THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS (Canada, 2003)
Directed by Denys Arcand
October 4, 6:45 p.m., Uptown
Denys Arcand’s follow-up to The Decline of the American Empire bursts at the seams. Among other things, The Barbarian Invasions manages to incorporate its predecessor’s caustic commentary by taking aim at sexual mores, satirical sideswipes at public health care, a post-9-11 rumination on American imperialism and an unabashedly sentimental portrayal of death by movie cancer (i.e., the kind that apparently doesn’t hurt that much). Frustrating as it may be at times, it’s hard not to be won over by the film’s generosity of spirit and the sense that one of the country’s best filmmakers is again firing on most, if not all, cylinders.
Remy Girard is very engaging in the role of Remy, the horny academic whose failing health inspires a reunion with Pierre (Pierre Curzi), Diane (Louise Portal) and the rest of the old gang. Remy must also find a way to reconcile with his son Sebastien (Stéphane Rousseau), whose unrepentant capitalism offends his dad’s diehard Marxist sensibility. But Sebastian’s bucks ensure that Remy gets a very graceful exit and – thanks to the help of Nathalie (Marie-Josee Croze), Diane’s drug-addicted daughter – all the smack he could desire.
HOLLYWOOD NORTH (CANADA, U.K., 2003)
Directed by Peter O’Brian
October 3, 4:00 p.m., Plaza
October 4, 6:45 p.m., Globe
Big(ish) stars. Big(ish) budget. No subtlety. In Hollywood North, Matthew Modine plays a Canadian producer who complains that he can’t get a script made without an American star in the lead. That would be really funny if the filmmakers were to admit to the irony of doing it themselves and run the story that way. Instead, we are treated to some really lame Canadiana jokes and excruciating American stereotypes.
It’s 1979. Bobby Meyers (Modine) is a lawyer trying to produce his first film, supposedly based on a Governor General’s award-winning novel. His investors insist on an American star, but the star he gets stuck with is a paranoid gun nut (Alan Bates) who is bent on destroying any hint of the original novel. There is also a subplot concerning a really bad Canadian "art film" that they pretend is really art.
There is a great performance from Jennifer Tilly, the hot to hump leading lady, and even Alan Thicke gives wry turn as a nasty investor, but the over-the-top dialogue that over-explains nearly every scene is too much to bear. Hollywood North is the perfect allegory for everything that is wrong with Canadian film. Or perhaps that was its intention. In that case, I have witnessed great art. But I doubt it.
HUKKLE (Hungary 2002)
Directed by Gyögy Pálfi
October 4, 9:15 p.m., Globe
Hukkle is a murder mystery, but the mystery here is spotting the murders in this charming ant’s-eye view of daily life in a contemporary Hungarian village. Owing more to Microcosmos and A Zed and Two Naughts than to any known genre film from Hollywood or Europe, Hukkle places the comings and goings of man firmly on the same level as those of farm animals and forest fauna. Without any explicit narrative or dialogue, the camera wanders leisurely through the landscape, zooming in and out between panoramic and microscopic views.
Like many debut features, this is a bit too high-concept for its own good, and its 75 minutes eventually seem a little on the long side. However, if you’re looking for something unusual but not exactly weird, and cute and quirky within the limits of good taste, Hukkle (Hungarian for "hiccup") is probably your best bet at this year’s festival.
AN INJURY TO ONE (U.S., 2002)
Directed by Travis Wilkerson
October 4, 4 p.m., EM Media
"Poisonville" was what Dashiell Hammett renamed Butte, Montana in his 1929 novel Red Harvest. Back in the early part of the 20th century, the worldwide demand for the copper in its mines made the town enormously profitable and just as toxic. But as Travis Wilkerson illustrates in this fascinating hour-long documentary, it wasn’t only the lake that was poisoned.
