A forum for smart, idiosyncratic writing about movies, Film Comment, published bimonthly by the Film Society, has earned and sustained a reputation as the finest film magazine in the English language.

Every issue is notable for the unusually literate, often elegant, style of its authors. handsomely designed, Film Comment brims with provocative, cutting-edge articles about all aspects of the art, entertainment and industry of filmmaking.

In the November - December 1996 Film Comment:

• NYFF as seen by Robert Horton and Phillip Lopate, plus Donald Lyons on Vertigo and Paul Arthur on (the absence of) avant-garde visions
• Kathleen Murphy on Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady
• Elia Kazan's Wild River, by Donald Chase
• Cave painter: Cornel Wilde, by Michael Atkinson
• Venice and Toronto film festivals
• James Benning: the filmmaker as landscape, by BŽrŽnice Reynaud
• The Cinema of Jean-Pierre Melville by Peter Hogue
• Don Siegel's The Killers by Howard Hampton
• Hollywood Egypt: Youssef Chahine, by Dave Kehr
• Jules Dassin--an interview with the director of Naked City, Rififi, et al., by Patrick McGilligan
• James Benning: the filmmaker as landscape, by BŽrŽnice Reynaud
• Marcel Ophuls interviewed by Kurt Jacobsen
• Also, Chris Chang on Engelchen, Dale Thomajan on show-going and more.

I probably won't make friends saying this, but every year at Toronto Film Festival time, I count myself particularly lucky to be in my line of business. Arriving in this handsome, cleanest, and most courteous of cities, I look forward--with almost sensual anticipation--to a feast of days during which I get to sample movieworlds spun out of every species of imagination. No matter how jaded the summer's blockbuster schlock has left me, I'm energized by the possibility of encountering a vision that cuts to the Heart of things, drawing cinematically sustaining blood. If even one-third of Toronto's nearly 300 festival films, from Algeria to Zimbabwe, toured the small towns of America, people zapped into parochial insensibility by Hollywood mallmovies would be gifted with the chance to tap into larger, livelier fare. Why should festival sensations be reserved almost exclusively for urban, coastal gourmands?

Subjects like sex, drugs, and family values would certainly sell in Heartland cineplexes. Happily, the fest films that tackled these themes eschewed snappy slogans for life. "Just don't do it" doesn't quite work as drop-dead existential credo in Nick Gomez's hallucinatory illtown. Here's a rare, brave director who keeps reaching for more in his films; in his latest effort, his reach exceeds his grasp, but what's important is that Gomez treats his movies like expanding, growing art--not a line of static money-machines assembled by formula.

Gomez's illtown is as much a state of the soul as it is a rather sunless Miami, sliced up into sales territories for drug dealers like Dante (Michael Rapaport), his yearning-to-be-pregnant wife (Lili Taylor), and their "froggy," pageboyed right hand (Walking and Talking's Kevin Corrigan, now tamed for mass consumption on TV's "Pearl"). This trinity runs into trouble when Gabriel, an old friend Dante once Judas'd to the cops resurrects, his stint in the lockup at an end (Adam Trese, also appearing in just-released Palookaville).

Woven through Gomez's killing world of drug hits (as in shooting and shooting up) and counterhits are tangled threads of Christian fabric, with perversely tinted Adam and Eve, fatal Fall, Cain and Abel, and dark, smack-dreaming Christ who sends everyone to heaven--a golf course of richly enchanced green into which Dante and his disciples pass away by golf cart. Dissolving between action and vision, quotidian and iconographic imagery, illtown ultimately styles out, but what movie-lover would want to miss Gomez's descent--along with standout sinners (including a lethal Tony Danza)--in his ambitious purgatorio?

If Gomez's Miami is illtown, then The Secret Agent, Christopher Hampton's Joseph Conrad adapation, operates in London as City of Dreadful Night (Mary Reilly's hometown, too), where busy innocence and even sin give way finally to an alien, freeze-framed nihilism. The film (after the novel) makes metaphysics of fin-de-siŹcle double- and triple-dealing among the great European powers and their pawns; and especially of the ways Secret Agent's players (Bob Hoskins, somnolent Patricia Arquette, et al.) inadvertently or deliberately shutter their views of all manner of murder and selling out. Hampton has mounted an honorable translation of one of the masters of epistemological deconstruction, but the show is stolen by an unlikely--and unbilled--cameo: see The Secret Agent for Robin Williams' bomb-builder, a grimy, grinning ur-Nazi who serves no cause but his purest lust to empty the world.

