TIFF 2006 Day 3
Jamie Gulpilil
TEN CANOES, winner of the Special Jury Award at the Cannes Film Festival this year, is Australia’s ATANARJUAT, which means that while you’ll see no ice, you will see a beautifully shot and uniquely transportive aboriginal story that takes you to a time and place you’ve never been to before. Shot in Australia’s wild and stunning Northern Territory by Rolf de Heer, we join an aboriginal hunting party as a young man learns the traditions, skills, and legends of his ancestors, all the while scheming how he might spend some quality time with his older brother’s youngest wife. Charming and amusing, TEN CANOES is definitely worth watching for.
Last year one of the festival pics I attended was a documentary called ZIZEK about Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek. ZIZEK the movie dealt with Zizek’s political philosophy, recorded while speaking at universities around the world. Now Zizek is one tightly-wound and charismatic speaker, so it’s no surprise he’s back that this in a new film. Sophie Fiennes, sister of actors Ralph and Joseph, has dropped Zizek into his favourite movie scenes so he can explain his theories about desire in the world of cinematic art. The title - THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA - doesn’t refer to what you might think: it’s Zizek’s contention that cinema is the most perverted of arts because it doesn’t respond to our desires, instead it tells us what to desire. If that sounds dry, the film is certainly not. Zizek takes us through climactic moments of many films, especially those of Hitchcock and Lynch, explaining their power, and enlivening his monologue with dry wit, comedic timing, and sheer energy. PERVERT’S GUIDE ends up as a fascinating discourse on the power and message of cinema, and is a cineaste’s delight.
Manufactured Landscapes
Ever since I first saw a 2004 exhibition of Edward Burtynsky’s photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario, I have been a fan. Burtynsky focuses his camera lens on landscapes that man has created - open pit mines, oil fields, quarries, and used tire piles are featured topics - and creates pictures that are both beautiful and unsettling. MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES, named after Burtynsky’s photo exhibition, opens with a 10 minute single take that travels the entire length of a Chinese electronics assembly plant, before we meet the thousands of workers on parade. The scale of everything in this film is staggering. Documentarian Jennifer Baichwal and cameraman Peter Mettler have captured much of Burtynsky’s magic in a moving picture that follows the Burtynsky to China’s Three Gorges dam project, to the cities upstream that were destroyed in advance of the rising waters, to a ship-breaking beach in Bangladesh, and to Shanghai where towering highrises threaten the old city of low-rise homes. Thought-provoking without being preachy, sobering without being scary, MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES will be in Toronto theatres at the end of this month.
Saturday evening seemed like the right time to go light, so a British romantic comedy called LOVE AND OTHER DISASTERS seemed to be the obvious choice. Brittany Murphy stars as Jacks, a sprightly twenty-something who works at Vogue magazine, who wants to be Audrey Hepburn, who lives with her gay best friend, who doesn’t know what to do with an ex-boyfriend she’s still seeing, and who spends her time trying to fix up everyone around her. Luckily none of this requires Murphy to act, as that’s not what she does: what Murphy does do is walk through scenes and say things. I don’t know if she can act because she doesn’t act, she delivers lines. What I am saying is that Brittany Murphy is not a bad actress; in fact she is not an actress at all, she is a person who gets filmed doing things. Am I being clear?
That said, I like Brittany, but what is she doing in films? They have actresses for those.
Anyway, in LOVE AND OTHER DISASTERS, the ability to deliver lines is an important one, because that’s what this silly, silly film is: a bunch of lines, many of them mid-season-replacement sitcom-worthy, but some of them terribly good, delivered by a bunch of mostly unknown actors (who will remain so for the moment because I am too tired to look up all of their names), mostly pretty well. LOVE is an amiable and occasionally very funny film. The story revolves around, oh who cares? Dawn French shows up for a couple of minutes as a relationship therapist - that should be enough to get you into the theatre to enjoy a good laugh, or enough to make you wonder ‘who’s this Dawn French that she gets a mention for a two-minute role?’ if you don’t know her. Oh, and there were some life-affirming insights at the end. Can you tell I am uncomfortable with really having enjoyed this film?
VENUS, however, I have no reservations about. VENUS is the story of Maurice, an aging British stage actor, played by a superb Peter O’Toole, who falls for a young girl who has been nursing his friend. It seems the young lady - hmm, she’s no lady - played with intensity by newcomer Jodie Whittaker (does she realize she’s holding her own acting with Lawrence of Arabia?) is turning her aging charge into a mental patient: Maurice’s friend Ian just doesn’t know how to relate to Venus, and she’s driving him nuts. Maurice initially just gets her out of Ian’s way, but this long-in-the-tooth ladies’ man is soon considering her as an object of desire, despite their huge age difference. Written by the brilliant Hanif Kureishi (MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE) and directed by Roger Michell, (someone who has been really proving himself of late: ENDURING LOVE, THE MOTHER), VENUS deftly walks the fine line in an area potentially loaded with mines. What will Maurice do? What can he do? What should he do? This film, which could have been cheap and silly turns out thoughtful and poignant, and very, very funny at times. Besides O’Toole and Whittaker, the film holds small but good parts for some other great British actors including Richard Griffiths and Vanessa Redgrave. It is a refreshing take on aging, and the ageless quest for love. Easily worth your hard-earned dollars at the box office.