Film Freak Central

Crisis (2021)

*/****
starring Gary Oldman, Armie Hammer, Evangeline Lilly, Greg Kinnear
written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki

by Walter Chaw Nicholas Jarecki's Crisis is a Stanley Kramer piece, a "means well," ripped-from-the-headlines message flick that hews closer to 3 Needles than to Traffic in terms of effectiveness and humility. In place of dialogue, there is exposition; and in place of performances, there are swollen forehead veins and trembling lower lips, aghast at the injustices of a cold universe. Crisis sheds "importance" from itself like dander from a stressed but beloved pet, and it's unseemly to come down too hard on it when its greatest crimes are that it is middlebrow in its politeness and really doesn't have much to say beyond what's already inherently obvious. It's possible to do stuff like this and make something like The Insider--that is, something powerful, artful, and transformative. More commonly, it turns out like Crisis has turned out: instantly forgettable and mildly embarrassing in the way of your hip dad trying to jam with you about the evils of the sticky icky. Oh, and use a condom, son.

DIFF '04: Imaginary Crimes

**/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Emile Hirsch, Jeff Daniels, Michelle Williams
written and directed by Dan Harris

by Walter Chaw Another installment in the ongoing Ice Storm chronicles, screenwriter-turned-hyphenate Dan Harris's Imaginary Heroes also incorporates elements of stuff like A Home at the End of the World and Moonlight Mile. The picture shows its hand early and often, with a star swimmer (Kip Pardue) killing himself before the main titles have finished, thus leaving his already-dysfunctional family to pick up the suburban, Ordinary People pieces. Mom is Sigourney Weaver, sis is Michelle Williams, Pa is Jeff Daniels, and the star of the show is likeable Emile Hirsch; the early scenes where Hirsch goes back to school to a slo-mo parade of kids doing their best to be sympathetic (see: Donnie Darko) demonstrate a sort of comfortable indie familiarity with the material. Dad drinks too much and doesn't go to work anymore, Mom discovers the joys of joints and the humiliation of being arrested (a reaction extreme that doesn't ring true), sis falls in love with an emotionally shattered but affable young lad (Jay Paulson), and the "other" son decides to kiss his best friend (Suzanne Santo) one night whilst standing under a plastic snake that acts as an ersatz Freudian mistletoe. (To its credit, the picture resists the Judd Hirsch-ian (no relation) shrink, though given the situation, one does wonder why none of these people are in therapy.) So, if you're sick of this master plot and these stock characters, rest easy that you know all there is to know without needing to suffer through it. But if you miss Sigourney Weaver and wouldn't mind seeing her transfer over to the Joan Allen role in another white-collar blues bit, hell, Imaginary Heroes is just the ticket. Originally published: October 15, 2004.

TIFF '07: Angel

**/****
starring Romola Garai, Michael Fassbender, Sam Neill, Charlotte Rampling
screenplay by François Ozon & Martin Crimp, based on the novel by Elizabeth Taylor
directed by François Ozon

by Bill Chambers François Ozon is what David Bordwell might call a "polystylist," though his eclecticism has mostly yielded diminishing returns. His latest finds him suiting up for yet another genre, and although it could be considered something of a throwback to his early features Water Drops on Burning Rocks and 8 Women (if by virtue of its roots in someone else's material), he's too tony now for the vaguely subversive pastiches with which he made his mark. Based on a book--unread by yours truly--by the other Elizabeth Taylor, Angel on the one hand arguably corresponds to the historical biopic (or sprawling period pieces in general) the way the upcoming Walk Hard does to Walk the Line or Ray, with the contempt seemingly manifested in Romola Garai's silent-movie gesticulations and a globetrotting sequence that has less aesthetic credibility than Conan O'Brien's wild desk rides betraying the film as a turn-of-the-century Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. And yet, there's a kind of lazy veneration for stalwart tropes like the shell-shocked veteran, the tragic miscarriage, the mistress in the city, and, my personal favourite, the death-by-heartbreak--all of which serves to undercut the singularity of Angel's protagonist, a woman who writes her way to wealth and privilege in Edwardian society. (Perhaps Ozon's playing it safe because this is his first film entirely in English.) While Garai is very good in the title role, ingratiating even at the character's brattiest, only Sam Neill, as the henpecked publisher of Angel's potboilers, transcends the movie's cumulatively-disengaging tonal fluctuations. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

