Toronto Screen Shots

Alfred & Jakobine (Director: Jonathan Howells): After meeting and falling in love in Japan in 1955, American Alfred Hobbs and Danish artist Jakobine Schou impulsively married, with their mutually adventurous spirits taking them to Casablanca shortly thereafter. Here, the newlyweds purchased a beat-up London taxi built in 1934 and spent the next four years driving it on an epic global road trip, where the couple’s passion for each other never waned and their exploits brought them minor celebrity. When their journey was over, Alfred and Jakobine (pronounced “Yauk-o-beena”) set down roots in New York state. Not long after, Alfred unexpectedly walked out on Jakobine, leaving her shattered. The couple reconnected at a party a few years later, conceived a son, and Alfred soon exited Jakobine’s life once again. 40 years later, an 84-year-old Alfred confronting his mortality decides to fix up that same taxi, travel across America with the son he’s never really known, and surprise the woman whose heart he broke by offering her “one last ride,” as he describes it.

Director Jonathan Howells is the benefactor of this rich source material and has produced a reflective and moving film about the beauty and pain of love. The filmmaker entwines the past and present with an effective balance of first-person recollections and visual aids (taken from the couple’s archives made up of 3,000 photographs and numerous hours of their well-crafted 8mm and 16mm film footage), and the documenting of both the difficult restoration process of the taxi and the 2,400 mile trip in September 2009 that Alfred and his son Niels took in it from Taos, New Mexico to Jakobine’s home in Oneida, New York. Adding to the intrigue encompassing the modern-day trip are the distant relationship between Niels and Alfred, the arduous toll of the trek upon their delicate vehicle, and the fact the unsuspecting Jakobine (who appears to have never gotten over Alfred) has been happily remarried for decades to a likeable chap named Rusty, who actually helped coordinate the reunion.

Alfred & Jakobine‘s only real fault is that it doesn’t go deeply enough into the many fascinating layers of this story due to the all-too-brief 73-minute running time (presumably due to business considerations involving running times for theatrical screenings and television broadcast, not creative reasons). Specifically, Alfred’s mysterious reason for leaving Jakobine never feels explained to satisfaction and the scenes involving the Taos-to-Oneida journey seem scant in comparison to the four weeks it took to complete the trip. Additionally, the lack of stories involving Alfred and Jakobine’s adventures in the 50s is disappointing. The film’s press kit references one story not included in the documentary that found them “captured by armed guerrillas in (Africa’s) Atlas Mountains and…thrown into a desert prison, where they thought they would most certainly die”. It’s a testament to Alfred & Jakobine‘s core appeal, however, that a compelling narrative such as this could end up excised from the final cut and the film still has plenty of proverbial meat on the bone. Hopefully, the documentary’s future DVD/Blu-ray release allows for a more in-depth presentation. Brevity aside, Alfred & Jakobine proves to be a touching charmer.

Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere (Director: Dave Jannetta): The ingredients of Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere sound like they’ve been plucked from a Bruce Springsteen song or a David Lynch movie, as the film delves into the mysterious death of a loner in a remote American midwest town (Chadron, Nebraska), the quirky personalities who populate it, and the eccentric writer documenting it all. Director Dave Jannetta based his film on the 2013 book of the same name from author Poe Ballantine (real name Ed Hughes), a Chadron resident.

The core of the film is formed by the 2006 death of mathematics professor Steven Haataja, who disappeared a few months after taking a job at Chadron’s local college. 95 days after last being seen, Haataja’s charred body was found tied to a tree on a nearby ranch and while the evidence seems to point to it being a homicide, too many unanswered questions result in a case that remains unsolved to this day. The murder(?) mystery, made more compelling by some shoddy police work and speculations of suicide after revelations of Haataja’s history of depression come out, fuels the intrigue of the residents of the quiet town of 5,600. A number of them weigh in with their wide-ranging theories on the case and brief remembrances of Haataja and it’s these interviews that really elevate the quality of Love & Terror…. Jannetta strikes cinematic gold here with one colourful interview subject after another. One, a former detective who worked on the investigation, surprisingly admits to being the case’s most likely suspect, while another disgustingly asserts that “If it had been a fucking football coach who disappeared, they would’ve called in the National Guard.” The third component of Love & Terror… comes from its significant time spent with Ballantine, who spent six years researching the case for his book. The writer possesses an idiosyncratic charm that fits right in with the documentary’s gallery of oddballs, and his philosophical ponderings and recollections from his life never fail to fascinate (like Haataja, Ballantine also struggled at times with severe depression). Ballantine also acts as a sort of tour guide (albeit speculatively) through Haataja’s last moments alive, helpfully retracing the likely routes the professor would have had to take to his final destination.

Although its central focus is quite dark, Jannetta and Ballantine add a surprisingly lighthearted and humorous touch to Love & Terror…, which is unlike any other documentary I’ve ever seen. The mixture of these two elements may make some viewers uncomfortable (I was a little), but the end result is a thoroughly entertaining and engrossing film that never disrespects Haataja’s memory (it should be noted that Haataja’s family declined to be interviewed for the film and was opposed to its making).