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2008 TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
All films from U.S.A. unless otherwise specified.
(- seen on video; [v] video piece; [s] short, under 30 minutes; [m] medium length, 30-69 min; * grade changed upon repeat viewing)
NOTE: Jump over the preview essay and head on down to the reviews by clicking here.
This Year You Lucky People Get a Teeny Tiny Little Preview Essay
Regarding 2007, I'm reminded of what Alec Baldwin's character in State and Main said after the car flipped over: "So. That happened." That's to say, the almost cataclysmic bounty of Cinema 07 is something I personally am still sifting through, and in a lot of ways I'm hardly prepared to flip the calendar, even at this late date. (Still trying to track down: Go Go Tales and A Pitcher of Colored Light. All leads appreciated. All tips confidential.) As far as whetting an appetite for TIFF 08, reliable reports of a dismal Berlin and a middling Cannes certainly don't help matters any. Not to mention that TIFF can't necessarily be counted on to deliver the goods, when they are good. As of my writing this, the entire film list has not been announced, and I'll drop in an addendum when all the facts are known. But will the G&T class of Berlin (Hong, Eimbcke, Zonca) make the show, or will it just be Mike Leigh's grinning idiot idiotic film with its major-distrib backing? [POSTSCRIPT: I was wrong about Poppy; more on this below.] Will the drab disappointments of Cannes -- nobody taking any real chances, even the greats content to just refine their brand -- yield new surprises when held up in a different light? Also, the less said about the Venice Comp line-up, the better. Just hold an L to your forehead and move on.
This time around, I'm also getting the chance to advance-screen most of the Wavelengths slate, which will certainly help me face what's always my single biggest challenge during the festival -- affording avant-garde works the concentration and analytical attention they deserve. I can say already, based on my prior familiarity with many of the filmmakers involved, that the program(me)s that Andréa Picard has assembled this year will all be impressive and eye-opening, even if (as is always the case in group-show situations) some fluctuation in quality is inevitable. It's obvious that Picard's found her curatorial voice. (To grossly oversimplify, she's a keen-eyed formalist with an active globalist-political sensibility.) As TIFF continues to drift toward unapologetic supply-side economics (goodbye Directors' Spotlight, Canadian Retrospective, and other industry non-imperatives), Wavelengths is a niche that cinephiles should hold as sacrosanct, lest we find outselves red-carpeted right out of the equation altogether, reduced to some sad salon des refusés over in Brampton.
Enough with the blathering. Now, time for more blathering, but with number-grades. (Although I have decided, following my Views coverage tradition, that I will not post experimental film grades on this page. Interested parties can find them elsewhere on the site.)
seen prior to the festival
-Black and White Trypps Number Three (Ben Russell) [s] [7]
March 2007. See review here.
How to Conduct a Love Affair (David Gatten) [s] [7]
Views 2007. Review here.
-O'Horten (Bent Hamer, Norway / Sweden / Germany) [5]
April 2008. Review here.
films previewed prior to the festival
-Trypps #5 (Dubai) (Ben Russell, U.S. / United Arab Emirates) [s]
After producing one of the most joyous non-narrative films of 2007 (that would be Trypps Number Three, also showing in Wavelengths), Russell turns in a brief tone poem that, on first glance, appears utterly different. Actually, though, both films are united by a distinctly musical sensibility. From a fixed frame position, we see a large fragment (it appears to be almost the entirety) of an outdoor neon sign. The middle of the sign looks to be anchored by the word 'HAPPY,' although the H and the Y are not completely visible, and so, following from the rules of context and Gestalt, we're forming conclusions based on inference. (Above the Western alphabet letters, there is smaller but complete Arabic script. So a more knowledgeable audience can "read the signs," but I and many others aren't in on the code.) The neon is in startling pastels -- hot pinks, baby blues, sea greens -- which contrast with the fire-engine red of the block letters. Within this photographic scheme, Russell gives us just enough time (not quite two minutes) to watch as the sign lights up in myriad ways. The neon tubes illuminate from left to right; they alternate; they play pianistic chords; they divide the sign in half and blink; and on and on. When I said that Trypps #5 had a musical quality to it, I was thinking very specifically of the modernist compositions of Anton Webern or Milton Babbitt, composers who would organize a set of parameters and then exhaust virtually every possibility within the framework. Russell prepares you for a pop-like trifle of a film ("HAPPY"!), and it is, without a doubt, extraordinarily buoyant. But the thing is, you see a sign like this, and you think you know what it is you're seeing, and what it is you're going to see. In a very short time, Russell shows just how many surprises there can be within things we mistakenly treat as mundane phenomena. Isn't that exactly what experimental film is supposed to do?
-Flash in the Metropolitan (Rosalind Nashashibi / Lucy Skaer, U.K.) [s]
Strange, seeing this immediately after Trypps #5, since in certain ways it's the exact inverse of Russell's film. So it is very canny programming to have them on the same Wavelengths program(me), where they can bounce nicely off one another. This is my first exposure to Nashashibi's work, although she has been making quite a splash in the British art scene over the last few years (don't know her stats, or if she's technically a "YBA"), and I can see why. Flash is exceedingly simply, but oddly effective, one of those rare "theatrical" mood pieces that straddles the grammar and attitude of experimental and narrative film but sells neither short. (For a failed example of this model, see the work of Müller and Giraudet.) Nashashibi and Skaer basically move through the antiquities sections of the Met, providing a collision-montage of pre-Columbian, African, Greek, and Roman artifacts in display cases. The formal rhythm results from the fact that the directors film in complete darkness, then pulse a powerful spotlight on the objects before the lens, making the room, and the film, "breathe" with an arresting sense of drama and suspense. Movements across the space are generally smooth tracking shots, although the darkness also conceals edits which "cheat" the integrity of the space, but make for jarring head / mask interfaces. I confess, my appreciation of Flash is formal and formal alone. Apart from a museum in-joke regarding the prohibition of flash photography on delicate specimens, I have no idea what the film "means." It strikes me as pure impact, and as such, it's surprising just how much visual interest Nashashibi and Skaer generate from their single idea before the lights come up for good.
-Chocolate (Prachya Pinkaew, Thailand) [6]
[MILD SPOILERS] We may as well get it out of the way: Jija Yanin kicks major ass. Frankly, I think she's far more agile and balletic than Tony Jaa, but of course she's probably not quite as strong. So we don't see her picking up vending machines and throwing them around like Jaa did in Ong Bak, but we do get an altogether more graceful, dare I say beautiful martial arts throwdown. As it happens, Prachya has risen to the occasion, since he's become a much better director than he was in 2003. I found Ong Bak an almost excruciating sit, largely because the inept filmmaking tended to get in Jaa's way. Now, okay, sure, Chocolate is not the finest directorial work you'll see this year. The first half hour plods, certain compositions are fussy and contravene the action, and even within the fight choreography, there are some pretty obvious errors. (Watch as one anonymous fighting guy crouches and holds so Jija can glide efficiently across his back.) But for the most part, Prachya and Jija work in concert, devising more and more elaborate ways to display her mindblowing Muay Thai. (The under-the-ducts fight is particularly impressive, since it provides spatial impediments one normally wouldn't even think of.) I can't say there's much purpose for the autism angle. It doesn't pull any heartstrings (Jija's Zen character is too self-sufficient), and it adds a slight discomfort in terms of gender politics, as though a young Thai girl can only whupp ass if she's somehow absolutely guileless about it. Still, I'd say to anyone bemoaning the absence of Ong Bak 2 on this year's schedule, I think Midnight Madness Airways probably gave us an upgrade.
