TIFF 2003 RUNS FROM SEPTEMBER 4-13, 2003
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Jonathan Demme alternates between fiction and documentary filmmaking, a practice that has gone curiously unheralded for an Academy Award-winning director of both mainstream and cult repute. If The Agronomist is any indication of what to expect from Demme's Cousin Bobby or Storefront Hitchcock, to name two of his earlier documentaries thus far unseen by yours truly, I can see why his studio features garner all the attention: though a committed work (Demme began tracking the exploits of his subject, slain Haitian radio journalist Jean Dominique, as far back as the late eighties), The Agronomist is amateurish bordering on sloppy, overreliant on newsroom-font intertitles as a way of not only conveying research but also patching together a chronology for newcomers to the seismic shifts in Haiti's inscrutable political climate. Additionally, however good his intentions, Demme had an obligation to lay into Dominique a little for his repeated self-exiles to New York City whenever the Haitian people needed his outspoken, progressive voice the most: he seems to count Dominique's founding of Haiti's first film club (which provides ample opportunity for cheesy inserts of classic one-sheets) as a pre-emptive bid for redemption. Still, their kinship, if you will, is not unavailing: Demme's window into Dominique through a shared love of movies humanizes the latter in a way a standard piece of reportage might not, and The Agronomist's ending is appropriately cinematic in its bittersweet uplift. I suspect the next step is a biopic, which, if produced in America, will surely omit Demme's shrewd criticisms of U.S. foreign policy. **1/2 (out of four) | Programme: National Cinema Spotlight; Running Time: 90 minutes

Bus 174 sums up its own trumping of the devious City of God with a quote from Sandro do Nascimento, the hostage-taker who becomes the focal point of this absorbing, even-handed documentary: "This ain't no American movie!" Presumed to be on a cocaine bender as he holds the passengers of a Rio city bus at gunpoint, his irrational demands amounting to more firearms (he asks police for "a rifle and a grenade"), Sandro is almost impossible for special forces to psychologically profile: he lets a student go to prevent him from being late for class but refuses to relinquish a woman in the throes of a stroke. Director José Padilha attempts to retrace the escalating misfortunes that led to Sandro's tragic June 12^th, 2000 hijacking; the tranquility of those aerial vistas to which Padilha crosscuts underscores just how Brazil's street kids--among whom Sandro roamed--earned their nickname "The Invisibles," so deflective is the candy-coated surface of this tourist town. At once an overview of the crime-poverty cycle (Sandro's pregnant mother was murdered, orphaning him to the life responsible for her demise), a discomforting police procedural, and a re-sensitization to action-movie tropes, Bus 174 is one of the most thoughtful films of 2003, an incredibly sensitive account of a situation that should never have transpired and probably will again in some form, to be as fatalistic as the filmmakers about it. **** (out of four) | Programme: National Cinema Spotlight; Running Time: 118 minutes

For tyro directors, even genre can become an irresistible new toy. So it is with the Spierig Brothers' Undead, an Australian film that liberally applies CG but more detrimentally cribs from every and any horror flick that fanboys ever extolled; those mouth-breathing types who post talkback at AICN have never been this condescended to, yet I fear that Undead's pandering will sail over their heads and lead to a misguided appreciation of the film as a one-stop shop for all their geek cravings. Borrowing the alien conceit and over-the-top splatter from Peter Jackson's Bad Taste, the super-prepared avenging quasi-cowboy from The Evil Dead and its innumerable rip-offs (Undead's wannabe Ash totes a cumbersome three-barrelled shotgun), the zombies from Day of the Dead (actually zombie cinema in general, but the third entry in George Romero's Dead trilogy specifically for a gruesome decapitation-by-shovel), the moderately attractive heroine who stays clothed throughout from the annals of slasher tradition, the space creatures with inverted knees from The Arrival, the transporting beam of light from Fire in the Sky, and the miracle cure from Signs, the picture is exhaustively derivative. Unendurably boring in its superfluousness, its ersatz feel accentuated by a plethora of digital effects, Undead is simply a stiff. 1/2* (out of four) | Programme: Midnight Madness; Running Time: 100 minutes

