EIFF: Soul Kitchen

It can feel a bit callous to dislike a Fatih Akin film, particularly one like Soul Kitchen, a frenetic comedy that tries so very hard to inject a little bit of mirth into the joy-sucking void of early 21st century living. But it’s also that same earnest effort that makes Akin so hard to enthuse over. Like his previous film—low-key cross-border drama The Edge of Heaven—Soul Kitchen is well-meaning and well-crafted and, well, lifeless.

Not that the film lacks for energy. The plot piles up with eccentric characters and sudden complications, operating under the principle that a lack of anything to say is best hidden beneath a cloud of noise. The story revolves around the titular Soul Kitchen, a restaurant run by Zinos, a Greek man who wants to finally pull the struggling business into shape so that he can leave it in the hands of his brother and run off to China to reunite with his reporter girlfriend. The expected colorful cast of broad types duly arrive to entertain us, whether we like it or not—the criminal brother and his cronies, a crusty old captain who lives in the restaurant, the fiercely principled gypsy chef with a fondness for knife throwing, the raunchy, scheming old school friend, and so on.

Madcap farce can be a kind of music created out of voice and movement. When it’s working, the audience is swept along, startled by its whirlwind incidents, which are completely unexpected and yet somehow logical. But in Soul Kitchen, the humour is too often predictable and flat, each setup telegraphing an all-too-obvious payoff. I found myself tapping my foot during the film—not to the music, unfortunately, but impatiently as I waited for Akin to finally reach the expected conclusion of each gag. Given the retro stylings of the film, there’s perhaps a touch of ironic self-awareness to these stale jokes, a winking “This is so obvious and corny that it’s almost funny.” I suppose that’s a kind of humour, but I also think I would rather the film was just plain, old-fashioned funny.

Still, there’s something vaguely appealing in Akin’s social mishmash, where a Greek restaurateur can go with a German physiotherapist to see a Turkish healer, and real estate tycoons and tax collectors can party with ex-cons and squatters. Music and food are mediums of cultural exchange, where different groups express themselves and swap ideas. Akin seems aware of this, which is perhaps why bringing in live music and authentic ethnic food saves the restaurant. Too bad he provide us with recycled pratfalls—a key scene for the plot involves Zinos throwing out his back while trying to lift something heavy by himself—instead of some fresh and funny insights into these colliding cultures. I’m not asking for more earnest drama from the director, but I do expect something beyond this empty energy. Doesn't he have anything to bring to the table?

EIFF: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

A princess who hides her ugliness behind a veil leans over a pond and catches a glimpse of herself in the water, but beautiful now, the beauty she feels is her right but has been denied her. A catfish surfaces and begins to speak, praising her loveliness, and she enters into the water, dropping her jewels as an offering as she asks to be made as beautiful as her reflection. Finally, she floats in the centre of the pond, and the catfish begins to, um, pleasure her.

This rather odd folktale/digression/past life(?) is dropped into the middle of Apitchatpong Weersethakul’s beguiling, baffling, and altogether astounding Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. More a drifting dream than narrative film, this curiosity from Thailand nonetheless tells the story of Boonmee, an aging farmer whose kidneys are failing him. As the end of his life draws near, he is joined by the ghost of his dead wife and his long-missing son, who appears in the form of a monkey spirit with eyes that glow piercing red in the dark.

Don’t ask me what any of this means on a literal level, or how it relates to the story of the princess, but let me assure you no other film this year has offered me as much pure delight per square inch of celluloid. The key is to not allow the idiosyncrasies of the storytelling distract from the fundamental, and rather simple, theme. Much like how Weersethakul’s earlier Tropical Malady was a deeply strange yet completely clear love story, exalting romantic surrender in the most mystical terms, this film hinges on the idea that any death is also a birth, and then allows us to take that notion in any number of directions.

For instance, in various interviews Weersethakul has spoken of the film as an ode to the dying medium of film. Certainly, you can see a reverence for cinematic history in such disparate reference points as Thai costume drama (the sumptuously shot story of the princess and the catfish) and Chris Marker’s La Jetee (Boonmee’s dream of the future, told in a series of still photos). The darkened cavern Boonmee and co. enter at night is both a womb and movie theatre, the shadows on the wall and primitive cave paintings pointing to the beginnings of all visual arts. It’s the origins of man and the origins of cinema—and the primal place where Boonmee goes to die.

You can take a lot of different ideas from this, which is perhaps the point. Weersethakul carefully avoids overexplaining his films in interviews, and his reasons are obvious. He’s after a sense of wonder above all else, and wonder cannot exist without at least some level of mystery. If you completely understood the significance of the red-eyed monkey spirits, if you knew that they were meant to symbolize such-and-such thing, would you feel that mixture of dread and awe at their appearance? Would you feel anything at all?

Perhaps this sounds like a cop-out, but we’re so used to our cinematic pleasures being parceled out through a neatly organized delivery system that we lack the language to properly praise a film that provides such unfiltered delight. If anything, the real problem is whether or not we would be so accepting of this mystical weirdness from a western director. The last thing exoticism should be is an excuse to engage with art we would deny if it were domestic.

But I can think of no director quite as guileless as Weersethakul, whose work is so open and gentle, even as it looks unblinkingly at the darkness of the world (the violence of his homeland is never denied, with Boonmee even wondering if his illness is karma for the communists he killed in his youth as a soldier). There’s no sense of calculation here—in fact, the story might make more sense if there was. It’s also worth noting that Weersethakul’s father died of a kidney affliction similar to Boonmee’s, suggesting that part of the film’s strangeness comes from how it pulls on private experiences and distorts them for cinematic effect. Like North American eccentrics such as Guy Maddin and David Lynch, Weersethakul’s unique sensibility comes from the way his films derive from his own memories and dreams. He’s probably as much a curiosity to his countrymen as he is to us.

None of which is any help for the hapless viewer approaching this remarkable work. We cannot see this film through Weersethakul’s eyes, only our own. But to my eyes, this is a beautiful film by any measure, open with possibilities for anyone willing to enter its mysteries. This is perhaps what the director intends with the multiple worlds we see at the end of the film. In one alternative, three characters sit in a hotel room, transfixed by the dull glow of the television set, frozen into complete passivity. In the other, two of these people leave the room and head to a karaoke bar, where they may or not sing, but regardless, they are free and moving through the world. I cannot tell you which alternative the director intends as reality. But I can tell you which one is more fun.

EIFF: Let Me In

Near the beginning of Let Me In, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the March of 1983, Ronald Reagan appears on a television in mid-speech. He’s giving the infamous “evil empire” address, and the film turns on the moment when Reagan quotes de Tocqueville. “America is good,” he says. “And if ever America ceases to be good—”

The film cuts away at the crucial moment, letting the unfinished thought hang over us like a knife waiting to drop. The missing line: “America will cease to be great.”

Heavy burden for what is one of the bottom-feeding entities of the American film industry—the dreaded remake of a foreign cult hit—but writer/director Matt Reeves has high ambitions for his version of the much-loved Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In. He has clearly thought long and hard about the problems of adapting this story to American soil, and he’s pulled together an excellent cast to make it work (Kodi Smit-McPhee and Chloe Moretz as the boy and his vampire, with Richard Jenkins and Elias Koteas providing a bit of soul to the supporting parts).

The original’s lonely mood and wintry pall are faithfully aped, and the basic shape of the story remains intact—Owen, a bullied 12-year-old boy with divorcing parents and no friends, develops a relationship with Abby, the new girl next door, who turns out to be an ageless vampire. Where Reeves’ version of this story defines itself is in the details. The wall of Owen’s bedroom—where he taps out morse-code messages to Abby next door—is a giant moonscape, frozen and eternal and empty. His gym teacher, who promises to make Owen strong if he comes to after-school weight lifting, is Russian (American strength during this era being spurred on by perceived Soviet might, this is a particularly nice touch). The Cold War lingers on like the stubborn New Mexico winter.

But it’s that speech from Reagan that registers most strongly. Although the film is less persuasive the more we see of the vampire’s activities (low-budget horror effects are too cheesy for this story’s essential solemnity), it nonetheless remains a rare remake that justifies its existence. Using the original film as a springboard, Reeves meditates upon the “evil empire” speech. Late at night, after witnessing Abby brutally savage a neighbourhood woman, Owen tearfully calls up his father and asks, “Do you think there’s such a thing as evil?” You can find Reagan's reply in part of his speech to the National Association of Evangelicals that remains unquoted in film: “There is sin and evil in the world.”

Notice: this isn’t just a matter of evil, but sin. Owen’s mother is devoutly religious, and God dwells inside the story like a wraith, on the dresser in a picture of Jesus watching Owen steal money from his mother’s purse, in the schools lurking inside the pledge of allegiance. Reeves has injected a good dose of old-fashioned American religion into the original story, opening up new possibilities in an already richly suggestive premise.

One of the chilling things about Reagan’s speech was how he used religion to bolster the image of himself as leader of a righteous nation, beset by evils both without (the evil empire) and within (abortion, the less famous but almost more frightening part of the speech). It’s the notion of evil that drives the nation into his cold arms; it’s the fear of evil that leaves people seeking refuge in dreams of power. And Abby, more than anything else, is Owen’s dream of power, his escape from isolation, from terror, from the bullies that loom in his mind as the greatest threat in the world.

