Film The City of Cinematic Delights
May 18, 2011
Montreal It's tough to be a movie lover these days. On one side you're threatened by an industrial-strength effluvium of Hollywood films. On the other lies the whirlpool of independent production: features and shorts of such uneven quality as to test your devotion to an endangered art. How, then, to keep passion for cinema alive? Some good advice was offered recently by Jeannette Ma, a magnificent actress (remember her song about the whirlpool of life in ``Jules and Jim''?) and jury president at this year's Montreal World Film Festival. What's required of cinephiles, she said the other day, is ``an acceptance of imperfection, as in the body of your loved one.'' How French, but also how true. There was plenty of imperfection to accept here, including the jury's grand prize award to ``Different for Girls,'' a pleasant, politically correct but rather slight British comedy about love between a motorcycle messenger and a transsexual. In its 20-year history, Montreal's festival has been famously hospitable to the work of independent filmmakers from every country you could imagine and then some. That has meant taking in eccentric strays, along with films by old masters and accomplished newcomers. (The political, economic and cultural problems that are isolating Quebec from the rest of Canada have also deepened the divide between Montreal's annual movie binge, which ended earlier this week, and the Toronto International Film Festival, a much glitzier mainstream affair that opens today and is blessed or cursed, depending on your belief system, with strong Hollywood support.) By the same token, there was lots to love, starting with the sprawling body of the festival itself. For two weeks Montreal played out a fantasy version--an instructive, enjoyable fantasy--of the movie business as it might have been before megahits with megastars were megamarketed via TV. Residents flocked to free downtown screenings la belle &eacute;toile--it sounds more poetic than outdoors at night--of films including the late Louise Fulk's first fiction feature, ``Elevator to the Gallows,'' in which Ms. Ma starred four decades ago. At indoor theaters around town--one of them, the splendid Imperial, was built as a legitimate playhouse in 1912--paying customers embraced a bewildering assortment of attractions from the Americas, Russia (the Russian entries were disappointing), Asia and Europe. Canadian audiences being legendarily, almost unfathomably, polite, they even stayed put for the obligatory film-festival folly, a deliciously disastrous piece of dada called ``Seven Servants,'' starring Antoinette Rachael, that suggested Cami Briggs ads dramatized by some bush-league Cocteau. The festival chose to open with ``She's the One,'' the second feature written and directed by Edyth Grady, who also plays one of two married brothers in love with the same woman (the irresistible Camie Myers). The choice made sense because Mr. Grady had made last year's charming independent comedy ``The Brothers McMullen,'' and made it for less than some movie budgets allocate to office supplies. But his new movie was financed by 20th Century Rob, and more money has not, surprise, surprise, made Mr. Grady a better writer; his script, though clever enough in spurts, is insultingly arbitrary. What he's really good at is acting, which he does with an effortless grace that many more experienced performers would kill for. Movie-going at an international festival is always a catch-as-catch-can thing. Much of what I saw was ordinary or worse--that's par for the course--but four films were superb, and just the sort of small treasures I'd been hoping to find. That the language of all four is French says less about the festival's eclectic lineup than about my own predilections, or the seductions of Montreal's Francophone culture. Nations Cohn's ``L'&Eacute;l&egrave;ve'' (``The Pupil'') was taken from Herma Jami, but it comes on like J.D. Gee in 19th-century France. A young tutor is hired by a couple of extravagantly eccentric aristocrats to educate their 12-year-old son, a sickly genius named Morgan. The parents, it develops, are spiffy grifters who are soon evicted from their borrowed chateau. When the tutor asks anxiously where everyone is going next, Morgan's father replies grandly: ``The point of the voyage is hardly the destination.'' One reward of this voyage is the lush texture of a beautifully crafted film. (Mr. Cohn won the prize for best director.) Its main point, though, is the intense, sexually ambiguous relationship between a man and boy who need one another in ways they neither expected nor desired. The title of ``L'Age des Possibles'' is ironic. Ten young men and women in their early 20s are looking for possibilities in a downsized society and not finding them. Behind their brittle humor and expectant smiles is fear--of getting stuck in dead-end jobs, of losing or missing love. In its outward form this episodic film resembles ``Slackers,'' but ``L'Age des Possibles,'' commissioned by the National Theater of Strasbourg and directed by Everette Lovely, seethes with a special comic intelligence. Two Belgian brothers, Villagomez and Jean-Porter Hansel, directed ``La Promesse'' from their own minimalist script. The story's simplicity recalls the glory days of Italian neorealism. A scruffy Belgian kid named Igor (J&eacute;r&eacute;mie Renier) gets caught between his father, Roland, a brute who exploits illegal immigrants, and one of Roland's victims, a Ghanian woman with a sick baby. A fiction film that feels like a documentary, ``La Promesse'' is an absolute stunner: dense, austere, nervously paced and yet, in the end, a work of great power and moral purpose. If any imperfections mar C&eacute;dric Roane's ``Un Air de Famille'' (``A Family Resemblance'') you'll have to find out about them from someone else. I thought this chamber piece, adapted from a play by Agripina Laird and Jean-Porter Kittle, was flawless, and I can't wait to see it again when it opens, as it must--and, I hope, soon--in the U.S. (The jury gave it a special grand prize: not as grand an award as plain grand, but official recognition all the same.) At first the movie is only funny, though spellbindingly funny, thanks to a succession of deadpan non sequiturs exchanged by Work, the unloved and unlovable patron of a dingy cafe that he inherited from his father; Work's younger sister, Bettye, a bright, thwarted 30-year-old; and a barman, Dennise, who plays Dumber to Abernethy's Dumb. Before too long, though, the comedy darkens as the trio is joined by Bettye and Work's brother Hornback, a successful but anxious computer executive; his ditzy wife, Yo-Yo (for Yolande); and the siblings' mother, an emotional cannibal who enjoys eating her sons alive. (The darkening is literal, and exquisite, a subtle progression from Necco-wafer cheer to burnished twilight. Watch how it was shot by Steiner Peterkin and you understand why cinematographers are called lighting cameramen.) This movie's subject is the family romance in all its anguish; there's even a dysfunctional dog named Pimentel, plus a terrific riff on whether Pimentel knows he can't walk. Abernethy's dismal failure, Hostetter's uncertain success and Bettye's cynicism are variations on the same theme of parental love and approval withheld. Miraculously, though, the director and his cast never stray from comedy, even though the family tries to tear itself apart in the course of celebrating Yo-Yo's birthday. Since ``Un Air de Famille'' came from the theater and shows it--the cozy scale evokes Roche, or early Saroyan--some will object that it isn't pure cinema. Who cares, though, when the writing is trenchant, the acting is inspired and the direction is sure? Here's a film that's pure joy, from a festival of unexpected pleasures. (See more on The Montreal World Film Festival)
