Two Films Commissioned For The Millenium
A group of French television producers from La Sept ARTE commissioned ten films from ten countries to usher in
the new Millenium. Included at this October's Vancouver Film Festival were:
The Hole from Taiwan, where people have begun behaving like cockroaches and it rains all day in epic amounts;
the Hal Hartley directed Book of Life, starring PJ Harvey amongst others, in which Jesus Christ discusses
the apocalypse with his lawyers at JFK Airport, while the Devil drinks in a bar across town; Life On Earth,
from Mali-'a Mauritanian filmmaker living in France returns home to capture sounds and images of a passing way
of life'; Midnight from Brazil directed by Walter Salles (also director of Central Station, which garnered
a noticeable amount of press this Fall) and Daniela Thomas-'A young man recently escaped from prison and a young
woman about to take her own life find each other on a rooftop in Rio, on December 31, 1999. Moving fluidly between
the breathtaking beauty and choking squalor of Rio, the film is a kinetic and romantic story which still manages
to explore the growing rift between rich and poor, and North and South, in a country staring its future in the
face'; and Last Night, the directorial debut of one of Toronto's most ubiquitous, Don McKellar (screenwriting
credits include collaborations with Francois Girard on Thirty Two Stories of Glenn Gould and more recently The
Red Violin, amongst others).
I caught up to McKellar during the afternoon prior to the Awards Gala of the film festival, which featured his
film. By this point, it had evolved from a contemplation on the Millenium to an apocalypse drama. Says McKellar,
"They asked me to represent Canada, and right away when they asked me, I thought, 'Let's take it all the way
and put the thing to sleep.' And I thought by now the millenium thing would already be dated. And then it came
together fairly quickly."
(See below this for a review of the Hole, which was unfortunately the only other of the five movies I was able
to see-you really have to attend this festival to realize how many movies out there that should be seen, and how
little time there actually is to do it.)
Apocalypse Toronto Style
'Your film is about the end of the world, and it takes place in Toronto, which is, I think, a very good place for
the world to end.'
This quote is relayed by McKellar as something the host of a 'hoity-toity' French TV show said to him, when he
was in Cannes with the movie. With Last Night, McKellar brings a refreshing, albeit Canadian, spin to the newly
anointed apocalypse movie genre-a nice Autumnal, albeit treeless, anecdote to the Summer of 1998, which brought
us the weepy Deep Impact (a movie I came into 45 minutes late, albeit intentionally, just in time to catch the
tidal-wave-engulfing-New-York scenes, which were disappointingly fake looking), Godzilla (fascinating mainly for
its fascination with New York's underbelly), and Armageddon. I doubt Last Night will go over blockbuster-American
style for one reason more than anything-it doesn't even bother to explain why the world is about to end. "Initially,
I thought of making it a meteor. I'm so glad I didn't though, because all those meteor films came out," says
McKellar. Though Bruce Willis is out there somewhere doing his thing, McKellar jokes, this is the most placid apocalypse
movie you're likely to see.
In medias res, it begins at 6:00 PM. Night is a word that has lost its meaning, now that daylight goes 24 hours.
People have known for months that the end of the world is near, and most of the looting, emotional breakdowns,
panic, bedlam, and confusion has occured in the months leading up to this moment. So by the time the Apocalypse
rolls around, the characters of the movie are stoically treating this last night as if its whatever important day
they want it to be. Along with directing, McKellar plays the role of Patrick, whose mother is treating the Apocalypse
like its Christmas Dinner. She even buys the cheap wine, while his father cuts down the neighbour's tree, instead
of going out and getting a Christmas tree. Patrick's friend is diligently trying to complete his list of necessary
sexual conquests ('just things I wanted to do, not every perversion,' he insists, as Patrick eyeballs the chalkboards
in the kitchen which list hundreds of exploits, going back over the past few months). Sandra Oh plays Sandra, who's
trying to make it across town to meet her husband for a double suicide, but her car's been smashed and overturned,
while she's been inside a grocery store with ghostly empty shelves, as she tries to pick up a few last minute items.
Her husband, played by David Cronenberg, works for the Gas Company, and he dutifully sees to it that everyone will
have their power working right to the very end. Says McKellar, "One of the things that always intrigued me
was the practical side of the city. Cause the city's not going to be running very well anyway. Would it be possible
to still get across town to your parents? Considering there's no cabs. So that was part of the fun, the practical
side."
All of this takes place in a bleak Toronto landscape that reminded me of the video for U2's "Last Night On
Earth," in which the band patrols the empty freeways of Kansas City. The mayor of Kansas City was outraged
when he saw the unflattering portrait that emerged. "I haven't seen that video actually. Someone told me about
it when I was writing, so that scared me," says McKellar, voicing every artist's paranoid fears of having
an idea robbed before its conception.
