TIFF

JCVD (2008, Director: Mabrouk El Mechri): At just 47 years-old, Jean-Claude Van Damme (JCVD) is looking really old and tired. He’s a fading action hero like Sylvester Stallone and Steven Seagal. What could be a better way to get back in the spotlight than make a film about yourself, warts and all? It worked for Pauly Shore, sort of.

Van Damme plays himself in this action-comedy. He walks into a bank robbery and gets taken hostage with several others. The police mistakenly believe that Van Damme has gone over the edge and that he alone is behind the robbery and hostage-taking.

This isn’t your typical Van Damme action film. Instead, it examines the nature of fame. It shows how false the notion of celebrity can be. The hostage crisis shows Jean-Claude to be a regular guy who fears for his life in a dangerous situation. He may be a famous Belgian movie star, but he’s also in the middle of a child custody battle, broke, and losing movie roles to that damn Steven Seagal.

All of this leads up to a bizarre monologue whereby Van Damme looks directly at the camera and pours out his soul for 9 minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it, but the scene absolutely works. At the Q&A after the film, director Mabrouk El Mechri revealed that this entire scene was kept secret from the crew until the moment of shooting.

A lot of the scenes in JCVD were improvised. El Mechri had a script but quite often let the actors come up with their own dialogue. The results are very funny and in El Mechri’s words, “better than the dialogue [he] came up with.”

This film generated a lot of buzz at Cannes which is sure to continue after the screenings in Toronto. Tonight’s crowd at the Ryerson Theatre loved the film and it was a great way to kick off the Midnight Madness program at TIFF ‘08.

I found the film to be unique and quite enjoyable despite the comparisons to Being John Malkovich (1999). If you’ve ever wondered what happened to the “Muscles from Brussels” then JCVD is your answer.

Tagged as: belgium

{ 1 comment }

Country Wedding (Sveitabrúðkaup) (2008, Director: Valdís Óskarsdóttir): For a country of just 300,000 souls, Iceland has a remarkably creative and productive population. It’s practically crawling with artists, musicians and filmmakers and normally we get a good selection of Icelandic films at TIFF each year. Strangely, this year there are only two, and they are both about weddings in the countryside. I chose to see this one based on the trailer, which made it look more like a comedy than Baltasar Kormákur’s White Night Wedding (Brúðguminn), which is in all likelihood an equally worthy film. Director Valdís Óskarsdóttir is a well-known editor who has worked on the films of Gus Van Sant, Michel Gondry, Lars von Trier and others; it makes sense that for her directorial debut she would return home to work with a talented group of actors who were comfortable working in an unorthodox way.

The barebones story concerns a couple traveling in two rented buses with their families, friends and assorted hangers-on to their wedding ceremony in a country church. The film is more interesting for the methods used in its making than the actual story itself. Óskarsdóttir gave each of her actors a sort of character outline and asked them all to come up with their own backstories and at least one “secret” that they could choose to reveal or not reveal during filming. They rehearsed, but only events that would have happened before the actual events portrayed onscreen. The actual shoot was just seven days long and was completely unscripted and largely improvised. The results are genuinely funny and uncomfortable in equal measure, with the plans and relationships going off the rails at every opportunity. The best part of the cast Q&A after the screening was learning that several of the onscreen obstacles and revelations were actually real.

Trailer (subtitled)

Here is the Q&A with director Valdís Óskarsdóttir and the cast 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: 15:01

(7/10)

Tagged as: iceland, wedding

{ 1 comment }

Examined Life (2008, Director: Astra Taylor): This documentary takes philosophy to the streets as filmmaker Astra Taylor conducts interviews with nine prominent thinkers in decidedly non-academic settings. Most entertaining is Cornel West, perhaps America’s best-known public intellectual, who rhapsodizes about jazz, blues and the life of the mind in the back of a New York City taxicab. Almost as interesting is Slovenian cultural critic Slavoj Zizek (the subject of Taylor’s first film, simply called Zizek!) who holds forth on the environmental crisis in the middle of a dump. His provocative suggestion is that humanity should become even more artificial and separate from the natural world. Martha Nussbaum provides a clear historical overview of political philosophy and discusses why the field is in dire need of new enquiry. The other segments were less successful for me, mostly because ideas were either insufficiently unpacked, or else huge assumptions were left undefended. Though that’s unavoidable in a film potpourri like this one, I think I would rather have had more time with the above three thinkers. As a film, it was only moderately successful. Though some of the subjects seemed happy to be in new settings, others seemed distracted by their surroundings or by their chosen method of locomotion (Michael Hardt struggling to steer his rowboat clear of obstacles rather took away from what he was actually saying).

I’m glad that Taylor is making the effort to bring the work of these thinkers to a mass audience, but given the enormity of the issues they’re discussing, it seems a little unfair to limit them to ten minutes each. Since this was partially funded by TVO and the National Film Board, I’d be interested to know whether there were any talks about a series for television broadcast. I’d certainly tune that in.

The NFB’s web site for the film, including a trailer

(7/10)

Tagged as: culture, disability, ethics, gender, philosophy, politics, theory

{ 0 comments }

Le Silence de Lorna (2008, Directors: Jean Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne): Sadly, once again I come to the work of acclaimed filmmakers with no previous experience of their work. The Dardenne brothers have been mining their own seam for many years now, exploring the lives of the poor, unglamorous and desperate in unfussy realistic films. Their latest provoked polarizing reactions at Cannes this year, where some found it stylistically too similar to their previous work, or thematically too much like other films about the intersections of the old and new Europe. Luckily, I wasn’t carrying that baggage.

Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) is a young Albanian woman living in Belgium whose dream is to one day open a snack bar with her boyfriend Sokol. In order to be eligible for bank loans and other benefits, she enters a marriage of convenience with a heroin addict to gain her citizenship. We quickly learn, however, that this is only a small part of a larger, darker scheme masterminded by a local small-time hood named Fabio. Both Lorna and her husband Claudy (Jeremie Renier, a stalwart of the Dardennes’ recent films) have been paid, with the understanding that Lorna will divorce Claudy as soon as she gains her citizenship so she can remarry a wealthy Russian, allowing him to obtain citizenship as well. At least that’s what Claudy thinks. But Fabio’s plan is to stage Claudy’s death from a heroin overdose instead. Will Lorna go along with this deception? At the beginning it appears that she will. She and Claudy live under the same roof, but keep separate rooms and there is little in the way of sympathy. But when he decides that he wants to kick his habit and begins begging her for help, Lorna’s attitude slowly begins to change. After a successful hospital stay, he is released and his relationship with Lorna seems to enter previously unknown territory. The plan is in jeopardy because people who started off using each other start to feel connected. Fabio, meanwhile, is desperate to complete the deal with the Russian at all costs.

Dobroshi is in almost every frame of this film and she is wonderful, showing a single-minded stoicism punctuated with some unexpected outbursts of emotion. Remarkably, despite the dehumanizing aspects of the scheme, it’s one Lorna entered into willingly, and at no point is there any sexual exploitation. In fact, when sex does enter the picture, it’s as an expression of rebellion and of passion, and it throws the whole greed-fuelled plan into disarray. She soon comes to realize her powerlessness and expendability and by the end of the film, her dreams have been replaced with a desperate desire simply to survive. Along the way, though, this solitary and determined figure becomes more alive and less alone, even as her carefully-ordered life loses all of its stability. If this is minor Dardennes, I can’t wait to catch up on the major stuff.

Trailer

(9/10)

Tagged as: belgium

{ 0 comments }