NOEL MURRAY
Festival favorites:
• Offside. Jafar Panahi's latest Iranian slice of life follows a group of young soccer-loving women who get arrested for impersonating men and trying to sneak into the Tehran arena for a key pre-World Cup match. Panahi's criticism of his country's treatment of women is as clear as ever, but so is his faith in Iranian women's ability to make their own way, through persuasion and righteousness. And as always, Panahi spins long, engaging setpieces where people ping off each other, in everyday conversations fraught with unexpected tension.
• Pan's Labyrinth. Guillermo del Toro's odd hybrid of a Spanish Civil War history play and an arcane childhood fantasy comes together magnificently in a final scene that explains how legends—both real and imagined—resonate through generations. As the movie's war story gets increasingly bleak and its fantasy story increasingly wild and gory, del Toro observes how heroes can get everything wrong, yet still be judged right by history.
• Shortbus. John Cameron Mitchell's New York indie relationship drama opens with a montage of explicit sex acts, intercut with an image of the Statue Of Liberty, all set to a old recording of "Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby?" The rest of the movie is fairly conventional, though it's graced with uncommonly rounded characterizations and warmly intimate cinematography. But that opening provides the best context for all the sex and soap opera, positioning Shortbus as a libertine's patriotic response to an increasingly conservative culture. It's a reminder that dominatrices and ass-eaters are Americans too.
• 12:08 East Of Bucharest. Continuing the Romanian New Wave begun last year with The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu, Corneliu Porumboiu's deadpan comedy looks back at the ouster of Nicolae Ceausescu through the eyes of three disagreeable men on a low-rent local TV talk show. The movie starts as a mordant slice of life, develops into a hilarious farce, and ends on a poignant note. It's slight, but in the best possible way.
Feeling the hate:
The Prisoner, Or: How I Planned To Kill Tony Blair. "Hate" may be too strong a word for this trifling documentary, but between the movie's inflammatory title, pointless animated reenactments, goofy sound effects, and attempt to use the anecdotal story of one wrongly imprisoned Iraqi as a sweeping indictment of American foreign policy, The Prisoner exemplifies pretty much everything that's wrong with contemporary agit-prop docs. It was also emblematic of a generally weak field of documentaries at Toronto this year. Sensationalism trumped sympathy.
Regretting missing:
Jim Brown and Gary Burns' documentary Radiant City reportedly packs in a short history of the suburbs, a sharp explanation of why living there is bad for society, and a nutty twist ending. Shane Meadows followed up his punchy Midlands revenge thriller Dead Man's Shoes with the well-regarded This Is England, a quasi-memoir about growing up punk—and trying not to become a racist—in the '80s UK. And Eytan Fox's The Bubble apparently works as a less-explicit, Tel Aviv-set companion piece to Shortbus, since both movies are about gay folk and straight folk of multiple ethnicities, all trying to overcome their differences via orgasm.
Trends and themes:
"To create, you must destroy."
In Stranger Than Fiction, an author has to decide whether to kill one of her fictional characters and produce a timeless masterpiece, or let him go on living a happy life. But that wasn't the only TIFF movie about the destructive nature of art. Films as diverse as the documentary Manufactured Landscapes, the static Korean romance Woman On The Beach, the witty Brit-com Venus, and the fanciful fable The Fall all dealt with the idea that truly great art leaves behind toxic waste.
"History is written by the winners, but who decides when the game is over?"
In addition to Pan's Labyrinth, history-minded features and documentaries like 12:08 East Of Bucharest, American Hardcore, Black Book, Deliver Us From Evil, Seraphim Falls, and The Last King Of Scotland all dealt with the way the judgment of history is perpetually revised, depending on who's in power and what their agenda might be.
TIFF '06—Good or bad?
Mostly good, but not great. The festival was full of happy little discoveries like the domestic thriller Summer '04 and the surreal Icelandic comedy The Bothersome Man, and some reliable auteurs like Kim Ki-duk, Hong Sang-soo, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul delivered wonderfully confounding visions of fractured relationships with, respectively, Time, Woman On The Beach, and Syndromes And A Century. But this year's headlining slate didn't have the heft of last year's, which included Brokeback Mountain, Cache, The Squid And The Whale, A History Of Violence, and even problematic must-see fare like Walk The Line, Capote, and Lady Vengeance. It says something that the most universally acclaimed film at TIFF '06 was Borat, a tremendously funny comedy that feigns at saying something significant, but never really lands a punch. And it says something that at Borat's first big public screening, the projector broke. When it comes to zeitgeist-rattling cinema, this year's fest was a non-starter.
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