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  • 05 Feb

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    Review: Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945)

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    [Starting Thursday, February 9th, Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox will be presenting a retrospective of French master Robert Bresson's films entitled The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson. To celebrate the event, here is a review of Bresson's second film, which will be playing at the Lightbox on February 23rd and March 5th.]

    Here, in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, is a story that might have been given an unsatisfactory treatment, like so much melodramatic drivel, and instead is carefully invested with some actual weight. Each of the central characters and their concerns are represented with an admirable amount of depth and conviction, elevating the narrative to nearly grand proportions. This shows how, even at just his second feature film, Robert Bresson had a firm grasp on his craft. That craft would eventually grow into a singular, pure style far more severe than what he uses here, yet Les Dames still certainly deserves recognition as a notable (and entertaining) entry in the great filmmaker’s body of work.

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  • 17 Nov

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    Review: Breaking the Waves (1996)

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    With 1996’s Breaking the Waves, Lars von Trier made his first proper venture into the territories of female martyrdom and suffering that he would become so well known for. It features one of his most memorable characters: Bess McNeill (Emily Watson in a one-of-a-kind performance), a child-like young woman who lives with her mother (Sandra Voe) and sister Dorothy (Katrin Cartlidge) in an isolated coastal community in Scotland. At the start of the film, she gets married to Jan (Stellan Skarsgård), who works on an offshore oilrig. Their early days together are happy ones, but he soon returns to the rig to continue his work, plunging the fiercely affectionate Bess into sadness. Then disaster strikes when an accident leaves Jan paralyzed. After a period of slow healing and depression, he makes an unusual request of her: Bess is to pursue sexual encounters with other men and tell him about them as a sad substitute for the moments of carnal bliss they once shared together. With difficulty, Bess complies, leading to tragic consequences in her relationships with Jan, her family, the town and God.
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  • 12 Nov

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    Review: Europa (1991)

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    Being the third and final film in Lars von Trier’s Europa trilogy, Europa occupies quite a pivotal place in the Danish director’s career. At the time, it was his most thematically and stylistically ambitious achievement, escalating his ongoing study of European society to impressive new heights. At the Cannes Film Festival, it received no fewer than three awards, including one for “Special Artistic Contribution” – yet this didn’t keep von Trier from playing the sore loser when he didn’t get the Palme d’Or by calling Jury president Roman Polanski a midget. As if in response to this “loss,” von Trier then embarked on a new stage in his work, adopting the rougher, more emotionally lacerating approach seen in films like Breaking the Waves (1996), Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Dogville (2003) that he is perhaps best known for. This drastic shift makes Europa all the more fascinating as an exhilaratingly bold flirtation with large-scale filmmaking and outright spectacle.

    Jean-Marc Barr stars as Leopold Kessler, a naïve American who goes to Germany shortly after the end of World War II to work as a sleeping car conductor. Accompanied by his German uncle (Ernst-Hugo Järegård), he begins to socialize with the Hartmann family who run the Zentropa railway line. He becomes romantically involved with Katharina (Barbara Sukowa), daughter of the company’s owner, Max Hartmann (Jørgen Reenberg), while facing pressure from both an American colonel (Eddie Constantine) and the branch of Nazi supporters known as the Werewolves to aid their respective sides. Eventually, the non-committal Kessler is pushed to finally decide where his loyalties truly lie.
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  • 11 Nov

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    Review: Epidemic (1987)

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    For the second film in his Europa trilogy, Lars von Trier went in a noticeably different direction than the one he tread for his debut effort, The Element of Crime (1984), and the trilogy’s third film, Europa (1991). Both of these works are distinguished by their boldly stylized aesthetics and involving narratives, with Element providing a feverish, orange-tinted variation on the noir genre while Europa weaves a spellbinding tale of postwar Germany. In comparison, Epidemic (1987) feels completely different right from the start, with its sensibilities more rooted in documentary than fantasia – initially, at least.

    The film opens with the writer Niels Vørsel calling his creative partner Lars von Trier (the two men collaborated on the scripts for the Europa trilogy and the television miniseries The Kingdom, and here essentially play themselves) about their latest screenplay. Lars goes over to Niels’ place only to discover that the disc containing the script (entitled The Cop and the Whore, a cheeky nod to The Element of Crime) has been erased. Left with just a few days before they have to hand in their work to their producer, they scramble to write up a brand new script. They decide to create a new story about the spread of a deadly plague across the world and begin to conduct research and map out a plot. They make progress and see to other matters like a road trip to Germany while remaining unaware of an actual outbreak that is quietly making its way across Europe.
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  • 08 Jul

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    Toronto Preview: Shinsedai Cinema Festival 2011

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    [With less than two weeks to go before the Shinsedai Cinema Festival arrives in Toronto, here is a friendly reminder for the event and a look at some of the films audiences can look forward to catching]

