Filmfest 2004 - 10
Every year since the festival’s 25th anniversary 4 years ago a classic silent film has been drawn from the vaults and presented at the Elgin Theatre or Massey Hall with a full orchestral accompaniment. It has always been fun.
This year’s, sans orchestra but with a newly restored and rerecorded soundtrack, Buster Keaton’s 1927 classic THE GENERAL was presented. A brisk and terrifically fun story of a train engineer from the South whose locomotive is stolen by Union spies, Keaton engages in magically fluid physical gags as he races into enemy territory to retrieve his beloved engine.
Classics like THE GENERAL show up all too infrequently these days: luckily you can find it and other of Buster Keaton’s films on dvd.
The evening, and festival, ended for me with two films in the Masters program, and I didn’t quite get either of them.
CHASED BY DREAMS is an Indian - comedy? -drama? -dramedy? by director and poet Buddhadeb Dasgupta about a government employee who brings educational films around to remote villages. On the road with his driver, the two meet a pregnant Bangladeshi woman fleeing to her homeland in wake of her husband’s death. While grabbing a bite to eat at a roadside restaurant, the projector is stolen from their unattended jeep, and events get beyond the control of the protagonists.
It’s mostly a serious story of past tragedies and unrealized dreams, but it has moments of slapstick, and a number of jokes about social standing in India that only the Indian members of the audience got. For me the seriousness of the film is detracted from by the silliness of the comedy, but it’s a cultural thing and did not seem to bother those more used to this kind of filmmaking.
The last film of the festival was a real head-scratcher for me. DEMAIN ON DÉMÉNAGE, which means “Tomorrow We Move”, is the first film I have seen by Chantal Akerman, who as it turns out, has had the most films of any director ever screened at the festival. Akerman makes dramas, documentaries, and allegedly, comedies.
DEMAIN stars Sylvie Testud in a life-threatening role as Charlotte, a writer who has a commission to create an erotic novel, and a cigarette habit that would bankrupt the Sultan of Brunei: there isn’t a scene where is she isn’t lighting up the next one. Oxygen tanks were likely just off set for every break, Testud was likely hospitalized in an iron lung every night.
Conflict appears when Mum, played by Aurore Clément, moves in with Charlotte after Dad has died, and brings her grand piano, her noisy piano students, and an unbelievable amount of furniture with her. I don’t use ‘unbelievable’ lightly here, as nothing about this comedy is close enough to reality to elicit the laughs I think its grasping for.
We soon meet a cluttered cast of caricatures including a real estate agent and a number of potential buyers all of whom have one-note eccentricities and who move about in an oddly choreographed manner. They prattle on ridiculously, dropping lines which Charlotte transcribes into her non-sequitur laden novel. If we cared about any of the characters, if anyone said or did anything interesting, if all of this added up to something, if DEMAIN had made the leap into Theatre of the Absurd territory, it might have worked for me. It is merely a collection of disconnected thoughtlets however, and it doesn’t get beyond aggravating Theatre of Stupidity.
Some of the audience thought this cacophony was cacofunny: out of 450 filled seats, it sounded like there were about 30 people laughing consistently throughout. Their reaction puts me in mind of France bestowing Jerry Lewis with the Legion of Honor. I just wanted it all to end, and I would have walked out had I not been 1) with a number of friends, and 2) in the dead centre of the theatre. Each painful non-joke seemed to further telescope the length of he filled seat row on either side of me, so feeling trapped, I began checking my watch often and contemplated suicide more than once. DEMAIN was not an appropriate way to wrap up the fest.
In the Q & A Akerman stated that she was not trying to imitate real life, she didn’t know what exactly she was doing. She’s right.