| TORINO '06: seen Sat 17th (Directed By, For Your Consideration, The Prestige of Death) |
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| Sunday, 19 November 2006 | |
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Sunday, 11.39am : Schiphol Airport, The Netherlands In between flights, and able to jot down a few thoughts about the pictures I saw yesterday (Saturday) - my last full day at the Torino Film Festival. Well, kind of full: I had to be in bed ludicrously early (9.30pm) in order to be up and reasonably compos mentis for my 5.15am pickup this morning, meaning I had to give the closing-night party a miss. My plan was to round off my festival with the additional screening of Takashi Miike's Big Bang Love at 8.30, but this was scuppered when I found of that said screening was accompanied by Italian subtitles only. There's much to admire and enjoy about the Torino Film Festival, but the subtitling policy isn't one of them: even when films are billed as having English subtitles, such as Saturday afternoon's screening of Joaquin Jorda's rarely-shown 1979 documentary Numax Presenta, they don't always materialise. My final film of Torino '06 was thus the "surprise" showing (announced at the very start of the festival) of Christopher Guest's For Your Consideration. I quite liked Guest's Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, and the subject of Oscar campaigning is a ripe one for satire. Dispiriting, then, that the film itself turns out to be such a lame misfire: very seldom funny, very seldom accurate in the details of the subject it's supposedly lampooning. A sparkling cast (including Parker Posey, Jane Lynch and Fred Willard) is criminally underserved by the material they're given to work; the picture looks drearily drab, and the "action" is over by the 80 minute mark (the running-time is padded out by extensive, slow-rolling credits). All told, a truly bathetic way to round off what's been a worthwhile week-and-a-half. Saturday's two previous pictures were rather more rewarding: in the morning, I caught what's reportedly the finished version of Peter Bogdanovich's Directed By, an updating of his 1972 documentary Directed By John Ford. Usual assemblage of clips and talking heads, but the clips (from Ford's own films) and the talking heads (including James Stewart, John Wayne and Ford himself) make the experience a very easy and illuminating watch. Not sure that Ford (with whom Bogdanovich had a famously stormy relationship) would have been so happy with the picture's reverent, hagiographic tone: and we learn little about his private life, nor the political and artistic context for his long, remarkable career. A change of pace for the afternoon's screening of The Prestige of Death, a ramshackle and totally daffy-dippy-dopey comedy from veteran French farceur Luc Moullet. Moullet plays himself as a struggling, over-the-hill director who hits on a clever scheme to restore his public status: he fakes his own death, taking on the identity of a rambler whose "body" (a decidedly rubbery-looking and un-heavy corpse) he stumbles across while location-hunting in the hills. The media duly runs extravagant tributes to the deceased auteur - whose scam had to be delayed when his compatriot Jean-Luc Godard inconveniently passed away (an entirely fictional device, nouvelle vague fans will be pleased to hear). I'd heard very bad reports of Prestige, including from one esteemed colleague who exited before the 15 minute mark, but found myself unexpectedly tickled by its rickety charms - crucial to which is the doddering figure of Moullet himself, who's very seldom off-camera and popped up after the screening to receive a generous round of applause. That's me done: 29 films (including three hour-long TV episodes from the Masters of Horror series) not such a bad tally. I'll review them all in more orthodox fashion on these pages over the next few days, and will also be posting a 600-word roundup of the festival which I'm writing for Tribune magazine. Next up: KLM flight 0961 to Newcastle. As they say in Torino, "ciao-ciao"... Neil Young 19th November, 2006 Directed By : [6/10] : aka Directed By John Ford : USA 2006 : Peter BOGDANOVICH : 108m (film-festival catalogue timing; version shown cut-off during end credits) : seen at Massimo cinema The Prestige of Death : [6/10] : Le prestige de la mort : France 2006 : Luc MOULLET : 74m (timed) : Massimo [original rating 5/10, upgraded on reflection] For Your Consideration : [3/10] : USA 2006 : Christopher GUEST : 86m (approx) : Ambrosio (surprise film) Jigsaw Lounge 2006 Torino Film Festival coverage : index page official site...  |
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