    Now entering its third year, the Shinsedai Cinema Festival will once more be bringing a slew of independent Japanese films to Toronto this summer. Began in 2009 by author and Midnight Eye co-founder Jasper Sharp and Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow founder and editor-in-chief Chris MaGee, the festival is designed to highlight some of the newest filmmakers to emerge from Japan, giving North American viewers a rare chance to take a look at noteworthy films that have received attention elsewhere in the world. This year’s guests will include Kiki Sugino, the lead actress and producer of the opening night film, Koji Fukuda’s Hospitalité; comedian and director Devi Kobayashi, whose films Mariko Rose the Spook and Hikari will be shown back-to-back; and Ryugo Nakamura, a fifteen year-old filmmaker who already has an impressive number of short films (thirty, to be precise) to his name and will be presenting his latest feature, The Catcher on the Shore.

    This year’s lineup looks like quite the diverse grab bag of cinematic treats, offering a wide selections of genres to choose from. Along with the above-mentioned films, I am quite intrigued by a few films I recognize from this year’s lineup from Frankfurt’s Nippon Connection film festival, which I had the pleasure of attending. Besides highlights like Koji Shiraishi’s Shirome, a mockumentary that features girl group Momoiro Clover thrust into a horror film scenario, and Yoichi Higashi’s Wandering Home, a family drama starring Tadanobu Asano as the alcoholic photojournalist Yutaka Kamoshida, I am perhaps most excited about Keita Kurosaka’s Midori-ko, a positively brilliant, beautifully strange work of hand-drawn animation that took its maker over ten years to complete.

    Check out the trailers for Hospitalité and Midori-ko, both tucked under the seat.

    The 3rd Shinsedai Cinema Festival will run from July 21st-24th, 2011, at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto. Full details on the films, schedule, tickets and passes and location can all be found at the festival’s main website.

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  • 22 Jun

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    Exploring Kieslowski’s Three Colors Trilogy: Red (1994)

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    As I mentioned in my previous review of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue, the films that make up his Three Colors trilogy can be considered as responses to specific genres. While Blue is said to be an anti-tragedy and White an anti-comedy, Red is the anti-romance – and, I believe, the film that best fulfills its designation. It certainly addresses love, but does so in a curious, indirect way, circling questions and elements of romance without ever delivering the full emotional payoff one might expect. One of the film’s relationships, between a young man named Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit) who is studying to become a judge and his blonde girlfriend Karin (Frédérique Feder), is only presented in short, fleeting scenes mainly focused on him. Another is stretched thin across Europe, tying together Geneva-based model Valentine (the enchanting Irène Jacob) and Michel, a university student living in London, through increasingly fraught phone conversations. It feels like Kieslowski uses these two storylines to examine contemporary relationships – or, rather, how certain relationships were never meant to work.
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  • 13 Jun

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    Exploring Kieslowski’s Three Colors Trilogy: White (1994)

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    Sandwiched between the opulent Blue and the more elusive Red, White suffers to a degree from the “middle film syndrome” found so often in film trilogies. There are numerous possible reasons behind this specific case: it is a comedy (of sorts) amid two more deeply serious films, its titular hue doesn’t promise as much visual splendor as blue or red does, and it possesses a more surprising and quirky quality than what one might initially expect before viewing it. That final point partially stems from certain promotional images for the film focusing mainly on actress Julie Delpy. It makes sense in the context of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy and the marketing for it as a whole: three colors, three films, three lovely leading ladies (with Delpy joined by Juliette Binoche and Irène Jacob).
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  • 08 Jun

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    Exploring Kieslowski’s Three Colors Trilogy: Blue (1993)

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    Until recently, Krzysztof Kieslowski remained one of my biggest blind spots in the gallery of world cinema’s quintessential auteurs. One of those figures who continually lingered in my peripheral vision, the Polish filmmaker bears a reputation that ranks him among the likes of Bergman and Tarkovsky, Almodóvar and Haneke. But besides his prominence in the European arthouse scene, I was intrigued by the nature of his films – deep, mesmerizingly shot considerations of chance, fate and humanity. It wasn’t until after I read Roger Ebert’s Great Movies essay on Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy that I learned of the warmth and empathy he was capable of. Basically, he seemed like someone whose perspective I could readily appreciate and even grow fond of, and thus my appetite was properly whetted.

    So I took it upon myself to pick up the trilogy and watch it over the course of a few nights. Consisting of Blue (1993), White (1994) and Red (1994), they mark the end of Kieslowski’s directorial career. Shortly after completing Red, he announced his retirement from cinema. Sadly, approximately two years later, he passed away when he had a heart attack during an open-heart surgery operation in March of 1996. Yet he left behind an impressive body of work that concludes with a final run of films that any filmmaker would be proud to go out with.
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  • 19 Feb

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    Hitchcock-Truffaut Interview Recordings Resurface Online

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    Anyone who is a fan of either Alfred Hitchcock or François Truffaut will have at one point at least heard of the legendary series of interviews that took place between the two in 1962. Truffaut, a great admirer of Hitchcock’s work, sat down with the master and conducted half-hour interview sessions that covered nearly the entirety of his films and his filmmaking strategies. Helen Scott of New York’s French Film Office acted as a translator between the two, as Truffaut’s English skills were limited. She would become a great friend to the French filmmaker and assisted him with his only English language film, 1966′s Fahrenheit 451.

