Film: This is the end

Here are the final five review from the Toronto Experience. This second last day began later than usual, at midday, as opposed to nine thirty or so, like most others. Sleep in!

The whole day also took place at the Ryerson theatre, which was my favourite venue. It was just at a university in downtown Toronto (funnily enough called Ryerson University) so there wasn't a candy bar, but it had a nine number of seats- a little over twelve hundred- but it even at the furthest back you got a decent view. The best place to sit was either right at the front of the verandah area, ot halfway down the lower part, if you actually want to get decent photos of the Q and A sessions.

Something I learnt far too late.

Black Book

You know those films where you have a protagonist is a really nice soul, and they just want to survive and do good in this world, and then they get kicked, and then kicked again, and then just when you want to walk out of the cinema almost just so you don’t have to see this person suffer anymore and then they get kicked once more? Black Book is one of those!

Carice Van Houten plays Rachel Steinn, a Jewish woman from Nazi-occupied Denmark at the end of the Second World War, who loses her family in a failed escape attempt. She disguises her Jewish heritage with bleaches hair, then joins a group of freedom fighters, and seduces a high ranking Gestapo officer for the cause.

Director Paul Verhoven is known for the sex and violence in his films, and Black Book is no exception. But this is a spy movie, and a thriller, and a tragic drama. It’s also pretty good, if occasionally melodramatic. Van Houten gives a pretty great performance, and the plot goes to many unpredictable places. In fact, almost a little too much- it becomes sort of difficult to keep track of exactly who is double crossing who. On top of this, it does too go on a little too long.

And despite these flaws, it is wholly absorbing. You do really feel the sadness, especially towards Rachel’s final challenges. It’s also at times pretty thrilling. The war genre too is one I don’t often like, so Black Book really does stand out and suck you in.

8/10

The Fountain

To be honest, really, I have no idea.

I’ve missed Darren Aronofsky’s first film Pi- it’s difficult to come by in this country- but adore Requiem for a Dream. I understand that Pi has some similarities to Requiem, but The Fountain shares pretty much nothing with that film, beyond being weird. I haven’t seen Requiem in a while, so maybe there were some that I didn’t notice.

Anyway, Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz married couple Tom and Izzi. Respectively, obviously. Izzi is an author dying of cancer, and Tom is a doctor or researcher or something trying to find her a cure. We also see two other timeframes: Jackman as a Spanish conquistador searching for the tree of life, with Weisz his queen, and Jackman as a space traveller travelling to save a dying tree in a bubble-like spaceship, who frequently gets visions of the modern-day Weisz. Yeah, I know.

The easy stuff out of the way first. The film is gorgeous to look at. Really, obscenely pretty, in lighting, design and composition. If nothing else, The Fountain has this. The music too is great; Aronofsky has brought back Clint Mansell for this. Jackman and Weisz both serve the film well, although Jackman gets a little melodramatic towards the end, although he’s supposed to.

So, technically, very good. Film is story, though, and I’m not sure about the story here. I don’t mean I’m not sure as in it’s a bad story, I just really don’t know. The past-story is pretty much, in the film, supposed to be the book Izzi is trying to finish. The future-story may be part of this book too, or in the imagination of Tom, or it may just exist on a purely symbolic level, or it may be a combination of all of these things. On occasion I even doubted the reality of the present story. This movie is almost pure symbolism. It’s so arty it could be a museum installation, although those generally don’t contain A-list stars and budgets of this size. The symbolism will help in repeat viewings, although I don’t know that the rest of the story will. The overt artistry of this film was certainly distancing, and the story of a man grieving for his dying wife was never for me as sad as it should be. And Aronofsky, that man can do sad.

But it’s pretty impossibly to judge this film on a first viewing. I’d definitely recommend seeing it to all people open to non-mainstream cinema, and it’s a sad fact that this doesn’t mean everyone. Even then I think this will cause frustration for many people, although there will also be many people who immediately adore it. It is a film I’ll need to see again, and I do want to see it again, which is something in its favour. Although I don’t know if Aronofsky has sacrificed character for art and meaning. Give it a few more viewings. For now, though, I really don’t think I can give this one anything. See it.

?/10

Severance

The final night of Midnight Madness did not in any way disappoint. Severance has been described as “The Office meets Deliverance” and that’s not far off. A mostly British team of workers for a huge American defence corporation are in the Hungarian countryside for a team building getaway. A fallen tree blocks the road, leading the team down the wrong path, without their bus or its angry driver. They are soon at what is clearly at the wrong lodge, and are soon set upon by its tenant: a survivalist with many weapons and booby-traps and the skills to use them.

And it’s funny. Really funny, and impressively suspenseful. This is another horror film with characters you like who could, for the most part, die in any order. We have the bored and possibly anorexic Maggie, played by the ever-reliable Canadian actress Laura Harris (who was fantastic in Dead Like Me and delivered the finest moment of 24 in the entire run of that series), the hilarious drugfucked Steve, played by Danny Dyer, and the boss’s pet Gordon, played by Andy Nyman, who’s very Nick Frost-esque, among others. All characters have something to like about them, even the useless team leader played by Tim McInnerny.