Abby destroys Owen’s tormentors, but it’s not quite clear if he fully understands at what price this release has come. There’s a brief flicker of awareness, though, in one of the most painful scenes in the film. Owen enters Abby’s apartment after the disappearance of the man we assume is her father. (He is actually her servant, a weary old soul with cracked glasses and a dead expression finding fresh blood for the vampire’s hunger.) On a table, Owen finds an old picture, in faded sepia tones, where Abby is next to a young boy with large glasses. The look of horror Owen gives her in that moment is perhaps the only time he sees her truly. But he still returns to her, and he still chooses her. Reagan’s prophecy comes true, and the evil empire is real. Its anthem is tapped out in frail, desperate code, and its borders stretch from an empty room beneath a New Mexico street to the surface of the moon itself.

Edmonton International Film Festival: The Loved Ones

Visceral, sticky, and avert-your-eyes ugly—that’s not just a description of most people’s high school years, but also The Loved Ones, Australian writer/director Sean Byrne’s lively marriage of teenage melodrama with splatter horror. Part of the fun seems to be finding suitable reference points for this genre mash-up—the festival programmer introduced it to us as the combination of John Hughes with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—which makes the film seem much more glib and gimmicky than it actually is. Even as the violence goes for grisly excess (there were a few walkouts once feet started getting nailed to the floor), Byrne remembers to treat the emotional wounds of his characters with respect and sincerity. The threat of bodily mutilation is always good for prompting some reflexive cringes in the audience, but the real horror lies in discovering the massive psychic scars nurtured by these characters.

The film—Byrne’s first feature—is helped immeasurably by Robin McLeavy’s high-wire performance as Lola, an awkward girl who asks Brent, the boy of her dreams, to be her prom date. He politely declines and heads to the school parking lot, where he steams up some car windows with his girlfriend. Perpetually wounded and completely domineering, Lola witnesses everything and has her servile father kidnap Brent and bring him to a private prom / torture chamber (as if anyone needed to underscore the connection between high school dances and sadism), complete with a disco ball twirling throughout the madness. Mutilation inevitably ensues.

The film, much like one of its fumbling teenagers, is not without its awkward moments. A subplot featuring one of Brent’s friends taking a curiously beautiful goth girl to the prom feels tenuously connected to the rest of the film, even if it does provide a bit of relief from the gruesomeness of the Lola scenes. Built around the contrast of slobbish, overeager boy with hardened, indifferent girl, these scenes are mostly played for light comedy. But there are also hints that this girl loved one of Lola’s earlier victims, with the implication that this traumatic loss left her in the damaged state in which we discover her. All of which is thematically sound, but functionally irrelevant. The central conceit of the film is so potent that this innocuous subplot does more to distract from than enrich the main story. Two girls wearing prom dresses wrestling over a knife speaks more eloquently to the primal truths of high school than a thousand tuxedo t-shirts.

EIFF: Day Nine

Okay, so I've blinked away the scum that coated my eyes after watching Pirate for the Sea, and I've cleared my head and thought only positive thoughts all day. Now I'm ready to write up the last two films I saw at the film fest.

Dammit, I don't want to hate any more movies. I'm so tired of hating movies, and I feel my prose growing gnarled and hunchbacked as I scowl through another review of more EIFF mediocrity. Just give me a bright spot to go out on, that's all I ask. Not just for me, I ask, but for the suffering few who might read this blog. Oh lord, please, spare the innocent.

Passenger Side

And yet, here I am tempting my own wrath by going to see a quirky Canadian comedy-drama that seems aimed straight down the middle-road of independent filmmaking. Perhaps I bring this on myself.

A sometimes charming but clearly flawed film, Matt Bissonnette's Passenger Side follows a pair of brothers as they drive across Los Angeles in a day. Various eccentric characters are encountered along the way, their chief reason for being apparently to help the film reach feature length. Some moments are funny, to be fair—an encounter with a hermaphrodite hooker is downright surreal, actually—but mostly these digressions just add to a sense of a film lost and struggling to find its bearings.

But let it not be said that Passenger Side is not without its virtues as well. I found myself enjoying the fraternal interplay of Joel Bissonnette and Adam Scott, even as they were saddled with sometimes overwritten, unnatural dialogue (call it a case of DCD, or Diablo Cody's Disease). And Matt Bissonnette finds some surprising emotional depths in these two characters as we move from glib, jokey exchanges to more complicated family dynamics. There's some meat to this rather slender premise.

Unfortunately, the film stumbles in the final moments, and not just a minor, slip-on-the-wet-grass kind of fall—this is a full-on, tumble-face-first-into-a-brick-wall-because-your-pants-fall-down kind of wipe-out. It's as if the film is afraid to follow through with its modest ramble of a tale and has to somehow instill a sense of narrative payoff at the end of the journey. Inexplicably, we end with a plot twist, which feels somewhat incongruous considering the film's general lack of a plot in the first place. Sensitive little dramedies just shouldn't have big "gotcha" moments.

Love at the Twilight Motel

Ah, final film of the fest. At last we reach the end. Tell me, little film, what will you offer me? Pleasure, or pain?

Perhaps both? A compelling documentary about the pain of pleasure, Alison Rose's Love at the Twilight Motel offers a glimpse into the lives of the clientele at a shady Miami motel that charges $25 for the first two hours. Rose interviews seven different people, ranging from Cadillac (a recovering junkie) to Gigi (a 46-year-old overweight escort) to Richard (a Cuban rafter who works as a massage therapist and claims he was destined to have lots of affairs with married women).

The use of the word "love" in the title might be misleading, as this motel is not really in the business of love, but rather sex. The interviewees muse on what it means to be faithful and the distinction between sex and love, in the process offering insight into the torturous ways we rationalize and compartmentalize our lives. It is to the director's credit that she doesn't try to force an artificial argument on the film, but rather allows each interview to provoke its own conclusions.

Mr. B, for instance, is a happily married man who professes to adore his wife, even as he admits that she can't satisfy him sexually. However, his use of the motel goes beyond mere infidelity, as he elaborates on his use of heroin and shoots up for the benefit of the documentary crew. In one remarkable moment, he even receives a text message from his wife asking where he is. He sighs—"I hate lying," he explains—and then decides to pretend that his phone has died. The problem isn't that he's bad at lying, according to him, but rather that his wife seems to believe whatever he says, suggesting a certain contempt for her gullibility even as he emphasizes his love for her. Near the end of his interview, he concludes that he is a functional junkie. Considering the vast schism between his family life and motel behaviour, functional schizophrenic might be more accurate.

And this is just one of the twisted personal stories we discover. All of the interviewees offer some startling personal revelations—so many, in fact, that the film might start to feel like a bit of a gratuitous exercise in revelling in the sordid underbelly, a walk on the wild side for us all-too-boring gawkers in the audience.

But the film is too thought-provoking (and beautifully composed, incidentally) to be dismissed. Issues of how and why people isolate sex from emotion arise, as do questions of how repression affects our personal lives. We meet prostitutes struggling with past sexual abuses and self-justifying philanderers who seem blind to their own contempt for women. We see people filled with self-loathing and, surprisingly, others serene and content. All people struggling to find a measure of peace, but none quite sure of the route.

It's a fine film, and certainly an excellent way to conclude my festival-going for another year. Thankfully.

EIFF: Days Seven and Eight

Fair warning: this is a pretty dire post. Three films, only one keeper, and that by Michael Haneke no less, which is a bit like saying the best part of your vacation to Singapore was the caning.

Enter if you dare. I'll try to remember to go see some good films tomorrow.

Those Three

I'm struggling with how to summarize this one. Maybe try to imagine a version of Andrei Tarkovksy's Stalker that is somehow half the running time and yet feels twice as long—that captures some of the stultifying power of this film, which often does feel like a clumsier version of Tarkovsky's mystical wonders. Better yet—how about a humourless version of Waiting For Godot in which everyone dies and then a pregnant woman walks on stage and delivers a baby.

No, wait, that actually sounds kind of fun.

Or at the very least, more fun than this monotonous little Iranian film about three military deserters who wander a snowy plain where they meet a pregnant woman and then die of exposure. Along the way, there are a few other incidents of note—a few squabbles, a random encounter or two, but nothing of great significance. Essentially, we watch three figures wandering an endless white landscape, blotted out by the environment. Aside from the occasional tree, there are no landmarks, just a seemingly eternal, numbing haze.

I suppose writer/director Naghi Nemati is going for a spectral anti-military film in which our three protagonists head off in dangerous terrain rather than stay in the army. They face the inclement world, suffer at its hands and die, while a baby comes into this same cruel environment at the end as a symbol of future hope or continued suffering or—who cares, really? I get bored just writing about this earnest, thoroughly unimaginative attempt to convey so many banal concepts. Never before have I been so conscious of the fact that going to the theatre is nothing more than staring at a white sheet for an hour and a half.

The White Ribbon

I'm a little ambivalent about the films of Michael Haneke. He's undeniably a brilliant director, but his depictions of middle-class alienation often have the feeling of an expert marksman with a barrel of fish. Sometimes I just wish he would apply all that formal rigour of his to something completely outside of his comfort zone instead of gunning down the same easy targets each time.

