Whenever I return from a film festival, the first question my colleagues at the Tribune ask is, ”Did you have a nice vacation?”
This is galling to someone who has just spent two weeks sitting through six or seven movies a day, enduring endless press conferences in the dim hope that someone will say something quotable, meeting filmmakers with an uncanny ability to recall word for word the pan I wrote of their movie eight years ago and trying to survive on cocktail party snacks and three or four hours of sleep a night.
”Vacation!” I whine, ”Vacation?!,” trying to sound as wounded as possible. If this was a vacation, I think I`ll spend Christmas in Beirut.
Yet it is fun-fun to immerse yourself so thoroughly in the medium you love; fun to spend time with your fellow critics from across the country and around the world, exchanging information, opinions and gossip; fun to root out new directors and emerging national cinemas from the hundreds of movies on display.
Nowhere is it more fun for me than at Toronto`s Festival of Festivals, which wrapped up its 15th edition last weekend. Although there are more movies to be seen at the Berlin festival and more contacts to be made at Cannes, somehow Toronto achieves the perfect balance of cinema and
sociability.
It is big enough-291 titles this year-to offer plenty of choice but not so big as to be overwhelming. Even with all of its growth in recent years, the Festival of Festivals still projects a friendly, accommodating, communal sense. You feel a part of the festival, not merely its witness or adversary.
If only Chicago`s festival were anything like this, but it is not. What we have here is a bunch of screenings, most of them underattended; what they have there is an event.
A new film by Jane Campion is an event in itself. The prodigious New Zealand-born director of last year`s ”Sweetie,” Campion confirms her tremendous gifts with ”An Angel at My Table,” a three-part adaptation, originally designed for television, of the autobiography of New Zealand author Janet Frame.
The 156-minute feature, blown up from 16 to 35 millimeter, is strikingly different in tone and style from ”Sweetie,” yet every gracefully composed frame bears Campion`s unmistakable signature.
Three actresses play Frame: As a pudgy, red-haired child (Alexia Keough)
she experiences the death by drowning of a beloved older sister; as a teenager (Karen Fergusson) she becomes agonizingly shy; as an adult (Kerry Fox) she falls into a depression when her younger sister also drowns.
Mistakenly diagnosed as schizophrenic, she is packed off to a mental hospital, where she suffers some 200 shock treatments over eight years and is saved from a lobotomy only when her first book of poems is published.
The final segment of ”Angel” follows Frame on a fellowship year in Spain, where she has a summer romance-her first love affair-with an American poet.
”Angel” continues ”Sweetie” `s interest in emotional disturbances, though this time from the point of view of the disturber.
Janet, with her bristly hair and large build, somehow seems physically out of synch. She is always the inconvenient one, the person too many who upsets the balance of family or friendly relationships.
Destined always to be alone, Janet wastes no time on self-pity but learns to live quite comfortably within herself. The entire film builds to a single, radiantly beautiful gesture of affirmation contained within the final shot.
Where ”Sweetie” seemed to bristle with creative energy, ”Angel” is calmer and more controlled, yet it is no less invigorating an experience.
Thanks to programmer David Overbey, the Toronto festival has served these last few years as the main point of Western entry for the revitalized popular cinema of Hong Kong.
This year`s selection was heavy on melodrama and relatively light on the action films that have figured among the festival`s biggest crowd pleasers.
There was, however, Ching Siu-tung`s ”A Chinese Ghost Story II,” the sequel to the 1987 special effects extravaganza that was one of the first Hong Kong features to attract Western attention. Although the new film contains nothing as outrageous as the giant tongue that attacks the characters of Part One, it is breathlessly paced and consistently imaginative.
Still, the highlight of the Asian section was unquestionably John Woo`s
”Bullet in the Head,” another ultraviolent gangster film from the director of ”A Better Tomorrow” and ”The Killer,” yet graced by a new emotional weight and moral seriousness.
Taking his habitual three-buddy structure (boyhood slum pals Tony Leung, Jacky Cheung and Waise Lee), Woo casts it back to the 1960s. The
Americanization of Asia has introduced rock `n` roll to Hong Kong and economic anarchy to Vietnam, where Woo`s heroes repair in search of their fortunes.
Once again, Woo uses an extreme, stylized violence as an index to the intensity of the characters` emotions; but where the earlier films induced an ecstatic giddiness, this new film haunts the viewer with an undercurrent of despair and entrapment.
