A.V. Club Blog

Day One at the Toronto Film Festival is a little like the clearing of the throat

before an aria. It’s Thursday, a day before the blitz of festivalgoers arrive,

and though the press enjoys a full schedule, the first screening for the public

doesn’t start until the evening—and for both press and public, the

choices are pretty inconsequential. Nevertheless, I dutifully zipped through customs,

baggage claim, and currency exchange; took a manic cab ride to the hotel for check-in;

picked up my credentials; and arrived just under the wire…for a movie I

didn’t care for in the least. Festivals like this are a weird phenomenon:

You travel hundreds of miles and rush around frantically day-after-day to catch

movies that, in many cases, you wouldn’t scrape yourself off the couch to

see otherwise. It might seem irrational, but in a festival of over 300 films,

there’s always the threat of some elusive masterpiece that you would have

missed if you weren’t taking part in a sleepless, ass-busting 10-day marathon.

Needless to say, The

Piano Tuner Of Earthquakes is not that masterpiece. It’s

the second feature-length film directed by the Quay Brothers, an eccentric duo

that made their name on strange, disturbing stop-motion animated shorts, most

famously the Peter Gabriel video for “Sledgehammer.” I never saw their

first feature, the by-all-accounts interminable Institute Benjamenta,

but from the evidence at hand, what may seem intriguing and suggestive at five

minutes turns obscure and fussed-over at 100 minutes. What I could piece together

of the story sounds intriguing enough: An evil “doctor” abducts a

beautiful opera singer and takes her to some faraway lair to be the key player

in a special performance. The doctor also hires a famed piano tuner (who, in a

typically odd detail, hails from generations of tuners who were immaculately conceived),

not to tune pianos, but to calibrate a series of elaborately engineered machines

that will drive this performance. Unfortunately, the diabolical purpose of this

scheme is never revealed all that clearly, which leaves a lot of pregnant scenes

where characters speak in English as a second language. The images are immaculate

but stifling, hermetic, and ultimately narcotic: Many of the critics around me

were snoozing, and it took some Clockwork Orange-like eye-peeling for

me not to join them.

Things didn’t get too much better with L’Enfer

(Hell), the second (after Tom Tykwer’s Heaven) in a trilogy conceived

by the late Kryzstof Kieslowski before he had an opportunity to execute it. This

one is directed by Denis Tanovic, who made a splash a few years ago with his Balkans

drama No Man’s Land. A tale of three sisters whose present problems

with men are related to a past trauma involving their father, the film proves

yet again that nobody can do Kieslowski but Kieslowski; in other hands, those

twists of coincidence and fate seem either too cute, or, in this case, too mechanical.

Had the movie sustained the Hitchcockian chill of its final scene, it might have

been onto something.

After two disappointments right out of the gate—going by Noel’s TIFFstat,

I was worried that I’d be seeing 40-50 bad films this year—a pair

of comedies raised the bar considerably. If you’re unschooled in late-‘70s

Korean politics (as I am, I’ll humbly admit), it might be difficult to fully

understand the significance of The

President’s Last Bang, but I can see why it caused such

a stir in its home country. Imagine if JFK were reconfigured as a Dr.

Strangelove-esque political comedy, and you’ll get some idea of the

tone of this movie, which gets big laughs from the decadence and corruption that

riddled President Park Chung-hee and his inner circle. Like the recently released

South Korean gem Memories Of Murder, the film dares to take a grave subject—in

Memories, it was the country’s first serial killer—and introduce

an often broad, bawdy comedic tone that’s daring for being so inappropriate.

Not much to say about the midnight movie, Sarah

Silverman: Jesus Is Magic, other than it’s a cut above

other stand-up concert movies. For one, Silverman is very funny. For two, the

film doesn’t open with the standard tack of interviewing all the excited

people entering the theater (“Margaret Cho is fa-bul-ous!,” et al.),

but with a scripted segment that builds anticipation for the show while getting

some laughs in the process. Like Noel, I’m not convinced that Silverman

is a particularly “relevant” comedian. She’s edgy and fearless

in drawing out racial and ethnic stereotypes or dropping bombs about sexuality,

but her observations never really engage with society in a meaningful way. At

the Q&A, someone compared her to Lenny Bruce, which I think is right and wrong:

She busts taboos just as aggressively, but she’s walking the path that he

and others already blazed. But big laughs nonetheless and Silverman’s teasing,

off-handed, bad-widdle-girl delivery gets the most out of every joke.

