Although it isn't as well-known as, say, Grauman's Chinese in Hollywood, or the Grand Théâtre Lumière in Cannes, the Sala Leopoldo Lugones on the tenth floor of the Teatro San Martín in downtown Buenos Aires belongs on any list of the world's great movie theaters. A permanent screening facility for the Argentinian national cinematheque and a regular venue of the annual Buenos Aires Festival of International Independent Cinema, the Lugones is celebrating its 40th anniversary next month. To mark this historic occasion, the Lugones' excellent chief programmer, Luciano Monteagudo, asked a sampling of critics (including this one), filmmakers, and other Lugones faithful to write brief reminiscences of the theater for a commemorative supplement of the newspaper Página/12, where Monteagudo is also the film critic. The results appear in today's issue. For those who can't read Spanish, my contribution (originally written in English) appears below.

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La Lugones y yo

When we speak about the movies we love, too often we fail to mention the places in which we saw them, though the two entities are hardly independent of one another. Perhaps this is an antiquated idea in an age when the next generation of cinephiles—if there is to be one—will have grown up watching movies on laptops, video iPods, and those other lamentable descendants of Edison's single-viewer motion-picture machines. And yet, I would propose that for those of us who still relish to see movies on the big, public screen, in the company of a few hundred (or perhaps just a few dozen) strangers, the right cinema can make a great movie seem that much greater.

The Sala Leopoldo Lugones is one such cinema—one of the world's greatest, in fact. It is not the biggest, or the most palatial, or the most state of the art. (Nor, I should add, are most of the films that are shown there.) It is, rather, warm and lived-in, a bit battered by time, and as comfortable as the weathered loafers our feet may prefer to a pair of gleaming new ones. Its chief quality is one that can not be drawn on architectural blueprints, but which is similar to a quality possessed by the world's great cathedrals. It is a feeling one gets upon crossing the threshold, a shared feeling of being that says this is a place where others like you—the true believers of cinema—have come throughout the decades to worship at the altar of the flickering light. To take the metaphor one step further, getting to the Lugones requires an ascension—ten flights, to be exact, either by slow-moving elevator or, if one is less lucky, by staircase, after which you are sure to feel penitent for whatever earthly sins you have committed.

My own first visit to the Lugones occurred in April of 2004, during the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema—a true annus mirabilis during which the Lugones played host to retrospectives of John Ford, Glauber Rocha, Jonas Mekas, and James Benning, as well as sidebar of rarities (including Frank Capra's silent The Matinee Idol) on loan from the Cinematheque Francaise. Some of those days I entered the building at mid-day and did not re-emerge until well after dusk. And I have since returned to the Lugones many times, during subsequent editions of the BAFICI, and in my own mind whenever I have reflected back on movies seen there. We are a fundamentally transient people, we cinephiles, wandering the earth in search of new moviegoing horizons. So we must, like all pilgrims, seek adoptive homes in various far-flung corners of the globe, and the Lugones is one in which I know I will take shelter again, as soon as the needle on the compass points due south.

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While the younger directors present in Toronto this year have been throwing up bricks (with the notable exception of Jason Reitman's Juno, about which more later), the two most vital movies I've encountered here—the ones most deeply engaged with the culture that has produced them and with the language of cinema itself—are the work of two filmmakers who are already collecting their Social Security checks: Brian De Palma and George A. Romero.

One of somewhere near a dozen films screening in the festival that bear some thematic connection to the war in Iraq, De Palma's Redacted represents an audacious attempt by the Carrie and Carlito's Way director to reconstruct the events leading up to and following the widely reported rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by four U.S. soldiers in the town of Mahmoudiya in 2006. It is an event rife with discomforting parallels to the 1966 rape and murder of a teenage Vietnamese girl that served as the basis for De Palma's masterful 1989 film Casualties of War. But whereas Casualties was staged as straight drama, Redacted plays out as a roundelay of pseudo-documentary formats combined by De Palma in increasingly dense permutations.

