TIFF Finale Pt. 1: "Silver Cliff" and People's Choice Winner "Where Do We Go Now?"
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 1:46PM Paolo here back with...wait, there are more movies after the awards were announced? Yes, but before we get to that, I was unfortunately reminded by Amir that I saw Love and Bruises. It's a movie about a Chinese woman in Paris named Hua who studies the women's rights movements but hangs around with rapists outside of campus. One of these, Mathieu (Tahar Rahim, who needs to work with better directors), is the jealous possessive type but lets her alone with his skeezy best friend. Cheery stuff.
Silver Cliff
Aarim Ainouz' SILVER CLIFF begins with Djalma (Otto Jr.), a beefy guy who isn't having fun despite swimming on a beach in Rio de Janeiro and making love to his wife Violetta (Alessandra Negrini). He flies to a smaller city and dumps her over the phone. Arriving at the airport too late, she roams around the city, from hotels to beaches, playing his voice message and suspicious of its tone. She meets a father (City of God's Thiago Martins) and daughter with their own back story.
Rio is a city where Brazilians can get willingly lost and here we follow the abandoned halves of broken marriages in Silver Cliff. Though the majority of the film concentrates on Violetta, her scenes neither written nor performed compellingly, Ainouz's choice to begin and end with the male characters is a puzzler.
The People's Choice Winner...
Where Do We Go Now?
After the screening of Nadine Labaki's WHERE DO WE GO NOW? (Lebanon's Oscar Submission), I overheard a festivalgoer telling his friends that 'someone's probably blogging that this is the worst People's Choice Winner ever.' I might be one of those bloggers misconstrued as writing that.
The film's chief merit is its female perspective on Lebanese sectarian conflict. In the spirit of "Lysistrata," a group of village women try to stop men from gunned conflict through pranks. (Some audiences might see this approach as too idealistic since it's difficult for any group who hate each other and unite and pull off miracles.) The director also stars as Amale (Labaki) whose character arc takes her from merely vulnerable and beautiful to someone who can publicly question notions of masculinity and God. But why did the idealistic women have to hire those big city Ukranian exotic dancers? By exploiting them for the men's use these women are taking steps back as they try to move forward. Where Do We Go Now? would have been more effective with less of its irreverent comic tone and musical numbers which only work half the time. The film could still reach the same denouement without trying so hard for its laughs.
Reader Comments (6)
I cannot find any review of the movie by you. It doesn't seem you were able to watch it, yet you think you can judge it just by reading the plot?
I like how we have totally opposing views on Where do we go now?
You'll read in my thoughts when they're posted that I had certain similar problems with the film, but one thing I did not think at all was that it was trying hard for laughs. Some of the set-ups were over the top, but it never struggled for laughs at all.
What surprises me though is that it won the top prize. I guess you watched the special screening on the last day. I watched it without knowing it would win (a day before the announcement) and I was genuinely shocked to hear the news. I like the film a lot, but I just don't think it's of that calibre.
Also, I'm curious to know what you found problemtic with the musical sequences? The opening funeral and the hash cookies were both amazing, I thought.
foreign language update: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_submissions_to_the_84th_Academy_Awards_for_Best_Foreign_Language_Film
wait, the problem you had with the film was it's humor and musical numbers? so it should just be miserable and dead ass serious then. you just sound like an annoying film snob. do you honestly think itd be better without those sequences cause those sound like the right spices a movie like that needs. it has some personality then, it dares to have fun which doesnt sound bad to me but, then again, i didnt see the movie.
Guss: I tweeted about it. Bell Lightbox 1 on a Thursday afternoon. They didn't show the Eiffel Tower. It's a type of film criticism I call 'resummarize the movie to make it ridiculous.' A regular synopsis would have been 'It's about a mismatched couple,' which is a more boring version that doesn't show my opinion.
Amir: And The musical numbers reminded me of Christoph Honore's stab at the genre. Maybe it's that Labaki and the other singers were really a step above sprechgesang and that they didn't have the vocal chops. Although the hash cookies number was genius and reminded me of the parts of Fiddler that I've seen, but not necessarily to my sense of humour.
Poppy: It's not the 'that,' it's the 'how.' I do imagine that humour and comedy exists in the lives of non-fictional Lebanese people, but the way that is presented here could have been better.