Day Two

With Day One out of the way, the auteur parade began in earnest with Lars Von

Trier’s Manderlay,

the second after Dogville in a proposed (and now aborted) trilogy about

America. With Bryce Dallas Howard replacing Nicole Kidman as Grace, Willem Dafoe

replacing James Caan as her father, John Hurt returning as narrator, and many

Dogville cast members recast in new roles for extra confusion, the film goes back

to the well with diminished results. The action again takes place on a vast sound-stage

with chalked-in buildings and landmarks, and again attempts to reveal the hypocrisies

of Yankee democracy. Here, Grace comes across a Southern city in which slavery

is still practiced a good 70 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. With daddy’s

gangsters along as enforcers, Grace forcibly liberates the slaves and naively

attempts to introduce the concept of a free society. This being a Von Trier film,

things don’t go terribly well for Grace or the former slaves, who are anything

but grateful for her actions on their behalf.

In many ways, Manderlay may be more inflammatory than Dogville:

Basically, Von Trier implies that the slave system, while brutal and oppressive

and undignifying, may be preferable to the perverse form of “democracy”

that replaced it. In his view, the promise of democracy for blacks is a whopping

lie that continues to be perpetuated, because the system doesn’t offer any

real opportunities for social advancement. Given that this point has just been

enforced in New Orleans, where the almost uniformly black and poor population

was left to rot in the flood waters, Von Trier’s extreme cynicism would

appear to be right on target. And yet it’s clear why he’s stopping

at #2 in the trilogy, because Dogville makes many of the same arguments

(in that case, how democracy applies to the immigrant experience) in exactly the

same stylistic fashion, so the element of surprise is gone.

Not much to say about Neil Jordan’s Breakfast

On Pluto, his second Patrick McCabe adaptation after The

Butcher Boy, and a much lighter and less substantial effort, though it does

delve occasionally into The Troubles. With Cillian Murphy cast as a blessed-out

Irish transvestite, the film follows his self-destructive (yet strangely optimistic)

quest to find the mother who orphaned him as a baby. Those who aren’t open

to the idea of red-breasted robins occasionally commenting on the action in translated

chirps are probably ill-suited to withstand the quirkiness that follows, but Jordan

handles it deftly and sweetly, and some of the individual episodes—especially

one involving Jordan regular Stephen Rea as a melancholy magician who takes Murphy

on as his assistant—are really affecting.

After some minor pleasures and disappointments, the festival finally delivered its

first great movie with Brokeback Mountain, a beautiful adaptation of

Annie Proulx’s great short story about gay cowboys in Wyoming. Turning a

short story into a 130-minute movie may seem like an indulgence, but it accomplishes

what all adaptations should aim to do: Retain the spirit of the source material

while offering a new experience altogether. Director Ang Lee works at a patient,

deliberate pace that captures the passing of time in way that Proulx’s story

inherently couldn’t: As the years continue to elapse—and both men

get tangled up in dutiful marriages with children—the film grows progressively

more heartbreaking as their future dims. In that respect, Brokeback Mountain

deserves a place next to great movies like The Age Of Innocence, In

The Mood For Love, and Far From Heaven, all about passions extinguished

by societal codes that can’t accommodate them. Like those movies, the characters

rarely articulate how they feel about each other, which those rare moments when

they do register like a sock in the gut. This is the movie of the year for me

so far.

As if to bring some cruel balance to the universe, Brokeback Mountain

was followed by the crushing disappointment of Cameron Crowe’s new movie

Elizabethtown,

which calls to mind Krusty The Clown’s protestations when the network threatens

to makes cuts to his show: “It’s the tightest three hours and 20 minutes

in show business!” This is Crowe’s Heaven’s Gate: Given the

full resources of a major studio at his disposal, he’s invested himself

so completely in the project that he refuses to make the tough decisions that

would have made the film better. In short, he’s fallen in love with every

frame of his movie, and the effect is incredibly wearying after awhile, especially

in a final act that yawns into infinity. All of which isn’t to say that

there are great things here, such as an all-night conversation between Orlando

Bloom and Kirsten Dunst bottles the excitement of connecting deeply with someone

for the first time. But Crowe needed another set of eyes to locate the shapely

movie that lurks in this epic unloading of personal baggage.

And speaking of unloading baggage, I apologize for the gratuitous length of this

first blog entry. Expect more drive-by criticism in the days ahead.