The director presents the violent unrest that wracked Butte’s mines in 1917 – which Hammett witnessed as an agent-cum-goon for the Pinkerton agency and fictionalized in Red Harvest – as the beginning of the end for a bona fide American socialist movement. An Injury to One charts the events leading up to the murder of union activist Frank Little, who’d come to help miners protest the terrible conditions at Butte. Little’s brutal (and largely state-sanctioned) lynching inaugurated a nationwide crackdown on the growing labour movement.
While the director’s anger is palpable in his stern narration, his film otherwise employs a coolly rigorous, formally inventive style. Wilkerson skilfully combines text, archival photographs, haunting contemporary images of Butte and chilling music by Low, Jim O’Rourke and Will Oldham to create a bracing history lesson.
LOVE, SEX AND EATING THE BONES (Canada, 2003)
Directed by Sudz Sutherland
October 3, 7:15 p.m., Uptown
October 5, 3:30 p.m., Globe
A romantic comedy from first-time director Sudz Sutherland, Love, Sex and Eating the Bones was well received at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival ,where it was given the City-TV Award for Best Canadian First Feature.
Michael (Hill Harper), a security guard and wannabe professional photographer who has an addiction to pornography, meets Jasmine (Marlyne Afflack), but finds out he can’t perform sexually with a real woman.
From that point on, the film marks the twists and turns involved in romance. Although sex is the theme of this genuinely funny movie it really only serves as background to an urban version of boy meets girl and the subsequent struggle to figure out what it means to have a real relationship.
For those who care: Ed Robertson of Barenaked Ladies fame also makes an uninspiring appearance as a friend of the lead character.
THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD (Canada, 2003)
Directed by Guy Maddin
October 2, 6:45 p.m., Globe
October 4, 3:15 p.m., Globe
Guy Maddin has had no shortage of critical kudos since 2000, when his mock-Soviet comeback short Heart of the World slayed audiences and won major awards, thereby ending the slump that followed the troubled production and lousy reception of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. But the Winnipeg fabulist’s first major production in six years may win something even finer: the affection of the masses. As delirious and idiosyncratic as Maddin’s past works, The Saddest Music in the World benefits from more robust pacing, greater narrative coherence and less preciousness overall. Then again, it’s still plenty weird.
Adapted by Maddin and longtime collaborator George Toles from a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, this is a Depression-era melodrama-cum-musical set in Winnipeg that details the battle between two brothers – the sneaky, pseudo-American Chester (a terrific Mark McKinney) and the morose, pseudo-Serbian Roderick (Ross McMillan) – in a contest to determine which country can create the world’s saddest music. Musicians arrive from all over the globe as Maddin mounts a fantasia of loony cultural stereotypes. The judge is the self-crowned Queen of Beer, imperious brewery baroness Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini), whose legs were accidentally amputated by Chester and Roderick’s father. Her expression of glee when she is given a pair of beer-filled glass gams is just one of the movie’s many delights.
SECRET THINGS (Choses secrètes, France, 2003)
Written and directed by Jean-Claude Brisseau
October 2, 4 p.m., Globe
October 4, 7 p.m., Uptown
Humiliation, voyeurism, autoeroticism, orgies and hot lesbian sex collide in this glorious mess from French director Jean-Claude Brisseau. Earlier this year at Cannes, Secret Things netted Brisseau the France Culture Award for French Cineaste of the Year an that honour perhaps contributed to the 2003 festival’s reputation as one of the worst ever.
Secret Things is among the most offensively misogynist films ever made, right up to the end, when an unearned reversal signifies that women may yet derive power from something other than sex (of course, they’re going to need a gun to do it). But by then, it’s too little, too late, as the film has already shown us that no matter how much they try to manipulate men, women just want to be dominated. This dim view of heterosexual relationships is consolidated further by the numerous female-on-female sex scenes – a wank-fest for the raincoat brigade if ever there was one. While the film redeems itself somewhat with its satire of capitalism in the final third, the bad aftertaste leads one to believe that some secrets are best left untold.
