Today’s post was going to start, ‘You know what TIFF has that the LFF doesn’t? Answer: sunshine. Oh, and a Daniel Libeskind-designed museum.’ (See photo above.)
But as it’s currently pouring with rain and I still have a long streetcar ride to my last films of the day, strike the sunshine part. But really: it turns out that there are these things called mornings, which are new to me, and that they have sunshine and lots of gourmet coffee and stuff.
The reason for mornings, apparently, is to line up for things. And in these lines, you chat to people. News from the lovely American distributor who shared a wait for the elevator with me is: the new Jonathan Demme is indulgent, but has a breakout performance from Anne Hathaway (although I thought that was Brokeback Mountain). Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist, with geek heartthrob Michael Cera, may not be this year’s Juno but it’s cute.
So far, so expected. But in the bizarro world that is the Canadian sense of humour, the film on everyone’s lips is… RocknRolla. And not in a ‘career death for all involved’ way. Then again, this is a country where On the Buses and Are You Being Served? still screen in primetime and attract huge audiences. A relief, then, to take some time out in the world’s best video store, Bay Street Video, where they were watching a Spaced box set. I’ve never been inhumanly glad to hear a Prefab Sprout song before, but that’s what three films and three interviews in six hours will do to you.
RADIO LOVE REVIEW
As Angela Chase would say: you know when you watch way too many films in one day, and you’re really watching them, they start to seem, you know, connected, like, on a profound level. Like there’s some great theme of our times they’re trying to work out. Today’s three films couldn’t have been more different: a shamanic heist thriller from Kazakhstan directed by the 2nd unit director of Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan; a documentary about D&D lifestylers in suburban America made by a music video director from Dallas; and a spiky Spanish romantic comedy of manners from a first-time filmmaker with a long career in advertising.
It’s about as varied a portrait of contemporary cinema as you can get, but all three films were connected, in my humble opinion (did that phrase originate with My So-Called Life?), by their search for spirituality in the material contemporary world. Radio Love takes that search as its theme: Caroline, an attractive 36-year-old, becomes dissatisfied with her life and starts looking for change. Cue comedic montage of Tai-Chi, poetry workshops, yoga – funny, but culminating in an amazingly sensual belly-dance. Caroline is Angela Chase grown-up and working in radio, re-finding that teenage desire to question everything, to truly become.
LEONARDO DE ARMAS INTERVIEW
Director Leonardo de Armas told me that he had been on a similar journey, and that our generation look back to the 1960s and ’70s and long for that kind of possibility. He said that for him, the search for a spiritual life lived in the real world is the only path to happiness. In fact, he gives that message to the protagonist, playing a small cameo in one of the film’s most charming scenes. When a herbalist begins speaking to Caroline in Chinese, Caroline – who would be played by Catherine Keener in the American remake, and Carmen Maura if Almodóvar had made the film 20 years ago – gives up and leaves, but the customer behind her (played by Armas) turns out to speak Chinese, and acts as a conduit for the herbalist’s words of wisdom. Not so much Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown as Woman on the Verge of a Major Breakthrough. The film – which combines Almodóvar’s social observation (influenced by Chekov, according to Armas) with a rich visual sensibility, some astounding choreographic sequences – this guy can really film dance – and Armas’ love of British comedy of embarrassment (which, I just about remembered, does not translate to embarrassada in Spanish, so I narrowly avoided asking about ‘comedy of pregnancy’ which would have confused issues, so props to my secondary school Spanish teacher for impressing that one on me) has the potential for major break-out as well.
BAKSY REVIEW & GUKA OMAROVA INTERVIEW
Whether Baksy (‘Native Dancer’) does as well depends on an imaginative distributor. Guka Omarova’s second feature clearly shows the skills she learnt through her direction of the action sequences in Mongol. The film is confidently shot and edited with an enduring strangeness that’s also a weird familiarity. Think of it as an Eastern Eastern Promises with an awesome ambient soundtrack by French composer Sig, remixing traditional Kazakh music. Batyr, a Kazakh businessman, has given a piece of land to a shaman, Aidai-Apa, to thank her for aiding his wife in conceiving their son. The boy is an apt pupil and has some of the shaman’s abilities. But the land, from which she draws her power, draws others too. Specifically, some Russian-speaking mafiosi in a shiny black jeep.
Omarova’s skill is evident in the jeep’s first appearance: it swings through the eerie, barren Kazakh-Chinese border landscape as if in a car ad, but with a sense of foreboding that reverses the consumerist associations. Money’s coming to undo a way of life that, as the director told me, had begun to reappear after the end of the Soviet Union, when it was forbidden even to say the word ‘shaman.’ The mafia kidnap Batyr’s son to force him to give up the land, and the film – which begins in the world of ethnographic documentary with a truly unforgettable scene in which a woman bathes in sheep’s blood to cure her bad legs – takes up the trappings of the kidnap/heist film and entwines them with the shaman’s spirit world. There’s rituals and spirit paintings – but there’s also bad cops, car chases and earthy humour. Omarova has plans for two potential future features, one set in Europe and one in Africa, which she sees as going through changes similar to Kazakhstan and having similar values. I hope that the film’s shamanic power (Aidai-Apa is based on a real shaman, the production designer is a shaman, and the location was chosen for its powerful spiritual weight of old graves and stone circles) gains it a wide audience.
THE DUNGEON MASTERS REVIEW
The film’s eerie power shows that Omarova really thought through how to depict the shaman’s vision-world, which she said she chose to do as naturally as possible, to fit with the film and its world. Magic and reality also co-exist in film number three, The Dungeon Masters, Keven McAlester’s second documentary, following up a disturbingly intimate portrait of Roky Erikson. McAlester has an incredible talent for getting close to his subjects, one that has led to rumblings of exploitation and fun-poking. Certainly, the crowded screening of The Dungeon Masters was all about laughing at rather than laughing with the three role-playing subjects – although I was moved by the creativity, ambition, self-awareness, camaraderie and power that McAlester discovers in all three. I was particularly moved by DarkElf Liz who lives the dream that Kevin Smith shows at the end of Chasing Amy (no, not blanking Jason Lee): two fans with the same costume who find each other.
And there’s more going on than just social observation and personal revelation. We see LARPers going to war. One of the dungeon masters is a reservist. One is writing a novel that features men impervious to bullets. All are struggling economically. It’s unspoken – or barely audible in gasps of radio news (beloved on documentary makers, although not used here quite as pointedly as in Jesus Camp) – but these three are not just figures of fantasy (or fun), but of Bush’s America. Liz nearly lost her home in Katrina. McAlester implicitly, carefully asks: ‘Why are these people escaping into fantasy worlds to become the imaginative, comradely, active, brave people that they are?’ I found myself wondering whether the combined talents of all the gamers in the film (surely a score of at least 120 power, and with some considerable magic skills) could – if refocused – start a revolution.
Possibly not, but dungeon master Scott Coram was inspired to start a cable-access TV show about a failed superhero that had recurring ninjas. Radio Love also had a ninja sequence, derived from de Armas’ childhood love of Bruce Lee movies. Will I spend the festival being chased by ninjas – or will Shaolin Love and girl-ninja film Chocolate remain beyond my timetabling abilities…
And so I head off in the rain for my final screening of the day, Vanessa O’ Neill and Jennifer Reeves in the Wavelengths program, wondering whether Skuli Sverisson will show to do live music. And who Atom Egoyan was ticking off when he said “So basically, you’re just congratulating me for making a film.” Having shared a PR office with Adoration star Devon Bostick, I predict big things. He just has that, you know, boy thing. I bet he leans really well.
