Northern Exposures
Romero gores, Araki scores, and others bore at this year's Toronto Film Fest
The Toronto International Film Festival offers two faces - both smiling and polite since, after all, this is Canada.
The first face is turned towards an astonishingly responsive, and mostly local, audience, who obediently line up for dozens and dozens of sold-out, or nearly sold-out, public shows.
The other face reveals the critics, entertainment journalists, acquisition executives, sales agents, program directors from other festivals, and publicists, who prowl restlessly from press screening to press screening, ever more exhausted yet ever more excited. While Toronto is no Cannes as far as parties go, it does offer a wide array of dinners, receptions, and galas attended by many of the aforementioned, looking for that elusive million-dollar sale or just some sort, any sort, of notice. These events can also provide a quick, filling, and free (FREE!) meal for critics who suddenly find themselves dizzy - a condition that must be caused by hunger, since the Spanish sex comedy just seen was hardly of the head-spinning variety.
That hunger and exhaustion, endemic to most first- and second-tier festivals (Toronto is the former, one of the so-called Big Four along with Cannes, Venice, and Berlin), often leads to the weirdest sort of buzz. For instance, I emerged from a woefully under-attended screening of a stylish, witty, and deeply paranoid Hong Kong thriller, The Exodus, and decided to drop in on a screening of Just Like Home, the latest from Danish director Lone Scherfig. After all, though her previous film, Italian for Beginners, had been a minor art-house success, how many in-the-know critics and industry folk would want to waste precious time on what would undoubtedly be - and was - another simpering, self-consciously "offbeat" comedy? Well, quite a few, as it turned out. I got the last seat in a 204-seat auditorium for a movie about a small village turned upside-down when an unknown citizen takes a late-night saunter in the nude. The film defined "blah."
The Exodus, on the other hand, exemplified the type of movie that spurs you to go to a festival in the first place. Simon Yam (Infernal Affairs) stars as a deadpan Hong Kong police sergeant who opens the film by accidently walking into a room where an interrogation is taking place. He then quietly leaves the room after noting that the half-dozen or so officers berating and beating the suspect are dressed in bathing suits and snorkeling gear, including swim fins.
To help - albeit reluctantly - a fellow officer, the sergeant interrogates a suspect arrested for Peeping Tomism in a ladies' restroom. The bespectacled, alternately meek and enraged voyeur insists he wasn't after sexual thrills but was documenting a vast conspiracy by women to kill off the world's men. Ridiculous - until the officer begins to wonder if this apparent lunatic is right. So he does a little investigating and then ... .
Writer-director Pang Ho-cheung (who wrote the novel on which Johnnie To's Fulltime Killer is based) keeps you wondering up to the very end whether his perplexed hero is onto something, or just increasingly paranoid. Setting the action in a cool, architecturally austere world of bizarre hostility, Pang has come up with an engrossing oddity.
You wouldn't be surprised to learn that The Exodus doesn't have a U.S. distributor. You might be shocked, however, to hear that George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead also does not. Of course, Pittsburgh's greatest filmmaker might be holding out for a sales figure he's just not going to get, but it's still a bit discombobulating to think he couldn't hook a single fish with this bloody bait.
Diary is technically not a sequel in the Living Dead line. The action is set in present-day Pennsylvania (though shot in Canada), and the world is only just awakening to the birth of the living dead (this time, in an urban housing project). A group of film students from the University of Pittsburgh interrupt their own production of a horror film to escape, in an RV, to a supposedly "safer" Philadelphia. The journey, and all its attendant horrors, is documented by one of the kids, Jason (Joshua Close). Jason's reflexive instinct to record everything receives enthusiastic criticism from his girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan), who exercises a kind of moral authority over the group, but not strongly enough to end what she considers an addiction to recording and replaying blood and gore.
Although they function perfectly well as characters, Joshua and Debra clearly represent a conflict within Romero who, at age 64, seems unsure of his legacy. Through the Internet (which comes under much criticism), TV, radio, surveillance cameras, cell phones, and cell-phone cameras, the travelers are bombarded by a surfeit of stimulation, to which they inevitably contribute. Romero uses this background media noise to score a lot of points on the soundtrack, but it's really the blood-and-guts action that carries his eternal concern: When we fight zombies, when we "kill" the dead, what are we really confronting? This time out, it's young people having their initial encounter with death (their first real zombie encounter comes in that most common of cadaver factories, a hospital), and confronting their own precious mortality.
Gregg Araki is one controversial (by choice) director whose latest effort does have a distributor. Again, seeing it was a quintessential festival experience; I had some time to kill before catching my flight home so, with some wariness, I popped into a theater to see Smiley Face. The first 10 minutes of the movie seemed to confirm the worries engendered by the festival catalogue's description: An L.A. actress gets so stoned one morning that a trip - from her apartment in Burbank to a Hollywood audition to a Venice hemp festival - turns into an alternately harrowing and goofy comic adventure.
But halfway through the first reel, Smiley Face started getting funnier and funnier. Araki has often favored a palette of bright, shiny colors that recall Technicolor during its glory days in the 1950s. The images in Smiley Face look like geometrically assembled reproductions of color-field paintings, with the added pleasure of animation. Throw in a propensity for bold compositions that translate into startling, self-enclosed jokes on their own, and you have a comedy that can't help but evoke the work of Frank Tashlin.
Araki is also lucky in his choice of star, Anna Faris. The actress has been a fixture in the Scary Movie series, and mostly confined to "dumb blonde" roles, a type of caricature that, unlike its antecedents (see Judy Holliday, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, et al.), has been limited to movies for the adolescent, self-pleasuring set.
This time out, Faris doesn't play dumb at all - she plays very, very, very high. That's harder than you think because, when you're straight, the stoked among us come across as dull or obnoxious. As Faris's Jane stumbles (literally and otherwise) from mishap to disaster, the actress plays out a series of hilarious responses, from somber to hysterical. There are individual scenes that alone would be worth the price of admission, including her wildly enthusiastic audition (before a cruel casting agent played by Jane Lynch), and a paranoid experience in a dentist's waiting room. Both Smiley Face and Faris are things to look forward to when the movie is finally released.
As always, French cinema produced a crop of floral beauties. Catherine Breillat has her first period picture on display, The Last Mistress, in which a professional mistress (Asia Argento, international cinema's current hubba-hubba gal) plots to hold onto her young lover as he prepares to marry into the aristocracy. One quibble: It's unlikely that in 1835, Parisian beauties liposuctioned their torsos or used breast implants. Meanwhile, Claude Chabrol had the most delightfully perverse film, A Woman Cut in Two, in which sporting but innocent becomes the prize in a sexual joust between a middle-aged bestselling author and a young, unbalanced heir to a fortune.
Finally, Eric Rohmer had a film that will likely never land on American shores: the strange and strangely entrancing Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon, which, if its mythic, fifth-century setting with shepherds and druids wasn't non-commercial enough, is about the simultaneous development of uncompromising love and mono-deism.
Published: 09/20/2007
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