Danny Deckchair is so aware of being a formula fish-out-of-water comedy that it leaves some of the more crucial gestures of plot off its checklist, resulting in a film equally unsatisfying for its clichés and its lack thereof. Rhys Ifans, that starved Allman brother, plays Danny Morgan, a Walter Mitty-ish construction worker stuck in a dead-end relationship with Trudy (Glenda Lake), a fame-hungry travel agent seeing a TV newsman on the side. Aware that Trudy is sick of his weird inventions, Danny ties a bunch of helium-filled balloons to a deckchair to rattle her at a barbecue and ends up floating away to the far off Aussie town of Clarence, where he crash-lands in the backyard of a lonely traffic cop named Glenda (Miranda Otto). When the villagers storm Glenda's house, pitchfork-style, in search of the alien they saw cruising the skies, Glenda impulsively introduces Danny as a visiting professor from her college days, and in no time flat the town adopts the stranger as one of their own. It's a shame that Danny's awakening to happiness is weaved into a fabric of deception, since it means we'll have to suffer the trite dismantling of his newfound life. Perhaps the filmmakers waited as impatiently as we do to reach that point, since there is nothing on the order of, say, the unsung Doc Hollywood to show that anyone but the love interest would ingratiate herself with Danny, who gives the locals a left-field testimonial two-thirds into the picture--it all feels rushed through the motions. (Raising Arizona, meanwhile, did better the policewoman and her dishevelled mate watching sunsets together.) Only The Lord of the Rings' Otto, securing our sympathies from our first glimpse of her like Emily Watson in Punch-Drunk Love, makes Danny Deckchair bearable, emerging from the wreckage a new and dignified sweetheart icon. ** (out of four) | Programme: Viacom Galas; Running Time: 90 minutes; Saturday, September 13, 8:00 PM - ROY THOMSON HALL; Saturday, September 13, 8:45 PM - UPTOWN 1

"They're getting a little warm in their sweaters," David Lynch said of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert when they panned his Kafkaesque Lost Highway. And Ebert finally combusted at last May's Cannes Film Festival when he threw stones at the glass arthouse that is Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny; you'll note, however, that he never did mount a convincing case against it. Instead, Ebert catalogued his mainstream biases (unbroken takes: bad; non-classical structure: bad; name actresses being aggressively sexual: bad), made a crack about the esoteric tastes of the French (who legitimized his field of film criticism--oh well, phooey on them), and then had a bigger delusion of grandeur than The Brown Bunny's Gallo-centric credit assignations: "I will one day be thin but Vincent Gallo will always be the director of The Brown Bunny." At worst, The Brown Bunny suggests a student film, that sensation often aggravated by the fact that Gallo, who also stars, was his own cinematographer--shots give off the impression of Dad setting the camera timer and then running into the frame, although Gallo has never looked more handsome. The picture is like the plastic-bag scene in American Beauty minus the disingenuousness--there it's just foreplay, after all, but Gallo, his cobalt eyes frozen in gawk, is truly receptive to the mundane; his awe is infectious. (His character's name, Bud Clay, implies both malleability and oneness.) Bud is on his way to a motorcycle race in California, a trip that brings him closer to the memory of a lost love (Chloe Sevigny), and their foreordained reunion--which, yes, includes graphic fellatio--is the essence of a man in a quiet room with his pain. If such wounded passages fail to resonate with Ebert, I can only envy his charmed life--though in his defense, the version of The Brown Bunny I saw ran thirty minutes shorter. *** (out of four) | Programme: Visions; Running Time: 90 minutes; Tuesday, September 9, 6:30 PM - UPTOWN 1; Saturday, September 13, 9:45 PM - VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN)

