As part of its selection of the top 10 Canadian films of the year, the Toronto International Film Festival Group also compiles a list of the year’s finest homegrown shorts. 2008’s picks are predictably uneven, but the mix contains enough worthwhile pieces to attest to our fair nation’s perennially underrated cinematic prowess. The shorts will screen during two programmes at Cinemathèque Ontario, making stimulating viewing for those who want to support our film industry but just can’t work up the emotional energy to take in Atom Egoyan’s latest.
Patrick Gaze’s Mon Nom Est Victor Gazon is a dark, dark comedy—very well made, but almost excruciating to watch. Victor, the ten-year-old narrator, is shocked to learn that both his uncle and an older student at his school have recently committed suicide. After reasoning “my mom said that my uncle committed suicide ‘cause there were more things that made him sad than things that made him happy,” Victor tallies up the good and bad things in his life to decide whether or not he too should do the deed. Gaze knows how to manipulate his audience (with his blend of comedy and tragedy, I was reminded of Hitchcock’s quote about “playing the audience like a piano”), and he captures his protagonist’s childlike innocence perfectly—perhaps a little too perfectly.
Next Floor, by Maelström director Denis Villeneuve, is a giddy absurdist satire about the calamitous happenings at a lavish dinner party with a group of wealthy upper-class men. Villeneuve’s visual style is reminiscent of the baroquely formal landscapes of Terry Gilliam’s bourgeois parodies (particularly Brazil), and his dry wit and strong sense of comedic timing make the film’s central joke work.
Kazik Radwanski’s Princess Margaret Blvd. is an effective impressionistic and bittersweet film about an old woman’s gradual submission to Alzheimer’s, evocative in its treatment of the disease. Similarly emotive is Mike Rollo’s Ghosts and Gravel Roads, an atmospheric portrait of empty landscapes and abandoned locations in southern Saskatchewan. Theodore Ushev’s Drux Flux is a politically charged animated film, which contrasts images of industry and Soviet propaganda in a montage style that can only be compared to Sergei Eisenstein.
Less successful is Semi Chellas’ Green Door, a complex, ambitious attempt to weave several unrequited love stories and mistaken identity shenanigans amongst six apartment dwellers, two of whom are dead or dying (one of whom is played by ubiquitous Canadian media figure Don McKellar). Green Door is fitfully amusing, but tries to cram too much into its 13-minute running time. It’s hard to be impressed by complex character relations when the characters themselves aren’t given enough time to develop.
Kevin Lee Burton’s Nikamowin (Song) begins with voice-over of a Cree Canadian asking another Cree why he does not speak his tribe’s language. The rest of the film depicts different Canadian landscapes to the sound of distorted, rhythmically enhanced Cree audio. The prologue suggests that the film’s goal is to make a case for the beauty of the Cree language…but wouldn’t any language sound beautiful if subjected to so much electronic manipulation?
The biggest puzzler in the roster is Chris Chong Chan Fui’s Block B. It’s hard to describe, but imagine a cross between Jacques Tati’s Play Time and Andy Warhol’s Empire, and you might have an idea. This 20-minute film is comprised of two ten-minute shots of an Indian apartment building, with copious day-to-day activity barely visible on each of the floors. “Observational cinema at its most extreme and audacious,” writes Alex Rogalski in the Cinemathèque programme, and that’s definitely accurate. The film is visually beautiful, thematically rich (Rogalski notes that we “learn much about the social structure of the Indian working class” —perhaps we also view the activity from the perspective of God?), and very trying on the viewer’s patience. Certainly the silver screen is the only way to really appreciate this undeniably unique achievement.
The best of the shorts is Marie-Josee Saint-Pierre’s Passages. Animated in sparse black-and-white (the background is black, while shifting, malleable foreground figures are thin, white outlines), Passages is a first-person account of Saint-Pierre’s ordeal with the Canadian health care system while delivering her baby. Treated by hospital staff seen as incompetent and lacking empathy (they are depicted as clowns, robots, and wild animals in the animation), her baby nearly dies from the results of a botched birth. Passages is the angriest and most powerful of the shorts, and also the one that plays with the cinematic form to the greatest effect.
Programme 1 plays at Cinemathèque Ontario on January 31st at 9:15 p.m. It contains Ghosts and Gravel Roads, Drux Flux, Green Door, Next Floor, and Block B.
Programme 2 plays on February 1st at 7:15 p.m. It contains Mon Nom Est Victor Gazon, Nikamowin (Song), Princess Margaret Blvd, Passages, and La Battue.
