TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2003
SEMI-DAILY REPORTS

By Gabe Klinger

Is this Parisian love?  Claire Denis' Friday Night does not propose this question explicitly, but in a conventional way it can be thought of as the gritty, realist alternative to all those hokey Paris love stories.  That would be simplifying its greatest virtues, though.

Claire Denis is an ambitious filmmaker in the most subtle ways.  Her most successful film with audiences was Beau travail (1999) largely because of the incredible adaptation of the source material, Melville's Billy Budd, in profiling her characters.

Friday Night is also adapted from a novella but one wonders if its sensuality is as muted as that of the Melville, or if Denis has adapted its tactile descriptions of surface qualities word for word.  Whether it's a successful adaptation is another story: the film itself, alternating from out-of-focus perspective shots of arbitrary images to carefully calculated tilts and trembling travelling shots when its characters are in motion, is a masterpiece as far as surface qualities go.  And as it rolls along, the heart and soul of Friday Night emerge from the cumulative energy of the images.

A woman (Valérie Lemercier) is packing boxes in her house as the sun dawns over Paris.  She moves the boxes into her car and starts to drive - where is unclear, though we learn she's going to a dinner party with friends.  The city is jammed with traffic, the reasons for this also unclear.  She starts listening to music in her car, and she hears a radio announcer say that it's good to carpool, and to, next time, offer a stranger a ride.  "I tried it once and it was fun," says the announcer.

Earlier, in a suspenseful moment, the woman feels she's about to be attacked by a shady character on the street, but within minutes she proceeds to ask

strangers on foot if they need rides.  This is the first in a pattern of blatant mood changes: Denis plays with our predictions but leaves enough visual space between people to leave you guessing their motivations.

The woman eventually picks up a man (Vincent Lindon) who will remain in the car for most of the film's duration.  Her relationship with him becomes passionate very quickly.  They don't talk much and all they seem to have in common are their age and physical proportions.

As a test of love, the man leaves the car at one point but the woman later circles around to find him.  If they're apart after this, it will be sad to lose them: their wordless affection for each other is as obvious as it is heartening.

At some points, Friday Night takes its cues from Stalker - Paris becomes a zone where you can only go sideways or in reverse, and if you aren't careful, you'll be in a jam.  But there is no fear between the two main characters: in fact, their relationship grows on trust more than anything else.  Claire Denis is a filmmaker who is perfectly content with real life and her world.  And when the men and woman finally make love, the trust is rewarded back to the spectator. 

There are hardly any films nowadays that dare to be so happy and out to prove so little (except that maybe cinema is still alive and well).  After the troublesome Trouble Every Day (2001), where Denis presented a gruesome psychological fantasy that was difficult to relate to on any level, Friday Night picks up where Beau travail left off.  In the uncertain moments when life is both strange and joyous.

Friday Night (Vendredi soir) is still without a distributor.

Lilja 4-Ever begins with a teenage girl committing suicide, and the rest of the movie is like Rosetta and Nights of Cabiria times ten.  Unfortunately for the young Lukas Moodysson, who so far has made two very good films, it lacks the finesse and innovation of its predecessors.  It's not that Lilja doesn't pack a powerful political point-of-view (it presents a grave social situation in Russia); it's that it lacks structure, characters that are not clichéd, and most of all, a goal.

What does Lilja 4-Ever achieve for the audience?  Moodysson is as personal a filmmaker as any, but here he surrenders his style to a conventional story.  The results are not very worthwhile; we see a young girl (Lilja, played by Oksana Akinshina), who is abandoned by her mother in the projects, slowly turn to prostitution to sustain herself, eventually becoming a prisoner to pimps.  Every move is calculated to be an eye-opener, showing us that teenagers in this part of the world are truly powerless to their surroundings.

Perhaps the film's biggest flaw is Lilja's relationship with a younger boy, Volodya.  The film chooses its peaceful moments between these two: Lilja admires Volodya's ingenuity, and in return, Volodya likes hanging out with a cool, older chick from the neighborhood.  When Lilja is not hanging out with her younger friend, he is severely depressed.

In the end, their needs are so far apart they cannot accommodate one another.  That is, before they're at the point of collapse and realize how meaningful their friendship was.

This is all to say that the relationship between Lilja and Volodya is a predictable retreading of several miserablist-type postwar European and East European films, wherein the filmmaker gratifies the audience by insisting on making the one happy relationship the sole point of resonance.  Rosetta (1999), by the Dardenne brothers, is a similarly structured film, but what makes it a great is that it allows us to decide for ourselves whether the one optimistic relationship in the main character's life will actually help her or leave her in the lurch.

Lilja 4-Ever is depressing forever, and there doesn't seem to be any other point.

In a way Ararat was the perfect opening night film to TIFF.  It's pure Egoyan, which doesn't necessarily mean it's good Egoyan.  But it's also complex without being demanding, and inspired, but without ever reaching a single moment of brilliance.  And it combines the talents of several interesting Canadian actors (and one Charles Aznavour).  I was glad for it because it helped me to ease into the true masterpieces of the festival.  Anyway, the audience seemed - at the end I could feel the people around me wipe back the tears.

