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FILM COMMENT
November/December 2002
TORONTO: RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME
by Mark Olsen
above: The Good Thief
Taking place mostly in a five-square-block jumble of multiplexes and hotels, the Toronto Film Festival is physically quite compact. But with so much to see, you always get the creeping feeling that you're in the wrong place, that there's something better, hotter, stronger playing just across the hall. By the time it's over, and you've seen 30-odd films in ten days, it's all a blur. What exactly was that 11:30 a.m. movie from Tuesday? Searching for themes and overarching ideas in the festival seems futile, since there could be whole subsets that you simply didn't see. I, for example, steered clear of the obviously editor-ready 9/11 films. If you were looking, there was a solid handful of selections about violence against women, or the origins of evil (subset: Hitler). I even saw three (or was it four?) films that involved a misplaced passport, but nobody's declaring this the year of the travel dilemma picture.
Genre films that played it straight, specifically crime films, were largely a bust. Neil Jordan's The Good Thief, a remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's masterful Bob le flambeur, has top-notch actors and beautiful locations but never quite rises above the level of an exercise. Starring Nick Nolte as the down-on-his-luck gambler (with the addition here of a longtime heroin habit), the film presents a roguish and charming underworld of expatriate bohemia in Monte Carlo. The funky music and jazzy cutting seem drawn from Soderbergh's Out of Sight/Ocean's Eleven playbook, to which Jordan adds strange momentary freeze-frames, sometimes between scenes, sometimes slap in the middle of them. At first you think they're projection glitches; eventually they become just annoying. If the desired effect is to keep the viewers jostled and off-balance, it doesn't work. There's a nice late-breaking plot twist (at least somebody gets away with something), but by then the film has run out of gas.
More successful were films that tried to mobilize the tropes and iconography of their respective genres to some other end. Michael Almereyda's Happy Here and Now comes off as a narcoleptic whodunit, as the main story of a missing girl itself frequently goes AWOL while the film indulges in tangential asides. Part detective thriller, part low-tech sci-fi, the film mainly just vibes off the same thrift-store r & b version of New Orleans Jarmusch worked in Down by Law (providing opportunities for terrific bits of business with Ernie K-Doe, the eccentric singer whose Mother-in-Law Lounge has been a hipster hotspot for some time now, and who passed away after filming). Though not quite as striking as his Hamlet, and undone perhaps by Almereyda's total disregard for narrative pacing, it's nevertheless another strong effort from an often overlooked filmmaker.
Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things starts with a mystery premise-how did that human heart get into that hotel room toilet?-and uses it as an entry point into the shadow world of illegal immigrants struggling to survive in London. Working from a script by Steven Knight, the film interweaves a Turkish girl (played by Amélie's Audrey Tautou), a Nigerian ex-doctor, a Spaniard, a Russian, and a Jamaican as off-the-books employees at an upscale hotel. The story is firmly anchored by Chiwetel Ejiofor as the doctor staying one step ahead of immigration officials as he ekes out a living as a cab driver by day and a hotel clerk by night. Rich and unfussy, the film packs a surprising punch, and despite an unfortunate switch into message-pic mode, the tough emotional realities of the ending refreshingly sidestep the storybook clichés lying in wait.
In Gurinder Chadha's pleasing but slight Bend It Like Beckham, a box-office smash on its release in Britain, the youngest daughter of an Indian family living in London gets the chance to play competitive soccer. The film features a healthy dose of good-natured cross-cultural comedy, plus a young-girl-empowerment angle that makes it decidedly au courant. The unsure editing and pacing and reliance on montages set to music (the girls go shopping, the team practices) could perhaps be forgiven if this were Chadha's debut, but since it's her third feature her hand should be steadier, or at least up to raising her material above the level of just agreeably diverting.
Keira Knightley plays the plucky, fresh-scrubbed friend in Beckham, and so it is startling to see her as a pregnant teenage junkie in the decidedly darker Pure. The latest film from Hideous Kinky director Gillies MacKinnon focuses on one young East London boy's struggle to hold what little family he has together in the face of his mother's crippling addiction.Though one's instinctive emotional reaction to the film's climactic custody battle is to root for the family unit to be restored, rational judgment dictates the opposite, and it is in the divide between the two that much of the film's drama lies. Strong turns by Harry Eden as the too-old-too-soon son and Molly Parker as his mother, as well as Knightley, David Wenham as the seedy neighborhood dealer, and Gary Lewis as a local cop keep the film head-and-shoulders above simpleminded melodrama, though at times MacKinnon's choices (particularly a heavy-handed score) nearly sink their efforts.
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