I realized that all I’d posted about my trip to Montréal so far was my list of films to see and then a few reviews. I wanted to post a little bit about my trip and about the festival experience itself, in case any of you are thinking of making the journey in the future.

I returned this past Wednesday after spending five days at the 34th edition of the Festival des films du monde. Started just one year after Toronto’s Festival of Festivals (now known as TIFF), Montréal’s oldest film festival has remained the personal project of Serge Losique, who has determined to keep its focus on (mostly) European art cinema. Although it has gradually been dwarfed by Toronto’s juggernaut, it still offers a huge range of programming (430 films from 80 countries!) and it has plenty to offer cinephiles who don’t mind doing their homework. Not to mention that it takes place in a beautiful city and that tickets cost a fraction of what TIFF is charging these days.

One of the things I like about MWFF’s programming is that it features a pretty wide range of what I’d call more commercial offerings from a few European markets. For instance, Quebécers are big fans of French cinema, so instead of only getting a few “important” films like at TIFF, this festival offers everything from comedies to thrillers, not only from France, but from places like Belgium and Spain as well. I also think that M. Losique and his programming team must be fans of the national cinema of places like Russia and the Balkan countries, for those seem to have healthy representation in the programme, at least over the two years that I’ve attended.

I purchased the 10-coupon booklet for $65 (all taxes included) this year, and that also gave me a $5 discount on the programme guide, which normally sells for $20. Compare this to TIFF’s prices ($160 plust HST and “fees” for 10 tickets, $32 plus HST and “fees” for the programme guide) and you’ll see what I mean about MWFF being a bargain. Apart from the cost, the festival experience is far less stressful as well. Unfortunately, that’s mostly due to the lack of crowds. It would be nice to see a few more sold-out screenings.

There are a few quirks. First of all, and this may be a problem with most festivals, but the web site needs some work. It’s navigable, but it needs to be updated in a more timely way. Even as a newsletter subscriber, I wasn’t notified when the programme was announced, nor was there a press release posted on the web site. For the record, the festival announced the full lineup on August 10th, but I had to dig around on the site to finally figure out when it had been updated.

Another caveat is that, although most films are shown with English subtitles, there are a few that are not. Last year, for instance, it was only when I was standing in line to get my ticket that I realized that the Spanish film I was anticipating was screening with French subtitles only. The key is looking for the letters “s.t.a.” (sous-titres anglais) in the printed schedule or on individual film pages of the web site. It can be deceiving since every film description in the programme guide and on the web site is translated into English, leading one to believe that an English speaker can actually see and understand every film in the festival. It doesn’t happen often, but if you want to avoid disappointment, check the schedule carefully.

Normally, each film screens several times but there some that may only screen once, another reason to check the schedule beforehand when planning your dates. Last year, I attended from Monday through Friday, and I found that many of the films I wanted to see were not programmed on the weekdays. Including a weekend this year turned out to be a good idea.

This year, I saw 9 films. I had a ticket for a tenth (The Myth of the American Sleepover, which I subsequently heard great things about), but opted for an early night instead. I haven’t written about all of them yet, but hope to get at least one more review posted before the madness of TIFF begins.

I also got to enjoy a little of the city itself. I stayed in an apartment in the Mile End neighbourhood owned by the mother of my friend Nicolas Gulino, a documentary filmmaker. Although I didn’t get to spend as much time with Nicolas as I would have liked, the apartment was in a fantastic location, 5 minutes’ walk from both Fairmount Bagel, Montréal’s oldest bagel bakery, and Dieu du Ciel, home of some of the most sublime microbrews I have ever tasted.

For the past two years, MWFF has proved to be a tasty appetizer for TIFF. If you have the time, I’d recommend checking it out. I took the train, and VIA’s service is comfortable, convenient to downtown, and relatively inexpensive. They even have free wi-fi on the trains.

Here are a couple of photos. They’re not great, since my camera was on full zoom and so they’re a bit blurry. They are, in order, Pete Smalls is Dead (review) director Alexandre Rockwell, star Seymour Cassel, Limbo (review) director Maria Sødahl, stars Line Verndal and Bryan Brown.

