Also this issue: The Magic Mountain Notes from Telluride. -Archie Perlmutter and Ruth Screen Picks -Sam Adams New Continuing repertory film Showtimes

September 19-25, 2002

movies

Try to Remember

Putting on a good face: Elia Suleiman directs and stars in Divine Intervention.

The Toronto Film Festival's directors cope with the past year.

by Sam Adams

Inevitably, the events of last Sept. 11 found themselves reflected in this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, not least because for anyone who attended last year’s festival, the shock of that day will forever be associated with interrupted screenings, frantic phone calls home and desperate attempts to find any mode of transportation capable of leaving the country. Only a handful of this year’s films -- most notably Jim Simpson’s The Guys, adapted from the recent New York play, and the French-financed 11’9”01 -- September 11, which anthologizes 11 responses from directors around the world -- addressed the attacks head-on, while mentions creeped into movies like Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, whose main concern is the American propensity for violence.

But even a movie like Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven, a sort of deconstructionist revisitation of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, evoked surprising resonances. The story of a perfect '50s society wife (Julianne Moore) who discovers the racism and homophobia on which her placid suburban society is built, the film is heavy on style (so much so that it may take a second viewing to fully appreciate), but underneath it is a story about what Moore called "the end of American optimism."

Ditto the blithe innocents of Gus Van Sant's sparse, existential Gerry. Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, who co-wrote the scenario with the director, start out as motor-mouthed hikers who deviate from a desert trail, but as they find themselves progressively more lost, their talk turns from Wheel of Fortune blunders to urgent matters of survival. Salted with lengthy time-lapse shots of clouds pouring over mountain ranges -- Werckmeister Harmonies' Béla Tarr is thanked in the credits, and the movie is dedicated to Ken Kesey -- Gerry begins as an elongated comedy but spirals to a bleak finish, one that the dozens who walked out on the press screening should be sorry they missed.

It would be pushing it to say either Far From Heaven or Gerry is in any way a deliberate response to the last year's turmoil, especially since both were begun well before Sept. 11. (Heaven was in the midst of shooting on the New Jersey side of the river that morning.) But based on the evidence, the indirect, even unconscious approach is by far the most effective, certainly for American directors. The Guys -- and the American segment of 11'9"01, directed by Sean Penn -- conveys the sense of a wound still too fresh to be examined. Anne Nelson's play does perhaps too good a job of conveying the seesawing emotions of New York in the weeks after 9/11. As a writer who helps a fire captain (Anthony LaPaglia) draft eulogies for men from his company who died in the Twin Towers, Sigourney Weaver gives voice to incoherent cries of loss and rage; of the foreign response to the attacks, she cries, "They all thought it was about them, but it's about us! Isn't it?"

A similar mess is on display in Israeli-born New Yorker Udi Aloni's Local Angel: Theological Political Fragments, whose laudable attempts at balance come off more like naiveté. Aloni, whose mother is a well-known Israeli peace activist, combines documentary, video-journaling and experimental film techniques, giving voice to the Palestinian rap group DAM (who perform in both Arabic and Hebrew), Palestinian activist Hanan Ashrawi and even Yasser Arafat who, incredibly, depicts then-prime minister Ehud Barak literally running away from a peace settlement Arafat was, he says, keen to sign. The credibility of such statements is hardly in doubt (there is none), and Aloni's failure to challenge them seems like well-intentioned liberalism gone awry. Israeli filmmaker Amos Gita• took a better shot with Kedma, set in the months immediately preceding the formation of the state of Israel. The film, which begins almost silently, becomes progressively more verbose, climaxing in a series of dramatically set monologues taken from historical sources and filmed in long, unbroken shots.