As it stands, The White Ribbon does seem like a bit of a broadening of Haneke's usual world, however slight that expansion might be. True, this depiction of an Austrian village set just before the First World War is in many ways a typical Haneke excursion into cinematic water-boarding, but there are also surprising moments of tenderness and humour. The narrator, Lehrer, is a schoolteacher who behaves honourably and kindly, without even a trace of the wanton cruelty that defines so many Haneke characters, including a great many of those who populate this film. And I never would have believed people might laugh at a Haneke film unless I heard it myself, but the scenes revolving around a pastor's son discovering the joys of masturbation are surprisingly quite funny.

Of course, this being a Haneke film, the innate cruelty of human society is always lurking around the corner. The little village is rife with inexplicable crimes, including, most gruesomely, the torture and blinding of a young mentally handicapped boy. The mystery unfurls with Haneke's typical commanding grace, and ultimately implicates the entire society (of course), suggesting the seeds of Nazism that lurk in the younger generation will come to bloom because of the willful blindness and cruelty of the older.

Also typical of Haneke are the instances of button-pushing horror, including the aforementioned child mutilation, as well as some gratuitous incest and even a bit of nasty animal violence (the guy just can't give up on his usual cinema of shocks, I suppose, although he does show some admirable self-restraint for most of the film). Still, the black-and-white cinematography is excellent, and Haneke's command over his material is as sure as ever. Even if Haneke's conclusions are pretty much predictable from the start, the unfolding of this plot is still a thing of terrible beauty, and worth beholding.

Pirate for the Sea

Ugh. Now we're really hitting the dregs of the fest. This tedious piece of agit-prop focuses on Paul Watson, a co-founder of Greenpeace who went on to form the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an organization dedicated to defending marine life. With their own ship—named for Farley Mowat, who also appears in interviews in the film—the Sea Shepherds attempt to block the Canadian seal hunt and illegal Japanese whalers near Antarctic.

Director Ron Colby gets some suspense from these tense, often violent confrontations, but make no mistake—this is a ham-handed, dull, at times even downright dim-witted documentary. The film takes a fair cause—outside of Ottawa and the Maritimes, who even supports the seal hunt anymore?—and makes it seem almost unlikeable. Watson is surely a charismatic fellow with a powerful sense of conviction, but I like some ambiguity and nuance in my documentaries (or at least a bit of originality or insight), and Colby really has little to offer viewers looking for anything other than a confirmation of their own rightness.

Instead, we get a fawning, uncritical portrait of a controversial figure who could surely provoke more interesting work than this. Pirate for the Sea is a film so unthinking that it can show the crew on the Farley Mowat being warned that if the hull is breached they could easily die, and then later capture that same crew ramming a Japanese whaling ship with a device called "the can-opener" intended to rip open the enemy ship's hull. Yet still Colby allows Watson to claim the moral high ground of having never harmed anyone in his actions, even as the man engages in activities that could result in the deaths of people on both ships. And this doesn't even touch on the disturbing fact that Watson supplied AK-47s to a ranger station on an island conservation area, supposedly for the purpose of warding off illegal fishing. I hate to be a nag, but whatcha gonna do with those Kalashnikovs, Paul? Shoot the fishing nets?

The detail flashes by so quickly you have to wonder if Colby is embarrassed to mention it, or simply doesn't give the matter a second thought. Sadly, the film isn't interested in such contradictions. Instead, Colby settles for broad gestures toward easy sentiments that reveals a failure to employ any rigorous critical attention to his subject, or, for that matter, his craft (the general blandness of the film's style suggest nothing more than a corporate recruitment video). Good intentions don't excuse bad art.

EIFF: Day Six

A Prophet

Here I am, reaching the end of the week, and I'm starting to feel my resolve sapped by one too many mediocre films (I think Getting Home might have pushed me too far). But then I see a film like Jacques Audiard's A Prophet, and I'm a little embarrassed by my lack of endurance. First, because this is a quality piece of work and it shouldn't feel like a chore to drag my lazy ass out the door to see it, and second, because Audiard manages to sustain a remarkable level of tension for two and a half hours without relenting—a rather impressive feat of endurance in itself.

One could take this tale as a sly commentary on the immigrant experience, but A Prophet offers a great deal of satisfaction simply in the twists of its tight narrative. Malik El Djebena enters a French prison with nothing, slowly working his way up in this world of rival factions. A group of Corsican gangsters strong-arm Malik into assassinating one of their enemies in prison, and the young man finds himself playing the role of their lackey, sneered at for being an Arab and yet increasingly essentially to the operations of the gang. As Cesar Luciani, the group's leader, finds his partners whittled away through paroles and murders, he increasingly relies on Malik. And yet still the young man has to jump when his boss calls, doing errands and making coffee.

All the while, Malik is quietly gathering power, creating a drug-running operation outside of prison and forging alliances with other gangs both inside and outside the prison. This is a difficult character to capture, and Tahar Rahim does an excellent job, depicting Malik's transformation from helpless to powerful in a way that feels plausible and natural. After the initial shock of being forced to murder a man, Malik effaces himself, gives himself over to the role of servant, only to find that his dutifulness and loyalty is a kind of power in itself. And Cesar, as portrayed by Niels Arestrup (in a performance that nicely complements his work in Audiard's last film, The Beat My Heart Skipped), inspires some pathos as he travels an opposite trajectory, transforming from a fearsome, domineering figure into an isolated, helpless old man.

Audiard's direction is often tactile and vivid. He casts his eye on little viscous details that make for some striking images. Yes, it's an engrossing, intense story, but much of the film's power lies in those small touches that make the most sensational moments feel tangible. I'm struck by the sight of Malik washing the blood from his hair after a particularly grisly hit, which makes a surreal bit of movie violence suddenly seem horrifically real. Or what of that string of blood and spittle that arcs between his hand and mouth before that first assassination? The blood comes from a razor hidden in Malik's mouth—the only way to get a weapon this close to the intended victim—and it drives the weight of the moment straight into my gut. Aside from a few ill-conceived excursions into the supernatural, this is a film that remains firmly rooted in a queasy, inescapable present.

EIFF: Day Five

When I can, I like to find a unifying thread between all the films I'm watching, and today I have a handy theme: things I'm ignorant about. In particular, today I'm talking about Chinese cinema and Pedro Almodovar. So let's blunder through this together, you and I, faithful reader, and see if we can't crack these nuts.

Getting Home

My experience of contemporary Chinese filmmaking is limited mostly to art-house fare like Zhang Ke Jia, so I was quite curious to see Getting Home, a more mainstream example of the Chinese cinema. Director Zhang Yang does a solid job balancing the sadness and humour in the story of Zhao, a construction worker carrying the body of a dead friend to be buried near his family home at the Three Gorges. It's a charming film, but not without some serious problems.

The plot takes on an episodic shape, with Zhao encountering various figures along his journey who are moved by his plight to help him. Some episodes veer a bit too much into tear-jerking terrain—a fact not helped by the obnoxious score, which underlines each emotion and then adds five exclamation marks in case we missed the point—but others have a nicely understated droll whimsy to them, such as the scene where Zhao fakes mourning at a funeral in order to get a free meal, only to be joined at his table by the man from the coffin. Other comedic moments carry on that tone of low-key weirdness, such as a nice bit of underplayed physical comedy when Zhao tries to commit suicide by knocking his head against a tree.

The problems with the film are deeper than structure or performance, and have more to do with its treatment of the Three Gorges Dam, which has caused environmental devastation and lead to the relocation of over a million people. The unspoken intention of the film seems to be turning these larger issues into minor and ultimately harmless inconveniences. By the time a kindly police officer takes Zhao under his wing, the film had lost me. Getting Home ends as nothing more than a paean to the benign, all-knowing state apparatus in China; Zhao's biggest error is his foolish attempt at self-reliance. The implication is that he should have simply given himself over to the wisdom of the authorities, who will care for all Chinese citizens like a dutiful parent.

Oh, horseshit. Maybe films like Zhang Ke Jia's Still Life and The World don't represent the mainstream of Chinese culture, but at least they don't swallow the government agenda with uncritical loyalty. Give me some intelligent, idiosyncratic filmmaking instead of obsequious nationalist propaganda any day of the week.

Broken Embraces

I must shamefully confess that Pedro Almodovar is a major blind spot for me. Yes, I'm aware this man is one of the major figures in the Spanish cinema at the moment, much lauded for a body of work stretching over thirty years. And yet, I just can't find the motivation to dig into his work, and what little I have seen has only spurred on my galloping indifference. What can I say? It's carried me this far, so I haven't had a reason to stop.

But I found myself enjoying Broken Embraces, his latest collaboration with Penelope Cruz, which makes me wonder if it's time to start digging deeper into Almodovar's work. Strangely, most critics so far seem to have yawned through this one as it makes the rounds on the festival circuit, and I'm not sure what to make of that. Does that mean I too would be bored by this film if I was actually familiar with Almodovar's work? Or is this merely an indication that a good director on familiar terrain can't really excite jaded critics who crave something new, not just another solid film from a well-known director? Your guess is as good as mine, and I won't bother trying to fathom the mysteries of the professional film critic's mind.