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Report: Montréal World Film Festival 2010

Limbo (Director: Maria Sødahl): I was initially attracted to this film because of its setting: a community of expat oil engineers in 1970s Trinidad. But quite apart from exquisite art direction, Limbo features one of the strongest performances I’ve seen in quite a while. Sonia (Line Verndal) has delayed joining her husband Jo in Trinidad to care for her mother, who’s just had a stroke. But after six months, she packs up her two young children and leaves Norway for the Caribbean. Upon her arrival, she experiences much more than culture shock. She discovers that her husband has been carrying on an affair with a local woman in her absence. Despite his declaration that it was just a “fling” and that it is over, she can’t seem to trust him, or to settle into her new life.

She’s also not accustomed to having servants make her meals and clean her house, and she seems unable to slip into the life of leisure that the other expat wives take for granted. Despite the fact that her husband’s friend has a Swedish wife, she seems unenthused by the other woman’s overtures of friendship.

Jo’s efforts to win her trust back also fail, and when she backs out of a trip to Houston with him, he becomes suspicious. When the children convince her to accompany their gardener on an overnight trip to catch crabs, she goes along and even flirts with the man, but it’s revenge and not lust that drives her.

Before long, her discomfort grows into a full-blown nervous breakdown, and she checks herself into a monastery to “rest.” With this time to clear her mind, she makes a decision about her future that upsets the equilibrium her husband has been so desperate to establish.

Though it might sound a bit like a soap opera on paper, in reality, the performances lift this considerably, turning it into a character study of a woman trapped in circumstances seemingly beyond her control. When she finally develops the strength to choose her own future, it coincides with a moment of tragedy that gives the film an ambiguous but somehow satisfying conclusion.

Here is the Q&A with director Maria Sødahl and stars Line Verndal and Bryan Brown from after the screening.

Download audio file (limbo_qa.mp3)
Duration: 16:33

(8/10)

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Limbo

Bjarnfreðarson (Director: Ragnar Bragason): Based on a popular Icelandic television show, Bjarnfreðarson topped the domestic box office for several weeks last Christmastime, besting even James Cameron’s Avatar. Although I suspect that familiarity with some of the TV show’s plotlines would enrich the experience, the film works quite well as a standalone story, and if anything, it’s made me eager to seek out the rest of the series.

We first meet Georg Bjarnfreðarson (Jón Gnarr, who co-wrote the script with Bragason) as he’s being granted parole from prison. Despite his protests that he never applied, he’s forced out and we soon understand why. Georg is a tyrant, imposing his own will on everyone and everything around him. Flashbacks show us the reasons. The son of a very unique single mother, Georg was raised as a vegetarian feminist communist and was expected to be a “great man.” Instead, his misadventures landed him in the slammer. Upon his release, his mother refuses to see him, so he crashes with Daniel, with whom he spent time in prison.

The nerdy Daniel is not someone you’d expect to have a criminal record, but apparently he got caught up in one of Georg’s schemes and did some time. Now, he’s about to graduate from medical school. At least, that’s what his wife and parents think. Secretly, he’s been studying art instead. Also living with them is Olafur, another prison buddy. He’s a 40-year-old who thinks he’s still 20, and when he loses his job as a delivery driver, an amazing piece of luck leads him to his true calling as a radio DJ.

Watching these three characters interact, it’s no wonder that they’ve featured in an entire series. What the film does, though, is to probe the oddball Georg’s backstory, and in the process, make us care about him. As we see him being picked on throughout his childhood, we realize that he’s never known a normal life or normal relationships. His desire to bond with the goofy Oli leads to some hilarity, but in the end, these misfits really do need each other.

Though this reminded me in parts of Canada’s own Trailer Park Boys, there was something deeper at work here. Although guilty of a few instances of poor taste (including giving Daniel a mentally-challenged brother-in-law and a father reduced to mumbling incoherently after a stroke), the film does convey a real sense of outsiders trying to make a new beginning, of trying to escape the personas that have been forced upon them. That the film is able to achieve this while also providing plentiful laughs is a credit to the filmmakers.

In any case, it has me prepared to spend large sums of money to watch the rest of the story. And shipping DVDs from Iceland isn’t cheap, you know.

(8/10)

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Bjarnfreðarson

Le Sentiment de la Chair (The Sentiment of the Flesh) (Director: Roberto Garzelli): When Helena, a young medical illustrator, begins experiencing lower back pain, she goes for x-rays, bringing her into contact with Benoit, a radiologist. A series of circumstances brings them together again and again and soon they are involved in a passionate love affair. Each of them is drawn to obsessively document the human body, both inside and out, and in order to break down all barriers to intimacy, they go to extreme lengths to explore each other’s bodies. Robert Garzelli’s feature debut has the germ of a fascinating idea at its heart, but in the end is as shallow, albeit beautiful, as its protagonists.

