Last Sunday, on morning TV, an old man with a fine, lived-in face - America's new PoetLaureate, in fact - opined that "We need poetry now, perhaps more than ever. Poetry teaches ushow to feel ... how to feel more than one thing at once." How gently, lucidly, this wisdom wasimparted. And it hit home, making me wish that the Toronto International Film Festival, where Irecently spent a glorious week, offered takeout service. Then one could bring home to Seattle'sscreens some of the most illuminating and beautiful cinematic poetry the world has tooffer.
Two of my favorite films - Rolf de Heer's "Ten Canoes" and "The Journals of KnudRasmussen," co-directed by Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn - fish for truth inhumankind's "primitive" past. "Canoes"' slyly genial narrator (David Gulpilil) spins a tale, circa1930, about a feisty young Aborigine who covets his older brother's youngest wife. In turn, as thetribe journeys upriver to build canoes and hunt geese, elder brother serializes a 1,000-year-oldlegend for the boy's instruction.
Set in gorgeous widescreen landscapes and populated by unaffected, first-time actors, "TenCanoes" slips from black and white into color, from recent past to prehistoric times, from theelegant art of making a canoe to a fabled warrior's life and death immortalized in oral history.Telling time and stories, reading nature and humankind's place in it, human life itself - all flowas currents in "Ten Canoes"' great river, moving us in an ageless, democratizing medium.
Kunuk and Cohn helmed 2001's spectacular "Atanarjuat: Fast Runner," and their "Journals ofKnud Rasmussen" revisits the Alaskan Inuits' bygone world of white, where, as in "Ten Canoes,"time, character and narrative flow in a mysterious, less than linear fashion.
"Journals" celebrates the Inuits' extraordinary, body-to-body intimacy and innocence, warmed bythe golden glow of oil lamps inside crowded igloos, bound by strong community and easyconnection with the natural world. Mesmerized by the impassive yet somehow rapt expression ofa shaman as he shares how he came to his vocation, how he received his "good spirits," we haveplenty of time to notice a woman's face, framed in white fur, uninsistently backing our InuitMerlin. That she is one of those "good spirits" - in the flesh - is a shock of recognition that maynot come until much later, as does our understanding that a snake - whites' religion - has slippedinto Inuit Eden. "Journals" quietly chronicles the end of an age, the Inuits' way of seeingand making poetry of their pristine world.
Bong Joon-ho's "The Host," a South Korean "Godzilla" spoof and sharp sociopoliticalsatire, threatens a different brand of apocalypse. Years after an American military scientist dumpslethal chemicals into Seoul's Han River, an evolutionary horror - think gigantic ambulatorycatfish with horrifyingly prehensile tail and a crustacean's sucking mouth (F/X are terrific) - risesto wreak traditional havoc. When a wildly dysfunctional family unites to rescue a child from thecreature's larder, they find their culture can be as vicious as any ecological demon. A funny,terrifying jeremiad, "The Host" is aptly titled, exposing nastiness on both the biological andsociopolitical fronts.
Inconvenient truths about our relationship with nature also crop up in Larry Fessenden'scautionary "The Last Winter," a paranoid thriller set in an undeveloped Alaskan oilfieldbeing scouted by an enclave of oil entrepreneurs and "green" scientists. Fessenden's forte ishorror with an edge that cuts deep into contemporary issues (see "Wendigo" or "Habit"), and herehe mines terror out of nature's guerrilla-style assault on the human virus that's infected her. Lackof budget curtails effects, but the film generates a genuine climate of eerie threat by framing vastinhuman landscapes, where waves of ghostly caribou sweep over dark, melting snowfields.
Everyone agrees that Spanish director Pedro AlmodÛvar ("Talk to Her") works wonders withwomen. No surprise then that colorful "Volver" is all women, all the time. Vengefulmamas with abused daughters, mousy and sexpot sisters, bosom buddies, helpful hookers andloving ghosts - they're all here, fairly bursting with love, passion, tragedy, courage and all theother plus-sized Female virtues. Do I sound less than enchanted? 'Fraid so. For me, AlmodÛvar'slargesse overdoses on heartwarming estrogen, but "Volver" admirers will be genuinely turned onby another gay-ly imagined matriarchy. (Give AlmodÛvar his due: he brings PenÈlope Cruz,unresponsive to American directors, to delicious, energetic life.)