The opening sequence of Carlos Saura's Taxi introduces us to a breed of fascist abroad in modernday Madrid. A woman cabbie, seemingly sympathetic, picks up a girl on the nod from shooting heroin. Not much later, the driver and the cohorts she's radioed drop the half-awake addict off a bridge as though they were offloading a sack of garbage. Saura's Candides in Taxi are a young college dropout--aptly named Paz--and Dani, the boy she falls in love with, both children of the "family" cleansing the city of drug-users, Arabs, blacks, homosexuals, and anyone else they stigmatize as the source of Spain's ills.

There's nothing of Taxi Driver's savage, illuminating style in this banal, overlong look into the sick soul of Europe, and Saura's symbolic baggage weighs heavily on the film's two pleasant but uncharismatic kids. The director's longtime understanding that sex and politics may fatally intertwine crops up here, most effectively during a celebratory dance that contrasts the vitality of a fascist flamenco queen with the immobilized mousiness of a wife with conscience. Taxi climaxes with a midnight shootout in a kind of Sergio Leone "theater in the round"--a classically pillared and sculpted court where a bad, retrograde "father" tries to take out repentent children, the future hope of Europe, the world. As the three variously aim guns and stab at each other with knives, it gets to be a little much, a silly rather than fateful duel.

Few filmmakers possess as sensual an appreciation of young people (or folk of any age) in their flesh as does Denis, and I don't know of one who can paint the colors (especially her trademark blues), textures, and architecture of isolating urban environments with such deft strokes. Gregoire Colin is irresistible as Boni, whose dark good looks--a Gallic Noah Wyle--can bruise up in a flash with a little boy's surprised hurt; and Alice Houri projects Nenette as a weary little girl called upon to be mother on too many fronts. It is in the nature of things that Denis's reunions are transient, her families fragile, but Nenette and Boni has its moments of sheerly life-affirming good humor: Boni's rapt face, concentrated into archetypal adolescent passion, as he religiously listens to the buxom object of his desire giggle her way through a ditsy analysis of the "pherome molecule--female pigs are driven crazy!"

The baker who adores his fluffy blonde wife in Nenette et Boni is none other than Vincent Gallo (the new Michael Imperioli on the indie front, cf. Palookaville), who also stars as one of the Thirties gangster brothers, with Christopher Walken and Chris Penn, in Abel Ferrara's The Funeral--a very bent take on the "idea of reunion, and of family." Manhattan's baddest auteur works an old "Playhouse 90" conceit into the shape of a mini-Godfather: a nightlong wake, for the dead Gallo, becomes the opportunity and catalyst for all manner of dysfunctional-family shit--present tense and in flashback--to hit the fan, with predictably bloody fallout.

Ferrara invites us in to the ill-lit, claustrophobic homeground of damaged, limited folk you can't like or sympathize with much, and encourages us to watch them blow up real good. There are two exceptions to the largely pointless sturm und drang of this encounter group for mafiosi: Chris Penn's schizzy golem, at one moment standing foursquare as protector of an innocent girl about to go wrong, and in the next crowding her punishingly into sexual humiliation. No great leap to imagine that this great, sexually conflicted pudge (the madonna/whore syndrome) might hate his skinny little brother, who ruts like a weasel. (The Venice Film Festival voted Penn a special supporting-actor award.) And you will not soon forget Benicio Del Toro, a gangster dandy who might have swaggered through the dangerous streets of 16th century Venice, wearing such a mask of voluptuous depravity as to be the model for more than one of the deadly sins.

FROM Funeral to Floating Life is a leap from self-devouring family life and baroque, backward-looking angst to a delicately composed poem about an immigrant "house" that comes to anchor its inhabitants through tidal waves of futureshock. Clara Law's autobiographical film focuses on an aging Hong Kong couple who move--with two teenage sons--to Australia to live with their assimilated (and spiritually lost) daughter. Another married daughter resides far away in Germany, and an older son, adrift in affairs, has stayed behind in Hong Kong.

