SLIFF 2009: The Beaches of Agnès

2008 // France // Agnès Varda // November 22, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Agnès Varda cooks up a delicious slice of cinematic heresy with her latest work, The Beaches of Agnès. Could it be that the most invigorating film to emerge from the French New Wave's aged auteurs in recent years is a whimsical, affecting, exquisitely crafted documentary memoir? Octogenarian Varda, who was the odd woman out within the New Wave's Boys Club, has created an intensely personal, utterly frank, and wholly lovely film. With a mischievous smile that hints at both her warmth and her restless intellect, Varda narrates the story of her own life. Self-aware yet never apologetic, Beaches strikes the tone of a shared journey. We feel the director's bemusement, wistfulness, and melancholy as she tours the locales and visits with the people that shaped her art. With Beaches, Varda decisively triumphs over peers such as Rivette, Chabrol, and Resnais, whose late works (The Duchess of Langeais, A Girl Cut in Two, Private Fears in Public Places) have been trifling and ham-fisted. The beauty of Varda's film is the beauty of herself, presented honestly: a confident, relentlessly curious artist, whose life of achievement has not been diminished by her probing uncertainty or her persistent grief.

SLIFF 2009: Liverpool

2008 // Argentina // Lisandro Alonso // November 21, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

There are not many film-makers that simultaneously demand the utmost patience and attentiveness from their audience and also hew to scrupulous realism in their work. This unusual pairing of qualities is what defines the downright vexing films of Argentine director Lisandro Alonso, who has made four features that exemplify the term "acquired taste." His latest is Liverpool, which trades the rain forests of Los Muertos for dreary, snowbound Tierra del Fuego. Structurally and thematically, however, this new film is close kin to his 2004 feature, as both train their gaze on a man on a familial quest. Here the protagonist is the lanky, inscrutable Farrel (Juan Fernández), a cargo ship worker who journeys inland to find his ailing mother. The delicacy of Alonso's observational power is what makes Liverpool such a unusual species of film, but it unfortunately suffers from a suffocating emotional inertness. Most filmgoers will likely find Alonso's style tedious, if not excruciating, principally due to his seemingly emphatic lingering on banalities. In fact, Liverpool never emphasizes; it only invites observation. It is a grimy, ragged, uncompromising work, but so taxing that only the most disciplined cinephile would dare tackle it more than once.

SLIFF 2009: Three Monkeys

2008 // Turkey // Nuri Bilge Ceylan // November 20, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Noir doesn't come much more languid than Three Monkeys, a moody Turkish thriller that concerns itself as much with hidden ugliness as it does with naked emotional upheavals. Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan sketches this story of loyalty and lust with the thinnest of narrative lines, but via a style that practically howls its themes to the moon. Hence the florid, queasy detail captured with his HD video: slick sweat on greasy skin, lifeless urban spaces of yellow and green, and cloudy skies that seem almost bruised. There are dabs of magical realism as well, as a harrowing specter lurches through and clings to the lives of the principals. Shut up in a cramped apartment but miles away from each other, loutish husband Eyüp, dissatisfied wife Hacer, and troubled son Ismail contend with a maze of lies, all flowing from Eyüp's fateful decision to take the fall for his boss's hit-and-run accident. Ceylan doesn't add sufficient dramatic energy to the proceedings to justify the film's ostentatious pacing, and Three Monkeys never feels like it connects with his thematic ambitions. Still, as a lusciously stylized--and often deliciously ugly--glimpse of human folly, it's satisfactory.

SLIFF 2009: 35 Shots of Rum

2008 // France // Claire Denis // November 20, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Claire Denis' newest film, 35 Shots of Rum, exhibits a remarkable humanism that takes its time uncoiling and working its spell on you. With an unhurried and affectionate tone, the film weaves the story of a sagging Parisian apartment complex, where widower Lionel (Alex Descas) and his adult daughter Jospehine (Mati Diop) alternately resist and welcome the changes that life brings. Denis demonstrates a profound emotional grace in her approach, coaxing us to share her love of her characters by permitting us to see them without pretense or flattering poses. There is no cloying demand that we share Jo's fondness for her father. Rather, Denis bestows that fondness on the viewer by shooting Descas in a way that captures the gentleness and pain of his inner life. 35 Shots of Rum succeeds because of its modesty: there is no sense that Denis has constructed this intimate tale for our benefit, and its simple themes are wondrously emergent. Only a shocking and gratuitous development late in the film mars the pleasures of Denis' empathic observational power, but she rights things with a melancholy, ambiguous coda that nonetheless underlines her story with admirable precision.

SLIFF 2009: Jerichow

2008 // Germany // Christian Petzold // November 18, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Christian Petzold's lean, sordid little thriller positions itself as a successor to the works of Hitchcock and Wilder, but its most direct ancestor is The Postman Always Rings Twice, to the point that Jerichow might be regarded a near-remake. Here the Frank Chambers part is a penniless Afghan war veteran, Thomas, played with a distinctly Germanic heat by the chiseled Benno Fürmann (also appearing in North Face at this year's Festival). Recruited into the employ of snack bar entrepreneur Ali (Hilmi Sözer) through the sort of happenstance that seems endemic to noir, Thomas inevitably hooks up with the boss' wife, Laura (Nina Hoss), a ragged blond who seems like more trouble than she's worth. Petzold's script is admirably sparing and suitably tense, especially given that the bulk of story's action occurs in sun-kissed daylight. The film is resolutely focused on its core conflict, barely permitting any characters other than its three principals to intrude. Its main sin is that it's a film in search of a purpose. At bottom, Jerichow is a skillful retread of territory that's already been extensively explored, and Petzold doesn't bring anything fresh other than some unconventional (but not unexpected) twists in the third act.

SLIFF 2009: One Day You'll Understand

2008 // France // Amos Gitai // November 17, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Amos Gitai's camera tightly frames his characters in his Holocaust-cum-family drama, One Day You'll Understand. The film flirtis with a claustrophobic atmosphere, yet it remains distractingly distant from the unfolding events. In its slackest moments, Gitai's style exhibits no feeling other than idle curiosity, a odd flaw given the intensely personal character of the story. That story centers on the prying of Victor (Hippolyte Girardot) into his family's muddled history, which thrusts together Catholics and Russian Jews in Nazi-occupied France with predictably tragic results. Unfortunately, his elderly mother Rivka (a magisterial Jeanne Moreau, one the film's bright spots) is reluctant to speak of the past. The film's primary problem is that in trying to weave together two substantial thematic threads--the veiled character of post-WWII Jewish identity in France, and the challenges of birthrights--Gitai fails to give either a sufficiently rich treatment, and the results feels fumbling and hollow. A late scene, wherein Girardot wanders his mother's flat as it is dismantled for its valuables, plays as a pale echo of Summer Hours. One Day You'll Understand lacks the focus, grace, and delight for character and space that made Olivier Assayas' film an exquisite exploration of a mundane subject.