Not counting the masterpieces in Toronto that premiered in Cannes—
Alexander Sokurov’s
Alexandra,
Carlos Reygadas’s
Silent Light, and
Gus van Sant’s
Paranoid Park—two of the best films are very different studies in naturalism that are, coincidentally, both directed by actors:
The Visitor [pictured above], by New York-based thesp
Tom McCarthy (
The Station Agent); and
Jar City, from Icelander
Baltasar Kormakur (
The Sea,
101 Reykjavik), who no longer performs. McCarthy subtly captures New York City with nearly 100% actual locations, the exteriors as well as the interiors, whereas Kormakur heightens his South Icelandic setting with exaggerated landscapes that scream “pathetic fallacy.”
In
The Visitor--over which international sales agents and domestic distributors are going nuts in Toronto--an understated
Richard Jenkins plays Walter, a lost and lonely Connecticut widower who stumbles upon a couple, illegal aliens, staying in his Manhattan pied-a-terre. They are an extroverted young Syrian man who plays the djembe, something like bongos, in occasional gigs and his guarded Senegalese girlfriend, a street vendor of jewelry. The repressed Walter gradually opens up, learns the djembe, and helps his new friends, especially when the man ends up at a federal detention center and his mother (the great Palestinian actress
Hiam Abbass) arrives at the apartment.
With a seamless and unobtrusive style that underlines dramatic high points merely with a change in camera set-up or a cut at an unexpected moment, McCarthy wraps important social issues in an engaging and moving character-driven narrative. The film is a multiculti isomorph of
A Star Is Born: As the couple’s opportunities in the States diminish—the man is faced with deportation--Walter, under the spell of the gifted Syrian, opens up as a human being. Their misfortune begets his epiphany, though not in a negative way. The presence of the mother finishes Walter’s transformation: He allows his heart to be touched.
McCarthy says they made the film in 28 days for less than $5 million. His exteriors matched the interiors, something unusual in filming today. “You create a consistency,” he maintains, “while the budget determines the aesthetic.” Rather than point to a bogeyman in the unjust immigration process, he reveals a faceless bureaucracy that begs analysis. “Many of these centers are privatized, and they hire people from the surrounding depressed communities to do the work,” he explains. Shared music becomes the vehicle for cultural exchange and understanding, and McCarthy brilliantly formalizes the process through montage and mise-en-scene. Learning the djembe is a way for Walter “to be present in his life.” The Visitor is at once heartbreaking and hopeful—not an easy balancing act.
Jar City is a thriller focusing on genetic propensities in Iceland, an island of 300,000 that has a limited gene pool. A private company is creating a database of questionable ethical merit of Icelanders both living and deceased in an attempt to track inherited diseases. A worker at the firm loses his four-year-old daughter to a neurological illness that has been passed down—but how? Simultaneously, we see a ne’er-do-well man who has been bludgeoned to death. How are these two events connected? Time becomes compressed: The fact that the murdered man had infiltrated the family’s genetic structure two generations back precipitated the passing of the illness through the family line. Cemeteries and a department called Jar City, in which fetuses and dead children occupy formaldehyde-filled glass bottles, contribute to a somber tone, aided by the funereal chants of a police choir and other mournful music. A driven detective tries to solve the case, which develops in a Hitchcockian manner, never devoid of humor. All the while, Kormakur foregrounds the neglected south side of Iceland, a region of simple, quirky farmers. He uses long lenses to bring majestic mountains to the fore and focuses on the lava, rather than the stereotypical glaciers one sees in most films from the country. He says he has been influenced by the Icelandic painter
Kjarval, who painted such natural items as moss and lava. “I’m not keen on waterfalls,” he says drily.
Kormakur wants to give visibility to the South. “I wanted to focus on the people in the tiny villages,” and he does so with affection. The detective orders a sheep’s head-to-go at a drive-in and we watch him eat it, eye first, at home. He orders the exhumation of the body of the bereft father’s young sister, who had died at the same age as his daughter 30 years before, in order to prove a connection with the murdered man. “He knows in his heart he is doing wrong, crossing the line to disturb the dead,” says Kormakur. “He is digging into God’s ways.”
Both Kormakur and the detective are ambivalent about the computerization of each of our genetic characteristics. “It’s disgusting that we can discover our grandmothers’ secrets,” says Kormakur. “On the other hand, these companies are doing good things in terms of tracing diseases.”
IFC First Take picked up
Jar City during Toronto. Kormakur, who won the Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary in July, tells me that Americans have expressed interest in remake rights and in him as a director. “They want me to do horror!” he says with a mix of surprise and disgust. “But in my film the crimes are motivated! I’m lucky I produce my own films. Most foreigners go to the U.S., make some crap, and go back home.” For now, he is happy on his farm in Northern Iceland.
# posted by Howard Feinstein @ 9/11/2007 12:46:00 AM
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