Discombobulated and deadly dull for its initial half-hour, Hiner Saleem's Vodka Lemon coalesces before it's too late into something by no means ineffectual. The first in an accumulation of vignettes finds an old man being schlepped in his bed through the Armenian tundra to a funeral site, where he promptly removes his dentures to pipe a dirge for the other mourners. The picture continues to lightly tread such surreal ground until the whimsical closing shot, in which music also acts as a kind of catharsis; Saleem stocks as much of his faith in minimalism as he does absurdity, though, the hush mergence proposing at the best of times--during the nonverbal love story between two transient peddlers that commandeers the narrative--Sunrise for a new era. With a title like Vodka Lemon and wintry bleakness as far as the eye can see, one could easily misinterpret this as a Mosfilm production, but the film, despite the economic hardships it itemizes, is more Beckett than Chekov, the title referring to the beverage served at a lemonade stand in the middle of nowhere, the characters carrying portable chairs with them on their regular snowbound treks not, it would seem, for the small luxury of idleness, but rather should an impromptu bottomless debate arise. Vodka Lemon is a self-confident work that disarms existential misery with humour without trivializing a soul--there's actually an abundance of joy to savour here, even if it takes a microscope. *** (out of four) | Programme: Contemporary World Cinema; Running Time: 84 minutes; Friday, September 12, 10:00 PM - UPTOWN 3; Saturday, September 13, 6:30 PM - CUMBERLAND 2

I've sat here staring at a flashing cursor, wondering what to write about Takashi Miike's Gozu--a picture whose spirit harks back to the David Lynch of Eraserhead--that could persuade you to see it: though Gozu begs a viewing, any description likely to pique one's interest would force you to pre-emptively pass moral judgment on a film that a) explicitly requests to be taken as a joke, and b) is too fecund to truly offend. Gozu begins with the over-the-top murder of a "Yakuza attack dog" the size of a purse; Ozaki (Shô Aikawa), the perpetrator, is stopped before shooting the driver of a "Yakuza attack car" by his closest "brother" Minami (Hideki Sone). Escorting Ozaki across the Japanese countryside to a Yakuza meeting, Minami, fearing further consequences of Ozaki's mental breakdown, plans to ditch his passenger in a small town along the way. Instead, he accidentally kills Ozaki, Ozaki's corpse disappears, and Minami reluctantly enlists the aid of the ultra-eccentric locals (including a man whose "missing pigment" transforms his face into a Kabuki enigma) in finding his presumed-dead friend. I'm amazed by how cut-and-dry it all sounds in a recap, considering that not a second of Gozu, not a line of dialogue, is anticipated--with the possible exception of the gimmick of the lactating woman repeated from Miike's Visitor Q. As in Visitor Q as well, Miike threatens hommage to Takeshi Kitano, but Gozu most significantly moves that film's discussion of motherhood into the natal realm to arrive at a climax that goes through with what Martin Scorsese had planned for After Hours before the studio put the kibosh on it. Gozu (which means "cow head") suggests that the prolific Miike--the director of nine films in 2002 alone--has grown fond of the extended-family dynamic from practically living on a movie set; the film's stirring fraternal uplift is matched and tempered only by its witty, extreme grotesqueries. ***1/2 (out of four) | Programme: Midnight Madness; Running Time: 129 minutes; Thursday, September 11, 11:59 PM - UPTOWN 1; Friday, September 12, 5:45 PM - VARSITY 1 or 6

Jørgen Leth struck a self-described "Faustian" deal with half-insane auteur Lars von Trier to remake his own experimental short film The Perfect Human five times according to "ruinous" changes mandated by von Trier. But the pupil repeatedly outwitted his master with an incapacity for anything but quality product--the first four of the titular "obstructions" are up there with, well, early Leth, and the venture teaches von Trier--who thrives on unforeseen obstacles and how they lead to personal dissatisfaction with his work--that you can't make crap on purpose. In the film's best sequence (though it doesn't involve the best obstruction, a version set in Cuba with shots that last twelve frames apiece), Leth and von Trier express their mutual loathing for cartoons, prompting the latter to send Leth to the Austin-based workshop of Waking Life co-director Bob Sabiston, where the pair concocts an animated rendition of The Perfect Human that only bears out Leth's artistic integrity. (No matter the medium, a true filmmaker won't begrudge his or her vision so long as reputations are at stake.) It'd be imprudent to spoil the nature of the fifth and final obstruction, but suffice it to say the final minutes of this fascinating, if specialized pseudo-documentary are as unexpectedly affecting as most von Trier productions, even if they confirm one's preconceived notion that von Trier is a terribly malicious softy. ***1/2 (out of four) | Programme: Real to Reel; Running Time: 90 minutes; Thursday, September 11, 9:00 PM - UPTOWN 2; Saturday, September 13, 6:15 PM - VARSITY 4 or 5

