A major strength of the Toronto Film Festival is the range of programs it has. It's possible to cram a ridiculously wide cross section of films into a very short time and that's precisely what I've done over the past fourteen hours or so with viewings of The Machinist, House of Flying Daggers and 3 Iron - psychological thriller, historical wuxia, and magical realist films respectively.
I feel a little bit bad for Brad Anderson. His films don't really fit into any sort of established North American genre so, since they tend to involve some grotesque elements, they end up classed and marketed as horror films which they really are not. Marketers tell audiences to expect one thing, the film delivers something slightly different, the audience is disappointed and the film doesn't do so well. It happened to Session 9 and I'm pretty sure it's going to happen to The Machinist as well. I also felt a little bad for the guy when his screening got pushed back more than half an hour - a big deal when you're already in a midnight timeslot - apparently thanks to a particular elf throwing a bit of a hissy fit and stalling things out at the screening of his star vehicle which screened immediately before Anderson's pic. Anyway, the point. Get to the point. The Machinist is being treated as a conventional horror film in the trailers. It isn't, so get that out of your head. What it is is a psychological thriller following a man slowing falling into a reality fractured by a solid year of insomnia.
Most people that see The Machinist will be there thanks to Christian Bale's shocking physical transformation. The man lost nearly a third of his body weight for this film and his resultant physique is honestly more horrifying than anything else that the film has to offer. If ever there was an anti-anorexia poster boy, it's Bale in this film. Bale is pretty remarkable here both in terms of the physical change and in his acting performance, and Anderson has a fantastic visual style which he puts to great effect but the film is sadly very, very derivative in its basic themes. If you're going to crib an idea from a film as strong as Fight Club you'd better have some mighty impressive goods to back yourself up and though The Machinist is certainly not a bad film it certainly comes across as fairly underwhelming.
Following a very, very brief post-Machinist night's sleep we were up at 6:30 to hit the box office and then score some breakfast and, hopefully, some good seats for what was surely one of my most anticipated films of the festival - Zhang Yimou's House of Flying Daggers. I adore Yimou's Hero, which I've owned on DVD for almost two years and watched countless times, and have been so eagerly awaiting the release of Flying Daggers that there was a very real risk of my building the film up so much that I was virtually guaranteed disappointment. Didn't happen. Not a bit. Flying Daggers is a fantastic film and, thanks to a more straightforward storyline, should be expected to outperform Yimou's Hero when it releases before Christmas.
The House of Flying Daggers tells the story of two police officers - Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Leo (Andy Lau) - towards the end of the Tang dynasty, in a period of time when anti-government groups are a serious threat to the power of the established order. The most significant of these groups is The House Of Flying Daggers and when Leo and Jin learn of a possible Flying Daggers agent employed in a high class brothel they set up what amounts to an undercover sting operation with Jin setting out to win the girl's trust in hopes that she will lead them to the Daggers' leader.
All the elements that make Hero so strong are in full effect here. The production design is simply staggering, the cinematography is beautiful and the acting - particularly from Takeshi Kaneshiro - is solid throughout. Where the film makes large strides forward, however, is in the fight and action sequences. Yimou has gone on record several times saying that Hero was essentially an experiment, an attempt to see if he could figure out the wuxia genre. As a result Hero's action scenes, although spectacular, are generally very conventional in their approach. Hero presents the action spectacularly well, but it is all essentially stuff that has been seen many times before. The initial trial phase now done with, and a new sense of confidence in place, Yimou is bringing his own bag of tricks to the table. I've seen a lot of martial arts films in my day, far more than the average viewer, and there were a number of sequences in Flying Daggers that had me picking my jaw up off the floor. The Peony Pavilion dance sequence, the prison break, the bamboo forest, the open-meadow ambush, they all had elements that I had simply never even seen attempted before, never mind executed this flawlessly.
Daggers does drag some in its final act when it veers a little too deeply into mellodrama but on the whole it is a beautiful, tragic love story with stunning production values, a dead solid cast and incredible action set pieces. I'll be in the audience for the first available public screening of this without fail.
My last film of this block - Kim Ki Duk's 3 Iron - is a prime example of someone stumbling across something awe inspiring purely by accident. I was not planning on seeing this film. I've seen a few of Kim's earlier films and despite all the critical praise I have just never really connected with any of them. I've always had the impression that he was just an angry man looking to shock his audience more than anything else and have never once found any of his characters to be fully three dimensional. That said, he's the kind of director that I've always had the nagging suspicion that I should like and have always figured that one day he would produce something to win me over, so when Andrew decided that he was going to catch the screening of 3 Iron that came immediately behind The House of Flying Daggers I figured why not stay myself, too.
A good choice? Well, it's early yet and there are a lot of films I'm very much looking forward to but at the moment 3 Iron is the best of the festival as far as I'm concerned. Yes, something else could very well knock it off that perch but any film that wants to try has got a lot of work to do to ever get within spitting distance. 3 Iron is, quite simply, a flawless film. There is not a single thing wrong with it, nothing that could be improved, nothing that needs changing. I am shocked by how much I love this film.
A story told almost entirely in silence 3 Iron revolves around Tae-Suk, a young man we know virtually nothing about throughout the course of the film. Even by the end of the film we know only that he is college educated. Tae-Suk lives life as a drifter, distributing flyers throughout specific neighborhoods to see which ones are removed by home owners entering and exiting the houses. When he discovers an empty premise this way he picks the lock and takes up residence for a day at a time. Our initial impression is that he is a young thug - did he pay for the expensive motorcycle he rides through theft? - but it very quickly becomes apparent that he is actually a pure innocent who means no harm by his break ins. He does no damage whatsoever and actually leaves the homes in better condition than he found them in, taking the time to do their laundry, take care of their pets and fix anything that he finds broken. He seems content to simply fantasize briefly that these homes are his own, that he has a place in the world.
Tae-Suk's life changes permanently when he enters a home he believes is empty but is actually occupied by Sun-Hwa, a shell of woman utterly shattered by her abusive marriage. When Tae-Suk witnesses how Sun-Hwa is treated by her husband he intervenes and she chooses to leave with him and a quiet, tentative relationship slowly develops entirely without words.
3 Iron is filled with the same sense of magical realism that makes Last Life in the Universe such a potent viewing. As the film progresses there is a very real question about what is real and what is not which, in turn, raises issues about emotional reality versus physical reality. The film is entirely dependent on the performances of its two leads and both are simply stunning, conveying worlds of information with minute glances and gestures. It is beautifully shot, flawlessly edited and shockingly funny in places. Before seeing this I couldn't imagine ever laughing at a Kim Ki-Duk film at all, never mind laughing as often and as hard as I did in this. After building a career around anger and alienation Kim Ki-Duk has turned in a film about hope and innocence, and it just may prove to be his master work.