TIFF '08: Lorna's Silence

Le silence de Lorna
***½/****
starring Arta Dobroshi, Jérémie Renier, Fabrizio Rongione, Alban Ukaj
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne

by Bill Chambers That figures: I'm finally ready to get on board the Dardenne Brothers bandwagon and everyone's bailing. What I like--maybe love--about their latest, Lorna's Silence (Le Silence de Lorna), is that it zigs when you expect it to zag, which may peg me as superficial (some reviews of the film have admonished it for having a plot) but which nevertheless strikes me as a refreshing change of pace from the neorealist wallowing of their earlier work. (To my mind, the Dardennes crossed the threshold of self-parody with the psychotically-overrated L'Enfant and needed to acknowledge that they'd become predictable.) The picture opens on Lorna (Arta Dobroshi, bearing a striking if irrelevant resemblance to the Ellen Page of Hard Candy, right down to the costume), an Albanian immigrant residing in Belgium's economically depressed Liège (a.k.a. Dardennes Central) who's evidently reached the end of her tether with junkie husband Claudy (L'Enfant's Jérémie Renier, in a lovely performance). (We don't have to live with him, of course, but he generates a tremendous amount of pity when she slams the door in his face after he sweetly asks her to play cards.) Slowly, as though the narrative itself were irising out, Claudy is revealed to be the pawn in a green-card scheme, the necessary evil before Lorna can enter into an equally sham marriage with a Russian mobster. But if The Apartment taught us anything, nothing brings ersatz couples together like convalescence: During Claudy's latest detox, he and Lorna start acting more like a real husband and wife. And then comes the most jarring bifurcation this side of Full Metal Jacket; Lorna's Silence is two different movies, really, and it's the picture's second, less conventionally satisfying half which has courted the most hostility from critics, despite the fact that it arguably justifies more than any of their previous films all the ink spilled over the years comparing the Dardennes to Robert Bresson. (Maybe it's a challenge to those who insist on making the link.) Tempting to trot out that hoary description "fairytale for grownups," but let's just say that Lorna's Silence is on top of everything else a clever and affecting pro-choice fable. Minor Dardennes is my kind of Dardennes, I guess. PROGRAMME: Masters

TIFF 2019: Atlantiques

Atlantique
***/****
starring Mama Sané, Amadou Mbow, Ibrahima Traoré, Nicole Sougou
screenplay by Mati Diop, Olivier Demangel
directed by Mati Diop

by Angelo Muredda Working from her own 2009 short Atlantiques, first-time feature director Mati Diop makes a bold impression with Atlantics. An elegant film that will hopefully lose the ungainly subtitle "A Ghost Love Story" by the time it makes its way to Netflix (where it's bound in the coming months), it's an awfully strong directorial calling card with a distinctive rhythm and point of view, its tactility and sensuousness evoking the work of Diop's former director and mentor Claire Denis without losing its own youthful verve.

TIFF 2019: Sound of Metal

***/****
starring Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke, Mathieu Amalric, Paul Raci
written by Abraham Marder & Darius Marder
directed by Darius Marder

by Angelo Muredda It comes as a pleasant jolt that there's a lot to say about Sound of Metal, The Place Beyond the Pines' co-screenwriter Darius Marder's feature debut. On paper, the story of Ruben (Riz Ahmed), a noise-metal drummer and recovering addict who suddenly loses his hearing in the middle of a tour with his girlfriend and musical partner Lou (Olivia Cooke), seems like the stuff of a run-of-the-mill disability melodrama about learning to appreciate life's little pleasures in silence. And though it veers close to something like that message in its final moments, which threaten to put a bow on a rather messy human drama, the film is surprisingly complicated about the new worlds, sensory experiences, and cultures in which Ruben is being initiated.

