SLIFF 2010: Hideaway

2009 // France // François Ozon // November 15, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Call it the Gallic answer to the expectant mother melodrama. French writer-director François Ozon's undemanding Hideaway is a strangely standoffish and vacant object, out of tune with the warm, sun-drenched beaches of its rural setting. Following her trust-fund boyfriend's heroin overdose, the aimless, prickly Mousse (Isabelle Carré) discovers that she is carrying his child. For the duration of the pregnancy she withdraws to a seaside cottage, where her dead beau's gay brother Paul (Louis-Ronan Choisy) appears at her puzzling invitation. The anticipated emotional twists ensue, as Mousse grapples with her evolving urges and her ambivalence towards parenthood, while Paul attempts to distract himself from the undeniable allure of his impending niece or nephew. While Ozon dapples his supple, attentive film with appealing moments of visual grace and raw emotion, the story proves to be thin stuff on which to hang a feature-length work. Frustratingly, both Mousse and Paul remain enigmas, and Ozon does little to develop any significant themes from their situation. The simple, swelling fact of the child and the characters' clashing, conflicted stance towards it (and each other) are not compelling enough in their own right to warrant our attention, beyond the benign human spectacle one can find in any soap opera.

SLIFF 2010: 127 Hours

2010 // USA - UK // Danny Boyle // November 14, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)

The strange auteurism of Danny Boyle--cosmopolitan, passionate, often stylistically and tonally awkward--is on full display in his new oddity, 127 Hours, a squirm-worthy stress-test with a Successories ethos and heedless, music-video aesthetic. Boyle's take on the remarkably story of mountain climber Aaron Ralston (James Franco) is at once cruelly straightforward and yet littered with eye-catching detritus. The celebrated self-amputee's ordeal is presented as a kind of stationary thriller, equally an obligatory celebration of the man's fortitude and also a blunt retort to the sort of American recklessness that cloaks itself in athlete-cowboy "self-sufficiency". Franco compels in what is essentially a one-man show, never more so than in the moment of absolute shock and horror when he first appraises his situation (and the title card finally appears, in a marvelous touch). Yet despite the raw, terrifying simplicity of the story, Boyle's method lacks discipline, and he almost immediately grows bored with Ralston's dusty surroundings. The director ornaments the film with every visual effect in his arsenal, with little consideration of whether it is warranted; he indulges in flashbacks, hallucinations, flamboyant POV shots, and more in order to expand the film's boundaries. A more rigorously constrained approach (as in Rodrigo Cortés' superior, fictional Buried) would have served Ralston's astonishing story better.

SLIFF 2010: My Dog Tulip

2010 // USA // Paul and Sandra Fierlinger // November 14, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)

It's likely that eight exasperating years with an unruly, peculiar basset hound primed me to embrace My Dog Tulip at its most elemental level. In adapting J.R. Ackerley's memoir about his autumnal years with his beloved German Shepherd, first-time feature directors Paul and Sandra Fierlinger have created a tender, eccentric portrait aimed squarely at the hearts of dog lovers. The film's scratchy, hand-drawn lines and gorgeously painted backgrounds establish its tone of dry wit, while the stranger flourishes--doodles that anthropomorphize the dog characters, an amusing visual digression on Zeus and Europa, beachfront houses as giant picture postcards--provide its most memorable moments. Still, the film functions most potently as a romantic (yet unglamorous) paean to the mystery of our relationships with dogs. While the Fierlingers elide Ackerley's homosexuality, they never gloss over the unseemly aspects of dog ownership: the barking, pissing, shitting, humping, and unremitting destruction. Indeed, the challenge of life with Tulip is what makes Ackerley's tale and his unflagging adoration of his companion so endearing. Viewers who feel that the perfect devotion of a canine trumps any quantity of infuriating misbehavior and disgusting excretions will find an ideal expression of that sentiment in this warm little film.

SLIFF 2010: And Everything Is Gong Fine

2010 // USA // Steven Soderbergh // November 13, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)

The Steven Soderbergh that crafted this affectionate, sweeping, but necessarily piecemeal portrait of monologist Spalding Gray is plainly the defiant, infatuated chameleon-auteur of Bubble, Che, and The Girlfriend Experience. However, And Everything Is Going Fine is anything but a vanity project, given that Soderbergh so thoroughly surrenders the film to the wry confessional voice of his subject. Assembled entirely from footage of Gray's performances and interviews (and the occasional home movie), the film functions as a CliffsNotes version of the troubled man's life, presented roughly chronologically and in his own words. Call it a posthumous highlights reel complement to Soderbergh's 1996 Gray's Anatomy performance film. The director breezily tours the myriad topics that occupied Gray's monologues, although fear, sex, family unmistakably dominated the man's thoughts. Perhaps necessarily given its scope, the film emphasizes Gray's struggles with manic depression, and the pivotal role his mother's own mental illness and suicide had on his life and art. While there's nothing especially revelatory in Soderbergh's treatment of the man, the tone of the film is plainly one of admiration and remembrance, and his method--surrendering the content, if not the shape, entirely to his subject--is eminently fitting.

SLIFF 2010: The Country Teacher

2010 // Czech Republic // Bohdan Sláma // November 13, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Nimble in its cinematic technique and pleasantly mellow in its tone, Czech director Bohdan Sláma's The Country Teacher is a touch more refined than the standard coming-out melodrama. When a closeted Prague science teacher (Pavel Liska) flees his personal demons by relocating to a rural school, he wanders into the lives of a hard-bitten widowed cattle rancher and her troubled teenaged son. Sláma's screenplay focuses on the fallout from the collision of diverse personalities and conflicting concerns, although it occasionally veers into the trite with its employment of stale metaphors and platitudes. The film impresses, however, with a discursive, shifting story that displays an intuitive understanding of familial angst while tiptoeing around discomfiting sexual territory. Enlivened by exceptional performances from the cast, marvelously liquid camerawork from Divis Marek, and a pastoral aesthetic that emphasizes both the sweet and bitter, the film ultimately proves to be a gentle but firm condemnation of closeting, one remarkably untethered from the particulars of Czech culture. With a piteous eye, The Country Teacher establishes how bottled anxieties can poison relationships and befuddle morality, and ultimately questions the validity of crude preconceptions about urban-rural cultural dichotomies.

SLIFF 2010: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

2010 // Thailand // Apichatpong Weerasethakul // November 12, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

For all the esteem he garners from critics, the admittedly gorgeous films of Thai director Weerasethakul--call him "Joe"--have remained stubbornly inert works in my eye, devoid of passion and so amorphous that they seem impervious to analysis. Which is perhaps the point of the filmmaker's approach, which can only be described as "Cinema as Tone Poem." Nonetheless, Joe's new feature, the Palm d'Or-winning Uncle Boonmee, possesses an affecting allure that goes beyond its hypnotic visions of mosquito-netted sickrooms, twilit rain forests, and eerie "ghost monkeys" with smoldering red eyes. Mortality is foremost on this film's mind, and it's perhaps due to the starkness of this theme (and the glimmers of warm humor) that Uncle Boonmee elicits profound, often discomfiting metaphysical ruminations. In short, it provokes, unlike the largely opaque Syndromes and a Century. As with all of Joe's works, Uncle Boonmee contains a delicate current of the erotic, but what most impresses is its languid, granular magical realism, echoing the second half of the director's Tropical Malady. In Uncle Boonmee, Joe posits a cosmos where the personal and the mythic are indivisible: creating and devouring one another, and bestowing a dose of understanding (far from complete) when we reach our end.