In all fairness to the lukewarm reviews so far, I should be clear that this is not a flawless film by any means. For the work of such an experienced director, Broken Embraces is surprisingly clumsy at times as it jumps between different time periods while trying to build up a somewhat overstuffed plot. There comes a point when plot twists start to feel gratuitous, as if Almodovar was throwing in surprises that are justified by the film's themes, but which only provide more unnecessary clutter to the narrative itself. And the ending is a bit limp, with people explaining away the convoluted story instead of allowing events to unfold before our eyes.

So, there are weaknesses. But there's also a lot to enjoy in this weirdly referential comedy-melodrama-noir mash-up, even if it lacks the expected grace of an old master exploring his craft. In fact, the sheer amount of things going on in this film may be its biggest charm.

I'm not even sure I can summarize the film. We begin with a blind writer named Harry Caine, who was once a director by the name of Mateo Blanco (Lluis Homar), and then go deeper into his past, into a passionate, doomed love affair with Lena (Penelope Cruz), the lead actress in one of his films. But Lena is the mistress of the film's producer, a controlling old business man who instructs his son to follow Lena around, filming her every move on set in order to watch for any potential infidelity.

From there, I'm not sure if I can explain much more without giving away the whole game, but suffice it to say, there is a mess of double identities, secret relationships, and so many movie references I can't even begin to process the elaborate conversation Almodovar seems to be having with the entire history of film. In fact, the easiest way to pick apart this film might be to figure out all of its references. There are telling allusions to Vertigo and Peeping Tom, and a glimpse of one of Ingrid Bergman's collaborations with Roberto Rossellini, a real life example of a leading woman in an affair with her director. I can only imagine how much more I'm missing.

Perhaps that's the source of some people's dissatisfaction with this film. It seems like a minor pleasure, and yet it is still so dense that it feels like much of it passes by the viewer at first. Still, the incidental charms of this film are often enough to satisfy, whether it be hilarious glimpses of Girls With Suitcases, the farce Mateo is making with Lena, or the eerie sight of Lena's sugar daddy watching the soundless video of his lover leaving him while she stands behind him, reciting the words she spoke in the video (it makes sense when you see it, honest). Despite the frustrations and the flaws of the film, it's hard not to like a work brimming full with so many striking ideas and images, rich with poignant performances and broad comic turns, often from the same actor.

EIFF: Days Three and Four

Okay, two things: first, I'm sort of cheating in the title to this post. I didn't actually go to see anything at the film festival on day three, but I felt weird jumping from day two to four, hence why I threw it in there.

Second, I've decided to skip the usual orgy of verbiage that I seem to require whenever writing one of these things. No, I've resolved to keep my words chaste from now on. More films, less chatter. My promise to you.

Outrage

Kirby Dick is clearly pissed off, and rightly so, in this documentary about gay Conservative politicians who hide in the closet while pursuing an anti-LGBT agenda. The film begins with an astounding audio recording of Larry Craig's police interrogation after his failed bathroom tryst with an undercover officer, begging the question: is Craig seriously in such deep denial that he believes having sex with other men doesn't make him a homosexual? Or is he simply that dedicated a liar and hypocrite?

Sadly, we'll probably never know. Dick obviously can't get direct interviews with people like Craig or his wife (who I am sure would have some whopper stories to tell if she cared to talk), but he does get some insights from formerly closeted politicians like Barney Frank and Jim McGreevey. He also follows the work of people like Michael Rogers, who runs BlogActive, which is dedicated to outing gay politicians. And while some people might feel uncomfortable with this sort of prying into the private lives of public figures, Dick's film makes a persuasive case that the self-deception required by living a double life often leads to a dangerously homophobic legislative agenda. Many of these closeted politicians seem to adhere more closely to an anti-gay agenda simply for fear of being associated with their own denied identity.

What's especially chilling is seeing someone like Charlie Crist, current governor of Florida, who has left behind a fairly impressive trail of evidence for his own homosexuality, but continues to deny his sexual orientation, even to the point of getting married—seemingly just to help his chances at a VP slot on the McCain 2008 ticket.

The film's most significant flaw might be its occasional lapse into conspiracy thinking. A note at the beginning of the film declares this to be a "brilliantly orchestrated conspiracy," which is perhaps a slight overstatement. There's no real deep organization behind this history of lies, but rather just a large group of powerful men who have internalized years of homophobia and turned it into a corrupt lifestyle. When Dick starts trying to suggest that the mainstream media is complicit in some sort of conspiracy to hide the truth, I think he starts to overreach. Yes, the mainstream press ignores many of these outing controversies until they blow up to Larry Craig proportions, but more than anything else that seems to be a function of the same homophobic discomfort that informs the politicians in the scandals.

There are times when Dick panders to paranoia when some good hard-nosed documentary filmmaking is really just required. The worst example of this is when he points out an episode of Larry King Live was edited after its first airing to remove a comment from Bill Maher outing Ken Mehlman, chairman of the RNC and crony of Dubya.

The film leaves the incident suggestively open, as if it were sign of a conspiratorial censorship. Is it not plausible that a major news corporation would not have the guts to stand behind a potentially libelous offhand remark offered without backing evidence? This is surely the same kind of self-censorship that keeps people like Ken Mehlman in the closet, but there's no real proof that it is somehow directed by the halls of power instead of ass-covering legal departments. Even more troubling, the film gives no indication that Dick bothered to interview anyone involved in the incident in order to uncover what actually happened—suggestive possibilities being better here than facts, apparently. The righteous rage and sense of purpose Dick brings to this documentary is vital and necessary, but unfounded conspiracy-mongering isn't really needed. The simple truth is frightening enough.

Tales From the Golden Age

It just wouldn't be a film festival without something from Romania, would it? And so we have Tales From the Golden Age, an omnibus film consisting of five different stories set during the twilight of Ceausescu's rule. That's right, an omnibus film—the Romanian New Wave is all grown up now.

The film benefits from being solely written by Cristian Mungiu, who directs one of the stories while handing over the reins to four other directors for the rest. None of the directors veer too far from the same deadpan style Mungiu effects, and the whole film maintains a consistency of purpose and general quality that is rare in these types of films. Admittedly, it's a minor work when compared to Mungiu's last film—the brutally powerful 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days—but still quite enjoyable.

In fact, I like Tales From the Golden Age as a sort of complement to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. In that film, set during the late Ceausescu era like this latest one, Mungiu depicted a young woman's attempt to get an abortion as a cold-sweat nightmare. It was intense and immediate, narrowing the widespread political repression of the Communist regime into personal bodily subjugation.

By contrast, this latest film takes a more detached, absurdly humorous approach. Each of the five tales is treated as an urban legend of life under a repressive regime, all told with a dryly mocking tone. In one story, a student decides to earn some extra money by scamming people out of their empty bottles and getting the deposits for herself. With her partner in crime, she goes through apartment buildings posing as a member of the Ministry of Chemistry taking air samples to measure pollution from nearby industrial factories. The plan sounds ridiculous, but it works—largely because every person they talk to admits to having filed numerous complaints about the stench. Indeed, most people are surprisingly easy to scam. They're just happy to see someone from the bureaucracy doing something.

The rest of the stories maintain a similar balance between the absurd and the bleak. People create little black market enterprises to get by, while others struggle to hide the occasional bit of good fortune lest it be taken away (one of the funniest sequences in the film involves a policeman and his family trying to figure out how to silently slaughter a pig so that none of their neighbours find out they have meat). The film very nicely captures the farce of living under a crumbling dictatorship while not covering up the tragedy of the situation. In short, a worthy example of police-state humour.

EIFF: Day Two

I may never understand the pitfalls of celebrity. Save for one unfortunate brush with small-town fame—when I was eight years old I won a giant four-foot tall stuffed rabbit from a grocery store, which resulted in my picture running in the local paper—I've managed to remain thankfully obscured from the public eye. Granted, should I ever become a Pynchonesque media-shy author, this grainy, faded picture of my young moppet self squeezing a giant bunny might come back to haunt me, but I remain hopeful that this image has buried by history, just as the rabbit itself has long since been lost.

In fact, I've even managed to achieve a certain anonymity in my everyday life. Co-workers have mistakenly confused me with the following people: Robert, Bryan, Ryan, and Hey You. Best of all, a woman who had worked with me for months inexplicably took to calling me Mark for almost three weeks—a mistake I encouraged, as it allowed me to hide from her dithering ineptitude. "Where's Mark?" she would ask, only to receive a chorus of confused shrugs, finally wandering off, her dazed, wide-eyed look resembling nothing so much as a deer caught in a world of headlights. I was rather disappointed when my supervisor finally corrected her. How liberating it was to be a Mark and throw off all the baggage of my old name, even if only for a few weeks.

There's a point to all of this, I assure you. Some fortuitous scheduling at the festival allowed me to take in two complimentary documentaries that deal with the perils of unwanted celebrity, and both films feature people confronting past embarrassments. In Best Worst Movie, this fame comes from the shame of appearing in Troll 2, which was once listed as the worst movie ever on IMDB (it has since relinquished the crown to Pocket Ninjas). In Winnebago Man, it is the questionable notoriety of a viral video phenom. But in both cases, people find their pasts coming back not just to haunt them, but to drag them into the spotlight. And oh, how that brightness burns...

