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FeedRe-entering the void of the 2009 Toronto Film Festival
Last year's Toronto International Film Festival was probably my personal favorite, and I think Jared would agree with me. Several of the films we saw—The White Ribbon and Up in the Air, specifically—went on to Oscar noms and critical kudos. And several, including Antichrist and Enter the Void, drew wildly diverse reactions, if not outright condemnation.
In other words, chaos reigned, baby.
In four days at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival, I witnessed the following—onscreen, thankfully: the slo-mo plummeting of a toddler from an open apartment window, male genital-crushing, blood ejaculation, a self-administered clitoridectomy, murder by medicine-withholding, death by stoning, the brutal beating of a mentally disabled boy, a couple hours of out-of-body first-person wandering, a visualization of a male orgasm from the interior of the female body, decapitation by one-eyed Viking, and a post-apocalyptic landscape populated by hordes of cannibals, thieves, and murderers. Oh, and Matt Damon with a paunch and dweeb moustache.
This was TIFF09, and while it might not have been pretty, it was mostly brilliant, an affirmation of the power of cinema to distill a real-life landscape of worldwide paranoia and fear into art. At least that’s what Spree co-worker Jared Mobarak and I think of this, our third year at TIFF.
Things started innocuously with the bodacious Megan Fox’s appropriately saucy turn in the soon-to-bomb Jennifer’s Body—yeah, her sex is on fire. Next came Lone Scherfig’s charming An Education, a coming-of-age treat written by Nick Hornby and set in pre-Beatlemania London. It included a star-making turn from young Carey Mulligan. We finished off day one with Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist … and … well … I’ll get back to Antichrist.
Day two included the debut feature from Jordan Scott (Ridley’s daughter): Cracks is a compelling boarding school drama starring the darkly ravishing Eva Green and Juno Temple. Jane Campion’s story of John Keats’s doomed love, Bright Star was as moving as one would hope, featuring extraordinary performances. The night ended with Irreversible director Gasper Noé’s Enter the Void, and … let’s wait on that, too.
The Informant! is very funny, and already underrated; director Steven Soderbergh introduced it by promising no sex or videotape, but many, many lies. Agora and the Viking romp Valhalla Rising were visually stunning, but unlovable.
But later came Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, a film that haunts, intrigues, and fascinates me weeks later. Set in a small Austrian village shortly before World War I breaks out, Ribbon tells of a series of bizarre, violent, seemingly unexplainable “accidents” that may involve the blond-haired young. To say any more would be ruinous; suffice to say, it’s likely 2009’s finest film. It lacks any—any-—sort of resolution, but ambitious viewers will be rewarded by something quite unlike anything they’ve seen before. (Hint: Haneke refers vaguely to “the beginning of terrorism”— Nazism?—in the press notes.)
Others: Jason Reitman’s odds-on best picture nominee Up in the Air was as funny as it was emotionally involving, with a note-perfect George Clooney (best actor, too?); and the long-awaited adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was a well-made stunner.
I can’t put them off any longer … I think Von Trier’s Antichrist and Noé’s Enter the Void are incredibly powerful works, each sharply criticized in some circles as unwatchable or worse, and they were two of the most intense experiences I’ve ever had in a cinema. In their own way, these are horror films about the fragility of childhood, the burden of guilt, the possibilities of life after death, and the scary beauty of everyday life. As with Ribbon, I find images from these films replaying in my mind—a neon-lit hotel populated by fornicating bodies, the blurred faces of scores of women ascending a hill, bodies zig-zagged in a forest landscape, a junkie’s corpse slumped on a dirty men’s room. To me, Void and Antichrist were involving, overwhelming, deeply personal visions. In other words, the epitome of what one can discover at such a fest.
Are these not sounding enjoyable? Good. Sometimes art has to hurt. And TIFF09, above all else, proved to Jared and me that the spirit of cinema is alive and well. Happily, for these four days, the horror stayed onscreen.
