Toronto International Film Festival
Read all about the holy trinity of defiance, depravity and debauchery represented by the entries at the September 2004 film extravaganza.
By Rebecca Flint-Marx
Published: October 7th, 2004 | 10:59am
Toward the end of The Libertine, Laurence Dunsmore’s Bruegel-flavored 17th-century tale of wit, lust, and ruin, the film’s title character, the Second Earl of Rochester (Johnny Depp), disfigured by syphilis, sits in a chair and pisses himself. Despite this humiliation, he manages to remain as defiant and foul-mouthed as he was at the height of his powers, when he was a favorite of both the royal court and countless noblewomen, prostitutes, and fresh-faced young men.
The defiance, depravity, and debauchery captured in this scene proved to be something of an omnipresent holy trinity in Toronto this year, manifested in characters ranging from Depp’s dissolute Earl to Kevin Bacon’s convicted pedophile attempting to build a new life in Nicole Kassell’s The Woodsman. If people weren’t having or recovering from dysfunctional sex, they were doing or recovering from drugs (heroin seemed to be the drug of choice this year, though cocaine did some obligatory screen time). And they were doing it against a backdrop painted with broad strokes of despair and endless struggle.
Dysfunction was so inescapable this year that it’s a wonder festival programmers didn’t hand out bottles of Paxil before screenings. One of the most notable downers was Lukas Moodysson’s A Hole in My Heart. Set in the apartment of a pornographer and his withdrawn, alienated son, it was as unsettling as it was graphic (those with queasy stomachs should steer clear of the film’s depiction of the black market labia trade). Picked up by Newmarket, the film showed that Moodysson is still pushing the boundaries he began to test with his debut feature, Fucking Amal, yet left some filmgoers still recovering from Lilya 4Ever, his previous adventure in emotional devastation, pining for the bygone halcyon days of Moodysson’s lighter, but no less affecting Together and Fucking Amal.
Bodies were also on display, graphically so, in Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs. Having stirred up a ruckus in Cannes, Winterbottom’s 65-minute portrait of a couple’s brief relationship packed its Toronto screening, with viewers no doubt drawn in by reports of copious nudity, actual sex, and an Old Faithful of a money shot. Unsurprisingly, many left disappointed; for all of its notoriety, the film is little more than a simple, entirely improvised account of the lusty interactions between two somewhat annoying people. Still, the film — thanks largely to its brief run time — managed to be fairly engaging because of its honesty: once the memories of penetration and cum shots leave you, what remains are those of the small, mundane interactions universal to couples (a shared bath, a quiet dinner at home) that Winterbottom captures so marvelously.
9 Songs may have its detractors, but it generated far more heat than the festival’s other supposedly sexy cause celebre, Eros. A collaboration between Wong Kar-wai, Steven Soderbergh, and Michelangelo Antonioni, it was trumpeted as three short meditations on the subject bestowed generously upon us by the masters. If only. Wong’s short, The Hand — by far the best — is the sad, gloriously stylized story of a high-class hooker’s (Gong Li) relationship with her devoted tailor. But despite some beautiful scenes and a serenely poignant ending, The Hand felt like a trifle for Wong, who already did more or less the same thing with In the Mood for Love.
Still, The Hand was still far more successful than Soderbergh’s entry, Equilibrium, which seemed tossed off in the crudest sense of the word. Shot in black and white and set in the '50s, it features Robert Downey Jr. as a man relaying a boring dream to his uninterested shrink, who is far more intrigued by what he views out his window through a pair of binoculars. The twist Soderbergh gives the ending has all the hairpin excitement of a Kansas highway, and it’s almost embarrassing to think that he may have truly believed he was being clever.
But as disappointing as Wong and Soderbergh’s segments were, they were masterpieces compared to Antonioni’s contribution, The Dangerous Thread of Things. If his work here is any indication, Antonioni needs to be prevented from making a film ever again. Muddled, pretentious, and unforgivingly tedious from beginning to end, it was an excrutiating illustration of the sort of mindless indulgence so often granted to directors who, having had their critical heyday decades ago, are allowed to coast along in the light of their slowly dimming halos. A small team of heavily sedated lemurs could have done a better job; if only they had.