-The Parable of the Tulip Painter and the Fly (Charlotte Pryce) [s]
Pryce's latest nature study has suitably lovely passages, but it's somewhat hobbled structurally and thematically by a rather overdetermined metaphor. The film consists of a loose fugue of two dominant elements, direct photography of the natural world (in the form of the titular tulip and fly, and the sunlight that plays against them) and various forms of flattened artificial representation of those selfsame actors. The opening shot is of a still life painting distorted by undulating anamorphic waves, followed by an extreme close-up of the end of a paintbrush piercing the surface tension on a globule of clear turpentine or resin. Pryce plays with the paintbrush motif throughout, juxtaposing the movement of the live fly with its "dead" painted counterpart. Later, she underscores the real / Memorex concept by showing the hard geometric swath of a painted reflection against the brilliant glint of sunlight in clear liquid, the threads of the edge of a glass jar providing an Alice Neel / Joyce Wieland study in quotidian radiance. In time, Pryce's play with the plastics of cinematic light emphasize her own film's additional layer of flattening and artifice, and the results are often lovely. But from moment to moment, the progression of images is unclear.The thematics at work are too deliberate by half, but strangely, Pryce's montage doesn't seem to add to the persuasive power of the process. And although Pryce does achieve some pleasing effects, there's a nagging feeling that even her finest images operate within well-trod boundaries of avant-garde aesthetics: phenomena / noumena; flatness / depth; painting / photography; all wrapped in a tight little bundle, complete with rack focus and end flares.
-Lossless #2 (Rebecca Baron and Doug Goodwin) [v/s]
One of the bugbears of "conceptual art," especially where film and video are concerned, is the claim leveled by skeptics that hearing the work described is just as satisfying, if not more so, than actually seeing the piece in question. (Or, as Laurie Anderson put it, "Language is a virus from outer space, and hearing your name is better than seeing your face.") In most cases, such quibbles are simply untrue, the province of philistinism and lazy spectatorship, so when it does in fact prove to be the case, it's particularly disheartening. Lossless #2 is a Work of Art in the Age of the Mechanically Reproduced One-Liner, and once you grok what it has to say about new media interfaces, the unexpected collision of information from one era and format with a foreign and rather unamenable context, and the promiscuity of the post-Internet film image, all you can do is wait for it to run its course. Baron and Goodwin downloaded a bit torrent file of Meshes of the Afternoon, and began the playback before the download was complete, resulting in smeary, digitally mashed-up images that bled one shot into the next. Yep, that's what happens when you play a torrent too early.
[SPOILERS] This film strikes me as one of those attempts to internalize the language of experimental filmmaking but somehow make it less forbidding, to bring it (literally) down to street-level through a simpler form of organization, more readily recognizable imagery, and a flat, accessible sense of humor that treads into the territory of an almost sweet, avuncular corniness. One thing I can say for Dig, which is not a particularly interesting film, is that it seems genuine, and that it exhibits none of the hipster posturing characteristic of a lot of other deliberately "inviting" non-narrative film, especially from Portland. But, like Todd's Office Suite performed certain unnecessary revisions on Ernie Gehr, Dig strikes me as a very simplified riff on Robert Breer. The film consists of close-up pavement shots, looking down on spray-painted arrows that utility companies use to mark their excavation plans. The dancing performers of this semi-rapid animation are instantly recognizable, so the viewer is flattered -- an obscure part of my world is now put before me, and I am now attending to it with aesthetic concentration. But Todd's manipulations are extremely basic -- usually the arrows simply circle quickly around the frame, but occasionally they flash opposite one another. In the only break from pavement imagery in the four-minute film, Todd gives us a short Rose Lowder-like interlude of flash-frame flowers, a gag on what might've been found had you "dug" somewhere else, I suppose. Overall, the film actually provides the germ of an idea -- the painted marks are an uncommon part of city life, usually unseen even in the most abstract city-symphony films -- but instead of elaborating on that promise, it seems to want to get in, land a jab, and get out, resulting in lackluster, uninspired form.
-Garden/ing (Eriko Sonoda, Japan) [v/s]
[SPOILERS] Sonoda's tricky little video sneaks up on you, initially coming on like a rather bland landscape diary -- my camera will describe a single arc around my back window several times over, recording the micro-transitions in my garden over time -- and gradually lowering the boom. The less said about Sonoda's technique the better, since the conundrum of trying to find your place within its ever-shifting spatial parameters is part of the fun. What I can say is that Sonoda shows us black and white images of a rounded track across a turret window looking out onto the backyard. We see the same four trees, over and over. Sometimes we see laundry hanging, sometimes not. Sonoda interrupts the arc with an uncomfortable staccato, turning the curve into about eight distinct planes. As the video progresses, getting into its second and third movements, photographs start to interlope into the scene, resulting in multiple intersecting arcs and a space that becomes increasingly bent and illegible. Suffice to say, Garden/ing, like Pryce's Parable, is an examination of the problematics of representation, but where Pryce told us a story about the issue, Sonoda provides an object lesson that pretty much rides your skull to work, And although Garden/ing does this with beauty and precision that belies any "aggression," per se, it's also a video piece that isn't afraid to genuinely tax its audience's perceptual hardware. It's a welcome break from placid contemplation. In both approach and attitude, Garden/ing is a film that echoes Michael Snow's best work (in photography as well as cinema), and so its rightful place in a program(me) called Wavelengths is fairly incontestable.
