Oh hello. Sorry to leave you sitting there in the dark like that. Hello? Hello? Is this thing on? Is this thing on?

The Toronto International Film Festival wrapped up last weekend, and I'm still feeling that post-festival melancholy. I wish there were more movies, but thank God there are no more movies.

I had the opportunity to catch up with a few friends, meeting some of them in person for the first time, which turned out to be a real highlight of the festival, despite my having been in social retreat for a couple of months (I've been writing less — I wonder if there's a causal relationship?). I strongly encourage you to read their own thoughts on the festival: Doug Cummings, J. Robert Parks, Darren Hughes, and Girish Shambu.

I also, surprisingly, found that random strangers were eager to talk to me about movies. As regular readers of this site know, I myself am a random stranger. What are the odds that two random strangers would be sitting right next to each other? Out of all those people! Such serendipity.

A woman I met at my very first screening went over her entire schedule with me. Although I was scheduled to see 40-some movies and she was scheduled for a couple dozen, we had very few in common. The festival is that big, and each attendee's choices are quite personal. Her calendar wasn't much like mine, but we did run into each other again. We compared notes on "that annoying French film", which of course I loved.

There's the older woman who sat next to me and muttered, "Love films. Just love films. Can't get enough of them," a comment that can't be left to hang in the wind, no matter how softly it's spoken, so we struck up a conversation about how rock-and-roll is here to stay, daddy, and you know it. Well, actually we talked about movies. What else? The man who had three back-to-backs at the Cumberland Theatre shared his thoughts on the "filmmakers' dialogue" that he'd just attended. And I managed to exchange some words with some friends of friends. Lorraine even flew in for the last few days, and we roamed downtown Toronto and ate lox on bagels in the back of a cafe whose walls are lined with books. I gave her one of my movie tickets. She came all this way....

My summary, in brief:

My Favorites

• Our Music (Notre Musique) — Jean-Luc Godard's blend of fact and fiction, of essay and poem, has a deceptive symmetry that entices the viewer to cleave it up the middle and watch the scales balance just so, all the while arguing against such geometric views of the world. He's packed more ideas into Notre Musique than I could process in a single viewing, but I loved snatching whatever I could. It's cerebral and perplexing, but it's also surprisingly moving. I'm hoping to catch the movie again soon, thanks to the Mill Valley Film Festival.
• The Intruder (L'Intrus) — Also exploring problematic symmetries, the latest film from Claire Denis, finished just two weeks before the festival, is probably the most challenging and most mysterious film I've seen from her, and it may be my favorite film of the festival. Doug Cummings at filmjourney.org has called L'Intrus "confounding" and I have to agree, even though I love it. To me the film is an abstract, circular exploration of an individual's relationship to things foreign, of the barriers that we build around ourselves, of the desire to choose what penetrates those barriers and choose what expanses we'll cross, and ultimately of our inability to patrol these personal borders with surgical precision. Despite our best efforts, what permeates our skin is necessarily a mixed bag. The movie repeatedly gives cues that it's not meant to be taken literally: a bloody heart in the snow, a man dragged by horses, an audition for sons that recalls for me the "voices of fathers" from Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father, albeit in reverse, and a scar that appears on Michel Subor's torso, making him both the Frankensteinian scientist who lives in seclusion and the scientist's pieced-together creation. I had the opportunity to speak with director Claire Denis for a forthcoming article in Paste Magazine (which I'll post here after it appears in print). She didn't clear up all of the movie's ambiguities, naturally, but she did offer a few fascinating insights.
• Café Lumière — I wasn't sure how far the great Hou Hsiao-Hsien would go to celebrate Yasujiro Ozu's 100th year. Would he make a few loose allusions to the work of the Japanese master or would he let Ozu's distinctive style envelop his own, adapting it to modern material, something like Todd Haynes did with his Douglas Sirkian Far From Heaven? As interesting as such a technical exercise might be, Hou has instead made a lovely film that's wholly his own, and I suspect that this is the film that will last. It's no stunt. The nods to Ozu are fleeting winks, a household interior here, a train interior there. Three people seated at a noodle counter. He forgoes Ozu's tatami-eye view, letting his camera instead look down at people seated at tables; he shoots each scene with a single long take, reframing and refocusing to follow the characters; and, except for an opening shot of power lines which fades to black, his scenes are abruptly but poignantly assembled, sometimes jumping from day to night, from light to pitch black, in the same setting, with no Ozu-like static cushions between them. All of which means that Café Lumière is stylistically 100% Hou, but he keeps Ozu firmly in mind by merging their worlds. The result is a universe of careful observation and family evolution nestled in a womb of criss-crossing trains. Like all of Hou's films, I'll need to see it again before I know what to make of it, but I already feel that it has pockets of brilliance.
• Whisky — A gem discovered on the last day of the festival, and one that I knew almost nothing about when I entered the theatre, this second film from Uruguayan filmmakers Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll has been aptly described as a bittersweet, deadpan comedy in the style of Aki Kaurismäki. The daily routine of a small-time sock factory is presented in careful detail then upset when the owner's more successful brother comes to town. It's a movie of gentle smiles, not belly laughs, confident to let the small gestures of its characters speak louder than the dialogue. The owner of the factory ropes his assistant Marta into a scheme to convince his brother that he's more successful than he really is, and the trip that the trio embarks on feels like something from Stranger Than Paradise but with older characters. Like the girl in Paradise, Marta follows the program but has a will of her own. Although it's very low-key, the film is quite accessible, and I hope it'll be widely distributed. The title, by the way, is what photographers tell their subjects: "Say whisky!"
• Tell Them Who You Are — A documentary in the same vein as My Architect or The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack, but the best of the three, Tell Them Who You Are is Mark Wexler's portrait of his father, famous cinematographer Haskell Wexler. One reason the film rises above other father-child biographies is that this father is not only still present but feisty as hell, even with 80 years under his belt, and his beloved vocation is the same one that his son must step into to make this film, creating natural conflict that's evident from the movie's first moments; Haskell criticizes Mark's direction like an overbearing father grabbing his child's hand to help him make his letters straight. But that's not the only reason this movie shines. Mark displays a keen sense of patterns by not only talking with people who knew and worked with Haskell, as any documentarian would, but also pointing out that many of those people see aspects of their own fathers in Haskell or their own children in Mark. He shows tremendous restraint, not afraid of emotion, but not seeking it, either. Nathaniel Kahn found the perfect visual summation for his film — the son roller skating between the parallel wings of his father's Salk building as they reach toward the ocean — and Mark finds his while his father swims across a pool, a rare moment when the father and son meet half-way. It's one of the few moments of optimism in the film, but of course even then a camera stands between them.