Domino (2019)

***/****
starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Carice Van Houten, Eriq Ebouaney, Guy Pearce
written by Petter Skavlan
directed by Brian De Palma

by Alice Stoehr When Brian De Palma was 17, relates Julie Salamon in her book The Devil's Candy, he tried to prove his father was having an affair. "All summer long he recorded his father's telephone calls," she writes. "On more than one occasion he climbed up a tree outside his father's office and snapped pictures of him and his nurse." Though perhaps too pat as an origin story, this experience--oft-repeated by biographers, as well as the director himself--haunts his filmography. From Dressed to Kill to Blow Out to Snake Eyes, his characters and camera fixate on audiovisual evidence. They foreground how film itself can act as documentation, to either reveal or distort the truth. These same preoccupations shape Domino, his thirtieth feature and the first he's directed since 2012's Passion. The espionage thriller, penned by Norwegian screenwriter Petter Skavlan, intertwines three sets of characters as they bound across Western Europe. Christian (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is a Copenhagen cop who sees his partner's throat slit in a set-piece modelled after the opening of Vertigo. He seeks vengeance against the assailant, Ezra (Eriq Ebouaney), who's blackmailed by a handler at the CIA (Guy Pearce) into tracking down the same ISIS cell that beheaded his father. It's tawdry material, nesting two revenge narratives and plenty of terrorist intrigue inside a film that's under 90 minutes long.

Mandy (2018) + Suspiria (2018)

MANDY
***/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache, Bill Duke
screenplay by Panos Cosmatos & Aaron Stewart-Ahn
directed by Panos Cosmatos

SUSPIRIA
****/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Mia Goth, Chloë Grace Moretz
screenplay by David Kajganich, based on the screenplay by Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi
directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Walter Chaw Panos Cosmatos's Mandy is an old-fashioned acid trip of a movie--like if Head were directed by Rob Zombie. Indeed, the film it owes the most to is Zombie's exceptional mood piece Lords of Salem. It's already gained a fair deal of cult cachet (as well as a surprising/not-surprising box-office run), not the least for the best use of King Crimson since Children of Men (prog-rock is having a good 2018 between just this and Private Life), for the late Jóhann Jóhannsson's bliss-out score, and for an unhinged Nicolas Cage performance augmented by Viking berserker rage superpowers. Not for nothing is Mandy a period piece opening with Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech, dissolving into a pixie-font title card setting the scene as "The Shadow Mountains" in the year of our lord, 1983. Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) is drawing "kinda like a jungle temple" in the remote home she shares with Red Miller (Cage). In bed, they talk about their favourite planets (hers: Jupiter, for the storms; his: Saturn, probably--no, wait, "Galactus") as Cosmatos bathes them in neon reds, then pans up into the Northern Lights arrayed above them. They canoe and it's so beautiful, the wave patterns and the blue, so blue it's almost lurid. Fire, then, a screen of it. All the elements will be represented here as metaphor for the completeness of their bond. It's not subtle. Now's not the time for subtlety.

Let the Sunshine In (2017)

Un beau soleil intérieur
***½/****
starring Juliette Binoche, Xavier Beauvois, Josiane Balasko, Sandrine Dumas
screenplay by Claire Denis and Christine Angot, based on the book A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes
directed by Claire Denis

by Angelo Muredda Improbable as it might seem for a filmmaker who once wrestled with philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy's elliptical and uncanny autobiographical essay on his heart transplant, Claire Denis sets her sights on the ostensibly lower-hanging fruit of the romantic comedy in Let the Sunshine In. This play with formal conventions has some precedent, to be sure, in the near-magical coincidences of Vendredi soir and the table-setting musical centrepiece that drives the final act of 35 Shots of Rum. As with L'Intrus, the film also stands as an idiosyncratic adaptation of a French philosopher's non-narrative work--this time Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, whose musings on how lovers talk to each other aren't loaded in the characters' mouths here so much as they are allowed to steep into the ambience like a strong tea. If the genre of happy endings and restored cosmic imbalances seems on paper to be an odd fit for Denis's predilections for delicate wordless gestures, in practice, Let the Sunshine In is nevertheless as singular as Denis's ostensibly less categorizable work: a mercurial and rather lovely portrait of a lonely woman's attempt to replenish herself and secure her future without closing any doors, which is ultimately as open to possibility as its heroine.

What Happened to Monday (2017) - Netflix

Seven Sisters
**½/****
starring Noomi Rapace, Glenn Close, Pål Sverre Hagen, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Max Botkin and Kerry Williamson
directed by Tommy Wirkola

by Alice Stoehr The bad news manifests itself in a flurry of stock footage and newscasters' voices. "Too many people, not enough food," declares one near-future pundit. "It is the biggest crisis in human history," adds another. Dr. Nicolette Cayman, a politician so Thatcher-esque that Glenn Close plays her in pearls and a navy blue suit, helps Europe's now-federalized government institute a strict one-child policy. Her Gestapo-like Child Allocation Bureau (or "CAB") patrols city streets, threatening hidden siblings with indefinite cryogenic stasis. So far, so familiar. It's much like Soylent Green or Children of Men or any of a dozen other dystopian thrillers. But What Happened to Monday's knotty premise continues: What if, say, seven identical sisters grew up in this political climate? They could each leave the house exactly one day a week, each time assuming the same collective identity. And what if one of these sisters, while out and about, happened to disappear?