-Tziporah (Abraham Ravett) [s]
I'm embarrassed to say, this is actually my first encounter of Ravett's work; he's obviously a filmmaker of note, and although I've been aware of his films, I haven't had the chance to actually see one until now. I mention this because I think this may be a substantial problem here. Tziporah is rather difficult to access, and I suspect that it would carry much more force when seen as a small component of Ravett's overall long-form project of documenting and memorializing the Jewish experience. As noted in the accompanying materials, "tziporah" is the Hebrew word for bird, and in a sense the film itself, or the particular vision it instantiates, could be likened to some kind of metaphorical avian consciousness, although one oddly at rest. The film is purely serial in its organization. One after the other, Ravett shows us close-ups of flowers stitched onto handmade garments or quilts, or printed flower patters on swaths of fabric whose style and condition seems to mark them within a general 1930s-50s period. This is a transitional era, the gradual move to suburban living serving to curtail a great deal of domestic handicraft and home sewing in favor of impersonal retail. (When's the last time you saw a Simplicity pattern around anyone's house? Kind of sad, really.) In any case, Ravett's flat, one by one presentation offers sewn blossoms to the camera eye, false bird meeting false flower. (Again, like in the work of Pryce and Sonoda, nature and its representation are a major theme this year.) But beyond this, Ravett's simple array, which turns the space of the screen into something of a craft fair display or a quilting bee show, instantly transports viewers of my generation to the homes of our grandmothers, prompting us to contemplate their subject position and the creativity they expressed through the limited means society permitted them. Again, I suspect Tziporah in and of itself would have far more resonance seen in the wider context of Ravett's historical reclamation project, but that's something I'm not qualified to say.
-Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, U.K.) [4]
[MAJOR SPOILERS] I will be the first to man up and admit, I misjudged this film from a distance, and as Leigh booster Mike D'Angelo correctly notes, that may well be a big part of the point. Shortly after H-G-L debuted at Berlin, I viewed an extended clip online (the first encounter with Eddie Marsan's driving instructor) and out of context, it certainly seemed as though Leigh and Sally Hawkins had created in Poppy a wholly irksome creation, and that the film was like some kind of strange, condescending paean to working class female mediocrity. At first blush, Poppy scans like a misbegotten combo of la-di-da ladette affectations with the sad forced optimism of a crying-on-the-inside middle-aged desk clerk, counting down to the weekend and piña coladas with the girls from Accounts Receivable. As it turns out, Poppy is really pretty cool, a funny, well-adjusted grade school teacher who's a bit tasteless but, as they say, is "high on life." (And frankly, if we need anyone on earth with a disposition like this, it's elementary school teachers.) The trouble is, Leigh has dropped Poppy into the most jerry-rigged, deterministic social universe he's ever created. From the opening scene in the bookstore, where guys are pointedly rude for no apparent reason, it becomes clear pretty quickly that H-G-L is, at best, going to hold a somewhat distorted mirror up to reality in order to make some rhetorical point about happiness, and what we can really know about other people's. (The disco scene, when Poppy and her gang dance to Pulp's "Common People," leaves little to interpretation.)
But as it progresses, the film bears less and less resemblance to actual human existence on Planet Earth. The most egregious examples are Marsan's Scott, whose preposterous hostility soon reveals certifiable insanity, but of a uniquely stylized sort that allows for peculiar right-wing rants and perverse sexual insecurity that smacks of the Actors' Workshop. (Did Leigh come across some old anti-immigrant tirades by Gary Numan in Melody Maker and recall that he felt safest of all 'cause he could lock all his doors in cars? A character is born!) But aside from a few key relationships (Poppy's flatmate Zoe, her flamenco-dancing co-worker, and her social worker boyfriend), nothing in this film rings true, not the family relationships, not the TMI dance instructor, not the stilted chat about poor parents' responsibility to get their kids off the PlayStation, and certainly not the sudden, pseudo-Beckett interlude with Homeless Dude. Each and every interaction is a contrivance, seemingly designed to inject "drama" into what should be a character study. Leigh and Hawkins (who is phenomenal here -- her love scene alone completely shifts one's sense of Poppy's emotional capacities as a human being) really have something here, but Leigh apparently didn't trust it, or his audience, and decided to crush it under leaden, incoherently didactic comedy. And a lot of critics and festivals are taking the bait! I'm dumbfounded.
-Suspension (Vanessa O'Neill) [s]
Everyone will tell you that the greatest pleasure you can experience in the context of a film festival is a new discovery, the joy of a major talent jumping out of the crowd and forcing you to take notice. I'm happy to report that Vanessa O'Neill appears to be such a talent, based on the evidence of Suspension, a dual-projection seascape abstraction that takes essentially familiar elements and weaves them into an entirely unique, transportive visual field. In describing what she's done, it will sound fairly simple. The two single film images represent significantly different spatial effects, and the spatial differential results in a hovering, luminous painterly image that mutates across the running time. Much of the film operates as a sort of optical contest between a sharp, Yves Kleinian cobalt blue and the pure white of the projector lamp. Against this action there is the tension between shifting water images. Sometimes we're deep in the drink, with waves filling the frame a la the end of Wavelength; sometimes they're offset with a white sky managing the top half of the frame. But time and again, the secondary filmstrip contains active film grain in motion, so that seemingly static images seem to zoom forward like oncoming traffic, or form and disintegrate like atoms. What's more, at key transitional moments, O'Neill washes the film frames out to the bare minimum of information -- a blue horizon line or a hovering edge. In one significant moment midfilm, a gaping blue cut opens and retracts from left to right, turning the screen into a Lucio Fontana canvas, opening itself in time. O'Neill is a relative newcomer on the film scene, having only recently earned her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. What good news for us. We should keep an eye out for whatever she does next.
-Public Domain (Jim Jennings) [s]
According to program notes, Jennings made Public Domain in response to Michael Bloomberg's (failed) initiative to levy prohibitive costs on those seeking to film in New York City. In a sense, Jennings' film is an ideal demonstration both of what would be lost if NYC imagery were restricted, and, perhaps more importantly, of how any such law would be meaningless, since a world of fleeting fugitive images exists beneath the radar, well below the ken of even the most intrepid "independent" filmmakers whose aspirations chain them to 35mm film crews. Jennings, as a one-man band and total mobile unit, can move undetected through the bustle of the streets and collect fragments of life that the Woody Allens and Spike Lees of the world wouldn't notice. Now, having laid out what I take to be the thematic justification for the shape and form of Public Domain, let me say that no precis can express the sheer exhilaration, the formal precision and nonstop observational inventiveness of the film itself (I'm not sure if such a concept -- observational inventiveness -- isn't an oxymoron. But Jennings attunes himself to what's around him, and achieves such varied results in the process, that I sense he continually finds new ways to observe the spaces he moves through, a sort of active passivity.) Jennings has been one of the un(der)sung heroes of experimental cinema for decades now; his body of work clearly shows him to be equal in stature to acknowledged masters such as Ernie Gehr, Ken Jacobs, Nathaniel Dorsky, and Warren Sonbert.
