Filmfest 2004 - 09
Amedeo Modigliani: painter extraordinaire, upcoming retrospective subject at the AGO, and if the new film MODIGLIANI starring Andy Garcia is true-to-life, major screw-up drunkard who had an allergy to success.
Not on par with POLLOCK, not on par with GIRL WITH THE PEARL EARRING, but hey, we get to wallow in bohemian Montmartre for a couple of hours with Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Maurice Utrillo, Pablo Picasso (with whom Modigliani had a tempestuous rivalry) and Jeanne Hebuterne, Modi’s muse, with whom he had a tempestuous relationship. They’re all played by well by actors most people have never heard of, so I’m moving on…
This flick just doesn’t get under Modigliani’s skin - Andy Garcia either blusters his way through scenes, as if this man lived only to compete, or suffers miserably when he is beaten. We are rarely privy to any internal dialogue, and no attempt is made to explore Modigliani’s unique painting and then connect it to the man. We don’t have to see many of Modi’s paintings to see what a great artist he is - we certainly don’t get any close ups or real feel for his painting process or technique - but we don’t need to because we know how great an artist he is because he’s such a failure as a human being. He was tormented! Of course he’s a genius! It’s just the man that is the story here, and that’s where POLLOCK and EARRING work better: the art is connected to the artists in those titles.
Elsa Zylberstein merits a mention as Jeanne, Modi’s lover and eventual wife. She provides an emotional core for the film, tendering portraying a put-upon woman caught in a love affair with a magnetic but unreliable and tormented man.
Speaking of tormented, a taxi ride to the Paramount then brought us to THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS, a quote from the book of Jeremiah, and a tour of America’s white trash underbelly, or more specifically, Knoxville Tennessee. Well, Knoxville actually stood in for a whole countryful of trouble. HEART, second film by bad-girl director/star Asia Argento, tells the story of messed-up, drug-addled Sarah and her son Jeremiah. The poor kid’s been living peacefully, brought up by loving foster parents, when at the age of 7, his messed-up mother manages to win back custody of him. She and he are soon on the road and free of the constraints of social services. Sarah needs money to pay for her addictions and finds it turning tricks, sometimes turning them into husbands briefly.
When Jeremiah manages to run away, he ends up in the custody of his grandparents, fundamentalists who believe in discipline, actually who believe in disciplining above all else. Kidnapped back by his mom, he gradually comes to depend upon both her love and abuse.
Despite how sad it all sounds, I was surprised by how watch-able it all was. Peter Fonda plays an amusingly stern cult-leader-like Grandpa, Jeremy Sisto is one of Jeremiah’s drugged-out father figures, the blonde kid from Gus van Sant’s ELEPHANT is a straight-laced but evil cousin. The soundtrack is deliriously thrashy punk with a bit of hardcore country thrown in. The settings are the best white trash can offer, including my favourite, a restaurant called the Burger Barrel.
Next it was on to KONTROLL, part of the festival’s Midnight Madness program. Filmed entirely in Budapest’s subway system, KONTROLL tells the story of a team of ticket checkers who run into all manner of bizarre types who ride the system. It seems that those who don’t buy tickets to ride are more than just transit scofflaws - they’re the vilest and most threatening people who one would ever care to arrest and they make the job of Bulcsú’s team a growing nightmare. Our hero Bulcsú has another nightmare to worry about: somebody is pushing passengers in front of trains, and the rest of the team isn’t so sure it’s not Bulcsú himself…
While KONTROLL casts a spell with its shady but endearing characters in an out-of-control, grungy and menacing alternate world, it sadly fell apart for me with an unsatisfyingly easy ending. Ultimately KONTROLL is another of those sci-fi flicks that promises to mine deeply into the human psyche’s dark side, but which never finds the motherlode.
LOS MUERTOS, from Argentina, tells the story of Vargas, in his 50s, and just released after a very long jail stay: many years ago Vargas murdered his brothers.
The film takes place over the course of his journey home: at first driven to the town nearest the prison, then off across country through the jungle and to a landing along a river where a friend has left a boat for him. The boat journey will take him two days, through a very sparsely populated and undeveloped part of Argentina.
It’s a quiet film: Vargas interacts with a few characters along the way, mostly we just experience the landscape with him. At one point while rowing along the river Vargas spies a young goat on the bank. He pilots the boat over, snags the goat, slits its throat, and once it has bled to death, guts it and cleans the cavity. Several people walked out during this scene: it is not often that a film depicts survival at this basic a level, but everything, from the actors to the setting is so thoroughly authentic one has the feeling that the goat surely fed some of the poverty stricken people we’ve been meeting on screen. I wish I had had time to stay for the Q & A: I am sure that the first questions would have been about the goat and the truth of what we were seeing.
An extremely simple and elemental story with a documentary feel, LOS MUERTOS was at turns gentle and brutal, and entirely engrossing.
To end the evening, a number of friends and I decided to attend a different type of festival event; a tribute to Brian Linehan, known in Canada for his years of interviewing celebrities on Citytv, good friend of the Toronto International Film Festival, and cancer victim from earlier this year.
Linehan, who had not worked much in the last few years as the full length interview has fallen out of vogue, always managed to amaze his subjects by preparing incredibly in-depth research into their lives. He actually made friends with many of the screen greats he met, a very rare thing for someone from the press to accomplish, as we learned from the panel.
Included on stage that night, Festival Director Piers Handling and Toronto media writer George Anthony for introductions, film critic and festival friend Roger Ebert as host, and guests film director Norman Jewison, comedian Martin Short, actress Sharon Gless, and comedienne Joan Rivers, all of whom called Brian their friend.
The evening proceeded with many clips dug up from Linehan’s hundreds of interviews with such stars as Peter O’Toole, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Liza Minelli, Robert Duvall, and many others, interspersed with stories recounted by the panel. It was surprisingly personal and pretty emotional for those on stage. The evening was very funny too: Martin Short’s Brock Linehan satire was played a bit, and Joan Rivers (and I know a lot of people hate her) was both caustically funny as can be expected, and also surprisingly tender - something we don’t see so often in her.
The audience was heavily made up of Toronto media types in black, dressed to the nines: thank goodness I had at least worn long pants and a long-sleeved dark shirt that day, this was not the usual festival crowd. The whole thing felt like a little bit of Festival history unfolding before our eyes, and I was glad to have been there.