VIFF PIX! (Oct 5 update)
Posted by , Oct 5 2005, 03:01 PM
VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Sep 29 – Oct 14
Complete catalog now up at VIFF website
Tickets available online or by phone (for folks with a VISA credit card)
Print programmes available at Videomatica, Limelight, Black Dog, Chapters, etc.
Listed in order of their next showing: notes in red for films I've seen;
DEAR WENDY
Wed Oct 5 , 10pm (Vogue)
I really enjoyed this one - my review is here - and scratch my head at the extreme negative reaction of so many critics. Surely they're not all "my country right or wrong" folks? Surely I'm not completely without aesthetic judgement? (Don't answer that: it's a rhetorical question.) WENDY may not be a masterpiece, but it's sure as heck interesting! Brash, silly, fascinating, absurd, theatrical, great soundtrack - what's not to like? Check out Roger Ebert on WENDY and DR STRANGELOVE: are the two movies really that different, apart from the size of the weapons and the broadness of the comedy? (P.S. Finally got my copy of the Sept Sight & Sound, and they've got my back on this one. Whew.)
"A love story about a boy and his gun, Thomas Vinterberg's DEAR WENDY (US/Denmark), written by von Trier, stars Jamie Bell as the leader of The Dandies, a pacifist gang of weapons lovers."
ROME, OPEN CITY
Thu Oct 6, 9:30pm (Vancity)
Fri Oct 7, 2:30pm (Vancity)
"A rare screening of Roberto Rossellini's neorealist classic, ROME, OPEN CITY, a film that still thrums with energy and immediacy, despite its having been released 60 years ago."
In December 2003 the Museum of Modern Art in New York City launched a three month, thirty-one-film series entitled The Hidden God: Film & Faith. In the essential volume of essays published to accompany the films, the curators wrote "Some directors seemed natrual, even inevitable choices, such as Dreyer, Pasolini, Bergman and Tarkovsky. Roberto Rossellini was the frontrunner in our list and in those of our authors, who chose no less than five of his films for the book" – L'AMORE (1948), STROMBOLI (1949), THE FLOWERS OF SAINT FRANCIS (1950), EUROPA '51 (1952), VOYAGE TO ITALY (1953).
In this month's Pacific Cinematheque program guide, Fellini scholar Sam Rohdie writes "Fellini, after the end of the war, travelled and worked with Rossellini. He was involved in writing the scripts for what are, without question, the great films of the modern cinema, all by Rossellini, 'the forefather of us all', Felleni remarked. These films were ROME OPEN CITY, PAISA, THE MIRACLE, THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS, and EUROPA '51." ("...without question"? Yikes!)
A few years back, IMAGE Journal dedicated their summer issue to film, and asked various Los Angeles film types to talk about "the film(s) that most powerfullyinfluenced their spiritual lives." Sven Birkerts picked FANNY & ALEXANDER, Ralph Sarriego offered A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS, Elizabeth Thoman (a nun) was blessed by KLUTE! Paul Mariani offered A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS, THE MISSION and ROMERO before settling on Zeffirelli's JESUS OF NAZARETH (think he might be a Catholic?), while Kathleen Norris picked PONETTE (and cheated by throwing in THE SILENCE, THE DEAD, THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS and OLD YELLER for good measure). Director Arthur Hiller picked OPEN CITY; "The film OPEN CITY had a strong effect on me spiritually. Granted, I saw it shortly after returning from flying missions in World War II with the Royal Canadian Air Force, but it still stays with me by showing me it is still possible to keep your faith and goodness while undergoing one of the most unjust and emotionally wrenching disasters of this century. The scene where Anna Magnani chases after the truck while the fascist troops drag off her friend and priest still haunts me. It is such an affirmation of the human spirit that it raised my expectations of myself and helped me to realize that doing what is right is essential even in the worst circumstances. I grant you that I don't come through every time – I weaken – but this film did much to me spiritually and strengthened my faith and ability to hang in for what is right in so many difficult situations."
ARVO PART: 24 PRELUDES FOR A FUGUE
Fri Oct 7 10:30AM (Granville)
Part is the deeply Christian composer who was all the rage ten or fifteen years ago, along with fellow East-European, fellow Christian, Henri Gorecki. An apparently plain documentary portrait that rewards close attention with something like transcendence. For my full review, click here
A little over two decades ago the music of composer Arvo Pärt was little played in his homeland of Estonia or, for that matter, outside his home country. He is now one of most respected of living composers. Still he remains a reclusive figure. Pärt initially gave his approval for Dorian Supin's documentary (his second on this subject) only on the grounds that he would not give interviews. Supin followed the man and his method for more than three years, filming at rehearsals, premieres, meetings and seminars. The composer conceded a conversation and provides personal recollections, retold on walks and over tea. The result is a fascinating and comprehensive portrait revealing the spiritual nature of the man and his work, featuring excerpts from Tabula Rasa, Alina, My Heart's in the Highlands and Cecilia, vergine romana amongst others."
3 NEEDLES
Fri Oct 7, 11am (Granville)
The promising premise and worthy subject aren't well served here. The film is high-minded, but lacks spiritual or narrative integrity. Exquisitely shot, but the extremes of sexual violence and commodification are not earned by the story-telling mess and ill-conceived appropriation of religion, resulting in something annoying and disappointingly tawdry. My full review is here.
"Three divergent stories look at the global reach of the AIDS pandemic. In South Africa, a group of nuns (Olympia Dukakis, Sandra Oh and Chloe Sevigny) set out to save as many souls as possible only to discover that local superstitions and harsh everyday realities generated more pressing and prosaic concerns. Wise narration lends a spiritual spin to suffering, sacrifice (often inextricably linked to exploitation) and transcendence. Chloe Sevigny is particularly impressive as Clara, a novice nun whose profound devotion is re-shaped in pursuit of her evolving understanding of the greater good."