When Helena tells Benoit that it is a privilege for him to be able to see inside people, she’s right. But in equating that with intimacy, both she and Benoit are ludicrously misguided. If the film seemed more aware of that irony, it could have been a fascinating exploration of a romantic relationship. When she asks Benoit to scan her completely in an MRI machine, saying “I don’t want to have any secrets from you,” I almost laughed out loud, for all that we’ve seen from this extremely attractive couple up to that point has been an intense sexual relationship. Neither seems to know or care anything about the other’s family, circle of friends, dreams or aspirations.

The fact that Benoit can possess a full set of images of his lover’s body gives him no insight into her character. It’s simply x-ray porn. The lovers’ belief that they can know each other by knowing each other’s bodies is naive, at first charmingly, and then disturbingly so. If it was only that easy to see what was inside the other’s mind, heart, or soul.

In the end, the film goes for the psychological angle, and almost becomes a thriller, as we see these two obsess over, and then reject each other as they try to quell the growing intensity of their shared fetish. The final scene is meant to disturb, and it does, to a point. It prompted a few walkouts from the audience at my screening, but failed to generate any emotional reaction from me. The director seems to keep his distance, giving the film a cold, hard, dare I say clinical edge. Unfortunately, if there was any beating heart in this film, the x-rays failed to find it.

(7/10)

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Le Sentiment de la Chair (The Sentiment of the Flesh)

Pete Smalls is Dead (Director: Alexandre Rockwell): Peter Dinklage plays K.C., a former Hollywood screenwriter who now runs a laundromat. Having moved to New York after his wife died, he has little time for his former life, preferring to spend time with his beloved dog Buddha. But after a loan shark kidnaps the dog and holds him as ransom for an unpaid debt, K.C. has to come up with $10,000 fast. At the same time, his former colleague Pete Smalls, a successful director, has just washed up dead on a beach, and his friend Jack is pestering him to go to the funeral. Only after Jack promises to get him the money does K.C. agree to return to L.A.

This highly-contrived premise is the set up for a shaggy dog film that is overstuffed with quirk and straining from the abundance of shopworn cliches it employs to reach its predictably happy ending. On one hand, it’s great to see Dinklage in a role that doesn’t constantly make reference to his size. But he’s burdened with portraying a character who hasn’t cracked a smile in ten years, and who doesn’t get to change that in the film. Another annoyance is the use of voiceover throughout, as if this were a film noir.

The structure and characters are much too reminiscent of The Big Lebowski, a film with a much better script and fresher performances. Rockwell has assembled a great cast, most of whom have appeared in his earlier films, especially In the Soup. Some of the supporting cast have fun, especially Steve Buscemi (in a blonde afro wig) and Michael Lerner, playing a couple of greasy producers. And Mark Boone Junior, in the dude role of Jack, reminded me at times of the late great Maury Chaykin.

In the end, the script just has too many twists for its own good. The quirky gang of pals that comes together to help K.C. out seems thrown together unbelievably. Stabs of pseudo-symbolism (butterflies, snow globes) are embarrassing, and the overuse of film techniques like the iris zoom are just annoying.

I hate to sound so down on a film that was clearly a labour of love for all involved. Rockwell seems like a genuinely nice man, and I’m sure his cast all did the film as a favour to him. But the story didn’t hold my interest beyond the half-hour mark, and some characters (esp. Seymour Cassel’s) seemed to be written into the script just so he could give one of his actor friends a role. It feels a bit like a reunion project with no real life as a film of its own.

Perhaps it was just K.C.‘s (or was it Peter Dinklage’s?) gloom that permeated what was supposed to be a fun caper film. In any case, Pete Smalls is Dead. To quote one of the characters in the film, “he’s dead as a doornail.”

Here is the Q&A with director Alexandre Rockwell and stars Mark Boone Junior and Seymour Cassel from after the screening. Of note is the fact that Rockwell’s 87-year-old mother Svetlana lives in Montréal and was at the screening, sitting in the row right behind me. She asks Seymour Cassel a question that he spends quite a bit of time, uh, answering. Also of note was that Rockwell’s wife and daughter were sitting in the row behind me as well. His wife is Karyn Parsons, who played older sister Hilary on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Download audio file (petesmallsisdead_qa.mp3)
Duration: 22:01

(5/10)

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Pete Smalls is Dead