Antichrist (Director: Lars von Trier): I’m grateful that I waited to see this. By following the steady stream of reviews, first from Cannes, then from TIFF, I’ve been able to steel myself for what I anticipated would be a harrowing experience. Because I knew in advance some of the more gruesome images to which I would be exposed, it affected the way I watched the film. I closely observed the behaviour of each of the characters early in the film to try to determine what would set off such a chain of events.

Some very brief plot summary for those who may not have heard already. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg are an unnamed married couple (identified in the credits only as He and She) with a young child. In the black and white prologue to the film, they are making love unaware that their young son is crawling toward an open window. As Handel plays over the slow-motion images, the child plunges to his death. The rest of the film deals with the aftermath to this tragedy. She is almost swallowed up by her grief, and spends a month in hospital on medication. He’s a therapist, and resents the fact that someone else is treating his wife. With a curious detachment, he takes over his wife’s therapy, convincing her that she needs to throw away the medication and face her grief head-on. As she slyly points out, he has never paid so much attention to her as when she becomes his patient. She also accuses him of indifference to the death of their child.

As she passes through the stages of grief, she enters a phase of tremendous fear and anxiety. She suffers panic attacks, and in an effort to treat her, he asks her to tell him where she feels most afraid. She tells him that the woods terrify her, referring to the forest around their rural cabin, ominously named “Eden.” She and their son had spent the previous summer there, while she tried to finish her thesis, on gynocide (violence against women.) They pack their things and head to the cabin, where things gradually unravel and acts of horrific violence take place.

The film is divided into chapters, with a prologue and epilogue framing four chapters entitled Grief, Pain, Despair, and The Three Beggars. The last refers to a collection of figurines glimpsed early in the film, each named for one of the other chapters. Grief, Pain and Despair also come to be associated with three different animals the couple encounter in the woods. Grief is a fox, Pain is a crow, while Despair is a deer. The Three Beggars also refers to a constellation mentioned in Gainsbourg’s thesis, although Dafoe declares late in the film that no such constellation exists. If this gives you the idea that the film is crammed with symbolism, you’d be right. The violent confrontation between He and She is not so much between two people as it is between two ways of thinking. Dafoe is rational and controlling, and he’s totally unaware of his own arrogance. His wife represents the chaos of emotion, both fear and rage, and the darkness of nature. Nature as represented by the forest setting refers both to the natural physical world as well as to the mysteries of human nature. As a literature student, I remember being introduced to the concept of the forest as the wild, uncontrollable unconscious mind and our animal nature.

What becomes obvious in the woods is that these two (or possibly more) ways of thinking cannot co-exist. One will have to conquer the other and that means that someone will die. From my very basic understanding of He and She, the possibilities are that the clash of systems might represent:

• Male vs. Female (very basic)
• Science vs. Intuition
• Rationality vs. Morality

Director von Trier has said that he made the film in the midst of a very serious depression and it’s clear that it is the work of someone who is struggling with what it means to be a supposedly rational being in a world that often seems far from rational. It’s muddled but audacious, and I can think of no one else currently making films that give us so much to think about as well as so much to feel. Though the last twenty minutes or so will make a repeat viewing a bit of a challenge, there is a lot I want to figure out. I think that most of all, it’s a beautifully-constructed film, with stunning cinematography and a thought-provoking script. Charlotte Gainsbourg in particular shows tremendous range in a very difficult role. The irony is that in a film where a fox solemnly intones that “Chaos reigns,” that a man has crafted the message so carefully.

Antichrist opens in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver on November 13, 2009.

Official site of the film

(9/10)

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Antichrist

After a few brief weeks of unemployment, I began working again at the beginning of October. It’s just a few days a week for now, but it’s likely to grow into a full-time position before long. I’m working for a small but mighty distributor called Kinosmith. I’d been aware of them for a while, but didn’t realize that the company was only founded in early 2007. Or that up until now, it’s been essentially a one-man operation. Robin Smith has worked in the Canadian film industry for more than 20 years, for companies such as Capri Releasing, Seville Pictures, Lions Gate, Alliance Atlantis, and the Toronto International Film Festival, and he seems to know everyone. But he made it clear upon meeting me this summer that he needed some help. Although my main areas of responsibility will eventually be the web site and social media initiatives, for the past few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of administrative work. It’s been a great way to begin to understand the business, and I look forward to absorbing some of Robin’s expertise as we continue to work together. I consider myself extremely lucky to have been in the right place at the right time.

I had been emailing back and forth for the past few months with another industry veteran, Oliver Groom, proprietor of Project X Distribution, a specialized DVD label that puts out the work of British filmmaker Peter Watkins as well as a few others. We finally decided to meet in person for a drink and since Oliver and Robin had recently partnered up for their DVD releases, Robin came along too. All three of us got along well from that first meeting and after another get-together and a few emails, Robin asked me to come and help him out. He recently moved his home office to Oliver’s house and so even though I work for Robin, I see Oliver a lot as well.

If I haven’t been writing here as often as usual, it’s not because I’ve been watching fewer films. On the contrary, I’m also helping out by watching screeners submitted to Kinosmith as well as catching up on the films we’re releasing now. Robin has built up a very impressive catalogue of films in just over two years, and lots of filmmakers want to work with him, so things are very busy. It does bring up a bit of an ethical dilemma for me. I don’t intend to refrain from reviewing films that happen to be distributed by Kinosmith, but I want to be completely transparent about my relationship to the distributor. Do you think it will be enough to put a standard disclosure notice at the beginning of any blog entry that deals with a Kinosmith title? I promise not to give any film preferential treatment, but I don’t want to ignore them, either, especially if I’m ever somehow involved in the decision to acquire the film for Kinosmith.

