Gianni Amerlio’s The House Keys (Le Chiavi di casa) has some of the crucial elements found in the Oscar reserved for foreign language films: An irrepressible boy with a crippling disease; a lonely father making a faltering effort at reconciliation; a the structure of a road movie. It’s even got an unfeeling bureaucrat in the person of an efficient German doctor to serve as a foil for dad’s burgeoning parenting skills.
But don’t write the movie off just because it fulfills the Academy formula. This isn’t the first time Amelio has taken a potentially lachrymose notion and fashioned an emotionally honest work out of it; his Stolen Children, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1992, is perhaps the most prominent example of his ability to deepen conventions. Although it tips towards sentimentality every once in a while, The House Keys is mostly an emotionally straightforward and touching family drama.
Young Andrea Rossi plays Paulo, a sweet 15-year-old afflicted with mental and physical problems that resulted from a difficult birth. Emotionally undone by Paolo’s condition and the death of his wife, Paulo’s father, Gianni (Kim Rossi Stuart), has left Paulo in the care of an aunt and uncle for practically the boy’s entire life. Now that Paolo is 15, though, the still-young father, a prosperous Milanese businessman, wants to effect a reconciliation with his son.
The vehicle for this reentry is Paolo’s annual train trip from Italy to Berlin, where he receives treatment from specialists. Pretty much what you expect to happen, happens: Overtures are rebuffed and accepted, difficulties are faced up to, crises inevitably occur. But Amelio’s attention to the realties of character are so sensitive and precise that the action doesn’t play like the recitation of a formula. Rather, the sense is that you’re watching an episode of life that is generally familiar, but is unique in its specificity.
Claire Denis is incapable of putting anything but beauty on screen, but that hasn’t kept her from making a bad film now and then. L’Intrus (The Intruder) is hardly in the class of her worst work (Trouble Every Day), but coming after the sublime Vendredi Soir (Friday Night), it’s more than a little bit of a letdown.
Essentially the film is an exercise in narrative minimalism, whose principal thrust emerges circuitously and through action and a scant measure of exposition. Despite its academicism, the film has real virtues, including the presence of the aging-but-vigorous Michel Subor (who co-starred in Denis’s Beau Travail, and way back appeared in Godard’s Le Petit soldat and was the narrator of Jules et Jim).
The underlying problem with the movie is that Denis’s approach is only half-hearted. The action opens on the Swiss-French border, follows an off-duty guard to her home, shows local residents harassing border-jumping immigrants, and visits a bit with a kennel operator played by Béatrice Dalle. Yet most of these introductory elements fall quickly away in order to follow Subor’s character from his forest home to Geneva, Korea and Tahiti as he puts together what fairly quickly reveals itself as a combination of business and expiation. The only truly mysterious figure in what Denis may have meant as a study in dream logic, is a young blonde (“the Russian woman” according to the closing credits, though you’d have to know French better than I do to realize she was speaking with an accent) who appears now and then as a dangerous but, till the climax, somewhat aimless nemesis to Subor’s character.
L’Intrus is often provocative and nearly always beautiful. But it never shakes off a sterility born of excessive formalism.
Johnnie To had two films at the festival, of which I only managed to see one. Throw Down (Rudao Longhu Bang) is a quintessential auteur’s film, in which To deviates from his usual crime-film genre but maintains his signature tone and themes (actually, To takes a lot of directorial detours, including romantic and period ghost stories, but you have to get those on DVD).
Throw Down is set in the familiar milieu of nighttime Hong Kong with its chanteuses and gangsters, but the focus is on an ex-judo champion named Sze-To (Louis Koo). Some years previous, he had given up the sport to manage a nightclub financed by some shady types. Not only has Sze-To become a prodigious drinker; he’s also a catastrophically compulsive gambler who has taken to stealing for his gaming funds. One day, an out-of-towner named Tony (Aaron Kwok) shows up to challenge Sze-To to a bout, only to find himself forced to reform the former champ.
That turns out to be easier said than done, as the charismatic Sze-To is soon leading Tony and a newly-hired singer, Mona (Cherrie Ying) on a series of drinking binges, gambling spurts, and small and not-so-small grifts. To has shown an unusual capability when it comes to mixing comedy and suspense in the past, and he does so again here although the emphasis is far more on the comedy than is usually the case. There are serious issues at stake – Sze-To ultimately has to prove himself against an appropriately-named fighter, Kong (played somewhat surprisingly by Tony Leung Ka-Fai) – but Koo is such a naturally funny performer and Sze-To such a charming rascal that the movie as a whole has an agreeably lighthearted atmosphere.