Falling Angels has accumulated a lot of buzz over the past couple of days at the TIFF, but I don't mind telling you to ignore it. Basically a Sunday funnies version of The Virgin Suicides, the film stars an already-typecast Katharine Isabelle as the most embittered of three daughters who live under the gun of a live-wire buffoon (Callum Keith Rennie) while tending to their catatonic mother (Miranda Richardson, doing a mean Joan Allen impersonation). It's set in the early sixties, an excuse to splash the same old anti-suburbia tropes with a fresh coat of Day-Glo; the gap between the Canadian filmmaker and his/her audience doesn't get any smaller as a newfound satiric bent revitalizes the national cinema's incuriosity. Rennie and Richardson hardly suggest husband and wife (nephew and aunt, maybe), but more problematic is the latter's role, which requires of a terrific actress to sit silent on a couch for the film's duration, a slab of Canadian misery like one of the corpses Molly Parker bangs herself with in Kissed (also, like Falling Angels, based on a Barbara Gowdy novel). Falling Angels is, ironically, more realistic (ergo, likeable) in a series of flashbacks to the girls' temporary stay in a bomb shelter that exude the colours and compositions of old "Davy & Goliath" cartoons. *1/2 (out of four) | Programme: Perspective Canada; Running Time: 109 minutes; Monday, September 8, 6:30 PM - ISABEL BADER THEATRE; Wednesday, September 10, 3:45 PM - UPTOWN 3

A lame exercise in Mamet posturing, The Cooler has been subject to inexplicable pre-release hype for both its tame (by post-Irréversible standards) sex scenes and, apparently, being good. William H. Macy plays another variation on his stock nebbish, this one employed by the Shangri-La Casino to "cool" gamblers on a hot streak with his contagious bad luck, a premise that contains the potential to expose the heart of the most superstitious city in America. But writers Frank Hannah and Wayne Kramer (who also directed) can't leave well enough alone, giving Macy's Bernie Lootz (gimme a break) a ticking time-bomb boss (Alec Baldwin, gung-ho but deserted by the screenplay), a lubricious son (Shawn Hatosy), and a girlfriend-with-a-past (Maria Bello, in a well-modulated performance that's one of the film's few saving graces). The ballsiness of The Cooler's late-narrative contrivances almost conceals the pathetic lack of imagination that went into devising them, but this is a useless picture scarred from the start by Mark Isham's putrid light-jazz score, which does damage unknown since Lennie Niehaus' compositions for Tightrope. Doesn't change the fact that The Cooler is nearly unsalvageable, of course, but it shows the importance of a good music supervisor. *1/2 (out of four) | Programme: Special Presentations; Running Time: 103 minutes; Tuesday, September 9, 7:00 PM - VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN); Saturday, September 13, 6:00 PM - UPTOWN 1

"And I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll boorrre the hell out of you." Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Bon Voyage labours harder than any film in recent memory to entertain, but the result is so draining I don't recall grooving with it once. In the opening scene, the latest vehicle for champagne starlet Viviane Denverts (Isabelle Adjani, who at 48 should be too old to play an ingénue, but looks at least half her age--it's quite miraculous, really) leaves rapt the attendees of a French movie premiere. Scene two, the film's frisky producer pays Viviane a late-night booty call, and she shoots dead the would-be rapist. Scene three, Viviane's neighbour Frédéric (Grégori Derangère), an aspiring novelist, answers her cry for help, agreeing to dispose of the body. Frédéric is pulled over in scene four and convicted for having a corpse in his trunk in five. WWII reaches France in six; Frédéric escapes from prison in seven, boards a train in eight, and stows away with physicists--one of whom (the always-enchanting Virginie Ledoyen) finds him alluring--transporting a scarce supply of heavy water in nine. Thus within twenty minutes, Bon Voyage has dipped a toe in the waters of five or six distinct genres--never to cohere, alas. The film's most dependable tone is one of farce, but Rappeneau's problem is he wants to make an epic farce (and in the process asks a stage tradition to bear too much cinematic weight) along the lines of Spielberg's 1941, replete with Dolbyized door-slamming. I know, because every one of them woke me up. *1/2 (out of four) | Programme: Viacom Galas; Running Time: 114 minutes; Saturday, September 5, 9:30 PM - ROY THOMSON HALL; Saturday, September 6, 1:15 PM - UPTOWN 1