Movies I Enjoyed a Great Deal

• Cinévardaphoto
• My Summer of Love
• The Holy Girl
• Brothers
• Le Fantôme d'Henri Langlois
• Tropical Malady

Important Humanist Critiques

• Moolaadé
• Turtles Can Fly
• Stray Dogs
• Land of Plenty
• La Noire de... — a classic I saw for the first time

Documentaries I'm Still Considering

• Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
• Tenth District Court
• Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven's Gate

How Can I Not Mention...

• Evolution of a Filipino Family — The program notes said that this fiction feature was 9 hours long, but that turned out to be a mistake. It was 9 hours and 50 minutes. I'm just glad the powers-that-be scheduled a 10-minute intermission at the 6-hour mark or I might've gotten stiff. Actually, I took a rather lengthy break during the last half, and I don't know if it was late-night, post-marathon giddiness that made me chuckle, but I got a kick of out the following tidbits, at roughly 12:30am: 1) the film closes with the quote "I know how Jean Vigo died." Sadly, the text went by too quickly for me to see who it's attributed to (and, yes, I suspect "went by too quickly" will not be a common phrase in reviews of this film); 2) the director, Lav Diaz, said that he initially intended the film as it exists today to be the flashback portion of a slightly longer film. The frame tale would have taken place in present-day America; 3) Q: "Is the movie finished?" A: "The Toronto cut is finished. This is actually an older version because our hard-drive crashed. Also, we're doing a week of additional shooting when I get home." (paraphrased) By the way: the movie wasn't bad. Despite my levity here — this isn't a review — the movie is a serious work, and I commend filmmakers who recognize and shatter our understandings of the limits of film, whatever they may be.
• The House of Flying Daggers — More exciting, and I think more beautiful, than Hero, this is Zhang Yimou's second action movie. It's not a sequel to Hero, but it's in the same vein. I liked the movie but wanted a more engaging third act.
• Heaven's Gate — I'd never seen this. I'd read about it, of course, Michael Cimino's notorious, career-killing flop, made in 1980 right after he swept the Oscars with The Deer Hunter. As I expected, the restored 3-hour and 45-minute original cut isn't bad. In fact it's quite beautiful to look at and has a nice, slow pace. The characters are too simple to support such an epic, I think, but it's quite clear that the lore of Heaven's Gate is based on 2% cinema and 98% business and media. I'm glad that I saw the film the day before I saw the making-of documentary, mentioned above, which is worth seeing for production-related anecdotes but lacks any deep analysis of either the movie business or the film itself.

It was a long-but-short 10 days, somehow not as tiring as I expected, nor as tiring as some other festival experiences have been. Obviously, keeping the brain engaged, by movies and people, was the key.

You know you've had a long day when the director of the day's first film thanks the audience for coming to such an early screening and the director of the day's last film thanks the audience for coming to such a late one. But you know it was a good day when you didn't notice that it was a late screening until someone pointed it out.