The blend of comedy and horror here is near-perfect. It’s been compared to Shaun of the Dead, a comparison it deserves, despite not quite reaching those heights -if only because I hold Shaun is such high regard, considering it to be not only hilarious but heartbreaking and one of the most perfectly paced films I’ve ever seen. There is certainly a bigger focus on horror here, though, managing to be scarier than Shaun of the Dead on many occasions.

Really, the only thing I didn’t like about this film is its over-reliance of loud sound effects to produce scares. It’s something that really annoys me in a lot of films, but here I could look past it; for whatever reason it didn’t feel as cheap, I guess because the horror actually feels like a threat. Severance is good at being scary, and good at being funny, and I pray for cult status, because it’s deserved.

9/10

And then the last day arrives at last, with just two movies. I know, but the plane was at give, so we had to leave. And interesting choice of movies, both pretty slow movies, but both in their own unique ways.

Day Night Day Night

This was possibly the most intriguing movie I saw at the festival, and it’s not clear why it didn’t get more attention. The lead character here is never named, but she’s played brilliantly by Luisa Williams. The time we spend with her is a day, a night, a day, and a night.

This movie is a very slow moving one, but it’s captivating from the start. The woman arrives at a bus station and then is taken to a hotel. It is there she waits, for what we don’t know. All we do know is that at the opening of the movie, the woman whispers to herself that she has chosen exactly when and how she will die. The second half of the movie takes place in Times Square, and it becomes some very suspenseful cinema. It’s a strange experience which almost borders of being numbing.

Day Night Day Night takes who could have been a faceless plot device in another film and places her front and centre. We have no idea what her purposes are at the start, but as they become clearer, we are continue to be fascinated by her both despite and because of her actions. They whole movie rests on Luisa’s performance, which is fantastic, especially for a first time actress, but director Julia Loktev should also be commended for the engaging subtlety of her film. Also remarkable are the Times Square scenes, apparently filmed with real people rather than hired extras walking around a closed off section pretending to be real. This adds a heightened realism which makes these scenes even more intense. I don’t know what the market for this film will be, if it will be seen in many theatres, but it certainly deserves to be, if only to expose Loktev and Williams to the world.

8/10

As The Shadow

As the Shadow is an Italian film about a woman who works as a travel agent by day and studies Russian by night. She doesn’t have much in her life, until she grows closer with her teacher and eventually forms a relationship with him. He then asks her to let his distant cousin from Ukraine stay with her for a few days, which she reluctantly agrees to.

Thrilling, huh? That above paragraph is a little more than half an hour of screen time. What an ordinary film could have done in perhaps fifteen minutes, or less, is padded out with scenes of our protagonist washing her hands and walking around, and then shots of the Ukrainian cousin walking around, and then the woman and the cousin sitting having dinner and practising Russian. It’s sort of a slow film.

And slow can be good, I know. It can be dreamlike or surreal or just slowly pull you into the film. You can gently get to know a character in a slow film, learning their quirks and growing to love them. Or maybe the film is just plain pretty, and a joy to look at. But As the Shadow is just dull. Painfully, alarmingly, stunningly, irredeemably fucking boring.

There’s nothing here to make you like any of these characters. They’re not awful people, there’s just absolutely nothing interesting about them. The story isn’t a hugely interesting one. Claudia, the lead, begins to grow suspicious of Olga, the cousin. Is she really a cousin, or is she more? But there’s no intrigue for the viewer because you don’t care because you don’t like any of these people and you just want to be away from their depressing little lives. And the film is no joy to look at. The Italy presented here is sort of ugly, but not in any sort of gritty way. Just, once again, boring. Characters are occasionally shot through glass, with a reflection in front of them. That might have been director Marina Spada trying to be deep or symbolic or something. I was minorly impressed that there was no camera reflected in the glass, but that’s about all. Kudos for that. Spada didn’t write the pointless script, Daniele Maggioni did, but Spada willingly shot the thing, so she deserves punishment too.

After about forty minutes the prospect of dealing with any of this for an hour or so more was too much, and so my final film of the festival was also my first walkout. So who knows, the movie might have picked up, but its first half was unforgivably dull. Maybe there was some huge character revelations or twists or some sort of thrilling car chase followed by a lesbian orgy. Maybe there was a cream pie fight, that might have been vaguely amusing. I don’t know, nor do I really care. And since it was a walkout, feel free to disregard my rating. But if you do ever get the chance to see this, and then you take that chance, and then you are awake for the duration of the film, assuming you didn’t give up partway through because you are clearly stronger than me, don’t say you weren’t warned, because you were. Skip it.

1/10

So, certainly an anticlimactic end to the festival, but a great festival it was nonetheless. Mext up will be the festival round up, with photos and my picks of the fest and all that shit. I'm currently watching Sheitan, which was the final Midnight Madness film, which was missed at the festival, but is already on DVD here. Weird.

It's also shaping up to be one of the most fucked up movies of all of Toronto! Always a bonus. I think I'm going to have to watch a festival of entirely G-rated films just to clense my soul after all of these.