TIFF to the last drop

Big ups and letdowns from the second week
of the Toronto International Film Festival

SEXY SCREEN TESTS: L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot

by MARK SLUTSKY

I wouldn’t have thought that the last day I spent watching movies at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival—a day when I was reaching my fatigue limit, my eyeballs practically burnt out from having already watched around 30 movies, my patience tested and worn thin by the fest’s general mania—would be the most rewarding. But I saw three things on Day 9, one art installation and two films, which leapt to the top of my list.

The installation was “Phantoms of Nabua,” by Thai director and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul (whose Syndromes and a Century is one of my favourite films of the last 10 years). A looping projection in a pitch black room, it features flaming soccer balls, lightning crashes and a long peek directly into the eye of a movie projector. Then I checked out To the Sea, a true discovery from Mexican director Pedro González-Rubio. The loose story of a father and son on a final fishing trip in the Chinchorro coral reef, it’s a gorgeous and lilting semi-doc, a perfectly lovely little film.

CARIBBEAN DREAM: To the Sea

After that was what might be my favourite movie of TIFF ’09: L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot. The doc partially reconstructs the great French director’s unfinished epic of jealousy and obsession, L’Enfer, which was derailed by Clouzot’s mania and avant-garde aspirations. Some of the images here, especially from his experimental screen tests of lead Romy Schneider, are truly incredible. A must for movie-lovers.

There were other nice surprises in the festival’s second half. When I heard that Montreal’s Evokative Films had picked up Ole Bornedal’s Deliver Us From Evil, I checked it out and found it an engaging, Straw Dogs-ian Danish thriller. Stephen Poliakoff’s Glorious 39 was another unexpected favourite. Starring Bill Nighy and Romola Garai and set in the summer before Britain entered WWII, it begins as a nostalgic-seeming British country house film, and gradually turns into something more resembling Rosemary’s Baby. A really interesting movie.

There were also disappointments. I had been looking forward to Marco Bellochio’s Vincere, a minor epic about Mussolini’s abandoned first wife and child, which weaves period newsreel footage and vintage title effects with its somewhat fictionalized drama. But I found it flat and not compelling, with a main character I just couldn’t connect with. Jason Reitman’s much-feted Up in the Air was also a letdown. George Clooney stars as a downsizing expert who spends most of his life, happily, on airplanes and in hotels, until human contact reveals the loneliness within. He’s good, and there’s some nice, thoughtful filmmaking here, but it also feels a little facile.

I’d also been looking forward to Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective, a cop movie from the Romanian director who also helmed the really interesting 12:08 East of Bucharest. But—and maybe it was just me—despite the movie’s obvious intelligence, it was just too damn slow for me. I’ll try and watch it again when I’m not on four hours of sleep. And let’s be honest, it’s a damn sight better than something like Don Roos’ atrocious Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, a Manhattan melodrama starring Natalie Portman that taxed my eyeballs for 37 minutes before I bolted. Still, for all the letdowns, most of the 30-odd films I saw this year had something to recommend them. I fell in love with very few films, but I still walked away with lots to talk about—that’s what a good festival’s all about.