I have these vivid impressions taking the bus out to the Toronto airport of the grim modernist sprawl. "Yeah
exactly. I wanted the urban sprawl stuff, which is not what Toronto wants you to see." But McKellar rightly
insists that Toronto is actually quite a green city in its downtown core-ironically, it is much greener than Vancouver's
downtown (Vancouver is considered a city amongst natural beauty, but despite the mountain and ocean vistas and
one great park, it's done a shameful job of preserving green space through most of the city. He says, "I went
out of my way to find a different look for Toronto. Toronto's a very green city. I had to search the whole city
for a street without trees on it. I would say the actual downtown core is greener than Vancouver's. But I didn't
want that. Because my idea was that it's always sunny, and if there's trees, they should at least be dead and brown.
But I didn't realize how hard that was going to be."
Contrary to the U2 scenario, the roads are actually cluttered with abandoned cars, and people trying to get from
one end of the city to another in a last minute panic. All the while, in a truly hysterical gesture, the radio
station counts down the Top 500 songs ever. At first, this music, lots of 70s classic rock as you would well expect
if this scenario ever played itself out, calls out for a DJ hanging Morrissey-style (Morrissey initially sang "Hang
The DJ, Cause the music they constantly play says nothing to me about my life," in the Smiths' "Panic,"
in defiance of the mindless club tracks that seemed oblivious to all the terrible atrocities of both the world
and the self), but quickly these urgent, love-as-minor-apocalypse songs take you over. In the soundtrack liner
notes, McKellar writes, "... certain songs were in the air. They seemed to play wherever I went, not because
I chose them, but through some perverse insistence of their own. I couldn't ignore music with such determination."
In The 5th Dimension's "(Last Night) I Didn't Get To Sleep At All," separation from a lover creates the
all-too familiar night-after-night scenario, where just avoiding phoning her/him and making it through to the morning
light, seems to take as much strength as surviving nuclear fall-out. Edward Bear's "Last Song" is the
classic song that Willie Nelson never wrote-'Did you know I go to sleep and leave the lights on, hoping you'd come
by and know that I'm still awake, But two years go by, and I still leave the lights on'-in which a lovelorned songsmith
comes face to face with the fact that he keeps writing the same old stupid song. But there's strength here, too.
This will be the last song he writes until the next song he writes.
Cause as McKellar himself points out in the liner notes, these songs all come from the years 1972 to 1974, and
the climate is one of survival. In his classic book, Mystery Train, seminal American rock critic Greil Marcus writes
about this time period, which followed the release dark, dream-is-dead, everything-done-for-naught, black hole
of a record There's A Riot Going On, by Sly Stone. The period produced paranoid, confused tracks like Marvin Gaye's
"Inner City Blues," the O'Jays' "Back Stabbers," War's "The World Is A Ghetto," the
Temptations' "Papa Was A Rolling Stone," the Chi-Lites' "(For God's Sake) Give More Power To The
People," and other tracks that Marcus lists. In Lipstick Traces, a later book, Marcus writes about how the
culture at large settled into a period where 'survival' became the new buzzword. "You could read the new ideology
off the record titles," Marcus writes. "Survivor, Rock and Roll Survivor, 'You're A Survivor,' I Survive,
"Soul Survivor," Street Survivor, Survival, Surviving, "I Will Survive," on and on into endless
redundancy." (On a personal note, I wasn't even born yet in these years, but the music from this period is
constantly on my stereo, more relevant now than ever. And until now when I just went back and checked Mystery Train
for titles, I wasn't even aware most of the connection of a lot of this music. The O'Jays' Survival from 1974 and
the Delphonics Alive & Kicking from 1975 are two of my best used record store finds in the last year or so.)
"Something about that era was slightly apocalyptic. There was a lot of dread, certainly reflected in the clothes,"
says McKellar, who in real life, as on film, seems to follow every serious sentence with a joke. "There is
something to [the survival theory], and something about the movies around that era, too. It was music that always
seemed to be playing, when I was in the backseat of the car, and my parents were in the store. I was originally
listening to the O'Jays and the Delphonics, and one of the first albums I bought was a Temptations album from that
period, and then I thought, 'Oh, well, Quentin Tarantino's doing a new movie, and I don't want to get anything
he would get.' And I was so happy, because he actually chose a whole bunch of songs that were on my list. And then
I thought, 'what wouldn't Quentin pick?' And I thought, 'Guess Who.' And then about three quarters of the way through
Jackie Brown, there's a Guess Who song." In one great scene in Last Night, a camera pans across a television
special-the world's largest jam session ever, where hundreds play along to Bachman Turner Overdrive's "Taking
Care of Business."
