This installment contains reviews of:

• Love and Other Disasters
• For Your Consideration
• Half Moon
• The White Planet
• Away From Her
• Cashback
• Copying Beethoven
• Radiant City

Days 5 and 6 continued the 4-films-per-day schedule.  There are some less than stellar items here, but some real gems, including my favourite of the festival.

Monday, September 11th

Love and Other Disasters
Alek Kashishian
U.K. / France
Rating: ***

What’s a girl to do when one of her best friends, a screenwriter named Peter (Matthew Rhys), just can’t find the man of his dreams?  Emily Jackson (a.k.a. Jacks, played by Brittany Murphy) has problems with her own love life — she’s still sleeping with her ex — but this doesn’t stop her from trying to help others amid the whirl of her life and job at Vogue magazine in London.

Peter despairs of true love, but one day in a hotel lobby, there’s a chance encounter, a collision with a tall, elegant young man.  Eyes meet.  Does Peter do anything?  No, he just spots the man’s name on a magazine mailing label.  Jacks is undeterred, and engineers another meeting between the two men.  There’s only one problem, Peter’s got the wrong man.  This is only the first of identity mixups that bedevil would-be romance in Love and Other Disasters.

Meanwhile, Jacks has met Paulo (the delicious Santiago Cabrera), spots immediately that he’s gay and works on setting him up with Peter.  Paulo spends much of the film trying, unsuccessfully, to tell Jacks that he’s straight.

Peter finally does connect with his idol, but the original elegant image gives way to the self-absorbed reality of an egotistical actor.

In the end, everyone is with the perfect partner (this is a romantic comedy after all), but wait!  There’s a twist.  What we’re seeing really is Peter’s screenplay, and none of the characters exactly matches their real-life counterparts.

Love and Other Disasters is a light bit of froth, but an enjoyable way to start off a Monday morning at the Festival.  

For Your Consideration
Christopher Guest
USA
Rating: ***

For Your Consideration is the standard line used on all advertising directed at members who vote on the Academy Awards®.  It is also the title of Christopher Guest’s latest film.  Yes, after heavy metal, community theatre, dog shows and folk music, Guest is taking on Hollywood.

Catherine O’Hara plays Marilyn Hack who, with that name, should be a screenwriter, but is in fact an actress whose one, small, triumph lies deep in the past, a blind hooker in Song for Reuben.  Now she’s the matriarch of a southern family (imagine the overplayed romance of the south married to New York angst) whose daughter Rachael (Parker Posey) is coming Home for Purim.  This film will make them all stars. 

Internet rumours peg this as Oscar® material.  The money men take over.  It’s too, er, ah, Jewish for the market, but with just a few changes, maybe a different holiday, all will be well.  Talk shows buzz with interviews of stars reborn.  And, finally, nomination day — whose phone will ring at 5 am? 

Christopher Guest is well-known to audiences as the maker of dry satires including This is Spinal Tap and Best in Show.  Throughout his career, a rep company of actors, all fine comics and improvisers, appeared and re-appeared in various guises.  Watching a new Christopher Guest film for the first time, we get the constant surprise of “who will so-and-so show up as this time”.

Eugene Levy co-wrote For Your Consideration although, in Guest’s films, “wrote” is rather a vague term.  During the Q&A, we learned that about 85% of the scenes were improvised, and Guest’s role as a director was mainly to tell the camera crew what he wanted to shoot as things unfolded on set.

For Your Consideration is funny in the first segments with a Z-list group of actors breathing life into their last-chance film.  Alas, they’re best known for their advertising — the Weenie Man, the man in a bun — gets more recognized than the actor’s serious work.  As the Internet buzz heats up, so does the film with hilarious takes on entertainment talk shows.  Yes, Fred Willard is back with his oh-so-sensitive patter more than ably assisted by his co-host played by Jane Lynch.  Vapid TV commentary never was better.

The Q&A at our screening (in the Elgin) had a great treat when almost all of the principal cast showed up.  A voice from far back in the audience (actually a friend of mine who shall remain nameless) asked Guest whether he had turned away from the mockumentary format because it had already been done for Hollywood.  He paused for a moment, then replied, “You mean, Troy?”

Great fun, and who knows what the Oscars® will bring?

