. At The New York Times, A.O. Scott is equally enamored with the film's strategic use of a goat to describe "the metaphorical goats, as it were, [that] can be found in the screening rooms, where audiences gather, sheeplike, to witness the frustration, misery and disorder of real life in various parts of the world." At The Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt complains the film is "a headscratcher" and judgmentally suspects the film was at Cannes "for one reason—to give the festival its annual jolt of graphic oral sex." (This is a bad thing?) At Macleans.CA, Brian D. Johnson deduces that "[t]he blow job is the new French kiss" and judges Serbis as "a shabby piece of video verite from the Philippines." At Lessons From the School of Inattention, Francis Cruz admits that Serbis is "hardly a perfect film" but is "undoubtedly fascinated" by the film's narrative complexity ("[t]he storyline is as complicated as the labyrinthine corridors of the theater") and appreciative of the film's intended aim of "mixing reality and fiction and blurring the fine line between film viewing and voyeurism." At Film Comment, Richard Peña overlooks the faults of the film's low production value to enjoy its "engaging anarchic energy" and how it "moves at breakneck speed and turns on a dime." Peña doesn't judge the film's erotics as much as others. In fact, he says: "The sex on the porn theater's screen begins to feel like an oasis of calm amid the hothouse atmosphere that envelops the film."

Serbis, which was the first Filipino film to play in Competition in Cannes in 24 years, has had its North American rights picked up from Fortissimo Films by Regent Releasing.

Cross-published on Twitch.

TIFF08—Rachel Getting Married

With Declan Quinn's unsteady and restless camera, Jonathan Demme observes the unsteady and restless dynamics of yet another American family traumatized into dysfunction. Fresh from rehab, Kym (Anne Hathaway, who at her wide-eyed worst looks like Liza Minnelli at her wide-eyed best) veers into the Buchman family's wedding preparations for sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt). Appreciative of the flagrant disregard for the rules of formula favored by screenwriter Jenny Lumet (Sidney's daughter), Demme and Quinn endeavor to emulate Lumet's heedlessness by creating "the most beautiful home movie ever made." But—as ever—beauty is in the bereft gaze of the beholder.

By refusing to not direct the movie tightly, never rehearsing before filming, rarely planning a shot in advance, and striving for a documentary feel that keeps the spontaneity factor as alive as possible, Jonathan Demme proves just how self-serving spontaneity can be. Believing he has channeled the spirit of Robert Altman in his portrayal of complex, not thoroughly likeable characters who nonetheless inspire concern, I care about as much as I can for any messed-up family that is not my own. I'm certainly embarrassed when they're out of control and hurting each other in public, bludgeoning each other with unbridled honesty and shaming recriminations.

Despite the familial tension and the threat of rain, Rachel's wedding is a feast of musicality, perhaps too much so. In chasing each spontaneous quarter note, the film meanders a half hour too long. I would have preferred a tighter edit, a firmer hand, and at least a tripod now and then. Bill Irwin and Debra Winger as emotionally irresponsible parents—the father for caring too much and the mother too little—are the film's main asset for proving that, yeah, sometimes your parents really are the ones who have screwed you up afterall. Irwin's Tony-award winning turn as George in the staged revival of Who's Afraid of Virgnia Woolf? has clearly secured him casting opportunities as bedraggled husbands rendered ineffectual by denial; he mixes pathos and tragedy in acutely human proportions. Debra Winger—truly lovely to behold—joins the ranks of performances such as Mary Tyler Moore's Beth Garrett in Ordinary People as mothers so emotionally closed off that they damage their children.

As family friends repeatedly express their disbelief that the Buchman daughters have grown up and Rachel is getting married, the truth is more likely that childhood simply can't wait for the parents to grow up. By film's end all these quasi-adults and their home movies left me caring very little about just when that might be. God bless 'em and all their tumultuous family reunions.

Cross-published on Twitch.

TIFF08—Synecdoche, New York

Synecdoche, New York is going to be a hard sell in Schenectady, New York; and not just because it starts right off with a titular pun more inclined to make a crowd of linguists chuckle than your average crowd at the multiplex. In my book, that's a good thing. For his first directorial effort, Charlie Kaufman proves there's still a trick or two left to the magical art of moviemaking; especially when imagination is the confused rabbit pulled out of the tophat. This is the movie that should have been preceded by the animated short Presto.

A dark mindtickler, Synecdoche, New York is a bardo state left waiting for that final trim in a barbershop of mirrors. Perhaps not so ironically—instead of a trim—things get shaggier and shaggier, which ultimately reflects Kaufman’s mentally-drenched tale as something flawed but heartfelt, cathartic and hopelessly human.