Law contrasts the various places these family members have fetched up in terms of space, light, and color, emphasizing the ways in which floating lives must mutate to survive. Mom and dad's new Australian home looks like the perfect, pastel Levittown into which Edward Scissorhands descended--a brand-new, back-projected community. When the elder son must move his grandfather's bones, the Hong Kong cemetery crowds in with not an inch to spare for the dead; later, in a cruelly moving moment, this son kneels in a nighttime park to bury the tiny form of his aborted child, the funeral encircled by skyscrapers. The last entry in Floating Life's line of spiritual real estate is a little blue house with pagoda-like eaves, set down in a dim green clearing, where an Asian-German grandchild dreams of bringing all her family to live.

Floating Life is by turns funny and Heartbreaking; Law quietly cherishes, with Ozu clearly in her mind's eye, the kind of salvation--of body and spirit--generated by familial circuits, plugged securely into the past and the future.

In Floating Life, a mother moves in with her catatonic daughter to rescue her from despair. Finding himself wrangling yet again with a divorce lawyer, sci-fi writer Albert Brooks decides to move back in with his mother (Debbie Reynolds) to ferret out what went wrong in the relationship that set the tone for all the dates and marriages to come. Mother starts out as wonderfully edgy mother-son comedy, the air full of nifty barbs and the ground mined with the infuriating "codes" of familial communication. Looks like this odd-couple movie is going to truly surprise us--with terrific performances, especially Debbie Reynolds's sly maternal sniper; smart, grown-up dialogue that mows down every target; and a tough, screwball-comedy catharsis. There's some of all that, but Mother finally peters out in easy psychobabble solutions, happy endings that are there because the movie stops short of its blackest humor. But see Mother for a knockout Debbie Reynolds--you'll get a bracing taste of what must have driven Carrie Fisher over the edge.

But this is all in flashback; when we meet Helfgott, he's been through mental institutions and ECT, Frances Farmer'd into what appears to be babbling idiocy. In its latter half, Shine follows David through many-watered rebirth, back to his instrument and into happy enwombment by an earth mother (Lynn Redgrave, prefigured in Googie Withers's earlier accepting mum), who becomes antidote to aborting father. Scott Hicks's film rides on performances, most spectacularly those of Rafalowicz, Taylor, and Rush; otherwise this crowd-pleasing biopic (it was voted audience favorite at the end of the fest) mostly brings tears by the numbers.

From Shine to Bone: in Anjelica Huston's disappointing directorial debut Bastard Out of Carolina,a little girl brutalized almost to death by a loser-stepfather (Ron Eldard, now of TV's Men Behaving Badly) comes to forge fiction out of her experiences growing up in a redneck, mostly matriarchal clan. Despite a terrific cast (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dermot Mulroney, Glenn Headly, Grace Zabriskie, Lyle Lovett, Michael Rooker, Diana Scarwid, and especially Jena Malone as Bone), Bastard can't seem to clearly sort out who its people are, how they are related to or disengaged from each other, and what familial flaw--among all these mothers--permitted the systematic murder of a girl-child's innocence. The film's climactic rape scene is excruciating to witness--Eldard and especially Malone are very courageous indeed to have undertaken it--but when this agon does not illuminate, one feels too much the voyeur.

Kevin Spacey's first directorial effort, Albino Alligator, could well have taken place on the stage, since most of its signficant action occurs in a basement bar called Dino's Last Chance. Yes, it's another "Playhouse 90" throwback: in this highly symbolic setting, a triad of bad guys (Matt Dillon, Gary Sinise, William Fichtner) and their hostages (Faye Dunaway, Viggo Mortenson, John Spencer, M. Emmett Walsh, Skeet Ulrich) agonize their way through moral mare's nests, until most get dead and a few live on, to bear their mea culpas. Spacey moves his characters' duels and rapprochements around the bar with considerable intelligence, and some of the acting--especially on the parts of the hoods--is certainly worth the ticket. But Alligator remains a rather airless exercise for a first-time filmmaker who will, one trusts, get better as he goes.