There are highly compact formal micro-dramas that characterize Public Domain's overall montage logic, in which brief quotidian gestures are glanced, then shown either on their side or right side up, so as to emphasize both the pure movement and rhythm within the frame and its human / geographical content. That is, when we see the distortion of buildings as reflected in the side of a moving bus, Jennings presents it twice or in some cases three times, with different orientations, so that we can quickly apprehend the formal information while the subject matter retains its denotative connection to the life of the city. What's more, within this overall bustle (less city symphony than string quartet, a set of sharply articulated scherzo maneuvers) Jennings even seems to expand on the theme of the "public domain" of the unrestricted cinematic image, with moments that recall other great avant-garde films and filmmakers, an entire tradition that didn't wait around for permits. We see Dorsky's floating bag, the wobbly buildings of Manhatta and N.Y.,N.Y., the upended pedestrians of Gehr and the urban grunge of Jacobs and Jack Smith. Jagged moments in the editing, shuttling us from the pavement to the sky, strike me as Warren Sonbert moments. And yet, in terms of color, lighting, tone, and pacing, everything is of a piece, and unmistakably organized by Jennings' unique sensibility, one which eschews detachment in favor of complete beatitude in the face of urban chaos. Public Domain, like all of Jennings' New York films, are records of the pleasure in being bumped into when you stop to think. Far from marking the cessation of thinking, that jolt simply occasions another, newer thought.
-Rodakis (Olaf Nicolai, Germany) [s]
Within the context of Wavelengths, Nicolai's film is a lovely little palate-cleanser, but this sells it short, and I fear it's the kind of film that could get lost in the shuffle of a group show, particularly when some of its neighbors' aesthetic procedures are rather more aggressive. It's slightly difficult to place, other than to say that it's very European in terms of its sources. Nicolai, a multimedia artist of considerable note, has produced a sly conceptual work which is not exactly the experimental documentary that it at first appears to be, although as a work of conceptual art, it is in fact the document(ary) of an unconventional research procedure. On the one hand, next to nothing is known about 19th century builder Alexis Rodakis (a forerunner of modernist architecture), and so Nicolai adopts the fundamental modernist stance: examine the work itself. In a series of beautifully composed, relatively static shots of the Rodakis home and its island environs in the bold Mediterranean sunlight, Nicolai provides a part / whole architectural photo-essay in time, patiently examining this key site. Visually, Nicolai's style owes everything to a spatio-realist avant-garde: Straub-Huillet most clearly, but also Heinz Emigholz, and the Greek-influenced holistics of Robert Beavers. Against this approach, we get a voiceover delivering a basic timeline of events in Rodakis's life, which, contrary to modernist tenets, we start to measure against what we see of his extant work. Eventually, Nicolai reveals this drive toward art-as-autobiography, or the demand for Lives of the Artists, to be a far more problematic issue than we thought, but to the film's credit, Rodakis doesn't just turn on a "reveal." Instead, the facts resonate as a set of new creations and desires, not incompatible with those needs that the Rodakis House satisfied for Le Corbusier or Adolf Loos. That is to say, we all find the Rodakis we demand, or perhaps deserve.
-Parícutin (Erika Loic, Canada) [s]
Loic's film is an admirable attempt at a documentary / avant-garde hybrid whose elements simply fail to gel. The title refers to the location in Mexico of a volcano whose birth and eventual retreat into dormancy has been observed and recorded, making it the only volcano to be charted over the course of its "life cycle." Loic combines footage from the field with pure graphic cinema -- mostly flickering black triangles against a white background, although other geometric forms emerge as well. She also incorporates hand-painted passages (mostly fresh-lava reds) and a piercing electronic drone. The specific movements of Parícutin are punctuated by texts in Spanish and English, providing both historical background on the site and testimony by indigenous villagers, who have various strategies for explaining the natural process that is so dramatically impacting their lives. Loic, a student of R. Bruce Elder, is to be commended for originality of approach, since I cannot think of another nonfiction essay capacious enough to incorporate methods gleaned from sources as disparate as Chris Marker, Stan Brakhage, and Oskar Fischinger. Alas, these elements sit side by side without mutually illuminating one another, and at times (as with the vibrating triangles) edge too close to naked literalism. Although more interesting than a hypothetical, straightforward documentary on the same subject, no doubt, Parícutin is an experiment that doesn't work.
-When It Was Blue (Jennifer Reeves, U.S. / Iceland) [m] [rough edit preview disc]
I really don't want to say too much, since I'll be seeing and reviewing the live performance. But for now, I will say that this piece is less of a film and more like a deep headspace you enter, a very intelligent person's private image-diary.If there's a theme to pull out of it (on first viewing, at least), it's a play on the idea of "blue." There's a great deal of nature imagery, and the overall mood is one of ecology in jeopardy. But at the same time, there's a personal anxiety about this very world.Whoever is seeing this fauna and flora is not unproblematically embracing it. So there's a tension between loving the world and cowering before it, of being afraid of and for it. The competition between the dual images conveys this like a fight to the death. Based on the single-screen combination preview disc, there's no way the live performance won't make my year-end top five. When It Was Blue Live is not to be missed.
-Mosaik Méchanique (Norbert Pfaffenbichler, Austria) [s]
It seems as though Austria has a bottomless supply of interesting experimental filmmakers, and all a programmer needs to do is phone Sixpack Films and ask about the Daily Special. I don't mean to sound glib, but anyone who follows the scene seems likely to notice the sudden appearance of a really compelling film every so often, by a filmmaker about whom you've probably heard very little if anything at all, but who upon further research has a filmography at least ten works deep. Such is the case with Pfaffenbichler, whose Mosaik Méchanique strikes me as a bold conceptual work, one that bowled me over completely upon first viewing. Now, I must admit that a second viewing tempered my enthusiasm somewhat, although this in no way diminishes Pfaffenbichler's intellectual and formalist accomplishment. It's just that the first time one encounters Mosaik, the sheer preponderance of possibilities it seems to open up can feel like a veritable expanding of the mind. [SPOILERS COMMENCE] To wit: what the film is is a gridlike arrangement of every individual shot of a 1914 short film starring Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle, entitled A Film Johnnie, each shot playing out as a loop within its place in the grid. The original film is a somewhat self-reflexive, behind-the-scenes one-reeler, so Pfaffenbichler's selection is hardly random. (It also contains certain silent-era chestnuts, like the waterhose gag.)
But as the whole film pulsates before you in one giant Cinemascope panel, one's entire sense of film time kind of explodes. Think of the implications! Is this what it looks like inside the mind of David Bordwell when he watches a film? Now we can observe tonal and spatial differentials and anomalies imperceptible when actually viewing the film, such as patterns of light and dark, or preferred gestures and directions! The narrative impulse is hereby defeated, resulting in a cinema of tabulation, one much more akin to database treatments of literature, so-called "distant reading" wherein computations tell us which words and phrases recur in Joyce or Flaubert! Finally, all vestiges of humanism have been purged from structuralist cinema, and the mechanistic character of the silent comedians, their brute surreal power, has been summarily displayed! But the thing is, all this mental hellzapoppin' can occur, in part, because the film is a semi-static object existing in time before you, allowing the viewer space to ruminate. Although Pfaffenbichler cites Kubelka and Léger as primary inspirations, Mosaik most resembles the gallery-hung filmstrip arrangements of Paul Sharits. And like many of his films, there is an unforgiving, slablike quality to Mosaik, almost like the cinematic equivalent of a Richard Serra Cor-Ten steel wall. And so, naturally, a second or third viewing will never yield as much raw power as the initial contact. But neither does it blunt the film's undeniable acuity. This is a major work, and, as is the case with all great structuralism, this film was completely inevitable.