Originally configured as a horror story, Kaufman borrows a cue from Jacob's Ladder but envisions it with the relative perspectives of M.C. Escher. The ladders in Synecdoche, New York aren't Biblically simple; they go up, down, sideways, backwards, forwards, and even bend a little caught in the gravitational compression of Kaufman's black hole of an imagination. Wrestling with a single angel seems simple by comparison. Never before has directorial control seemed so inaccessible, if not downright impossible.

As synopsized earlier, worried about the transience of his life, theatre director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in an—as ever—compelling, compulsive performance developed from the inside out) leaves his home behind and sets out to construct a massive artistic enterprise. Gathering an ensemble cast into a warehouse in New York City, he hopes to create a work of brutal honesty. He directs his actors in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a growing mockup of the city outside. The years rapidly fold into each other, and Caden buries himself deeper into his masterpiece but the textured tangle of real and theatrical relationships blurs the line between the world of the play and that of Caden's own deteriorating reality. With strong performances by an admirably supporting female cast which includes Jennifer Jason Leigh, Catherine Keener, Dianne Wiest, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Emily Watson and Hope Davis, Synecdoche, New York exalts the reiterative, the replicative, and the recursive as the stage becomes crowded with doppelgangers, triplegangers, and quadruplegangers. Learn how it’s really done, Michel Gondry!

At The Greencine Daily, Dave Hudson gathered the critical response from Cannes08. Additionally, in his Cannes report to Film Comment (July/August 2008, pp. 59-60), Gavin Smith observed: "Not known for its patience, the by-now-weary press corps was in no mood for a meandering, over-extended comic evocation of solipsism, and responded with apathy if not antipathy. Which is a pity because it's a pretty interesting first directorial effort by an unruly but original talent. …Sprawling, confusing, and marred by strained and turgid passages (particularly in the first half), Kaufman's film nevertheless steadily builds toward a genuinely cathartic ending, carried along by Jon Brion's increasingly mesmerizing score. A melancholy comedy about terminal self-absorption is a hard sell, but this is a film of real ambition and unlike anything else around."

Logan Hill interviewed Catherine Keener for the Fall Preview issue of New York Magazine while at Spout Blog, Brandon Harris interviewed special effects supervisor Mark Russell. At The Guardian, John Patterson felt the film's 130-minute length was "a life sentence." For me, however, Synecdoche, New York is an eloquent sentence with a whole life in it.

Cross-published on Twitch.

TIFF08—35 Rhums

For some it is difficult to retire the past, for others impossible, and—in the case of a dead cat—for at least one fellow it's comically effortless. Claire Denis' 35 Rhums (variously translated as 35 Rums and 35 Shots, and best conflated as 35 Shots of Rum) is her melancholic ode to recompense and reconciliation in the face of irretrievable loss.

Lionel (in a charismatically understated performance by Alex Descas) has lost his wife; Josephine (Mati Diop) has lost her mother, and their shared grief is held in "incestuous" abeyance, both reluctant to let go of their family's past shape to honor future incarnations. Lionel resists Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) who aggressively dreams of stepping into the void left by his wife to become Josephine's surrogate mother; Josephine resists Noe (Grégoire Colin), the hopeful young man upstairs who courts her attentions faithfully against memory's odds. They all reside in the same apartment house where breaking Lionel and Josephine's "incestuous" enthrallment is the film's thinly-guised homage to Ozu's Late Spring. "Incestuous" is—as Rob Davis has complained in the comments to this entry—a hard and seemingly inexact adjective but it serves my thought in that it connotes—not a literal sexual relation, of course—but a psychological substitution wherein a daughter is replacing a wife's role in a dynamic that becomes emotionally hazardous and unhealthy. It's not just about serving Dad dinner or ironing his shirts—that's too simplistic—and more about subsuming an inappropriate role where too much affection hazards an erotic valence curtailing appropriate erotic expression. Lionel recognizes this, it angers him, and he asserts his independence in hopes it will encourage Josephine to pursue true wifehood. In other words, I'm using "incestuous" in its alternative dictionary meaning as "being so close or intimate as to prevent proper functioning." It's a spell of grief that needs to be broken in order for both husband and daughter to let go and move on.

With a nocturnal palette of "yellow and TV blue windows" and sinuous night trains curving the rails, Denis establishes a mise en scène of urban loneliness early on in 35 Rhums, emphasized by repeated night rides home (either on motorbikes or taxis or rendered in one rapturous poetic image as father and daughter gallop on horseback over the tracks). Both darkness and loss are held at bay with lit interiors and—in yet another lovely sequence—children's paper lanterns ward off the dusk. Love ultimately shines forth and appropriate relations established; a cause for a celebratory toast of the titular 35 rums.

Cross-published on Twitch.