Peter Chattaway comments at BCCN
DOG NAIL CLIPPER
Fri Oct 7, 6:40pm (Granville)
Kicked off my festival viewing with this one, and it remains the high point (with LA NEUVAINE a close second). I've rarely had a film affect me spiritually in such a powerful way. Not that it's explicitly religious, and not that I'd expect other people to have the same experience. But the immersion in the particularities of another place and time - set just after WW2, many sequences could be a century or two earlier - combined with the utter simplicity of the story, hard realities offset by straightforward kindness and ordinary courage... The right film at the right moment, for me. I walked the streets afterward feeling I'd been touched by eternity. My review is posted here.
"DOG NAIL CLIPPER (Finland), a lyrical rumination on the resilience of the human spirit starring Franzén as an idealist wounded in the head during WWII who refuses to give up on life and his fellow humans. ... winner of five Jussies (the Finnish Academy Awards),Markku Polonen's "lyrical rumination on the resiliance of the human spirit" (Variety) features a brilliant acting turn from Peter Franzen as an idealist wounded in the head during WWII who refuses to give up on life and his fellow humans. The stunning cinematography of northern Finland is a bonus." Markku Pölönen - "In these days when the spiritual atmosphere of the world is becoming crueller and crueller becoming more 'medieval' - it is important to remind people that good still exists. It is just so quiet that it doesn't produce material for tabloids as easily as the works of evil." - and these titles from his filmography, GIFT FROM HEAVEN and ON THE ROAD TO EMMAUS.
EVE & THE FIRE HORSE
Fri Oct 7, 7pm (Ridge)
Sun Oct 9, 11:30am (Granville)
"When a series of misfortunes strike her family, Eve and her older sister Karena turn to Catholicism in an attempt to gain control over their destiny. With the help of Sunday-school classes and a book entitled Living Together in Heaven on Earth, Karena sets a demanding path toward salvation. Their mother May Lin leaves the girls to navigate the tricky waters of faith alone; not particularly devout in her own religious practices, May Lin pragmatically places a cricifix next to Buddha on the mantle. The girls' spiritual journey is a wondrous one, in which Jesus dances with the Buddha and the goddesses in the moonlight and a grandmother's spirit can be reincarnated in an opera-singing goldfish."
Peter Chattaway
C.R.A.Z.Y.
Mon Oct 10, 3:20 (Granville)
Thu Oct 13, 7pm (Vogue)
Born into a suburban Catholic family, Zac grows up to understand how a blessing can also be a curse. When the Tupperware lady proclaims God has given him the ability to heal, it becomes clear he will never be quite like everyone else. Michel Cote is superb as an old-fashioned father, afraid his fourth son will grow up to be a fairy, who won't accept the priest's guidance that it is the act which is a sin and not the inclination."
HELL
Mon Oct 10, 7pm (Vogue)
Tue Oct 11, 2pm (Granville)
"Danis Tanovic, the director of NO MAN'S LAND, returns for his sophomore film with HELL, a gripping story chronicling the lives of three sisters, bound forever by an act of violence witnessed in their childhood. Starring Emmanuelle Béart, the film was written by Krzysztof Piesiewicz, who developed this film as part of a trilogy with the late Krzysztof Kieslowski."
THE DEKALOG, the first collaboration of the two Krzysztofs, is one of the landmarks of "spiritual film-making," a morally searching ten-film series derived from the ten commandments. After their celebrated THREE COLOURS trilogy, the boys put their heads together and cooked up another – HEAVEN, HELL and PURGATORY – which remained unfilmed when diector Kieslowski died of a heart attack in 1996.
Six years later, RUN LOLA RUN wunderkind Tom Tykwer released his respectful (and wunderful) treatment of the first of the trilogy, toning down his dazzling camera style and slowing the pace to give us something very close to what his mentor might have offered. We looked at Tykwer's splendid films in Robert Johnston and Catherine Barsotti's Ecclesiastes course at Regent College this summer, and they recommended NO MAN'S LAND as another recent European Must-See. Now it all comes full circle with HELL. (Any guesses who gets the nod to lens PURGATORY?)
L'ENFANT
Fri Oct 14, 7pm (Vogue)
"This year's Cannes Palme d'Or winner, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's gripping and concise L'ENFANT (Belgium) will close the Festival. Ill-equipped to handle his new paternal responsibility, 20-year-old thief Bruno undertakes an horrific act, which itself begets other drastic, life-changing crises."
Runner-up for my own personal Movie Of The Millenium would be THE SON, also by the brothers Dardenne. As sparse as Bresson, more emotionally immediate. They're calling this one "Dostoevskian." I'm out of town for the film's one screening – what's with that!? – so I'll have to comfort myself catching up with les freres other two much-lauded fiction features, LA PROMESSE and ROSETTA, on DVD.
