TIFF 2011: Pen-ek Ratanaruang's HEADSHOT

Sigh. This was one of the films I was most excited about seeing at this year's festival -- Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe was really beautiful and cool -- but it wound up being a bit disappointing. As I said in the Audioboo that accompanied my post on Roman's Circuit yesterday, I was originally disinclined to say more about Headshot than that, but looking over clips and things again I am developing a retroactive fondness for the film. Perhaps another case of memory migration? And is this why I recall liking Last Life in the Universe so much more the first time than I did on a recent second viewing? It's kind of bugging me.

This time around, Ratanaruang was adapting a novel -- the novelist, the prolific Wyn Lyovarin, seems to be a fan of Ratanaruang's and has sent him copies of everything he's written -- called Rain Falling Up in the Sky. It's big-time crime fiction, with cops and drug dealers and hitmen and femmes fatale galore, romping all over dirty old Bangkok. Our hero was a cop until the crime boss found a way to manipulate/force him into switching sides and becomes an expert hitman -- the action scenes in which he plies his trade are pretty good from my point of view, but I'm no action aficionado so take that with however much salt you wish -- until one day a botched hit leaves him, yes, headshot. When he recovers, he sees everything upside-down, which is the hook that intrigued me about this film beyond Ratanaruang's name in the credits.

What ensues is a decently plotted crime tale, with just enough twists and surprises to keep from getting boring... except for the fact that this is Thai cinema and it's apparently a rule, written or un- (Ratanaruang educated us after the film, a bit, about the kinds of restrictions the Thai government places on filmmakers, including no negative depictions of Buddhist monks or people dressed as monks, ever) that there must be a lot of long, static shots of important characters staring profoundly into or just beyond the camera. They were okay in Last Life in the Universe because it was Tadanobu Asano doing the staring, and we knew the kind of lushly gorgeous scenery he was staring at, and it was part of a slower, more thoughtful story, but they were pretty out of place here, however attractive this new leading man (Nopachai Jayanama, who is very attractive indeed) may be.

And, too, while the neurological damage and ensuing strange point of view is what really makes this film unique, it's not really utilized; it's more of a throwaway that's good for trailers and promotional blurbs, to make it sound more interesting than it is.

And so between this and Uncle Boonmee (which we dubbed Uncle Bore-Me) I will never get Paul Laroquod to go to a Thai film again.

But damn, is Pen-ek Ratanaruang a funny speaker, very dry and subtle and understated and hilarious. "This film is in Thai," he counseled us before the screening, "So it is subtitled, so if you cannot read there is no point in staying," he said in his quiet, small voice...

He hasn't lost me yet, but I tap my foot a bit in his general direction....

Oh, and I WANT that typewriter.

TIFF 2011: Sebastian Brahm's ROMAN'S CIRCUIT (EL CIRCUITO DE ROMAN)

Movies have given me many sensations over the years. Linklater's A Scanner Darkly and Lyne's Jacob's Ladder, for instance, both got me what I can only call high; Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain made me feel I was being metaprogrammed a la Robert Anton Wilson... there are others, you get the idea.

Sebastian Brahm's first feature, Roman's Circuit, though, is the first one that made me feel like a guinea pig.

Whut?

To quote Inigo Montoya, let me esplain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

Roman's Circuit concerns an odd and upsetting stage in the career of Roberto Roman, a neuroscientist of some renown. As a young man, he shipped a groundbreaking theory of memory migration -- the process by which memories mutate over time from a straight-up record of an event or period into a conscious narrative, which he says happens when different "circuits" of the brain take up these memories over time -- under the guidance of a mentor for whom, years later and somewhat washed up, he returns to work with. Said mentor being his mother's boyfriend. And Roman's ex-girlfriend is dating a departmental rival. And the department is encountering opposition to its experimentation, which relies a lot on animals. And stuff.

But the plot isn't really the thing here, cut up into shards of revelation and startling image as it is.

Brahm has done something quite subtle and remarkable here. As the film opens, we are given pieces of story, exposed to ideas and images and dynamics; we are given the raw stuff, in fact, of a memory. And as the film continues, it and our own brains integrate more ideas, more layers, more elements that subtly but profoundly change our understanding of what's going on. Our memories change, and with them our reactions to certain repeated scenes and images -- the poster falling down as seen in the trailer above, for instance, is seen several times and has different overtones each time.

Think on all of that for a moment. Do you have memories that have maybe changed over time? My own experience here bears out what I'm saying quite vividly. For instance, my ten-year class reunion was a revelation: lots of people I thought I'd known very well (ours was a small school in a small town and 90% of my graduating class had been in pre-school with me), remembered a whole lot of things a whole lot differently from how I recalled them, were sometimes completely backwards about things. Or was I?