The movie begins as the purported video diary of an American army Private, morphs into a French documentary with delusions of humanistic grandeur, becomes a Muslim fundamentalist website's streaming video of IED attacks on U.S. soldiers, and sheds its skin nearly a dozen more times before it's over. Each time the form of the film shifts, so does the perspective on the material: Did, for example, American soldiers indiscriminately open fire on a pregnant Iraqi woman after waving her through a checkpoint, as is reported by an Al Jazeera-like TV network? Or was it just a matter of linguistic confusion, as appears to be the case from the French documentary? And do such distinctions even matter given the chilly lack of remorse exhibited, in the video diary scenes, by the soldier who pulled the trigger?

Redacted poses many such questions and offers few conclusive answers, splintering and obfuscating the “truth” at every possible juncture—sometimes obviously, sometimes less so—as when De Palma inserts a single staged photograph into the montage of “actual” Iraq combat photos that concludes the film. For those and other reasons, Redacted has angered many viewers here, as it did in its Labor Day weekend screenings at the Telluride Film Festival, and that, I would argue, proves just how effective the movie is. De Palma wants to rankle audiences, especially those who may enter the theater anticipating some genteel, hand-wringing, good-little-liberal lament about the physical and emotional scars of wartime. Redacted is unapologetically angry and direct, and De Palma does very little to ease you into the movie. Some have suggested that this is evidence of haphazard construction, or shoddy acting by the film's largely unknown cast, but it is the entire point of Redacted that we are observing crude, found video objects, and that their subjects, aware of the camera that's recording them, assume the awkwardly self-conscious stances of people in vacation pictures and birthday-party videos.

Indeed, the biggest enigma of Redacted may be that anyone could take the film's dizzying manipulations of image and reality as anything less than fully intentional on the part of a director who has spent his entire career pondering the art of voyeurism and who is on record as saying, “Where the camera is placed is, to me, as important as the material itself.” But De Palma's movies have rarely been less than divisive affairs, and unlike some of his recent work (including last fall's The Black Dahlia), Redacted can withstand the criticism and then some: In a sea of dramas, docudramas and documentaries all trying to make some sense out of our misbegotten Middle East adventure, it is the only one I would rank alongside Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight in the category of essential viewing.

Romero's Diary of the Dead isn't an Iraq movie per se, though like Romero's last picture, 2005's Land of the Dead, it features one unmistakable reference to the torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the commemorating of said atrocities with pornographic photo and video keepsakes. Like Redcated, Romero's film also dons several guises, primarily that of a student-made documentary called The Death of Death that has been uploaded onto the web in the days following the outbreak of zombie mayhem. In a conversation following the Diary of the Dead press screening, a friend who works for a prestigious New York museum tells me how, nowadays, the vast majority of the museum's patrons are not content to merely stand and observe the paintings and other objects in its impressive collection, but rather feel compelled to take digital photographs of themselves and their friends/relatives in front of, say, a Van Gogh or a Rodin. And Romero's film is, I think, partly a response to this very tendency—to our perpetual camera-readiness, to the feeling that to film something is to somehow legitimize it, and to the counter-intelligence that says seeing is no longer believing.

Some, of course, will come to Romero's film wanting to see only a gory zombie movie, and they will not go away disappointed. This has always been part and parcel of Romero's subversive genius. Diary of the Dead is chock full of exploding heads and popping eyeballs, includes what may be moviedom's first act of human-zombie murder-suicide, and—since this wouldn't be Romero otherwise—some literal eating of the rich. In the note for Diary in the Toronto festival catalogue, Romero himself points out that the film is neither a sequel to nor remake of his earlier Dead films, but rather something of a new beginning. “This one comes from my heart,” he says—and while few of Romero's films have ever seemed less than heartfelt, there's no denying that Diary of the Dead pulsates with the radical vigor and sense of experimentation one expects of a much younger filmmaker.

