Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with our man in Canada, eh. He's been a busy little bee and has bunches of flicks to tell you about! Enjoy, hosers!
3-iron (2004, directed by Kim Ki-duk)
In discussing Kim Ki-duk with a couple of people, one of them pointed out that Kim is on a roll like no other director on the planet. He's brought to Toronto, in order: The Isle; Address Unknown; Bad Guy; Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring; and now 3-iron, which is every bit as good as the previous four. Dude is now five-for-freakin'-five, and all of them are home runs. Who else can claim that?
The plot of 3-iron is deceptively simple. A young man posts restaurant flyers on doors, not so much to earn a living and to scope out potential residences; after a day or so if a flyer is still there he knows no one is home and it's safe to break in. He's a very conscientious burglar, however. He steals nothing but a little food, and pays for it by doing laundry and repairing small appliances. He's like the Vacation Fairy, keeping your home tidy while you're gone.
One day he breaks into a house that isn't, in fact, empty. Hiding in a corner is a young woman, a former model who is a prisoner in her own home thanks to her abusive husband. Suddenly the young man is forced to make a choice: continue in solitude, or reach out and connect with someone who needs it as much as he does.
What follows is, like so many great movies, completely surprising and utterly inevitable.
Kim's sheer confidence in his ability is breathtaking. I never want to curse a film by calling it 'perfect', but I'll be damned if I can find a mis-step in 3-iron. All is genius, from casting (including a totally dialogueless performance by Jae Hee in the lead almost reminiscent of Johnny Depp at times) to pacing to framing... just astounding.
3-iron is an early contender (hell, early favorite) for best film of the fest, and Kim Ki-duk just stepped up to challenge Kitano as my favorite living filmmaker.
* * * * *
Clean (2004, directed by Olivier Assayas)
There's an inherent, nearly insurmountable obstacle to making films about recovering addicts -- recovery is boring. Good and necessary, sure, but compared to the rush and the crash, the bare-bones living pales both for subject and observer. It's just not cinematic, dig?
Which is why you cast someone like Maggie Cheung to live it.
(Incidentally, my quixotic quest to meet the divine Miz C so far remains unfulfilled, so imagine my shock when I realized a certain scene in Clean was shot around the corner from where I was staying at the time, with me completely oblivious to the whole proceeding. That mocking laughter you hear is the universe's, and it's meant just for me.)
Maggie plays Emily, a tiny little light in the pop culture firmament, a former French TV presenter and singing semi-sensation (think Nico by way of 'Downtown' Julie Brown). She's married in all but name to Lee, another didn't-you-used-to-be whose music career peaked a lifetime ago. In a dingy motel room they fight like stray dogs over the carcass of their fame; she storms out after one such blow-up and nods off down by the lake. He stays behind and ODs.
Not so much hitting bottom as dipping her toes in it, Maggie (never really getting a chance to mourn) starts to vaguely sort of try to put her life back together with one goal sustaining her, that of rebuilding a relationship with her young son Jay. It's easier said than done. All of their former friends quickly turn out to be his former friends, and shun her; Lee's parents, Jay's guardians, keep him far away from her (not that they don't have cause); and all of them hold Emily responsible for Lee's death. What's a woman to do?
Pills, of course. And weed. And chug her methadone like the secret of life is hidden at the bottom of the bottle.
Clean is a fine little movie. Olivier Assayas' direction is smooth and secure. Nick Nolte, as Emily's father-in-almost-law, plays slightly against type as a quiet, good-hearted man sorting through the detritus of his son's crazy life. And Maggie of course is radiant and superb. For the most part...
The film has one glaring Achilles heel. Its English dialogue, for whatever reason, is... well... bad. Nearly Titanic bad. And it certainly doesn't help Maggie's performance when contrasted with scenes where she's speaking French, a language she seems far more comfortable in (to her credit Maggie tries to build on this, using the distance the clumsy words force on her as one more expression of her insecurity and emotional withdrawal). I suppose it could have been an intentional choice by Assayas for exactly those reasons, but it's a major distraction and detraction, especially when even native speakers like Nolte and Don McKellar stumble through the clunky text. In fact I'm pretty sure Clean plays far better if you don't speak English at all, if you can simply let Maggie's pure performance shine through, and her best actress award from Cannes this year backs me up on that.