Fantastic Fest '16: Raw

Grave
****/****
starring Garance Marillier, Ella Rumpf, Rabah Naït Oufella, Marion Vernoux
written and directed by Julia Ducournau

by Walter Chaw A spiritual blood sister of Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day, Julia Ducournau's feature debut Raw is a crystallization of the last couple years' steady creep towards unabashedly gyno-centric fare. Kimberly Peirce's unfairly derided Carrie, which Raw references in one of its canniest, funniest moments, gathers monstrously in the rearview as a film doomed to have been just ahead of its time--literally hours away from being justly hailed as harbinger of a period of Furiosas and Reys, of It Follows and The Witch and The Green Room and more. As genre fare, Raw is as raw as it could be, the tale of a vegan first-year veterinary school student named Justine (Garance Marillier) who is submitted to a series of cruel hazing rituals that introduce her to body-image issues, existential crises, eating disorders, and the taste of sweet, sweet animal protein. You know, freshman year. Ducournau captures it all beautifully: the horror of being away, of surrendering to the higher university mind, of experimenting with drugs and drink and sex and becoming a full inhabitant of the desires and fears that will fuel the rest of your life. There's a scene early on where Justine visits a doctor (French writer and director Marion Vernoux) that reminds of the sequences in Jacob's Ladder where Jacob visits his angelic chiropractor. It's shot differently from the rest of the film. It's brighter. The film will never be this bright again.

TIFF '16: A Quiet Passion

****/****
starring Cynthia Nixon, Jennifer Ehle, Jodhi May, Keith Carradine
written and directed by Terence Davies

by Walter Chaw Terence Davies doesn't make a lot of movies but he does make masterpieces fairly regularly. A Quiet Passion, a biopic of the notoriously reclusive Emily Dickinson, is his latest. His portrait of the "Belle of Amherst" captures the poet (Cynthia Nixon, transcendent) as a woman who finds no succour in the petrified pieties of her rigid New England society, turning inwards instead to the dubious pleasures of family and verse. She looks for approval from both. Her father (Keith Carradine) suffers her streak of rebellion. There's the sense that he sees in her the continuation of his own modest progressivism, indicated by the quiet approval he gives to his children's mockery of his silly sister (Annette Badland), his acceptance of Emily's rejection of a religious education, and his indulging of Emily's desire to write in the small hours of the night. One senses that these witching hours are her room of one's own. The tableaux of Emily swaddled in the purple cocoon of night is not just a romantic notion, but evocation, too, of Davies's deep consciousness of colour in his pictures, pointing to how these early, idealistic moments are contrasted by the sick yellows, whites, and browns that populate the period after her father's death. He breaks that mourning with an impressionistic interlude that opens upon a green bower, then Emily bathed in firelight in something like the physical/spiritual ecstasy that would be denied her--that she perhaps denied herself for fear and self-loathing--all her life. He closes a door on her, slowly. It's a passage that expresses the tension of the film's title: Emily finds deliverance only upon a deeper metaphysical implosion.

TIFF '16: Elle

***/****
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Bill Chambers The first thing you hear in Elle, after Anne Dudley's giallo-worthy (and, thus, slightly misleading) overture, are some violent sex noises, but the first thing you see is a cat, a good ol' Russian blue, who is watching his owner get violated with daunting ambivalence. Meet the director. Migrating from his native Holland to France this time, Paul Verhoeven has made a movie fascinated with rape at either the best or worst cultural moment he could have chosen. Michèle (Isabelle Huppert) is depicted being raped several times over the course of the film by the same ski-masked stranger; my own reaction was a complicated gnarl of disgust and desensitization that led to more disgust. Eventually, I think, Michèle's relationship with her attacker becomes S&M in all but name, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Michèle is a well-to-do Parisian with a videogame company that seems to specialize in hentai (meaning you also get to see tentacle rape, Verhoeven-style). Family members--including a mother (Judith Magre) who's into much-younger men and a layabout son (Jonas Bloquet) who's fallen under the spell of a pregnant gold digger (Alice Isaaz)--orbit in close proximity despite her abrasive candor, which at one point finds her telling her friends and puppyish ex-husband (Charles Berling) about her rape over cocktails after work. They worry, but because she's the alpha dog, they probably don't worry enough.

