POSTCARD #2 FROM TORONTO 2006
BLACK BOOK, LOVE FOR SALE, 7 ANS, AND GLUE
Reviewed by Joel Johnson
Here is
another installment of short reviews from last September’s Toronto
International Film Festival. The Netherlands’s Best Foreign Language Oscar
entry Black Book will be released into American movie theaters
beginning on April 4, 2007. The New Directors/New Film series from the Film
Society of Lincoln Center is a harbinger of spring’s arrival and this year
three films (Love for Sale, 7 Ans, and Glue)
that I saw in Toronto are featured in the film series.
BLACK BOOK: Paul Verhoeven (RoboCop, Total Recall,
Basic Instinct, and Showgirls) returned home to his native
Holland to film a complicated story about the Nazi occupation and Dutch
resistance during World War II. The main character in the film is a young
Jewish woman named Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), who, when the story
begins, is simply trying to avoid being sent to a concentration camp so she
can survive the war. When a plan to escape from occupied Holland goes
tragically awry, she changes from evade and survive to an active engage and
disrupt. She entertains the Nazis by singing at their parties, fraternizes
with them, gets a job in their headquarters, and then passes information to
her compatriots in the resistance. However, what would normally be a classic
battle of good guys versus bad guys soon develops rather extraordinary
complexity. Some of the good guys really aren’t good, and some of the bad
guys aren’t that bad. The film’s plot twists, and shifting loyalties
illustrate the extraordinary moral challenges endemic to war. It brings out
the best and the worst in human nature. Verhoeven and his coscreenwriter
Gerard Soeteman shoehorn a lot of different things into one woman’s story.
If it seems to push the limits of credibility, that may be because the film
is derived from the experiences of three different women during World War
II. However, Verhoeven insisted to festivalgoers in Toronto that all of the
events in the film actually happened. The film shows collaboration most foul
and the vicious persecution of undercover members of the resistance for the
appearance of collaboration. This holds up a mirror for the Dutch to see how
war’s strain has revealed their humanity and its flaws. War is such a
maelstrom of morality that not even the Canadian forces that liberated
Holland emerge with their heroic virtue unsullied. This is a very well-made
film with stellar performances throughout, but a truly terrific Oscar-worthy
lead performance was turned in by Ms. van Houten. I would not be surprised
to see her emerge as an international star.
LOVE
FOR SALE (SUELY IN THE SKY): Karim Aïnouz’s (Madame Satã) film
was known as Suely in the Sky when it was shown at the Toronto
International Film Festival. It has been renamed Love for Sale for
its appearance at the New Directors/New Films series put on this spring by
the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The film tells the story of a young
woman trying to remake her life. The film opens with Hermila describing the
impulsive sexual encounter that produced her son and led to her to marry the
baby’s father. However, the film quickly moves when she returns from São
Paulo to her home village in northeastern Brazil. She arrives alone with her
infant son and is waiting for her husband who supposed to be following in a
few days. As the days become weeks, it is clear that her marriage is in deep
trouble. This is a slice-of-life film. It is firmly grounded in a dusty,
hardscrabble life in a community where nearly everyone is having a hard time
getting by. While the reckless sex and failed marriage certainly could lead
to a heavy dose of recriminations and tears, the film has more than
disappointment and despair. It has love, desire, ingenuity, determination,
and energy. Hermila resumes a dependent lifestyle in her grandmother’s home,
cobbling together part-time jobs to contribute to the household and
otherwise living life as an almost single twenty-one-year-old woman. Her
grandmother Zezita and Hermila’s lesbian Aunt Maria provide a supportive
cocoon and do a lot of childcare. João, her old boyfriend, is ready to pick
up the emotional pieces of Hermila’s failed relationship. Yet despite the
support that she receives, Hermila is not happy to have come back home and
is not comfortable being a mother. She devises a raffle to finance her new
beginning. The prize is Suely—a pseudonym for Hermila. The new title leaves
little coyness as to nature of the prize for the raffle-winner. The acting
is very good, and Hermila Guedes, who plays Hermila, was recognized as Best
Actress at the Slovak Film Festival in Prague. The film is deliberately
paced, adding to the sense of reality. Its most glaring weakness would
appear to be that it never has Hermila express a vision for what she wants
from life. However, one needs to remember that many life decisions made by
young people are not based on what is truly wanted but rather what they
think must be avoided. Hermila may not win unqualified approval, but you
will not stop caring about her.
7
ANS: Jean-Pascal Hattu makes an interesting feature film debut as the
director and screenwriter of this challenging film about the relationships
between men in prison, the women they have left outside the prison walls,
and the men who guard them on the inside. The French title refers to a
seven-year prison sentence. Although the film’s premise of a triangle
masterminded by the prisoner is certainly farfetched, the extreme nature of
the prison setting means that all bets are off as far as what is truly
inconceivable. As the triangle between the prisoner Vincent (Bruno
Todeschini), his wife Maïté (Valérie Donzelli), and the prison guard Jean
(Cyril Troley) unfolds, each plot revelation fits the reality the filmmaker
has fashioned. Even so, the film’s deliberate pace and downbeat themes give
the film a narrow emotional range and relatively low energy. While the
actors have created characters—especially Valérie Donzelli’s Maïté —that the
audience cares about, and they are in a situation that causes lurid
fascination, the filmmaker doesn’t quite know how to resolve the story. The
result is the film seems to stop more than reach an ending.
1/2
GLUE:
This is Alexis Dos Santos feature film debut, and it is very intriguing. The
strong suit of this Argentine film is how it superbly captures the essence
of the adolescent search for identity and meaning in two adolescent boys and
an adolescent girl. This makes the film an important artistic work. In
addition to the ruminations on meaning and identity, there’s plenty of teen
experimentation with sex and drugs. The film’s title is drawn from the
several sequences showing the use of glue as an intoxicant. Along with
various other scenes of Lucas (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), Nacho (Nahuel Viale),
and Andrea (Inés Efron) engaging in masturbatory, homoerotic, and ménage a
troi behavior, these sequences may make many filmgoers feel their
sensibilities are under assault. Likewise, the near complete abdication of
parental responsibilities will be difficult for some audience members to
accept. This is absolutely not a film for those easily shocked and dismayed
by teenaged misbehavior, but the film definitely seems to overreach in
heavy-handedly laying on the aberrant behavior, making it a mixed bag
indeed.
1/2.
