Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien): I have to admit that as much as I’m familiar with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s name, I hadn’t seen any of his previous films (Three Times (2005) and Café Lumiere (2003) being the most recent). That being said, someone I know told me that in his opinion, most of Hou’s best work was from the 80s and 90s and is actually pretty hard to find. Setting the film in Paris was admittedly a gamble, and deciding to make a sort of homage to Albert Lamarisse’s classic children’s film La Ballon Rouge (1956) an even bigger one. For me, anyway, it didn’t pay off.
We’re dropped into a story with very little exposition. Juliette Binoche plays Suzanne, a voice actor for a puppet theatre and a harried single mom. Her son, Simon, is watched by a new nanny, Song Fang, who just happens to be both Chinese and a film student making a film. So, with an obvious directorial stand-in in place, what happens? Not too much. Song uses Simon in her film project which is very much like the classic film, and we see footage scattered throughout the rest of the main film including, somewhat confusingly, at the very beginning, before we’ve even met the characters. There are also scenes where the titular orb floats outside the apartment when Song is not actually filming. I found its presence baffling most of the time, and the film, like the lives it portrays, as scattered and uneven, though well-intentioned. Suzanne’s living arrangements are messy and her relationships unclear, and by the end of the film, there’s really no sense of resolution. What I did like about the film was its wonderful use of natural light, as well as the corresponding naturalness of the dialogue, with characters repeating dialogue not heard the first time by other characters, and other realistic touches.
But in the end, I wasn’t really moved. My balloon, instead of taking flight, just slowly deflated over the film’s 113 minutes.
Trailer
(6/10)
Tagged as:
children,
china,
france,
TIFF
Chaotic Ana (Caótica Ana) (Director: Julio Medem): Chaotic is one way to put it. Train wreck might be more accurate. Annoying, artificial, absurd, and by the end, simply appalling. This was a real disappointment. I had been warned earlier in the week by some friends who saw the first screening, but I wanted to see for myself. Unfortunately, Medem has turned all the elements of his previous films up to 11, making this a jumbled mess of coincidence, chance encounters, performance art, hypnosis and an international cast speaking all the wrong languages. The director has clearly bitten off more than he can chew, and though the first half was at least watchable, I was annoyed by what appeared to be a kind of “show-off” attitude. Ana (played by the lovely Manuela Vellés) is a raw-talented painter living in a cave with her father on the island of Ibiza. One day, the slightly sinister Justine (Charlotte Rampling) arrives and offers to take her to Madrid and be her patron. Once there, she’s esconced in a decadent and mysterious house filled with artists of all kinds. Cue the pretentious art talk.
Then Ana begins to have powerful flashbacks and through a random encounter with experts in hypnosis, is suddenly the subject of numerous sessions exploring her past lives. Then she escapes as a stowaway on her friend’s father’s yacht and ends up in New York City, where both her handsome young hypnotist and Justine find her and take her to the desert, to discover her “true” self, the first in a long series of reincarnated women who all die violently at the age of 22. Still with me? There’s more. By the end, there’s even a ludicrous attempt to tie everything into the Iraq war.
Using intertitles to count down from 10 to 0, as in hypnosis, had one positive function. It let me know how much longer I had to endure. Even the sight of often-nude Ana wasn’t enough to make me stop wishing it would end. Medem is a talented director, but this was just self-indulgent and for that reason, it’s all the more disappointing.
Trailer
Official Site
(5/10)
Tagged as:
#tiff07,
spain,
TIFF
A Gentle Breeze in the Village (Tennen kokekkô) (Director: Nobuhiro Yamashita): Director Nobuhiro Yamashita clearly loved school. His last film, Linda Linda Linda, was set in a high school, and this film is his ode to the rural schools, where primary and middle school students share the same building. Beautiful and sensitive Soyo is the only student in Grade 8 at her school in the idyllic countryside, and there are only six students in all. That is, until the arrival of Osawa, a cool boy from Tokyo. She’s immediately smitten with him, and although first love is thrilling for her, it also causes turmoil in her settled life. But Osawa soon fits in and is embraced by this remarkably close-knit group of students. The film covers a period of about 18 months, and all the time, Soyo can feel her childhood slipping away. This wonderful secure bubble will burst one day, but not just yet.
Yamashita has a wonderful way of portraying a sense of nostalgia, even while events are happening. It’s clearly an adult perspective, and it sometimes seems odd to see it being felt by teenagers, but it had me longing for the days when all I had to worry about was my school uniform. Adult problems hover in the distance. Osawa’s mother has some potentially major health issues in a town without a doctor. As well, she has moved back to town with him after her husband has left, and there’s a hint that Soyo’s father may be carrying on an affair with her. But in general, Soyo keeps all these worries at arm’s length. In her incredibly safe and love-filled world, she’s free to explore these new feelings for Osawa, all the while knowing that this means leaving behind her childhood for good. In one incredibly poignant scene, after a failed kiss with Osawa, she gently kisses the school’s blackboard. It’s a rehearsal for things to come, but also a farewell to something she loves deeply. Among all the gorgeous imagery that the film floats in front of us, that scene speaks loudest and truest.
