Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema

Directed by Todd McCarthy

A film lover's tribute to a film lover that will likely only keep the interest of film lovers, Variety critic Todd McCarthy's documentary Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema is particularly memorable for the amazing lineup of directors who weigh in on the titular movie buff's career. It's also a kind of wet dream for devout film fans everywhere: What movie buff wouldn't want to go from critic to art house programer to new director champion to Cannes emperor and Asian New Wave patron?

For all the stylish cinema its subject facilitated, there's not much style to recommend McCarthy's film, unless one counts the jumpy editing rhythms during its interviews as a nod to the French New Wave. After all, the first of Rissient's many contributions to film history was as assistant director on Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. Rissient's subsequent achievements are related by beneficiaries of his eye for talent like Sydney Pollack, Jerry Schatzberg, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Jane Campion and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Meanwhile, McCarthy accompanies Rissient to his small hometown in the French countryside, where the globetrotting movie industry chameleon discusses regional history with picture-perfect little old French ladies.

Rissient's charm and passion for film are self-evident, particularly when he tells industry anecdotes. One story about trying to keep an aging, boozing John Ford dry during a visit to Paris is especially memorable. It speaks to his many close relationships with film legends and the friendly, personal way he could still interact with them, all the while stoking his fan-boy adoration.

Rissient emerges as a benevolent patron of cinema. First as a discoverer of overlooked classical Hollywood gems, then as a promoter of American independent cinema in the 60s and 70s, and thereafter dedicated to the development of Asian art cinema. At moments, the absence of counter-arguments looms large. Did Rissient ever pull strings against a director he didn't like? Also, fairly late in McCarthy's film several friends chuckle that film and women are Rissient's two great passions, "especially young Asian women." It's an uneasy, potentially creepy moment the film quickly speeds along from, on to the opening of a cinema named for the aging Frenchman.

Old but far from retired, Rissient tries to offer McCarthy some closing remarks, only to be interrupted by his interminably ringing cell phone. He takes the call, and we're left having discovered one of the most independent cogs in the international movie machine, one that's still turning out of sheer passion.

A similar version of this review appears on The L Magazine's website, and can be read here.

Let The Right One In

Directed by Tomas Alfredson

They don’t come much more stylish than this Swedish hybrid of vampire and adolescent sexual awakening genres. Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema’s elegantly composed shots and Jessica Fridén’s retro-cool costume department create an aesthetic somewhere between a fashion spread and a music video. Director Tomas Alfredson, and production designer Eva Norén work in a kind of icy blue-gray palette throughout the film’s Scandinavian modernist locales in suburban Stockholm. The hard geometry and morgue-like tiling of the housing complex setting nonetheless harbors a rag-tag community of friends and gossipmongers that we come to know well. This set-up of community life arranged around a courtyard recalls Hitchcock’s Rear Window, particularly as suspicions multiply and home invasions increase.

But such adult concerns (murders and other meddling problems) serve mainly as backdrop in Let The Right One In’s child-centric narrative. Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is our vaguely girly leading lad, living with an emotionally absent mother, and whose (perhaps gay) father resides in the countryside. Oskar is relentlessly bullied at school, and his budding knife fetish suggests he’ll soon seek a violent solution to his social problems. Mysterious Eli (Lina Leandersson) moves in next door, and a relationship of mutual growth and support evolves.

To call the mix of child sexuality and tactfully deployed vampire action that ensues a genre hybrid is reductive though. The two narratives aren’t grafted onto each other for novelty’s sake. Rather, they carry each other into more interesting territory – not unlike the way Oskar and Eli push each other into greater confidence and maturity. Vampirism as a metaphor for sexuality is nothing new – with Interview With A Vampire and Buffy as only the most recent iterations of a trend already firmly established by the time Bram Stoker’s Dracula was released in 1897. But that tradition is wonderfully adapted here as a vessel for exploring the too often taboo subject of children’s sexual awakening.

Not that Let The Right One In is all psychosexual allegory, but that dimension is very present. The portrayal of the housing complex’s depressed adults is also well-rendered, and provides a kind of crystal ball onto the future that makes Oskar and Eli’s evolution into even-keeled individuals all the more important. How depressing it would be if these conflicted but endearing kids ended up like the adults they’re growing up around. Let The Right One In places firm hope in its young duo, and does so with a mix of visual and narrative flair that’s original and entertaining.

This review appeared on The L Magazine's blog as part of that magazine's coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, and can also be read here.

