Quotes of the Day
The cinemavens at the Toronto International Film Festival talk about movies with a connoisseur's urgency and will pick a fight over pictures that may never grace a cineplex. Takeshi Kitano's Zatoichi, with the star-director playing Japan's legendary blind swordsman, provoked one such debate. Some said it was too faithful to the old Zatoichi movies to be a true Takeshi film, others that it was too Takeshi to be a true Zatoichi. (No matter: the picture still won the People's Choice plebiscite.)
But you needn't stand in the block-long queues for illuminating movie chat. You could simply flag a cab. One Toronto taxi driver—we'll call him Mohsen—launched into a passionate lecture on the state of Iranian cinema, listing the names of Iranian directors who had new work on show. "Of course the master is Kiarostami," he said, as if that name would be as familiar to his passengers as Spielberg's.
Toronto's festival, now in its 28th year, is North America's most congenial and capacious showcase for Asian films from Iran to Bhutan to Japan. That was particularly gracious this year considering that Asia's most notable contribution to Toronto in 2003 was a bite of the SARS epidemic. Forty-four locals died in the only major outbreak of the disease beyond the Far East. For months pessimists envisioned a festival depleted of its usual horde of stars, not to mention filmgoers decked out in surgical masks. It didn't happen. The top hotels were overbooked by Nicole Kidman, Nicolas Cage, Denzel Washington, Meg Ryan and all their pampering attendants, while the film public showed up in full force, with no masks or misgivings.
On screen, the only grudging Western take on Asia was a comic one: Sofia Coppola's widely praised Lost in Translation, with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson as two Americans who strike sweet sparks while stranded in Tokyo. These two characters are acutely and lovingly observed in contrast to the Japanese bit players, who fit all the dumb stereotypes: they're short of stature and long of wind, they constantly take photos, and damn 'em, not enough of these people speak English! The U.S. dominates so much of the world, politically and pop culturally, that it seems astonished to discover that a few spots have still not become the Mall of America.
Occasionally an Asian film will shoot a spitball directly at the colossus. In Im Sang Soo's Korean drama A Good Lawyer's Wife, the lawyer's ailing father tartly observes, "Voting that Texas hick Bush for President—that's why Americans are so f---ed up." More often, though, Asian directors dip into the pool of cultural references created by the West and happily exploit them. Vishal Bharadwaj's Maqbool sets Macbeth in Bombay, with gangsters in the place of Scottish lairds, though this entertaining Indian epic owes as much to Scarface as to Shakespeare. The Tesseract, from a novel by Alex Garland and directed by Oxide Pang (who with his brother Danny made last year's Hong Kong thriller The Eye), has a femme fatale with leather skirt, gun, motorcycle, high cheekbones—all the noir accessories. Open your bedroom door and five tough Thais stand outside, ready to make your face a map of welts. Pang never gets much momentum going here; he's happy to synopsize the genre conventions. And thriller directors never tire of "referencing" the shower scene from Hitchcock's Psycho. In Takashi Shimizu's The Grudge, a girl steps into the shower and starts washing her hair. As she rubs in the shampoo, she reaches to the back of her head and feels ... a third hand! It's clammy, it's dead and, when she whirls around in fright, it's gone.
The Koreans, who in recent years have seized pop-film primacy from Hong Kong, make the most of their borrowings from other cultures. Jang Jun Hwan's Save the Green Planet! has a paranoid science-fiction premise: that aliens are to take over Earth at the next lunar eclipse and that, our deranged hero believes, they use their hair to broadcast telepathic signals. You've heard this before, possibly from someone muttering next to you on a bus. But then the madness escalates: for a while you think the movie is going crazy; then you realize that the insanity is contagious.
If there's one basic difference between mainstream Hollywood movies that carpet the globe and the Asian and European films that are the Toronto fest's main fare, it's this: Hollywood movies are about (and for) guys; art films are about women. So the true stars of this year's festival were luminous presences like Gong Li, who never seemed more relaxed and human than in Sun Zhou's triangle romance Zhou Yu's Train—we note, with pleasure, her steamy sex scene with Hong Kong's Tony Leung Ka-fai—and Korea's Moon So Ri, the lead in A Good Lawyer's Wife. As a sexually vital and frustrated woman who says, "I seem to have lost my G spot," and then tumbles into a reviving affair with the teenaged boy next door, Moon is the charismatic anchor for a smart erotic tale.