I was tearful when I saw Kiarostami's Ten a couple days later.  In fact, along with Jia Zhang Ke's Unknown Pleasures, and Claire Denis' Friday Night, I doubt I will see any additional favorites go by unnoticed.  Maybe.

While I have already seen a trio of masterpieces, I woke up Saturday and found three incredible films all in a row.  And perhaps what is most incredible about them is that my expectations were so little, and each did something for me in ways Kiarostami, Jia, and Denis could never do.

The first of these was Hong Sang-soo's Turning Gate, his fourth film, and like Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, each of his films remains within the same emotional and aesthetic boundaries, though the refinements and character twists are exciting to witness with each new work.  In this one, he does not play with points-of-view, or jumble of the ellipsis, broken up by bright green title cards with snippets of plot.  This moves the story along swiftly, but more complex are the relationships Gyung-soo (played by Kim Sang-kyung), a young actor who's suffering burnout, with two girls: a dancer named Myung-sook, who is obsessed with him, and a beautiful country girl, Sun-young, with whom he alternately becomes obsessed.

Gyung-soo travels a lot, he likes to think, and when he meets these women, at different points in the film, he manages to be cool but with a peculiar friendliness.  There isn't much to the dialogue (plenty of quiet, awkward moments), but each shot is breathtaking with condensed imagery.  In one scene, Gyung-soo describes to Sun-young in a noodle shop how his presence in restaurants seem to attract patrons.  "Whenever I come in, it's empty.  As I sit down, it starts to fill up."

Sun-young cannot relate to this, and answers nothing back.  Gyung-soo wanders outside for a moment, and when he comes back in, the restaurant is crowded.  This scene doesn't merely suggest that anything is possible in Hong's cinema.  The characters are living intangible realities that are processed into real life based on impulses and raw feelings - because nothing is comfortable in Hong's cinema, no relationship is simple.  And like real life, interaction is desirable (and essential) because the possibilities are limitless.

The next film I saw addresses cinema more than real life.  Philippe Grandrieux's La Vie nouvelle.  In the post-screening Q&A, Grandrieux was asked: "Is th is, like, all your sexual fantasies come to fruition?"  Grandrieux answered in deadpan: "Yes."

And the problems (interesting ones) start to flood in: the super-difficult La Vie nouvelle fights against plot and character construction (at least in a traditional way), coherent cutting patterns, and easy-to-digest images.  It's the year's best horror film (easy to say, but it's true), and the mass walkouts at both the press and public screenings were provoked maybe not so much by the shocking images (from Bad Guy to Irréversible,  there's plenty to go around at TIFF), but because Grandrieux is deeply impassioned with his deathly universe, he does not distance himself, and his technical genius - from the Peter Tscherkassky-like soundtrack to a surprising articulateness with out of focus and underlit images - form an extremely radical and unforgettable whole.  I have never felt so haunted by a film, but talking to some older colleagues, they're not as impressed. 

The third film ... well, the third film will have to wait for another time.  Rushing once again ...

9/11/02: KEN PARK

Larry Clark's long awaited Ken Park hit the festival today (for press - the public screening was yesterday).  Clark and co-director (and cinematographer) Ed Lachman have been trying to get the film made for a decade now - with original ideas by Clark but a script formulated by Harmony Korine - and it's still as timely as ever, and definitely worth the wait.

As press was filing in to see the early afternoon session, Clark (who, I later learned, had just walked out of Moodysson's Lilja 4-Ever, unfulfilled) stood in the lobby and gave us all a grin.  "Oh boy," said a friend, "here we go."  Clark, of course, can be a kind of public enemy for those who want.  His filmmaking is constantly evolving (getting better, in my opinion), but since his debut, Kids (1995), we know there's no uncomplicated way of just leaving his films, writing about them, and forgetting about 'em.

In this respect, Ken Park is not revolutionary. If you have seen Kids and the more recent Bully (2001), you know his inclinations, his concerns, his obsessions.  When you get across the shock aspects, Larry Clark can be a strangely affectionate filmmaker.  More than in his other films, Ken Park has the most easily discernable polar-ends between the shocking and the "necessary" - the necessary, in his words, being the honest, often unnoticed side of love and survival.

Ken Park builds towards a threesome scene that is the apex of this theory, and the most beautiful thing in any of Clark's films.  After a Friday full of turbulence and frustration, three friends meet to have sex and pass a few hours of their weekend.  There's really no set-up, Clark just cuts into it, but the justification is obviously there, as well as the emotional payoff.  The three friends know and talk about each other, but till this point in the movie they have not been hanging out; they meet to escape their other environments, and not coincidentally, they are the three emotional survivors of the film.  They survive because there is sex, sex that is forbidden (after all, they're 16-year-olds), but not in the same way as the perversion, violence, and drugs that overflow other aspects of their lives.  In the end, Clark is not making such a radical statement.

After the film I was walking towards my next movie when I saw Larry Clark on the street.  I approached him and said I'd like to interview him without having to go through the studio publicists.  He said sure and sat graciously for a half hour.  The interview will be appearing at a later time on the site.

24fps Home | Archive