Tanya Wexler’s new film Hysteria, a romantic comedy centring on the invention of the vibrator in the late 19th century, is exactly what you would expect it to be. Although few people might be familiar with this history, the film does not take any unusual paths or give its audience insights they might not expect. But this is not necessarily a bad thing.
Hugh Dancy stars as a progressive doctor recruited by Jonathan Pryce to deal with his plethora of female patients and their condition of ‘hysteria’, the treatment for which is ‘pleasuring’ by the attending doctor. Dancy, along with his patron, played with his usual dry wit by Rupert Everett, invent an electrical device in order to relieve the doctor of constant hand pain.
In the meantime, Pryce’s daughter (Maggie Gyllenhaal), rejects her upper class roots to help the less fortunate of London (who have greater needs than hysterical relief). The journey of the film is very fun, in particular a brilliantly written scene where Dancy and Everett explain the nature of their new toy to Pryce with the most beautifully subtle double entendres.
The film attempts to examine the roles and rights of women in the early ages of the suffragette movement, revealing sexist medical and cultural attitudes through its humour, and there is some modest success for the film in this regard. Overall, however, this is a light-hearted look at a subject that is usually only discussed over copious amounts of wine, and it’s good to see that Wexler has embraced the material with such vigour and fun.
Prolific Hong Kong director Johnnie To turns his sardonic and clever eye to the recent financial crisis in his most recent film, Life Without Principle, a more comedic and less violent work that usual. Telling parallel stories of various people caught out by the sudden collapse of the stock market in a single day – a bank sales agent who must sell a high-risk investment or lose her job, a small-time gangster indebted to the Triad, a woman trying to buy a condo, and an elderly lady who just wants to make more money.
To’s script is extremely dense and moves between these stories rather swiftly, requiring more concentration from his audience than they would normally give his past action films. This is not necessarily a detriment to the film: more it is a reflection of a Hong Kong society based increasingly around money and the stock market, and how one must think fast or risk losing everything. To manages to make the audience feel sympathy for the criminal and perhaps a little disdain for the bank employee who must trick her clients in order to save her own skin.
The violence, when it happens is swift and bloody, and perhaps hits harder due to its sparseness. It is a very tightly constructed piece, and speaks to the superficiality of the market, a worsening obsession with instant wealth, and its negative effect on the real lives of ordinary people (petty criminals included).
The engaging and densely packed Generation P (directed by Viktor Ginsburg and based on Victor Pelevin’s cult novel) looks at life in the new Russia, post-communist and not necessarily all that happy to be so, and specifically the world of advertising. The title refers to those who came of age just as the USSR collapsed; the main character, Babylen Tatarsky, finds himself climbing a strange, surreal and somewhat drug-infested ladder to the top of the new Russian corporate advertising game.
Condensing so many event filled years into nearly two hours is almost a bit too much. But that density is also reflective of the speed with which Babylen finds himself moving from job to job, sometimes up the ladder, sometimes sliding down a few rungs. Combining realism with drug-induced fantasy sequences of goofy and epic proportions, Ginsburg negotiates between the corporate and the spiritual, which apparently lead to the same place. Lead actor Vladimir Yepifantsev navigates this strange world with a generally blank stare that makes him into a sponge, absorbing all around him and relaying it to the audience.
When he encounters a cult that seems to worship a Mesopotamian god and wants Babylen to follow suit, it takes a turn for what seems like the absurd, and yet it is a biting satire on both Yeltsin-era consumerism and the continuing consumerism of western culture, pervading the world with its rampant greed. Ginsburg’s film is biting, surreal, sometimes confusing but never boring, and seems to be another addition to the great new wave of Russian cinema.
Apocalypse films generally fall into one of two categories: the events leading up to the end, and the events that follow. Doug Aarniokoski’s moderately successful film The Day falls into the latter category. We are never told exactly what happened that ended civilisation as we know it; what we do know is that there are few survivors, and those survivors fall into either good or bad categories. A ragtag band of five people are making their way south to land that one of them (Dominic Monaghan) is convinced will have soil good for growing; the others seem to follow likely out of boredom as oppose to hope.
At first the film seems to be a bit of a poor imitation of The Road, with similar lens filters to wash out all trace of colour, and hints that all animal life apart from humans is dead. And you know what that means. The actors, who despite the attempt at appearing dirty can’t help but be a little too pretty for a post-apocalypse story, attack the material with great gusto.
Ashley Bell, though, shines as a terse and hardened survivor, hiding secrets as well as she hides her weapons. As the group fractures and each member are pitted against the other, the question of whether one can rely upon anyone else in matters of survival is brought to light.
At times, though, the film seems to be an imitation of apocalypse films, though, rather than a creation of its own. The actors are too young, and as stated, too beautiful to be believed as survivors of a terrible disaster. The parts add up to much more than the sum of the film.
For more info visit tiff.net
Toronto International Film Festival 2011 – Diary: Day 7 (text) by Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