Fermat’s Room

Directed by Luis Piedrahita & Rodrigo Sopeña

Equal parts David Mamet double-cross thriller (House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, Heist) and quasi-metaphysical math-themed sci-fi (Cube, Cube 2: Hypercube), this stylish Spanish story of four math geniuses stuck in a shrinking room doesn’t have the narrative chops to sustain its tension to the end. Piedrahita and Sopeña create a nail-biting scenario over the first hour, but as Fermat’s Room enters its final phase leaps in logic and overwrought explanations make for a disappointing ending. Also, the riddles these supposed geniuses are made to solve in order to avoid compaction are old favorites most of us learned as teenagers. Does this mean Americans have finally climbed to the pinnacle of logic and mathematics education, vastly outstripping these Iberian lackeys? Doubtful. More likely Piedrahita and Sopeña weren’t ballsy enough to write a script of completely mumbo-jumbled equations that we would never have bothered to investigate.

After expository introductions, the four main characters are invited via mysterious letters to a meeting of great mathematically-inclined minds in the titular room. Our four protagonists quickly fall apart and reveal their secrets as the walls push them together. There’s the old-world aristocratic professor, the working-class engineer, the egocentric young math star (such a thing exists apparently, in Spain), and the uppity woman they pass around more or less metaphorically. This is where the film falters, as elaborate back-stories are provided to connect these characters who function much better as archetypes without fully-developed personalities.

Fermat’s Room is strong where Cube and its sequel were weak (acting, art design), but could have benefited from mimicking their disregard for narrative explanation. Referring to past events and having characters recount injurious stories slows the pace more than the additional information justifies. This background data does little to heighten the tension. If putting four essentially likeable characters into a deadly trap doesn’t make us care about them (which it had), finding out they’re alternately lying, cheating, lecherous and murderous won’t help.

Beyond its over-determined audience identification and over-simplified riddles, Fermat’s Room is an enjoyable film. The narrative is engaging until the last third, and there are no glaring weaknesses. It’s more polished and big budget-looking than many international entries at Tribeca this year, with snazzy locations and sets, and stylish cinematography. The opening credit sequence, incidentally, is a close second to Simon Brand’s Paraiso Travel for the Festival’s coolest.

This review appeared on The L Magazine's blog as part of the magazine's coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, and can also be read here.

My Winnipeg

Directed by Guy Maddin

The latest from the Manitoban mystic known for his inventive prairie expressionism is a kind of “Dear John” letter to his hometown. Maddin combines family anecdotes, local history, regional legend and pure fantasy to create a portrait of himself and Winnipeg. The result is an endearing collage of public and private insights that privileges revealing fictions over hard facts. The otherwise disparate elements are held together by the movements of a sleep train around the hushed city – Winnipeg has ten times the national rate of sleepwalkers, we are told – and the charming deadpan of the director’s commentary (recounted at one remove by Darcy Fehr, who acts and narrates the part of “Guy Maddin”).

Early moments in Maddin/Fehr’s voice-over narration recall another filmmaker who tends to append personal narratives to documentary subjects. As Maddin introduces his sleepy city, Michael Moore’s recurring visits to Flint, Michigan come to mind. Luckily the likeness is momentary. The earnestness of Maddin’s strangest claims (that, for instance, sleepwalkers who re-enter previous homes must be welcomed by the current inhabitants) undermines the vanity a project like My Winnipeg inevitably suggests. These and other citywide pronouncements (“everything that happens in this city is a euphemism,” was a personal favorite) flow smoothly into ruminations on the director’s family, especially his mother.

In fact, for those familiar with Maddin’s trademark style, the visual integration of My Winnipeg’s original material and stock footage might be its most impressive achievement. Whether showing archival film from the early 1900s of horses frozen in the local river, re-enacted domestic scenes or the recent implosion of the city’s storied hockey arena, the disparate materials of My Winnipeg all adhere remarkably to the Maddinian aesthetic.

Beyond visual coherence, My Winnipeg mobilizes many metaphors to string its materials together. Aside from the sleep train, Maddin’s vehicle for exploring and leaving the city (“what if I film my way out of here?” he asks early on), the most interesting is his Native-informed interest in The Forks. According to local legend The Forks – where the Assiniboine and Red Rivers meet – is a churning pool of discordant energies. This geographic intersection shapes Winnipeg’s layout, but for Maddin its upheaval of imperceptible powers is the generative force behind many of his hometown’s idiosyncrasies. This fork imagery also evokes Maddin’s career. If My Winnipeg is a kind of therapeutic exercise, it will be interesting to see what direction the director takes from this juncture.

This review appeared on The L Magazine's blog as part of the magazine's 2008 Tribeca Film Festival coverage, and can be read here.

Canadian Front, 2008

March 13-20

The eight films having their New York premieres during MoMA’s annual survey of new Canadian cinema resort alternately to personal drama, political satire, or clever genre manipulation, but propose a consistently cynical outlook.