Half Moon (Niwemang)
Bhaman Ghobadi
Iran/Iraq/Austria/France
Rating: ***1/2

Half Moon is a touching film from the director of Turtles Can Fly, a surprise hit at the 2004 Festival.  Our view of the Middle East, in particular of Iran and Iraq, is so coloured by daily news footage that we do not see life there outside of that context.

The Kurds’ minority status in every country makes their’s an embattled culture fighting to survive.  Director Ghobadi hoped that his film would pass the Iranian censors, but alas they have banned it as “secessionist”.  He intends to recut Half Moon to restore some footage that was removed in an attempt to make it acceptable.

Mamo (Ismail Gaffari) is an aging Kurdish musician hoping to travel from Iran to Iraq for a concert celebrating the fall of Saddam Hussein.  Such a journey is very difficult (as indeed it was for the crew making Half Moon) since it must pass through areas of active conflict and skirt the Turkish frontier.  Even with official permission for the journey, problems arise and bribes must be paid.

The travelling band includes Hesho (Hedieh Tehrani), a female singer and Mamo’s muse.  Her presence must be concealed the from police and army along the way.  At a border inspection where, clearly, the guards know what they are looking for, she is revealed and spirited away, only to be released later by a sympathic Kurdish member of the patrol.

In their journey, they come upon a village of women exiled to live in the wilderness.  An eerie sound of their chorus echoes through hills, a haunting, noble sound rather than the fatal siren’s lure so often associated with women’s voices.

The further they go, the harder the journey as winter falls in the mountains.  They come to a village expecting to meet an old friend but he has just died.  During the burial, an ethereal female voice sings and the body moves.  This is only a brief ray of hope, not a resurrection, but it foretells what will come later.

One by one, the troupe dwindles and the instruments are lost or damaged by police.  By the time they reach the Iraqi border, only a few are left.  Mamo himself is seriously ill, but his drive to bring his music to the celebratory concert forces him onward.

Rather than taking the road to the border where almost surely they will be stopped if not killed, the small band try a route over the hills where they meet the woman whose voice we heard before at the funeral.  Her name is Half Moon, she is of mixed Iraqi and Iranian birth, and she is probably not mortal.  She is a guide who will lead Mamo on his last path.

As Mamo dies, we discover that close to his heart, under his clothes, he carried his compositions for the celebratory concert.  He wished to be on stage in Iraq with his music, and his wish comes true in the moving conclusion.

Half Moon is a beautiful parable on the survival of a culture and the transforming power of music.  With luck and the good reception at Toronto, it will be picked up for North American distribution soon.

The White Planet
Thierry Piantanida, Thierry Ragobert, Jean Lemire
Canada/France
Rating: **

At some point, makers of nature films will learn that there’s more involved than splicing together a bunch of odd footage and hoping that people will notice there are no penguins.

The White Planet looks at Canada’s arctic through the conventional lens of the four seasons.  In spring, everyone comes out to play, blooms, melts, whatever.  Summer is the season of mating and migration.  Fall comes too soon, and then it’s winter all over again.  This can work if you can follow several species through the seasons, and you can build some sort of story arc, but a passing “Look!  There’s an owl!” does not make a documentary.  Some northern species are ignored completely, but we get some spiffy underwater shots.  A lot of underwater shots.

By the end, someone remembered that they should talk about the environment and global warming, but it felt out of place.  Rather than integrating this message throughout White Planet, our directors chose to say “Look!  Melting Glaciers!” without going into how this affects the very cycle they just spent over an hour showing us.

As if this weren’t bad enough, the film has an overbearing soundtrack with far too much music, dubious for anything other than manufactured excitement, and far too little of the natural soundscape.  We didn’t come almost to the North Pole to hear Bruno Coulais’ symphonic oeuvre.

There are no penguins. 

Away From Her
Sarah Polley (adapted from “The Bear Came Over The Mountain” by Alice Munro)
Canada
Rating: *****

For a few weeks after the Festival, I waffled about my favourite film.  Which one would get the five stars?  In time, it came down to Away From Her because that story left its warmth in my heart the longest of all. 

