Yours truly has been attending the Toronto International Film Festival as part of the FIPRESCI critics jury (FIPRESCI is an international critics group that organizes such panels to festivals). Our brief has included films that are both feature debuts and world premieres, a total sum of 21 movies. That has left some, if not much, time to see other work.
Best among them so far has been Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre Musique, characteristically indefinable, a mixture of fiction, documentary, and poetic essay. The film is divided into three sections: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, the first and third about ten minutes long and the second around an hour. Hell is a brilliant montage of war footage, both from newsreels and feature films (Alexander Nevsky, Zulu, etc.), that moves from simple fighting, to war technology (a clip from Kiss Me Deadly helps illuminate the atomic weapons section, along with shots of actual mushroom clouds), to pictures of victims. While the technique’s brilliance is unmistakable, it releases such a flood of image-born emotions that, even if you’re trying to identify the clips, a sense of helplessness or horror is irresistible.
Purgatory takes place in Sarajevo, during an event called the European Literary Encounters, one of the formal intellectual gatherings the once-besieged city has hosted as part of its resurrection. Godard plays with the forum’s title, in that much of the “action” occurs as a series of aphorisms or literary/intellectual exchanges between writers and journalists.
The aphorisms are memorable (“killing a man to defend an idea isn’t defending an idea; it’s killing a man,” says Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo) and the conversations provocative (Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich compares the Palestinians’ literary fate to that of the Trojans). At least as significant is the presence of two Israeli women: Judith, a journalist, and Olga, apparently a student. The two represent contrasting responses to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Judith optimistic and practical (Darwich makes his comments while being interviewed by her), and Olga verging on despair. Gradually, Olga’s situation outgrows the others, and the Heaven sequence is essentially a coda to her tale.
It sounds didactic; well, of course, it’s didactic. The question is, whose didacticism? As he assembled a combination of factual and fictional images to the Hell sequence, so does Godard assemble factual and fictional voices in Purgatory. In the context of Sarajevo, these constitute a (very articulate) wail of the suffering, though not suffering without hope.
As always, Godard’s film is beautiful in its expressiveness, even of scenes of devestation. Images of Sarajevo’s trolley cars form lovely stanza breaks, their dual implications of loneliness (as they proceed singly down ruined streets) and human cohesion (the passengers on board) forming a nice encapsulation of the movie’s themes.
Another superb work that defies easy description is Benoit Jacquot’s A tout de suite (Right Now), another festival highlight. On the one hand, the veteran filmmaker’s latest is easy to describe: A 19-year-old bourgeois woman, played by Isild Le Besco, gets involved with a handsome young bank robber (Ouassini Embarek), and joins him on the run after a botched heist.
But it’s harder to point to the source of Jacquot’s psychological acuity. Part of it lies in the wealth of detail: the young woman is having an affair with a girlfriend when the movie begins; she’s alienated from her separated parents but, more interestingly perhaps, a slightly older sister; her voice, as opposed to her body, is cloaked in whispers and silences.
But it’s Jacquot’s keen ability to just watch the young woman that ultimately pays off. The filmmaker’s work is, in a sense, a male obsessive’s study of female obsession and, in this particular case, he seems even more struck by the object/subject of desire than usual. Jacquot has shot the film in black-and-white on hand-held video cameras, partly no doubt to ease the introduction of street footage from 1975, the year of the action. But his style also allows for the least room possible between viewer and viewed. The video transfer to film is accomplished with such finesse that it looks simply as if it were grainy, but otherwise light-sensitive film. The proximity of the camera and the particular quality of the film thrust us right into the middle of the young woman’s vertiginous infatuation. Jacquot only seems barely able to maintain some distance from her, but the lack of “objectivity” carries us through the throes of that infatuation, through its risky crisis, and finally into a strangely peaceful denouement.
With Café Lumière, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien has set out to make a tribute film to the great Japanese master, Yasujiro Ozu. The films of both directors employ a contemplative style and broadly share an interest in families and, often, the sadness of separation. But they are also far enough apart from one another that it would seem Hou would have to submerge his own voice, at least to some extent, under the echoes of the deceased master.
