TIFF tizzy

Murder, mayhem and psychedelia at this
year’s Toronto International Film Festival

NOTORIOUSLY NUTS: Antichrist

By MARK SLUTSKY

“It was good, but it was too crazy, disorganized. Everything was all over the place.”

It is a mark of how movie-mad-attending the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival has made me that, on overhearing the above bit of conversation while waiting in line, I interrupted to ask what film the two friends were talking about. As it turns out, they were actually talking about a dim sum restaurant. But in my frenzy of rushing from screening to screening, of hurrying down hotel corridors to make it in time to interviews, you’ll have to forgive me for being unable, this week-and-a-half, to stuff anything but cinema into my brain.

There’s been a strange mood at this year’s festival. As the new headquarters, Bell Lightbox, continues to be built across Toronto’s downtown, it feels like people are holding their breath, waiting to see if moving TIFF’s centre of gravity away from Yorkville, the neighbourhood which it’s so long been associated with in the eyes of the city (and the world), will fundamentally change its character.

And then, of course, there’s the famous Toronto Declaration, initiated when filmmaker John Greyson removed his short film Covered from this year’s TIFF to protest the festival’s Tel Aviv spotlight. A letter protesting the programming (read it at torontodeclaration.blogspot.com) was signed by people like Julie Christie, Noam Chomsky, Harry Belafonte and Jane Fonda, though it hasn’t amounted to any sort of boycott, and overt protests have been few (although, as this article was being written, a “Celebration of Solidarity” rally was taking place). Many heated words have been exchanged, but it remains to be seen whether the Declaration and its fallout will have any significant impact on TIFF, or indeed the Palestinian people themselves.

BAD TRIP: The Road

CHAOS REIGNS

I’ve seen some great movies this year. But man, what sights my eyes have beheld in the process. I’ve been witness to genital mutilation, war crimes, mass murder and rampant drug use. And that’s just the press lounge! Ayo! No seriously, the first film I saw this year was Lars von Trier’s already notorious Antichrist, which stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a bereaved couple who retreat to the woods and do very, very bad things to each other. This movie is genuinely, beautifully nuts—at one point, a dying fox looks at the camera and says “Chaos… reigns.” (So metal.) The first five minutes or so, shot in exquisite slow-mo black and white, have been playing in my head the entire festival—that opening scene is probably the best thing I’ve seen here and I’ll say no more about it.

That same day, I also saw Chinese director Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death, a stark and entirely B&W war picture about the Japanese occupation of Nanjing in 1937, which resulted in some truly unspeakable atrocities. The next morning was Jacques Audiard’s epic-length A Prophet, about a young Arab kid (Tahar Rahim) and his ascension through the ranks of a French prison population. Think the jail scene in Goodfellas meets The Wire.

Almost matching von Trier’s flick for director-driven nuttiness was Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, one of two fiction films he’s got here this year (the other, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? I hadn’t seen at press time). A loose remake of the Abel Ferrara flick, it stars Nicolas Cage as an increasingly deranged New Orleans cop and features some of the best hallucinatory breakdancing of the fest. (Also the best press kit quote, from Herzog: “I call upon the theoreticians of cinema to go after this one. Go for it, losers.”) But by far the most visually crazy movie has to be Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, a two-and-a-half hour (I’m seeing a trend here), mostly first-person after-death drug trip set in Tokyo and Montreal. A truly psychedelic and insane film.

It hasn’t all been swirling psychedelia (though I haven’t even mentioned Terry Gilliam’s surprisingly okay The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus yet). Violeta Ayala and Dan Fallshaw’s documentary Stolen tells a moving story of modern-day slavery in North Africa (and retrieving their footage from the African desert while various political factions looked for them took some serious skullduggery, which makes it into the film). Jane Campion’s Bright Star is a gorgeous telling of the love story between poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). And Tim Blake Nelson’s Leaves of Grass is a literate and funny story of twin brothers, both played by Ed Norton.

MAMMALIAN MIND-MELD: The Men Who Stare at Goats

UPS AND DOWNS

It hasn’t all been great, though; there have been some notable disappointments. Chief among these, for me at least, was John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s amazingly dark novel The Road. Viggo Mortensen plays a dad shlepping his son through a devastated post-apocalyptic landscape; some of the visuals are nice, but the book’s deep molten core of fear and hunger just isn’t there. And they left out the barbequed baby scene! Also on the apocalyptic letdown tip was George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead, the latest in the increasingly poor oeuvre of the onetime zombie master.

But as I mentioned above, some movies proved to be pleasant surprises, and Gilliam’s most recent film—also Heath Ledger’s last ever—was one of them. It’s actually more Christopher Plummer’s show, as he plays the titular doctor, an immortal storyteller who runs a ramshackle travelling theatre that allows audiences to enter into their own wildest imaginations. It’s all a little confused and confusing, but there are some beautiful visuals, and the trick of replacing Ledger with other actors (like Johnny Depp and Colin Farrell) for the scenes he didn’t complete before dying actually works perfectly well and fits in with the story.

Another uneven but still highly entertaining offering, The Men Who Stare at Goats, stars the power trio of George Clooney, Ewan McGregor and Jeff Bridges (doing a very “Dude”-esque turn) in the sorta-true story of a U.S. Army program to harness psychics and create paranormal-powered super-soldiers. The movie’s plot is a bit iffy, clearly meant to string together all the cool anecdotes from the Jon Ronson non-fiction book that it’s based on, but it’s full of great moments and enjoyable performances.

Speaking of the Dude, I found myself loving the Coen Brothers’ latest, A Serious Man (there are also movies called A Single Man and Solitary Man playing this year). With no stars at all—the biggest name on the marquee is character actor Richard Kind—the Coens tell a deceptively dark morality play set in the late-’60s Minnesota of their youth. Anyone who’s ever spent time in Hebrew school or studying for a Bar or Bat Mitzvah will be able to relate to this one.

And there’s still plenty left to go. Thai wunderkind Apichatpong Weerasethakul has both a short and an art installation at this year’s fest, both of which I’ve yet to see. Same goes for Guy Maddin’s new short for the NFB, Night Mayor. Then there’s Jason Reitman’s much-fêted Up in the Air and Don Roos’s Love and Other Impossible Pursuits. Stay tuned!

LIFE AFTER HEATH: The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus