If you live in Canada and aren’t aware that CBC Newsworld runs a lot of great documentaries, then you’re missing out. Here are just a few bits of exciting news about their upcoming schedule.
This Sunday night, September 23rd, at 10pm Eastern and Pacific time, catch Everything’s Cool (review), a great positive documentary about climate change and people that are actually trying to do something about this scourge.
During the week of October 7th, the network is screening five of the films from the Why Democracy? project, three of which just screened at TIFF (the other two were featured at Hot Docs earlier this year). Full schedule and more information here.
Be proud, Canadians. These are your tax dollars at work!
Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien): I have to admit that as much as I’m familiar with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s name, I hadn’t seen any of his previous films (Three Times (2005) and Café Lumiere (2003) being the most recent). That being said, someone I know told me that in his opinion, most of Hou’s best work was from the 80s and 90s and is actually pretty hard to find. Setting the film in Paris was admittedly a gamble, and deciding to make a sort of homage to Albert Lamarisse’s classic children’s film La Ballon Rouge (1956) an even bigger one. For me, anyway, it didn’t pay off.
We’re dropped into a story with very little exposition. Juliette Binoche plays Suzanne, a voice actor for a puppet theatre and a harried single mom. Her son, Simon, is watched by a new nanny, Song Fang, who just happens to be both Chinese and a film student making a film. So, with an obvious directorial stand-in in place, what happens? Not too much. Song uses Simon in her film project which is very much like the classic film, and we see footage scattered throughout the rest of the main film including, somewhat confusingly, at the very beginning, before we’ve even met the characters. There are also scenes where the titular orb floats outside the apartment when Song is not actually filming. I found its presence baffling most of the time, and the film, like the lives it portrays, as scattered and uneven, though well-intentioned. Suzanne’s living arrangements are messy and her relationships unclear, and by the end of the film, there’s really no sense of resolution. What I did like about the film was its wonderful use of natural light, as well as the corresponding naturalness of the dialogue, with characters repeating dialogue not heard the first time by other characters, and other realistic touches.
But in the end, I wasn’t really moved. My balloon, instead of taking flight, just slowly deflated over the film’s 113 minutes.
All The President’s Men (Director: Alan J. Pakula): I was seven years old when the Watergate scandal broke in 1972, and I learned about it mostly from reading Mad magazine, believe it or not. Still, 35 years later, I’m not exactly sure exactly what happened, and I seriously believe that nobody under 50 even cares. But what Watergate showed us is that the abuse of power in a democracy is not new, but that stupid and evil people sometimes don’t get away with their crimes. That is, if the media is doing its job.
All The President’s Men was originally a book published by the two men responsible for breaking the story, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, both reporters for the Washington Post at the time of the scandal. Pakula’s film teamed up two of the era’s hottest actors, Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, and attempted to dramatize the story of perhaps the biggest political scandal of the 20th century. But though the film scooped four Oscars (including an adapted screenplay Oscar for writer William Goldman), I don’t think it’s aged well.
Audiences approaching the film today with little background knowledge will come away baffled, since the story moves along at breakneck pace, with names being tossed out with no context. The filmmakers may have assumed that in 1976, people would still be familiar with the story, since it occupied the newspapers for months on end. But without that background, it can seem pretty opaque. As well, we learn next to nothing about any of the characters, most notably our intrepid journalists. Worst of all, despite a running time well over two hours, the conclusion of the film is remarkably weak. A final roadblock seems to be wrapped up hastily and the ending disappoints with nothing but a teletype machine informing us of several indictments. There’s not even any archival footage of Nixon talking about the scandal, nor of his resignation.
Despite its obvious weaknesses, I still feel this is an important film, because it inspires the belief that journalism’s function is to empower democracy by speaking the truth to power. It’s outrageous that increasing corporate ownership and consolidation of the media landscape has left our democracy weaker and less accountable. My only wish would be for someone to make a strong documentary about Watergate to educate a younger generation. Maybe they could even recycle some of Mad’s satirical Watergate songs.
Chaotic Ana (Caótica Ana) (Director: Julio Medem): Chaotic is one way to put it. Train wreck might be more accurate. Annoying, artificial, absurd, and by the end, simply appalling. This was a real disappointment. I had been warned earlier in the week by some friends who saw the first screening, but I wanted to see for myself. Unfortunately, Medem has turned all the elements of his previous films up to 11, making this a jumbled mess of coincidence, chance encounters, performance art, hypnosis and an international cast speaking all the wrong languages. The director has clearly bitten off more than he can chew, and though the first half was at least watchable, I was annoyed by what appeared to be a kind of “show-off” attitude. Ana (played by the lovely Manuela Vellés) is a raw-talented painter living in a cave with her father on the island of Ibiza. One day, the slightly sinister Justine (Charlotte Rampling) arrives and offers to take her to Madrid and be her patron. Once there, she’s esconced in a decadent and mysterious house filled with artists of all kinds. Cue the pretentious art talk.
Then Ana begins to have powerful flashbacks and through a random encounter with experts in hypnosis, is suddenly the subject of numerous sessions exploring her past lives. Then she escapes as a stowaway on her friend’s father’s yacht and ends up in New York City, where both her handsome young hypnotist and Justine find her and take her to the desert, to discover her “true” self, the first in a long series of reincarnated women who all die violently at the age of 22. Still with me? There’s more. By the end, there’s even a ludicrous attempt to tie everything into the Iraq war.
Using intertitles to count down from 10 to 0, as in hypnosis, had one positive function. It let me know how much longer I had to endure. Even the sight of often-nude Ana wasn’t enough to make me stop wishing it would end. Medem is a talented director, but this was just self-indulgent and for that reason, it’s all the more disappointing.
A Gentle Breeze in the Village (Tennen kokekkô) (Director: Nobuhiro Yamashita): Director Nobuhiro Yamashita clearly loved school. His last film, Linda Linda Linda, was set in a high school, and this film is his ode to the rural schools, where primary and middle school students share the same building. Beautiful and sensitive Soyo is the only student in Grade 8 at her school in the idyllic countryside, and there are only six students in all. That is, until the arrival of Osawa, a cool boy from Tokyo. She’s immediately smitten with him, and although first love is thrilling for her, it also causes turmoil in her settled life. But Osawa soon fits in and is embraced by this remarkably close-knit group of students. The film covers a period of about 18 months, and all the time, Soyo can feel her childhood slipping away. This wonderful secure bubble will burst one day, but not just yet.
Yamashita has a wonderful way of portraying a sense of nostalgia, even while events are happening. It’s clearly an adult perspective, and it sometimes seems odd to see it being felt by teenagers, but it had me longing for the days when all I had to worry about was my school uniform. Adult problems hover in the distance. Osawa’s mother has some potentially major health issues in a town without a doctor. As well, she has moved back to town with him after her husband has left, and there’s a hint that Soyo’s father may be carrying on an affair with her. But in general, Soyo keeps all these worries at arm’s length. In her incredibly safe and love-filled world, she’s free to explore these new feelings for Osawa, all the while knowing that this means leaving behind her childhood for good. In one incredibly poignant scene, after a failed kiss with Osawa, she gently kisses the school’s blackboard. It’s a rehearsal for things to come, but also a farewell to something she loves deeply. Among all the gorgeous imagery that the film floats in front of us, that scene speaks loudest and truest.
Here is the Q&A with director Nobuhiro Yamashita from after the screening (the long pauses are when the translator is whispering the questions into his ear):
(6/10)
(7/10)
(5/10)
(8/10)
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