Aki KaurismŠki's Drifting Clouds deserves more than festival exposure; it's a deceptively small film about unglamorous, ordinary folk--primarily a married couple (Kati Outinen and Kari VŠŠnŠnen)--trying to make a living. When that living disappears, these two proud individuals find themselves devolving--economically, emotionally, spiritually. (KaurismŠki's uninsistently honorable style: Outinen picks up a photo of a child, only the minute trembling of an earring betraying the grief of a woman we hadn't known was a mother. The picture is of Matti PellonpŠŠ as a child--a very special tribute to KaurismŠki's perennial male lead, untimely dead this past year.) We watch as husband, wife, and friends painfully, doggedly inch their way back into life's mainstream--and find that, imperceptibly, this undistinguished pair has come to matter to us very much, and that their fates have somehow enlarged to embrace our own.

Fire and Kama Sutra are very different takes on distaff friendship, rivalry and fate, in presentday and 16th century India, respectively. In Deepa Mehta's Fire, two beautiful Indian wives--one resigned to her fate, the other hungrier for life--eventually fall in love with each other, mostly because they don't have anything else to do in their dim hareem, and every man in the film is caricatured as a misogynistic ass. Fire boasts some broad humor, predictable play on cultureshock, and edible color--saffron, gold, and the brown skin and black hair of its gorgeous protagonists (Shabana Azmi, Nandita Das).

But you could overdose on the sensual hues and textures, flesh and fabric of Mira Nair's Kama Sutra, the saga of a ravishing servant girl (Indira Varma, in her first, auspicious film appearance) who steals her mistress's husband as payback for a slight, and spends her life learning the arts of love, body and soul. Don't for a moment think Indian Life of Oharu: no great matter (or style) weights this cinematic "romance novel," replete with dark-haired Fabios, wonderfully sexy costumes, and often authentically erotic lovemaking. Still, few films I've seen in the let-it-all-hang-out Nineties project as much pleasure in the sublimely formed landscape of a woman's body, or generate sexual frisson by savoring a prehensile foot--embroidered with elaborate patterns--as adept in bedplay as any hand. (In contrast, Fetishes, Nick Broomfield's documentary excursion into Pandora's Box, a Manhattan S&M parlor, convinces the viewer/voyeur that human sexual fantasies, at their down-and-dirtiest, achieve mostly flaccid banality.)

Ed's Next Move, NYU graduate John Walsh's first feature film, is one of the least pretentious, and sweetest, indie outings I've encountered in a while. Nothing much happens; a Wisconsin newcomer to New York (Matt Ross) moves in with a black, randy roommate (Kevin Carrol, appearing on "Chicago Hope" this season) who becomes his friend and advisor in the pursuit of love. The Manhattan girl of our hero's dreams (Calliope Thorne) plays violin in an ensemble that sings weird, droning lyrics, sort of Raymond Carver crossed with Hoagy Carmichael. Their first date, dinner in his apartment, is a deftly timed and directed series of close encounters and disasters--punctuated by a puking pussycat and the necessary execution of two mice. Walsh has a bright, easygoing assurance that doesn't rough you up to get you to go where his movie is.

Every Festival screening at Toronto was preceded by a minimovie; its images and intonations are still stuck in my head. Spoofing various film genres, a blonde actress wafted up to the camera as a crimson-gowned vampire, whispering "Enter the Air Canada contest..."; flew down palace stairs as a bewigged and giggling Mozartian flirt, with candelabra; exhaled a stream of Forties cigarette smoke, in a black-and-white saloon out of Casablanca; stood in longshot silhouette at the end of a monumental Third Reich hall; and spat out her invitation as a "Sprockets"-punk backed by industrial-chic decor. Air Canada promised the prize of a trip to Los Angeles (!). Cracked the audience up every time. The festival sponsor's ad subliminally sold a better itinerary: tripping out in the movies.

Kathleen Murphy wrote about another Toronto film, Dan Ireland's The Whole Wide World, in our previous issue.

©1996 by Kathleen Murphy