*
Lots of other films of interest: I'll single out the ones that look like they might have God Stuff:
DAYS AND HOURS, "Sarajevo-set story about a good-hearted bachelor whose visit to his elderly aunt and uncle sets the stage for a healing experience that helps them cope with the tragedy of the recent war. Shot through with surreal moments and capped by a soaring finale, this is humanist filmmaking at its best" - the last seven words often being code for Soul Food content;
THE PORCELAIN DOLL, which "unfolds at Star Farm, a supernatural place that exists in and out of time: instances of miraculous resurrection unite the film's three episodes";
TWIST OF FAITH, "the first documentary to investigate the aftermath of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy in the US";
SHAPE OF THE MOON, the story of Rumidja, "a Catholic widow whose son has recently converted to Islam";
FATELESS, which "follows Jewish 14-year-old Gyorgy's descent from relative affluence to hell on earth, first Auschwitz, then the hard labour camp of Buchenwald";
BANKING ON HEAVEN, an expose of the polygamous Mormon splinter group that also has a franchise in Bountiful BC;
THIS DIVIDED STATE, the Michael Moore-related look at Utah;
PROTOCOLS OF ZION, a doc on the white supremacists;
CAFUNDO, "inspired by the life of João de Carmago, a black healer and spiritualist who combined Catholicism and African beliefs. Seen as a Brazilian saint and even known as the "Black Pope" (Chattaway;
THE DEVIL'S MINER: "the silver mines of Cerro Rico, Bolivia date back to the 16th century. Through children's eyes we encounter a world of devout Catholic miners who sever their ties with God upon entering the mountain, for it is an ancient belief that it is the devil who controls the fates of all who work within the mines.";
LE GRAND VOYAGE, where "a French youth obsessed with girls and his mobile phone agrees to drive his devout Muslim father all the way to Mecca";
LITTLE JERUSALEM crams into a tiny French apartment a Jewish extended family and marital infidelity, in which "Laura must choose between following the tenets of her faith, or her own desires. Against a background of sunagoguse being firebombed and Jewish men being beaten by gangs of thugs are the affecting quotidian details of long-sustaining Jewish traditions depicted in a gentle and solicitous way";
BITTERSWEET PLACE tosses in a little "long lost Judaism courtesy of a handsome Hassid";
OF LOVE AND EGGS is "a film about the place of Islam in the lives and minds of believers, an anti-fundamentalist polemic;
the ultra-realism of KEANE invokes comparison with "the great Dardennes brothers, using a mostly handheld camera to follow his protagonist... a tense, gripping viweing experience";
ESTAMIRA is a documentary about "a 63-year-old shizophrenic woman who lives in a garbage dump near Rio: trapped in an obsessive monolgue of hate, the object of her verbal agfgression is no less than God himself, a deceitful, bad God, responsible for all the trouble created around her";
SHIN SUNG-LI IS LOST "imagines a rural Christian orphanage where the kids are taught that eating is a sin and that the sight of others eating is disgusting. The grasping adults who run the place don’t starve themselves, of course, and when the kids discover they’re being tricked a rebellion of sorts erupts. Young Shin Sung-Il runs away into town and discovers the pornographic reality of restaurants and communal eating...".
These ones are all finished;
LA NEUVAINE (THE NOVENA)
A quiet, wise, perfectly-scaled film. For my full review, click here
Winner of the Ecumenical Jury prize at the Locarno Film Festival for presenting simple faith with respect and acknowledging the difficulty of belief in the face of tragedy. Dr Jeanne Dion considers suicide. On the St Lawrence river, near the basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre, she meets an enigmatic young grocery clerk named Francois. He is on a nine-day pilgrimage, or novena, offering prayers for his dying grandmother's life. The doctor must confront her agnosticism as Francois reveals his deep belief and hope."
Peter Chattaway
TOEING THE LINE
Sun Oct 2, 7pm (VanCity)
Very pleasing anthology of short films included one by Bevan Klassen, a Winnipeg film maker who belongs to a film and faith email group I'm part of. Now I feel like a real festie, hangin' out with the artistes! (Wonder if Lars wants to do coffee?...) Bevan's film is ON A SUNDAY, in which "A weekend at the Living Rock Bible Camp exposes a long-standing grudge held by a controlling church leader" – nice use of black and white to evoke period and a strong sense of place, with the relationship between a church-outsider father and his son particularly well drawn. The collection about social conformity includes at least a couple others with Christian elements (natch); "The faith of a Jehovah's Witness is tested by a beautiful young philosophy student, and a dying man is forced to decide how much he is willing to pay for immortality." Another very strong film from an Emily Carr student, far more experimental and less narrative than the rest, considered female body image, also stood out.
MANDERLAY
An absolute disaster. The second-worst film I've seen this year. Lays out its premise at the top in a baldly obvious "remember when you were a little girl" anecdote, then completely loses its way for two hours before scrambling to pay it all off in the last half hour - by which time all my enthusiasm or willingness to suspend anything has long ago left the building. Gone is the visual interest of DOGVILLE: this turns elegant simplicity into a cluttered, badly composed mess. Gone are the vivid characterizations, gone is the irony of the narration, the tightly focused story, the building dread. This is either a terrible rush job, an editing hatchet job in an effort to reconstruct something out of available footage once actors walked off set and donkey sacrifices were outlawed, or the work of a director in some other sort of dire straits. It's just horrible.
FALLEN
A middle-aged man witnesses a woman's apparent suicide. Riven by guilt, he becomes obsessed with her and roams the city looking for traces of her existence, confronting his own soul in a search for forgiveness and releas. It owes something to both Hungarian master Bela Tarr and Dostoevsky in the way its striking images and feelinngs of guilt, despair and hope are inextricably intertwined. Reminiscent of Bresson's works, or Bergman's eraly works, the inner drama of the protagonist is transformed into hope and perhaps even salvation."
Whew.
And this from Darren Hughes;
"From what I've seen I can highly recommend:
- Cache
- The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
- L'Enfant
- Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine
- The Intruder
- Three Times
All except for The Intruder (which was my favorite film of last year) will definitely end up on my best of 2005. Most are fairly obvious choices (Haneke, Dardennes, Denis, and Hou), but don't miss Lazarescu and Instructions. They're amazing, amazing films."
And this from Doug Cummings;
"La Neuvaine and Fallen are both very strong films; the former is a quiet, pro-faith character study (written and directed by a professed non-believer), and the latter is a brooding, existential mood piece that is atmospherically very reminiscent of Béla Tarr's work. (The director has served as Tarr's cameraman in the past.) Neither one are on the level of L'Enfant, but they're solid, well-wrought, thought-provoking works."
