TIFF

Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding

by Drew Kerr on September 30, 2011

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding

Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding (Director: Bruce Beresford): Jane Fonda takes on just her third acting role in the past 21 years in dir­ector Bruce Beresford’s latest film. It’s not dif­fi­cult to see what drew Fonda to the showy char­acter of Grace, an eccentric hippie that allows her to send up her lib­eral Hanoi Jane image. What is hard to figure out is why she pulled her­self out of semi-retirement for a dramedy that has little else going for it, as Grace inhabits a cine­matic world that sur­rounds her with dull char­ac­ters and unin­ventive storylines.

The plot: Diane, a repressed, con­ser­vative New York City lawyer (played by Catherine Keener) sep­ar­ates from her hus­band of 20 years and decides to take her two kids Zoe and Jake (played by Elizabeth Olsen and Nat Wolff, respect­ively) to visit her mother (Fonda’s char­acter) in Woodstock, New York. Diane and Grace haven’t spoken in 20 years, an estrange­ment appar­ently stem­ming from an incident where Grace tried to sell an attendee at her daughter’s wed­ding some pot. Seems a little harsh, but okay. We know Grace is wacky because she lets chickens stay inside her house and still lives like the 60s never ended. Naturally, Diane’s kids come to love their cool new grand­mother because she rep­res­ents everything their uptight mother isn’t. The gang’s earn­estly trans­form­ative trip finds Diane and Grace trying to heal their rela­tion­ship, while Diane and the kids also all laugh­ingly set off on their own romantic adven­tures: Diane hooks up with a carpenter/singer-songwriter played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoe with a butcher played by Chace Crawford, and Jake with a diner wait­ress played by Marissa O’Donnell.

Joseph Muszynski and Christina Mengert’s script suf­fers greatly from an unima­gin­ative over-reliance on the theme of oppos­ites to create dra­matic ten­sion. That might be fine if they played this card once or twice, but they go to the well three times with it in pairing char­ac­ters with dia­met­ric­ally opposed beliefs and ways of life. Along with the mother/daughter rela­tion­ship we also have Zoe, a staunch veget­arian, falling for a guy who slices and dices dead animals for a living, and Diane fights her ingrained repres­sion (and the fact she’s mere days removed from leaving her hus­band) as she falls for Morgan’s free spir­ited char­acter. By the way, Morgan’s tone-deaf singing per­form­ances are by them­selves enough for me not to recom­mend the film. The other major problem with the script is the reunion of Diane and Grace and the intro­duc­tion of the kids to their grand­mother for the first time. There’s some mild awk­ward­ness, but other than that it just feels com­pletely devoid of any emo­tion or basis in reality.

Fonda’s per­form­ance is one of the few redeeming parts of the film, even if Grace does veer some­what toward being a cari­ca­ture of an aging bohemian. Despite being 73, Fonda still brings a sex­i­ness and energy to her work that’s a good fit for her mis­chievous char­acter — her “cock block” line is one of the fun­niest I’ve heard in a film this year. Otherwise, Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding dis­ap­point­ingly plays it safe and straight up.

Tagged as: #tiff11

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Hollywood Classics: The Cinema Is Nicholas Ray at TIFF Bell Lightbox

by James McNally on September 29, 2011 · 2 comments

in Cinematheque,Directors,Special Events,Theatrical Release,TIFF

Hollywood Classics: The Cinema <em>Is</em> Nicholas Ray at TIFF Bell Lightbox

From October 2nd through December 13th, TIFF Bell Lightbox will present a ret­ro­spective of the work of icon­o­clastic American dir­ector Nicholas Ray (1911–1979). It’s a full-scale exhib­i­tion in honour of the cen­tenary of Ray’s birth, and will con­tinue into the new year with another selec­tion of his work.

Ray was a unique char­acter, making per­sonal films about ali­en­ated youth and vul­ner­able people within the Hollywood studio system. Perhaps best known for his work with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Ray had been exploring the same themes from the very begin­ning of his career. His first fea­ture, They Live By Night (1948), fea­tured two naïve young lovers on the run from the law; it was remade by Robert Altman as Thieves Like Us (1974) and was a huge influ­ence on Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973). Other career high­lights screening during the series:

  • In A Lonely Place (1950): Humphrey Bogart gives one of his best per­form­ances as a man accused of murder who finds love but sees it des­troyed by his self-loathing rage.
  • On Dangerous Ground (1952): Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino star in this noirish tale of the trans­forming power of love.
  • Bigger Than Life (1956): a Technicolor marvel fea­turing James Mason in a ter­ri­fying turn as a bene­volent teacher trans­formed by the side effects of a drug treatment.
  • Bitter Victory (1957): an anti-heroic war film set in the North African desert during World War II, the film pits two British officers against each other in the after­math of a love triangle.