Winnebago Man

Nearly twenty years ago, a video of outtakes from a shoot for a Winnebago promotional film began circling among people who trade these sort of underground tapes. The appeal of the "Winnebago Man" video, as it was called, lied in the foul-mouthed star of the film, who flubbed lines, cussed out the intern, and said baffling things like, "I want no more bullshit from anyone—and that includes me." It was viral video before the concept even existed.

Of course, when YouTube took off, the tape was uploaded and found an even larger audience. For most people, it was just a cathartic bit of fun—look at this guy having a terrible day and simply letting that vitriol fly. But documentary director Ben Steinbauer was obsessed with discovering the man behind the video, and began a search for the "Winnebago Man" that would result in this film.

The man in the video is named Jack Rebney, and it turns out the tape was created by the disgruntled crew in order to get him fired. Their plan worked, and Rebney seemingly disappeared off the face of the Earth while the tape began its second life in underground tape-trading circles before graduating to the dubious distinction of an Internet video phenomenon.

Now 76 years old, the man lives alone in a secluded cabin on a mountain in California with only his dog Buddha for company. At first, he seems polite and modest, disinterested in the documentary but amiable nonetheless. But as he warms to Steinbauer (and perhaps realizes the documentary offers a chance to redeem himself after his Internet humiliation), Rebney begins to drop his guard and reveal the full force of his opinions and personality on film.

It's bracing, to say the least. He's very much the definition of a crotchety old man, but also absolutely charming despite (or perhaps because of) his obvious crustiness. He's rightly wary of the new fame Steinbauer wants to bring to him—this is a man whose fame rests on a tape specifically designed to humiliate him, remember. But he's also possessed by a restless, talkative demeanor, and he can't help but pour out a torrent of words the instant he's prodded. There are times when you want to roll your eyes—he's working on a book called "Jousting With the Myth," which is apparently a "heretical analysis" of politics, sex, and religion, whatever that means—but the man is also sharp-witted and quite endearing. As one fan in the film notes, "He's everyone's angry grandpa."

In fact, one of the highlights of the festival so far had to be the post-screening q-and-a with Steinbauer and co-writer/producer Malcolm Pullinger. In response to one question from the audience about Rebney's book, Steinbauer offered to call the man himself. Speaking through a cellphone, Rebney regaled the audience with his own mix of eloquent charm and cussedness. Steinbauer barely had to say anything and the man was off and running—praising Canada, thanking us for our generosity, complimenting his director, describing his swearing as "Anglo-Saxonese," making jokes about lutefisk, and just generally saying whatever occurred to him.

It was funny and ridiculous, but it also makes clear why this simple film is so engaging. Steinbauer never really quite deciphers the mysteries of viral video or Internet fame; quite naturally, the film evolves into a character portrait of Rebney himself, and Steinbauer contents himself to get lost in the strange and fascinating personality of this sweetly embittered old man. By the end, Rebney finds his redemption as a man willing to speak his mind, letting loose with anger, gratitude, or simply whatever curious thought happens to be drifting by at the moment. We should all be so uninhibited.

Best Worst Movie

I suppose there are worse fates than having a picture of your chubby-cheeked cherubic little self squeezing a plush rabbit printed in a small-town newspaper. For instance, as a child you could be cast in a film called Troll 2, only to realize your hope of becoming an actor has been forever destroyed because you just appeared in what will come to be known as the worst movie ever.

That's the fate of Michael Stephenson, who starred in the famously awful Troll 2 and also directed this film, Best Worst Movie, chronicling the growing cult legend of that legendary bit of crap cinema. After years of running from that dire credit (one of his costars who has continued with acting admits she never puts the film on her resume), Stephenson has decided to embrace it with this film, and turn that liability into a bit of camp celebrity.

He rounds up the bulk of the cast, although the film mostly focuses on George Hardy, a gregarious small-town dentist who also once harbored dreams of acting, only to have them dashed by Troll 2. The film follows the reunited cast as they attend enthusiastic fan screenings, re-enacting scenes from the movie to giddy applause and hysterical laughter. As the film enters its second life as a cult object, the cast—Hardy and Stephenson in particular—struggle to turn this embarrassment into something redemptive, like a second shot at fame.

Best Worst Movie has its charms, but I found myself liking it less than I thought I would. Of course, there's a fair bit of humour to be found in excerpts from the brilliantly awful Troll 2, just as there's some enjoyment in seeing the grown actors replay the most bizarre scenes or reminisce about the difficult, confused shoot (the crew was Italian, and the ensuing language barrier meant the cast had only the frantic hand gestures of the director to explain what was required of them).

At the same time, there are some more ambivalent strains in Stephenson's film that he seems unable or unwilling to address. There is the disturbed Margo Prey, female lead in the film and a clearly troubled, lonely woman whose life seems a shambles. There's the self-deluding Claudio Fragasso, volatile Italian director of Troll 2, who defends the worth of the film while twisting himself into knots rationalizing the mocking adoration of his film (at one point we see his patience finally break as he berates the cast for making fun of the film, calling them "dog actors").

Finally, there is George Hardy himself, who—while clearly charismatic and goodhearted—is something of a narcissist finding his ego fed by this dubious celebrity. It's simultaneously funny and painful to watch him foist his awful movie appearance on clients at his dental clinic, and there are points where you can't quite tell if Stephenson is simply mocking this poor guy. It brings to mind a point in Winnebago Man where Steinbauer muses over the wisdom of putting Rebney in front of a camera again, especially if it only provides new humiliation for the man.

Stephenson, who seems to be a less nuanced director than Steinbauer, doesn't even really pause to consider this possibility. For that matter, he might be too complicit in this story to really pick apart the Troll 2 experience with any real insight beyond his own bemusement. I was amused for a while, but the film itself never really becomes genuinely compelling. And by the end, it becomes clear Stephenson intends his film to serve as a sweet conclusion to a bitter memory, which unfortunately requires the film to gloss over its more contrary elements.

However, I should note that I've never seen Troll 2, so I don't really fit into the group of devotees who would most likely lap up a film like this (myself, I'm holding out for a Gymkata revival). For those of us outside of the cult, Best Worst Movie is at most a minor pleasure and mild curiosity, and little more.

But there are still valuable lessons to be learned here. Like this: there is no sense in running from notoriety. Hiding from your past doesn't necessarily stop it from finding you. Embrace it; only when it is close can you get your hands around its throat. Also, Italian directors are crazy. And according to Jack Rebney, Karl Rove deserves to have a hot poker stuck up his ass. Amen.

Now, I believe there is a four-foot-tall plush rabbit I need to find, lest I be on my deathbed calling out in a weathered croak, "Foo-foo Bunny," and then dropping my cherished snow globe.

Keep on truckin',
Mark

EIFF: Day One

Another autumn in Edmonton. After outrageously record-breaking heat earlier this week, you can start to feel the chill setting in as we prepare to dive into months of snowy hell. The leaves, feeling a heart-sinking terror at the coming cold, leap to death rather than face the agonies of frost. The cracks in the asphalt are fairly panting with anticipation for the ice to come and pry open their maws, turning the Edmonton streets into a giant car-eating beast. It hungers. You hear its stomach growl as the weather begins to change.

And just as we feel our spirits sagging with the weight of the coming winter, the Edmonton International Film Festival (23rd edition) comes along offering some sort of shelter from the dismal spectacle of nature committing hari-kari en masse before first snowfall. Yes, let us seek comfort in the antiseptic environs of City Centre Mall (speaking of dead things) and warm ourselves beneath the glowing lights of the cinema.

But is there enough combined friction in this slate of films to even generate the heat needed to offset the chilly blast of the theatre's air conditioning? Will we all freeze to death sitting before some middlebrow mediocrity so devoid of spark you could lock it in a room full of dry tinder and not lose a wink of sleep? We shall see.

Cooking With Stella

The beginning film sets the tone, as festival producer Kerrie Long noted in her introduction to this year's opening gala. In that case, what does Dilip Mehta's Cooking With Stella presage for the rest of the week? It's not a terrible film, but certainly a bit of a clunker. Set in New Delhi, the film focuses on a Canadian family new to India: Maya, a Canadian diplomat (Lisa Ray), and Michael, her chef husband (Don McKellar, who answered questions with Mehta after the screening), along with a young baby. They're greeted by Stella (Seema Biswas), a cook and household servant who has served visiting diplomats for thirty years.

For years, Stella has conned her employers with little scams, overcharging for laundry and food and earning commissions from the complicit shop owners. She also steals the duty-free western groceries and sells them on the black market, and even, on occasion, simply swipes jewelry. But when Lisa and Michael hire a nanny for their baby, Stella finds her cash cow under threat by an honest outsider.

Mehta plays this mostly as a comedy, and while the quality cast helps in this regard, I'm not sure if the film really works. The director said after the screening that he wanted the audience to laugh and then feel a "pinch," as he called it, when they considered what they were laughing at. His real intention, he made clear, was to make a comedy about the economic disparity between the servants and their employers. Certainly, that element is there, but the humour is often too broad to really connect with the actual themes of the film, and the plot requires far too much credulity on the part of the audience to really hold together.

Mehta might be the film's main weakness. Primarily a photojournalist, he confirms my (potentially unfair, I admit) bias against photographers-turned-filmmakers. For every Stanley Kubrick, there are ten Dilip Mehtas—directors who possess a fine understanding of light and composition, and yet do not seem to have a clear grasp on how to make good cinema. The film, at first glance, does not seem ugly, but it is certainly flat and inert, possessing an aesthetic with the depth of a made-for-television movie.

