Remembrance of Things Past

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.