Ray’s focus on out­siders, on the lonely and mis­un­der­stood mis­fits in our midst, was ahead of its time, and has endeared him to modern dir­ectors like Jim Jarmusch (who studied under him at NYU in the 1970s), Martin Scorsese, and many of the fig­ures of the French New Wave, most not­ably Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. It was Godard who, in his review of Bitter Victory, provided the quo­ta­tion that forms the title of the series:

There was theatre (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforward there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray.

Tickets for all screen­ings are now avail­able to order online.

Tagged as: lightbox, nicholasray

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The Lady

by Drew Kerr on September 29, 2011

in Film Festivals,TIFF

The Lady

The Lady (Director: Luc Besson): Director Luc Besson steps out of his com­fort zone with The Lady, a biopic about Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese politi­cian who spent almost 15 years under house arrest in her family com­pound for leading a demo­cratic uprising that opposed Burma’s oppressive and cor­rupt gov­ern­ment. Best known for high energy movies like La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element, and Leon: The Professional, Besson reins in the action for this expansive drama, which sur­pris­ingly focusses as much (if not more) on Suu Kyi’s rela­tion­ship with her family as on her polit­ical his­tory. In per­form­ances sure to gen­erate Oscar buzz, Michelle Yeoh plays the tit­ular char­acter and David Thewlis plays her hus­band Michael Aris, a pro­fessor of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at the University of Oxford.

Suu Kyi lived abroad in England for most of her adult life, where she and Aris raised two boys, until returning to her native country in 1988 to tend to her sick mother. Once there, she is approached by locals to lead efforts to form a new gov­ern­ment that will bring demo­cracy to the country, ending the iron-handed rule and human rights abuses of the leaders in power. This is one area of the film where the expos­i­tion felt clum­sily handled; it’s jar­ring and con­fusing when Suu Kyi rap­idly goes from seem­ingly being a simple Oxford house­wife to the high pro­file leader of a polit­ic­ally chaotic country. No back­ground is given on her adult years before her return to Burma (was she polit­ic­ally active while in England?) and there’s no real probing into her motiv­a­tions or qual­i­fic­a­tions for taking on such a weighty and dan­gerous pos­i­tion, other than the fact that her father aspired to be a figure of change in the country before he was killed by opposing mil­itary forces when Suu Kyi was a child. That was obvi­ously a factor, but a deeper explor­a­tion of this crit­ical point in Suu Kyi’s life is needed, espe­cially when we see the massive sac­ri­fices she makes for her beliefs (she misses years of her family’s lives and is unable to be with her hus­band as he fights and ulti­mately suc­cumbs to cancer in 1999). Thewlis gives an excel­lent per­form­ance as Aris, who devotedly shared in his wife’s struggle and unre­mit­tingly fought for her freedom.

Yeoh delivers a dig­ni­fied, com­pas­sionate por­trait of Suu Kyi, but is hand­cuffed some­what by Besson’s and screen­writer Rebecca Frayn’s rather ped­es­trian sum­ma­tion of her struggle. Despite its lengthy run­ning time (145 minutes), the film feels rushed and fails to res­onate quite as deeply as such a remark­able story should. Yeoh met the politi­cian in Burma last December, a month after Suu Kyi was finally freed, and attempted to visit her again in June while on a break from shooting The Lady in Thailand, but was deported and black­listed by Burmese officials.

I’d never heard of Suu Kyi until U2 brought her name to a wider audi­ence with the song “Walk On” and during brief seg­ments about her at every show on their last couple of tours, for which Besson gives the band a couple of shout-outs in his film, how­ever awk­ward (one of Suu Kyi’s sons wears a shirt from the band and one of their songs plays on the soundtrack). The Lady, although flawed, is a well-intentioned effort that will bring fur­ther atten­tion to her extraordinary life and the ongoing fight for human rights in Burma.