-Tell Me On Tuesday (Astrid Ofner, Austria) [s]
Here is a perfectly pleasant, perfectly lovely, semi-narrative poetic essay film that doesn't really belong in an avant-garde showcase, but most likely has no other place to be, given the current configurations of film festivals and the marketplace. And if my opening sentence sounds as though I'm damning with faint praise, I probably am, because I can't help but feel like I've seen many other films like Tell Me On Tuesday, each just as lovely and unassuming, each quite capable of passing your time like a soothing cup of film-tea. But indeed, there is a distinct lack of frisson here, a sense that all the elements are working so harmoniously because harmony for its own sake comprises the lion's share of what Ofner is putting onscreen. The film consists of a narrator reading love letters from Franz Kafka to his beloved Malena, set to a variety of Super 8 images of Vienna on expired stock (many of which look as though they might've been shot through a pinhole camera, or at least with altered lenses), supported by the music of Anton Webern. So, with these players on the field, Tell Me On Tuesday simply couldn't be an unappealing film. And yet, if you look more closely at Ofner's editing choices, they exude no compositional urgency, no structure unto themselves. Likewise with the sound / image relationships. As with, say, the otherwise very different films of Wes Anderson, Tell Me On Tuesday uses music cues and an overall narrative / emotive thrust to lend itself a coherence that the film itself, from a strictly formalist standpoint, often lacks. This, again, isn't to say that Ofner's work is less than enjoyable or even emotionally edifying at times. Her Super 8 shots in particular, when blown up to 35, swirl with a hot grain so instantly satisfying it may as well have come out of an Uncle Ben's box. But there is a certain aesthetic shorthand at work, resulting in a swoony fog with no discernible center.
-Block B (Chris Chong Chani Fui, Malaysia / Canada / Japan) [s]
[MILD SPOILERS] In its own way, Block B might represent a perfect combination of strict formalism and socio-anthropological content, but oddly enough, the result is that the two tend to impoverish one another, each seemingly like a mutually justifying stunt. Comprised of two identically composed camera runs each nearing ten minutes long, Block B is an extreme long shot of the titular apartment building in Kuala Lumpur. Block B is the sort of high modernist structure that punctuates the urban centers of Asia; the West, by and large, has rejected the Brutalist dreams of Le Corbusier and Louis I. Kahn ("piles of concrete," one noted critic has called them) but megacities like Shanghai, Mumbai, and KL still rely on them. Chong's composition is a basic elevation on the balcony side of the building, resulting in a facade with identical modules up both sides and an elevator shaft up the middle, encased in a jutting cement rectangle that makes the entire residence resemble a dingy Barnett Newman painting. We see tiny moving denizens on the balconies, and hear conversations very high in the sound mix, as though we were right there in the communal bustle. Only when one woman remarks that she has accidentally dropped a bedsheet off her balcony, and we see it fly down several stories on the left hand side, do we realize that we are, ostensibly, watching a real-time social event, whose tactile aural character is matched by its spatial miniaturization. The second part shows the same building at night, as tenants discuss a party brewing on what looks like the twelfth floor from the top, as fluorescents cast all activity within an electric halo. But Chong's most significant intervention here is that we can see inside each apartment. It seems that for the second half, every room may have been shot as a separate video channel which was then laid over the building-grid in post-production. Perhaps this isn't the case, and Block B simply enjoys a degree of transparency that would have made even Jeremy Bentham blush. (And if Chong somehow employed actual film for each individual room, the technical achievement makes the head swim.) At any rate, the final 35mm film doesn't provide enough sociological material to transcend its limitations as a nifty stunt. We just don't spend that much time with these folks, even at a distance, so we get a kind of negligible mash-up of Big Brother, Pedro Costa, and Greenbergian aesthetics. And in fact, Chong's chief gimmick has already been trumped by HBO's on demand / side-of-a-building miniseries "HBO Voyeur," which was admittedly ridiculous but had no pretensions of avant-doc hybridity.
-Horizontal Boundaries (Pat O'Neill) [s] [2008 version]
Or, following Wong Kar-Wai (also in the festival this year), Horizontal Boundaries Redux. I really be entirely trusted about this one, since there were glitches aplenty in the DVD screener. And, although apparently O'Neill has so thoroughly reconstructed and re-scored this film (with the help of composer extraordinaire Carl Stone), now, I believe, in its third overall version, that it constitutes a whole new film, I, never having seen the original(s), cannot authoritatively say. What I can say, however, all throat-clearing now out of the way, is that HB08 is a highly inconsistent film, sort of a "container" work more than an integral effort with a single set of structural principles evenly applied. (Think of such Michael Snow films as *Corpus Callosum or Rameau's Nephew, but more compact.) From the opening moments, we get a taste of what O'Neill is up to. rapid-fire segments of highly processed SoCal imagery -- beaches, bungalows, car life, palm trees -- stuttering across each other vertically as a horizontal line bisects the frame. Basically, the title refers to a kind of intentionally faulty registration, wherein images slip into and onto one another on the horizontal axis, as though film and projector were not the same gauge. Against this is a chugging, humming, Steve Reich-like soundtrack with occasional fragments of film noir dialog. This is, in essence, an echt L.A. film, turning superimposition, bad registration and solarization into formalist metaphors for a kind of sunbaked, distracted Angelino consciousness. But not everything in the film works this way. Sometimes O'Neill goes into the woods, for passages that move in vertical wipes. There are long blackout portions, including one with Irish ceili music. (Why?) There's a slow, hazy zoom into what looks like a building across a runway, in glassy videography. Large portions of HB08 don't really coalesce into a singular film-entity. And, having now seen four films by O'Neill (two shorts and two longer works), I'm finding that this is an O'Neill hallmark. The man has an absolute mastery over the manipulated image, combining the tactility of sculpture and collage with the frenetic fly-away chaos of DJ culture and live-mix video. I see how it all comes together "across the page," but not necessarily "from cover to cover," if you know what I mean. At any rate, I'll soon see it properly on film, and I'm sure that will help.