Scenes in a crowded Indian marketplace, for example, feel as if they were filmed in a studio with twenty extras. Most likely, these scenes were actually on location (the film was made in New Delhi), but Mehta hits a barrier here where his abilities as a photographer cannot help him as a director. He does not lead us into his images, but rather cuts right to the primary information in the shot. There is no sense of the scope of the marketplace—no establishing shots, no stray details of the bustle and vitality of the crowded place—just Michael walking through it, close to the camera. Mehta's frame makes the world smaller, less real. And this from a director who claimed his editor needed to work in New Delhi in order to take in the flavour of India.

Not Quite Hollywood

EIFF has a particular fondness for documentaries about crap cinema and figures on the margin of the film industry, which makes Not Quite Hollywood a good fit for the festival. Mark Hartley's energetic documentary chronicles the heyday of Australian exploitation cinema in the 1970s and '80s (or Ozploitation, if you prefer), when a flurry of low-budget filmmaking in that country produced a series of violent, sexed-up cheap thrillers that have grown in cult popularity over the years.

The tone of Not Quite Hollywood is celebratory, although for a bit of variety Hartley also talks to a couple of film critics who mostly sniff disdainfully at the parade of vulgarities relished by the film. There are some interesting little movies that Hartley puts under the spotlight, like Roadgames (Rear Window set in a truck on the highway, apparently) and Long Weekend (obnoxious couple go camping and are attacked by vengeful nature, from plants to weather to animals), but mostly there is just a lengthy parade of cheesy gore and sex.

It's entertaining, if a bit tiring at times—those montages of naked women or over-the-top murders start to get a bit monotous, you know—but when Hartley focuses his attention on a single picture the film gets more interesting. Tales of Dennis Hopper's debauched adventures during the filming of Mad Dog Morgan are particularly enjoyable, as are anecdotes of the difficult Chinese action star Jimmy Wang Yu. The film also makes a fair point in how genre cinema often serves as a necessary foundation to more respectable filmmaking (which echoes the development of the Canadian film industry in the 1970s in some ways), but mostly, this is just a celebration of using naked women as living hood ornaments and the art of setting actors on fire.

EIFF: Gomorrah at the end of the festival

The Edmonton International Film Festival has been over for several days now, and yet I continue to churn out these entries, trying desperately to write about as many films as possible before they are all consigned to the graveyard of memory. Even as I type these words, I can feel the casket closing on Let the Right One In, a Swedish coming-of-age tale spiced up with vampires. That’s an oversimplification of what is actually an interesting little movie, but it has been lost in the blur of films I’ve seen since. I’ve given up on writing anything about it, save for these few words, which I offer in the way of apology and epitaph. Its sense of privileged intimacy reminded me of a secret shared between friends, and so what it said to me shall remain untold.

The reason I couldn’t find time to say anything else about Let the Right One In is for a simple and welcome reason—I was too busy watching other films. I began writing about this year’s festival with some anxiety about EIFF’s usual fondness for bottom-of-the-barrel crowd-pleasers, and the short film selection seemed to bear this out. The bulk of the short films I saw stuck mainly to a glib-cute tone that quickly grows wearisome when it dominates all other styles. There were a couple of stylish allegories that offered some relief, if not genuine satisfaction (The Eye and Next Floor), and at least one lovely, oblique mood piece (The 12th Alley, a lonely metaphysical bowling alley soliloquy), but these were the rare exceptions.

More common were variations on clichéd ideas, such as stories of kids trying to get their ball back from an elderly person (baseball in the case of A Pickle; soccer in the case of Because There Are Things You Never Forget) or the usual bland comedies about the war of the sexes (which probably covers about half of the short films at the festival). Still, the low point had to be From Little Things Big Things Grow, which is four minutes of hyper-cuteness that could spur even the softest heart to infanticide. School children dance as they sing the title song, a cheesy piece of self-esteem celebration that includes lyrics where the children all say what they want to be when they grow up. I appreciated the specificity of the kid who said he wants to be a graphic designer; I’m a little more concerned about the one who said she wants to be a mermaid. Trust in yourself, and you can do anything, even become an imaginary creature. That’s one to grow on, but I’m not sure what it’s doing in a film festival.

Despite my disappointment with this year’s slate of short films, the features offered some surprising gems. EIFF tends not to stray too far from the middle of the road, but they do occasionally swerve precariously close to the ditch. But to be fair, there were even some fine films that were a perfect match for the festival’s populist sensibilities. Consider Man on Wire, an excellent documentary by any measure, but also essentially an inspirational movie about a man following his dream. Still, it is not saccharine or condescending, but rather an elusive, moving film, and proof that a film can fulfill the crowd-pleaser mandate of EIFF without forsaking craft or ingenuity. Which is really just my way of saying that there is no excuse for pap like From Little Things Big Things Grow.

You may ask what is four minutes of discomfort in exchange for hours of pleasure, and you would be right—besides, part of the fun of watching short film programs is seeing stuff you normally would never go near. You may also ask what sort of misanthrope sneers at cute, cheerful children, and all I can say is now you know. But if am I to truly do this festival justice, how can I end on a such sour note? A true crowd-pleaser should end on some sort of positive, optimistic high. To that end, allow me to present one final review, this time for Gomorrah, a dense, powerful Italian mob epic directed Matteo Garrone.

Gomorrah

Let me be clear on one thing: this is not a typical mob story. Near the beginning of the film, Garrone shows a couple of teenagers quoting dialogue from Scarface, as if to emphasize how far he strays from the usual glamorization of violence and wealth found in films about organized crime. Even the opening scene—a series of gruesome murders in a tanning salon—teases the audience with a promise of violence that is never quite fulfilled. The scene begins by mocking the vanity of these middle-aged, pudgy mobsters preening over their looks, but the sight of their dead bodies in the buzzing blue light of the tanning beds is a chilly taste of what is to come. There is no glorious final shoot-out for these men—death is ugly, swift, and brutal.

The reason for this stark contrast to the typical mob film is probably because Garrone has a very real target in this film: the Camorra, the oldest and one of the largest organized crime cartels in Italy. This isn’t some starry-eyed mob movie (as the teenagers quoting Scarface seem to believe they are starring in), but a drama that draws its purpose from real conditions. This is still fiction, but it is tied intimately to real problems posed by the Camorra.

The film is built out of multiple stories, most of which centre on characters from a single apartment complex, and the layers of walkways that make up the building mirror the various parallel narrative threads that run throughout the film. Some stories might seem almost recognizable, like that of the grocery boy who begins working for the Camorra despite his mother’s misgivings, or the two aforementioned Scarface-quoting teenagers who steal from the Camorra and openly defy its power. Others are more unique, such as the story of a tailor who secretly teaches workers at a Chinese garment factory, risking his life by helping one of the Camorra’s rivals. Another tale follows a young man who works as an assistant for one of the Camorra’s garbage disposal bosses, who roams from site to site, scrounging up new dumping grounds for dangerous waste.

None of these threads connect in any obvious way. Fate is not hurtling these people through space and time towards some sort of grand unity in the end; the Camorra has replaced fate. You defy the Camorra and you die, or else you join it and you die. The characters are linked through the Camorra, so that it becomes the great unifier in this film, the only unity possible in this poor place. It is entrenched in tradition and pervades the social order. In a telling shot, we see the grocery boy running drugs for the Camorra on one of the walkways in the apartment complex, and then the camera drifts to a wedding procession passing on the walkway below.

The film is filled with such striking moments. When the drivers responsible for transporting toxic waste refuse to work after one of their own is badly burned after a spill, the Camorra’s man rounds up a bunch of young children and tells them to each pick a truck. Hustling about in a game mood, he gathers cushions to allow them to see over the steering wheel, and Garrone shows the man triumphantly watching a procession of heavy machinery driven by children. It’s an absurd, comical sight, but obviously disquieting as well. Even better is a scene where a dying man lies on his bed, crucifix above his head, rasping “euro” over and over again, invoking a new god as capricious and cruel as the one of old.

There’s a grim humour to such images, even as they reveal the sick social order that has arisen because of the Camorra. Most of the characters struggle with finding a way out from under the Camorra’s influence, but the organization is simply too pervasive. It controls so many aspects of the economy that there doesn’t seem to be any way of leaving one Camorra business without somehow, even inadvertently, joining another. Indeed, the Camorra is the economy in this film, blurring the line between capitalism and crime until the two seem interchangeable. As average workers watch their savings and jobs disappear while executives get multi-million-dollar severance packages, this idea rings true no matter where you are. It might even be—dare I say it?—a bit of a crowd-pleaser.

EIFF: Momma's Man

American movies generally don't do maturity well. This probably sounds like specious generalizing considering my last two posts were about American films possessing mature worldviews (Rachel Getting Married and Sugar, in case your scroll function is mysteriously disabled), but I think the point is still valid. Between Hollywood escapism and the sort of cynicism and violence that often characterize movies marketed at adults, there isn’t much room for a film that opts for a more considered approach to life. Even the independents aren’t much help at this point, with the current vanguard of young filmmakers preoccupied with solipsistic stories about twenty-somethings falling in and out of love (I’m talking about mumblecore here, and may you all have mercy on me for using that ridiculous term).

