Christian Lalumière gagne un prix Gémeaux pour Réalisation : jeunesse – variétés/information pour l’émission Les Pieds dans la marge 3, “L’importance d’innover”. Il gagne ce prix avec les réalisateurs Félix Tanguay, François Lachapelle, Jean-Sébastien Busque, Mathieu Gadbois, Mathieu Pichette et Paul Carrière. Producteur : Groupe Pixcom inc.
Jim Donovan wins best director at the Mexico International Film Festival for 3 Saisons and Carinne Leduc best actress at the Salento International Film Festival in Italy.
C’est un peu le “Dormeur du val” de Rimbaud. C’est surtout très beau. Patrick Boivin tourne des scènes sous l’eau… ça coupe le souffle. Et la fin est toute simple et superbe.
As the Toronto International Film Festival draws to a close, we are featuring our last blog on TIFF films. We may even have kept the best for last, but we are by no means overlooking Campion’s Bright Star or Audiard’s Prophet, but Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Nymph is a huge visual treat.
In the tradition of I Am Cuba and Touch of Evil, Ratanaruang opens with an eerie scene shot that is as sensual as it is suspenseful. It is one long shot of nature, catching two men in the process of raping a woman. Then begins a long, long series of camera movements with the lens running across tree bark, leaves, forest plants and water. As though Rataranuang were asking nature to make love to the camera. Imagine a really tense FPS hunt inside your favorite porn scene. It is all accompanied by an uncannily sinister soundscape, finally closing (two cranes and a steadycam later) on the two dead men floating in knee-high, murky water.
That is the opening of Nymph. And like Ploy before it, Nymph deals with the intrusion of a third element into the relationship of a blaséd couple. This time, the element is a tree.
“The idea for this film came from the image of a guy doing it with a tree. Then it grew from there,” Ratanaruang says. In old Thai legends tree spirits are personified by vengeful and lustful females. Thus the title.
This is where the cautionary tale begins.
Nop, a photographer, brings May along on a photo assignment in the forest. She’s detached, laconic and can’t seem to pry herself away from her cell phone. We know she has a lover back at the office. Ratanaruang cast lead actress Wanida Termthanaporn, an unknown, because “she has a guilty expression all the time. And that’s what the script lacked—guilt.”
Nop soon meets the fateful tree. Yes it sounds far-fetched and maybe even a little silly. But Ratanaruang has so adeptly prepared us for this that it works. The film never falls prey to the Hollywood trappings à la Lord of The Rings. So no SFX to embody supernatural forces that are seemingly the cause of Nop’s disappearance. Instead, Ratanaruang relies on skillful story telling that is all ambiance driven, banging out a few themes on the way: contemporary angst, alienating technology, illicit affairs and the destruction of nature.
The film is almost a horror, but it’s more of a suspenseful human drama than anything else. Do check it out for size…
This is Andrea Arnold (middle) during Q&A at the Toronto International Film Festival where she is presenting Fish Tank. A coming-of-age tale about a 15-year-old girl living in the slums of Essex, England. It stars Michael Fassbender and newcomer Katie Jarvis who Arnold cast after she was overheard arguing with her boyfriend on a train platform.
Simply put, Jarvis is the film. The story is told from her unique point of view. It’s more than two hours of Jarvis. And it’s never too much.
She plays Mia, a raw teen who doesn’t want to fit in.
The film opens with Mia headbutting the leader of a group of girls, quickly establishing why she’s a loner and spends her time dancing to the sounds of hip hop blaring from her Ipod earphones in a vacant apartment somewhere in the bleak tower she lives in.
Her mother is a blond party girl who sports short, short denim skirts, drinks beer and enjoys noisy sex. When she brings Connor (Fassbender), her new man, home he is not only irresistible to mommy.
After watching Mia dance in a parking lot after a “make believe we’re a family” outing, Connor encourages Mia to follow her dream of being a hip hop dancer. And from there both their fates are sealed. The chemistry between the two after that is likely to explode… and does.
To better prepare for an upcoming dance audition, Connor introduces Mia to Bobby Womack’s cover of California Dreaming. The song becomes a haunting ode to the dreams of otherness Mia pines for throughout the film.
The film’s atmosphere is as coarse as Mia’s language, but the opportunity for giving love is always present. Especially when Mia tries to free an apparently starving white horse tied to a cement block at some trailer trash settlement beside a highway. The horse scenes have an ethereal quality, almost touching something mythical. But when Mia is brutally attacked for trying to free the horse, she drops her prized Ipod in the process.
Mia’s unharnessed rage takes us to yet more unexpected places. And it all works beautifully.
Andrea Arnold has directed the acclaimed short films Milk (98), Dog (01) and Wasp (03), which won the Academy Award® for best live-action short. Red Road (06), her first feature film, was awarded the Prix du Jury at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. She has been compared to another British great—Ken Loach. And the comparisons are justified.
Arnold brings rare sensibility to family dysfunction and exhilarated hopelessness.