In the weeks before the Toronto International Film Festival in early September, I deadpanned with all due solemnity to friends and colleagues that "'Borat' will be the linchpin of the festival." I was referring to the feature-film expansion of one of the most outrageous fixtures on HBO, the segment of "Da Ali G Show" that chronicles the passage of an imbecilic, sexist, homophobic, ethnically bigoted and obsessively anti-Semitic video journalist from Kazakhstan through these United States. It never occurred to me that my mock-prediction would come true.
At Toronto, Borat ruled. Not only the vehemently improper movie, whose proper title is "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," but Borat himself in the person of the brilliant, fearless, Cambridge-educated - and quite Jewish - Sacha Baron Cohen, who stayed in character (possibly even in his sleep) and showed up for his film's first public screening in a carriage pulled by a donkey. That the screening was permanently interrupted 20 minutes in by projector problems seemed only fitting. The replacement screening the next night was mobbed. So were all the shows in the largest reserved-for-press auditorium, and the critics' scorecard on the back page of each day's festival bulletin had "Borat" topping the chart, no matter how many high-profile Hollywood releases and latest works by esoteric cinema masters were also in the running.
Now, all power to Borat, whose latest publicity coup cum act of political theater was to invade Washington, D.C., to invite "your great warlord Premier Bush" to come see his movie, even as the visiting leader of the real Kazakhstan was fuming over the film's myriad insults to his nation. And all power to Sacha Baron Cohen, who had already stolen "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby" from Will Ferrell during the summer (he played the gay, macchiato-sipping, Camus-reading "Frawnch" race-car driver), and who will be huge (along with being giraffe tall) when "Borat" opens in November. However, the sober critical fact is that "Borat," albeit an indecently funny and liberatingly un-PC event, barely hangs together as a movie even at 82 minutes.
Yet at North America's most comprehensive and valuable film festival, that was the year that was. Unlike 2005, when one saw (or could have seen) most of the films on one's eventual Ten Best list within several days, Toronto 2006 resisted consensus.
There was no shortage of terrific movies among the upwards-of-300 titles. There were, in fact, too many candidates for even the most assiduous of cineastes to catch, since no one has quite perfected the technique of being simultaneously present at Johnny To's "Exiled," Pedro Almodóvar's "Volver," Hong Sang-soo's "Woman on the Beach," "The Journals of Knud Rasmussen" (by the guys who made "Atanarjuat"), Tsai Ming-liang's "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone," Alain Resnais's "Coeurs" and the documentary "The U.S. vs. John Lennon" - to cite some of the titles on offer for press screening the second morning of the fest. But that's always the case at this best-of-Berlin, best-of-Cannes, fresh-from-Telluride smorgasbord of world cinema.
On a less exalted but often infectiously exciting level, TIFF did not (insofar as I was aware) rise to its mission as the semi-official opening of Academy Awards season. The "Oscar buzz" machine sputtered but never quite revved up. Certainly the long-delayed first glimpse of the long-delayed "remake" of the 1949 Oscar winner "All the King's Men" immediately confirmed it as Oscar irrelevant - save for, perhaps, a galvanic frog-leg twitch of a nomination for Sean Penn, who predictably achieved a few moments of sulfurous fulminating as Willie Stark before the ill-structured screenplay did him in. (The almost thoroughgoing failure of writer-director Steven Zaillian's picture can be traced to his excessive fidelity to the Robert Penn Warren novel; in 1949, Robert Rossen knew that what works poetically and structurally in a novel doesn't necessarily work on screen at all.)
Other ambitious misfires included Darren Aronofsky's "The Fountain" (see Kathleen Murphy) and Alejandro González I?árritu's "Babel," the highest-profile endeavor yet from the director of "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams." Working again with writer Guillermo Arriaga (who scripted Tommy Lee Jones' "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada"), González I?árritu seeks to interweave the adventures of a well-to-do California couple (Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt) grimly vacationing in Morocco, their blond kids and loving-but-illegal Mexican housekeeper back home, a rambunctious wedding party in Mexico (at which Gael García Bernal looms large) and the mysterious agendas of a sex-spooked Tokyo teen (Rinko Kikuchi) and her widower father (Kôji Yakusho). It's all beautifully shot and some of it's sharply observed, but the concept is dismayingly thin - a tonier, multinational "Crash." The aim is to explore how we all speak different languages and fail to really hear what one another say, but too much of it hinges on people doing things that are just plain, unilluminatingly stupid and irresponsible.
Best among the ambitious American indies was "Little Children," the second feature effort of Todd ("In the Bedroom") Field as adapted from Tom Perrotta's novel. Kate Winslet is a knockout as a suburban mom drawn into a daytime affair with a househusband counterpart (Patrick Wilson); credibility is stretched only in that, even in sweatpants and tank top, she is not for a single second less than the aforementioned knockout, though the script obliges her to feel outshone by her lover's brittle careerwoman wife (Jennifer Connelly). Life in their picture-perfect Massachusetts community is complicated by the return home of a convicted sex offender (superbly played by Jackie Earle Haley, one of the original "Bad News Bears" and the "Breaking Away" guys), against whom Wilson's loutish cop buddy (Noah Emmerich) mounts a relentless terror campaign. It goes without saying that the little children of the title are not the kiddies supposedly at peril of Haley's creepy attentions, but the putative adults on whom the American Dream has been squandered. Oscar should have plenty to pay attention to here.