“It's too easy to use,” remarks one of Romero's film-student characters, first of a camera and later of a gun, which is roughly the same lesson learned by the cameraman protagonist of Haskell Wexler's 1969 cinema verité classic Medium Cool. Like that movie and David Cronenberg's 1983 Videodrome (which, a good two decades before “reality TV” became a media-world buzz word, offered the sage forecast that “Television is reality, and reality is less than television”), Diary of the Dead and Redacted both posit that our culture's so-called “democracy of images” comes with certain responsibilities—that what, where and when one chooses to film are decisions not to be made lightly, and not without significant consideration of the moral and ethical consequences. These are not new ideas, but in our YouTube'd, MySpace'd age, when young people are as (or more) likely to make their own film as they are to watch somebody else's, they have taken on new resonance. Here in Toronto, De Palma and Romero have been actively engaged in trying to figure out what—if any—place cinema has left in a world of cameras filming cameras and screens reflected in screens.

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Just how far the relationship between tech-toys and journalistic self-importance has progressed might be measured by the man loudly working two cell phones and a laptop right down to the wire at my first Toronto Film Festival screening. At least he had the grace to power down once the movie started, which is more than I can say for the nattily dressed young woman seated next to me who, all entreaties to the contrary, consulted her Blackberry every 10 minutes throughout. That must have been some deal, or tryst, or both she was hoping to seal—it all but ruined my experience of the most beguiling movie I’d see during my four-day stay. Israeli writer director Eran Kolirin’s first feature The Band’s Visit, a deceptively modest comedy about an Egyptian police orchestra’s trip to Israel, comes as sweet balm in a season of terrorist thrillers and vigilante splatter-pics. Played mostly by Palestinian actors, the band gets misdirected to a hole-in-the-wall development town where they’re hosted in with varying degrees of good grace by local Sephardi families, among them a sexy but lonely free spirit beautifully rendered by Ronit Elkabetz, whom you may remember from another excellent Israeli comedy, Late Marriage. With its arresting powder-blue palette and gentle wit, this goofy charmer, which Sony Pictures Classics will release in 2008, offers the sweet credo that the road to conciliation begins not with politicking but with conversation, tea and sympathy, and a little bit of cross-cultural nookie. 


Toronto has always been hospitable to Israeli cinema, and this year being no exception, The Band’s Visit set me on course to see as many as I could while I was there, plus a few others with Jewish themes. Avi Nesher’s The Secrets, an absorbing but florid drama about young women seeking identity and meaning in an Orthodox seminary in the ancient town of Safed, certainly packs in the upper-case themes—feminism, mysticism, lesbian love, it’s all in there. Fanny Ardant gets sutured in rather unfortunately as a possible murderess seeking absolution, but as the melodrama drove off a cliff, I got the queasy feeling that some of Israel’s most pressing social divisions were being ripped off and mangled into soap opera.

In a lower but far more potent register, our own Etgar Keret (LA Weekly regularly runs his short stories) has made a film written by his wife Shira Geffen, about a loosely connected bunch of blitzed young Israelis who are lost to themselves and each other, who regroup and re-pair in every sense of that word. “I don’t like developments,” one of them murmurs dreamily. Just so: Much happens in Jellyfish (to be released by Zeitgeist) and it’s all going somewhere, but not in a straight line, and never to a foregone conclusion.


Finally, I doubt whether anyone outside the very small sub-culture to which I belong (children of the kibbutz) is going to jump up and down about Children of the Sun, a documentary by Ran Tal about kids raised in the kibbutz movement in its Marxist heyday. I went hoping for something that went deeper than the usual bromides about how mothers hated “giving up” their babies to the collective nursery (my mother always said she spent more intimate time with her kids there than she was to get later in her multi-tasking city life back in England). In vain, but this perfectly pleasant film—a welcome antidote for all its limitations to last year’s poisonously resentful narrative feature Sweet Mud—with its home movies and footage of collectivized work and play, took me right back to when we sang and danced in our blue shirts and stout knickers. Sovietized and homogenized, perhaps, but what happy little socialists we were! How perfectly ordinary that life seemed to us, and how utterly bizarre it must seem to anyone on the outside, looking in.
 Well, not quite finally.

