(Isabelle Huppert in Claire Denis' White Material. Images courtesy of Toronto International Film festival)
Toronto’s over but New York’s reached the middle. The two festivals, though much different beasts, share a lot of titles.
No festival is able to entirely synthesize the moods and currents of international cinema, though Toronto certainly gives it a whirl. Toronto is also something of a reactive festival: a movie makes a bang in Venice or Telluride suddenly hot property.
That was certainly the case with Lebanon, the remarkable debut feature by Samuel Maoz, the Israeli cinematographer, documentary filmmaker and theater director. It’s a structural war movie about a four-man tank command with the action restricted to a taut, tense 24-hour stretch of the first day of the June 1982 Israeli Lebanon incursion.
The mistake is thinking, in the aftermath of Beaufort and Waltz with Bashir, that this devastating piece is somehow redundant. “No one knew the color of the sky,” Stephen Crane wrote at the start of his harrowing short story The Open Boat. Maoz sustains an identical mood of disorientation, rage and defeat. He largely refuses to individuate the four soldiers, preferring a spellbinding layering of image and sound that evokes an impressionistic, terrifying sense of the mounting dread and confusion both the inside and out.
Maoz inverts the received idea of moviemaking as war, suggesting that war is an outsized, horrendous brand of filmmaking that offers no cathartic release. The point of view is crucial, and much of the action is rendered through the subjective perspective of the gunner’s viewfinder.
An acute stand in for the movie camera, the device is equipped with a kind of zoom lens that enables the gunner to acquire a tight close up of his intended targets. The clicking sound made by the zoom is the most anguished heard on the soundtrack, a kind of heart tearing thwack that registers sonically like a dead tennis ball hitting a loose string racket. Every time you hear that sound, your heart just deflates. The point is not the obviousness of war’s hell but the horrifying cumulative emotional and physical wounds incurred by every side.
(Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch, with the remarkable lead performance by Julie Sokolowski.)
Damaged faith and God’s capriciousness underlined a number of Toronto titles (A Serious Man, The Road, To The Sea). In a festival brimming with standout French titles, director Bruno Dumont’ Hadewijch is his most electrifying and emotionally involving work since his superb debut The Life of Jesus.
The title, referring to a 13th century mystic poet, is a 20-year-old woman (Julie Sokolowski) of privilege and devotion who’s repatriated from her religious order to Paris after her superiors are shocked by her bouts of extremism and piety. Her absolutism is subtly and then profoundly altered by her developing friendship with a young French Arab who introduces her to his older brother, the leader of a Muslim religious group.
It is the first of Dumont’s films with a largely urban setting. The questions of faith, humanity and moral inquiry that inflect all of the director’s work is constant. Fortunately the mannered self-laceration and martyrdom that has marred the director’s previous couple of films is replaced by something tougher, more inscrutable and difficult to grasp.
Working again with nonprofessional actors, Dumont has found an incredibly vibrant and alert lead performer. Sokolowski has an incredibly open and suggestive face that evokes Benoit Jacquot’s mid-nineties trilogy (La desenchantee, Marianne, La fille seule) about young women and how their self-expression and sexual habits lead to their own alienation and extreme solitude.
There is in Dumont’s film an eerie, strangely beautiful scene where Sokolowski, naked, walks in her massively ornamental bedroom, lies on her bed and pulls her dog towards her body that becomes a striking renunciation of carnal pleasure.
Dumont told me in an interview that Sokolowski is, privately, an intense nonbeliever. She is an expressive and natural performer who makes the protagonist’s startling transformation all the more believable and astounding.
Claire Denis’ stunning new film White Material is her third feature (following her autobiographical debut Chocolate and the 1999 masterpiece Beau travail) set in Africa, where she lived as a young girl. In the movie, Isabelle Huppert stars as a coffee plantation owner caught between warring factions of government soldiers and rebel armies in a national uprising. She turns down the French authorities demanding she evacuate the country, preferring to shore up what remains of family’s dissolving empire.
The political rupture is mirrored in her family’s own unraveling. As is her wont Denis ruptures the narrative track, elliptically playing with time and space in attaining a ravishing, hallucinatory physical grounding of terror and disruption. Huppert is for many a deeply polarizing performer, but her deepening trauma and splintered emotional consciousness becomes a haunting gateway to look at and consider the material. Denis’ filmmaking is as sensational and tactile as ever. It is Huppert’s own ferociously ravaged state that leaves the strongest impression.
Soi Cheang is a disciple and former assistant of the great Hong Kong action stylist Johnnie To (Election, Vengeance). His new film Accident, produced by To’s production company, is an unusually soulful and contemplative action flick about a mysterious network of assassins that carry out elaborately staged contract hits to appear as horrifying accidents. When a sinister fate befalls one of their operations, the team leader (Louis Koo) must try to disentangle the motives and actions of his operatives to determine whether they have been targeted in response.
Shades of Francis Coppola’s The Conversation, Accident pivots on the protagonist’s own supreme solitude that turns increasingly paranoid and emotionally unsettling. As much as Accident remains suggestively open ended and enigmatic in the particulars, it offers a stimulating and quite provocative visual essay on the velvety night textures and existential despair typical of Hong Kong’s architecture, streets and byways. It offers one beguiling and fascinating instance of people lost in space. Accident is a work haunted by absence, permeated by its own melancholia and remembrance of things past.
Alas, not every film turns out as one would hope. My greatest disappointment was The Warrior and the Wolf, the new film by China’s greatest filmmaker, Tian Zhuangzhuang. Tian’s The Horse Thief is one of the truly great works of art of the last two and a half decades. The new film, based on a well-known Chinese novel, is set during China’s feudal era of banditry and tribal wars.
The central section plays like a Chinese In the Realm of the Senses, capturing the feral lust of the title warrior (Joe Odigari) and a beautiful though shunned Harran widow (Maggie Q). The rest of it is fairly incoherent; even Tian has to resort to repeated uses of crawling text to sort the narrative out. The finished form feels like something hacked together from something much more ambitious and sprawling. It has some occasionally spirited and poetic imagery, but mostly it feels bloodless, down to the dismaying use of digital technology that is a very poor substitute for the sublime power and wonder of the director’s finest work.
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Posted by: natural therapies | 11/27/2009 at 09:00 AM