It thus occurred to me, about 2/3 of the way during the film, that given that animal research is becoming more and more problematic, scientists are perhaps someday going to have to develop new methods of experimentation. And mightn't one of them, for neuroscientists and psychologists at least, be narrative film?

I got the opportunity to ask this of Brahm, more generally in the Q&A (TIFF tickets are worth the expense just for the Q&A, they really, really are) and in person after the screening. He smiled at the thought, kind of mysteriously, and seemed taken with the idea.

So I wonder what kind of data point I form...

TIFF 2011: LAND OF OBLIVION (AKA TERRE OUTRAGEE)

I think I like the original French title for this film, Terre Outragée, a little better than the English Land of Oblivion. For film that examines in a very specific and  haunting way the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, a phrase that appears (to this non-Francophone) to translate as "the insulted" or even "the assaulted" land just better suits.

This film, director Michelle Boganim's first non-documentary, hit me where I live, despite how its narrative kind of falls apart toward the end (to be frank, I didn't notice how much was left dangling until I discussed it later with my best film buddy, who has a sharper eye for that sort of thing and into whom this film did not get its emotional hooks as deep). It begins by presenting a rapturous rural Ukrainian idyll, all rowboats on the river and kids at play on a lushly wooded riverbank; we learn the pair in the rowboat are soon to be married and they are happily in love. Knowing this film does concern Chernobyl, the viewer can't help but know this is not going to end well, but everything is so beautifully presented and photographed that happy sighs escape as the scenes are taken in -- even when rain interrupts the wedding party and drives everyone under cover.

Queue dead fish floating belly up in the river. Dying, blackened trees. And power plant employees, including the bridegroom, being summoned to work under mysterious circumstances.

Boganim wisely doesn't dwell on any attempt to re-enact the tragedy itself; all of this is just prologue. The main events take place 25 years later, when stubborn, homesick former residents of the village of Pripyat (just eight miles from the reactors) start finding various excuses to return home despite official warnings not to. Noplace else is home; nowhere else feels right; cancer and radiation sickness and ruined, moldy houses with mutant birch trees growing through them be damned.

I could relate. I have a similar attachment to the valley where I grew up, a valley that lives under threat of destruction, not from a nuclear accident but from forest fire (look up any article you wish about the Medicine Bow National Forest and its lost battle with the Mountain Pine Beetle). It has its hooks in me gut-deep and I can never tear myself away, and you bet even if it did somehow, someday, become an irradiated hellhole, I would still sneak back to be there if even one tree was standing, one pool of water still reflecting the sky.

Yeah, this film made me cry. Well done, Ms. Boganim. Well done.

Once again, I have embedded the AudioBoo I recorded with Paul Laroquod the day we saw the film, just for completeness' sake.

TIFF 2011: THIS IS NOT A FILM

Imagine you're a filmmaker. Maybe you even are one. And it's all you've ever wanted to do, and you're good at it, and the world has come to love your work and love you for doing that work.

Now imagine your government has banned you from doing it for 20 years because it finds your work politically objectionable in some way.

That's the plight in which we find Jafar Panahi as this elegantly moving little documentary, This is Not a Film, opens. His case is on appeal; his lawyer is on the fight; his family is trying to keep his hopes up. But he's at home and going a bit stir crazy, a completed script that's ready to shoot tormenting him. So he asks a fellow filmmaker, a documentarian, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, to come over and just noodle around with him. Bring a camera.

The resulting portrait of an artist going a little stir crazy feels like it should be a lot more uncomfortable to watch than it is; Panahi is doing his best to handle his situation with grace and humor and the cracks only really show once, towards the end of an extended "scene" in which he is reading from his script and sort of enacting it in a room of his home (I have been banned from writing and directing, but not from acting, he tells us early on. Bit of a stretch, but aren't loopholes always?).

For me, the film is almost stolen by Panahi's daughter's pet iguana, who treats Panahi as part of the furniture and stares impassively into Mirtahmasb's camera for long, hilarious seconds in the process -- which becomes retroactively even more amusing later when a neighbor who knows Panahi is home and bored tries to press him into dogsitting a yappy dachsund who wants no part of the filmmaking and comes unglued at the sight of the equipment.

This is Not a Film was screened for free at the Toronto International Film Festival, and while there was no way Panahi was going to be let out of the country to attend, there were hopes that Mirtahmasb could -- alas, dashed; the documentarian was detained on his way to Toronto and may now be in the same pickle as Panahi. Good thing the duo seems to have invented a new way of not making a film: grab a guy who isn't in trouble yet and have him run the cameras while they talk about the film they'd be making if allowed. Repeat until everyone in the country is banned from making films. Nice job, Iran.

Oh, and in case you missed it, here's an AudioBoo I recorded with Paul Laroquod soon after seeing the film.