Although audience unhappiness defined the experience of enduring Eros, it was far surpassed by the suffering visited upon characters in entries such as Shane Meadows’ Dead Man’s Shoes, an unrelentingly grim yet powerful revenge drama set in the Midlands and starring Paddy Considine in a terrifying performance; Keane, Lodge Kerrigan’s account of a mentally ill man (Damian Lewis, giving a gripping if at times cringe-inducing performance) searching for his ostensibly kidnapped daughter; Automne, Ra’Up McGee’s minor though enjoyably over the top look at a hitman with a conscience (and possibly the most stylish wardrobe in northern France); and Alejandro Amenabar’s The Sea Inside. Starring the great Javier Bardem as a quadriplegic attempting to end his life, it was one of the festival’s most anticipated films, and also — if the screenings were any indication — one of its most eagerly embraced. That may in part be because the film is, among many things, an unrepentant yet entirely seductive tear jerker. Hankies came out and stayed out by the film’s half-way point; Amenabar may fail to present a believable counterpoint to his protagonist’s conviction in his right to die, but this problem — and that of the unredeemed selfishness of Bardem’s character — was swallowed up by the mastery of Bardem’s performance, which all but screamed, shouted, and yodeled “Oscar bait.”
Oscar echoes also surrounded Kevin Bacon’s performance in The Woodsman. The subject matter of Nicole Kassell’s film had company in Todd Solondz’s Palindromes, in which several actresses play a 12-year-old girl who wants more than anything to have a baby, and Mysterious Skin, Gregg Araki’s story of two boys who deal with childhood sexual abuse in very different ways. Both films are saddled with directors whose past work has inspired as much loyalty as loathing, so it was difficult to approach these latest efforts without a modicum of both dread and anticipation.
Unfortunately, both were disappointments, Solondz’s because of its intense tediousness and awkward, obvious attempts at social satire; Araki’s because of — among other things — the overwhelming message that the filmmaker, after dabbling so long in cartoonish, ultra-violent nihilism, was finally making a Grown Up Picture About Serious Issues. Although it boasted strong work from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet and Michelle Trachtenberg, their performances were unable to rise above facile characterization and painful attempts at poetic lyricism that Araki sprinkled into his film with the panache of an amateur chef attempting to lend spice to a bland dish.
Pleasant yet smart and thought-provoking diversions from all the doom and gloom came courtesy of films like Kinsey, Bill Condon’s biopic about the legendary taxonomist cum sex researcher, Alexander Payne’s hilarious and touching Sideways, and Dylan Kidd’s P.S. The film Kinsey saw Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, and Peter Sarsgaard heading a strong cast who played out the partial story of Kinsey’s life in a lively, appropriately frank way. Linney was also front and center in P.S., Kidd’s follow-up to his brutal, verbally dexterous Roger Dodger. P.S. is the odd, ultimately compassionate (and acidly funny) story of a Columbia admissions officer who falls for a prospective student (Topher Grace) who bears an uncanny resemblence to a long-departed boyfriend, and lent an air of wry levity to the festival roster. Likewise did Sideways, which enjoyed what was perhaps the festival’s most rapturous critical reception. Starring Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church (best known to children of the early '90s as the dimwitted Lowell on TV’s “Wings”) as two longtime friends who go on a week-long tour of the California wine country before Church’s wedding, it’s easily Payne’s most complete, heartfelt, and fulfilling film yet, and should be viewed with a glass or four of pinot noir in hand.
Also amusing, though nowhere near as emotionally satisfying, was Yvan Attal’s Ils se marierent et eurent beaucoup d’enfants (And They Lived Happily Ever After), a comedic yet poignant portrait of a marriage (between Attal and his real-life wife, Charlotte Gainsbourg, whom he directed in My Wife is An Actress) in mild crisis. Attal’s character is inexplicably cheating on his fabulous wife, while his two good friends are having relationship issues of their own. An enjoyable if solidly bourgeois film (with a nice cameo by Johnny Depp), it provided an interesting contrast to another French portrait of marital discontent, 5 x 2. Directed by Francois Ozon, for several years now viewed as France’s most successful enfant provocateur, it tells the story, in reverse, of the disintegration of a couple’s marriage. Realistic and gut-wrenching, it displayed the sort of emotional honesty that was in short supply among many festival entries. Next to Under the Sand, it’s Ozon’s most mature film to date, told with a simplicity that leaves plenty of room for its quiet devastation to take root and blossom into one lethal flower.
Finally, Oscar talk abounded in the wake of Jamie Foxx’s portrayal of Ray Charles in Ray, Taylor Hackford’s biopic of the late, legendary musician. Although burdened in its last act by a couple of hammy scenes, the film was one of the most cohesive Toronto had to offer. In watching Foxx’s performance, one was never aware that the actor was anybody but Ray Charles, and his work will undoubtedly set a new standard for the portrayal of real-life characters. Watching Foxx was a thrill, and was a particularly vivid reminder to weary festival goers of the hope and triumph to be found among the smoldering devastation, real and metaphorical, that so relentlessly characterized Toronto’s 2004 offerings.
Issue #26
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