-The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World (Weijun Chen, U.K. / The Netherlands / Denmark) [v] [W/O] (1:08)
I gave this one an extended look-see based mostly on the fulsome praise Chen received for Please Vote For Me, last year's mid-length doc about a student body president election in China. And, as you'd expect, Biggest Restaurant does in fact provide a glimpse at the complex workings of the West Lake restaurant in the Hunan Province, which in fact is the largest restaurant in the world, period. We meet the woman who owns and runs the place, Qin Linzi, who describes the failure of her first marriage and its inspiration to become an independent success. We see a shlubby guy and his golddigging Bridezilla prepare a lavish wedding at the West Lake, while others discuss changes in Chinese wedding traditions. But the whole thing (or the more than half I saw) really skates over the surface. We learn little tidbits about high-end Imperial cuisine, but not much about the mechanics of the restaurant business. Mostly, it's just a series of portraits that -- SURPRISE, SURPRISE -- show us the fragmented complexity of 21st Century China, a nation in transition. Why spend time with fundamentally unexceptional ("typical") people, captured with negligible videography, for the sake of such a basic thesis, when an actual filmmaker like Jia Zhang-ke can offer all that and so much more? Sorry, but this Chinese Restaurant just didn't deliver. [rimshot]
-El Greco (Yannis Smaragdis, Greece / Spain/ Hungary) [W/O] (0:47)
Is it Sister Wendy's fault? What's with the recent rash of Lives of the Artists films (Girl With the Pearl Earring, Modigliani, Klimt) that insist on treating painting as a fundamentally narrative pursuit, one that always sublimates sexual desire in the most mundane manner possible? El Greco is compulsively watchable, partly because it hits all its marks like clockwork. But it's also fascinating as an almost laboratory-hatched specimen of a particular kind of middlebrow Euro-pudding object, from its unremarked-upon toggle from Greek to English in the first five minutes, to its wall-to-wall explanatory narration, to its generic firebrand cad (Nick Ashdon) representing the forces of freedom and modernity against the oh-so-repressive hypocrisies of the Church. Naturally, in an early scene, sexy El Greco catches the eye of the hot-to-trot daughter (Laia Marull) of the leader of Italy's occupation government in Crete, with the least furtive glances in the history of the eyeline match. Of course Greco's family is part of the resistance (factually true), but dear old dad won't let Junior take up arms, because "your weapon is your paintbrush." Need I mention that the painter has an early friend in a progressive priest (Juan Diego Botto) who maybe, just might end up stabbing our hero in the back at a pivotal moment? (In case you had any doubts, Smaragdis helpfully kicks things off with a flash-forward.) The existence of this sort of film, with its well-appointed art direction and featherbrained take on the act of creation, no doubt contributed to Peter Greenaway's baldness. I was ripping out my hair just watching it. Anyone still unconvinced that 2008 represents a nosedive for TIFF should take a look at this utterly useless film, which has no business holding down a slot in any festival, no matter how capacious.
Wednesday, 9/3 -- Pre-festival previews, including one unexpected surprise: Air Canada's in-flight movie selections from Houston to Toronto included Assayas's Summer Hours. Boy howdy.
-Tale 52 (Alexis Alexiou, Greece) [5]
Shortly after posting my capsule review on El Greco, a critic friend of mine sent me an email with the final line of the above review, with the subject line, "get ready to copy and paste." Tale 52 is a perfect example of what he was warning me about, since in and of itself it's a film that has no real business being in a festival, short of maybe San Jose Cinequest or some other mid-level slick-indie enclave. It's more of an advertisement for Alexiou's potential than a forceful statement per se, since its portrait of a troubled relationship as refracted through a troubled mind treads no new ground formally or intellectually. But from shot to shot, Tale 52 does traffic in an off-center beauty, schizophrenia as edgy perfume commercial. There is a blunt but undeniable Lego-logic to the way shots link in the editing, or the way space accumulates around Iosonas (Giorgos Kakanakis, kind of a damaged, smut-puppy Lars Rudolph) and Penelope (Serafita Grigoriadou, who is probably packing for Hollywood as we speak) as they struggle to organize themselves in semi-linear time. The film is compulsively watchable because its form is oddly aggressive and swaggering and yet haunted, as though implicitly apologizing for its own shallowness. The cinema du look was supposed to be fun, but here surface affectation folds in on itself like a kind of stylish cancer, and by the end you might feel slightly dirty if you felt anything at all. A kind of adolescent Alain Resnais film for sensitive misogynists, Tale 52 is probably headed straight for IFC's Festival Direct channel, like so much near-art.
-Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, France) [7]
Apparently this film is now disavowed by the very Musée d'Orsay commission project that spawned it (the same one that gave us Hou's Flight of the Red Balloon), and if this is in fact the case, it's not without good reason. Inevitably critics and audiences are going to praise the very fine Summer Hours as a return to form for Assayas, or even a return to reason, following alleged follies like Boarding Gate and demonlover (a film about which I myself am very ambivalent). Visually, Hours has the "look" of great French cinema al fresco, sun-dappled and bustling with so much boisterous life and casually sculpted chatter that the frame can barely contain it. This looks more like a Téchiné film, really, but operates in a highly writerly register, not unlike Sentimental Destinies and especially Late August, Early September (with which it almost shares a spot on the calendar of life). Summer Hours is "about something," it is a film with a capital-T theme, and virtually everything that happens in the film, and certainly everything that's overtly discussed, is relevant to the exploration of that theme -- cultural versus familial legacy, and whether art objects that have a function, even if only as sentimental family heirlooms, become existentially damaged when they turn into cultural commodities. In a family of three adult siblings, only the stodgy intellectual (Charles Berling) wants to retain the family's holdings. The designer (Juliette Binoche) and the venture capitalist (Jérémie Renier) are in favor of selling.
But there's a little more going on than meets the eye, since Assayas is in essence taking museum money in order to critique the basis of museology and its object-fetishes. By the end of the film, we are asked to bear witness to a "death" of precious, meaningful things, the material residue of both love and intellection. It's to Assayas's credit that his commitment to taking vases and furniture as seriously as the fine art of Corot and Degas results in a wide-ranging consideration of the emotional stakes in the problem. Summer Hours is more like Statues Also Die and, yes, Toy Story 2 on this front than, say, an essay by Bourdieu. But even more than this, Assayas seems to turn the tables on his own place within the project, since he is making another kind of precious object. Part of the narrative structure of the film's inheritance question hinges on whether or not he family's children will even want the old summer house, these old paintings from two centuries ago, this clunky old furniture. That is, the issue isn't will we pass culture down to the next generation, but which one do they want? (It's not for nothing that the film opens with a direct citation of Cold Water and eventually finds the young people treating the old place, and this rather tasteful Assayas film, as a hip-hop party zone.) And so, this sigh of relief that Assayas has returned to the fold is very much missing the point. He has, in fact, produced the outward shell of a particular format, the pastoral bourgeois French film. It, too, is a museum piece of sorts, and by the time we've moved through Summer Hours, its cozy use value has also begun to feel rather like cottage best closed down.
