Certainly, many people will try and distance themselves from the luxe sensory experience of Perfume, Tom Tykwer’s ambitious, more than a tad ridiculous, often exhilarating, wildly textured adaptation of Patrick Süskind’s cult classic novel. An intriguingly self-sufficient, heavily metaphorical slab of expressionistic romantic-horror that by virtue of its highly descriptive style, reportedly became both the biggest selling German novel since Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front as well as a mainstay in creative writing courses worldwide, Süskind’s book never seemed particularly filmable, as it’s predicated almost entirely on describing 18th-century France via its smells: from the fetid to the flowering. Tykwer’s task, then, is monumental, and while the approach may not be novel (lots of close-ups, rhythmic cutting, evocative photography, John Hurt, natch, providing storybook voiceover, and of course, shots of nostrils flaring…), the affect is nearly swoony: long passages without dialogue or narration, drinking in the nape of a neck, the turn of an arm…The film feels so stripped down to the bare essentials that when it gets to its final half-hour, wall to wall with sensory flights of fancy, it doesn’t seem remotely alienating. If anything, Tykwer’s great with consistency of tone, and Perfume, a dastardly difficult project that flirts with the risible in its Goya-esque mixing of the grotesque and the gorgeous, benefits from his steadfast cinematic gaze.
So, what is it? More on the film later when it opens, but it’s basically the story of a serial killer, born into stench, with heightened olfactory senses, spurred on to murder young women so that he can claim, own, and perhaps literally bottle their allure. The young man’s mysterious nature (he seems to both grovel beneath and float above humanity) make him both devil and angel (fittingly, actor Ben Whishaw is alternately pin-up cute and toad-like repellent, based on how he’s shot); as a cipher, he’s terrifying on the page, yet on screen (one of the film’s inherent drawbacks) perhaps more penetrable, magnetic, and less of the unknown being he needs to be.
It’s a film that seems destined to please those who hold the novel close to their hearts (though I don’t know if the book would today live up to its outsized reputation; appropriately, the book wafts across my memory like a faint scent from childhood). Every scene reimagines Süskind’s key ingredients for the screen with exacting lushness, and even the sizable missteps (Dustin Hoffman camping it up as the grand master perfume maker Baldini…go ahead, laugh, I think it’s okay…) add to the entire project’s ever-growing unease. There’s even a whiff of Hammer horror and a splash of Nosferatu in this film, which is even odder on screen than in novel form. Rather than bring Süskind’s creepy fable to the mainstream, Tykwer’s film will probably become as much of a cult item as its source material. Mission accomplished, then, I say.
Hail all ye kingmakers: Romania is officially the new hotbed of international art cinema.
On the heels of Cristi Puiu’s lacerating The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, comes Corneliu Poromboiu’s lighter, but no less accomplished 12:08 East of Bucharest. Where Lazarescu could be argued as having politicized the body to offer a critique of contemporary human relations, Bucharest literally deals with the body politic as refracted through a motley group of characters and their questionable involvements in the 1989 revolution which ousted Ceausescu (at 12:08 PM). Hugely pompous Virgil Jderescu hosts a local access television program, and has scheduled for the day of the film a look back 16 years (a comically arbitrary number) to question whether or not protesters in their sleepy town (East of Bucharest) participated in the revolution, or merely followed in its wake. His equally arbitrary guests are Manescu, town professor and drunk, who recasts himself as the hero of the day, and old man Piscoci who seem notable only in that he’s asked by those in his apartment building to play Santa Claus.
The final forty minutes of this brief work are devoted to Jderescu and his two guests fending off questions from callers in a hilariously run down studio. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a filmmaker do so much with so little, but Poromboiu milks three setups (played as the studio cameras) for comic gold, even as the broadcast touches on politics, revolution, the Romanian character, and the brutal evisceration of one man’s reputation. It’s a hugely dense and precisely choreographed sequence—the amount of information parsed through what is usually a rather hokey device is astonishing.
But this is not to say that the film lives and dies here. From its opening moments Bucharest announces itself as a major work, proceeding without hurry or any apparent desire for our full comprehension through a series of apartment interiors as our three heroes prepare for their day. The deft mixture of comedy and pathos is immediately present, as is the director’s eye for small details, all of which are tied up nicely as the narrative wears on. This is a thoroughly considered work, and features one of the more graceful bookends you’re likely to find on film. This one’s a total keeper.
The critical exhaltation of this week’s premiere of the abysmal Aaron Sorkin gabfest, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, established once and for all that you don’t have to be “smart” to be “smart.” By transplanting the same eye-darting rhythms and stilted cadences to a behind-the-scenes look at an L.A. Saturday Night Live-ish show, Sorkin proves that he doesn’t care to delve into other worlds so much as project the same fetishes onto everything he does. He’s the anti-Altman: there’s no sense of discovery in his work, and the world becomes one like-minded pool of scatterbrained egos.
I only bring this up because I tremble at the thought of this tired retread becoming an acclaimed award-winning show, praised for its “truth” and “timeliness” and, yes, of course, yawn, “wit” (if you don’t think that word is overused, think about how many things are actually witty…go ahead, name a few), while Christopher Guest’s upcoming For Your Consideration is accused of being old-fashioned or dated. Having heard the mixed reviews coming out of Toronto, it seems that a Guest backlash is forming, and the chosen line of attack is that it’s not relevant or parodic enough…not about Hollywood today…now! Having seen the film, I should note that it should be quite obvious that it’s not aiming for trenchant satire: For Your Consideration isn’t “smart” in that boring way that Aaron Sorkin’s mile-a-minute, dime-a-dozen dramadies are, brimming with behind-the-scenes shenanigans that are supposed to lend them instant cred. No, For Your Consideration is boldly anachronistic, a wonderfully old-fashioned comedy both in the tradition of Jewish and SCTV sketch humor. Its level of “satire” is something akin to Martin Short’s Primetime Glick—a compliment, indeed. And in its breaking away from the constraints of the mockumentary form (a post-credits crane shot (!) announces the rejection of the talking-heads-n-handheld formula, which had been slightly boxing in the Guest troupe in his previous outings), For Your Consideration frees up the tremendously talented actors to riff and improv their way through a fairly straightforward narrative.