Far and away the best film I saw at Toronto this year was Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitsky’s The Counterfeiters, a fact-based drama about a Jewish crook who’s forced by the Nazis to make fake foreign currency designed to destroy the Allies’ economies. Scott and I will have much more to say about this wonderful film when Sony Classics (I’m not on their payroll, honest, they happened to be batting a thousand at Toronto this year) opens it next year. For now I’ll just say that the movie blows a fresh wind through Holocaust cinema, which needs it badly.

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I ended my last post by discussing the work of film festival juries, and as it happens, this year in Toronto I find myself serving on one—not one of the festival's official juries, but rather the film critics' jury organized independently by FIPRESCI, a membership organization consisting of critics from just about every corner of the world. There, I am joined by three colleagues—one from France, one from Chile, and one from good old Canada itself. Our mission is to award a single prize to the best film in the festival's Discovery section, 14 movies described by the Toronto catalogue as “promising feature films by new and emerging directors.” Yet, halfway through the festival and having seen eight of the films, the only thing I've discovered thus far is that it is now possible to dwell almost anywhere on the planet and make films that are as concept-driven, slickly packaged, and direly uninspired as most of what emerges from the Hollywood dream factory.

Don't misunderstand: These aren't uniformly terrible films by any means—in fact, that's part of the problem. Most of them are impeccably well-photographed; some feature better-than-average acting. But just as so many movies from the ever-harder-to-define American Independent arena now look and feel like down-market knock-offs of their big-studio brethren, most of this year's Discovery titles feel like slightly exoticized versions of those Amerindie movie staples: the emo coming-of-age story, the earnest social-issues drama, and the “quirky” relationship comedy. And while the films themselves may hail from Spain, South Africa or Macedonia, their true birthplace is the film-school petri dish, where eager young filmmaking minds are taught "proper" screenwriting etiquette, the "correct" way to shoot and edit a scene, and other techniques designed to result in impersonal lifeless works.

Take, for example, September, a thick-headed civil-rights drama set amidst the farmlands of Western Australia circa 1968 that goes something like this: Idealistic white boy with a sensitive-artistic streak grows up buddy-buddy with the son of his father's aboriginal farmhand, until the ugly face of racial inequality frowns upon their blissful Camelot and turns the once-friendly jabs of the boys' afterschool boxing matches into punishing blows. Naturally, because these are good, honest country folk, they don't say more than four or five words at a time—all the better for the film's writer-director, Peter Carstairs, to fill the screen with lustrous images of wheat fields at dusk and barren rural roads (where, in the film's climax, we see our two protagonists walk past each other in opposite directions, just in case we didn't already get the point).

Or take—please—the shrill Danish comedy With Your Permission, in which the mild-mannered kitchen manager of a commuter ferry must concoct increasingly elaborate cover stories for the nightly physical abuse he takes from his shrew of a wife. Some have suggested that this is an Adam Sandler remake just waiting to happen. I spent most of the running time waiting for Norbit to call and ask for its plot back.

And lo, I have not yet even mentioned The Passage, which is most effectively described as a slightly artier (i.e., it opens with shots of cloud-covered mountaintops at dawn and hand pipes blowing on the soundtrack), less honestly exploitative version of last year's Turistas, here with B-movie-central's Stephen Dorff as an American photographer on vacation in Morocco who fails to heed that age-old wisdom: Beware the comely Muslim woman who cozies up to you in a crowded street bazaar, for inevitably she will want to kidnap you and sell your internal organs on the black market. This is, I feel fairly confident, the worst movie I will see this year, in Toronto or anywhere else. Things can only get better from here.

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There is a famous story about actor-director Erich von Stroheim that goes something like this: Cast as Rommel in Billy Wilder's 1943 Five Graves to Cairo, Stroheim was given a prop Leica camera as part of the character's wardrobe and proceeded to demand that the camera have film in it. When Wilder asked Stroheim why, he replied that an audience can always sense whether something is real or fake. It was that very fetishistic attention to detail and quest for “realism” that had, by then, already proved the bedevilment of so many of Stroheim's own film projects; he was brilliant, and yet, it was said, failed to understand certain basic principles of cinematic illusion.

