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Film Fest: Tuesday, September 11

Rating: NNNNN


ATANARJUAT (THE FAST RUNNER)

SPEC D: Zacharias Kunuk w/ Natar Ungalaq, Sylvia Ivalu, Peter Henry Arnatsiaq. Canada. 167 mins. Tuesday, September 11, 6 pm VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN) Thursday, September 13, 11:15 am VARSITY 1. Rating: NNNN

Unerringly authentic (down to the specially created early-19th-century dog sleds), the first film written in the Inuit language is some kind of masterpiece. Shot in breathtaking digital video in northern Nunavut, this resonant epic is based on an ancient oral tradition. Through the sheer force of its images and the elemental power of its story, it won Cannes’s prestigious Camera d’Or prize for best first feature, the first Canadian film to do so. Two brothers are ambushed in their sleep after challenging the evil order dominating their small nomadic community. One, Atanarjuat, escapes by running naked over sea and ice. Director Kunuk, a nomad himself until he was nine, has been producing documentaries for years as part of a collective, and imagining the naked runner since childhood, all basic training for this thrilling visualization where land, sea and sky all seem to meet. PE

ELOGE DE L’AMOUR

MAST D: Jean-Luc Godard w/ Bruno Putzulu, Cecile Camp. France. 98 mins. Tuesday, September 11, 6 pm UPTOWN 1 Thursday, September 13, 11 am VARSITY 4 Thursday, September 13, 11 am VARSITY 5. Rating: NNNN

Godard’s Eloge De L’Amour purports to be about the stages of love, but it’s really about the difficulties faced by a young director who’s trying to make a film about the stages of love. Thirty years after Tout Va Bien, and Godard’s still chewing over the same problems and the same atrocities, though in Tout Va Bien he was worried about Vietnam and in Eloge De L’Amour it’s Kosovo and the homeless. At the same time, Eloge was the most beautiful film in the Cannes Competition this year, its plangent black-and-white images of Paris almost shocking in an era when young filmmakers seem addicted to the rawness of the hand-held. Whatever one says about the hand-held work in Godard’s early films, it was never raw. Which leads to a secondary question: why, when most of the Dogme-influenced directors work with natural light, do their films look lousy, but when Godard and his great cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, shot with natural light did they come up with exquisite images? JH

MONSOON WEDDING

GALA D: Mira Nair w/ Naseeruddin Shah, Vijay Raaz. India. 119 mins. Tuesday, September 11, 6:30 pm ROY THOMSON HALL Wednesday, September 12, 10 am UPTOWN 1. Rating: NNNN

Hurray for Bollywood, Mira Nair-style! Nair returns to her Delhi roots for this fully realized, fast-paced, life-affirming crowd-pleaser set during the four days and nights leading up to a traditional Punjabi wedding. Punjabis are a passionate people to whom family life is central, and Monsoon Wedding indulges their love for food and drink, song and dance. But this is contemporary India, and all is not well within the large clan gathering from all parts of the world. Nair doesn’t sugar-coat her Altmanesque plot. Its illicit trysts, dark secrets, betrayals and bitter feuds reveal how uneasily traditional and modern values co-exist in this middle-class world. A celebratory tour de force.PE

MARIAGES

PC D: Catherine Martin w/ Marie-Eve Bertrand, Guylaine Tremblay. 95 mins. Tuesday, September 11, 8:45 pm VARSITY 1 Tuesday, September 11, 8:45 pm VARSITY 6 Friday, September 14, 3:45 pm CUMBERLAND 3. Rating: NNNN

First-time filmmaker Martin conjures up 19th-century rural Quebec, where free-spirited, 20-year-old Yvonne (Bertrand) battles her pious older sister Hélène (Tremblay), who wants to send her to a convent. Martin focuses on the women’s daily toil and rough-hewn existence, but she also captures Yvonne’s dreamlike life in the woods and with her lover. Think Cries And Whispers shot through cheesecloth.IR

MILLENNIUM MAMBO

MAST D: Hou Hsiao-hsien w/ Shu Qi, Jack Kao, Tuan Chun-hao. Taiwan/France. 119 mins. Tuesday, September 11, 9:15 pm UPTOWN 2 Wednesday, September 12, 3:30 pm CUMBERLAND 2. Rating: NNN

Women seem to live and wilt faster than they used to. This is the central point of Taiwan master Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo, a film that opens with promising sensual melancholia but quickly turns cold and jaded. Vicky (the stunning Shu Qi) is the butterfly at the centre of this portrait of a drifting generation.

Pretty as a white light, she burns her wings under the dark suns of Taipei’s smoky discos, game arcades and opiate pleasures, caught between two men – the young and jealous loser Hao-hao and the older, richer but shadier Jack. The images are intoxicating, and Shu Qi’s feline beauty is riveting. Unfortunately, Mambo soon begins to feel as empty as its protagonists. Hou Hsiao-hsien is less inspired by today’s drugged and technologized youth than he was by the gorgeous prostitutes of 19th-century brothels in Flowers Of Shanghai. JC

WAKING LIFE

SPEC D: Richard Linklater w/ Wiley Wiggins, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy. U.S. 97 mins. Tuesday, September 11, 9:45 pm VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN) Thursday, September 13, 5 pm UPTOWN 1. Rating: NNNNSee cover story, page S1.IRLE PACTE DES LOUPSMM D: Christophe Gans w/ Vincent Cassel, Monica Bellucci. France. 142 mins. Tuesday, September 11, 11:30 pm UPTOWN 1 Friday, September 14, noon VARSITY 8. Rating: NNNThis is one of the more amusingly anachronistic French films of recent years. A great beast is terrifying a remote province in pre-Revolutionary France, so naturalist Cassel and his faithful Indian companion (Marc Dacasos) are sent by the king to investigate, only to find that they need the fighting skills they doubtless learned at the Shaolin Temple in Quebec City. Watch this overlong and ostentatiously pictorial piece and you think, “Great costumes and Bellucci is a great beauty, but no one ever accused her of being an actor.” Gans has a great windup but not a lot of hop on his fastball.JH

This is one of the more amusingly anachronistic French films of recent years. A great beast is terrifying a remote province in pre-Revolutionary France, so naturalist Cassel and his faithful Indian companion (Marc Dacasos) are sent by the king to investigate, only to find that they need the fighting skills they doubtless learned at the Shaolin Temple in Quebec City. Watch this overlong and ostentatiously pictorial piece and you think, “Great costumes and Bellucci is a great beauty, but no one ever accused her of being an actor.” Gans has a great windup but not a lot of hop on his fastball.JH

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