Though it ultimately garnered Gus Van Sant the Best Director prize (in addition to the Palme d'or), Elephant's lukewarm reception among ink slingers at last May's Cannes Film Festival confirms the dulled senses of the critical establishment--that a contemporary masterwork can practically blind with its colour scheme and still go unrecognized as such by cinema's ambassadors is more terrifying than anything in Van Sant's searing interpretation of the Columbine atrocity. The first film intended for theatrical exhibition to be screened in Academy ratio since possibly the sixties, Elephant observes youth in the constrictive TV dimensions in which it perceives itself while at the same time giving the lie to the medium that most panders to them; camera moves that stalk students from behind, meanwhile, call attention to the con of Donnie Darko and its bravura tracking shot through the hallways of an overpopulated high school: bustle is hardly the epitome of adolescence. Van Sant's Watt High is a veritable ghost world, and it's easy to see how this building could become the nexus of hate for Alex (Alex Frost), who's being pelted with spitballs when we meet him because, despite a quiet temperament, he seems yet to have found his camouflage. That Elephant doesn't overexplain Alex and Eric's (Eric Deulen) motives for opening fire on classmates and faculty, or even much exert itself to circumstantiate characters (Van Sant's tactic of introducing each student with a title card is a remarkably efficient way of ensuring there are no nameless victims), has perhaps frustrated viewers, but how much more poignant can you get than scoring--in a sequence that for once shows first-person shooters for what they are, a capitalization on the youthful disregard for human life, not a progenitor of violence--a thrill-kill videogame to Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata"? Van Sant caricatures three superficial girls who turn out to be bulimics in an uncharacteristically insensitive and costly aside (it has the temporary effect of making us root for the killers), but the rest of Elephant is the best picture of his career, a more shocking recovery from his extended detour through the Hollywood wasteland than even Gerry. Elephant also has an ending that packs the unnerving wallop of John Frankenheimer's cruel Seconds. ***1/2 (out of four) | Programme: Masters; Running Time: 81 minutes; Saturday, September 6, 7:00 PM - VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN); Sunday, September 7, 12:00 PM - UPTOWN 2

A coming-of-age movie in the vein of--though superior to--a Tony Gatlif special, the diverting Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran ("Coran" being the French spelling for the Koran) is set in a down-and-out Paris neighbourhood circa the early nineteen-sixties. The story concerns Moses (Pierre Boulanger), a.k.a. Momo, an artless Jewish youth accustomed to holding down the fort while his father sweats away in an office for a piddling wage. Momo regularly purloins items from the grocery run by "the Arab," and when Monsieur Ibrahim (Omar Sharif, poised for a substantial comeback) at last confronts him about it, he goes easy on the lad: "Better you steal from me than steal somewhere else." Soon Ibrahim is giving Momo advice--some of it solicited, most of it part and parcel of the social contract between the wise and the naïve--on money and women, and if there's anyone whose advice you should take on money and women, it's Omar Sharif. The movie begins a shift in tone as death and religion enter Momo's maturation: beforehand, it's a convincing, pop-hued period piece, the local colour (including the streetwalkers who prove sensitive to Momo's sexual needs) straight out of a Roger Vadim memory; afterwards, Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran turns parched-looking and strange-feeling while remaining mostly predictable--Finding Forrester with a third act set in Turkey. The film's conclusion is oddly disturbing in its implication not of torches passed but bodies possessed--an extreme reading, to be sure, yet I can't think of a better way to convey the melancholy that suffuses the closing shot. **1/2 (out of four) | Programme: Special Presentations; Running Time: 94 minutes; Saturday, September 6, 9:30 PM - VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN); Monday, September 8, 10:00 AM - UPTOWN 3

