Take One (Dec 2003 - Mar 2004)

‘ESSTIVACWREDS 40 is an adaptation of a hit play. The movie portrays a psychological face-off between a former officer in the Serbian Secret Service and an intellectual dissident who has become an influential publisher with a lot to lose. MWFF opened with a competing movie that was a big surprise for some viewers, but not to admirers of Louis Bélanger’s Post mortem, a major winner at the 1999 MWFF. The 38-year-old writer/director’s new picture, Gaz Bar Blues, is a solidly directed, beautifully acted comedy/drama focusing on the male world of a familyrun gas station. Set in the late 1980s, its characters (based on Bélanger’s real family) are beset by everything from yearnings for wider horizons to the onset of Parkinson’s disease. With unforced naturalism recalling Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, Bélanger’s movie plays like the blues, transcending the sorrow he laments. “l wanted to show the beauty of this universe,” he told me. “In these people, who live on the margins, there’s a form of beauty and poetry, friendship and tenderness.” Gaz Bar Blues won the MWFF’s Ecumenical Jury Prize and the Air Canada Public Prize for most popular Canadian film. Festival-goers also ranked it second in the Air Canada competition for most popular film of the entire program. Of the other Canadian films at the festival, Peter Wellington’s Luck is also a period piece, a 1970s story about compulsive Sarah Polley in Peter Wellington's Luck. + DECEMBER 2003 — MARCH 2004 gambling. Wellington (Joe's So Mean to Josephine), approaches the subject with non-judgmental humour in a movie about a young guy who bets to advance his heroic vision of himself. Luke Kirby is charming and energetic in the role; the picture also features Sarah Polley and Jed Rees, whose dementedly wired gambling addict is a scene-stealer. Incidentally, Atom Egoyan executive produced Luck with an eye on the box office, which both Wellington and the prince of Canadian art-house cinema found amusing. In the festival’s World Documentaries section, Barbara Doran’s The Man Who Studies Murder is an intriguing look at Elliott Leyton, a Newfoundland academic with a mission to understand why people kill, and what murderers reveal about the societies they live in. The public’s choice for best documentary was Sexe de rue, which champions the right of streetwalkers to live with human dignity. Sadly, the film’s director, Richard Boutet, died of a heart attack a few days before its screening. Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, influenced by Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries, was an obvious standout in the MWFF’s traditional Hors Concours section. As the Cannes Palme d’Or winner tracks a day in the life of a typical high school, Van Sant sees banality and beauty in daily routines that are shattered by kids armed to the teeth with assault rifles and homemade bombs. Inspired by real-life massacres, Elephant rejects the facile “explanations” served up by Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine, refusing to see human beings as socially engineered puppets. Guests at the MWFF included the strikingly beautiful Iranian filmmaker, Samira Makhmalbaf. She was a highprofile presence, running the jury that awarded the First Feature Prize and talking up her new film, At Five in the Afternoon. Like her father Mohsen’s The Road to Kandahar, Makhmalbaf’s compelling movie evokes Afghanistan’s tragic karma by focusing on a refugee who returns home and finds herself at odds with the country’s medieval patriarchy. Swedish actor Erland Josephson, best known for his collaborations with Ingmar Bergman, travelled to Montreal to receive a special prize for his “exceptional contribution to cinema.” Quebec producer Denise Robert (Les Invasions barbares) and Martin Scorsese, in town shooting his Howard Hughes biography, The Aviator, were given the same honour. Scorsese returned the compliment by introducing Mean Streets to a packed screening.