None of my curmudgeonly carping should discount the fact that good cinema can arise from any of these groups; I certainly don’t want to make any blanket dismissals here. I just want to make a point that maturity is a rather neglected theme, which is why Momma’s Man is so welcome and ultimately so disappointing.

Directed by Azazel Jacobs, the film tells the story of Mikey, who, after visiting his parents in New York, finds he is unable to return to his wife and new-born child in California for reasons purely psychosomatic. Staying with his parents is a kind of prolonged adolescence, and he seems unable to give it up. He begins to lie to everyone—his wife, his coworkers, his parents—in a vain, self-defeating effort to remain inside that place of comfort and security. He begins to steep himself in talismans from his past, reading comic books and old notebooks from high school. In one particularly funny scene, he even plays an angst-ridden song aimed at a former girlfriend that he wrote as a teenager (the chorus, delivered in a whisper because his parents are trying to sleep, is mostly just, “Fuck / Fuck / Fuck / Yoooouuuuu!”).

Despite such moments of humour, the film is underlined with melancholy. Jacobs casts his own parents as Mikey’s parents in the film, and the apartment used in the film is the actual Jacobs home. The film is often at its most poignant as an affectionate portrait of Jacobs’ parents. Surely any adult who has stayed with their parents for a few days will recognize this situation and identify with Mikey’s desire to stay there, freed of responsibility. But behind that desire is the knowledge that this sanctuary is beginning to fade away. When Mikey is talking to his wife at one point, he justifies staying in New York by telling her, “You don’t know what it’s like to watch your parents grow old.” He back pedals right after he speaks (presumably her parents are dead), but the words show the rest of the film in a strange light, making it seem as if Jacobs is casting his own future sorrow over the death of his parents as the subject of the film.

Sadly, the film only glances that emotion. More often, it retreats into its humour, which, while at times enjoyable, lacks any real traction in the story—it has nowhere to go in the rather barren landscape of the film. Mikey’s continual lying casts a dark shadow over the film’s more whimsical moments, but Jacobs doesn’t really know how to handle it. Even when Mikey’s father discovers his son's lying ways, nothing comes of it. Now, I don’t expect a film with this kind of quiet, fragile mood to resort to shouting melodramatics, but a film that doesn’t seem to believe in consequences can’t help but feel a little inconsequential.

EIFF: Sugar

This film breaks my heart. It isn’t the story that’s to blame, though the film is certainly moving at times. No, it’s the fact that this is one of those modest but inherently decent little films that seem to be shuffling through theatres on a path to some sort of oblivion—it will live on, but just barely, subsisting on scattered DVDs in a few video stores, doomed to be pawed for eternity by uncomprehending renters who pick it up only to put it down disdainfully after reading the back and not seeing any recognizable names. Like any other animals, these people know the scent of the sickly and weak and avoid it at all costs.

But that is hardly a just fate for this film. Sugar is by no means a great work, but it is a very good one, and its merits are rare enough that they should be seized upon by others. Unfortunately, the screening I went to was poorly attended, with only around 20 to 30 people in the crowd—a stark contrast to Half Nelson, the previous film from Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, which sold out its screening at EIFF two years ago. To be fair, Half Nelson had the benefit of a recognizable lead actor (Ryan Gosling) and a juicy premise (inner city high school teacher buys drugs from one of his students), while Sugar contains a cast of unknowns and tells the rather unglamorous story of a young man from the Dominican Republic drafted into the minor leagues.

This is certainly one of the most mundane sports films I’ve ever seen, and I mean that as a compliment. Miguel Santos (nicknamed Sugar for various reasons, which seem to change depending on what he’s doing at the time) never rises above the minor leagues. His American baseball career begins and ends with a Single-A team in Bridgetown, Iowa. Unsurprisingly, the film’s treatment of baseball is scaled to this level, meaning that there are no big make-or-break games, no bases-loaded, bottom-of-the-ninth moments of redemption.

In fact, this is not even a “baseball movie” in the normal sense. More than anything, this is the story of a young man coming to terms with what he wants from life, as well as a poignant recasting of the typical immigrant story. Sugar comes to America with ideas of baseball glory looming in his imagination. He brags of his great pitching abilities and even shows enough talent to become the toast of the team for a while, but once he is sidelined by an injury, his game never really recovers. However, there is a steady stream of other players from the Dominican Republic and elsewhere to take his place, and Sugar finds himself caught in the strange bind of having been brought to a country where he is no longer really wanted or needed.

Boden and Fleck tell this story simply, but eloquently. Their greatest virtue as filmmakers—and the reason I feel so saddened by this film’s presumable failure in the marketplace—is their ability to approach their characters in a way that is sympathetic and yet still critical. They are aware of the cruelty of this system that chews up talent, while being careful never to sneer at anyone who is caught up in it. Even as a coach is scolding Sugar for smashing a water cooler in a burst of rage, the filmmakers find ways to suggest more depth in this man, who other films would just dismiss as a stock character. The coach implies that he knows exactly what Sugar is going through, and as he speaks, his voice becomes more charged and emotional, his face becoming pained at a memory playing out as he speaks.

There’s another movie contained in that brief spark of emotion, one that follows the coach from his own youthful glory days to his decline, and reveals the quiet sadness of his job watching youngsters fall into the same traps that he did. The film does not always live up to the promise of such richly suggestive moments—some supporting characters, such as the small-town Christian girl Sugar develops a crush on, never quite rise above the level of sketches. But when the film does reveal the nuances of a character in a few lines of dialogue, you really feel the strength of Boden and Fleck as filmmakers.

This deep-rooted empathy prompted Half Nelson to its unsettling moral quandaries, but Sugar is comparatively more modest in reach, even if it still shows itself acutely aware of the political implications of its story. The film is certainly no polemic, but the tenderness of the drama suggests that the real purpose is to encourage an understanding of the difficulties facing a foreigner in a strange country. And even though the film mainly sticks to the intimacy and immediacy of Sugar’s problems, it still nods towards the larger scale of these issues when Sugar discovers an entire weekend league of discarded latino players, all of whom now only play for the love of the game as they struggle to carve out some place for themselves in American society.

After showing off his pitching prowess to his new friends, Sugar sits down on the bench amidst cheers and congratulations. A sorrowful look appears on his face, just for a moment, before a grin finally appears. Even as he celebrates what he has gained, he seems painfully aware of everything he has lost. It’s a quiet yet profoundly moving moment, and proof of the merit of Boden and Fleck’s approach, which displays great sympathy and humanity without ever descending into sanctimony and superficiality.

EIFF: Rachel Getting Married

Jean-Luc Godard once described one of his films as a “neorealist musical,” and while I doubt he would approve of this use of the term, I can’t help but feel it was made for a movie like Rachel Getting Married, Jonathan Demme’s buoyantly told story of a woman getting out of rehab to go to her sister’s wedding.

In making this film, Demme employs what is probably the most common marker of cinematic “realism” these days—the shaky, handheld camera that so many other directors have used as a lazy short-cut to building a sense of being in the moment. However, Demme’s use of this method is hardly laziness; rather, he displays a great deal of self-discipline and skill in how he tells the story. Scenes rarely feel forced or stagy, and the film has a kind of home-movie immediacy that comes from all of the clutter and people wandering in and out frame.

The music, however, is what really matters here. The film is built around music, but at the same time, it approaches the music on realist terms. There is no non-diegetic sound in this film; everything emanates from within the space of the story. Even the music played during the closing credits comes from peripheral characters in the film who are jamming in the backyard after the wedding is over.

In spite of this one constriction, the film is still dripping in music, oozing it from every moment, at times almost absurdly (the film’s style may say “realism,” but there’s something surreal about seeing Robyn Hitchcock singing at a Connecticut wedding). The family is surrounded by musician friends, so the score of the film largely comes from these people hanging around the house, practising their parts for the wedding. The groom even sings his wedding vows, and quite well it should be added, seeing as how the character is played by Tunde Adembimpe of TV on the Radio (who brings a nice geeky awkwardness to the groom, most memorably in a tour-de-force dishwasher loading sequence).

More so than teary-eyed speeches and shouting arguments, the music elaborates the emotions of the characters, as it should in any musical. At times, it is sentimental, other times simply jubilant, and it even occasionally verges on sarcastic (at one point, a couple of kids practise a version of “Here Comes the Bride” that calls to mind Jimi Hendrix doing “Star Spangled Banner”). But most importantly, this approach turns the film into a curious hybrid, beholden neither to the demands of realist drama nor Hollywood melodrama.

It’s a pleasant surprise. I really wasn’t expecting such a charming, idiosyncratic film to come out of this story. The premise flirts with the maudlin and cliche, but it never really succumbs, which is admirable when you consider what we’re dealing with here. There’s Kym, fresh out of rehab, whose acid-tongued remarks and sarcastic demeanour hide the guilt and self-loathing she feels for her involvement in the accidental death of her younger brother (yes, a dead child story. It’s one of those movies). Then there is Rachel, the more successful, stable sibling who feels resentment at Kym for disrupting what is supposed to be a perfect wedding day with ugly emotional truths, family conflicts better left buried, et cetera. This is well-trodden emotional terrain we’re walking on.