The Novena
Posted by , Oct 5 2005, 02:28 PM
THE NOVENA ("La Neuvaine," CANADA, Bernard Emond)
And all the bad we do, trying to do good?
We can be forgiven.
A woman leaves her car at a motel and walks along the shoulder of the highway. Her clothing is dark and expensive, her face set against the greyness of the afternoon and the threat of the traffic that roars past. She is a doctor, and she's seen too much misery, witnessed evil. Her heels make uncertain progress in the roadside gravel: her face is resolute. She comes to a turnout leading to a pier that thrusts out into the broad and brooding river. Standing at its brink, we watch from behind as her wish to die battles her will to live: finally, arms by her sides, her fingers extend as she is about to leap.
There comes the sound of tires on gravel. A pickup truck pulls up behind her, a young man with a roundly boyish face regards the river as he slowly works on the sandwich and juicebox that constitute his lunch. The woman backs away from the river's edge, sits on a yellow-painted cement pylon. The boy walks to another pylon, six feet away, and sits. She faces the river straight on: his body is turned ever so slightly toward her, though he mostly doesn't look at her. A long silence. Distant cathedral bells. "Go away."
The camera pulls in tight on the woman and the river. Colors deepen, it becomes evening, then night. She does not leave the river. Begins to shiver. The camera pulls back: the boy is still there. He gets up, puts his coat over her shoulders. "Leave me alone." And he says, "Come with me." She cries. He gives her a sandwich. She doesn't eat. "C'est bon?" "C'est bon." Only it clearly isn't. And it won't be for a long while. But maybe it's getting just a little better. Un petit peu.
Francois is a grocery clerk who puts price stickers on soup cans with the same contemplative slowness with which he prays his rosary. He asks permission to come in afternoons. "Yes, but why?" There is something he must do for his grandmother. She is very old, "It is her heart," she is dying. She's all the family he has in this world, so he begins a novena for her healing, nine days of morning prayers at the basilica of Saint Anne, who was mother of the Virgin Mary.
We know what Francois' fear and innocence won't allow him to contemplate, that whether or not healings happen, people eventually die, and his grandmother is a very old woman. What will become of his childlike faith when her death makes him a man?
We also sense that Jeanne, the doctor, has good reason for her despair, and as the film moves quietly forward through her melancholy and Francois' determined faithfulness, abrupt and painful flashbacks show the story that has brought such a brilliant and self-sacrificing woman to this place. And we wonder what might become of her well-earned skepticism toward God – and, for that matter, any sort of hope – when faced with unadorned kindness and a naive faith being confronted with the same dark realities of death and loss.
The film is humble in its aspirations, and it achieves them without a single mis-step: it is perfectly pitched and perfectly scaled, allowing us to live through a few days in a pair of lives, either or both of which might be our own at some point. There is genuine maturity in the way writer/director Emond regards his utterly human characters with respect, never condescending to psychologize or spiritualize their stories. There is understated artfulness in the gentle connections the film observes between the doctor's past experiences and present events ("Are you okay?" "I'm okay."), between the life of the Holy Family and these modern, isolated souls, between the prayers of the Novena and the events that quietly unfold.
Perhaps the film's greatest wisdom is seen in its resolution, which could so easily have gone wrong. It does not. Perhaps there are no great surprises here: perhaps the film tells us nothing we don't already know. But to ask that of such a film would be to miss the point completely. Novelty is not all: sometimes all a film aims to do is to tell a good and simple story well, to put us in the presence of good people for an hour or two. Sometimes that is more than enough.
3 Needles
Posted by , Oct 5 2005, 02:27 PM
3 NEEDLES (2005, Canada, Thom Fitzgerald)
We're not here to love them, we're here to save their souls from purgatory.
The best looking Canadian film I've seen, gorgeous cinematography of hilly, picturesque African seacoast and even hillier and more picturesque Chinese agricultural land. Strikingly handsome when it keeps quiet, but as soon as it opens its mouth...
Three AIDS stories about corruption, compromise and grotesque ideas of martyrdom are linked only thematically, not interwoven so much as scrambled. Each of the stories is complicated to the point of muddle-headedness, working so hard to pile tragedy on conundrum that human behaviour and simple story mechanics become baffling – a particular problem when the juggler can never seem to keep all three of these gaudy and unwieldly balls in the air at once, there's always at least one lying neglected on the floor.
That's frustrating, and pushes us out of the picture, but what's galling (and almost pushes us out of the theatre) is the outsider-peculiar appropriation of Catholicism to provide a toxic stock for this distasteful soup. It would be difficult to find contemporary Catholic mission workers with the apalling theology of the Mother Superior who provides the gallingly improbable voice-over –– or the destructive naivete of her medical mission team who have as hazardously precarious a hold on medical procedures as they do on theology. These twisted stereotypes we just don't need to see perpetuated.
Nor do we need to see the disturbing sexual violence and commodification that runs throughout the film, from the serial rape of a pregnant woman and a this-is-probably-relevant-to-the-story-but-I-can't-for-the-life-of-me-see-how sequence about coming-of-age circumcision which open the picture to an alternately matter-of-fact / campy look at the Montreal porn industry, or any number of other rapes, sexual murders and sex-as-commodity scenes: the film may be earnest, but still falls far short of earning the right to show these horrors, and so it begins to feel tawdry and exploitative in spite of its higher aspirations.
By far the strongest of the three stories is the one set in rural China: the relationship between an ambitious farmer and his savvy not-yet-twelve year old daughter is lively and loving, and there's a parabolic quality about his story that might evoke the folk-tragic resonance of the shorter works of Steinbeck or Pearl S. Buck if it wasn't so compromised by the narrative and spiritual clutter packed around it.