My taste for distaff truths runs to dicier cinematic territory, like the environs of "RedRoad," writer-director Andrea Arnold's promising debut. A Glaswegian camera surveillanceoperator, tightly wound Jackie (Kate Dickie) watches snatches of other people's lives on herscreens - until she becomes inexplicably obsessed by one particular ginger-haired, womanizinglout. Soon she's playing a calculated part in the fellow's charmless "movie," climaxing in asteamily realistic sex scene. Is this the story of a voyeur who gets real - or does some other,nastier script underlie this psychological thriller? Like Jane Campion, Catherine Breillat andCarine Adler, Arnold maps a woman's soul, not in pretty pastels but in darker, more challenginghues.
Darren ("Requiem for a Dream") Aronofsky's reach far outstrips his grasp in "TheFountain," a mystical love story and quest for immortality that spans centuries, continentsand cultures. An admirably ambitious idea goes very, very silly in the execution, especially whenHugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz (dull and earthbound as lovers) fetch up in a bravely imaginedmetaphysical realm featuring the Tree of Life, souls afloat in the heavens like fireflies, and ourshaven-headed hero's achievement of nirvana (some literalminded critics have mistaken thisspiritual apotheosis for Jackman's astronaut phase, following his stints as conquistador andscientist!). One can't deny that "The Fountain" is cinematic folly, but Aronofsky's creativerisk-taking, so uncharacteristic of contemporary American filmmaking, deserves credit.
"Nip/Tuck" fans may groove on Kim Ki-duk's delicious "Time," a dark, funny, visuallypoetic exploration of the human desire/compulsion to reinvent oneself, to be new and differenteven as time makes our flesh an ever more familiar landscape to those with whom we areintimate. A young woman who fears her photographer boyfriend's roving eye enlists a plasticsurgeon to sculpt her a different face and body, then turns up in his life as a new woman. Troubleis, he actually loved the old one. This is far from the last turn of the screw in Kim's increasinglydisquieting investigation of what constitutes idiosyncratic, compelling identity - in the eye of alover or a camera - as time goes by.
The uses and abuses of flesh abound in Gyorgy Palfi's "Taxidermia," a deeplytransgressive, often blackly hilarious exercise in magical realism. (Remember "Hukkle," Palfi'sweird, wonderful debut film, screened in SIFF 2002?) Not for the squeamish, this Hungarianfairy tale revels in voyeurism, bestiality, bulimia as Olympic sport, patricide, self-mutilation andall the perversions and appetites through which the human imagination may express itself. In itsnarrative arc from pigsty to museum, from troglodyte to behemoth to hunger artist, from"stuffing" to anatomically perfect art, "Taxidermia" gets under the skin, rubbing our noses in thebiological forces that drive us. A brilliant film, full of images that brand the mind's eye, but one, Ifear, you will not be seeing at your local multiplex.
One of the most remarkable films screened at Toronto was Guillermo del Toro's "Pan'sLabyrinth," another excursion into adult fairy tale and magical realism. It's 1944, and anoutpost of Franco's soldiers are torturing and killing off the few remaining insurgents who'vetaken refuge in the gloomy Spanish mountains. A bookish little girl, helpless in the face of adultsadism and pathology, penetrates the heart of an arboreal maze, where goat-headed Pan sets hertasks that may or may not result in happy endings.
No mistaking Ofelia's trips into superbly realized phantasmagorical realms as kiddie escapism:the horrors there are no less savage than those in the "real" world. Shifting seamlessly betweentwo frames of epistemological reference - which tragically, triumphantly become one - del Torocomposes visceral poetry out of a child's quest for the restoration of familial order and love in atime when ties among fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters are terribly subverted or lost.
[[In-content Ad]]
