Rating: NNNNN
CODE BREAKER
CRITICS’ picks indicates 4- and 5-N reviews
Festival series are abbreviated as follows:
CR — Canadian Retrospective: Jean Pierre Lefebvre, Vidéaste
CWC — Contemporary World Cinema
DIAL — Dialogues
DISC — Discovery
GALA — Gala
MAST — Masters
MM — Midnight Madness
NORD — Nordic Visions
OV — Open Vault
PA — Planet Africa
PC — Perspective Canada
R2R — Real To Reel
SPEC — Special Presentation
SPOT — Spotlight: Ulrich Seidl
WAVE — Wavelengths
Monday, September 10
LA PIANISTE
MAST D: Michael Haneke w/ Isabelle Huppert, Benoît Magimel, Annie Girardot. Austria/France. 130 mins. Monday, September 10, 3:15 pm UPTOWN 3 Friday, September 14, 2 pm VARSITY 2. Rating: NNNN
After a brief foray into Euro-humanism with last year’s Code Inconnu, Haneke is back on his favourite terrain, dissecting the workings of very disturbed minds. The pianist is Erika Kohut (an electrifying Huppert), esteemed professor at the prestigious Vienna Conservatory. A woman with icy manners and a seriously deranged psyche, Erika lives in a sick state of enslavement to her obsessive, controlling mother. She chillingly rebukes the men who dare approach, seeking refuge instead in morbid voyeurism and self-mutilation. Based on a controversial novel and treated with almost clinical precision, The Pianist was the shock movie at Cannes this year, where it walked away with three awards (the two acting prizes and best director). Perverted work of genius or grotesque trash? One thing’s for sure the faint-hearted should abstain. JC
CHOP SUEY
R2R D: Bruce Weber w/ Peter Johnson, Jan-Michael Vincent, Frances Faye. U.S. 98 mins. Monday, September 10, 6:15 pm VARSITY 8 Tuesday, September 11, 11:15 am CUMBERLAND 3. Rating: NNN
Weber is best known for films that valorize a certain kind of male beauty, reaching an apotheosis in Let’s Get Lost, an exhaustive study of the ruin that was jazz singer and trumpeter Chet Baker. Chop Suey follows suit with its lust-filled photographs of apparently straight model Peter Johnson, but it’s also a bizarre memoir about singer Frances Faye’s life and times as a cabaret performer in the closeted 50s. The title is accurate – Chop Suey is all over the place. But it has rather less of the obsessive earnestness of Broken Noses and Let’s Get Lost. JH
IT’S ABOUT TIME
R2R D: Ayelet Menahemi, Elona Ariel. Israel. 54 mins. Monday, September 10, 6:30 pm ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM Tuesday, September 11, 2:15 pm ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM. Rating: N
This Israeli doc allegedly addresses the meaning of life and time – why are we here? what is time? – but its not-so-subtle subtext is the justification of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The glaring omission of any Palestinian voices other than brief references to terrorists disturbs. The cosmic propaganda is intercut with stand-up soliloquies by comic-mime Yakov Cohen, backed by a coffee-table jazz quartet. The sorry flick hurtles to its inevitable clichéd conclusion. It’s About Time is about one hour wasted. SD
DISTANCE
CWC D: Hirokazu Kore-Eda w/ Tadanobu Asano, Arata, Yusuke Iseya. Japan. 122 mins. Monday, September 10, 8:30 pm CUMBERLAND 3 Thursday, September 13, 2:30 pm CUMBERLAND 2. Rating: NN
Distance, the latest by the director of After Life, brings together four strangers who are related to the members of a small apocalyptic cult that poisoned Tokyo’s water supply some years earlier. If After Life built a certain narrative and emotional rigour on its No Exit premise, Distance plays like a bizarre cross between Shinji Aoyama’s Eureka (people recovering from a traumatic event) and The Blair Witch Project (annoying people lost in the woods with a shaky-cam). I’ve always agreed with Hitchcock: if you show someone arriving somewhere, the audience will make the leap and assume that he got there somehow. No need to show the whole journey. JH
LE FABULEUX DESTIN D’AMELIE POULAIN
SPEC D: Jean-Pierre Jeunet w/ Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz. France. 120 mins. Monday, September 10, 9:30 pm VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN) Wednesday, September 12, 3:30 pm UPTOWN 1. Rating: NNNNN
High on the list of phrases I never thought I’d hear: “a romantic comedy from the director of Delicatessen and Alien Resurrection.” Tautou, who had a small role in Vénus Beauté, gets to stretch as a shy young woman who re-routes her quiet life when she realizes that her destiny is to help other people, though in extremely odd ways. She’s matched by Kassovitz, playing a young man who collects discarded photo-booth strips. Kassovitz is best known in North America as the director of La Haine and the recent thriller Crimson Rivers, but he has a considerable filmography as an actor in France.
Jeunet uses Paris very inventively, mixing the familiar (Sacre Coeur) with the unexpected and treating the streets and buildings as a great big set, altering and repainting at will. The result is the kind of whimsical Paris not seen much lately – a real movie Paris, if that isn’t too much of a contradiction in terms. One of the best movies I saw at Cannes.JH
