Northern Exposures

Every year the Montreal World Film Festival runs for ten days (through Labor Day), and the Toronto Film Festival picks up a few days later and carries on for another ten. Twin colossi of the Great White North, they unspool some 300 movies each, and, for in the past three years, I once again had the bleary-eyed good fortune to scale both summits. Scale is perhaps not the right word: I did not, after all, see 600 movies. Forty is more like it.

Nor did I find the peaks all that exhilarating. I encountered no masterpieces. On the other hand, the high view was invaluable. Great films may not be rampant, but if nothing else I discovered that there sure is a lot of bustle on the international film scene, with fresh names cropping up, next to the usual slew of stalwarts.

The most interesting entry I saw in Montreal was Of Freaks and Men, directed by the Russian Alexei Balabanov, whose work is new to me, even though his films have played the festival circuit before. (His 1997 film, Brother, was Russia's biggest commercial success that year.) Set in turn-of-the-century St. Petersburg, Of Freaks and Men (in Russian) is a disturbing, expressionist black comedy featuring, among others, a maker of pornographic photos, a blind wife, a mistress, and Siamese twin boys. The tone is leering yet distanced. While the film's high-society setting might indicate some kind of political agenda, Balabanov is far too eccentric to be a social satirist. Often he's just gnomic. Movies that flaunt their obfuscations are my least favorite kind, yet I found myself being drawn into the strangeness of this escapade. And Balabanov has a feeling for pathos that most mumbo-jumbo artists lack. When one of the Siamese twins slowly expires, the helplessness of his brother -- and his awareness of his own imminent death -- is excruciatingly moving.

Another film that tries to balance disparate tones is Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful. Benigni is Italy's most famous -- and exportable -- movie comic. (He has turned up in a couple of Jim Jarmusch movies, 1986's Down by Law and 1991's Night on Earth.) I've often enjoyed his curlicue movements and bugged-out facial comedy, but he can be Chaplinesque in all the wrong ways -- he jerks pathos. Set during the tail end of World War II, Life Is Beautiful (in Italian) is a "comedy" about a sweet couple and their little son who are sent to a concentration camp. It would take a comic artist of genius to bring this off without seeming either offensive or misguided. Benigni essentially works his shtick in a horrific setting; the contrast isn't shocking, it's just odd, as if we were watching two different movies that somehow got spliced together. The film made me yearn once again to see Jerry Lewis's legendary unreleased concentration camp picture The Day the Clown Cried. For complicated legal reasons, just about nobody has seen it since it was completed in the early Seventies. It must be ineffable.

Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run (in German) is a film I enjoyed for its kinetic charge. Lola (Franka Potente) has twenty minutes to get the necessary deutsche marks that will save her in-hock-to-the-Mob boyfriend's life. In three separate what-if? scenarios that interconnect, we see Lola sprint nonstop on her mission. Tykwer's camera style and sensibility is a cross between Brian De Palma and Chuck Jones; his work has such dazzle that it's a shock to realize he also has a feeling for character. He makes you care about Lola. With her punk red hair and lean racer's body, she's a sprinter propelled by her own ardor. What a girlfriend! Every guy should be so lucky.

The most controversial movie I saw in Montreal was Jeanne Labrune's French folie a deux drama Si Je T'Aime ... Prends Garde a Toi -- in English, Beware, My Love. Maybe you have to be French, or at least French Canadian, to get this film. Nathalie Baye is a writer who meets a man (Daniel Duval) on a train who eventually becomes her lover. He's so unstable and possessive that after a while you realize she's at least as nuts as he is for wanting to keep him around. But the film presents their nuttiness as something transcendent. We're supposed to think these two are acting out some primal ritual of passion. All it looked like to me was a lot of hair pulling and face slapping.

Unlike the Montreal fest, which feels European, the Toronto shindig was crammed with marketeers and Hollywood types. Jeffrey Katzenberg of DreamWorks SKG -- he's the "K" -- showed up for the closing night screening of his studio's Antz. Tom Cruise, sporting his stubble, was on hand to promote Without Limits, which he produced. And so on.

As an antidote to all this hustle, a lot of critics found refuge in small and esoteric fare. I mean, why shuffle off to see Home Fries when you can see that acclaimed new Brazilian movie?