Tagged as: #tiff11, biopic, Burma, humanrights, politics

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Pearl Jam Twenty

by Drew Kerr on September 21, 2011

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,TIFF

Pearl Jam Twenty

Pearl Jam Twenty (Director: Cameron Crowe): Director Cameron Crowe revisits his rock journ­alist past with Pearl Jam Twenty, a ret­ro­spective of the Seattle band’s career and the first film that was accepted at this year’s fest­ival. The screening I attended came a couple of days after the film’s world premiere and was sand­wiched in between a couple of con­certs in town for the band, so the numerous hard­core fans in attend­ance were exuberant and clearly in the midst of a Toronto Pearl Jam love-in. More casual or “lapsed fans” (such as myself), who lost touch with the group fol­lowing their first decade of megas­tardom, might find them­selves strug­gling to main­tain a heightened level of interest as the story unfolds, however.

That story begins with a pre-grunge band called Mother Love Bone that fea­tured future Pearl Jam mem­bers Jeff Ament (bass) and Stone Gossard (guitar), who go on to form Pearl Jam after the drug over­dose death of Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood. Crowe appro­pri­ately handles the material on Wood with del­icacy, but the rev­er­ence afforded the mar­gin­ally tal­ented singer’s unmem­or­able work by his peers is over­stated and com­pletely failed to con­nect with me. Ament and Gossard are left to start over, adding gui­tarist Mike McCready and vocalist Eddie Vedder, who col­lect­ively form the core of the new group. All four mem­bers have stayed together since, with some­what of a revolving door pro­ces­sion of drum­mers that the film humor­ously addresses in a short seg­ment (the pos­i­tion is even­tu­ally sta­bil­ized with the addi­tion of former Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron). The standard rock doc/Behind The Music fare is covered: the band grap­pling with the effects of their met­eoric rise to fame, group power struggles, striving to stay music­ally rel­evant, and sig­ni­ficant moments from their career, not­ably their noble attempt at taking on Ticketmaster, and the 2000 Roskilde Festival tragedy in Denmark, where nine fans were crushed to death during the band’s set.

Crowe was the bene­fi­ciary of a band that was very for­ward thinking in doc­u­menting their career, allowing him the luxury of having approx­im­ately 1200 hours of archival footage at his dis­posal. Much of it is rare or pre­vi­ously unseen, such as the clip (long rumoured to exist among Pearl Jam and Nirvana fans) of Vedder meeting sup­posed rival Kurt Cobain at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards. As Vedder explains it, the two bickered with each other in the press, although the media blew their dis­like for one another far out of pro­por­tion. Other mem­or­able clips include one where Vedder barely man­ages to con­tain his rage toward an overly aggressive security guard during one of their Vancouver shows, plus numerous video examples demon­strating Vedder’s dan­gerous propensity for scaling to the upper levels of various venues while per­forming and launching him­self into the audi­ence. Scattered throughout the film are Crowe-shot live per­form­ances, including a ver­sion of “Alive” that only served to remind me that if I never hear that, or any of the other singles off their over­played debut album again, it’ll be too soon. Band inter­views reveal indi­viduals who come across a little less ser­ious than is prob­ably their public per­cep­tion, which is prob­ably because Vedder, who appears to have mel­lowed with age, was more than insuf­fer­able enough for the entire band.

I prob­ably expected more out of Pearl Jam Twenty, just because a big-name dir­ector like Crowe was at the helm. He does a thor­ough, com­petent job in presenting the band’s col­ourful story, an integral part of which has been their desire to diverge from the status quo career path that rock bands are sup­posed to take, but the film fails to stand out in the rock doc­u­mentary sub-genre.

Pearl Jam Twenty received a world­wide one-time only the­at­rical screening on September 20th. It will be broad­cast on the PBS American Masters series on October 21st, fol­lowed by a DVD and Blu-Ray release on October 25th.

Tagged as: #tiff11, music

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TIFF 2011: That’s a Wrap

by James McNally on September 20, 2011 · 3 comments

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Despite this being my 17th fest­ival, I have never really written wrap-up posts, but I’m doing so this year for the first time. Mostly because I’m afraid that I won’t be able to deliver full reviews for everything I’ve seen, des­pite my best inten­tions. As my reviews have grown in length (back in 2000, I think I wrote about 100–150 words on each film), they’ve also become harder to write. Getting behind can sap a lot of energy, so instead of just giving up, I’m going to write a little bit about each film, with my inten­tion to write more later still intact.

