Thursday, January 21, 2010

Maelström

by James McNally on January 21, 2010

in DVD

Maelström

Maelström (Director: Denis Villeneuve): My first exposure to Villeneuve’s work was his wickedly funny and stylish short Next Floor, and his latest fea­ture Polytechnique just won the award for Best Canadian Film of 2009 from the Toronto Film Critics Association, so I was eager to watch this film, which ori­gin­ally played to con­sid­er­able buzz at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival. I’m sorry that it took me so long to catch up with this unique film, and I can tell you that I’m going to be watching Polytechnique and every other bit of film Villeneuve has had a hand in cre­ating as soon as I can.

Maelström is the sort of auda­cious film­making that begins its tale with an untrans­lated title card in Norwegian, con­tinues with a talking fish as nar­rator, and then assaults you with the strains of “Good Morning Starshine” (from the musical Hair) over scenes of a woman having an abor­tion. And that’s just the first five minutes.

Bibiane Champagne (Marie-Josée Croze) is a suc­cessful young entre­preneur, run­ning a fash­ion­able boutique with her brother. They are the chil­dren of a famous designer, and this seems to weigh heavily on her. Weighing more heavily is the guilt she feels for the abor­tion she’s just had. After a night of partying to forget her pain, she drives drunk, hit­ting a ped­es­trian on her way home. She finds out a few days later in the news­paper that the man dragged him­self out of the road, staggered home, and died sit­ting at his kit­chen table. With her guilt now doubled, she’s dis­con­nected even fur­ther from her work and pon­ders sui­cide. Planning to ditch her car in the river, she almost drowns, but emerges from the water hoping for a second chance at life.

Her second chance arrives in the form of the son of the man she’s killed. While his father was a Norwegian fish­erman, Evian (Jean-Nicolas Verreault) is a scuba diver (or charm­ingly referred to in the sub­titles, a “frogman”), working for Hydro Quebec in the remote northern part of the province. When Bibiane is drawn to the morgue at the same time as Evian, they begin an enig­matic rela­tion­ship in which Bibiane pre­tends to be his father’s neigh­bour. Eventually the truth will come out and these two people will have to decide how to move for­ward with their lives.

Maelström has the sump­tuous visual style and mor­bidity of Peter Greenaway and the obses­sion with coin­cid­ence and weighty philo­soph­ical themes as Krzysztof Kieslowski. While that might not appeal to everyone, it’s a dream match for me, and while I caught myself a few times thinking the film was just a bit too pretty, I was solidly engrossed throughout and sat­is­fied by the conclusion.

Bold film­makers like Villeneuve are rare, and they can often make ter­rible mis­takes in judge­ment. Witness Julio Medem’s most recent film Caótica Ana (review), or Jaco van Dormael’s Mr. Nobody, both huge per­sonal dis­ap­point­ments after I’d enjoyed their earlier work. But I’m always willing to give film­makers like these another chance, hoping that failure doesn’t blunt their appetite for risk-taking. Or mine.

9/10(9/10)

Tagged as: canada, quebec

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Last Train Home

by James McNally on January 21, 2010 · 1 comment

in Doc Soup,Documentaries,Film Festivals

Last Train Home
Update — January 2011: I’m happy to report that KinoSmith is releasing the film on DVD in March 2011. Order your copy here.
Editor’s Note: Doc Soup is a monthly doc­u­mentary screening pro­gramme run by the good folks at Hot Docs. It gives audi­ences in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver their reg­ular doc fix each year from the fall through to the spring, leading up to the Hot Docs fest­ival itself.

Last Train Home (Director: Lixin Fan): China is argu­ably the world’s most important eco­nomy at the moment and the past fifty years have seen incred­ible changes, polit­ic­ally, eco­nom­ic­ally and socially. Many film­makers have emerged from the country, including a number of excel­lent doc­u­ment­arians. Chinese-Canadian Lixin Fan can proudly stand among them with Last Train Home, just his first fea­ture film as director.