Man on the Train (2002); Chaos (2001); And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen... (2002); The Son (2002)

L'Homme du train
***/****
starring Jean Rochefort, Johnny Hallyday, Jean-François Stévenin, Charlie Nelson
screenplay by Claude Klotz
directed by Patrice Leconte

CHAOS
*/****
starring Catherine Frot, Vincent Lindon, Rachida Brakni, Line Renaud
written and directed by Coline Serreau

AND NOW... LADIES AND GENTLEMEN...
***½/****
starring Jeremy Irons, Patricia Kaas, Thierry Lhermitte, Alessandra Martines
screenplay by Claude Lelouch, Pierre Leroux & Pierre Uytterhoeven
directed by Claude Lelouch

Le fils
****/****
starring Olivier Gourmet, Morgan Marinne, Isabella Soupart, Nassim Hassaïni
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne

by Walter Chaw After a brief period where French cinema seemed exclusively interested in the ugliness and violence festering in its anti-Semitic margins, what with pictures as variegated as Baise-moi, Trouble Every Day, My Wife is an Actress, and indeed, Gasper Noé's sensationalistic Irréversible (which demonstrates a continuing fascination with a tumultuous French cinema in extremis), the old guard begins to reassert itself with its own tales of the underbelly of life displacing the façade of the comfortable upper class. Patrice Leconte's new film Man on the Train (L'Homme du train) is reserved and slight while Chaos by Coline Serreau (who was born the same year as Leconte, as it happens) tries to soften the cruelty of much of modern French cinema by overlaying it with a patina of feminist uplift and misplaced social satire. Films like Rohmer's The Lady and the Duke and Godard's In Praise of Love attempt to draw a line between the nouvelle and the digital age (and Chaos is shot in ugly DV), and pictures like Rivette's wonderful Va Savoir and now Claude Lelouch's And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen... act as surveys and auto-critique of the medium itself. With these three pictures, the meta-critical instinct--something of a hallmark of French culture in general and cinema in particular--finds a new voice in, ironically, its older generation of directors. Somewhat apart from all of that is the Dardenne Brothers' The Son (Le Fils), which is on its own stylistically but looks thematically for common ground in its own tale of obsession and reconciliation.

Hot Docs '16: No Man is an Island

**/****
directed by Tim De Keersmaecker

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers The white sands and turquoise waters of Lampedusa, Italy's southernmost island, have attracted tourists like iron filings in the age of TripAdvisor. It's paradise found, an oasis in the Mediterranean. And it's "the door to Africa," a European outpost at which migrants dock en masse. No Man is an Island alternates between two young refugees who've established themselves there in some capacity. Omar, who fled Tunisia during the Arab Spring, is the Eliza Doolittle-like apprentice to the doctor who heads up the medical centre for new arrivals, while the comparatively laconic Adam, from Ghana, is the houseboy of a man who came to Lampedusa by way of Colombia and seems a little sketchy in his "Miami Vice" digs. Both Omar and Adam are struggling with assimilation--Omar feels out of place, perhaps owing to unresolved feelings about his sexual orientation, whereas Adam is finding it difficult to transcend the jocular racism of his newfound peers--yet nothing particularly dynamic or revelatory comes from paralleling their stories; ultimately, this feels like two discrete documentaries interrupting each other. Director Tim De Keersmaecker develops motifs--recurring images of sea turtles and the Virgin Mary--but his dreamy, elliptical approach robs them of thematic weight. (Reading about Lampedusa, I discovered that it simultaneously rescues some 200 sea turtles a year from the vagaries of the fishing industry.) More superficial than profound, the film is a glorified DSLR demo video when all's said and done, and as sympathetic as Omar and Adam are, this aesthetic really emphasizes the poetry of their surroundings, taking the edge off their rootlessness. No Man is an Island might be a better tourism video than it intends.