Arvo Part
Posted by , Oct 5 2005, 02:25 PM
ARVO PART: 24 PRELUDES FOR A FUGUE (2004, Estonia, Dorian Supin)
How should a composer approach his work? He has to love each sound, each single sound.
A rare documentary portrait of the composer whose music, along with that of Henri Gorecki, emerged from Eastern Europe in the 1980s grounded in deep Christian faith and and a thrilling commitment to both innovation and tradition. Apart from the occasional cathedral and some brief but strikingly effective color-manipulated landscape imagery (looking like black and white photographs painted over with water-colour), the visual appeal of the film is minimal, matter-of-fact photography matching the utilitarian apartments, rehearsal halls and cinder-block sanctuaries where we witness the composer at work. But the sound is glorious, and this quiet-spoken man utterly fascinating. His extraordinary attention to detail amounts to reverence, rendering not only each sound but each human interaction sacred. Part talks at length with a vocalist about a particular moment in a new piece of music: cutting to her performance we are astonished at the nuance, complexity and power of a single phrase, even a single note. He plays a ten note sequence of two-voice piano music to a master class, savouring the separate voices, lingering on each interval, glorying in each change of tonality. We feel we could go on listening to that handful of notes for hours, reluctant to leave the company of this man without pretense who simply loves the sound of things.
Dog Nail Clipper
Posted by , Sep 30 2005, 04:36 PM
DOG NAIL CLIPPER ("Koirankynnen leikkaaja," 2004, Finland, Markku Polonen, Veikko Huovinen novel)
Has the dog of the world bitten Mertsi again?
Mertsi Vepsalainen is a handsome young man who leaves his fiancee to drive the Russians from Finland following World War Two. A head wound sends him home confused, forgetful of even his name, and he finds himself alone in the world.
The story that follows is as simple – and quietly odd – as the young man himself. Mertsi drinks in the story of a garrulous old carpenter's dog, the splendid, half-wild companion he's had to leave behind in pursuit of work. His great regret is that there's no-one to cut the animal's dew claws, which get caught painfully in the forest underbrush and bleed. We see the image in Mertsi's deeply empathetic imagination: the golden dog stands on a rough board porch in the middle of a rapidly expanding pool of vivid red blood.
The next morning Mertsi is gone, without explanation, money or warm clothes – or the wits you would think he'd need to survive the depths of a Scandinavian winter. He doesn't plan or initiate, he goes along, and we go along with him, and see the world with the same immediacy and particularity he does. There's no complex plotting – Mertsi isn't made for that, so neither is his story – only this damaged man's inescapable questions, "Who am I?" and what will happen to me next.
So it is a film of Finnish faces, of shaggy logging camp ponies up to their bellies in snow, orange lamp light in windows, strong hot coffee drunk through a sugar cube, cold hard labour, haunting dreams of war and a dog in a green field, and the kindness of strangers. "The world holds together when we have a few good men and women."
One description of the movie describes Mertsi as "an idealist who refuses to give up on life and his fellow humans," but that's not quite it. There is a nobility in this vulnerable man, the humble courage of the almost helpless, but it's Eetvi who refuses to give up, a quietly good and generous man who becomes something of a guardian angel to his simple friend. What a memorable performance! I was deeply moved by the simple glory of that round and ruddy Nordic face, the ready smile, but stoic and still and not without an undercurrent of unspoken suffering.
On occasion we glimpse what lies beneath. When letters arrives at the isolated camp, another man thrusts a picture of a naked woman between Eetvi and a letter from his distant wife and family. This quiet, gentle man explodes in fury, storms into the wintry night, kicking at skis that lean against the bunkhouse wall. "There is not enough happiness in this world for everyone. People drive it away because they are so stupid! Happiness is a rare delicacy. You better enjoy it in silence." Later, when his simple-minded friend is sick and despairing, filled with loneliness and envy of Eetvi's strength and the love of a family, Mertsi is met with a stern and sobering response: "I have my share of worries and troubles in this world."
And Mertsi has his share of joys. And by the time he remembers his name, and finds his humble place in the world, if we've let this remarkable film do its work on us, we find ourselves plain and still enough to enter into that humble glory along with him.
Any story with a simple-minded character and this movie's lack of cynicism will be glibly written off as sentimental, and I'm sure this profoundly decent film will attract such unthinking adjectives. How superficial. Sentimentalism pushes for emotion: this thoroughly Scandinavian film acknowledges deep feeling, but never displays it, always gets on with the hard business of living. Living well, living generously with little, living in the face of dying.
Director Markku Pölönen: "In these days when the spiritual atmosphere of the world is becoming crueller and crueller – becoming more 'medieval' – it is important to remind people that good still exists. It is just so quiet that it doesn't produce material for tabloids as easily as the works of evil." Makes me wonder about his other films, even more obscure, with titles like GIFT FROM HEAVEN or ON THE ROAD TO EMMAUS (no, not that Emmaus, but still...)
I've rarely had a film affect me in such a spiritually powerful way. I left the film festival screening and headed back out to Vancouver's cold autumn streets, dark with two days of rain that had driven away our Indian summer. But I walked out of the theatre changed. Like I'd been touched with eternity. I wandered the scummier stretches of Granville Street for an hour or more, and it all looked glorious, charged with the grandeur of God. A scruffy crow with a broken wing stood on some newspaper someone had put out for him in a doorway out of the rain, pecking at a pile of cheese shavings from the pizza-by-the-slice shop. The dreary leather and adult novelty shops were just there, impotent and irrelevant. The air was filled with warm cooking smells, the rain, a hint of the sea. There was a bookstore, quiet and dry and I bought some books. People smiled at me, I'm not even sure I was aware they were mostly smiling back at me. I ended up praying with Edward, an educated and tender man wracked with guilt over his drinking. "It's alright. Jesus loves you. It's hard to stop, once it's got hold of you." He wept at his helplessness: he was weak, confused, and desperately ashamed. "Jesus loves you even if you can't quit, do you know that? Should I pray with you?" He was already holding on to me, now he dropped to his knees on the soaking pavement. We dropped to our knees. I don't do these kinds of things. Then he looked me dead in the eye and said, "You're Nordic. Are you Nordic?" I nodded, mumbled that I'm mostly Norwegian. Edward nodded, and we then there we were praying in the middle of the flow of pedestrians. And I didn't mind. It just seemed like the kind of thing you do.