In any case, I’m very excited to be indulging my passion for film and learning more about the business side of things. It’s a great opportunity and I’m very thankful to Robin and Oliver for taking me under their wing.

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Working for Kinosmith

Now in its fifth edition, the Eh! U European Film Festival seems to be really hitting its stride. Billing itself as “the free film festival” (since all screenings are subsidized by the various European consulates), this two-week festival is really a gift to the city’s cinephiles. This year features 26 films from 23 countries, and among them are no fewer than six submissions for the Foreign Language Academy Award. I’ll highlight those six, but be sure to check the festival site for others, as well as the schedule. Screenings mostly take place at the Royal Cinema, with the exceptions of the opening night film, The Karamazovs (Czech Republic) which plays at the Bloor Cinema, and the closing film, El Greco (Greece) which will screen at the Varsity. In addition to the high-profile films listed below, I can personally recommend an older film from Belgium in the programme, The Alzheimer Case (review), which screened at TIFF back in 2004.

The following are official submissions by their countries for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film:

• Austria: For A Moment Freedom (Director: Arash T. Riahi)
• Bulgaria: The World is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner (Director: Stephan Komandarev)
• France: A Prophet (Director: Jacques Audiard)
• Germany: The White Ribbon (Director: Michael Haneke) — the film is a co-production of Austria, Germany, France and Italy, and is listed as an Austrian film in the festival guide.
• Netherlands: Winter in Wartime (Director: Martin Koolhoven)
• Romania: Police, Adjective (Director: Corneliu Poromboiu) — you can read my review from TIFF if you like.

P.S. For the curious, here’s the complete list of submissions for Best Foreign Language Film.

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Eh! U European Film Festival 2009

The National Film Board celebrates International Animation Day (October 28th) with Get Animated!, a weeklong series of free screenings and animation workshops across Canada. From October 23–31, check out events happening near you. In Toronto, events will take place at the NFB Mediatheque (150 John Street).

In the Animation Feast programme, I loved Land of the Heads, which I saw last month at the Montreal World Film Festival, and Cordell Barker’s prize-winning Runaway. And in the International Showcase, Skhizein (review) is a can’t-miss. It’s also available in the current issue of Wholphin (#9).

I recently received a copy of the gorgeous NFB animation compilation Animation Express on Blu-ray, which contains many of the films being featured. Watch for a review soon!

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

International Animation Day 2009 at the NFB

The September Issue (Director: R.J. Cutler): Vogue’s September issue is its largest and most important of the year, and work begins on it almost a year in advance. R.J. Cutler and his small crew were granted unprecedented access to the process of putting the whole thing together.

The film begins with Vogue’s Editor in Chief Anna Wintour opining that fashion intimidates a lot of people, and therefore those people mock it. She could very well have been speaking about herself. Infamously lampooned by Meryl Streep in the film The Devil Wears Prada (based on a memoir by a former Vogue intern that portrays Wintour as a bit of a tyrant), Wintour has a reputation for meanness and iciness that has always seemed a bit undeserved to me. In fact, I’ve always had a bit of a crush on the so-called “Ice Queen.” My wife worked for several years as a copy editor at a fashion magazine here in Toronto, and her stories have made me feel a lot of sympathy for Ms. Wintour. She seems to be someone who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and the world of fashion seems overpopulated by fools.

Cutler’s film has only confirmed my opinion of Wintour, although there are comparatively few fools on display. When she’s asked late in the film what her greatest strength is, she unhesitatingly replies, “Decisiveness.” It’s what has propelled her and Vogue to the top of the notoriously fickle fashion world. She is an editor, someone who is called upon every day to decide between competing creative work, and that calls for a certain ruthlessness. Fashion is creative, but it’s also a business, and without someone making hard decisions, Vogue would certainly falter.

We meet two other types of people in The September Issue. The creative and generally hard-working people who act as writers, editors, photographers, art directors and designers. And then there are the sycophants, the air-kissers and ass kissers. The latter type is refreshingly more absent than I’d feared, but the examples on display (the buffoonery of André Leon Talley, the spinelessness of design director Charles Churchward) add a healthy dose of humour to the film, even if we’re cringing as we’re laughing.

The film actually spends more time with Creative Director Grace Coddington than it does with Wintour. The fire to Wintour’s ice, Coddington is a former model who has has worked with Wintour at Vogue for more than twenty years. Despite the fact that she was initially hostile to the filmmakers, she ends up opening up the most to them, and her passion, creativity and candor warm up the film considerably. One gets the sense that her ongoing battles with the editor over photo shoots are an integral part of what makes the magazine so consistently excellent.

But back to Wintour for a moment. As she talks about her English upbringing and the achievements of her siblings (“What I do amuses them, I think”), what comes through to this Canadian is reserve and perhaps shyness (why do you think she wears the sunglasses so often?) rather than any sense of hostility. I think Americans are simply a more gregarious people than most, and so her gentility comes across as something more sinister. She’s considerably more relaxed around her daughter, Bee Shaffer, and the scenes showing her support of young designer Thakoon also showed me a more tender side.

I found The September Issue hugely enjoyable, both for the inside look into the work of so many people coming together to create the magazine, and also for the revealing portrayal of the dynamic between a few of the people surrounding Anna Wintour. Although she barely lets her guard down, the little bit she does show dispels the myth that she’s heartless. If anything, it shows that she’s just incredibly busy, and her efficiency is a survival tactic. The film has only heightened my respect and admiration for her. Which is just a fancy way of saying that my crush is not only intact, it’s increasing. When she does finally retire, I desperately hope she’ll write a memoir. Maybe she can call it, Yes, I Wear Prada. You Gotta Problem With That?

The September Issue opens in Toronto on Friday October 23 at the Varsity Cinema.

Interview with Grace Coddington about the film

Official site of the film

(9/10)

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

The September Issue