TIFF 2006 Day 8
While none of my five films today were great, it was another good day at the festival. You’ll have to forgive the rather short reviews tonight - with five films again tomorrow, I have to find a little time to sleep.
Primo Levi’s Journey
PRIMO LEVI’S JOURNEY is a documentary by Davide Ferrario that retraces the 8 month journey home to Italy taken by Levi and other Auschwitz survivors upon their liberation by the Russians in 1944. Levi subsequently wrote a book detailing the trip, and here we stop where they stopped: Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldavia, Austria, and get a glimpse of some aspect of life in these places today. 
It’s a bit of a scattershot approach: in Poland we visit Nova Huta, a decaying industrial city created from scratch during the communist era, while in Belarus we see that the simple life is little different than it was 60 years ago, and in the Ukraine xenophobia is still potent. Whatever they found wherever the documentarians went, they filmed: without a compelling focus, this film, while pleasant, will be forgotten quickly.
Renaissance
RENAISSANCE, the only animated feature I’m seeing at the festival this year, is set in a dystopian Paris of 2054 where a corporation and its technology is threatening to overwhelm society. Directed by graphic artist Christian Volckman, this film introduces us to a stunning high-contrast black and white computer generated world - gray is used exceedingly sparingly, and colour splashes onscreen in only one setting - and motion-captured actors are used to bring realistic movement and shape to a highly stylized world. So it’s gorgeous, but that said, this crime-thriller story is clicheed: our cop hero must turn in his badge when his methods are too unorthodox for his superiors, but he keeps on fighting the good fight to save a kidnapped girl. Still, there are a couple of twists that keep it interesting. Jonathan Pryce provides his vocal talents to bring a creepy villain to life, with other notables like Ian Holm and Daniel Craig making less distinctive contributions.
THE HALF LIFE OF TIMOFEY BEREZIN stars the wonderful Paddy Considine as Timofey Berezin, a Russian nuclear technician who is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation at the plant one day. Director Scott Z. Burns weaves the doomed Timofey’s reckless mission to leave his wife and son with the means to carry on without him, into the story of Shiv, a small-time Moscow protection racketeer who has to make good on an expensive mistake he has made. Timofey wants to sell some weapons grade plutonium, Shiv might have some clients for that. With a terrific script, a cast of quirky criminals, and a chilling topic, TIMOFEY makes for an engagingly unpredictable ride.
I first noticed Nanni Moretti’s work when CARO DIARIO came to the festival in 1994, having won him Best Director at Cannes that year: I have been catching his films ever since. Some, like 2001’s THE SON’S ROOM, which took the Palme d’Or at Cannes for Moretti’s stirring portrayal of family who lose their teenage son in a diving accident, have been terrifically moving while others have been less successful. THE CAIMAN is Moretti’s latest film, created by him to help influence the outcome of Italy’s spring election earlier this year. The object of Moretti’s ire in the film is the very controversial (and now former) Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi. THE CAIMAN, which became Moretti’s most popular film at the box office, helped seal Berlusconi’s fate: he lost the election.
CAIMAN is really two films: one is the story of film producer Bruno’s attempts to get a film about Berlusconi made, the other film is about the disintegration of Bruno’s private life during the same time. If the two films, constantly inter-cut, had more parallels, it would be have been interesting to follow, but Bruno’s life story, as it is, keeps stalling the more interesting story of the scandal-plagued Prime Minister. Moretti told us that his intention was to hold up Bruno’s family story as emblematic of what has happened to Italy under Berlusconi, but it still seems a bit of a stretch. Despite my reservations though, THE CAIMAN is still mostly entertaining, and somewhat provocative, and Moretti makes for a terrific Q&A speaker.
HULA GIRLS is based on the true story of a Japanese mining town which when faced the the closing of the mine, turns to creating a Hawaiian centre replete with dancing girls to bring tourists to the town and save jobs. Very cute, but very bring-on-the-violins too, HULA GIRLS takes the FULL MONTY/BILLY ELLIOT/BRASSED OFF/KINKY BOOTS formula and saves the town while dazzling us with some great dance numbers. It’s an audience pleaser, and could find an audience here were it to be generally released.
I saw “Renaissance (2006)” yesterday. Ouch, 2 hours of staring at an inkblot. Also about immortality, but despite the avant-guard graphics, there was no hope for this movie. The new-ground broken with the computer graphics should have been summarized in a 5 minute clip and put on the web.
Comment by Jeff K — September 15, 2006 @ 3:46 pm