Now, divine encounters are idiosyncratic things, and I wouldn't suggest anybody else should count on DOG NAIL CLIPPER having the same effect. (Don't worry, you're safe. Probably. And I'm sure I'll get over it soon enough.) This was clearly a case of the right film at the right time, but truly it was the right film: its artful specificity and resolute courage and goodness took me out of myself, immersed me in another place, another time, another life. Stripped things away, cleansed me, reduced life to essence, tactile and specific and divine.
The film's life lies under the surface, like the miraculous bounty of fish beneath a frozen lake, like the profound compassion behind matter-of-fact Finnish faces. It is never explicitly religious: its power is in imminence rather than transcendence, in what is unspoken rather than what is noised abroad. Charged with the grandeur of God.
RIVERS & TIDES, THE MAN WHO PLANTED TREES
VIFF
Tue Oct 4, 9:30pm (Ridge)
Fri Oct 7, 6:40pm (Granville)
Dear Wendy
Posted by , Sep 30 2005, 01:19 PM
DEAR WENDY (2005, Denmark, Thomas Vinterberg, Lars von Trier screenplay)
Dick loves Wendy. As the film opens he's writing her a love letter, recounting the story of their romance from fateful first meeting through marriage and beyond, to the day when their love is put to the test by the arrival of another man.
Right back to Shakespeare, love stories end one of two ways, in weddings or in death. Dear Wendy is more Romeo & Juliet than Midsummer Night's Dream, moving past the "happy ever after" of romantic comedy right through to the "till death us do part" of tragedy, and the big questions of choice and destiny: did we choose our love, or did love choose us? Tragic lovers only know that once their fates are joined, once they abandon themselves to such an all-consuming love, everything else follows with relentless inevitability.
That's how Dick loves Wendy; helplessly, obsessively, tragically. Dear Wendy is story of star-crossed lovers that's as ancient as it is familiar. With one crucial variation on the theme: Wendy is a gun. Specifically, a 6.35mm six shooter, a sweet little double action pearl handle revolver with internal hammer who makes a new man of Dick, turns a weak and sensitive loner into a man with confidence and authority. A good woman or the right gun can do that.
Dick refuses to follow in the footsteps of the town's real men and work in the mine. He stocks shelves in the corner grocery and carts around a toy gun from a second-hand shop, comforting himself with smug judgements of the town's other inhabitants (as much an echo of DOGVILLE as the story's stylized small-town setting). It's not until he hooks up with the gun-loving Stevie that Dick learns the true power of what he carries in his pocket. His life begins to change. He's a natural shooter who he can plant six shots in the centre of a target without aiming or even thinking. Wendy and Dick are made for each other.
Problem is, one of Dick's strategies for moral superiority has been to call himself a pacifist – a label Stevie quickly claims as a way of cementing their friendship. But they decide that's no problem at all: their firearms will be carried but not brandished. Why bother? Just packing heat makes them walk taller – of course they're never going to use their weapons. It's a naive rationalization that contains the seed of their eventual tragedy.
"Pacifists with guns." It's an idea that's just too good not to share, especially since there are others out there who need what they've discovered. After all, Stevie notes, "we're not the only losers in Electric Park." So they form The Dandies, complete with secret passwords and symbols, rituals and pledges, even dress-up clothes and a secret clubhouse they fix up in an abandoned part of the mine. It's got everything you could want in a secret club for kids. Big kids. Kids with guns.
Of course, as Ibsen taught us, a gun on the mantle in Act One must be used before the curtain comes down on Act Three. Complications arise, and sudden violence escalates into a bloody Butch Cassidy / Wild Bunch showdown in the town square, triggered by a tragic misunderstanding.
Well, not exactly tragic. This sad-fated tale doesn't actually aim for the emotional catharsis of tragedy. Its tongue is mostly in its cheek, and it's plenty cheeky. Dogville is to Dear Wendy as A Clockwork Orange is to Doctor Strangelove. The "I can walk" climax is a direct nod to that other over-the-top satire of the American weapons fetish: this movie could easily be subtitled "How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Gun." Everything is played with a brash style and ironic tone that signals satire more than sentiment: Dear Wendy doesn't want to break our heart, it wants to poke us in the eye or slap us upside the head.
Judging by the critics, it succeeds at that if nothing else. This movie makes Americans mad – which no doubt makes Vinterberg and von Trier perfectly happy. The not-so-melancholy Danes are in mischief-maker mode, court jesters whose cinematic smackdown chooses provocation over subtlety. Antagonistic reviewers find the movie glib, its characters, situations and plot developments absurd: I'm guessing the film-makers simply find America's love affair with guns to be equally absurd, and are quite content to match style and subject.