And speaking yet again of Oscar ... Toronto offered no hour-and-a-half of gentler, more sustained bliss than the companionship of Christopher Guest and his little-theater group beloved from "Waiting for Guffman," "Best in Show" and "A Mighty Wind." That would be "For Your Consideration," a title that invokes the calculation, puffery and self-delusion inherent in Academy Awards chasing. Its focus is a deliciously preposterous low-budget project called "Home for Purim," during the production of which a veteran C-list actress (Catherine O'Hara), then her onscreen "daughter" (Parker Posey) and then the paterfamilias of the film clan (Harry Shearer, as an old trouper whose best-known role was in an underwear commercial) all come to believe "the buzz" favors them for Oscar nominations. Never fear, the cast also includes Eugene Levy, Fred Willard, Jane Lynch, Michael McKean, Bob Balaban, et al., with Ricky Gervais added as a deliciously smarmy studio executive. The only just response to this act of provocation will be a real Oscar nomination for the divinely ditzy O'Hara. I'm running out of room, though hardly of films - including the most powerful film experiences I had at TIFF 2006. Two of these, Andrea Arnold's "Red Road" and Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth," are being highlighted by Kathleen Murphy. Let me scurry to mention three others.
My personal festival began on a high with two films that comprised an unintended double feature: Ken Loach's "The Wind That Shook the Barley," which won the top prize (the Palme d'Or) at Cannes this past spring, and Rachid Bouchareb's "Indig?nes," whose principal cast were declared "best actor" there. Each movie delivers a corrective lesson on how the passage of a few years can affect not only our purchase on history but also national identity and cultural perspective. "Wind" is set in 1920-22, when the Irish "Troubles" sea-changed from British-on-Irish and Irish-on-British violence to Irish-on-Irish violence after the founding of the Irish Free State. The French/Moroccan/Algerian/Belgian "Indig?nes" - which will be released in America as "Days of Glory" - vouchsafes the astonishing spectacle of North Africans donning uniforms during World War II out of fervent devotion to their "motherland," France. Powerfully acted, with ferocious battle scenes free of glib CGI, the movie falls comfortably within the outlines of the classic Hollywood war picture (a sergeant is a sergeant is a sergeant) while recording the heroism of its warriors and delivering a scathing rebuke to France - which casually discriminated against its dark-skinned defenders during wartime and cancelled the survivors' pensions in the late '50s. (A week ago French president Jacques Chirac was shown the film, swept away by its power and moved immediately to redress that obscene injustice.)
For its part, Loach' "Wind" focuses the atrocities of the Irish struggle in terms of a single village and in particular two brothers. One (Pádraic Delaney) is a committed Republican from the outset; the other (Cillian Murphy) is a newly graduated doctor who, on the eve of his departure to London to begin his career, is confronted with one British outrage too many and joins the I.R.A. No one has ever bettered Loach at framing seismic historic and political change in the lives of particular human beings (v. his Spanish Civil War film "Land and Freedom"), or wresting emotionally invested performances from a cast of (to us) mostly unknowns. Murphy is a rare instance of a rising star working for this director and blending seamlessly into the ensemble; in the darkest, most crowded of scenes, he gets no "star lighting" or hagiographic closeups. And as in the heartbreakingly lovely opening scene, of a group of boyos playing football on a field beneath a majestic mountain, Loach constantly makes the picturesque beauty of landscape and nature a hurtfully ironic index of the pain wrought by internecine war.
Nature and environment play a starring role in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Syndromes and a Century." Whereas "Wind" and "Indig?nes" afford new ways of looking at 20th-century history (and "Pan's Labyrinth" a new way of looking at fairy tale), this quietly amazing Thai film affords a new way of looking at the world, and at movies, too.
What happens in it is difficult to describe, at least in conventional narrative terms. The TIFF catalog calls it "a meditation on memories recalled by the filmmaker's parents from the period before they were lovers." The principal setting is a small town that, over the course of the film, evolves from mostly rural setting to industrialized modernity. One daftly comic scene, involving a doctor interviewing an old monk who believes his health issues stem from the ghosts of all the chickens he has greatly enjoyed eating, is presented twice - once with a virtual jungle visible through the window behind the doctor's desk, and again from the opposite angle, which features the sterile office and anticipates an entire symphonic movement into and through a world where manmade forms seek a new organicity. Music and song have as much to do with the movement as the visuals and the often-droll dialogue scenes. The whole thing is sweet, mesmerizing and ineffably sad. The production company behind it is named New Crowned Hope. Coming soon to a theater near you? Hope springs eternal.
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