TIFF '15: Black; We Monsters; Keeper

BLACK
*/****
directed by Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah

Wir Monster, a.k.a. Cold Days
**/****
directed by Sebastian Ko

KEEPER (pictured)
***/****
directed by Guillaume Senez

by Bill Chambers My random sampling of #TIFF15's Discovery programme yielded a loose trilogy of bildungsromane. The most 'problematic' of these, as the kids say, is Black, a West Side Story redux set on the surprisingly mean streets of Brussels, where rival gangs of Moroccan and (I think) Congolese immigrants antagonize the locals and each other. Marwan (charming Aboubakr Bensaihi) and Mavela (gorgeous Martha Canga Antonio) meet-cute in police custody. He's Moroccan, she hangs with "the Black Bronx," whose name very purposely evokes American ghettos for that soupçon of danger. When he hits on her, she asks him how he'd feel if his sister brought a black man home; Marwan admits there's a double standard, then reassuringly points out they're both African. Within days they're a couple on the DL, whispering dreams of an honest future together. Alas, Mavela becomes inextricably tethered to the Black Bronx when she baits a female member of Marwan's posse to their clubhouse to be gangraped, then endures the same torment herself after they find out about her affair with Marwan. Note that the first rape happens offscreen while Mavela's does not, and though I don't condone any rape scene, there is something ultra-nauseating about graphically violating the Maria/Juliet figure, like when Edith Bunker endured a rape attempt: It breaks some socio-artistic contract we have with our most wholesome archetypes. It didn't make me hate her attackers so much as it made me hate the filmmakers.

Love Me If You Dare (2003) + Valentin (2002)

Jeux d'enfants
ZERO STARS/****
starring Guillaume Canet, Marion Cotillard, Thibault Verhaeghe, Joséphine Lebas-Joly
screenplay by Jacky Cukier & Yann Samuell
directed by Yann Samuell

VALENTIN
**/****
starring Julieta Cardinali, Carmen Maura, Jean Pierre Noher, Mex Urtizberea
written and directed by Alejandro Agresti

by Walter Chaw Former animator Yann Samuell's Love Me If You Dare (Jeux d'enfants) is painfully, dedicatedly unwatchable. It's vile and perverse in a puerile way that bears no discernable fruit. For a romantic comedy, it's conspicuously lacking in romance and comedy, and for a dark, satirical look at the Hobbesian baseness of human love and nature, it's astonishingly childish. The picture is the equivalent of a little boy eating a worm to impress the little girl he has a crush on: a tireless series of schoolyard transgressions portrayed in the whip-pan jack-in-the-box way of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie that shares with that film a strong thread of misanthropic mischief, but reveals itself the classless poseur in its constant keening for attention. Love Me If You Dare is so awful that its constant "hip" references to George Lucas films not only somehow make Kevin Smith seem current again, but also suggest of all things a rom-com directed by the clown-prince of Skywalker Ranch himself. There's an idea gnawing in my head that the reason this picture was so popular in France has something to do with a failure to translate the satirical dimensions of a film that succeeds so spectacularly in alienating its audience, yet, like Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio (the Italian version of which Jonathan Rosenbaum proclaimed one of the best films of 2002), whatever's happened in transit has handily transformed any rewarding subtext into a rising din.

Saint Laurent (2014)

***/****
starring Gaspard Ulliel, Jérémie Renier, Louis Garrel, Helmut Berger
screenplay by Bertrand Bonello and Thomas Bidegain
directed by Bertrand Bonello

by Angelo Muredda Bertrand Bonello enters the postmodern biopic sweepstakes with Saint Laurent, no less than the third chronicle of the titular French designer and haute couture icon in as many years. With regrets to Pierre Thoretton's understated but chilly L'amour fou, which comes at its subject through the reminiscences of his lifelong professional and personal partner Pierre Berge, Bonello's project is almost certainly the most fetching (thanks in no small part to costume designer Anais Romand), marrying a contemporary fixation on the limits of biographical storytelling with the sort of impressionist brushstrokes the Matisse devotee might have appreciated. In the wake of filmmakers as disparate as Todd Haynes and Abel Ferrara self-consciously toying with the limits of the biopic form, ostensibly killing dynamic subjects by pinning them to the wall, Saint Laurent isn't as radical a work of genre subversion as some of its adherents claim, but it sure as hell is beautiful, channelling its subject's hedonist spirit and delicate aesthetic sensibility in roughly equal measure.