10e Chambre, instants d’audiences (The 10th District Court, Moments of Trials) is Raymond Depardon’s anti-Peoples Court. Wrangling permission to take his cameras into a Paris courtroom, Depardon has taken advantage of the peculiarities of French misdemeanor court procedure to construct a series of compelling and amusing dramas.
The star of the film is a real-life judge, Michèle Bernard-Requin, a woman of formidable intelligence, a certain amount of patience, and a little bit of compassion (these are only misdemeanors; it’s not like she has the death penalty in her quiver). The court has only a semi-adversarial process. Essentially, Bernard-Requin questions the accused, the defense advocate is allowed to make a statement, the prosecution makes its case for punishment, and then the man or woman in the dock can make a statement.
This simple structure is reflected in the three camera angles Depardon was allowed in the courtroom: Locked down, head-to-chest shots of Bernard-Requin, the defendant’s post and the prosecutor’s perch. The result is some remarkable interchanges, mostly between the judge and the guilty party (as indeed they all are). The longest colloquy occurs over a woman in her 60s, a self-described artist, who first agrees, then disagrees, then agrees, then disagrees, and so forth and so on, that she is guilty of driving under the influence. When that issue is finally settled, Bernard-Roquin has to spend nearly as much time getting the woman to estimate her average monthly income, as in French jurisprudence, fines must be proportionate to income.
Depardon deliberately downplays the sensationalism or potential quarrelsomeness of the situations. What results are compelling, but strangely low-key, confrontations over guilt, innocence, and the justness of punishment.
A Way of Life has to have been one of the boldest of the hundreds of films at Toronto. Set in a subsidized housing development in Wales, it is, among other things, a complete repudiation of any cliché you might care to offer about the sanctity of motherhood.
The movie opens with a dark-skinned man being severely beaten by a group of teens, with director Amma Asante shooting the last blow – a stomp to the face – from the victim’s point-of-view. What follows in flashback is scarcely less harsh: The daily life of teenaged single mom, Leigh-Anne (Stephanie James in a performance of unalloyed ferocity). The young Welshwoman has the usual dedication to her baby, but it’s with a logically sharpened edge. As she exclaims at one point, her child is the only one she loves and (more to the point, perhaps), the only one who loves her.
This intense attachment leads Leigh-Anne into a series of moral dead-ends. The baby, for example, has skin and respiratory problems, but Leigh-Anne won’t go to a hospital lest the doctors take the baby from her. And when she needs £15 to pay her power bill, she “earns” it by pimping out a young teenage friend.
Dramatically, the film focuses on Leigh-Anne’s projection of her frustrations onto minorities in general and one neighbor in particular. In a typical flourish of “realistic” melodrama, Leigh-Anne has a brother who falls for the half-Turkish daughter of a neighbor, a relationship that leads to a climax that aims for tragedy. If A Way of Life had a therapeutic feature, you could call this the stuff of a 1980s Stephen Frears film; if it condemned the economic system and valorized its heroine, you could compare it to a Ken Loach movie. But Asante, a 28-year-old black woman maing her feature debut, keeps returning to the sympathetic-repulsive figure of Leigh-Anne herself, and it’s the denouement that features the most chilling moment, in which Leigh-Anne howls and throws herself around like a mortally wounded animal.
Uno, a Norwegian film, is another first-time effort that takes on a social (not socialist) realist cast. Writer-director Askel Hennie stars as a working-class youth, David, who has managed to acquire social status based on his intelligence and self-control. The forum for those virtues is a low-rent health club which is also the locus for a brisk trade in illegal steroids. While the owner maintains a veneer of respectability, his braggadocious son does what he can to rip it back with a series of clumsily-handled drug deals. It’s David’s job to clean up the son’s mistakes.
In an acutely fashioned conflicts, David finds himself caught up in a police dragnet thanks to one of his charge’s bollixed-up deals. But at the same time, his father is dying in a local hospital. Desperate to be by his parent’s bedside, David finally spills the beans to an unsympathetic cop, thereby disrupting his life forever.