Culminating with the fantasy slaughter of Israeli commandos, Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention might be less generous of spirit, but it's electrifying filmmaking all the same. The scene in question, which I'd been told beforehand was "offensive," begins with Israeli soldiers doing Busby Berkeley routines with their assault rifles, and climaxes with a firing-range target coming to life and eliminating the soldiers Matrix-style. The episode is bloodless -- the soldiers vanish or turn to smoke -- and clearly a daydream, which doesn't remove the discomfort, but then it's probably not supposed to. Suleiman (Chronicle of a Disappearance) depicts a Palestine, particularly his home town of Nazareth, full of Arabs just waiting to turn on each other, where the smallest disputes escalate quickly into violence. Suleiman's style is equal parts Godard and Three Stooges, slapstick violence mixed with bleak commentary, presented as a series of interlocking skits. Suleiman declined interviews with non-Canadian press during the festival, but he's previously called himself an "absolute pacifist"; the movie, then, is less a cerebral statement than an artistic id given free rein, the cinematic equivalent of an R. Crumb comic. Palpably an attempt to work through rather than an end to the journey.

The same is true of Moore's Columbine, an unusually complex and open-ended film essay with more questions than answers. And it's true of Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine's contribution to 11'9"01, which drew hisses from the crowd and got the collection labeled "stridently un-American." In Chahine's film, an actor playing the director communes with the ghost of an American soldier killed in a Beirut bombing in 1983. The Chahine character offers the G.I. a patronizing explanation of American misdeeds and an appalling justification for suicide bombing -- since Israel and the U.S. are democracies, "for the suicide bomber it's obvious that those citizens are responsible" -- but finishes with the director visiting the soldier's grave at Arlington National Cemetery, only to have the ghost of an Arab boy materialize and remind him of their own dead. Without Divine Intervention's ironic distance, Chahine's take comes off as clumsy, offensive by default if not design. France's Claude Lelouch mustered the most power by simply turning down the sound, replaying the morning of Sept. 11 from the perspective of a hearing-impaired woman in a Manhattan high-rise, who writes her lover a break-up note unaware of the cataclysm transpiring a few blocks away. (Amores Perros director Alejandro González Iñárritu used a visual approach to the same idea, flashing images on a mostly black screen while audio fragments played through the speakers.) Ken Loach drew valid comparisons between the attacks and the U.S.-sponsored 1973 coup in Chile, which also took place on Sept. 11, but No Man's Land's Danis Tanovic made the same point without it coming across as a scold.

Aftermath was also the subject of Frederick Wiseman's haunting La Dernière Lettre, adapted from a theater piece the veteran documentarian has staged several times over the years. Comédie-Française actress Catherine Samie gives a stylized but immediate performance as a Russian Jew writing her last letter to her departed son from a Nazi ghetto. Shot in black and white, Lettre is all light and shadowplay, deployed with a master's reserve. Gaspar Noé's Irréversible, beneficiary of this year's predictable Cannes controversy, is by contrast a study in whiplash camerawork and emotional bludgeoning. Told in reverse, it's the story of a brutal rape (depicted in a single, endless shot) and its brutal aftermath, filmed with panache but no attempt at insight. It's the kind of movie that makes you long for the unassuming perspicacity of the Iranian The Exam, which pulls off what The Circle only tried. Set outside a school on the morning of a crucial entrance exam, the film travels among groups of young Iranian women, all contemplating their futures in a country beset by change.

One of the festival's nicest surprises was the undeniable buzz surrounding Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's Lost in La Mancha, the story of Terry Gilliam's disastrous attempt to adapt Don Quixote for the screen. Fulton and Pepe, the once-local filmmakers who got inside the making of Twelve Monkeys with The Hamster Factor, inadvertently lucked into a bigger story than they could have hoped for when Gilliam's shoot ran into huge preproduction difficulties, culminating in the loss of his Don Quixote (French actor Jean Rochefort) to hip problems which made it impossible for him to ride a horse. La Mancha, due for theatrical release via IFC Films early next year, garnered great press, not least because Gilliam has been following the doc around the festival circuit -- no doubt using it as a tool to get the production refinanced. In other words, the movie about how Gilliam's movie didn't get made may just end up helping it get made after all. How's that for a twist of fate?