TIFF 2006 Day 2
Thank goodness I didn’t book a 9am movie today. With 5 hours of sleep I was able to make it to my 11:15 at the Paramount, but before bolting out of my place I hoovered down a little food, relaxed in the shower for 4 minutes, read some email (including a report that yesterday’s TIFF missive was riddled with typos - I’m not surprised, it wasn’t ‘finished’ until after 4am…) and changed water bottles in my festival bag. So now I’m here at the Paramount, parked legally downtown for $15 for all day(cheaper than I expected actually), and settling in to a comfortable seat for TAXIDERMIA - oh, the lights are dimming…
There’s a very fine line, it would seem, between what gets slotted into the Midnight Madness program, and what ends up in Visions. TAXIDERMIA, by Hungarian director Gyôrgy Pálfi, a gross-out morality play in three parts, would not be out of place at a midnight screening. On the surface it’s all squirm-inducing visuals as the stories of three generations of men - grandfather, father, and son - each 30 years apart, unfold for us: an oversexed soldier trapped in a muddy outpost with his lieutenant’s wife and daughters, pays with his life for leaving the lieutenant with an unexpected son - who grows to become Hungary’s obese communist-era speed-eating champion - and who fathers a rebelliously skinny and sullen taxidermist, who just may know how to deal with the excesses of his progenitor upon his demise. Graphic in its nastiness, while simultaneously unsettlingly funny, TAXIDERMIA works as an allegory for the social and political history of the Hungary from the 40s to the present. Too smart to be a Friday-night horror flick, and too gross to be acceptable to mass audiences, TAXIDERMIA is unlikely to find a place on many North American movie screens, but those who do get to see it should plan to eat well beforehand, or vegetarian afterwards.
After a lovely lunch I was back at the Paramount for SLUMMING by Austrian director Michael Glawogger. SLUMMING tells the story of idle-rich Sebastian who spends his days trying to amuse himself with cheap thrills he finds when pulling ‘harmless’ stunts on the people he runs into. One day Sebastian finds a drunk passed-out on a bench outside of a Vienna train station, and decides to transport him across the border in his trunk, then leave him on a bench in front of a train station in a Czech town. Sebastian’s victim is Kallmann, a paranoid down-and-outer who may finally have real reason to suspect people are out to get him. Well written, well acted, and with interesting comeuppances for the central characters, SLUMMING was a worthwhile way to spend some time in a theatre.
As much as you know what you’re going to see at the festival, you never know what you’re going to see at the festival. I had tickets today for THE BEST OF NORMAN McLAREN, a retrospective of work for the National Film Board of Canada by Canada’s late, great pioneering animator, most of it from the 50s and 60s. Lo and behold, but who should show up to introduce the films? None other than the Governor General Michaelle Jean and her husband, filmmaker Jean-Daniel Lafond… oh yeah, and fest director Piers, and someone from the NFB… but it was the GG that we had to all stand up for as she took her seat, and for whom the secret service agent sitting beside me was attending. I hadn’t felt like such a Colonial in - uh, ever. McLaren’s experimental animation was fun to see again, most of which I hadn’t seen since public school years.
Guy Maddin is one amazing filmmaker, and his films always reflect his gloriously warped imagination (such as 2003’s THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD which featured Isabella Rosselini as a depression-era Winnipeg Beer Baroness who has glass legs - this Guy’s nuts). This year Guy presented an odd silent film called BRAND UPON THE BRAIN!, a rather nightmarish retelling of his imagined childhood. Besides 12 members of the Toronto Symphony playing the score live, 3 foley artists provided live sounds effects for us: off to the right side front in the Elgin’s main floors boxes, we got to watch creaking door sounds being created, plates being smashed (for plate smashing sounds naturally) and anything one could possibly want audibly in a silent film coming to life for us. That was a real treat; a totally unique cinematic experience!
Unfortunately BRAND started late, and I had to leave before it was over, so I’ll just have to beg the friends I was with to review it for me…
My early departure brom BRAND was so that I could catch the latest round of announcements about the Festival Centre and the associated Festival Tower condo that I’d like to find myself in someday. That was held over in Roy Thomson Hall’s water garden patio, where our swellegant crowd was plied with wine, champagne cocktails, and nibbly things. Not a bad way to get me in the mood for Pedro Almodovar’s latest film VOLVER, the one gala I had tickets for this year.
VOLVER is yet more proof that this man is a genius. One Almodovar film raises expectations for the next, and this year’s work comes to Toronto with a screenplay award for Almodovar from Cannes, and with Cannes’ best actress award stretched to cover the entire female cast of the film, including Penelope Cruz and Carmen Maura. VOLVER does not disappoint in the slightest: it’s a very clever piece of work that covers a tumultuous time in the lives of its characters, with Cruz as a mother who has to save her daughter from jail and a ruined life, and whose sister is seeing the ghost of the pair’s dead mother. This one comes best as a surprise, so that’s all I’m saying. If you’re an Almodovar fan, you’ll be thrilled by VOLVER.