Grant and Fiona (Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie) have been married 44 years.  They are a well-settled couple who clearly are deeply part of each other’s lives.  But Fiona has a problem — she is in ealy stages of Alzheimer’s disease and the small memory lapses become harder to conceal.  Losing threads of conversations, forgetting what she is doing in mid-task happens often enough that it cannot be ignored.

Grant does try to pretend, for a while, but both he and Fiona must face what is happening.  He cannot bear the thought of being alone, of losing her, and dreads the idea of putting her in care more than she does.  One day, after Fiona wanders off and Grant finds her hours later, just standing at a bridge, they know it is time.

The new home is bright and cheery with an overly peppy administrator (Wendy Crewson) who rather aggressively knows what’s best for everyone.  Folks on the first floor are fairly independent, if a bit vague, but very focussed on each other, the people they see day to day.  The dreaded moment will be the inevitable move to the second floor where people require more intensive care and have lost more of their ability to communicate.

Fiona’s enforced absence from Grant distances her, and she seems to partly forget their former closeness.  Indeed, she takes up a friendship with Aubrey, a man who has lost the ability to speak.  She is quite close to Aubrey in the same caring way that once she was to Grant.  He worries that this is punishment both for their separation and for a past extramarital affair, although we will learn that was gone and forgotten decades ago.

Grant keeps visiting but he becomes a stranger to whom she is passingly polite.  He really has lost Fiona now, although at brief times the old spark returns.  Meanwhile, Aubrey’s wife Marion (Olympia Dukakis), also resents the loss of her husband to Fiona, but comes to accept it as an inevitable change.  In time, she and Grant become close friends.  The brief love scene between them is filled with the warmth of mature lovers and the deep sadness they both share of knowing they will never hold their partners this way again.

The cast is excellent, a joy to watch with such a difficult story.  Gordon Pinsent plays Grant with just the right level of tragedy, knowing he is losing Fiona, but not chewing up the scenery at every possible moment.  Julie Christie, who came by this role as an old friend of director Sarah Polley, is touching as Fiona alternating between someone terrified of what is happening and someone who is happily ignorant in her own world.  Her ability to drift in and out of focus with her surroundings, to desperately preserve the sense that she is in touch, is entirely believable.

Sarah Polley has preserved Alice Munro’s trademark style of moving effortlessly back and forth in time between the present and the past both near and far.  When Polley first thought of adapting Munro’s short story, she was unsure whether she could get the rights, then overwhelmed by having to adapt such a well-loved author’s material.  No fear.  At the Q&A, someone asked what Alice Munro story she was going to direct next.  She replied “There are so many!”.  We can only hope.

There is no sense of anything forced here or of Polley lingering too long on favourite scenes.  We get to see fine actors working in a moving story where we stop remembering who they are, familiar though their faces may be.  This a story about love and of letting love go, of accepting that life will continue even after a personal tragedy that stays with you long after the lights come up. 

Cashback
Sean Ellis
UK
Rating: **

Cashback is a short expanded to a feature, and suffers right off from this.  The original was nominated for an Academy Award and probably should have stayed that way.

Ben (Sean Biggerstaff) has an interesting talent — he can stop time, walk around people, really take a close look at them.  What does he use this for?  Well, Ben would like to have a girlfriend, but he’s not the sort to pick them up easily.  Instead, he freezes his surroundings in the supermarket where he works and sketches them, sometimes even posing them for the purpose. 

Ben’s co-workers all deal with boredom in their own way including Brian, a would-be kung-fu expert who looks particularly inept stopped in mid-move.  Sharon (Emilia Fox) becomes Ben’s idee fixe and he sketches her constantly although she is completely unaware of what is happening.  A conventional romance hasn’t got much chance until Ben lucks into a gallery showing of his drawings and Sharon sees just how much he cares (?) about her.

I have to admit here a personal objection to the idea of someone who takes advantage of immobilized people to rearrange their clothes, to cop peeks and feels on a nonconsenual basis, never mind how quaint the premise might be.  We could read this as all happening in Ben’s head, but it isn’t.

Cashback is amusing, subject to my caveat above, and worth seeing once.  As for Sean Ellis as a director, yes, he clearly knows how to put together a film, but let’s see if he can do it with completely new material and plot rather than a gimic.

Copying Beethoven
Agnieszka Holland
UK/Hungary
Rating: **

There are times when established directors, directors whose work I enjoy, go down a path that I refuse to follow.  Copying Beethoven is one of those.