Hennie uses digital video to emphasize the “street” side of David’s life and to give an accurate measure of the cramped living and work spaces that even a middling-successful drug dealer must endure. But the director is at his best evoking milieus and setting out moral quandaries. At pure plot he’s a bit less sure, and the movie depends so much on the actions of David’s younger, mentally-impaired brother that it’s hard not to recognize the youth as pure device.
Eros is a 104-minute collection of three short films by Wong Kar-wai, Steven Soderbergh, and Michelangelo Antonioni, all dealing with, you guessed it, romantic/sexual love.
Wong’s The Hand is the most characteristically successful of the three, the Hong Kong filmmaker using the opportunity to compose an erotic fairy tale about a tailor’s apprentice (Chang Chen) and a courtesan (Gong Li). On his first visit to his glamorous customer, the young man becomes visibly aroused, a situation the older woman resolves with the gentle strokes of her hand. From that moment on, the tailor is smitten, and though the two never have another direct erotic encounter, they maintain a strange, but intimate connection through the years. Not unexpectedly, the short film is saturated in a hot house atmosphere that makes such eroticism not only unexpected, but practically inevitable.
Soderbergh’s contribution, Equilibrium, is set in the 1950s and is built around a dilemma a successful ad man (Robert Downey, Jr.) is explaining to an easily distracted psychiatrist (Alan Arkin) :The patient is ridden with guilt over an erotic dream he has every night about a beautiful woman – not his wife. He also has a pile of other complaints, largely related to his era. Soderbergh does a nice job of contrasting acting styles and black-and-white with color. It’s a bit of nice, light comedy, although the ending suggests the director was after more – as if comedy about sex weren’t enough.
Antonioni’s portion caught the most flack at Toronto, with critics complaining (in person if not in print), that the maestro had succumbed to writing overly precious, stilted and corny dialogue (written in Italian with longtime associate Tonino Guerra, then translated into English) and to an inability to direct English-speaking performers (The Passenger and Zabriskie Point notwithstanding, apparently). I found it the best and most close-to-the-bone of the three, an old man’s sexual reveries wrapped up in a stylized tale of a husband, wife, and beautiful stranger. That concluding visions of each of the women dancing nude on a beach before encountering one another in a stuck prelude are full of plaintive nostalgia.
The Festival’s South Africa: Ten Years Later was hobbled by its emphasis on political or sociological change rather than on pure artistic effort. Drum is the story of Henry Nxumalo (Taye Diggs), a black journalist covering the nightlife and colorful characters of Sophiatown, a sort of Johannesburg version of Montparnesse with the addition of interracial socializing. Nxumalo is gradually radicalized by his work, writing exposes of slave labor and forced population relocation for his magazine Drum, despite the reluctance of its white editor. First-time director Zola Maseko has a real knack for composition, camera placement, and editing, but his film suffers fatally from a desire to cram too much history (Nelson Mandela is a recurring character) into too little space.
Red Dust, a U.K.-South African co-production directed by English neophyte Tom Hooper (and shown in the Gala, not South African, section) buries what could have been a fascinating story beneath the rubble of good intentions. Chiwetel Ejiofor (so memorable in Dirty Pretty Things) stars as a post-Apartheid member of parliament determined to see justice served on the heads of white policeman from his small, isolated hometown. The vehicle for this is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a real-life organization that granted amnesty to those who made a full confession of their misdeeds and crimes under the old regime.
The catch is it must be the whole truth and Ejiofor is convinced that an old nemesis is lying in order to avoid revealing as yet unknown atrocities. But Ejiofor has a sword hanging over his head: Contrary to popular belief, when he was a prisoner, he broke under torture and gave information to the police.
Placing such a conflicted character in a (virtual, at least) courtroom setting amounts to a waste of a provocative premise. Whatever internal drama might have developed is forfeited to a schematized external run-through that encourages rooting rather than the consideration of complexities. Add in that the character is further distanced from us by the presence of a white journalist (played by Hilary Swank), who occupies the narrative foreground, and Red Dust becomes an oversimplified ode to goodness.
Teddy Matera’s Max and Mona is a broad comedy of the country-mouse-and-the-city-mouse variety: A young man leaves his village to attend medical school in Johannesburg, only to find himself fleeced of his luggage and forced to throw himself on the mercies of a ne’r-do-well uncle. The movie bears every trace of being what the Germans call a heimatfilm; that is, strictly meant for domestic consumption. The plot machinations struck me as both implausible and contrived and the characters as often annoying stereotypes. But the movie probably does give you a notion of what some portion of the South African public is laughing at these days.