Free Zone (2005) + The Secret Life of Words (2005) - DVDs

FREE ZONE
*/**** Image C- Sound B Extras F
starring Natalie Portman, Hanna Laslo, Hiam Abbass
written and directed by Amos Gitai

THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Sarah Polley, Tim Robbins, Javier Cámara, Julie Christie
written and directed by Isabel Coixet

by Walter Chaw The not-at-all-hamfisted allegory of an Israeli woman and a Palestinian woman trekking across the disputed land to find an American who will settle some non-specific debt, Amos Gitai's tediously strident Free Zone opens with ten minutes, uninterrupted, of Natalie Portman weeping over what we discover to be the end of a love affair. It's showy and about as subtle as a kidney-punch--ditto the conception of Portman's passive Rebecca (Portman), the American on the sidelines, a matinee-beautiful beacon who stands by as impassively as Milton's God. That said, the device of a long, car-bound road trip narrated by flashbacks of the protagonists' separate journeys to this journey is, at least for a while, intoxicating. The problem--and it's a doozy--is that Gitai's picture is so blatant an allegory that nothing any of the characters say comes free of dramatic distance or irony, making it impossible to take the film seriously as anything other than ventriloquism for Gitai's, let's face it, unsurprising politics. Nothing wrong with Wailing Wall lamentations about the state of the world, but watching someone shake a fist at a dead horse, long past the hope of resurrection, for upwards of two hours, is tiring and futile. Is there traction in proposing that the film merely mirrors the hopelessness of the Middle East conflict? I guess, but then how many people--specifically, how many people renting a film called Free Zone directed by Amos Gitai--are going to feel edified by that?

TIFF '14: Cub

Welp
½*/****
directed by Jonas Govaerts

by Bill Chambers Cub--or Welp, as it is humorously called in the original Dutch--has a killer hook, or at least a viable-enough premise that some considerable buzz has built up around this Midnight Madness entry. A troop of cub scouts goes camping in Belgian woods allegedly occupied by Kai, a boy who becomes a werewolf by night; the two young scout masters, Peter (Stef Aerts) and Chris (Titus De Voogdt), build their own buzz about the cryptozoic creature to have something for the campfires (also because they seem to like antagonizing children), unaware of course that Kai does exist in the form of a lightning-quick feral kid wearing a mask fashioned from tree-bark. Sam (Maurice Luijten) actually stumbles on Kai's treehouse, where the child stows trinkets purloined from campers, The Final Terror-style, but being an apparent charity case gives Sam zero credibility with those he tells--particularly Peter, who takes sadistic glee in isolating Sam from his peers and targeting him for military punishments that Chris, the more empathetic and merciful of the two, is never around to avert. Seriously: even with a wild child who can't figure out how to work a can opener living large in a treehouse worthy of I.M. Pei, Chris's constant absence is the movie's most confounding mystery.

TIFF '14: Waste Land

**/****
written and directed by Pieter Van Hees

by Bill Chambers Ominously chaptered after the weeks in a pregnancy, Waste Land begins with an encouraging but deceptive touch of absurdity, as Brussels homicide detective Leo Woeste (Jérémie Renier) placidly stands in for the victim at a nauseatingly fresh crime scene while the addled perpetrator tries to reconstruct the murder for a forensics team. Leo's next case, involving the occult-related death of a young Congolese immigrant, coincides with wife Kathleen (the appropriately-named Natali Broods) announcing she's with child--her second, Leo's first--and planning on aborting it due to her husband's grim attachment to his profession. He goads her into keeping it by pledging to quit the force once he's through with this latest investigation, but it proves an unreasonable vortex that soon has him becoming infatuated with the dead man's sister (Babetida Sadjo) and going off the grid, as well as the proverbial deep end.

