One Week, Seven Days, 33 Films

Life during wartime linked the impressive animated feature Persepolis—adapted from Marjane Satrapi’s (autobio)graphic novels of growing up in the wake of the Islamic Revolution—to Paul Haggis’ Iraq drama In the Valley of Elah (see Short Takes on p. 68). A fictionalized telling of an appalling real-life incident—the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the killing of her family by U.S. soldiers—Brian De Palma’s gutsy, conceptually flawed Redacted stitches together a new-media patchwork of fake YouTube footage, video diaries, vlogs, news broadcasts, even a pretentious French documentary scored to the “Saraband” music from Barry Lyndon. This should be entirely in De Palma’s wheelhouse—it amounts to a sobering update of his stunning Vietnam rape-murder drama Casualties of War—but if anything, the movie isn’t splintered and contradictory enough.

As different from Romero’s MySpace apocalypse and De Palma’s downloaded diatribe as a movie could be, Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary My Kid Could Paint That nonetheless raises similar matters in reporting the rise of Marla Olmstead, a 4-year-old painter who became an art-world sensation. Then the story takes a jarring twist—and Bar-Lev asks probing questions about modern art, our fascination with prodigies, and even his own perhaps exploitative role as filmmaker. If nothing else, Bar-Lev issues a direct challenge to those who form their impression of an artwork from the signature.

Speaking of which, Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely seemed to overcome much of the press corps’ apparent hostility toward its maker. (It was picked up by IFC First Take, who came away with several of the fest’s finest films, among them 4 Months…, Gus Van Sant’s exquisite study in elided guilt Paranoid Park, and Catherine Breillat’s lacerating Une Vieille Maitresse.) The Nashville-based director’s first film since julien donkey-boy, it’s a childlike fable of faith and forged identity about a lonesome Michael Jackson look-alike (Diego Luna) who finds temporary shelter with a coastal commune of fellow celebrity impersonators, including a vulnerable Marilyn Monroe (a heartrending Samantha Morton) and her brutish Charlie Chaplin husband (Denis Lavant). Korine’s gift for shambling vaudeville and striking absurdist imagery shines here, as in the marvelous opening shot of a clown-bike rider and a stuffed monkey-angel circling lazily to the Bobby Vinton title song. But it’s the haunting ending that makes the film.

The other movie that’s been buzzing in my head for days is I’m Not There, writer-director Todd Haynes’ mesmerizing take on Bob Dylan’s life, career and ever-changing personas, each embodied by a different actor: Cate Blanchett (better than you could even hope) as the frizzy Judas Dylan of the mid-60s; Richard Gere as the outlaw Dylan out of Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and the Harry Smith Anthology’s old weird Americana; Christian Bale as the folkie Dylan who goes Christian; Heath Ledger as a sort of composite of ’70s sell-out Dylan and the folly of traditional biopics; young Marcus Carl Franklin as the Woody Guthrie wannabe Dylan. Will it make a lick of sense to anyone who can’t list everyone pictured on the cover of The Basement Tapes? Maybe not, but it’s a thrilling intellectual puzzle—the best movie anyone will ever make of Greil Marcus’ Invisible Republic.

On a whim, I ended the festival with a film I knew nothing about—and it proved to be my favorite. A Gentle Breeze in the Village, by Japanese director Nobuhiro Yamashita, follows the children of a village’s tiny school on countless small rites of development: walks to the swimming hole, trips to the city. Neither self-consciously cute nor precious, it exudes an innocence and concern for the lives of all its characters that’s almost unthinkable in contemporary movies. It’s a film I love so much I feel somewhat protective of it, as if I were nervously watching it walk off to school. Here’s hoping it graduates, with the finest of Toronto’s Class of ’07, to a theater near you.