Saving Face is an American independent film from Alice Wu, another first-timer. It looks as though it rolled right off the Sundance conveyor belt (although it was making its debut in Toronto): Ethnic young woman discovers her lesbian side with comedic, as much as dramatic, results. Michelle Krusiec plays young surgeon Wil, a Chinese-American, with appealing enthusiasm, a good match for Joan Chen as Wil’s mom, a widow who has become pregnant by an unknown lover (she’s not talking). The movie is best when it shows Wil escaping from her mom’s matchmaking, but drops off considerably when Wil falls for dancer Vivian (Lynne Chen) and things steam into turbulent romantic waters. In the tradition of such outings, Wu does not display an excess of pure filmmaking ability.
By far the worst American film this correspondent saw in Toronto was Chazz Palminteri’s first directing effort, Noel. A nightmarishly wrong-footed attempt at seasonal sentiment, if features ghastly performances by Susan Sarandon, Robin Williams, Alan Arkin and some younger performers as victims of holiday downers. As badly as the film is written – and it’s a candidate for worst screenplay of the year; oh, hell, let’s close the competition and crown it champ – it’s just as badly directed, with action constantly threatening to tilt out of frame.
Another shudderer from the land of liberty was Crash, directed by TV veteran (L.A. Law, thirtysomething, etc.) and Canadian-born Paul Haggis. It’s one of those multi-character dramas in which a seemingly disparate group, conveniently selected from different socio-economic strata and ethnic groups, find their lives intersecting in all kinds of authorially-forced manners. While Crash boasts a movie-actor line-up (Sandra Bullock, Matt Dillon, Don Cheadle, Brendan Fraser, Ludacris, et al), it’s strictly made-for-TV stuff. Haggis set out to make a movie on the state of black-white relations in contemporary L.A., but the view is strictly from behind the privacy hedges and security checkpoints of Brentwood.
A few films from Asia also disappointed. Vital extended writer-director Shinya (Tetsuo: Iron Man, Tokyo Fist) Tsukamoto’s preoccupations with the human body and its nature as the locus of personality. Tadanobu Asano stars as a medical student who is only gradually regaining his memory and ability to feel emotion as her recovers from an auto accident. Resuming his studies, he discovers the body he’s working on dissecting in anatomy class is that of his lover, herself a victim of the same accident. Tsukamoto has enough sheer filmmaking talent that there are compelling moments, but overall the feeling is that of a director treading water.
Im Kwon-taek’s Low Life (Ha-Ryu-In-Saeng) finds the distinguished Korean director working in a classic gangster genre. Deliberately foregoing the muzzle-exploding nature of contemporary Korean crime movies, Im focuses on the social conditions marking the rise of Choi Tae-woong (Cho Seung-woo) from mob-ruled street to corporate suite. Clearly, the movie means to compare Choi’s rise with that of the Korean military dictatorship and creation of the notorious KCIA (the film covers the late 1950s to the 1970s). Just as clearly, and given what seemed to a Westerner as an extremely anti-climactic conclusion, Low Life would speak more to the people with first-hand experience of the time and place than otherwise.
Song Il-gong’s Spider Forest (Geo-mi-soop) is a familiar South Korean type, the psychological thriller with a significant supernatural element. But this story of a TV newsman with terrifying visions of a murder he tries desperately to prevent is too discursive to sustain much suspense, and too glib psychologically to boast much insight.
Macedonian director Svetozar Ristovski’s Mirage (Iluzija) is the unrelieved chronicle of a 13-year-olds spiritual destruction at the hands of his human environment. Played by a delicate-looking Marko Kovachevic, young Marko suffers at the hands of a chaotic home life presided over by his drunken father. School is even worse, as the boy is a natural victim for the school’s gang of bullies. A teacher who spots Marko’s literary talent intervenes benevolently, but when he turns out to be undependable, Marko is pushed to the edge.
The trajectory is down, down, down thanks to one of the bleakest views of humanity on display at the festival. But Ristovski knows how to catch your eye and hold it and Mirage exudes an emotional force greater than its plot might suggest. Stay out of Macedonia, though, would be my advice.
[read part 1]