Style they've got. The visual design is highly theatrical (why does that present such a problem for the movie's detractors? it's just another way to make a movie, for goodness sake!), and when this band of armed and dangerous losers dress up Dandy and flourish their firearms, the film displays some real artistic chops: each character dances toward the camera in full thrift-store-Edwardian regalia before being freeze framed and diagrammed, their name and weapon doodled ornately on the screen. A groovy Zombies soundtrack means you'll never hear "It's the time of the season for loving" quite the same way, and po-mo pop culture vultures – especially Kubrick fans – will love playing "spot the movie reference." The young actors are strong, especially the wonderful Alison Pill in a sexy contrast to her Pieces Of April turn, and the remarkably assured and charismatic newcomer Danso Gordon. Bill Pullman turns in a caricature performance that nails the satiric tone of the movie – and which you may love or hate precisely in proportion to how much you love or hate this bratty little movie.
Whether you love or hate this movie may depend on whether you feel it's your nose that's being tweaked by the town fools. If you're pretty convinced that guns don't kill people, etc, that your country's more right than wrong and that America's current war "is really about peace," you'll likely find this movie by a couple of Europeans facile, as condescending and self-righteous as its misguided central character. On the other hand, if you consider all this Gunfight At The OK Corral stuff a poor way to run a country, Dear Wendy may seem a perfectly appropriate response, gleefully deconstructing our love of power and the dreadful gravitational pull of violence.
I don't go looking for a gospel message in every film I see. But I do have this habit of taking everything life brings my way – film included – and holding it up against the Bible, to see what light might be refracted. When I wonder what sort of letter Jesus might write to Wendy and her lover, I think of his words to Peter; "All who draw the sword will die by the sword."
Maybe he said that because, if nothing else, weapons are power. Intoxicating power. Dear Wendy charts the corruption wrought by that kind of power, observing the way young ideals fall by the way once easier, quicker, more decisive strategies present themselves.
Maybe what we've got here isn't exactly a love story or a tragedy, or even a satire. Maybe Dear Wendy is film noir in disguise, without tough detectives or moody black and white cinematography. Naive, corruptible, lonely young man meets femme fatale, and it all leads, inevitably, absurdly, to destruction.
Some dames you just can't trust. Dames like Wendy.
Vancouver International Film Festival
Mon Oct 3, 1pm (Granville)
Wed Oct 5, 10pm (Vogue)
NOW SHOWING: Small Screens
Posted by , Sep 10 2005, 02:31 PM
NOW SHOWING ON SMALL SCREENS
Recent arrivals at your local video emporium
(or orderable online)
AMATEUR (1994, Hal Hartley)
How can you be a nymphomaniac and never have sex?
I'm choosy.
I wanted to like this one a whole lot more than I was able to. For a while in the nineties Hal Hartley looked pretty exciting, a certifiably indie director as fascinated by spiritual things as he was by offbeat characters and unconventional storylines. But what sounded audacious and maybe even spiritually illuminating – a young nun leaves the convent to find her truer calling, fills in time writing pornography and dreaming of truer love – turns out to be kind of pointless and a bit tawdry in this not-quite-thrilling thriller (or is it a not-too-funny comedy?). There's a theme here of rebirth, or at least reinvention, and it works for some Hartley fans: none of these characters are what they appear to be, or what they used to be, they're reaching for new beginnings. The film wants to be transcendent: for me, though, it fails to transcend.
New at Videomatica
AU HASARD BALTHAZAR
Highest Possible Recommendation. One of the Everests of spiritual film-making, long unavailable, recently released on Criterion. It's Bresson, so you need to be ready to slow down and attend to this quiet masterpiece. But don't be intimidated: where I find Tarkovsky hard work, Bresson always moves me even on first viewing.
My Review
THE BOOK OF LIFE, THE (1998, Hal Hartley)
"The French "Collection 2000" series was an anthology of one-hour films released at the turn of the millennium. The sole American entry was Hal Hartley's THE BOOK OF LIFE, in which Jesus (Martin Donovan) and Satan (Thomas Jay Ryan) come to earth to preside over The End Of The World. Rock-and-roller P.J. Harvey co-stars as Magdalena, Christ's bodyguard. In typical Hartley style, wall-to-wall self-conscious quirkiness is punctuated with moments of poignancy and melancholy. VIFF Selection 1998."
New at Videomatica
BORN INTO BROTHELS
Film maker puts cameras in the hands of impoverished kids in India. Jeffrey Overstreet raved this doc, and so did my buddy Paul - recommendation enough for me!
A&F Thread
BRIGHT LEAVES (2003, Ross McElwee)
My review
New at Videomatica
CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE
"First-time director John Deery tackles not one, but two controversial issues inside the Catholic church in this highly-charged drama from Britain. The suicide of a prominent priest triggers the dismissal of his understudy ("Horatio Hornblower's Jonathan Forbes), as rumours of a homosexual affair run rampant through the church. Feeling that the police have ignored important leads, a journalist (Jason Berry) starts his own investigation and gains the trust of the dismissed fellow, but ponders whether his willingness to clear his name might be a cover for something more sinister. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of the church's men?"
New at Videomatica
CRASH (2005)
Multi-plot Los Angeles story not nearly MAGNOLIA, but well worth seeing: one of my two real enthusiasms so far in this dismal, Soul Food starved year at the movies (though things are looking up: fall is here!). Maybe too resolutely thematic (racism), maybe the 180 degree character reversals a bit too lock-step predictable, but hey, it's a swell ride. Anybody else notice those three wise men lurking in the background? Maybe they're keeping St Chris company.
"Canadian-born Paul Haggis won an Oscar for "Million Dollar Baby", putting him on the A-list for writers and opening the door to bigger and better opportunities. As his next project, he used his 20+ years of living in L.A. to inspire a compelling series of interweaving stories that cross the
city's ethnic lines. An ensemble cast, including Matt Dillon, Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullock, and
Brendan Fraser take on image-altering roles in stories that dare to show a gritty side of Los Angeles that is growing increasingly hostile. The film's stories cover interracial relationships, police corruption along racial lines, and how a simple act of carjacking leaves a distinct mark on
two very different social classes."
