Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Film Toronto: Curiosities and Leftovers
Posted by Nicolas Rapold on Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 9:09 AM
At a Q&A for I Am Love, Tilda Swinton said she and director Luca Guadagnino had discussed a project for years that would be like opera and cinema. Boosted and buffeted by surging selections from composer John Adams, the visually sumptuous result is a coolly passionate melodrama that recalls Douglas Sirk's insistence on the term's etymological tie to music. Swinton, whom Guadagnino once filmed in conversation for a doc series, plays the Russian-born wife of an Italian industrial magnate facing a generational shift in power. Set against the comfort and privilege of this dynastic family, amidst many monumental Visconti-inspired shots, the film follows this elegant matriarch's coup-de-foudre affair with a chef, with whom her son has an infatuated friendship. The film may not be for all tastes, but succumbing leads one to experience an ending with a devastating release.
More diverting than it should be, the material in Agora sounds equally improbable: the fall of the ancient library of Alexandria, starring Egyptophile Rachel Weisz as the scholar Hypatia. Alejandro Amenabar embraces the scale and clichés of the classical epic, setting sectarian unrest alongside Hypatia's infatuated suitors and her very vocal problems with Ptolemy's astronomical models. But despite a loonily promising early moment when she dissuades a suitor in class by presenting a cloth stained with "the blood of my cycle," you also find yourself keeping a running mental transcript of outrageous lines and tally of unbalanced dramatic shifts. It's still striking to see the historically tragic devastation of ancient Greek manuscripts rendered on screen, as well as the complex Christian-Jewish conflicts, but the intrigues run in ever-decreasing circles, with Amenabar cutting frequently to outer space to signify the cosmic spheriness of it all. Finally, and I know this hurts, but Leaves of Grass, starring Edward Norton as a classics professor and marijuana farmer who are identical twins, had the superior classical references.
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