Two entries explore working-class strife, with characters compensating for socio-economic impotence by exercising agency in the ring. The series’ headlining film – Poor Boy’s Game by director Clement Virgo – stars Danny Glover and Rossif Sutherland (Kiefer’s half brother). The film follows violent outbursts between lower-class black and white communities in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Honoring boxing movie conventions, Virgo’s film is all about men, their bruised egos and quests for affirmation through physical domination. Though more sophisticated than most boxing films, its final image of multiracial camaraderie predictably excludes women.

Le Ring (Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s first feature) follows hardheaded twelve year-old Jessy (Maxime Desjardins-Tremblay) growing up in Montreal’s roughest neighborhood. As his family falls apart, Jessy looks to amateur wrestling as an outlet for his anger, but discovers the matches are rigged. Le Ring ingeniously subverts the boxing trope used in Poor Boy’s Game. When it turns out the rules inside the ring are as unfair and arbitrary as those outside, Jessy looks for more durable solutions than cathartic violence.

The biggest film in Canadian Front, 2008 – except maybe the split screen psychodrama The Tracey Fragments starring Juno’s Ellen Page – Denys Arcand’s Days of Darkness is also about a Montrealer coping without hitting. Jean-Marc (Marc Labrèche), the middle-aged peon in a monolithic bureaucracy, daydreams of fame while his family plugs into blackberries and iPods. This archetypal middle-class white man’s anxieties over becoming obsolete produce terrific satire, and some silly set pieces.

This preview appears in the March 12 issue of The L Magazine, and can be read here.

New trial for an old case

Bamako – the opening film of the second annual Montreal Human Rights Film Festival – is fascinating and intriguing, but mostly for cinematic reasons that have little to do with human rights. Far more compelling than its political context and messages, the films manipulations of genre and systems of identification are complex and original.

Directed by Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako, the film is set in a communal courtyard in the Malian capital Bamako. Amidst the locals’ daily activities, the courtyard has become the setting for a trial: spokespersons for the African civil society are taking the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to court. The trial dominates the films narrative, but we are also aware of other goings on in the courtyard from which subordinate plots slowly emerge. Nightclub singer Melé (Aïssa Maïga) and her stoic husband Chaka (Tiécoura Traoré), the closest this Bamako comes to having main characters, provide a family melodrama as the couple drift apart and the future of their daughter remains unclear. This plot, however, stays undeveloped and is constantly displaced by the global trial unfolding outside their door.

The trial in the courtyard is a clever device, allowing Sissako to juxtapose impoverished Malian village life with a discussion of the international power structures perpetuating African poverty. But for a film being shown at the Montreal Human Rights Film Festival, a biting critique and indictment of the IMF and World Bank is, let’s face it, preaching to the converted. Well-articulated as Bamako is – complete with quotations from the father of postcolonial theory Aimé Césaire – the arguments it puts forward are nothing new in the denunciation of the neo-colonial practices of global financial institutions. That said, this film is completely fascinating for the ways in which it plays with cinematic conventions.

Bamako combines several different film genres in very jarring ways. The films form, a collision of different genres, becomes an analogy for the way globalization forces disparate cultures into dialogue in more or less exploitative ways. This piecing together of genres also testifies to the influence of the films multiple nodes of production – France, Mali, and the United States. The majority of the film, therefore, is a courtroom drama that overlaps with a humanitarian documentary on community life. Our glimpses of the domestic troubles between Melé and Chaka also provide a hint of the family melodrama genre. The most jarring use of genre in Bamako, however, is the intrusion of a xenophobic Western.

About halfway through the film, a family takes its TV into the empty courtyard at night to watch a film entitled Death in Timbuktu. What follows is five minutes of a hilarious movie-within-the-movie that stars Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon, Beloved). Death in Timbuktu shows a group of cowboys roll into the Malian city and shoot up every local who crosses their path for no reason. When the solitary Danny Glover character kills one of the cowboys their outlaw antics degenerate into dark comedy, and the group resorts to shooting wildly in the deserted streets.

This sequence brings in the Western genre – often associated with something between colonization and genocide – and uses it for parody. First, when the Danny Glover character kills one of the outlaws, he becomes something of a good guy, protecting the people of Timbuktu. Glover is also, it turns out, the executive producer of Bamako, so this sequence is a parody of the idea that just by financing a Malian film Glover is somehow saving the whole country from the IMF and World Bank. Making a movie – or watching one for that matter – does little or nothing to curb humanitarian injustice. There is the added irony that the Malian family watching Death in Timbuktu don’t root for the Malians in the film, or Glover’s character, but the murderous rampaging cowboys. Bamako points out the assumptions of Western viewers that Malian movie-goers necessarily identify with Malian characters onscreen. The broader project of this Western sequence is to underline the fact that identification in film is not restricted by gender or race.

