The 29th Toronto Film Festival

[Chris Knipp]

Don't agree on Demonlover (see my review) but certainly Clean is a worthwhile film.

[pmw]

I totally agree with you on Demonlover. I thought it was a misunderstood masterpiece (thus, not too suprising that it doesn't have a distributor). I think the reason that it's not at NY Film Fest is that its been in three festivals leading up to the fest. Not that they don't recycle certain titles but... It could also end up in Film Comment Selects (where Demonlover was shown) early in 2005. In any case, look forward to seeing it as Assayas is a favorite.

P

[arsaib4]

Indeed, Demonlover was neglected and as you said misunderstood upon it's release at Cannes couple of years ago. It's value has grown since then and it was generally well recieved by U.S critics last year. No doubt that few years from now it'll become even more relevant.

Yeah, I think you're right about Clean, it has already played in a few festivals. It'll definetely play in Film Comment Select unless it gets picked up and then hopefully it'll be part of French Rendezvous next year. Assayas' films are blind buys for me so if the french dvd is out before then, i'm going for it.

[Chris Knipp]

Le chiave di casa is the no. 3 box office hit in Rome this week, after Farenheit 9-11. Yesterday I saw a new Iranian film, Little Thieves, dubben in Italian.

[arsaib4]

The only Iranian film I see in the Top 20 is Marzieh Meshkini's Stray Dogs, may be you're talking about a different one but I couldn't find it. Another film which opened well recently in Italy is L'Amore Ritrovato with Stefano Accorsi and Maya Sansa.

[pmw]

Have we talked about this yet? Demonlover and Videodrome - fast becoming one of my favorite topics. Assayas clearly tipping his hat to Cronenberg. Demonlover is great on so many levels.

By the way (this probably belongs in another thread) just saw Agnes Jaoui's Look At Me. A crowd pleaser to say the least, but still a tougher, better film than Taste of Others. Not sure why that popped up...oh, its the opening night film of this year's NY Film Fest. It will be well liked I think...not as many stars as the culture class would like but...

Great reviews from Toronto. Enjoying them quite a bit.
P

[arsaib4]

Thanks for the kind words, P. As detail conscious as I am, I wasn't sure if I was going to write about the films in such manner but even though it's taking some time to discuss all of them, I am trying by best.

Videodrome is one film I really want to see as I've heard a lot about it. It's hard to keep up with what's going on now and still be able to watch the great films from the past (in my case) and but i've seen pretty much all that's required. Where do you see the 'inspiration' for the lack of a better word, in Demonlover? I knew Videodrome was coming out from 'Criterion' but wasn't sure it was so soon and thanks for your reminder.

[Chris Knipp]

The only Iranian film I see in the Top 20 is Marzieh Meshkini's Stray Dogs, may be you're talking about a different one but I couldn't find it. Another film which opened well recently in Italy is L'Amore Ritrovato with Stefano Accorsi and Maya Sansa.

Stray Dogs indeed is what I saw, but they titled the dubbed Italian version Piccoli Ladri, little thieves. i quite liked it, and I'm not a great fan of Iranian films, to put it mildly. Having the children speaking Italian may have sweetened the pill. And it was relevant to Italy, since it overtly refers in a semi-ironic way to De Sica's classic, Ladri di biciclette, bicycle thieves--hence perhaps the Italian title. It's a coincidence that the Italian film you saw listed is L'amore ritrovato, love refound, or perhaps one should translate it like the Proust title that it echoes, Love Recaptured. But unfortunately despite being a pretty film with a nice period feeling, I found it really very lacking in merit. I'm sorry, circumstances haven't been as favorable lately to my writing entries here and I can't go into much more detail. At this place they seem to take the term "internet cafe" too literally. This is cafe, with all the ambient sound and coming and going and secondhand smoke that that implies. Nice for people-watching, pehraps, but not for thinking. Maybe later when I'm with friends who have an Internet connection at home in another city, I can expand what Italian film notes I have to offer -- and I'll write reviews later of all that i've seen as reported earlier from Paris. Rome isn't quite such a breeze to get around in and the films aren't either as numerous or as accessible, but it's far from hopeless and I'm going to see another one today, Io lo vedo negli occhi I think It's called, I see it in your eyes. It was produced by Nanni Moretti and is at his theater, the Nuovo Sacher, in Trastevere.

My guess would be that the most interesting current Italian film as well as the most talked about is Le chiave di casa. I'm curious to see it again.

[arsaib4]

I am quite surprised to hear that from you regarding Iranian Cinema, maybe you were referring to a certain type of films with your 'Children speaking italian' remark. But I'll let you get back to comment on that further. Btw, Moretti is a big supporter of Iranian films, especially from Kiarostami.

It's safe to say that you liked Le Chiave di Casa very much. Hopefully we'll get to see it here soon.

[Chris Knipp]

Apologies if some of the following is repetitous: travelling from place without much time to work on entries here, i tend to get a bit confused about what i've said or not said.

I don't know if you understood what i meant by 'children speaking Italian.' Stray Dogs (assuming that's what it is) was dubbed in italian where I saw it at the Cinema Metropolitan on the Via del Corso in Rome. It is hard to find any movies shown in the original language in Italy; they're mostly dubbed into Italian. Italians say that's too bad, but always add that they have 'the best dubbers in the world.' i don't know why they say that, or what difference it would make. Surely there are excellent dubbers in France, since so many American TV dramas are dubbed in French too. As it happens i have not seen many Iranian films and tend to find those i have seen too unremittingly grim and deterministic. There was a certain irony, and beauty, in seeing Stray Dogs, with its overt references to De Sica's Ladri di bicicletta, post-dubbed in Italian, as the neorealist classics were.