In my lim­ited exper­i­ence, to make a great film about China, you must encom­pass the country’s vast­ness, both in terms of geo­graphy and of pop­u­la­tion, but also be able to focus in on indi­vidual stories. In this case, we are intro­duced to the Zhangs, a family of migrant workers, just as the par­ents are about to make their yearly journey home to their vil­lage to cel­eb­rate Chinese New Year. Along with 140 mil­lion other migrant workers, this is often the only occa­sion they get to spend time with their chil­dren and par­ents. Making their way from the indus­trial city in which they work to their vil­lage in the coun­tryside is an exhausting and stressful multi-day journey of more than 2,000 kilo­metres. Traveling by train, bus and ferry boat, they arrive exhausted and are able to spend only a few days with their son Yang (10) and daughter Qin (17), who have grown up under the care of their grandparents.

Despite the eco­nomic real­ities which make it neces­sary for fam­ilies to be divided this way, the Zhangs feel they are doing it so that their chil­dren will have better lives. They con­stantly badger their chil­dren about their grades, per­haps because they really have nothing else to talk about. Daughter Qin is reaching the stage of adoles­cence where she begins to rebel against her par­ents. She com­plains that they’ve essen­tially aban­doned her and her brother and a few months after they’ve returned to the city, she drops out of school to become a migrant worker her­self. The boredom of rural life for a teen­ager looks very dif­ferent from the per­spective of her par­ents who have been away for 16 years working in hor­rific con­di­tions just to provide their kids with this pro­tected upbringing, but that’s lost on Qin, who wants the “freedom” of working in a factory.

While this is a crushing blow for her par­ents, who wanted to see her finish her studies, by the next year, they’re ready to travel home again for the New Year hol­iday. They’ve been pres­suring Qin to return to school, and it looks as though she’s reluct­antly agreed. But this year’s migra­tion is affected by a snowstorm which knocks out the elec­trical grid and delays the trains for days. The scenes of huge crowds pushing each other are har­rowing. While the trip home is a huge hassle at the best of times, it become a ter­ri­fying ordeal when sched­ules don’t run smoothly. When they finally board their train, it’s clear that Qin is not speaking with her par­ents, and she spends the whole trip in sullen silence.

Things come to a head during the hol­iday, and Qin’s insolence leads to a phys­ical con­front­a­tion with her father. Eventually, like all par­ents, they resign them­selves to let­ting Qin go her own way, hoping that son Yang can finish school and sup­port the family. In the mean­time, they return to the city again, back to their mono­tonous factory jobs.

My syn­opsis makes this sound like a fic­tion fea­ture, and for all the intimacy the film­makers achieve, it might as well be. It’s helped tre­mend­ously by some very crisp editing, as well as some sweeping cine­ma­to­graphy of the lush Chinese coun­tryside. Last Train Home suc­ceeds in cap­turing both the epic scale of the changes sweeping today’s China and their impact on the indi­vidual fam­ilies strug­gling with them.

Two addi­tional notes. First the dis­claimer: my com­pany (Kinosmith) is the Canadian dis­trib­utor for this film. And second, the film is headed to the Sundance Film Festival, where it will com­pete in the World Cinema Documentary Competition.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Lixin Fan from after the screening:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 15:48

Official site of the film

9/10(9/10)

Tagged as: china, family, globalization

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NFB Goes 3D and HD!

by James McNally on January 21, 2010

in Web Sites

National Film Board Goes 3D

Celebrating the one year anniversary of their online screening room, and fol­lowing the suc­cess of such 3D titles as Avatar and Up, Canada’s National Film Board has con­tinued to innovate by making some of the films in its online screening room avail­able in 3D. Short films Drux Flux by Theodore Ushev and the Genie Award-winning Falling in Love Again by Munro Ferguson are avail­able now, as well as excerpts from Facing Champlain, a ste­reo­scopic pro­duc­tion cre­ated for the 400th anniversary cel­eb­ra­tions in Quebec City. The films will be view­able both in the online screening room and on the iPhone applic­a­tion using 3D glasses, which can either be ordered from the NFB web site, or picked up for free at their Toronto Mediatheque (150 John Street).

Visit the NFB 3D portal for more inform­a­tion.

In addi­tion, they are making 26 of their films avail­able in HD, including cel­eb­rated shorts like Madame Tutli-Putli, Ryan, and The Cat Came Back. No glasses required for these, just head to their HD portal and enjoy.

Tagged as: 3d, nfb

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