These are serious directors; they wouldn't be caught dead having their cameras merely gawk at women. They make movies with morals—sad ones about a woman's wiles and vulnerability, her rough handling by society, an infernal temptation or a curse. Art films, of course, take the woman's side; in serious cinema it is always the Year of the Victim.
India's quasi-art films, for example, may allow for the rare scheming woman—as in Maqbool, where the Lady Macbeth role is played with intoxicating seductiveness by Tabu—but more often they depict a complex and suffocating code of behavior condemning women to second-class status or worse. Rituparno Ghosh's Chokher Bali, A Passion Play, based on the Rabindranath Tagore story, tells of a young Calcutta widow (Bollywood megastar Aishwarya Rai) living in the lavish prison of her in-laws' home. The very beauty of the sets and costumes confines our heroine, traps her in their heavy luxury; the whispered commands and concerns of her keepers clang like a judge's death sentence. Ghosh may be a little in love with the swank trappings of this gilded cage, and his cry of feminist anguish is ultimately muted.
Manish Jha is no such equivocator. In A Nation Without Women (which won the critics' award at the recent Venice Film Festival), he exposes the social horror of India's antifemale birth policy from the first scene. A woman goes into labor; her husband paces anxiously; a baby's cry is heard. "It's a girl," the man is told; he takes the infant, drowns it in a well and apostrophizes, "Next year, a boy."
One consequence of the killing of baby girls is that many villages and towns lack brides for their young men. (In one of the film's sequences, a village patriarch pays dearly to marry his son off to a heavily veiled stranger who is ultimately revealed as a man.) So when the beautiful Kalki (Tulip Joshi) reaches a marriageable age and her father demands 100,000 rupees for his prize, a village father pays him 500,000 to make her the wife of all five of his grown sons. Each son will have one night a week with her, and father will have two. (It's only fair: he paid for her.) Kalki is demeaned and brutalized, chained in the barn, and soon a clan war breaks out. As the deaths escalate, inevitability swells in the viewer's gut. This is timeless tragedy, as true as it is appalling.
Iranian cinema has been investigating hard truths for more than a decade; that's why it's the favorite international cinema of critics and enlightened cab drivers alike. But not always of Iranian censors. Abolfazl Jalili, director of the wonderful coming-of-age drama Abjad, was told he could not leave his country to attend the Venice and Toronto festivals. Set in the late 1970s, Abjad is about a teenager (clearly a stand-in for the director) torn between artistic ambitions and the pressures of his parents and the new Islamic Iran. Since art is personified by a pretty neighbor, his decision isn't hard to predict. But it is cogently dramatized, with an attention to detail that makes it one of the finest recent works from that vital film industry.
Iran's censors also seized the original negative of another entry, Babak Payami's Silence Between Two Thoughts; Payami reassembled the film from his computer files and showed it on video. The story is set in a country similar to Afghanistan under the Taliban, where fundamentalist clerics move into villages and set up a new Draconian order. The film's protagonist is one of their henchmen, who has been told to kill a young woman in custody for an unnamed crime. The woman is confined to a hutlike cage, where she breathes heavily; she is a wolf with its leg in a trap, in agony but too proud to howl in pain. The film describes the edgy relationship of the young militant and his prisoner, each incarcerated by a tyrannical belief system.
There's one Hollywood-style trick that Iranian directors have long used to glamorize their naturalist fables: the casting of beautiful young people in major roles. The boy and girl in Abjad, the captive in Silence, even the bearded militant, are all such photogenic folks. And the girl who plays the militant's stepsister is an especially lovely child of perhaps 14. When she says fretfully that a sandstorm heading for their village could mean the end of the world, the young fundamentalist allows a smile to crease his stern face. "As long as there are beautiful girls like you," he says, "the end of the world will never come."
What more could a film festival offer than a varied line-up of edifying fables about beautiful girls in horrifying jams? For all that, Toronto is the place. And if you want a real film education there, take a taxi with Mohsen.
- Richard Corliss | Toronto
- From Thai martial-arts heroes to a sultry Gong Li, the Toronto International Film Festival showcases the best in Asian cinema