TIFF08—Liverpool

"And you want to keep moving / and you want to stay still / but lost in the moment some longing gets filled…"—Joni Mitchell, "Barangrill"

They say the cleanest line of nature is the horizon and whether one empties one's longing gazing from sea to land or land to sea, from the present to the past and back again—shifting projections from one to the other—the gamble is that desire (configured as what one looks for or looks at) will somehow fulfill you. In Lisandro Alonso's Liverpool, the longing to remember and to be remembered is so intense it measures as body's grief, moreso than the body of desire. Movement becomes the only available fulfillment and memory itself becomes the effort at remembering. The most token of connections becomes all that's left to hold onto of origins, lineage, and family.

Spatiality governs and informs Alonso's Liverpool. Interiorized spaces contrast against vast expanses of nature (both literal, and simulated as when Farrel (Juan Fernandez) eats a meal in a restaurant whose murals are an autumnal birchwood forest). Small ship compartments, small households, feebly contain the thoughts otherwise emptied into wintry landscapes. Compromised subjectivities contrast with compromised social spaces. Alonso places his camera to capture them all, large and small, thereby expressing the home one escapes and returns to, and the wandered distance between Liverpool and Ushuaia, the southernmost town of Argentina.

Liverpool is composed of beautifully articulated images. Dark long-eared rabbits in the snow. Snowcapped mountain ranges. A poster of Jesus pinned to the inside of a door. Farrel sitting alone at a long red table set against a green wall. Farrel's eyebrows raising in bemused disbelief when Analia (Giselle Irrazabal) asks him for money and what her request tells him. What he must feel when his frail, ailing mother tells him she was just a little girl when he had already grown tall. By accretion, not through narration, a story is told.

During an Atlantic crossing, Farrel asks the captain of the freighter he is sailing for permission to go ashore at the next port. He wants to visit the place where he was born to find out if his mother is still alive. Alonso explains: "What interests me in Farrel, the main character, is what he gets from the world he lives in, his submission, his loneliness, his lack of motivation and his lack of hope that something might change, that his life might be different, that he might have the possibility of relating to someone without distrust, without thinking he will be ill-treated. I would like to try and see what goes on in his head full of dark, blurred memories and hangovers. I wanted to follow the steps of someone running to hide away when he sees someone approaching, who does not want to communicate, who wants to be on his own, and whose single unsettled debt is with his mother, who can barely breathe and who cannot communicate with others anymore. I would like to film his face when he learns that he has a new, very close relative, younger than him, who lives in the same town and sleeps with anyone to survive and who supports his mother. And in the end I would like to see if that encounter can change the way he lives, if those two people will let themselves feel something they have never felt for anyone else before, if finding a relative whose existence they were not aware of can change their view of the world."

At The Greencine Daily, Dave Hudson gathers the critical response from Cannes08. At Senses of Cinema, Markus Keuschnigg writes that Alonso's Liverpool "basically continues the corporality of his previous films" but that—though "satisfying enough" as a film—"it lacks the profound coherence of his "trilogy"—La Libertad (2001), Los Muertos (2004), Fantasma (2006)." At Film Comment, Kent Jones is eloquent in his appreciation of Alonso's aesthetic. "Alonso is a fascinating figure," Jones explains, "who probably thinks more about form than any other narrative filmmaker his age. His attempts at overall unity are impressive if not fearsome, even when he miscalculates. At his finest, Alonso settles on journeys that accumulate observation (of landscapes and ways of life) that expand along the way into collectively internalized visions of existence and their horizon lines." These are qualities that fans of Alonso have come to expect. What is unexpected in Liverpool "is the unforced grandeur of the narrative/formal/thematic arc: out at sea one longs for land, and stuck on land one dreams of sailing over the horizon."

09/15/08 UPDATE: Dispatching to The Greencine Daily from Toronto, Michael Sicinski writes that "Alonso has achieved a new confidence and a sense of purpose that has lost none of its mystery despite having become as clear as crystal." Equally impressed with the film's spatiality, I concede to his much sharper analysis: "[T]he presence of Farrel in his steel bunk or working the boiler room provides a claustrophobic and also a comforting, cradling new environment for an Alonso protagonist. Compositions can settle around the figure without undue agitation, and the ship's hull allows for totally new qualities of light that have previously been absent in Alonso's work, such as the collision of fluorescent and incandescent bulbs at dusk as Farrel offboards the ship to begin the journey home. The obviousness of Alonso's structure here, from an enclosed metallic world into an open, snowy landscape, takes nothing away from the visual and spatial experience that Liverpool creates within this structure, and in fact, as with many avant-garde projects, Alonso's benefits greatly from the imposition of this objective shape."

Cross-published on Twitch.

WOULD YOU MUSTARD MY HOLE WITH A GENIE, BABE?

Michael Hawley discovers a whole new subgenre of YouTube films: the purposeful mistranslation.