Here is the premise.  Beethoven — yes, that Beethoven — is working on a new symphony (it will turn out to be the famous 9th) and he needs a new copyist, someone to write out the scores and parts in a fair hand from his sketches.  He’s not the easiest person to work for, and goes through copyists quite regularly.

The new one will be different.  She is a gifted student of musical composition (this is early 19th century Vienna we’re talking about here), and when the Maestro asks for “the best” conservatory student, that’s who shows up on his doorstep. 

Ed Harris plays Beethoven and Diane Kruger plays Anna Hunt.  They spar with each other, but Beethoven is impressed to find someone, a woman especially, who will stand up to his personality.  No, they are not going to fall in love, but they at least fall into a mutual respect.

On the sidelines, we have Beethoven’s nephew (the maudlin Matthew Goode) who spends his time mooching or stealing from his uncle only, in the end, to have his eyes and ears opened to true greatness by the power of the Ode to Joy.  But I’m jumping ahead of myself.

There is nothing in Copying Beethoven that is news to anyone with a passing knowledge of history, except to find several inaccuracies that combine to change a pseudo drama/documentary into a piece of melodrama with good tunes.  Among the problems:

• The female copyist is an interesting plot device, but not credible for the time and place.
• By the time of the 9th symphony, Beethoven was completely deaf, not merely hard of hearing as he is portrayed.
• The piano sonatas, mentioned in passing by their popular names, did not actually receive these names until after Beethoven’s death.
• A pivotal scene in which Beethoven “conducts” an orchestra he cannot hear while Anna conducts him from within the orchestra is actually modelled on the premier of the opera Fidelio where it was Beethoven who was in the wings trying to give pointers to the conductor.

Putting a character who could not exist into an historical situation makes for an intriguing premise, a “what if”, but it doesn’t add much to our understanding of the real Beethoven or of his music.

There will probably be a great soundtrack CD, but without this music there is nothing to make this film worthwhile.

Radiant City
Gary Burns, Jim Brown
Canada
Rating: *

Radiant City sits in the Real to Reel program and I’ve even read other reviews praising it as a bold new approach to making documentaries.  Hogwash.

This film is pure fiction:  the characters are all actors, the scenes and relationships are scripted.  As a portrait of mindless suburbs, this is very amusing, possibly even engaging, until we learn the secret — none of these people actually exist.  At that point, it becomes a caricature, a view of the burbs as satire, not documentary, and not very good satire at that.

Let’s go back to the beginning.  Radiant City is a catchy title because it refers to Le Corbusier’s design for a new “modern” building form in Europe.  Alas, Le Corbusier’s designs were most commonly implemented as soul-destroying tower blocks, windswept plazas devoid of life, urban forms tailor made to become high-rise slums.  People see the title and say “aha! a documentary on urban architecture”, but that’s not what we get.

There are two main tracks in this film.  First, we have the Moss family torn between a mom who wants a bigger better house even if it’s in the boring Calgary suburbs, and dad who really would rather be downtown.  Indeed, dad is mounting a community production of a musical called “Suburbs” (I don’t know if it really exists, but it’s a low standard even for community theatre) that gently mocks the very lifestyle he dislikes.  Meanwhile, the kiddies spend their time waiting for long bus (and LRT) rides to the far side of the city to visit their friends.  Which world view will win out?  We never find out because the “Moss family” is fictional.  I’m not sure it’s worth a sequel to find out whether they are still living together.

The second track is a collection of talking heads, notably Mark Kingwell of U of T and Ken Greenberg, late of Toronto Planning.  They don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the suburbs.

One notable omission in any of this is a discussion of the rise of poor suburbs, areas where large families pack themselves into the only housing available at affordable prices, but where the transportation network cannot handle their diverse and very transit-oriented requirements.  If we believed Radiant City, the only suburbs would be white and middle class.  So 50s, so totally out of date. 

Gary Burns and Jim Brown may have a cute concept, but this is not a documentary.  Indeed, as documentarists they are extremely lazy choosing to invent a story abou the burbs rather than looking at real ones in all their variety and detail.  The real story is how the suburbs are evolving, even striving to become cities in places, but telling that story would be real work.

You need more than a good title to make a good film.