Much like its heroine, Clean is a good movie struggling mightily against a flaw that might have killed a lesser film dead. (Hmm. Maybe I should give Assayas more credit for knowing what he's doing with that dialogue... the metaphor is a bit too perfect.)
* * * * *
Creep (2004, directed by Christopher Smith)
Whoar! This is a nasty, nasty piece of work.
Creep is one of those maximum-jolts-from-minimum-plot concepts everybody loves. Kate (Franka Potente) is a bitchy London party girl who falls asleep on a bench and misses the last train of the night from Charing Cross Station. Needless to say there's a Thing loose in the tunnels. Blood and carnage and mayhem ensue.
Is it predictable? Sure, and in a couple of places Smith even winks at you to let you know it's intentional. Creep isn't trying to reinvent the wheel (or the iron maiden, for that matter), and there's (almost) nothing ironic or pomo about it (to be fair, Franka does do a lot of running). It's just a savagely gory film. Period.
Think of Creep as the horror equivalent of the Hives, if grungier and not as well-dressed. If your point of comparison is the Stones/Halloween then sure, it ain't gonna measure up. But if your reference point is more reasonable or if (here's a kooky thought) you take the flick on its own merits, then Creep, well, rocks. And what more can you ask for?
* * * * *
Innocence (2004, directed by Lucile Hadzihalilovic)
Wow, what a perfectly odd movie.
Innocence is a very weird film about a young lady's passage into womanhood, sort of a Girl's Own Suspiria. It opens with a coffin drifting through water and dank tunnels, with the soundtrack all viscous and chthonic (imagine a Shoggoth loose in the Mines of Moria and you have some idea of the extraordinary noises accompanying the uber-retro opening credits.) Eventually the coffin arrives at its destination: a ordinary-seeming sitting room. Five young girls cluster around it before the eldest pulls a golden key from her pocket and unlocks the lid. Inside, just waking up, is an even younger girl, the newest member of the household.
From there, the movie gets strange.
Idyllic, exciting, dark and melancholy, the way all good films about childhood should be, Innocence simply refuses to take a straight line to any of its destinations. The residents of this most unusual boarding school certainly act like normal girls, showing all the accustomed delight, jealousy and yes, innocence, but the circumstances of their education/captivity are anything but normal.
I don't want to give anything away here. Innocence is a film that treasures its secrets, and I respect that. Technically, it's magnificent. The camerwork is gorgeous, the cast (including Marion Cotillard from Jeux d'enfants and Big Fish) excellent. And the final shot, giddy with joy and revelation and not a little bit of fear, might just land on my list of 10 favorite film endings ever (just behind O Brother Where Art Thou?, the undisputed champ, and jostling for position with Now, Voyager and Lone Star), all the more impressive for being the debut feature from Hadzihalilovic.
Go. See. Enjoy. Especially if the names 'Coraline' and/or 'Roman Dirge' mean anything to you.
* * * * *
Les revenants (2004, directed by Robin Campillo)
Ack. This was one of those movies where going in I knew I would either love it or hate it. I mean, it's a French art house zombie flick... there's going to be no middle ground here.
Hoo boy, was there no middle ground.
The plot of Les revenants is simple. One day, the recently dead are not so deceased, and shambling back into town. There's no brain-eating though, just loved ones with fuzzy minds and memories who nobody is quite sure how to deal with.
Therein lies the problem. It's a neat conceit, but that's all there is. Vast swaths of the film are taken up with bureaucratic meetings on how to deal with the 'returnees'. The whole thing feels like a zombie movie made by government committee. It does occasionally tease becoming interesting (hey, the living are starting to get paranoid, something might... nah. Oh look, things are blowing up, surely now it'll... guess not) but that just makes the resulting fizzle that much harder to swallow. Les revenants even squanders an opportunity to nod in the dircetion of Night of the Living Dead's classic ending, but instead it snootily turns up its nose at such a gauche trope. (On second thought, maybe that's why I hated it so much. The whole thing feels like making an actual zombie movie would have been beneath the filmmakers. It's insulting.)
Les revenants: proof that ideas aren't worth spit without decent execution.