Yet, despite shooting in Japan with Japanese characters, Hou makes his voice clear throughout. Typically, the movie follows the alteration, however slight, of a person’s relationships following a momentous (at least emotionally) occurrence. Here, a young woman, Yoko (Yo Hitoto), just returning home, announces abruptly to her parents (and to the audience), that she’s pregnant and, just as importantly, has decided not to marry her Taiwanese boyfriend. In an Ozu film this would have rocked the parents’ world, but in 2004 Japan, mom and dad have to at least hold their tongues, if not acquiesce.
Holding a tongue leads to silence, however, and Yoko’s need for conversation is filled by a friend, Hajime (Tadanobu Asano, of all people), a used book dealer who spends his free time taping the sounds of Tokyo public rail transit. Hajime’s love for the system’s ambient sounds is a corollary to Hou’s evocative photography of its multicolored trains and trolleys. Those conveyances travel over a myriad of tracks, bridges and tunnels that criss-cross, overlay, and parallel one another and form, not a metaphor, but a lyrical refrain to Café Lumière’s poetic loneliness.
This is less restraint than tactfulness, a reluctance to violate the earned privacy of the characters. Like Ozu, Hou is the most respectful of characters, and the movie reaches its emotional climaxes thanks to color, composition, and camera distance rather than dramatic intrusion.
Treatment and perspective, rather than subject or plot, are the winning features of In My Father’s Den, the debut feature from New Zealander Brad McGann, which won the FIPRESCI prize at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival.
In one of several strong performances, Matthew Macfadyen portrays Paul, a veteran photojournalist who has become famous largely for his depictions of children’s suffering. Conflicted enough over the exploitation of his subjects that he has turned down a prize for his work, Paul is first shown returning to his isolated New Zealand hometown for the funeral of his father. It is his first visit in 15 years, and the not unexpected strains with his stay-at-home brother (Colin Moy) quickly emerge.
The stage seems set for a familiar family melodrama, complete with the muted tone and painful conversations associated with the genre’s more hackneyed formulas. However McGann, who adapted Maurice Gee’s novel, introduces the first in a series of shifts which feel as emotionally logical as they sound merely abrupt.
With surprising ease, Paul postpones his return to the world of journalism when he answers a former teacher’s plea to supplement the faculty at the woefully understaffed local public school. McGann displays what will soon emerge as a characteristic appreciation for mixed motives: Paul surely is responding to the egotistical pleasure of extending his reign as a local celebrity, but it is also clear that he is responding to some deeper, if less explicable, urge for a home.
By this time, Paul is living in a remote cottage near a hideaway his father maintained and which the son discovered in his youth. This is the den of the title, a cozy lair filled with books, a globe, a comfortable chair and wine, all of which clearly represented the wider world to both father and son.
The den means the same to the film’s second significant character, a 15-year-old girl named Celia (remarkably well played by Emily Barclay), one of Paul’s students. She is the fatherless daughter of an old girlfriend, but it isn’t this which initially attracts him to her. Rather, it is her intellectual curiosity and sense of alienation, his own adolescent qualities, which soon bind the two in a tight friendship which belies the 16 years between them. Not surprisingly, the relationship raises local eyebrows.
As Paul’s new life grows in complexity, so does McGann’s technique. Primarily, this involves increasingly complex editing which more and more involves Paul’s past. But it also includes a less obvious, but equally significant, reinvention of material from earlier in the film. Thus, melodrama gives way to suspense, as, in the confluence of past and present, Celia abruptly disappears.
Impressively, considering that In My Father’s Den is his first feature, McGann crucially misleads the audience without playing unfair. Viewers and Paul himself come to believe that they know a secret that underlies his relationship with Celia, a secret that he keeps even at the risk to his own safety. In a final twist that some might find too flamboyant, others in keeping with the material, the film reveals that no one knew – or remembered – the truth after all.
Cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh shoots In My Father’s Den in dark, moist tones that accentuate the essential loneliness of all the characters, whether they find themselves in lonely landscapes, partition-making home décor, or in dark, secretive hideaways.
[read part 2]