But the conventional melodrama in the script that is trying to make itself heard never quite comes through—the songs just drown it out. The music inspires a loose-limbed approach from Demme that is miles away from the stiffness of his last fiction film, The Manchurian Candidate. Even as the script is pulling towards confrontation and catharsis, Demme is pushing the film towards something more open-ended, less easily defined, and ultimately, more rewarding.

The final confrontation, that last emotional bloodletting that would put everything in its place, mercifully never comes. Instead, we are left with things left unsaid, arguments never finished. In other words, a family like any other.

EIFF: Man on Wire

In 1974, Philippe Petit set up a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center and walked across it. In fact, he crossed it eight times, spending 45 minutes on a wire 110 stories above the ground.

It would be hard to make a dull documentary out of such a remarkable story. After all, how could a man who snuck into the World Trade Center to do a wire-walking performance be boring? But even beyond the obvious interest of the subject matter, this is an exceptional documentary, well-crafted and haunting. At times, it is part love story, charting Petit’s obsession of the towers from afar, showing the towers being built alongside images of his childhood, as if their meeting was somehow destiny (as one friend of Petit says, the towers were built for Philippe, of course).

At other times, it feels like a heist movie as it follows the elaborate plotting and preparation required in setting up the stunt. Petit cases the joint, as if it were a bank he was breaking into. He takes pictures, makes diagrams, and builds models to figure out where to place the wire. He impersonates a French newspaper journalist and manages to get in with a couple of friends in order to take photographs of the top of the building and quiz workers on safety hazards. True to heist movie form, there’s even an inside man.

Petit possesses an undeniable hint of megalomania. As his former girlfriend notes, when she met him, it was just assumed she would follow his destiny—whatever path she might have for her own life, it was secondary to his own. Still, the man is incredibly charismatic. As he describes his obsession, his plans, his great schemes, he talks rapidly, hands whirling about as if he were physically conjuring up his memories. He’s a superb story-teller, witty and self-dramatizing, and yet his intensity is never off-putting.

Maybe this is because there is a purity to Petit’s goal. He doesn’t seem preoccupied with wealth or fame. He just wants to walk between the towers because they’re the tallest in the world, because it would simply be a great thing to do and share with others. You start to understand his mania when you actually see the wire walk—the event is captured in stills and video footage so grainy that sometimes it seems like the wire isn’t even there, that he actually might be walking on thin air. In one image, he has a great, broad grin on his face, caught in mid-laugh. In another, he lies down on the wire, completely casual and calm. Having conquered such height, he makes it seem like the distance between the sky and ground has collapsed. He might as well be inches from the street.

It’s a remarkable moment, and the film allows it to speak for itself. In fact, I’m not sure if anyone could possibly put words to such a moment. When one of Petit’s childhood friends and co-conspirators tries to explain what happened on that day, he can’t do it. He trails off, buries his face in his hands, and simply cries.

EIFF: 12

Not having seen the original 12 Angry Men, I can only imagine how this Russian version compares—and anyway, I doubt the similarities and differences are particularly important to an appreciation of the film. This is more of a Russian take-off on the premise of the Hollywood original, with the defendant a Chechen youth accused of killing his adoptive Russian father, and the jurors all standing in for the different strata of contemporary Russian society.

I admit that there’s something kind of fun about this film, even as it flirts with, and finally succumbs to, the inherent absurdity of its set-up. Maybe I was a little charmed by the conviction and energy it brings to its most ridiculous conceits. If you can’t go for subtlety, you might as well at least go for gusto, right? But very quickly, the film falls into the rhythm it sustains for almost the entirety of its two and a half hour running time: a juror delivers an impassioned speech about his personal history, and then changes his vote on the verdict. This is Acting, capital-letter style—red-faced, spittle flying, strings on the score, camera cutting between close-ups of the speaker and the other jurors, who often sit agape in silence (probably mentally rehearsing the lines for their own monologues, I like to imagine).

If nothing else, this is entertaining bombast, although its formula does begin to increasingly grate on the nerves. I appreciate the point—that to be truly merciful and just we must see our own suffering in the lives of others—but between all the scenery-chewing, the characters barely find time to actually justify the innocence of the accused (and I should add that the scenery being chewed in this case is a school gymnasium, which if nothing else gives an indication of the sophomoric acrobatics we’re in store for) .

This monologue method reaches its most frenzied peak when one juror delivers a bizarre, rambling speech about how his uncle inadvertently became regarded as a terrorist. As the man speaks, he paces furiously around the table where everyone sits, watching in amazement and confusion. The man is pacing so fast he is almost running, and the speech is punctuated by the sound of an alarm clock periodically going off in his suitcase, which he kicks until the ringing stops. To top it off, he pulls out a bottle of nasal spray in the middle of speaking and sprays first into his nostrils, then his eyes, and finally, inexplicably, his ears.

This is funny stuff, if only for how it parodies the other speeches—the distracting pacing, the nonsensical actorly tic of the nasal spray—but it also makes the audience conscious of the posturing of the other actors. As we dutifully move from speech to speech, the absurdity of applying this method to every single character becomes increasingly apparent, and the whole formula reduces the accused to something of an after-thought. Ultimately, the film is hokum, plain and simple. Well-intentioned, delivered with panache, but hokum all the same.

(I should note that 12 was nominated for a best foreign film Oscar last year, which should come as no surprise. The Academy has always been a sucker for this sort of high-powered entertainment with a gloss of social significance. Of course, it lost to the World War II movie.)

EIFF: I Served the King of England

A prickly fable about a Prague waiter’s rise and fall in the 1930s and ‘40s, I Served the King of England moves between moments of scathing satire and passages of florid romanticism. It’s a strange approach, but the result is a beautiful film about ugliness, brutally funny and wise.

The waiter in question, Jan Diti, is a small man with large ambitions, who possesses not only the mischievous mannerisms of Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, but also that same lack of guile. Diti seems quite innocent, and as a result, is ripe for corruption. The film charts his rise in fortunes, from his beginnings as a waiter in a local bar to bigger and wealthier establishments where he measures his own worth by the importance of those he serves. All the while, the world slips steadily into World War II, and Diti continues his pursuit of wealth and power, seduced by pleasure and driven by a very innocent but unmistakable greed.

The film’s style is broad enough to include a parody of silent-film comedy, while also engaging in vividly poetic touches, like the woman who—to spite Diti’s employer for reprimanding the waiter after spilling a drink—pours two glasses of raspberry grenadine over her head. As she walks down the street, bees flutter about her, drawn to her sweetness. If this sounds a tad ridiculous, that’s because it is, and if it sounds beautiful, that’s because it is too.

In a different film, such flights of whimsy might seem unbearably precious, but I Served the King of England is grounded in a scabrous sense of humour. Sex and politics intertwine uncomfortably. Greed is routinely skewered with contemptuous glee. In a running gag, Diti delights in throwing his spare change on the ground in front of millionaires, and then stepping back to smile smugly as they drop to their knees and dig for a few coins to add to their fortunes.

And yet throughout, Diti remains a seemingly harmless, sympathetic fellow, even as he begins to ape Hitler’s hairstyle and blithely winds up collaborating with the Nazis. The film, much like Diti, proceeds through events in a hapless, bemused manner, but beneath its droll surface is a troubling story of how easily innocence is made complicit with evil.

EIFF: Roman de Gare

You could almost convince yourself that this is a good film. With its convoluted thriller stratagems, the film—directed by Claude Lelouch—proudly displays its cleverness, but I kept wondering when this cleverness would take flight into something truly imaginative and unique. Sadly, when you start to poke at the cracks in this film, it reveals that its only secret is that it has no secrets to give up. Lelouch’s approach to the complexities of his plot is stubbornly literal, revealing only his lack of imagination.

The story is too complicated to summarize—you either tell it all or tell nothing. At best, I can only describe the various balls the film juggles: Judith, the famous writer whose novels are ghost written; a mystery man who may be either Judith’s ghost writer, an academic who has abandoned his job and family, or an escaped pedophile/serial killer called “the magician”; and finally Huguette, a Parisian hair dresser who is abandoned by her fiance at a gas station after an argument and gets picked up by the mystery man as a result.

The problem lies in that mystery man. There’s something very disappointing in watching a director construct such an elaborate plot just for the purposes of playing a shell game with the audience. Someone with more patience than I could perhaps argue that Lelouch is showing how reality bleeds into fiction and vice versa, but I think that’s giving him more credit than he deserves. All that matters in this film is the cold machine of the plot, and the result is rather unsurprisingly a lifeless, mechanical film.

The only recognizable human emotion in the film is the vanity of the director; reduced to the role of pawns, the characters are in no position to make demands upon the audience. When the wife of the missing academic confesses that she can’t stop thinking about the detective handling her husband’s case, the audience’s response is to laugh because these characters are little more than jokes. The woman’s loneliness, her grief, her love—none of it is real, none of it matters, just as all the love and hate experienced by the other characters is of no consequence as well. Everything in the film is mere grist for the gears of the plot-machine.

And when the cold machine that seemed at first so impressive finally begins to break down with ridiculous, desperate third-act revelations, that doesn’t leave you with much, does it? All that remains once the machine breaks is a lump of useless metal—and it’s ready for scrap before the credits even finish rolling.