|
|
Daily News
|
|
Toronto Fest Features Canadian Invasion
With Denys Arcand's festival opener Les Invasions barbares plus offerings from Neil Young and Guy Maddin, Canadian filmmakers shine at the 28th Toronto International Film Festival.
Monday, September 8, 2003
By Pam Grady
|
And they're off! With the September 4 kickoff of the 28th Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Oscar season kicks off as the major studios bring their wares far north in an orgy of star-studded, red carpet screenings and press junketeering. With films like Robert Benton's The Human Stain, Carl Franklin's Out of Time, Robert Altman's The Company, Keith Gordon's The Singing Detective, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, Lars von Trier's Dogville, and Jane Campion's In the Cut, the festival offers Oscar handicappers an early look at some of the race's early favorites.
But TIFF is about more than Academy-Award potential and stargazing. While this year's fest even includes a trailer touting Ontario's preeminence as Hollywood north, the festival also celebrates the contributions of Canadian artists. TIFF 28 opened with one such film, Quebecois filmmaker Denys Arcand's Les Invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions), one of the few movies to escape this year's critically reviled Cannes festival with glowing notices, and went on to garner prizes for Arcand's screenplay and a Best Actress award for co-star Marie-Josee Croze.
Seventeen years ago, Arcand's Le declin de l'empire americain (The Decline of the American Empire) kicked off TIFF 1986 and Le declin's characters return in Invasions. Older now and sadder, the group of intellectual sexual adventurers reconvenes as one of them, Remy (Remy Girard), his body wracked by disease, faces his own mortality and the revelation that he never quite reached his potential as either a history professor or as a father. When his estranged son Sebastien (Stephane Rousseau) returns to Montreal to care for the parent who was absent during most of his childhood, a last chance is offered for father and son to bridge the divide between them. Invasions is a moving family drama, but as the irrepressible Remy continues to teach, after a fashion, the history of a world that has seen so much genocide to his nurses and to Nathalie (Croze), the young woman who surreptitiously brings him heroin, it is also an often biting political discourse.
Rock icon Neil Young may live in Northern California these days, but he grew up in Winnipeg and spent some years in the 1960s living in Toronto. Young returns to the city of his younger days as he screens his latest cinematic effort, Greendale, part of TIFF's Visions series, the portion of the festival dedicated to filmmakers working outside of the mainstream. That he certainly is with this musical drama, a rock opera of sorts, that begins with family troubles in a small California town when one of its members accidentally shoots a policeman. The family's predicament, though, is only the springboard from which comes Young's angry take on political chicanery, corporate greed, and environmental rape. Alas, as a drama, the film, with an ensemble cast lip-synching to Young's impassioned vocals, lacks energy, and Young's own blurry cinematography can be headache inducing. As a concept album, the piece is much stronger playing to Young's real strengths, his singular musical style and biting lyrics.
Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin screened his latest surreal drama, The Saddest Music in the World, recently at the Venice Film Festival, but for him the trip to Toronto, "kind of feels like coming home. I watched [the film] with an audience [in Venice], and that was great. Usually, I know exactly what I've made, but this time I'm really wondering and so only the experience of watching it with an audience will begin to answer the questions I have about what I've made. I feel that this is my hometown for my purposes anyway."
It is no wonder that Maddin has questions. The Saddest Music in the World, loosely based on a Kazuo Ishiguro (the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day) screenplay, is a musical melodrama that takes place in the Great Depression-plagued Winnipeg of the 1930s. Embittered, double amputee, beer baroness Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini), announces a contest to find the saddest music in the world and dangles a prize of $25,000 as bait. Among the competition are two of the baroness' former lovers, Fyodor (David Fox), representing Canada, and his despised young son Chester (The Kids in the Hall's Mark McKinney), now a down-on-his-luck Broadway producer, repping the U.S. Joining them in the contest is Fyodor's long-lost older son, Roderick (Ross McMillan), a grieving father, representing his adopted home of Serbia.
| The film, recalling both the Art Deco excesses of Metropolis and the lavish Hollywood musicals of the 1930s is quintessentially Maddin, stylistically, as well as in its many surrealistic touches and in its wit. Ishiguro might have written the original screenplay, but Maddin and longtime collaborator George Toles have added their own stamp to it with lines like Chester's boast that, "I've got schmaltz routines that could wring tears from a moose."
| |
With a cast that includes Maria de Madeiros, as well as Rossellini and an easy-to-follow narrative, the film also represents a real departure for Maddin and one that may garner this cult favorite a larger audience. Says Maddin, "It seemed that the material in the story suggested I should de-fog my narrative a little bit … This time I seem to have opened both double French doors and invited everyone in."
Maddin also adds an American spin to the story and that is one thing his film has in common with Arcand's and Young's. "I wanted to move into an American phase," he remarks, "especially the subject matter, a real, wheeling, dealing American, who makes things happen, who dominates a contest … In this contest, America makes sure everything is played on its terms."
| Les Invasions barbares reveals similar concerns in the historian Remy's take on American imperialism and his realization that his own career might have been stymied by working in Canada rather than the behemoth United States. And Young's Greendale works as a furious indictment of corporate/state environmental indifference, the Patriot Act, and the White House's behavior during California's 2001 electricity crisis. Taken together, the three films cast an acerbic eye on the ways in which the U.S. wields its power. In context of the Toronto International Film Festival, they might as well be commenting on the Hollywood dream machine, and how for 10 days every September, the entertainment capital's partner in the north emerges out of the shadows and into the spotlight.
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Email
|
 Print
|
|
|
|
|
|