One of the most fascinating aspects of film festivals is the way they crystalize far-flung themes and tendencies. This year, for example, one could sense a worldwide search for a new, more open comic form, as conducted in movies as diverse as the Portuguese ”Recollections of the Yellow House,”
directed by Joao Cesar Monteiro; the minimalist French comedy ”Monsieur,” by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, and ”Archangel,” the wonderfully strange new feature by Winnipeg`s Guy Maddin. (All three titles are scheduled for next month`s Chicago festival.)
The first two films draw their inspiration from the ground-breaking work of Jacques Tati (”Monsieur” even begins with a shot quoted from Tati`s
”Playtime”), making use of extreme long shots and minimal editing within sequences to place their wide-eyed protagonists firmly within absurd, uncomprehending environments.
There are no laborious setups and no ”jokes” as such, only a flow of odd details and curious juxtapositions which the spectator is free to find funny or not.
”Yellow House” stars the thin, birdlike Monteiro himself as ”Senhor Joao,” a hypochondriacal resident of a back-street boarding house who is madly, perversely in love with his landlady`s daughter, a musician in a marching band.
The comedy, if it can be called that, comes from a combination of crushingly banal situations and a ravishingly beautiful visual style, in which every frame is informed by a sublime sense of color and texture. Surrounded by transcendent beauty, Monteiro`s characters insist on stubbornly playing out their tiny obsessions.
Toussaint`s ”Monsieur” takes the opposite tack, reducing its world to a contrasty black-and-white. The settings are anonymous and industrial-office buildings, gymnasiums, cookie-cutter apartments. The protagonist (Dominic Gould) is a nice-looking young man in a black business suit who is polite, well-spoken and totally alienated from his surroundings.
Toussaint, a novelist making his directing debut with an adaptation of his own book, spreads a Beckett-like bleakness (Monsieur becomes the unwitting slave of his landlord, a Polish immigrant who forces him to type his treatise on mineralogy), but maintains an inner hopefulness that magically leads to a romantic denouement in the most beautiful square in Paris.
Guy Maddin`s ”Archangel,” however, exists entirely on its own terms. Like Maddin`s ”Tales from the Gimli Hospital,” which made the midnight show rounds last year, ”Archangel” is a seamless pastiche of a cinematic style that existed for perhaps 18 months-that of the ”part-talkie” that bridged silent and sound films.
Maddin is fascinated by the part talkie`s forced cohabitation of silent stylization (of performance, decor and narration) and sound realism (the deflating pops and crackles of the primitive sound track, the crushing return- to-reality effect of a silent actor lurching clumsily into speech), and explores its possibilities as both comedy and poetic delirium.
The plot of ”Archangel” is itself pitched on the far side of a fever dream. In the small Russian village of the title, the Bolshevik revolution flares up from the dying embers of World War I while four variously addled characters-their memories fogged by mustard gas-fall in and out of love, never quite sure to whom they are betrothed.
Drawing on a whole range of forgotten film rhetoric-iris effects, star filters, montage sequences-Maddin creates a convincing artifact, a film that could almost be a forgotten work of Josef von Sternberg, but funny.
Shown on the Festival of Festival`s final evening was ”Le Mari de la coiffeuse” (”The Hairdresser`s Husband”), a French film so new that it had not yet had its Paris premiere.
Directed and written by Patrice Leconte, whose darkly romantic ”Monsieur Hire” was one of last year`s finest imports, the new film is also a tale of amorous obsession, though this time played out on the opposite end of the tonal scale.
In contrast to the painful longing of ”Monsieur Hire,” ”The Hairdresser`s Husband” is about the romantic dream fulfilled, the ideal made effortlessly and magically real.
Since his childhood, Antoine (Jean Rochefort) has been haunted by the sensuality of the hair salon. His only ambition in life is to marry a hairdresser, and when he first sees Mathilde (Anna Galiena, an unforgettable newcomer) he knows he has found his perfect mate. She accepts his impulsive proposal with equal certainty; they are blissfully happy until, as it must, time intrudes.
”It`s exactly the opposite of `Monsieur Hire,` ” said Leconte at a press lunch, ”but it`s exactly the same.”
Alone among contemporary filmmakers, Leconte works the high range of romantic sentiment that once was the province of Frank Borzage (”Seventh Heaven”) and Leo McCarey (”An Affair to Remember”). His warm, funny, superbly executed film is a reminder that a well-jerked tear is also among the noble ends of the cinema.