2011 was a strange year for me per­son­ally at TIFF. For the very first time, I applied for press accred­it­a­tion. Since I was between day jobs, I figured I’d have a lot of time for films, industry ses­sions, inter­views, parties, the whole gamut. But when my request was turned down, I was glad that I’d still pur­chased a 10-ticket pass. Between that, a couple of films I saw in Montréal, pre-TIFF press screen­ings, a pur­chased Midnight Madness ticket and one more given to me by a friend, I actu­ally saw 19 TIFF films this year (21 if we count each Dreileben film sep­ar­ately. Here they are in roughly the order I enjoyed them, most to least.

The Artist

The Artist (France, Director: Michel Hazanavicius)

A joy from start to finish, The Artist is an homage to silent film and to the com­edies of the 20s and 30s. It’s not quite a silent film, and the use of sound in many clever ways, along with great art dir­ec­tion and two very attractive leads (three, if you count Uggy the Jack Russell ter­rier) make it an extremely enjoy­able trip into the early years of studio filmmaking.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Martha Marcy May Marlene (USA, Director: Sean Durkin)

A fea­ture debut by both dir­ector Sean Durkin and act­ress Elizabeth Olsen, this is a mature and psy­cho­lo­gic­ally rich film about a woman trying to flee a mys­ter­ious cult. Finding refuge with her estranged sister and her hus­band doesn’t prove to be very helpful. Smart editing and a remark­able per­form­ance by Olsen, along with careful use of genre tech­niques make this one of the best films I’ve seen this year.

The Story of Film: An Odyssey

The Story of Film: An Odyssey (UK, Director: Mark Cousins)

I saw this mam­moth 15-hour doc­u­mentary on the his­tory of cine­matic innov­a­tion in five 3-hour seg­ments, and by the end of the week, the smallish but enthu­si­astic audi­ence had bonded like after a week of summer camp. Mark Cousins’ impish pres­ence added to the magic, com­ple­menting his med­it­ative voi­ceover in the daily Q&A ses­sions. Global in reach, but also endear­ingly idio­syn­cratic, The Story of Film: An Odyssey should be required viewing for cinephiles everywhere.

Full Review

This is Not a Film

This is Not a Film (Iran, Directors: Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb)

Banned from film­making or leaving the country, and facing a prison sen­tence, Jafar Panahi made this “exer­cise” just to record a day in his life, waiting on legal appeals, meeting with a film­maker friend, dis­cussing the script of the film he’s now banned from making. But Panahi is a film­maker in the way that the rest of us are air-breathers. He simply cannot stop using the lan­guage of film to express him­self. This allegedly tossed-off exer­cise is moving, funny, beau­tiful and ulti­mately tragic if it is indeed the last film we’ll see from Panahi for a while.

Volcano (Eldfjall)

Volcano (Eldfjall) (Iceland, Director: Rúnar Rúnarsson)

The fea­ture debut from one of the most acclaimed short film dir­ectors in the world. Despite a script without a lot of dia­logue, Icelandic theatre actor Theodór Júlíusson delivers a nuanced per­form­ance as Hannes, a retired school jan­itor and all-around cur­mudgeon who seems to come to emo­tional life after a family tragedy. In the same way that a vol­cano can be beau­tiful to watch but also destructive, we don’t know what damage Hannes’ erup­tions might cause.

Goodbye First Love (Un amour de jeunesse)

Goodbye First Love (Un amour de jeun­esse) (France, Director: Mia Hansen-Løve)

As a huge fan of the director’s last film (Le pere de mes enfants), I was eager to see her explor­a­tion of the con­fu­sion and pain of first love. Lola Creton’s inscrut­able beauty is riv­eting as she nav­ig­ates a teenage love affair and its after­math over a period of almost a decade. Just 16 when the film was shot, it’s a bit dif­fi­cult to buy her as a woman in her mid-20s, but the film is emo­tion­ally res­onant and always a pleasure to watch, even when it’s also painful.

