What was reassuring at Monday night’s Fortissimo Films party and Tuesday night’s Rotterdam reception was the presence of movie directors from nations of relatively small population or stunted economic development who are not even blips on the radar of the U.S. publicity divisions and agencies that steamroll through the Toronto festival. I had lively conversations with filmmakers from countries such as the Philippines and Australia. The access to most American and other First World directors is mediated by the marketeers. Everyone loses. Anyone for symbiotic nurture?

My interview with Todd Haynes this afternoon, set up as it was by the p.r. people at the Weinstein Company, was, however, totally satisfying (and will be in print later). The Portland-based director has always been a lovely, smart, and cheerful guy, someone I’ve known since the early ‘80s. I had just come out of a packed press/industry screening of I’m Not There [pictured above], his new Bob Dylan collage that had shared the Special Jury Prize in Venice. (Rant: A lot of industry, or “product,” people work their Blackberrys, lights aglow, during the projections. Is this a way for reviewers, or any cinephile, to see films? Separate screenings, please. Press and industry appear to have different priorities.)

As a rule, I do not set up interviews until after I have seen a film—it’s a disservice to the filmmaker and to me—but with Haynes, I felt it worth the gamble. And it was. I’m Not There is brilliant, a visual and aural feast that is so complex in structure that it boggles the mind that he or anyone else could stitch it together. He interweaves six actors portraying various personas of the mutable singer and cultural icon in a nonlinear fashion, integrating as well the music of Dylan and a few others. And he places it all in the very real context of the American socio-political situation in the ‘60s and ‘70s, using both archival and recreated footage. The personal and the political are not separate.

The six actors, including a black youth and a woman, are vehicles in an approach that deploys artifice to attempt some understanding about the enigmatic singer. (There are, of course, sequences that are more “realistic.”) Images are magnified on walls, text suddenly flashes on the screen, circus and other performers appear out of nowhere. Sure, Haynes was enamored of artifice in Superstar, Poison, Velvet Goldmine, and Far From Heaven, but he amplifies the strategy here. Todd Solondz’s Palindromes was unsuccessful in its use of multiple actors for a single character, but Haynes’s gamble pays off. He also includes some fabulous fantasy sequences. This is Far From Naturalism.

Variety stupidly deemed it something only for Dylan fans. So much for the trades.

The other great film here that eschews realism is Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg. Produced by Canada’s Documentary Channel, it is outrageous, illogical, hilarious, and imaginative, in short, Maddin in top form. Though it purports to be a doc about his home town, the film is really an exercise in fantasy stream-of-consciousness. Winnipeg becomes a hotbed of myth and scandal rooted in the past, not to mention the setting for Maddin’s own primal dilemmas. While his surrogate character is making a movie, trying “to film my way out of Winnipeg,” we get scenes of his overbearing mother and his siblings that are never far from his take on the city itself. Here the personal and the historical are inextricably linked.

Haynes and Maddin understand that the fake can be truer than verite. Brian de Palma does not. In the superslick Redacted, he creates a faux-documentary about the U.S. military in Iraq, zeroing in on the notorious rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl and some of her relatives in Samarra by some horny, vindictive soldiers. I do not doubt the director’s sincerity, but none of the footage comes close in impact to the multiple fine real docs shot by brave docmakers with strong conviction in actual battle zones. De Palma’s actors—at checkpoints, in barracks, overdo it: This feels like a bad middle-school audio-visual film about venereal disease or the value of homework. What really pisses me off is the depiction of the two main transgressors as semi-insane oddballs. The only honest depiction in the film is the sequence of actual war photos that serves as a coda.

Redacted shared the Venice prize with I’m Not There. So much for the validity of juries.

# posted by Howard Feinstein @ 9/12/2007 09:54:00 AM

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