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
Thursday, September 13
LA FEMME QUI BOITPC D: Bernard Emond w/ Elise Guilbault, Luc Picard, Michel Forget. 91 mins. Thursday, September 13, 7:15 pm VARSITY 4 Thursday, September 13, 7:15 pm VARSITY 5 Friday, September 14, 2:30 pm CUMBERLAND 2. Rating: NN
The title pretty much sums up the seemingly endless 90 minutes of this minimalist and claustrophobic stream-of-consciousness film about a woman looking back on the tragedy of her life and her steady descent into an alcoholic hell. Guilbault delivers a fine performance in this perhaps praiseworthy but resolutely dreary and painful-to-swallow piece. JC
THE SON’S ROOM
MAST D: Nanni Moretti w/ Moretti, Laura Morante, Jasmine Trinca. Italy. 99 mins. Thursday, September 13, 9:30 pm VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN) Saturday, September 15, 2:45 pm UPTOWN 2. Rating: NNNN
Moretti’s Palme d’Or win with The Son’s Room, the story of a family going through a heavy-duty trauma, offers an intriguing commentary on this year’s Cannes Film Festival. In the shadow of a new century, the Cannes programmers loaded the Competition with the aging lions of world art cinema – Godard, Imamura, Rivette, de Oliveira – and Asia’s new wave (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Shinji Aoyama, Tsai Ming-liang). When the dust had cleared, the jury honoured a small, emotionally direct film by a director no one had expected to win.
People who dislike The Son’s Room are inclined to dismiss it as a movie-of-the-week, and even those of us who like it can grasp that argument. An English review of The Son’s Room remarked that if Moretti is Italy’s Woody Allen, then The Son’s Room is his Interiors. That said, there’s no denying the film’s naked emotional authenticity, or its ability to move a sophisticated audience in ways that audience might not even suspect it could be moved.JH