Oslo, August 31st

Oslo, August 31st (Norway, Director: Joachim Trier)

Based on the same novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle that inspired Louis Malle’s film The Fire Within, Trier’s second fea­ture film is a sens­itive and very sad explor­a­tion of one day in the life of Anders, a reformed junkie about to com­plete his res­id­en­tial drug treat­ment. On a day pass in order to attend a job inter­view, Anders tries to con­nect with his old friends and family mem­bers with little suc­cess. His des­pair at having to start his life over at the age of 34 drives him into a very dark corner. Trier’s lovely humanism makes watching Anders’ determ­in­a­tion to self-destruct heartbreaking.

Alps (Alpeis)

Alps (Alpeis) (Greece, Director: Yorgos Lanthimos)

Though not quite as sur­prising as his pre­vious film Dogtooth, Lanthimos applies his unique ideas about social con­trol to a larger sandbox. A group of “sub­sti­tutes” offer to imper­sonate the dead friends and rel­at­ives of the recently bereaved. The mannered acting and opaque motiv­a­tions of the actors make this a many-layered puzzle that will reward mul­tiple viewings.

Dreileben

Dreileben (Germany, Directors: Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, Christoph Hochhäusler)

Three films from three dif­ferent dir­ectors, built around the same story. A con­victed killer and sex offender escapes from a hos­pital in the idyllic German coun­tryside. Beats Being Dead is a teen romance between one of the hos­pital order­lies, a child of priv­ilege doing his national ser­vice, and a hotel maid from a poor immig­rant family. Don’t Follow Me Around explores the strangely com­pet­itive rela­tion­ship between a police psy­cho­lo­gist called in to work on the case, and an old col­lege friend who has moved to the area. One Minute of Darkness is the only film to deal head-on with the escaped man, and although most like a police pro­ced­ural, leads to a sur­prising con­clu­sion. Sort of like a German ver­sion of the Red Riding tri­logy, Dreileben uses a large canvas to illus­trate many dif­ferent themes about not only crime and pun­ish­ment, but about class issues and the psy­cho­logy of rela­tion­ships as well.

Drive

Drive (USA, Director: Nicolas Winding Refn)

Featuring Ryan Gosling as the unnamed Driver, Drive is a brilliantly-directed genre exer­cise from Danish dir­ector Nicolas Winding Refn, working in Hollywood for the first time. As an homage to the car and crime films of the 80s, it’s remark­ably slick and violent. Though Refn attempts to make it into a res­onant fairytale, for me it was more style over sub­stance. Despite a hyp­notic and unfor­get­table soundtrack of almost-cheesy synth music, the rest of the film faded away quickly after I saw it. But it’s def­in­itely still very much worth seeing.

Le Havre

Le Havre (Finland, Director: Aki Kaurismäki)

Reliably Kaurismäkian, Le Havre doesn’t find the Finnish dir­ector breaking any new ground, but it remained a pleasure to watch. Aging bohemian Marcel Marx is a shoe­shiner who takes pity on a refugee boy who has escaped the author­ities in the Norman port town of Le Havre. Like in many other of his films, Kaurismaki peoples his gloriously-lit palette with a quirky cast of sup­porting players, evoking a time when people really cared about their neigh­bours. If that neigh­bour turns out to be an illegal immig­rant, these people take it in stride. More a hopeful fable than a real­istic drama, Kaurismäki’s big-hearted humanism is still worthy of praise.

Full Review

Damsels in Distress

Damsels in Distress (USA, Director: Whit Stillman)

After a 13-year hiatus, Whit Stillman (Metropolitan) returns with this unchar­ac­ter­ist­ic­ally broad comedy about a group of col­lege girls, led by the excel­lent Greta Gerwig, whose attempts to help their class­mates usu­ally go pathet­ic­ally awry. I found the film genu­inely funny, des­pite many critics’ dis­ap­point­ment. Allowing Stillman to make a simple comedy seemed beyond their indul­gence, with most hoping for the incisive social cri­ti­cism of his earlier films. Considering that this pro­ject was the one he could get fin­anced, I prefer to think that he’s got more “intel­li­gent” pro­jects up his sleeve.

Miss Bala

Miss Bala (Mexico, Director: Gerardo Naranjo)

A Mexican beauty pageant con­testant becomes swept up in the war between drug traf­fickers and the police. Shot almost documentary-style, Miss Bala never leaves Laura’s (the gor­geous and vul­ner­able Stephanie Sigman) per­spective and while this increases the ten­sion as the film pro­gresses, it doesn’t allow us any con­text for what she’s exper­i­en­cing. Fantastic cinematography.

