Happy @tiff! On tap today: Beyond the hills, Tabu, Amour.
My #tiff12 is off to good if disturbing start with Palme d'Or winner Mungiu's Beyond the Hills. Reminds me of Schmid's equally eery Requiem.
I watched Beyond the Hills as a meditation on a (more or less unified) Europe today, with two women lost between a rock and a hard place -- Romania and Germany. East & west, modernity & middle ages, sexuality & religion, obsession & loneliness, mental illness, desolate orphanages...a film to watch 5x to reveal itself fully.
More Palme d'Or @TIFFnow: Michael Haneke's end-of-life tale Amour begins with death, even before the opening credits. Always the auteur (in a upliftingly auteur-heavy festival this year), the Austrian master then takes close-ups of the little deaths that precede the end. Great scene early on: An intimate father-daughter conversation appears all chatty and quotidian, then in one instance and little words uncovers their very different ideas of love.
Missed Match Factory/zdf/arte copro #Tabu @berlinale. Now finally @ TIFF Bell Lightbox (where it will have a run soon, don't miss it). Tabu is Guy Maddin-esque in its bizarreness, otherworldliness, humour + b&w silent era feel. The film actually goes (sort of) silent in its second half with suppressed dialogue & flashback narration. Formally intriguing, it also shines with brilliant piano score by Joana Sa, magical DoP & fantastic female cast. Understandably got a lot attention in Berlin, now hopefully in Toronto. The worthwhile (and stunning) press book has an interesting exchange between Portuguese director Miguel Gomes and German directors Maren Ade (Everyone Else; also Tabu's co-producer) and Ulrich Koehler (Sleeping Sickness):
How did the idea for the silent second part come up?
I’m not even sure the second part of the film is technically a silent film. Dialogue is suppressed, but there is a narrative voice-over that recounts the sequence of events taking place in this segment of the film. And there are the letters Ventura and Aurora exchange. Someone is telling a story for someone else who is listening to it. Between Ventura’s memory and Pilar’s and Santa’s visualization of his narrative there is no place for dialogue. As if the concrete words exchanged between characters got lost in time. It was also from this perspective that I wanted to address the aesthetics of silent film (or even of Super 8, a domestic and more recent variety of primitive and silent film). I didn’t want to make a modern pastiche of silent film, but rather find another way of getting through to some of its essence and beauty. Well, at least try to.
Was it a search for a cinema that doesn’t exist anymore?
Tabu is a film about the passage of time, about things that disappear and can only exist as memory, phantasmagoria, imagery – or as cinema, which summons and congregates all that. We chose to shoot the film in black and white, which is also on the verge of extinction – 35mm for the contemporary section, 16mm for the African section. I’m sometimes asked why the first part isn’t in color, according to the (somewhat absurd) convention that the past is in black and white and the present in color.
Where exactly is Mount Tabu?
There is no Mount Tabu in Mozambique, don’t believe everything you see in the movies!
One that note I am looking forward to sharing drinks with my colleagues at the opening party now. After a satisfying day and three films I'm glad I saw.
P.S. Curious about this Canadian newcomer, at the end of the day I also snuck into near-SF celebrity critique Antiviral by Brandon Cronenberg that comes with some Cannes hype. 20 minutes later I snuck out.
by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto
