Toronto Day 3: Reality and its Discontents

By Peter Bowen On September 13, 2009

Yesterday as most of us were sitting in darkened theaters watching films about gruesome murders and clever robberies, broken lives and bumping sex, a real-life caper was happening a few blocks away at the Four Seasons Hotel. A producer set down a briefcase filled with about $12,000 dollars and a new script in the hobby lobby. Then as TheStar.com reports: “A man, captured by security cameras, entered the lobby, sat down beside the briefcase and placed his knapsack beside it. He then picked up both items and walked.”

Real crime has a peculiar effect at a film festival. A few years ago a man was shot to death at a hotel filled with festival goers. It’s a shame when reality decides to crash the party. For myself, it changes my perspective just a bit. It makes watching an otherwise zany torture porn piece, like the Sean Byrne’s Australian prom night nightmare The Loved Ones, a bit more uncomfortable than usual. It’s news that turns a poignant documentary like Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s How to Fold a Flag, a four-part portrait of Iraq war veterans, all of whom served in the same unit, hard to see as just another movie. The four men all keep the war with them in different ways: one, a gentle man with four kids who competes in the brutal sport of cage fighting to keep the war alive; another returns home only to face death again as his mother struggles with cancer; a third tries to forget by losing himself in heavy metal; and finally one who takes the war to the street as he enters the local Congressional race as an Iraq veteran.

But reality comes in all forms and shapes. For two world auteurs like French filmmaker Francois Ozon and Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, reality is not the subject but the subtext of the films they bring to Toronto. Hirokazu Kore-eda, one of our great poets of death and memory, turns to pure fantasy in Air Doll in order to reflect on the most brutal realities of human existence––we all die. The story begins in one of those juxtapositions of the cute and the obscene that seems quintessentially Japanese. A middle aged man (Itsuji Itao) complains to his spouse Nozomi about the petty politics at the burger joint where he works as a waiter, and then takes her upstairs for a squeaky night of sex. Only it’s not the bed springs that squeak; it Nozomi, who just happens to be a blow-up sex doll dressed in sexy French maid’s outfit. As the film progresses the doll (Bae Doo-na) seems to slowly come alive, look for meaning and love in this strange new world. Based on a popular manga The Pneumatic Figure of a Girl, the film sparks a rich tradition of cultural references, from Pinocchio and Frankenstein to the 1987 Andrew McCarthy flick Mannequin. While  Nozomi fulfills her spousal duties every night when she returns home to be an air doll, by day she takes a job in a video rental store and explores what it means to be alive. As she begins to comprehend her identity as a sex substitute, her journey begins to illustrate how much everything in our lives is substitution: videos for films, films for real life, fantasies for emotions, plastic flowers for real ones…and so on. Much of this commentary seems particularly Japanese, but the overall effect is profoundly universal. In the end the question rides on what in our lives can we never substitute for some thing else, and the answers seem to return to Kore-eda’s major themes of time and memory.

In his new film, The Refuge, Francois Ozon again demonstrates that melodrama is not a substitute for reality, but a different way of interpreting it. The story begins with a death (and, yes, ends with a birth). A young couple––Mousse (Isabelle Carre) and Louis (Melvil Poupaud)––are camped out in a abandoned luxury Parisian apartment doing heroin. The next morning Louis’ mother finds them in a coma. Louis dies, and Mousse survives only to learn she is pregnant. Pure melodrama. When Mousse takes refuge in a small country house by the ocean (where she deals with her methadone treatment and her pregnancy), she’s visited by Louis’ brother Paul (Louis-Ronan Choisy), who might at first seem like the perfect substitute for her dead lover, only Paul is gay and not Louis’ blood brother. Ozon then stages a perfectly tuned waltz of personal intrigue, emotional distress, and sexual confusion. As with great melodrama (like those of Sirk and Fassbinder), the story provides the scenery to stage a number of probing questions. Here the normalcy of heterosexuality, the condition of gay marriage and adoption, the fragility of sexual identity itself. And the fun is how tawdry and tittilating they reamin as drama, not insight.