Yes, Gianni Amelio's Keys to the House (Le chiavi di casa), which has had a very positive reception in Italy, made a strong impression on me when I saw it in Paris -- in the original Italian, of course, with French subtitles, helpful to me since the handicapped boy's Italian wasn't the clearest, and this was I think the most human of the 11 movies I saw in Paris recently. i certainly would like to see more of Amelio's work, including the much-praised Stolen Children, which Oscar has spoken highly of.

[oscar jubis]

Il Ladro di Bambini remains unavailable here, but two others have been released on dvd in 2004: The Way We Laughed, which I like less than Ladro, and Lamerica, my favorite Italian film of the past two decades (with the possible exception of Michelangelo Antonioni's Beyond The Clouds). I hope your rental source has it. Lamerica was released by New Yorker Video in anamorphic widescreen and contains deleted scenes and an alternate ending. I find the list price of $34.95 too high. This film is an absolute MUST-see. If you watch it, please share your opinion.

[arsaib4]

Actually you said "children speaking Italian may have sweetened the pill" which I took as a reference to Majid Majidi's films and the possiblity that you perhaps find him annoying with his child-like fantasy approach to filmmaking but since you generally find Iranian films (atleast the ones you've seen) grim, you might actually prefer his films.

I might have agreed with you couple of years ago but some new and emerging Iranain filmmakers have brought new ideas and their handling of familiar subject matters also deserves praise. Someone who has slipped under the radar of most critics is Babak Payami. His style is more gentle and his films more symbolic in a sense that they don't necessarily present religious and social undertones. His first film One More Day involves a shop owner selling illegal prescription drugs and a woman who may or may not have had a relationship with him in the past. It's a quite, meditative film much like his second Secret Ballot which to me is one of best Iranian films from recent years. It's a story of a soldier guarding a post seaside near the border who hesitantly drives around a voting booth clerk collecting votes from far-out places. The bickering between the two has a sexual element to it not seen in previous Iranian films not to mention the beautifully shot landscape, neither harsh nor haunting like the way Kiarostami presented to us in Taste of Cherry. The slow yet eloquent pacing and some clever use of symbolism (politicial) has more in common with a European film than an Iranain one. I'm not all wrong, as Payami was trained in Canada.

Even Kiarostami who was maligned in some circles with Ten and the film and the filmmaker was deemed to be more concerned about his new toy, a DV camera than the subject at hand and what most failed to realize was this was his way of presenting and discussing the often talked about social problems involving women. It shouldn't be a prerequisite for an Iranian director to make a film about social issues but most of them have. Kiarostami brilliantly uses the camera to isolate the young boy in the beginning, not even catching the glimpse of the mother driving the car. Later on his camera barely catches the prostitute entering another car (a first for an Iranian film). What some people might have a question about is that the film isn't didactic unlike some others made on a now very familiar issue but the conclusion of his episodic narrative is all the same, she is not in control. This doesn't mean a woman has to be a ranting and raving creature whenever she is shown in an Iranian film, actually she is clever enough to behave differently at various part of her journey in Ten. After watching his documentary on Ten, called 10 on 10, it's clear what his intentions were and this was a well thought out project, although some might still find his affection for his DV, somewhat annoying.

Even Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold which I talked about elsewhere on this site has film-noir and other 'thriller' elements to it, which is a something new but Panahi deftly handles the situation at hand while still commenting on the class structure that exists in contemporary Tehran.

I didn't mean to make this a discussion of Iranian Cinema but I just wanted to point out a few things. Hopefully this helps. Btw, the director of Stray Dogs, Marzieh Meshkini is the wife of Iranian master Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Her first feature was The Day I Became a Woman.

[Chris Knipp]

No, I was not making a reference to Majid Majidi's films, of which I know little or nothing. Yes, I did know that Meshkini was the wife of Makhmalbaf; I think he produced. As I've said, I'm woefully lacking in knowledge of Iranian films and did mean to see the Panahi one and catch up on Kiarostami, but the Iranian films I've seen have been unremittingly grim and have put me off bec ause they have seem unbalanced that way and overly deterministic. Meshkini's is not exactly a lot of laughs, but it has a kind of charm and it really does remind one of De Sica and the Italian neorealist tradition, apart from the overt reference to Ladri di biciclette. I didn't know about Babak Payami. Thank you for your help.

[Chris Knipp]

To pick up something you said earlier in this thread, I did see L'amore ritrovato in Rome with an American friend who lives there. We tended to find it somewhat lackluster, its pace and setting dreary, the characterizations unconvincing. But its star, Stefano Accorsi, is really emerging as the big new Italian film actor. He's in a lot of things, and good in them, especially in Ozpotek's Le fate ignoranti in a gay role and The Last Kiss, and now I discover he was one of the two leads in Santo Maradona, Marco Ponti's first film which was a big hit in Italy. Last night I saw Ponti's new one, A/R Andata + Ritorno (Round Trip) which is hilarious and brilliant. Sure, it owes a lot to various English language slacker and heist movies, but it's completely Italian. You'd love it. At least I hope so. The only reason everybody didn't love it in Italy is that they so adored Ponti's first film, the aforementioned Santo Maradona, they wanted more of the same, and it wasn't. Santa Maradona was in the first New Italian Cinema series and A/R is in the second.

Why haven't we seen either? One reason is probably Miramax. Another is that Ponti is too modest a man. The other may be that the Italian cinema scene is dominated by dubbed American movies. But Italian moviemaking is coming back to life and so is Turin as a place to make them.

[arsaib4]

I've combined some of our exchanges on Italian Cinema in one thread. They were spread out all over the site. Now we can easily refer to what we wrote earlier, so hopefully can continue there.