Thursday, 9/4
Alonso’s previous films have all featured non-professional actors, and while many of the people who populate Farrel’s old village are clearly played by non-pros, I am not at all certain about Juan Fernandez. His bearing throughout the film as Farrel is also something that strikes me as radically new in Alonso’s cinema. He is more expressive of interior psychology, of the toll the years of guilt have taken. The film itself has the objective movement of a spatial rearrangement, from seascape to rough, unkempt landscape, but Farrel’s downbeat quest provides something additional, a level of narrativity that the landscape itself seems to reject. Whether or not Fernandez is a professional actor, his comportment and even his face and body represent a certain phenotype of the art-cinema male. He looks like Jean-Pierre Leaud and Vincent Gallo. As he finally arrives home, Farrel discovers that – corny, I know – “you can’t go home again,” but more than this, that there is a rhythm of life in the village that is more in keeping with the rest of Alonso’s cinema than Farrel or the nautical world he came from. So, one of the things that is most fascinating about Liverpool is that it is a subtle self-examination on Alonso’s part, a dialectical rethinking of his own project. Many have praised Liverpool for being a more conventional film than La libertad or Los Muertos, but this misses the point a bit. Farrel, as the agent of that conventional narrative thrust, is ultimately outcast. He isn’t just a drunk or a bad father; he also brings with him a certain self-consciousness and artifice that, in the best of circumstances, we call art, and in the worst of times there’s often no space for the life observed rather than lived. But as the final shot indicates, we, the characters, and Alonso have been changed for having undergone this quest. Liverpool is certainly a far more difficult film than Jerichow, and in the current unfavorable distribution climate, it’ll be a tough sell. But I sincerely hope more viewers get the chance to see it. It is one of the year’s best films, and ought to cement Alonso’s place in world cinema’s top echelon.
Winter and Sarabande function somewhat differently. Although this is a crass simplification of the two films, it is nonetheless fair to say that Winter is a study of the bisection of the frame by diagonals, while Sarabande takes the previous film’s color palette into a realm of heightened movement, specifically focusing on twisting and torquing forms as they reflect and diffract light. Within avant-garde film production, centering one’s film on such abstract forms as perceived in the world is a grand tradition, but it’s one that up to now Dorsky seemed to have actively abjured. Certain shot combinations within Winter recall the finest films of Ernie Gehr, which of course is some of the highest praise I can dole out. I do not think that these new films are fixated on abstract structure. Like Gehr’s films, they are too alive, too attentive to what’s happening in the world around them. But it does seem that Dorsky is perhaps no longer working so assiduously to avoid the perception of structures, or suppress their emergence. Likewise, there are singularly stunning reds and greens, or layered multiple reflections, but more than in any of Dorsky’s previous works there are not singular standout shots in Winter and Sarabande. Rather, they function as all-over compositions with a relatively stable timbre and pitch. This was an instance when Dorsky’s admiration for Ozu and Bresson, two modernists dedicated to construction from elements of equal weight, struck me as important for accessing his own work.
Winter is, as you might expect, a film largely characterized by blues and grays, however from the opening shot Dorsky shows us an aspect of the film’s treatment of light that will recur at frequent but irregular intervals. Against black shadows on pavement, a short diagonal shaft of hot sunlight draws and undraws itself on the right hand side of the frame, presumably as an unseen door opens and closes. Winter is frequently about intensities of light characterized by their fragility or near-disappearance. Although like all of Dorsky’s work, the film is firmly material and unshackled by needless metaphor, the jagged diagonals did strike me as somehow apposite as an objective correlative to the snowless San Francisco winters, a sharp, biting cold you cannot really see. This is only my interpretation, of course. But reducing Dorsky’s films to narratives and symbols is always to miss the point and to undercut their power. On the other hand, as is often the case with Dorsky’s work, there is a bone-dry wit at work. One shot in Winter features a poodle cocking its head, another variation on the diagonal but one with concrete resonance. And at the conclusion of both films, Dorsky provides a radical departure from the rhythms and forms to which everything up to that point had been getting you accustomed. In Sarabande a series of sunlit blossoms begins vibrating, the stillness of the camerawork suddenly shattered. At the conclusion of Winter, the varied images in depth give way to a compact montage sequence featuring beads of rain on a black car hood, glinting in the sun. The multiple views and angles of this flat field, bedecked with jewels of light, was gorgeous and immediately called to mind the paintings of Ross Bleckner. Dorsky follows this, by the way, with a flattened, perpendicular shot of windows and a wall, about the least diagonal thing to could photograph. There’s not only a clear sense of play at work here, but (please pardon the expression) an “exit strategy,” the indication that Dorsky has taken us somewhere and is easing us back into a more neutral visual world.
As with Yella, but to far greater visceral impact, Petzold plays with semi-misdirection. That is, it’s never clear that either he or the film is actively trying to deceive you in the manner of classic Hollywood plots. Rather, Jerichow layers the typical structure of the noir onto the seething, unspoken resentments created by years of German racism against immigrant Turks. This could have been clunky and artificial but, due in large part to Sözer’s heartbreaking performance as Ali, Petzold is able to turn our sympathies and our entire history of spectatorial identification inside out. Certain anomalies that may look like flaws at first, like some shockingly florid trysts and especially some highly wooden acting by Hoss and Fürmann, gradually reveal themselves to be integral weapons in Jerichow’s emotional and political arsenal. The result is a film that picks up the Sirkian project from Fassbinder in a way that seems, for the first time, completely logical, as though we’ve finally found the heir apparent. In any case, I doubt I’ll see a finer film this year than Jerichow.
JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri, France / Luxembourg / Belgium) [7]
Can someone actually find his "true self" while stranded on an unintended pilgrimage through the DVD bargain bin? Apart from the silly, self-enfolding loop-de-loop pleasures of JCVD, this question of the anguish of faded celebrity, and whether or not to take it seriously, and more importantly whether or not we are supposed to take it seriously, is the deeply satisfying intellectual crux of Jean-Claude Van Damme's new art thriller. Now, I should state outright, I have not seen The Wrestler yet, but by the sound of it, there are similarities in theme. And whereas Aronofsky and Rourke expect us to take the plight of a down-and-out WWF has-been and regard it with genuine pathos -- some sort of Greek tragedy version of Heavy Metal Parking Lot --, Van Damme gives us much, much more than an ironic out. On the one hand, there is the surface text, with its catalog of indignities present-day Van Damme faces: snotty young directors, a venal agent, near bankruptcy, and a vicious child custody battle. Then, there's the inside-the-post-office crime plot, which I found fun and serviceable but which Van Damme and El Mechri mostly utilized to demonstrate reality TV / celebrity meltdown as the last gasp of faded fame. Still, none of this is in any way new. It's all pretty standard-issue fame-kills claptrap, even if by my lights it' delivered with a great deal more wit that usual.