TEN (Iran/France, 2002)
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
October 5, 7 p.m. Plaza
Since a large part of the appeal of Abbas Kiarostami’s films is their gorgeous cinematography and sublime landscapes, the minimalist nature of the Iranian master’s latest may come as a shock. Shot on dashboard-mounted digital cameras, Ten takes place almost entirely in the tight confines of an SUV that is driven by an unnamed woman (Mania Akbari) in Tehran. In the film’s 10 segments, she converses with a variety of passengers, including a friend with marriage troubles, a devoutly religious old woman, a secretive prostitute and, more often than not, the driver’s grouchy young son, who complains endlessly about the problems caused by his parents’ divorce. From these exchanges emerges a complex and detailed portrait of the problems facing Iranian women. Though the film can sometimes seem grating and needlessly repetitive – viewers will likely become as flustered with the kid as his mother is – Kiarostami succeeds in illustrating the ways in which his characters must navigate through Iranian society. These women have more to worry about than crumpled fenders.
UZAK (Turkey, 2002)
Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
October 4, 7 p.m., Globe
Smart, observant and sad, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s third film was widely acknowledged to be the best feature in competition at Cannes this year. Though Gus Van Sant’s Elephant got the Palme d’Or, Uzak (Distant) walked away with the grand jury prize and acting citations for its two leads, one of whom, Mehmet Emin Toprak, died in a car accident earlier this year. This tragedy adds another level of poignance to Ceylan’s essentially melancholy but often very funny city-mouse/country-mouse tale about an unhappy photographer (Muzaffer Ozdemir) who reluctantly spends the winter sharing his Istanbul apartment with an unemployed relative (Toprak) from his hometown. Absorbed by their own private crises, the two men are unable to relate to each other, and their close proximity eventually leads to strife. Though Ceylan’s spare, sly and self-reflexive style has echoes of Tsai Ming-Liang, Aki Kaurismaki and even Woody Allen, Uzak still feels fresh.
THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND (United States, 2002)
Directed by Sam Green & Bill Siegel
October 3, 9:30 p.m., Plaza
Sam Green and Bill Siegel’s The Weather Underground is a captivating feature-length documentary exploring a revolutionary movement against the U.S. government during the 1970s. Former members of the leftist group The Weathermen reflect on protest bombings, the fine line between right and wrong and just how difficult it is to co-ordinate meaningful acts of aggression without killing innocent people.
The Weathermen, a rogue spin-off of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) with former members of The Black Panthers, were disgusted with the U.S. military’s acts of aggression and, specifically, the Vietnam War. Using the radical slogan "Bring the war home," the small yet effective faction bombed several U.S. federal facilities, broke acid guru Timothy Leary out of prison and quickly climbed onto the FBI’s most-wanted list.
With the end of the Vietnam War, the Weathermen’s tenets began to unravel as the revolutionaries grew up and pondered the ability of violence truly being able to bring social reform.
Amazing sound design, graphic war images and wonderful ’70s amateur footage support news footage, interviews, unique recreations and voice-over work by Lili Taylor.
Green and Siegel have created an eerily poignant document that shows the past is never far behind, and that even radical revolutionaries have trouble staying focused on the cause.
WILBUR WANTS TO KILL HIMSELF (Denmark/U.K./Sweden/France, 2002)
Directed by Lone Scherfig
October 2, 9:30 p.m., Globe
Despite its thick, syrupy orchestral score, Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself alternates between black comedy and grim pathos as it tells the story of a suicidal depressive (Jamie Sieves), his protective older brother (Adrian Rawlins) and the woman they both love (Shirley Henderson).
In her follow-up to Italian for Beginners, Danish director Lone Scherfig pushes the family melodrama through her offbeat comedic filters, and while the shifts in tone are occasionally jarring, the film nevertheless contains some finely observed characters and moments of morbid clarity. The bleak Glasgow setting is entirely appropriate for this irreverent yet compassionate look at death and dying. The film could rest in peace alongside other great comedies about death – such as Harold and Maude and Hirozaku Koreeda’s After Life – if it weren’t for that dreadful music swelling on the soundtrack in all the wrong places.
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