The ghost of Stroheim looms large over Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, which screened Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival and which, at just shy of three hours, plays like the kind of rough assembly that directors sometimes screen for studio executives and trusted confidants when they're mid-way through the editing process. It is, I think, a work of extraordinary hubris—the kind of megalomaniacal enterprise that can spring forth from a director coming off of a major critical and commercial hit (in Lee's case, Brokeback Mountain) and allowed by producers to indulge his every whim.

Based on the short (I repeat, short) story by the late Chinese writer Eileen Chang, Lust, Caution takes a relatively simple, straightforward tale of love and espionage—think Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious transplanted to Japenese-occupied Shanghai—and stretches it out like worn elastic, not by adding material, but merely by distending each and every moment until the film resembles that old Loony Tunes cartoon where Bugs Bunny inhales ether fumes and everything around him starts moving very verryy ssllooowwwllllyyyy.

The alluring Tang Wei, a former model and television star making her film debut here, plays the impressionable student actress Wong Chia Chi. The reliably debonair Tony Leung is Mr. Yee, the high-ranking Japanese collaborator whom Wong finds herself recruited to seduce and lure into an assassination attempt, and for whom—wouldn't you just know it—she comes to harbor genuine feelings. Their dance of duplicity—which, for reasons the film never makes entirely compelling, takes years to reach its inevitable terminus—includes a handful of explicit sex scenes that have contributed to earning Lust, Caution an NC-17 rating, often a dreaded occurrence for movies seeking to attract a large commercial audience, but here, I suspect, one of the film's few viable selling points. The couplings of Chang and Leung aren't particularly sexy, but they may leave the geriatric art-house patrons whom the film is likeliest to attract feeling as if they've gotten away with something naughty.

As one who has praised many long and slow films in the past, and who wholeheartedly hopes to find time, here in Toronto, for Filipino director Lav Diaz's 540-minute Death in the Land of Encantos, I hope it's clear that I don't object to Lust, Caution solely on the basis of its running time. Rather, I object to its titanic self-importance, to the endless shots of characters exiting cars, entering buildings, climbing staircases, descending said staircases, and so on and so forth, all the while cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto's camera cranes lovingly about the immaculately recreated streets of 1940s Shanghai and scrutinizes every detail of costume designer Pan Lai's magnificent period costumes—all of which seem of greater interest to Lee than the human beings at the center of the film's story. This same kind of ornamental pageantry without purpose could be seen to a less damaging extent in Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, where it was at least held in check by tighter pacing and some dazzling airborne fight choreography. In Lust, Caution, there is but a single moment, late in the film, that bears mentioning: Fearing for his life, Leung's Mr. Yee sprints across a street and elegantly dives into his waiting, chauffeured car in one of those seamless meetings of narrative, performance, and style that deserves to be called cinematic poetry in motion. For a split second, Lust, Caution seems alive in a way it hasn't before, and then, just as soon, it returns to its hibernating state, like a great sleeping bear risen prematurely from slumber.

Yet, as I am writing this, word arrives from this year's just-concluded 75th anniversary edition of the Venice Film Festival that Lust, Caution has been awarded the festival's top prize—the Golden Lion— by a jury comprised exclusively of international directors, including Jane Campion, Paul Verhoeven and Zhang Yimou. As a veteran of more than a few festival juries myself, and having seen most of the other Venice competition films (including Todd Haynes' extraordinary Bob Dylan meta-bio-pic I'm Not There) either here in Toronto or during the selection process for this year's New York Film Festival, I can say with reasonable confidence that the decision smacks of compromise. But I won't belabor the point, since the Venice jury also saw fit to award Brian De Palma with the Silver Lion (or "best director" prize) for his brilliant and searing Iraq war docudrama Redacted (about which I will have more to say in a later post), proving that all really is fair in love, war, and film festivals.

