TIFF 2011: Stranger than fiction

Here's the second of Grace Wang's posts on the 2011 Toronto Film Festival. She helped programme the festival, and here reviews four of its highlights. You can read her reflections on the festival as a whole, and her review of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights, here.

Into the Abyss (Dir. Werner Herzog)

No one is a better documentary interviewer than Herzog, who with his hypnotic, thickly accented voice seems to tease open the emotional valves of his subjects. Into the Abyss, his latest effort, crystallises the part of his work that I enjoy most: regular people talking, stranger than fiction.

A strong opponent of capital punishment, Herzog takes us to one place where it is a straightforward reality of life: Conroe, Texas. He then zooms in on the case of Michael Perry and Jason Burkett, who are both convicted on strong evidence of murdering three people to steal a car.

Instead of questioning their innocence, Herzog attempts to understand the environment that led them to their fate. A slew of interesting characters are interviewed, including a former director of the death house where executions are held, and families of both victims and criminals.

The documentary begins with police footage and captioned descriptions that seem to drift dangerously into the realm of the murder mystery. However, as people start talking, facts start to shift toward the surreal: a man gets stabbed nearly to the heart then goes to work in 30 minutes; a woman loses all her relatives in harrowing tragedies within a span of 5 years; a husband gives up his pension to save his sanity; a wife believes a rainbow proves the innocence and love of her husband who’s imprisoned with a life sentence.

With no voiceovers nor charismatic leading men, Herzog lets the shocking mundanity of small-town American landscape speaks for itself. The tale is riveting. 

A Simple Life (Dir. Ann Hui)

A simple life — it is what most of us want. It is what some of us get. One of Hong Kong’s finest filmmakers, Ann Hui, crafts a story of family, commitment, and honor, exploring traditional Asian values in a manner that is very much Asian: steadfast and patient, never rushed or brash.

Superstar Andy Lao plays Roger Leung, a film producer who is the last remaining member of his family living in Hong Kong. Ah Tao (Deanie Ip) is the family servant who has taken care of four generations of the Leung family. Their harmonious daily routine comes to a sudden stop when Tao suffers a stroke. Refusing to become a burden, Tao moves into a nursing home. Her absence triggers a curious change in Roger, who realises the important role this woman has played in his life and, in turn, the important role he has played in hers.

The narrative builds gracefully at a nimble pace, as both characters come to terms with progress and begin to understand their changing situation. Moreover, it never lacks nuance nor resorts to predictable melodrama. Hui purposefully layers the intentions, actions, and reactions of her characters, and then peels them back just as carefully.

Anchored by solid performances from both Lau and Ip, this is a simple story of a simple relationship — one built on decades of trust, commitment, loyalty, unwavering love and all the things that make up a beautiful, simple life.

This is Not a Film (Dir. Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Jafar Panahi)

Last year's sentencing of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on filmmaking and interviews shocked the world cinema community, and inspired the making of This is Not a Film — an honest document of a day in the life of a filmmaker deprived of his right to make a film, and an urgent cry from an artist who cannot be silenced.

With Panahi under house arrest, the day begins at his kitchen table, where he speaks into the camera directly. Unsatisfied with his efforts, he recruits Mirtahmasb, who joins him for the day. Throughout their time together, Panahi constantly checks on the status of his case while anxiously holding onto his craft. He watches his old films, talks about the new one he wants to make, and demonstrates using scotch tape on his living room carpet the set he intends to build. The result is both heartbreaking and mesmerising. Panahi’s anxiety at his deprivation is clearly evident, and it clearly overwhelms him at times. To see a grown man break down is hard.

Panahi works with resources available to him: an iPhone, a camera, his pet lizard, and even the young man who comes to collect the rubbish. As we follow Panahi and his hand-held camera to the last frame, we see what he sees: a metal gate that he cannot physically step beyond.

Shame (Dir. Steve McQueen)

From its first frame to its last, Shame is a precise and lyrical account of one man’s torment in the city. Set in New York, in the life of Brandon (Michael Fassbender), Steve McQueen delves into all of the man’s wounds — emotional, physical, sexual — and does so with fierce determination and unflinching focus.

Brandon is deteriorating to pieces, and we are brought along with him. No look is gratuitous. Every shot is crafted with weight and precision, and set to a tremendous score of matching emotional amplification. Same goes for Sissy (Carey Mulligan), Brandon’s sister, who is opposite in demeanour but no less of a mess than her co-sufferer. Like two caged animals, Brandon and Sissy are drawn and repulsed by each other, simultaneously tied by their past and tormented by their present, each struggling to survive in a city built on glass and steel, where money buys you dry martinis at high places, but never shelter from the darkness within.

With the critically acclaimed Hunger, McQueen and Fassbender announced to the world the astonishing potential of their creative collaboration. Here, the addition of Mulligan forms a sort of powerful trifecta: as boy and girl despair, search, hurt and be hurt, the camera stays close and watches in tender yearning, and so do we.

Grace Wang blogs at Etheriel Musings. and as a Far-Flung Correspondent for Roger Ebert at the Chicago Sun-Times.

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