Telluride '14: Two Days, One Night

Deux jours, une nuit
****/****
starring Marion Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione, Pili Groyne, Simon Caudry
written and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

by Walter Chaw Somewhere in the middle of the Dardennes' Two Days, One Night, Sandra (Marion Cotillard), trying to convince her sixteen co-workers to vote to allow her to keep her job at the expense of a bonus of one-thousand euros, accuses her husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione) of turning off the radio because the song is too sad and he fears she's too fragile for it. She turns it back on. It's Petula Clark's French-language cover of Jackie DeShannon's "Needles and Pins," "La Nuit N'en Finit Plus." Shot in the Dardennes style, close and over the shoulder, Sandra looks at Manu slyly for a second, pumps up the volume, and laughs. Cotillard is disarming, as always, and she's so natural in this moment--in all of the film, but in this moment in particular. It's stunning. Her Sandra is absolutely compelling throughout. Her victories are ecstatic; her defeats are deflating. About an hour in, I realized that Two Days, One Night is a fable--a literal one, with a heroine undergoing a series of trials, forced to say the same things like a Belgian Bartleby to a sequence of different people in different situations. Even her exit line at the end of every encounter ("Thank you, goodbye") is identical each time. It's through this repetition that the film finds a rhythm, sure, but also room for Sandra to learn and for Two Days, One Night to paint as complete and sympathetic a picture of depression as there's ever been.

L'Enfant (2005) + The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006)|L'Enfant (2005) - DVD

The Child
**½/****
starring Jérémie Renier, Déborah François, Jérémie Segard, Fabrizio Rongione
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne

THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON
**/****
directed by Jeff Feuerzeig

by Walter Chaw I believe the title is meant to indicate the arrested protagonist more than it is the baby he tries to sell on the black market, thus The Child (L'Enfant)--another of Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's mild, allegorical subversions of Robert Bresson and incrementally more violent subversions of the French New Wave--takes on Pickpocket via Breathless. In so doing, it conjures up this odd chimera of a stylistically backward-looking, formalist deconstruction, the first film of the Brothers (after La Promesse, Rosetta, and The Son) to feel this much like a knowing satire, to come so perilously close to being smug and post-modern that its style begins to become confused with its message. It could be a product of overfamiliarity with a fine and distinct sensibility (the last thing this kind of innovation can afford is to be outrun and second-guessed), or it could be that the Brothers are getting either bored of their shtick or fond of their reputation.

SDFF '13: The Fifth Season

La cinquième saison
****/****
starring Aurelia Poirier, Django Schrevens, Sam Louwyck, Gill Vancompernolle
written and directed by Peter Brosens & Jessica Woodworth

by Walter Chaw It begins as a puzzle, the active-engagement kind where a film, maybe an art film not very good and certainly not lacking in pretension, wears all the hopes of its creators on its sleeve. But then, out of nowhere, Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth's The Fifth Season (La cinquième saison) ties together all the pretty pictures into an entirely honourable updating of a few of the ideas from, but most importantly the atmosphere of, Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man. Truth be told, the pictures are more than just pretty: they're stunning at times, and it's easy to be mesmerized by them--by their surrealism and meticulous framing, and, at the end of it all, by their gorgeous absurdity. This is rapturous filmmaking that in its first minutes watches two teens kiss, tentatively, in the cold and the woods, their breath trembling the soft down on each other's faces. We feel, with them, the discovery of something new. The Fifth Season is a film about textures, but rather than just be a film about textures, it does something that maybe Terrence Malick's movies do, certainly Bela Tarr's: it makes its form comment on its function.

SDFF '13: The Broken Circle Breakdown

***/****
starring Johan Heldenbergh, Veerle Baetens, Nell Cattrysse, Geert Van Rampelberg
screenplay by Carl Joos & Felix Van Groeningen, based on the play by Johan Heldenbergh & Mieke Dobbels
directed by Felix Van Groeningen

by Walter Chaw Felix Van Groeningen's The Broken Circle Breakdown eventually loses impetus and becomes political theatre, but until it does it's exceptional melodrama, raw and emotional. It walks the fine line for a while, staying just this side of exploitation in its alinear tale of a little girl who gets cancer and her parents--how they met, the aftermath, and then the far aftermath. The film's central event, then, isn't the child's fate, but rather the meet-cute of the parents, with squarish Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) asking about Elise's (Veerle Baetens) tattoos in the parlour where she works. A bit shocked, and maybe titillated, that each has a story of a different man attached to it, he invites her to, essentially, come see him perform with his bluegrass band in a tiny club down the way. Van Groeningen, working from an original idea and stage play by Heldenbergh, adroitly alternates the events of the film with Didier's band's songs; in other words, The Broken Circle Breakdown owes a greater kinship to Cabaret than to Once--even though, at its best, its intent leans more towards the personal than the political. This means, of course, that once it becomes more political than personal, it also loses its rudder and balance. Already, effortlessly, about so much, it stumbles badly when it tries to be.