Here is the Q&A with director Nobuhiro Yamashita from after the screening (the long pauses are when the translator is whispering the questions into his ear):
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Duration: 15:04
Trailer
Official Site
(8/10)
Tagged as:
adolescence,
children,
japan,
TIFF
Captain Mike Across America (Director: Michael Moore): Michael Moore’s latest film received a standing ovation at the Ryerson Theatre last Friday.
Republicans will see his latest work as a propaganda film and some Canadians will call it a complete pile of rubbish. Democrats will love the film and see it as the truth that has been suppressed by the media. This Canadian found it very entertaining.
During the last American election, Moore travelled the country encouraging younger people to vote and more importantly, to vote Democrat. His visits to colleges across America became known as the Slacker Uprising Tour.
He takes the usual cheap shots at Bush, shows a number of Bush bloopers and invites musical guests to entertain the slackers (Eddie Vedder, Joan Baez, Steve Earle, REM and others).
One of my favourite moments in the film comes when Moore holds a press conference. He points out that he had the courage to bring up the weapons of mass destruction lie, at the Oscars several years ago. He goes on to lambaste the reporters for being lazy and not doing their jobs — which is investigating the truth instead of being a propaganda machine for the White House.
He argues that Americans should be able to sit at home, eat a bag of Tostitos and get the truth for free on the evening news. Instead, he argues that Americans had to shell out 10 dollars to get the truth in from his film Fahrenheit 9/11.
As Moore went across the southwest in 2004, it was amazing to see how Republicans tried to shut him down. One businessman offered $100,000 to a student group to not invite Moore to their school to speak.
Moore failed in helping to get Kerry elected but he succeeded in getting younger voters out to the polls in record numbers. For Democrats, Moore describes the film as “a cure for the hangover that followed” the 2004 election.
When asked if Moore would do a follow up to the film he said “no”. Moore claims that his life was threatened a number of times. At one event a guy allegedly got up on stage and tried to attack Moore with a pipe. At another event, somebody pulled a knife and while in Fort Lauderdale a man tossed a cup of hot coffee on Moore.
Love him or hate him, his films are entertaining. The audience at Ryerson couldn’t get enough of his stories. The film will have a limited theatrical release in North America according to Harvey Weinstein who was in the audience. Following that will be a DVD release which will include a lot of extra footage and a show Moore did in London shortly after 9/11. My guess is that all of this will come out next year just before the election (depending on how the Democrats are doing in the polls).
(7/10)
Tagged as:
Documentaries,
politics,
TIFF
Silent Light (Luz silenciosa) (Director: Carlos Reygadas): Another one of my previewed films that made the final cut, Silent Light is a bit intimidating to write about. Beginning with a stunning six minute shot of the sun rising over a Mennonite homestead, the film alerts us that it is going to require patience and a certain sense of contemplation. And it establishes right away that everything that follows, the human story, is secondary to the cycles of nature, to the circadian rhythms of the natural world, to the pulse of life that beats deep down in the earth and that echoes throughout the universe. I’m sorry if I’m using high-flown language; it’s the effect of this strangely haunting film.
Johan is a simple farmer who’s lived his whole life among the Mennonites of northern Mexico. They don’t communicate much with outsiders, and speak their own Plautdietsch dialect of German. He lives with his wife Esther (Canadian novelist Miriam Toews in a surprising role) and their large family. The film’s crisis comes when we learn that Johan has been carrying on an affair with Marianne, another woman in the community. He’s been honest about it with Esther from the beginning, and has tried to break it off, but deep in his heart he feels that Marianne is his “natural woman” and that marrying Esther was a mistake. Though he clearly loves her and his children, he’s torn by the power of his passion for the other woman as well as his conviction that she is his intended match. Reygadas’ decision to use authentic Mennonite non-professionals has mixed results. Though it’s clear that these are stoic people who use few words, in places the dialogue still felt excessively mannered. He is able to achieve more with the camera than with any spoken dialogue, and that’s where the film finds its emotional power.
The cinematography and sound design are almost Dogme-like in their simplicity, which makes the film’s climax all the more surprising for some. Without giving anything away, all I’ll say is that unlike many, I found it completely natural and moving in its simplicity. And although this is supposedly a community built on Christian faith, I found something closer to pantheism beating at its heart.
Here is the Q&A with director Carlos Reygadas from after the screening:
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Duration: 23:58
Trailer
Official Site
(8/10)
Tagged as:
adultery,
christianity,
faith,
mennonites,
mexico,
religion,
spirituality,
TIFF