New at Videomatica (and every other video store in the world)
LES DAMES DU BOIS DE BOULOGNE (1944, Robert Bresson)
"As one part of Paul Schrader's transcendental style triumvirate (the other
two being Dreyer and Ozu), Robert Bresson has a reputation for truly
austere filmmaking: eschewing professional actors for the truth of real
people, classical compositions and sparse storytelling. "Les Dames Du Bois
De Boulogne" is a little different than one expects from Bresson though. It
was his second feature film as director; he was still using professional
actors, and the story is more plot-driven than what would later become the
norm. The film is an adaptation of a story by Denis Diderot, with dialogue
written by Jean Cocteau ("Blood of a Poet") about a society woman whose
feminine ire is provoked when she is jilted by her lover. For revenge she
connives her former lover into an affair with a prostitute, whom he
eventually marries without knowing of her past.
New at Videomatica
FRANCESCO (LITTLE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS
Rossellini's St Frank biopic, just out from Masters Of Cinema AND Criterion.
GATES OF HEAVEN (1978)
"Errol Morris's first feature film was this documentary on pet cemeteries: the people that run them, and the people who use their services to bring their beloved critter companions to their final rest. Morris's non-judgmental approach to the material serves as a moving examination of
death and dying while simultaneously provoking helpless laughter in viewers that think "a funeral for Fifi" is comedy gold. Errol Morris grew so vocal about the problems of completing "Gates of
Heaven" that fellow director Werner Herzog finally said (exact words not preserved), "Errol, I'm sick of hearing you whine and moan about your dead animal doc! If you ever finish that movie, I swear I'll eat my shoe!" The result was a 20-minute documentary by Wes Blank, "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe". It's included as an extra on the Criterion edition of "Burden of Dreams"."
New at Videomatica
My review
HEAVEN CAN WAIT (1943)
"After a life of seven decades, Henry Van Cleve shuffles off this mortal coil and heads straight to Hell, where he is quite sure he belongs. The ruler of the tortured realm isn't so sure though and Henry tries to convince him by recounting his life and all his wicked ways. What follows are flashbacks to illicit affairs, drunken liaisons, adultery, and betrayal. This was arguably Ernst Lubitsch's last great film. It features all the hallmarks of the Lubitsch touch: worldly urbane wit, impeccable plotting, and top-notch characterizations, particularly by Don Ameche in the leading role, and the always dependable Charles Coburn as his sympathetic grandfather. The Warren Beatty film HEAVEN CAN WAIT is not a remake of this film, but rather HERE COMES MR JORDAN. Beatty simply liked this title better."
New at Videomatica
HITCH
Surprising accolades from the esteemed J Robert Parks at Phantom Tollbooth led me to check out this sweet romantic comedy. Could have been very bad, but... Amen to what JBob said! Add this to the list of movies with Great Dance Sequences You Can Learn At Home, right alongside the equally endearing NAPOLEON DYNAMITE...
HOTEL RWANDA
Highly recommended. The sheer scale of inhumanity inherent in genocide repels us: Romeo Dallaire wasn't being merely poetic when he wrote of shaking hands with the devil. The great accomplishment of this film is that it gives us a way in, walking us through the events in the shoes of one man who is not so very much different than us. See it with your conscience, to remember what goes on in other corners of the world. But see it also for the artistry: these performances are extraordinary: Nick Nolte brilliantly cast as the hardened military man of conscience, the brilliant Sophie Okonedo displaying a shattering range of feeling but never "akting," and Don Cheadle in the performance of a lifetime. Because his character isn't highly expressive, because he conceals so much, Cheadle's work doesn't have the obvious flash of more attention-getting performances. Not to take away from the more obvious tour de force performances - many of them are exceptional as well - but in many ways, Cheadle's challenge here is the more demanding one. The depth and range of his emotions - as much as the character tries to mute them - is extraordinary, and he never overplays, never misses the mark. I always sensed I could see him thinking, agonizing, strategizing - or being at a complete loss. An enormous accomplishment.
INTOLERANCE (1916)
"After someone explained to him that his first epic, "The Birth of a Nation", though a masterpiece of film grammar and story construction, was patently offensive and nothing but a KKK recruitment tool, D.W. Griffith made this film as a penance. Here, he examines the effects of intolerance on 4 different historical eras: ancient Babylon, Jerusalem during the time of Christ, Paris at the time of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572, and America in the present day (or rather 1916). Clocking in at 197 minutes, the film is packed to the gills with visual splendor, huge sets, pre-code lasciviousness and opulent expense. The bloated production was later lampooned to great effect by Buster Keaton in THE THREE AGES."
New at Videomatica
LOST IN THE PERSHING POINT HOTEL (2000)
"A story that is both an important commentary on growing up gay and also a parade of quirkiness, the Pershing Point Hotel is where Leslie Jordan sips his last drink, and ingests his last drug, winding up before God to explain his choices and enter the afterlife. Jordan takes God on a trip to the Deep South in the 1970s for a look back at how he managed to wriggle free of his restrictive upbringing of his Baptist family and find himself in the social hang-outs of Atlanta's gay
underground. Look for the late (and great) John Ritter, Kathy Kinney, and Marilu Henner
included in the supporting cast." Could be nothing but Christian Mock-O-Rama, but who knows? Sometimes we deserve it...
New at Videomatica
MARIA FULL OF GRACE
Darn fine film from '04 about a full-of-life South American woman who sees drug-running as a possible escape from her dead-end circumstances. Quasi-Soul Food, with backgrounded Catholic context and aching moral choices, but mostly notable for the excruciatingly visceral film-making: this is a movie you feel in your body.
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
Very highly r