One month on and a hundred or so movies later, Lumière's editors battled post-festival depression to wrap the 2005 TNZIFF programme. In Part A, DAVID LEVINSON takes us from the P's of Palindromes, to the Q's of Kings & Queen.


» Part A | [Part B]

Remembrance of Thingz Past

SO Y2K4's dead and buried, and just what do we have to show for the year that a documentarian saved our lives? Looking back, not much really; as popular consensus had it, Bush wasn't the anti-Christ after all, while Mikey Moore's messiah-in-a-baseball-cap routine was fun while the fireworks lasted, but failed to evolve into the social mallet everyone was holding out for. If anything, it's recognisable as a moment where our post-90s brand of slung-like-an-AK apathy was finally shed in the interest of banding together and seriously hatin' on shit. Now Mike's a little fatter, a whole lot richer, and the good vibes/bad vibes of it all have been swept under a rug, which has subsequently been doused in gasoline and burned.

Paint-by-trends and 2005 was the aftermath to F9/11's unravelling, left to cower behind its slew of assembly-line artist bios. I steered away mostly, the only real exception being Tarnation, in which Jonathan Caouette pouts, struts, primps and preens his way through his navel@48fps, mincing anguish with all the tenacity of a diva-in-heat. Film-as-exorcism-ritual is bad enough. However, things just get downright bizarre when autotherapy verges into autoerotica, turning the screen into a tangle of self-directed jailbaiting.

If Tarnation is all politics of the self, then Rize is all politics of tha Self, though David LaChapelle has no clue, sociologically-speaking: questions of entitlement aside, he moves from the obligatory – in his use of footage from the Rodney King riots to open to the film – to the opaque – in the way he draws straw-man connections between krumping and African tribal rituals –, and makes me wonder just who the hell's donning the safari hat in my uncharacteristically intense response to the sealed community on display. But no arguing that hot is hot, and when he's willing to just give in to his sugary impulse to create a hip-hop fashion commercial, shit's hot.

Anyway, as far as easy comedowns go, there's always The 10th District Court: Moments of Trials, where Raymond Depardon extracts magic from the grizzle of what basically should've been Judge Judy goes to France. A lot of it comes down to (dirty word) formal rigour, ditching the spotlit sitcom-arena of its American predecessor in favour of careful, sustained low-angle shots; hence, the plaintiffs withhold an air of dignity even as their throwaway excuses are allowed to evolve into labyrinths of delusion. It's the court as a stage for human drama, and the performances here silently reverberate with the ways class/status/race affect the way people allow themselves to live in society.

On the flipside of the fict/non-fict coin, turns out (gloat gloat) the Michael Haneke isn't the noo-wave wunderkind I'd initially pegged it for (owes more to this than either of us would care to mention). Still, he no doubt deserves a clap your hands say yeah for managing to channel Antonioni's embossed open-endedness and apply it to a closely-knit Parisian family unit. Within this system of unseen terror, the individual and political intersect but are never actually resolved, sending its inhabitants caterwauling through a 21stC no-man's-land. w/r/t moral/ethical fault lines, Crash tries to accomplish something similar, but fails because it's too retarded; The Sea Inside begs to be put outside of its Oscar-calibrated misery; while The Child, despite all of its obvious competence, proves that if it ain't broke and you ain't gonna fix it, at least give it a new paint job or something.

In a way, Hidden got off easy thanks to its early entry in the game – by the time the second week hit, it became obvious that critical discourse had killed the festival star. And I know, I know what this looks like – front-row seats to an A-list line-up of critical heavyweights and here I am bitching harder than a neglected war vet. But this was like witnessing a baseball game executed by Mondrian: every move came off with such a severe lack of complication that it was simply a case of putting ticks in boxes. The problem was that I had restricted myself to working almost exclusively within a sphere of stuff that already had some critical baggage attached to it, venturing out only once with A Common Thread, which was okay, if not a bit too predictably proto-feminist. In the end, what was consumed was a movie buffet that did everything to justify its price tag, but for whatever reason never quite made it into the stratosphere of the truly awesome.

Which didn't really exclude the possibility of wtf-retardedness generally yielded by more liberal excursions; in fact, Tsai Ming-liang almost took care of that single-handedly with A Wayward Cloud, and probably invented twelve new fetishes in the process. Pervs looking to get their freak on in a less perverted capacity turned to 9 Songs' compilation of porno postcards, as well as the shoulda-been-named "Sex in the Suburbs" trio, feat. Me and You and Everyone We Know, a girlish take on the Jon Brions-scored brand of candystore blues; Mysterious Skin, which tastefully sexualised its poppy, Nickelodeon-esque tropes; and Palindromes, yet another Todd Solondz-penned deathwish to the world that lacked the intricate mechanics of self-hatred found in Happiness.

New kids got some pretty cool tricks, but old masters Claire Denis and Hou Hsiao-hsien turned skeletal narratives into wireworks for formal showboating; in The Intruder, Denis carved away at an archetypal spy plot until nothing was left but a ghostly flicker, while Hou indulged in Ozu-via-osmosis, once again casting his eye on a bright young thing caught in the instability of transition. The degree to which Café Lumière is supposed to quote Ozu is beyond me; there isn't really much there, aside from a similar visual scheme, with even the staple inter-generational conflict failing to blossom into its expected network of familial ties. But then again I have a huge hard-on for cityscapes, and Hou pushes all the right buttons, so who really cares?

No cigar, but what had me closest to unleashing the M-word was probably Arnaud Desplechin's Kings and Queen. Hard to say why exactly – some things just don't immediately open themselves up to being written about – though do-or-die and I'd say this is probably the thing I saw that was most geared to what I'm currently about: an effortlessly bratty mash-up of the high&low, it careens from operatic tragedy to comic brevity, from hip-hop to Moon River within microseconds of each other, while still having time to turn Emmanuelle Devos into a sweltering sex object. Someone get this guy a fucking local distributor. Please. Lest this go down as the year Jim Jarmusch finally jumped Bill Murray's shark.

» Part A | [Part B]




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