The Porn of Pain

Suffering may be the great, undying subject of cinema, but at any film festival worth its salt, the escalating volume of calamity, catastrophe and apocalypse means that the conscientious (or congenitally miserabilist) critic risks drowning in pain porn. Stumbling from divorce to rape to abuse to endless variations on the art of killing, it’s easy to grow addicted, then numbed into insensitivity. Resolving to go against that grain this year, I took myself off to an early screening of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. After the travesty of Vera Drake, which is predicated on the charming notion that the British working classes speak in grunts and swill tea all day, I was ready for light relief and intrigued by the idea of a movie that takes optimism as its subject and isn’t The Sound of Music. As an equal fan of Leigh’s bleak early television work and his delightful Life is Sweet and Topsy-Turvy, I had High Hopes for his new film. But despite the elfin charm of Sally Hawkins, who plays an elementary schoolteacher with a sunny outlook that repels all adversity, Happy-Go-Lucky struck me as another form of condescension to the lower orders, only in primary colors. I’ll have more to say about this simple-minded pap (redeemed only by Eddie Marsan’s blistering performance as a driving instructor with anger-management issues) when it opens next month. For now, I can only roll my eyes at Hawkins’ giggling young thing, attired in circus reds and blues to emphasize her innate happiness, and so brimming over with loving kindness that she wanders down alleys in iffy quarters of North London after dark, looking for homeless guys to empathize with.

So, back to suffering. After interviewing the suavely self-possessed Ari Folman, director of Waltz with Bashir, the extraordinary animated documentary about post-traumatic stress disorder among Israeli veterans of the 1982 war with Lebanon, I sat through 135 minutes of Gomorrah, Matteo Garrone’s dramatic portrait of the notorious Italian mafia organization Neapolitan Camorra, among whose many business ventures, we learn, is the rebuilding of the Twin Towers. Focusing on the ancillary figures who, willingly or not, prop up the mafia’s activities, the movie shows to devastating effect — and with much arch referencing of the Godfather trilogy — how vulnerable children get caught up in the seductive violence and ruthlessly destroyed by the network’s hardened henchmen. If only the director were a little less excited himself by the brutality he depicts.

The same might be said for the excellent Danish picture Flame & Citron, but I’d make a case for the brashness of this elegantly skilled, fact-based drama about internal tensions within the Scandinavian resistance movement World War II. Focusing on two brash assassins — one who loves killing, the other who makes a mess of everything else — responsible for executing Danish collaborators with the Nazis, director Ole Christian Madsen complicates the heroic honor codes of movies about the “good war.” Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 masterpiece Army of Shadows is an obvious influence, but Flame & Citron is the film that the horribly over-rated Black Book might have been, had Paul Verhoeven not indulged himself in the shlock reversal of sensitive Nazis and treacherous partisans.

Obsessed though I am with the two World Wars, half an hour was all I could stand of Paul Schrader’s Adam Resurrected. Clumsily adapted from a novel by the fine Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk, the movie stars Jeff Goldblum as a German former cabaret clown driven mad by his concentration camp brutalization at the hands of, who else, Willem Dafoe. When Goldblum went down on all fours and barked like a dog — an important development in the novel that Schrader manages to make ridiculous — I made my escape to Tony Manero, a study of blood-curdling ruthlessness in Chile during the Pinochet era. Directed with grungy finesse by Pablo Larrain, the movie features a brilliantly chilling performance by Alfredo Castro as an aging Santiago lumpenprole obsessed with winning a John Travolta lookalike contest. The depravity of this exceptionally good film, though hardly exploited, is so disabling that had it been the last film I saw at Toronto, I’d have had to shoot myself.

Luckily on my last morning I dragged myself out of bed for an early screening of Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale, which at 150 minutes would be an indulgence in almost any other hands. Craftily hijacking the sob stories of the home-for-the-holidays domestic drama — from cancer to sibling rivalry to lost love — Desplechin turns them into a wonderfully fractured, endlessly self-renewing prose poem on the mysteries of family life. In its quarrelsome, logorrheic way, A Christmas Tale achieves a giddy happiness that, when it’s over, makes you want to slope off somewhere quiet to continue savoring its delights. So I did, all alone with my cappuccino and biscotti, and almost missed my plane.