Shame

Shame (UK, Director: Steve McQueen)

For me, this was a huge dis­ap­point­ment. After the vis­ceral impact of McQueen’s pre­vious film Hunger, I expected a lot from this story of a sex-addicted man (Michael Fassbender) living alone in New York. When his sister arrives, there is some real ten­sion between them, which for me seemed inces­tuous. But there’s not much revealed, and with no hint of any nor­mality in his life, the film failed to con­nect emo­tion­ally with me. Even the grandly oper­atic final act left me cold.

Take This Waltz

Take This Waltz (Canada, Director: Sarah Polley)

Sarah Polley’s sopho­more dir­ect­orial effort has a lot going for it. A great cast, some lovely art dir­ec­tion and cine­ma­to­graphy and an inter­esting premise (not to men­tion a title taken from a Leonard Cohen song). But the film, about a mar­ried woman’s struggle to choose between her dis­tracted but loving hus­band and a sexy stranger, failed to work for me. Too much reli­ance on romantic comedy clichés as well as a script that could have used a few more drafts spoil a poten­tially great film that des­per­ately needed a sense of gravity and some more grown-up dia­logue. And des­pite my fears that he would sink the film, Seth Rogen actu­ally delivers its best performance.

Full Review

Kill List

Kill List (UK, Director: Ben Wheatley)

I belatedly decided to see the very last Midnight Madness screening, des­pite not having seen Wheatley’s pre­vious film Down Terrace. Blending kit­chen sink drama with thriller and horror ele­ments mostly works in this dis­turbing little movie. Jay is a hitman who hasn’t worked in 8 months after some­thing went wrong on his last job. His wife is pres­suring him to get back to work, and when his partner and pal Gal pro­poses an easy local job, he accepts. But things start to get weird as they work their way down the list of tar­gets. I appre­ci­ated the smart script but the accents were a little hard to make out, and the twists the plot took left a sig­ni­ficant por­tion of the audi­ence scratching their heads. Wheatley is a prom­ising film­maker who might still be wearing his influ­ences a bit too vis­ibly on his sleeve at this stage.

Amy George

Amy George (Canada, Directors: Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas)

A debut fea­ture from two dir­ectors not long out of their teens, Amy George explores the dark and mys­ter­ious world of adoles­cent male sexu­ality. When 13-year-old Jesse gets an assign­ment in pho­to­graphy class to take a pic­ture that rep­res­ents some aspect of him­self, he soon finds him­self up a tree next to his neighbour’s house, training his tele­photo lens on his slightly-older friend Amy. If it’s at times overly impres­sion­istic and tech­nic­ally rough, the film pays dividends with its tiny epi­phanies in Jesse’s coming of age.

Full Review

J'aime regarder les filles

J’aime regarder les filles (France, Director: Frederic Louf)

In its themes and sub­ject matter, Frederic Louf’s film aims at being a French ver­sion of some­thing like Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan but it ends up a lot closer to John Hughes’ ter­ritory. Primo is a young man whose par­ents own a flower shop, but when he sneaks into a rich kid’s party one evening and spies the beau­tiful Gabrielle, he begins imper­son­ating someone he’s not. It’s 1981 and France has just elected its first Socialist President, François Mitterrand. Among his group of new friends, this is a dis­aster, but for Primo and his friend Malik, it’s an era of new hope. It’s a nice idea, but in the end, the film plays out quite simply. Primo learns his lesson and a few laughs are had, but the char­ac­ters are mostly ste­reo­types. It’s a fun comedy, but less sub­stan­tial than it tries to be.

SuperClásico

SuperClásico (Denmark, Director: Ole Christian Madsen)

Another comedy that ends up being a lot less than expected. Christian is the owner of a wine shop in Denmark whose wife has left him to live with a soccer star in Buenos Aires. He takes his son along to try to win her back. Despite the ref­er­ences to two of my favourite sub­jects (wine and soccer), SuperClásico man­ages to dis­ap­point with its wafer-thin char­ac­ters and simplistic plot. In a city of nearly 13 mil­lion, how does it turn out that Christian ends up in a hotel room next to his run­away son, for instance? These ele­ments of farce (along with an annoying voi­ceover from an anonymous nar­rator) seem very low­brow and just down­right lazy from a Danish comedy.

Tagged as: #tiff11

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