No, where JCVD scores, transcends itself (and himself) and becomes something fairly sui generis, is in Van Damme's fourth-wall-breaking monologue. Suddenly levitating out of the diegetic heist, over the top of the set and into the light, Van Damme looks into the camera and delivers what can only be described as a confession, if not a last testament. I could not do this scene justice with random quotations, which would fail to capture its halting diction, its baffling, fragmentary character, and the overall disheveled nature of Van Damme's thinking. This monologue is not only the formal and emotional crux of the film; it's clearly revealed itself as the deal-breaker, determining how audiences will feel about JCVD as a whole. Is it sincere? Are we supposed to find it deep? Funny? Well-acted? (Van Damme cries!) But I would argue that the monologue is precisely the point when JCVD stops being "about" the conundrum of celebrity and transcends itself, kickboxing its way past quaint notions of sincerity and performativity. What if this really is Van Damme baring his soul, and all we get is more bad acting? That not only says more about him and the system that made him than any mere treatise on the fraudulence of the movies. It's also genuinely heartbreaking. The monologue connects as a celluloid slab of pure trapped affect, because nothing real can ever escape. What's more, anything that's really inside this man, when stripped of all accoutrements of fiction, will most likely be so laughably banal that we'd be embarrassed to share that moment. Luckily, that's a moment the cinema will never allow. In the final moments of JCVD, we get something like that banal, anguished moment, one that too many fathers have had to endure (and have created for themselves) under a variety of circumstances. The film wisely cuts, resulting in a perfect ending. That's because it shows "the real" Van Damme, as real as any of us can ever be, condemned as we are to those overwhelming moments which words can only reduce to the theatre of self-defense.
So, one the one hand, lots of critics have noted since way back at Cannes that a lot of films this year explore not just “family” (what kind of a big deal would that be?) but the specific foundations of family, various angles of attack, or excavations on conventional ways of both being family, and representing family in film. I’ve certainly picked up on this too, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t rather predisposed to see a great deal of life through that particular lens and/or projector at the moment. Not only have I recently moved back to my hometown of Houston after nearly twenty years of living away; I’ve been spending the summer living in a house with my parents, my wife, my two-year-old daughter, my sister, her husband, and a yippity little pug. It’s, um, been lots of fun. Actually, it’s a bit like a movie.
So, amidst the umpteen French films on the topic (the Assayas, the Denis, the Desplechin) and other Euro efforts (the Dvortsevor, arguably the Serra), two Japanese films have taken rather different approaches to examining the changing cultural attitudes surrounding family life, and while one of them has been coded as the more accessible of the two, I’d submit that it’s also the subtler, more complex piece of cinema. (I’ll discuss Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata further down the page.) Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking looks as though it may turn out to be the sleeper hit of the festival, garnering almost uniformly positive notices and apparently strong response from paying audiences. But admiration has been tempered. True, it’s a “minor” film in that it’s a comedy centered around a brief visit by the grown children of an elderly couple, with their own spouses and children in tow. In the opening moments, the matriarch (Kirin Kiki) tries to carefully teach her daughter (singer-actress You) how to prepare a daikon radish side dish. “Oh, don’t worry,” she replies, “I’ll never do it.” Still Walking throws you off immediately if you are familiar with Kore-eda’s work, since its fast pace and preference for subsuming visual stylistics to its punchy script place it in an entirely different class from Maborosi, After Life, Nobody Knows, and his severely underrated Distance. Still Walking can appear frivolous precisely because it hits so many universal truths about sibling rivalry, fear of failure, the resentment bred by inexpressive fathers and the like. But look closer, and Kore-eda actually has a stealth project in place. From its Tokyo Story plot to its intergenerational squabbling right down to its spatial arrangement of railroad tracks, Kore-eda is calling forth the spirit of Ozu. But he isn’t adopting the master’s form. Rather, he’s brushing Ozu’s specific concerns against a classical-popular Hollywood film style. Still Walking is constructed like a madcap home-for-the-holidays comedy, right down to its (regrettable) at-the-buzzer tendency toward needless sentimentality. What’s more, it could be that this pop-cinema approach is the director’s analog for his own lack of certainty regarding which generation “has it right” in the end. Nevertheless, Kore-eda’s shockingly steely comic chops shouldn’t detract from his achievement here, which is smart and substantial.
Without a doubt, this year’s grand test case for the future viability of any form of large-scale political cinema, if not for outsized American auteur cinema in general, is Steven Soderbergh’s Che. Divided into two full-length films, each slightly over two hours, Che could be the ultimate sinkhole for our day, a giant leftist vacuum into which someone’s money vanished without a trace. How can this film even exist, and who is its presumed audience? To Soderbergh’s credit, there seems to have been little consideration of this question. I would like to be able to weigh in passionately on the debate around Che, but the sad truth is, there’s little onscreen to justify passions in either direction. Its champions have claimed that the bold dialectical structure, first showing the rise of Ernesto Guevara (Benicio Del Toro) as a leader in the triumphant Cuban revolution, and then showing the demise of his troops, ideas, and eventually his person in the failed Bolivian adventure, results in a deeply critical, intellectual project. Soderbergh’s achievement, some have claimed, is that the valor and worth of Che’s ideas, and the full-blooded romance of his early success, is gradually taken away, so that we are left, in a sense, in a post-Guevara world. That is, Soderbergh has created, depending on the interpreter, an internal leftist critique of the degeneration of Guevara’s project, or a rise-and-fall lament. (This can even be seen formally in the film, since the first half, The Argentine, is in widescreen, and the tragic second half, Guerrilla, reduces aspect to near-televisual claustrophobia.)
On the other side of the aisle are those who find the film a travesty, since it allegedly drains Che of all romance, all power, presenting his travails in a flat, declarative, perversely anti-dramatic mode. In fact both camps have some points to make, and that’s because in the end Che is a giant muddle, a perfectly watchable docudrama that is in fact flat and declarative, and does adhere to the rise and fall trajectory, but does so with such even inflection as to produce very little beyond history-buff engagement. There seems to be some question as to the relative accessibility of this film. Personally, I found that I could hook into it without caring, partly since I know the material quite well, but Soderbergh’s style and approach is anti-everything. No discernible personality, no clear take on the subject, no avoidance or deployment of Hollywood technique. For a time, the film’s lack of distribution (a matter soon to be resolved, apparently) [NOTE: IFC Films ultimately bit] resulted in talk that Che would become an HBO miniseries, and as I watched I found the film entirely suited to that format, alongside John Adams or another such plodding, anonymous effort. Even when Soderbergh deliberately breaks the glass surface for a joke, like Guevara’s attendance at a New York cocktail party, or a strange genre riff like the final, bizarrely B-Western shootout in a Bolivian village, these moments stick out as glitches in the system rather than thought-provoking formal strategies. There is more genuine political outrage (to say nothing of revolutionary joy) in the throwaway dice-factory uprising scenes in Ocean’s 13 than in all 260 minutes of Soderbergh’s Che Guevara film. And so, as a piece of political cinema for our age, I find Che an “interesting failure” only in theory, not in terms of the results. It isn’t fascist, as one major critic has claimed. Fascism requires clear aims, marching orders. Che leaves its viewer in a miasma of deadening procedure. It is not even an apolitical film about Che, which would certainly say a great deal about our times. It obviously believes in what it’s trying to do, but cannot convey that ideological conviction in any meaningful way. Ultimately, Che is hermetic, even autistic.