SLIFF 2010: The Illusionist

2010 // UK - France // Sylvain Chomet // November 21, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)

Sylvain Chomet's superb new animated feature, The Illusionist, functions as an affectionate homage to the films, spirit, and persona of French filmmaker Jacques Tati, all within a poignant fairy tale about grace and compassion. Oh, and it's also flat-out gorgeous--a triumph of design that boasts fresh delights at every turn. Chomet discards the surrealism of The Triplets of Belleville for this more grounded tale of entrances, meetings, and exits in the fading vaudeville community of 1950s Europe. However, the former film's hallmarks remain: grotesque characters, a reliance on pantomime and mumbled dialog, and a setting realized with breathtaking artistry. Based on an unproduced Tati script, Chomet's film follows the titular stage magician (a caricature of Tati and his Monsieur Hulot character) through a sequence of humiliating gigs, picking up a guileless country girl along the way. The pair eventually settles for a time in a splendidly rendered Edinburgh, where their tender relationship deepens and evolves. Chomet presents this mellow, tearful story with an appealing blend of uneasy pathos, endearing zaniness, and black humor. The Illusionist is a giddy reminder of the evocative potential of traditional animation, a potential that attains full flower in the hands of a master such as Chomet.

SLIFF 2010: The Milk of Sorrow

2009 // Spain - Peru // Claudia Llosa // November 20, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

There's a surfeit of lush sensory pleasures in Peruvian writer-director Claudia Llosa's arresting new feature, The Milk of Sorrow, enhancing the film's potency as a bracing portrait of emotional isolation. Born in the era of Shining Path terror, the timid Fausta (Magaly Solier) has surrounded herself with a moat of reticence and vigilance, especially when it comes to men. Most shockingly, she has taken rather... extreme measures to dissuade rapists. However, the death of her elderly mother acts as a catalyst, forcing the girl into the wider world that she has long shuttered herself against. Llosa's command of the frame is masterful, and she remains resolutely focused on humane details while using the arid Peruvian landscape to fine effect. The film is full of striking images: a demolished piano littered with colored glass; hands plucking scattered pearls from a bathroom floor; a procession of dancing wedding guests with their gifts held aloft. Such remarkable visuals provide a wondrous aesthetic substrate for Llosa's heartfelt, distressing (and at times comical) tale of a woman's emergence from her cocoon of fearfulness. The director presents even the story's most outrageous details with startling conviction and esteem, acknowledging both the terrible power of trauma and the warm, amusing qualities of everyday life.

SLIFF 2010: Black Swan

2010 // USA // Darren Aronofsky // November 19, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)

With the engaging but frustrating Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky again expands the range of his generic dabblings, this time to encompass backstage melodrama, psychological thriller, anatomical horror, and a bit of unexpectedly vicious camp. Thematically, however, the director's attention remains fixed on obsession and the annihilation of the self. Indeed, Black Swan plays quite unambiguously as a companion to The Wrestler, as shamelessly operatic in its sensibility as Aronofsky's previous film was tattered and doleful. Ambitious, high-strung ballerina Nina (Natalie Portman) dreams of dancing the lead in Swan Lake ("Done to death, I know," concedes her impresario), but is haunted by strange visions and a sultry rival (Mila Kunis). Portman is flawlessly cast and delivers one of her finest performances in a challenging, rather unsympathetic role. The fingerprints of Polanski, De Palma, Cronenberg, and many other filmmakers are conspicuous, but where Aronofsky falters is not in amalgamating his myriad influences but in controlling the film's tone. Black Swan veers from the grave to the ludicrous so fast that it disorients, while Clint Mansell's Tchaikovsky-indebted score thunders away. The director's often delicate observation of behavior is backgrounded in favor of creepshow spectacle, and the result is a genuine B-picture (a sort of werewolf picture, specifically). Aronofsky's style remains seductive, but Black Swan is his least daring work to date.

SLIFF 2010: A Room and a Half

2009 // Russia // Andrey Khrzhanovskiy // November 18, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)

For his feature film debut, Russian writer-director Andrey Khrzhanovskiy spins an arrhythmic, freewheeling fantasy about Jewish Soviet-American poet Iosif Brodsky, a writer who remains relatively obscure in the popular consciousness of the United States despite a Nobel Prize and stint as our Poet Laureate.  Ripe with dewy Old Country nostalgia and yet scornful of Communist rule and the Russian character generally, A Room and a Half looks at snowy Leningrad through the eyes of a self-aware artist who longs for his childhood (while conceding its bleakness). Framed by a fictional homecoming for the exiled Brodsky, Khrzhanovskiy's approach is amorphous and whimsical, complete with animated digressions, sepia and colorized recollections, and archival footage both real and mock. The film recalls meandering memoirs as diverse as Radio Days, Persepolis, and The Beaches of Agnès, but its most direct antecedent is My Winnipeg. However, A Room and a Half's at times overplayed heartache and dithering tendencies mark it as a lesser film compared to Guy Maddin's dreamy, ambivalent marvel. Khrzhanovskiy studs his film with oddly captivating little detours, but the result is a work that feels unfocused and rambling, one never entirely comfortable with the intensity of its own pathos.

SLIFF 2010: Vengeance

2009 // Hong Kong - France // Johnnie To // November 17, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)

For half a decade now, prolific Hong Kong director Johnnie To has been quietly establishing a lustrous reputation among Western cinephiles for his vigorous, dazzling works, which regard hoary crime thriller convention as a sandbox rather than a straightjacket. His latest feature, Vengeance, is a Hong Kong / French co-production filmed partly in English, and it proves to be the director's most unfussy film in years, a straightforward genre exercise pitched in To's peculiar key and seemingly formulated to lure fresh converts. The story is familiar: restaurateur and retired gangster Costello (weather-beaten French megastar Johnny Hallyday) searches Macau and Hong Kong for the killers who gunned down his daughter's family, recruiting a trio of Chinese hitmen as his local allies. Characteristically, it's the enthusiastic, slightly arch manner in which To presents familiar tropes that delights, as does his eye for memorable visuals: a landfill awash in shredded paper, a toy boomerang sailing silently through a picnic area, a flurry of girl scout stickers marking an execution target's trench coat. The film has its flaws, chiefly an unfortunate scene of mawkish drivel and a weakly conveyed plot device stolen from Memento. On balance, however, it's another fine illustration of To's enviable talent for transforming stale formulas into beguiling cinema.

SLIFF 2010: Rage

2009 // Mexico - Spain // Sebastián Cordero // November 16, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Sebastián Cordero's desolate, ache-laden thriller Rage accomplishes an uncertain bait-and-switch, gradually revealing a film quite dissimilar from the one its opening gestures suggest. At the outset, it's evident that seething laborer José María (Gustavo Sánchez Parra) harbors a violent temper that's going to land him and beatific squeeze Rosa (Martina García) in hot water. And it does, in short order, leading José to hole up in the attic of the mansion where Rosa works as a maid (without her knowledge). What begins as a Hitchcock- and Coen-tinged crime fiasco evolves into something quieter and more melancholy. José's boiling resentments are an ever-present factor, but the film eventually emerges as a tragic parable about separation, secrets, and shame. Cordero's stylistic approach, which embraces gangrenous shadow, loopy angles, and prowling camerawork, plainly cribs from the slicker side of recent Spanish-language genre cinema, especially The Orphanage and Timecrimes. While Rage's allegorical nods prove to be weak tea, it functions remarkably well strictly as a distressing, sorrowful story about damnation (of all stripes). Cordero's film suggests that our private hells are edifices of both personal and societal flaws, and that the path to liberation is not easy just because it is obvious.