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When, in a Toronto Film Festival preview story appearing in this week's Village Voice, my redoubtable colleague Nathan Lee offered a breathless, A to V list of the filmmakers whose work he was most hotly anticipating during our collective trek to the Great White North, he failed to sandwich Canada's own Jeremy Podeswa in-between the 98-year-old master Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira and the 37-year-old Mexican enfant terrible Carlos Reygadas. Not that the omission of Podeswa, whose first two features—The Five Senses and Eclipse—barely registered a blip on the radar of critics or moviegoers, was accidental: I wouldn't have had him on my must-see list either. But here in Toronto this year, where his latest film, Fugitive Pieces was selected as the festival's opening night film, Podeswa is something of a big man on campus.

From Cannes to Sundance, opening-night movies are notoriously compromised affairs, chosen less for aesthetic reasons than for some alchemic combination of name stars and backers (in this case, Canadian uber-producer Robert Lantos) with wallets big enough to shell out for the inevitable opening-night party. And yes, the movies themselves usually suck. So, I emerged from last night's Toronto screening of Fugitive Pieces surprised by how pretty not-bad it was. Not for the first couple of reels, mind you, which struck me as the dreariest form of Holocaust porn, or for the last half-hour, which afford more false endings than the last Lord of the Rings picture. But somewhere in the middle, the movie—portentously literary title and all—becomes more emotionally gripping, thanks to a gallery of lively performances and a feel for lives ripped apart by violence.

Adapted by Podeswa from a well-regarded novel by Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces tells the story of a Polish Jewish writer, Jakob Beer (Stephen Dillane), who as a boy bears witness to his family's slaughter by the Nazis, is rescued from certain death by a kindly Greek archeologist (Rade Sherbedgia), and ultimately emigrates with his adoptive father to the promised land of Canada. Still, all is not well: Suffering from an acute case of survivor guilt, the adult Beer lives in the present but dwells in the past, forever communing with the ghosts of his dead relatives, devoting himself to the completion of a text about historical memory, and otherwise trying to make some narrative sense out of his life's disparate fragments.

Proust this isn't, and it's hard to sit through Fugitive Pieces without being compelled to smack your head at the boldfaced obviousness of certain scenes, like the one where one Holocaust survivor harshly reprimands his young son for daring to throw away a half-eaten apple. Yet, for all the moments that are conceived as cliché, or which skulk across the screen weighed down by literary shackles (way too much lyrical voiceover, for starters), the movie comes alive in fits and starts. Dillane plays his part with agonized sincerity, particularly in a few scenes with Rosamund Pike (underused as the de rigeur shiksa goddess) in which he finds himself unable to utter the reassuring words that might shore up their imploding relationship. And Sherbedgia cuts an august figure, no matter a role that teeters on the saintly and saddles him with far too many lines that begin "There's an old Greek saying..."

Still, better Fugitive Pieces for opening night, I reckon—at least from the p.o.v. of the Toronto programmers—than David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, another Lantos-produced tale of the collision between old world and new, this one set in a London underworld of Russian émigré gangsters and the underage whores who fear them. Festival curtain-raisers, after all, are supposed to be warm, life-affirming, audience-pleasing affairs, with minimal throat-slittings, nude fight scenes in public bath houses, and other potential impediments to the evening's after-partying. So, Eastern Promises finds itself in one of Toronto's later “gala” slots, where it seems destined to divide viewers (as Cronenberg typically has) into two distinct camps: those who recognize its director as one of the most important filmmakers of his generation and those who, well, just don't get it. Like Conenberg's last picture, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises (which was written by Dirty Pretty Things' Steven Knight) pulls you in on a tide of familiarity—a set-up involving an innocent woman (Naomi Watts) drawn into this menacing subculture that wouldn't have seemed out of place in a '40s noir—then embarks on a series of inimitably Cronenbergian machinations including, but not limited to, bodily dismemberment and the transmutation of identity. Beyond that, I won't say much more—J. Hoberman and Nathan Lee will do those honors in next week's print edition, when the film opens in L.A.—except that Eastern Promises is one of the year's great movie achievements, Canadian or otherwise. Now back to the movies.

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