ARCHIVE
The 32nd Toronto International Film Festival
An online exclusive
Top: Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg / Bottom: Werner Herzog (left) in Antarctica
Saturday, September 22, 2007
The 32nd Toronto International Film Festival
Sept. 6–15, 2007
By José Teodoro
If asked to choose the highlight of the 32nd Toronto International Film Festival, despite the plethora of exciting new work I’d be hard-pressed to think of anything finer than the screening of a 47-year-old film presided over by a 78-year-old actor. At the final Friday night screening of The Virgin Spring, the effortlessly charismatic Max Von Sydow discussed at length his decades-spanning collaboration and friendship with the late Ingmar Bergman, and had the by-then film-weary audience engrossed in a fluid, open dialogue about lives fully given over to filmmaking of the most passionate, personal sort. Rather than suffuse the festival air with twilight nostalgia, the event was genuinely inspirational, not the least because Von Sydow himself is very much alive and well and working — with two new films screening that week.
Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, featuring an endearing, French-speaking Von Sydow as father to the film’s paralyzed protagonist, was one of countless superb Cannes hand-me-downs, some of which — Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon, Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light — were able to wriggle out from the shadow of their sometimes over-praised peers in their more generous Toronto reception.
Von Sydow’s other film, Paolo Barzman’s grotesquely titled Emotional Arithmetic, was one of several surprisingly satisfying sleepers to debut here. Adapted from Matt Cohen’s novel, the film is overburdened with weighty themes of regret, preservation, and the Holocaust, yet is considerably buoyed by performances from a glowing Susan Sarandon, Gabriel Byrne, and Christopher Plummer. Plummer shares the film’s finest scene with Von Sydow — two sleepless old guys hunkering over leftovers and Labatt 50 in the dead of night.
Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution rolled into town adorned with the fresh laurels of Venice’s Golden Lion, yet I suspect few viewers drawn to its prestige were prepared for just how closely the film’s notoriously intense sexuality is woven into its core. Its Mata Hari story of a resistance fighter charged with the seduction and liquidation of a government official collaborating with the Japanese occupiers is never more compelling than in its scenes of erotic negotiation and power struggles. Lee and his superb leads reveal more about the complex characters through ferocious sexual interplay than in any of the more mannered verbal scenes.
Likewise, Paul Schrader’s The Walker, though it concerns a murder mystery that potentially indicts a number of significant politicos (including the vice president), is most intriguing in the social-sexual conflicts surrounding a gay gossip queen/society ladies’ companion, deftly realized by Woody Harrelson. The real mystery is why he chooses to live in DC when the city’s tolerance is comparatively forbidding and his Southern family’s legacy an obvious burden.
One of a number of Mexican selections this year to engage interestingly in issues of class, Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán’s Cochochi follows a pair of mumbling indigenous kids from their lively sixth grade graduation ceremony through a misadventure involving a lost horse. The story is simple enough and so firmly grounded in behavior as to echo classical neo-realism, however, the mist-enveloped Chihuahua highlands and unforced color of those they encounter in their wanderings imbue the whole with a palpable love of people and distinctive atmosphere, one no doubt earned from the filmmakers’ extended familiarity with the remote region.
Remoter still are the vast white landscapes gleaned by Werner Herzog in his new documentary Encounters at the End of the World, whose title signifies both the Antarctic setting and the apocalyptic implications of the continent’s glacial recession. The film is visually stunning and rife with strangeness, yet Herzog’s characteristic focus on the overwhelming hostility of nature is pleasingly offset by his continual distraction by people — the colony of misfits and refuges from civilization (a philosopher-bus driver, a linguist in a country without languages) who find their way down to the bottom of the planet and construct an eccentric semblance of family.
Nearly as bleak, frigid and under-populated is the Manitoba prairie, subject of another art-house veteran’s attempt at a decidedly idiosyncratic documentary portrait. Among the very best films to have its world premiere here, My Winnipeg is Guy Maddin’s ode to the city he seems unable to escape, realized in the same deliriously fragmented, hyper-edited, monochromatic Super 8 imagery that characterized his recent Brand Upon the Brain! and Cowards Bend the Knee. My Winnipeg reveals the haunted, demented underbelly of the place Maddin claims to be the exact center of the continent, the world capital of nostalgia, and gripped by rampant somnambulism. Though the city’s inhabitants walk the streets clutching the keys to all their old residences (which by law they can enter at will), Winnipeggers can’t leave because they can’t seem to wake up. Their trains just keep circulating the city, and the people fall prey to a magnetic force that local natives call “the forks under the forks,” a double confluence of rivers deep under the city’s crust.
Strangely enough, Maddin’s affectionate but forbidding study made me want to visit Winnipeg, however dangerous its invisible forces might be, and stay there for a while. And since My Winnipeg was, quite pleasingly, my final movie at this year’s festival, perhaps I might now be able to rest up, collect all my thermal underthings and wake-up pills, and plan my journey to this icy frontier.