Sarah Polley shoots another movie in the foot with her ice-queen demeanour in My Life Without Me, not to be confused with her 1999 starrer The Life Before This. The English-language debut of Spanish writer-director Isabel Coixet, though My Life Without Me was produced by Pedro Almodóvar, his sensual eye is nowhere in evidence--which, however campy, would be a welcome respite from what Coixet has up her sleeve. Taking place vaguely in Canada but most definitely shot there under the influence of its countrymen, My Life Without Me languishes in a gritty, faux Dogmé aesthetic into which the artificial Polley fits all too well. Ann (Polley), a trailer maiden who went from attending schools to cleaning them in order to support her two daughters, learns she has ovarian cancer and elects to neither treat it nor--selfishly, no matter how many hoops of self-justification she and the film jump through--tell anyone; instead, she compiles a list of things she wants to do before she dies, including recording messages for her daughters for every birthday they'll have until they reach eighteen, finding her husband (Scott Speedman, yet again squandered) a suitable replacement, trying sex with another man (Mark Ruffalo), and paying her jailbound father (Alfred Molina) a visit. Canadian to the max, My Life Without Me's every confrontational beat is delivered to a taperecorder (the film succumbs to the "Dear Sally" conceit of Speedman's TV show "Felicity"), all the better to keep the proceedings emotionally sterilized--not that, with Polley around, they needed any help. Looking like sculpted wax, Polley is asked to cry a lot, but what she does is best described as leaking, so frozen is that ghostly snagglepuss of hers here; this is easily the worst performance of her career, condescending to the proletariat besides (delivered in Polley's inimitable monotone, Ann's saucy comebacks to doctors and other authority figures harshly represent the working class), and unfortunately, Polley is the movie. She's slightly more engaged by Ruffalo, whose tender final scene almost puts colour in the actress' cheeks, but such also contributes to the feeling that Ruffalo's subplot is incompatible with the rest of this caged beast. * (out of four) | Programme: Contemporary World Cinema; Running Time: 106 minutes; Saturday, September 6, 6:00 PM - VARSITY 8; Thursday, September 9, 9:30 AM - UPTOWN 3

Denys Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire belongs to the homecoming genre of films like Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill and John Sayles' Return of the Secaucus Seven, but its quasi-sequel, twice honoured at this year's Cannes Film Festival (for Marie-Josée Croze's performance and Arcand's screenplay), is a Muppet movie with socialists. When embittered polisci professor Rémy (Rémy Girard) is diagnosed with untreatable cancer, his estranged, millionaire son Sébastien (David Duchovny look-alike Stéphane Rousseau) seeks out Rémy's Marxist friends of yore--who have more or less gone their separate ways since that momentous dinner party in 1986 and are reunited in true Muppets Take Manhattan, Kermit-needs-me fashion--to be by his bedside for the old man's final days, while also scoring dad painkilling heroin from Nathalie (the plain wonderful Croze), the junkie with whom family friend Dominique (Dominique Michel), her mother, has irreconcilable differences. That the original's neo-realist gimmick of naming the characters after the actors playing them has been dispensed with for new additions to the cast announces Arcand's acquiescence to the inescapable fraudulence of motion pictures; the film's sentimentality, Arcand's embracing of it. Elements carried over from Decline are the most picayune in Invasions--ever-intrigued by the preoccupations of the younger generations, Arcand's heart lies with Sébastien, whose story takes a moving left turn in the final minutes that looks to set-up another, more interesting continuation. Still, Arcand's narrative skills are as lumpy as Tim Burton's: subplots name-checking a cop (French-Canadian cinema fixture Roy Dupuis) and Nathalie's dealer add verisimilitude but seem to lead nowhere by accident, while the impositions of mild contempt for American culture are just that--impositions. (The barbarians of the title refer literally to they who toppled the Twin Towers, discussed in an ill-advised, Noam Chomsky-inspired interlude.) Stilted yet emotionally successful, The Barbarian Invasions kicks off the TIFF on a promising note. **1/2 (out of four) | Programme: Viacom Galas; Running Time: 99 minutes; Thursday, September 4, 7:15 PM - UPTOWN 1; Thursday, September 4, 8:00 PM - ROY THOMSON HALL