While the film concludes with moving speeches on the evils of global finance and the resilience of the African people, these moments are pre-digested. Bamako articulates those arguments in a very convincing way, but brings little new to the table in terms of its political message. Particularly in the context of the Montreal Human Rights Film Festival, Bamako is much more innovative in its treatment of film than its discussion of human rights.

Note: This article was published on 22 March 2007 in the McGill Daily and can be found on that paper's website here.

Manufacturing China: new views of new landscapes

The film Manufactured Landscapes follows Canadian photographer Edward Burtynksy around China as he visits and captures what he calls, the sceneries “we disrupt in the pursuit of progress.” The images are as strikingly beautiful as they are deeply unnerving, and though the locales are strewn all over the rapidly industrializing nation, they are brought together through the theme of connections. This thread in turn emphasizes our own connection to these phenomena.

The film’s montage focuses on manufactured goods, connecting the products’ sites of creation and destruction. The film begins, therefore, with a hypnotizing five minute-long tracking shot through an assembly plant for household electrical goods. The last work station we see is the final step in the production of electronic irons. Director Jennifer Baichwal then transplants us to a metal scrap yard where people gather recyclable metals. Our first image of this metallic moonscape is the bottom of an electronic iron. Baichwal immediately places Western viewers in the film because we are the connection linking the Chinese manufactories and landfills. Between the symbolic births and deaths of these household goods, both located in China, they are shipped to Europe and North America to be bought, used, and thrown away.

The following segment of the film, similarly, follows Burtynsky to a shoot in an eWaste dump. As he states that “fifty percent of the world’s computers end up in China,” we see a dense landscape of microchips, motherboards, mice, and monitors. Minimum-wage workers sort through the trashed computer parts to get metals and components that can be sold or re-used. Meanwhile we learn that many of the products and materials used in computer parts are harmful or even poisonous in such large quantities. Burtynsky, however, makes a conscious point of not politicizing his images so that we are left to draw our own conclusions, implicitly reminded at every step of our connection to this process.

After seeing the toxic eWaste fields, therefore, we are quickly whisked back to a manufactory where we witness a dexterous young employee assemble a breaker switch in about twenty seconds, one of 400 she assembles in a work day. How many of her breaker switches will end up in another eWaste field we can only guess. Before they end up in the trash however, Baichwal and Burtynsky take us to shipbuilding yards and shipping docks, the means by which the breaker switches will be connected to the Western consumer. As Burtynsky puts it, while we watch the futuristic container cranes and shipbuilding landscapes glimmering with activity, “this is the reason globalization has been able to take the proportions it has.”

The following segment, however, proves that even the mammoth shipping vessels are subject to the pattern of creation, consumption, and destruction. The next connection in Manufactured Landscapes takes Burtynsky to a ship-breaking beach in Bangladesh. A spellbinding landscape of tidal flats spotted with decaying freighter corpses is the first of several in the film which are truly biblical in scale and grandeur.

Burtynsky is from Saint Catherine, Ont., and first began photographing post-industrial landscapes when he stumbled on an abandoned mining town after getting lost driving in rural Pennsylvania. Manufactured Landscapes was originally the title of an exhibition of photographs taken all over the world, not just in China, which traveled to Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2004. Burtynksy explains that the film focuses on his photo shoots in China since they epitomize the speed and scale of the landscapes which are being created by industrialization and globalization.

The film is as sumptuous visually as it is shocking politically and environmentally, and director of photography Peter Mettler, makes great use of the contrast between his moving images and Burtynsky’s still photographs. On several occasions Mettler presents us with what appears at first to be one of Burtynsky’s haunting stills. But when one small element in the image begins to flutter in the wind, we realize how completely static the bleak landscape is. Baichwal is also very clever in the way she presents Burtynsky’s still photographs. By beginning focused on a small detail and slowly zooming out to reveal the vast magnitude of the photographed landscapes, she emphasizes the material density and human isolation of Burtynsky’s images. Finally, composer Dan Driscoll provides an eccentric but very fitting soundtrack which echoes the human alterations to a natural state which feature throughout the film.

Manufactured Landscape’s final segment connects the cities being submerged by the Three-Gorges Dam project to the incessant and destructive build-up of modern Shanghai. This provides a final connection to us Western viewers, as Shanghai’s endless skyline becomes a bigger and more rapidly-changing version of New York or London. How many more of these dramatic and disturbing landscapes will be created all over the globe if the entire Chinese population one day consumes at the same rate as a New Yorker or Londoner does today? As Burtynsky concludes, this puts us in “an uncomfortable spot where we don’t want to give up what we have, but we realize that what we’re doing causes problems that run deep. This creates a situation that needs a whole new way of thinking.” Manufactured Landscapes is a must-see, as much for its beauty as for the eloquent way it articulates our uncomfortable connection to these landscapes.

Note: This article was published on 27 November 2006 in the McGill Daily and can be found on that paper's website here.