    The result of those interview sessions was the book simply titled Hitchcock, with Truffaut credited as its author (Scott assisted in the publication of the American edition). It has been available since 1967 and revised to include Hitchcock’s later films following the interviews, but the audio recordings themselves have been less accessible to current film buffs – until recently. The blog If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats, run by Tom Sutpen, first made the recordings available for download starting in 2006. Earlier this past week, they unexpectedly re-surfaced online, and now the entirety of the sessions can be downloaded in one zip file – provided here for your convenience.

    As for the recordings themselves? Well, in terms of pure content, there’s nothing new if you’ve already read the book. But (judging from the first few segments I’ve listened to so far) it’s wonderful to actually hear Hitchcock, Truffaut and Scott conversing and sharing the occasional burst of laughter from humorous anecdotes and jokes that arise throughout the discussion. Hitchcock speaks in his patented slow, almost leisurely manner, while it is quite easy to hear some enthusiasm in Truffaut’s voice as he asks his questions and provides his own observations – let’s not forget Truffaut was, first and foremost, a film geek like so many others who hold that particular torch high today. Hopefully, some of them will draw some delight from discovering this treasure of film history for themselves.

    Story info and links to audio recordings courtesy of FilmDetail.

  • 08 Oct

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    Now Playing at the Row Three Rep: The Art of Travel Triple Bill

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    [Row Three programming if we owned a rep cinema]

    The Art of Travel Triple Bill

    The Brothers Bloom – 5 pm
    What Time Is It There? – 7:15 pm
    Hotel Chevalier, followed by The Darjeeling Limited – 9:30 pm

    I love travel. There is nothing quite like the sensations of being immersed in an unfamiliar place, of learning to adapt to (or, at least, keep afloat within) a different culture, of making new discoveries and memories as you are carried along your journey. I believe the films selected for this lineup perfectly capture the experience of travel, each one focusing on different facets that, overall, comprise the cascade of impressions both positive and negative that are felt when you venture forth into the world, suitcase and camera in tow.

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  • 03 Oct

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    Review: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

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    Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
    Writer: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
    Producers: Simon Field, Keith Griffiths, Charles de Meaux, Apichatpong Weerasethakul
    Starring: Thanapat Saisaymar, Jenjira Pongpas, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Natthakarn Aphaiwonk, Geerasak Kulhong
    Year: 2010
    Running time: 114 min.

    After the tidy and at-times sterile spaces of 2006′s Syndromes and a Century, which has been recognized by many as the best film of the previous decade, Apichatpong Weerasethakul returned to the dark, mysterious depths of the jungles of Thailand for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. It is the latest in a series of works that are part of his Primitive project, which is centered around the town of Nabua in northeast Thailand where government soldiers tortured and killed farmers suspected of being communists between 1965 and the early 1980s. Through an installation piece, the short films Phantoms of Nabua and A Letter to Uncle Boonmee and the feature Uncle Boonmee, Weerasethakul has adressed the topics of memory, community and, in keeping with his ongoing interest in Buddhism, reincarnation.

    Uncle Boonmee is inspired by the 1983 book A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives by Buddhist abbot Phra Sripariyattiweti, who in turn based the book on the remembered experiences and reincarnations of a man named Boonmee. Along with elements from the book, Weerasethakul incorporated into the film memories of his own family (chiefly his father, who like the titular character, suffered from kidney failure) and bits of inspiration from old television shows and Thai comic books. The end result is yet another fantastically strange treat from one of the most original voices in contemporary Asian cinema.

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  • 24 Sep

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    Review: Film Socialism

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    Director: Jean-Luc Godard
    Writer: Jean-Luc Godard
    Producer: Ruth Waldburger
    Starring: Catherine Tanvier, Christian Sinniger, Jean-Marc Stehlé, Patti Smith, Alain Badiou
    Year: 2010
    Running time: 102 min.

    Quite fittingly, Jean-Luc Godard’s already-notorious Film Socialism was the last film I saw at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Having read reports of its difficult qualities (on top of being fully aware of his work’s striking transformations over the course of his career), I knew I was in for a rough ride when I walked into the theatre, and even had in mind the famous credits that accompany his 1967 film Weekend: “End of Film,” “End of Cinema.” Those words quite definitively marked the end of a remarkable run of films that at once reflected and defined the decade in which they were made. But anyone willing to follow Godard beyond then would have to turn away from Jean Seberg, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina and all other traces of romanticism from that phase of his work as he delved deeper into political theory, philosophy, video technology and an increasingly experimental style that tossed conventional narrative techniques out the window.

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