One thing Guest hasn’t left behind is his focus on his characters’ very tangible hopes and disappointments, which are perhaps more magnified than ever this time. And talk about game, these people are on fire here: John Michael Higgins’s pompous Choctaw-idiom–spouting publicity agent, Jennifer Coolidge’s demented glamour-puss producer, Parker Posey’s neurotic actress, Don Lake & Michael Hitchcock’s “Love It/Hate It” TV film critics, Fred Willard & Jane Lynch’s monstrous Extra!-ish co-announcers—For Your Consideration scats and bops from one hilarious moment to the next. This is no claws-out, insider-y, poison-pen letter to Hollywood à la The Player: this is a wonderfully inelegant mix of verbal and slapstick highs. And its focus on the buzz-making “world wide interweb”’s (as per Higgins’s parlance) control not over the minds of the money-counters but over the hearts of the actors/filmmakers themselves, adds a significant emotional layer of identification between the critical establishment and the artists at their whim (Shyamalan could only wish to accomplish this so slyly). Representing the fragility of this bond is Catherine O’Hara, whose incredible work here (hitting just as hard as her one-liners and physical shtick hit are her moments of heart-rending pathos, often within the same scene) will probably not be recognized come awards-time due to the general bias against comedy in the Academy and elsewhere. Don’t believe the hype (something this film would definitely agree with): For Your Consideration is a treat. More on this film closer to its release.
It’s late here at the Toronto Film Festival, but before I pass out, I think it bears mentioning that large sections of The Fountain feature a bald and pajama’ed Hugh Jackman lotusing his way through outer space in an intergalactic snow globe that carries the precious tree of life. And that he’ll often levitate out of said snow globe into one of two narratives: a half-hearted conquistador quest for Eden at the behest of the Queen of Spain (Rachel Weisz) and a modern-day medical drama where he’s researching ways to stop brain tumors in monkeys because his wife (also Rachel Weisz), of course, is dying of a tumor. By the end of the film, our hero’s learned the limits of his own abilities as a mortal, the larger interconnectedness of things, and that if one stabs the tree of life and drinks its nectar plants will grow out of your belly and mouth.
And no, I’m not making any of this up. The Fountain is truly one for the ages.
It’s time to add another entry to the list of films whose titles say all that needs saying. Reconfigure the letters in Babel only slightly, and you’ll capture the essence of this globe-trotting work, the third part of some rudely shoehorned post facto trilogy that includes Amores perros and 21 Grams. So disheartened was I by the put-on nihilism and general vacuity of Perros that I sat 21 Grams out entirely, and I entered Babel with more than a few reservations, but with a vague hope that a filmmaker who seemed to show signs of some unified aesthetic sensibility in the midst of the intellectual bankruptcy that marred Perros might do better.
I won’t deny that Babel represents an improvement on Amores perros, but that doesn’t necessarily make it worth 142 minutes of your time. Set across three continents (Africa, Asia, North America) and following four stories, I’m sure Babel was conceived as some sort of grand statement on global interconnectedness, but it’s realized more along the lines of a sixth-grade thought exercise: If a butterfly flaps its wings in Africa, will there be a tropical storm in the Caribbean? This isn’t a movie that attempts to riff off disparate stories and themes in search of a broader perspective—Babel’s game is all about winnowing global complexity and human experience down to silly narrative contrivances. Somewhat thankfully Iñárritu withholds the crucial, wholly ridiculous, link that binds the Japan-set portion of the narrative to the other stories until mid-way through the film, and this at least offers an hour of near-credibility before we become aware of how entirely hokey a contraption Babel is.
Populated with a host of archetypes (a teenaged deaf-mute volleyball player trying to puzzle out her sexuality amidst the sensory overload of Tokyo being the most ludicrously overdetermined, if most compelling anyway), Babel might have fared better if it worked harder to foreground its entirely artificial nature. Iñárritu’s only real concern at this point seems to be narrative mechanics, so I’m not sure how he reconciles that with his insistence on all the registers of realism tremulous camera work, non-actors, and location shooting can provide. The initial minutes of the film amongst the goat herders of Morocco has a nicely lived-in quality that reminded me more than a little of Mountain Patrol: Kekexili, and I’d have been happy to watch this movie at feature-length, but its not long before we shipped off to San Diego, then back to Morocco, then Tokyo, and so on. Some of his cuts between locales work smoothly, others are too obviously telegraphed, but if Iñárritu had never tried to connect the stories narratively at all, this might not have been an issue.
But, people buy this kind of stuff, and in great quantities. I can’t say I’d rather folks pay money to see You, Me, and Dupree, but I can already smell the hosannas that will get dropped on the lap of this “ingenious” and “mind-bogglingly complex” work. I’m sure no one will report on how two of the four sequences involve young girls exposing themselves, but, hey, who’s counting, right? I’ll admit that in a fall bursting with contenders (Forster, Shainberg, McGrath, Condon, Scott…does Tom Shadyac have a film?) Babel might barely register on the overall scale of offensiveness, but still…
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