Cave Of Forgotten Dreams
Director/Country/Time: Werner Herzog/USA/95 min.
Documentary
Program: Real To Reel
Headline: Priceless art in the world’s most exclusive gallery
Scott’s Take: When it was announced that Herzog was premiering a new documentary at Toronto (in 3-D!), Cave Of Forgotten Dreams immediately become the event of the festival (or close to it) for a lot of people, including myself. And I had the pleasure of seeing it under ideal conditions: In the new Bell Lightbox theater (brief impression: lovely venue, a line-management headache), with Herzog and his producer accompanying a print (or digital package, as it were) that was completed just 15 hours earlier. A product of his boundless curiosity, Cave Of Forgotten Dreams looks at the marvels inside the Chauvet caves of Southern France, a setting nature preserved so perfectly that cave paintings from nearly 30,000 years ago have suffered little-to-no deteriorating effects. Back in June 2008, Judith Thurman wrote a piece about it in The New Yorker, but she never actually saw the cave in person, due to restrictions that have limited all but a handful of scientists, archaeologists, and other researchers. But Herzog being Herzog, he gained a rare permit to bring his cameras into the Chauvet cave—four hours per day for one week—to document these extraordinary drawings from the Paleolithic era, including dramatic scenes of horses and clashing bisons, and even a rendering of a woman’s lower half. Working with his History Channel partners, Herzog is in Encounters At The End Of The World mode, acting as a tour guide through an otherworldly place while baffling scientists with abstract philosophical questions. In the process, he ponders the roots of artistic representation, proto-cinematic storytelling, and the possible birth of “humanness.” Cave Of Forgotten Dreams has much to recommend it: Herzog’s half off-the-wall/half-profound queries, a delightfully unexpected coda, a single scene that alone justifies the 3-D process, and the opportunity to see what so few have seen. Yet it lacks the freewheeling inquiry of Herzog’s best documentaries, and his compulsion to scan every inch of the cave walls (and twice more for good measure) gets tedious at times, plagued by a ruinous dirge of a score. Still, if we’re looking for cinema to take us someplace new, that’s a standard the film clearly meets.
Grade: B
Cold Fish
Director/Country/Time: Sion Sono/Japan/144 min.
Cast: Mitsuru Fukikoshi, Denden, Asuka Kurosawa
Program: Vanguard
Headline: Holy shit, Cold Fish.
Noel’s Take: There are dark movies, there are grim movies, and then there’s Cold Fish, one long, unflinching wallow in the muck of human desire. Mitsuru Fukikoshi stars as the meek owner of a tropical fish store, who meets a much more successful fish-slinger (played by Denden) when his daughter gets busted for shoplifting in a nearby store. Denden offers the girl a job, and asks for a favor from Fukikoshi in return: that he pretend to be his partner in a deal to breed rare fish for 10 million yen a pop. Before Fukikoshi even has a chance to say yes or no, Denden has him in a room with the prospective client; and not too long after that, the client is lying dead on the floor, poisoned. Director Sion Sono opens Cold Fish with jittery jump cuts and bursts of noise and color, but then slows the movie down to the pace of a classic noir. Sono is too infatuated with process at times; Cold Fish wouldn’t need to be two-hours-and-twenty-minutes long if there were a few less long scenes of corpses being dragged out to Denden’s remote “disposal unit.” But for the most part, Cold Fish moves with the inexorable pull of a nightmare, as Fukikoshi keeps getting in deeper and deeper with Denden. (The two leads’ relationship is reminiscent of Kyle MacLachlan and Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet at times.) Make no mistake, though: this is one fucked-up nightmare. Denden is of the great villains in movie history, glad-handing his way into people’s lives before bullying them into committing horrible acts—acts that, on some level, Denden’s victims actually want to commit. (And just so we’re clear, this includes graphic rape, dismemberment and child-slapping. This movie is not very nice.) Sono’s exploring a number of themes here, from gender and generational clashes to the notion of being “made invisible.” But I was most struck by Fukikoshi’s fascination with astronomy, and the idea that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old, and has 4.6 billion years left before it dies. What’s more disturbing here: that we’re now on the downward slope, or that we’ve got so much goddamn time left to go?
Grade: B+
Dirty Girl
Director/Country/Time: Abe Sylvia/USA/99 min.
Cast: Juno Temple, Jeremy Dozier, Milla Jovovich
Program: Discovery
Headline: Where festival buzz goes to die
Scott’s Take: This was a last minute schedule change on my part, done in response to the news that The Weinstein Company had paid $3 million—a princely sum in the current buyer’s market—for the rights to this debut feature. The acquisition turns out to be history repeating itself: Weinstein has essentially bought Happy, Texas again. If you’ll recall, Happy, Texas was one of the most notorious Miramax overbids, picked up in a Sundance feeding frenzy for $10 million; when it finally landed in the real world, to middling-to-poor notices, the film grossed short of $2 million. The two films have several things in common: A grotesquely stereotypical vision of a Southern small-town life, a sentimentality that burbles through the broader-than-broad comedy like acid reflux, a wealth of scenes that would never ever ever fucking happen in any world resembling our own, and the presence of one William H. Macy. Set in the ‘80s—beware the brutal soundtrack cues— the film stars Juno Temple as the Dirty Girl of the title, a trailer-trash nymph who’s worked her way through all the boys in high school; Jeremy Dozier plays a plump gay outcast who partners with her in class and eventually becomes her friend. The two travel, Little Miss Sunshine-style, from their Oklahoma hick-town to California to find the daddy that Temple never met. Along the way, she helps him come out of his latent homosexual shell, he helps her pick up the pieces of her crumbled self-worth, and together, they do their level best to annoy the bloody hell out of me for an hour and a half.
Grade: D-
Heartbeats
Director/Country/Time: Xavier Dolan/Canada/102 min.
Cast: Xavier Dolan, Monia Chokri, Niels Schneider
Program: Special Presentations
Headline: What sophomore slump?
Scott’s Take: Ah, the impetuousness of youth! Last year, at the tender age of 20, French-Canadian writer/director/star Xavier Dolan took the festival scene by storm with I Killed My Mother, a rough-hewn but winning and extremely promising debut feature. A year later, he returns with Heartbeats, a stunning confirmation of his precocious talent, and a major advance, technically if not otherwise, from the first. Currently, he wears his influences too much on his sleeve—you can tell from Heartbeats that he’s been obsessing over Wong Kar-wai, In The Mood For Love especially—but so did P.T. Anderson in his early films, and I’m confident that Dolan will grow find his way, too. Still, there are worse filmmakers to rip off than Wong, and Dolan’s story of desire and unrequited love goes beautifully with all that slow motion. (And a “Quezás, Quezás, Quezás”-like use of the French-language version of Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang.”) Dolan and Chokri star as best friends who fall for the same man, a preening, curly-haired Adonis played by Schneider. The three go to parties and restaurants together, with the friends, now quietly bitter romantic rivals, making their play on a man too consumed with narcissism to pick up the signals. The original (much better) title, Les Amours Imaginaires, speaks to the creative (and sometimes delusionary) nature of desire and the way it drives these young romantics to desperation and sabotage. It’s a little too neatly drawn, but Dolan’s passion and vitality suffuses every frame, and makes me optimistic for his future—and the future of cinema, for that matter. I love Heartbeats even more than I like it.
Grade: B+