One of the many pleasures of Last Night is the way it tenderly deals with the clutter of the past-the things that
weren't done, the things that couldn't be done. Patrick, for instance, is an architect, who has never actually
got to the point where he could make a building. In another scene, his friend Craig offers someone a magazine to
read to kill time, and it seems such a ridiculous gesture. What's the point of reading a magazine on the last night
on Earth? "In terms of nostalgia in the film, and the whole style," says McKellar. "I was making
references to eras when they dealt with the future in a very optimistic way. I find something very optimistic about
those songs, too. And about the architecture, too, the 30s modernism of the gas company, or the 60s modernism of
Craig's apartment, or the parents' home, which is very happy. And for me, that was particularly heartbreaking to
think that with no future, what does that all mean?"
No stranger to comedy, McKellar has Patrick deadpan lines like, 'they haven't worked for weeks, cell phones, they've
never really worked,' and 'cars another disappointment. They should have gone further than this. They peaked both
aesthetically and technically in the mid-seventies.'
The greatest disappointment of all though, in this modern era, has to be New Years Eve, where year after year hype
sinks like so much overpriced shit. "I hated New Years Eve," says McKellar. "That was one of the
big motivations behind this film. It's always a nightmare. Whenever I try, it's just a disaster. Sometimes, I just
stay in bed, or sometimes I go to a bar with a friend, not a bar with anything happening. I'm dreading this end-of-the-millenium
thing. I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't want the apocalypse to be a big disappointment."
The Hole
Rain falls in record amounts. There's an epidemic in Taipei. Infected people move to shadowy, dark undergrounded
places and behave like cockroaches, crawling on hands and knees. In the quarantined zones, which you get the feeling
is the whole city, heat and water are going to be shut off within the week-around the same time the calendar reads
2000 for the first time.
This is the setting for the latest movie from Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang (well known for a 1994 movie,
Vive L'Amour, which I've not seen), The Hole. Not exactly a love story, it's centered around the unsocial relations
of a lonely bachelor in his apartment, and the equally lonely bachelorette that lives directly below. The two lives
are linked after a water mane breaks in the man's apartment. A plumber comes in and tears the floor up around the
piping, and creates a hole in one spot that stares directly into the woman's apartment below. The plumber leaves
the job half finished, saying he'll come back, but as time goes by, the realization dawns that plumbers are a luxury
you won't have when the end times draw near.
And so the dripping begins. At first a woman keeps a bucket to catch the water, while she talks constantly on the
phone. Like the man's, her apartment is sparsely furnished and without decoration. But lucky for her, she's been
hording paper towel and toilet rolls. She has a whole room stacked six feet high with them.
The man spends his days in a dark underground loading-bay/parking-type space, where he runs a provisions store
without customers. He loafs around, appearing to enjoy cigarettes immensely and feeding a stray cat, which seems
to be his only confidant. He goes out drinking one night. You see him stumbling back into his apartment, out of
his wits, and fall down in front of the hole. And what does he do, but spew right into it! The poor woman below!
Her apartment's weeping, and now this!
The Hole plays up on that typically modern condition of alienation-lonely lives lived so closely, yet unable to
cross. They boil instant noodles at the same time, yet never know it. The only relief seems to be during random
interludes, where the movie slips into the imagination of the woman. In these reveries, she plays the part of a
diva straight out of a space age lounge circa 1957, singing playful and cute songs by Grace Chan, while flirting
with a suave, '30s movie star version of the man upstairs.
For his part, he becomes increasingly fascinated by the holes. It becomes the centrepiece of his apartment, as
if it's a television. He spends his time chipping away at it, enlarging it, while the apartment below gets wetter
and wetter. And by now, she never talks on the phone. There seems to be no one left to talk to. As the water levels
rise, so does the emotional content of the movie. When the wallpaper in her apartment detaches itself from the
walls top down, it seems to be weeping. She's in a tattered state herself. She tears at the walls, and what's left
of the wallpaper, and starts to avoid the light, burrowing into the deep piles of paper towel. One speculates that
she is becoming one of the human roaches.
Meanwhile, the man is on the verge of despair. Exterminators have sprayed the underground, and it's evident that
the stray cat is no longer amongst the living. And then the water shuts off. Water everywhere, and you can still
die of thirst. Now only one thing can save them. Each other. Call it a parable.
I thought a lot about The Hole this Fall. On a rainy Firday night, a pipe wore through in the walls of my apartment.
A wet patch on the floor grew and grew, spreading through the apartment. Two plumbers and the building manager
walked in and out until midnight, while I tried to read a book in wet socks. They stopped the leak eventually,
but managed to fuck up the shower and dirty the bath in the meantime. I didn't notice the latter till I prepared
a bath the next day only to realize the brownness of the water at the last moment before getting in. The temperature,
however, was just right. Life goes on. The faucet has been leaking for months. That must be the most depressing
symbol of a life where nothing goes as it should, and everything goes when it shouldn't.
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