What does Benjamin Britten’s opera Noye’s Fludde set in South Africa and sung in Xhosa have in common with the story of a young Québécois woman blessed with perfect pitch but afflicted with a learning disability? Or the return of the team behind the cult classic Koyaanisqatsi with a new film premiering to a live accompaniment by the TSO? Or with Jim Jarmusch’s vampire lovebirds who live like glam rockers? Or Mychael Danna’s first score since winning the Oscar earlier this year? They’re just a few of the films in the 2013 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) that appear to be of particular interest to The WholeNote readers. Yes, we’ve scoured the list of 288 features in this year’s festival and noted a number that look appealing.
Visitors marks Godfrey Reggio’s first film in ten years and his fourth collaboration with Philip Glass. Its world premiere takes place at the Elgin Theatre Sunday evening, September 8, when members of the TSO will provide a live score. Judging by the hypnotic trailer on the film’s inscrutable website, this black-and-white digital 4K projection could be the musical highlight of TIFF. The subtlety and restraint of the haunting score evident in the trailer finds Glass’ repetitive pulse backgrounded in the strings to allow precise woodwind tunes to come to the fore.
Here is the official pitch for the new film: “Visitors reveals humanity’s trancelike relationship with technology, which, when commandeered by extreme emotional states, produces massive effects far beyond the human species. The film is visceral, offering the audience an experience beyond information about the moment in which we live. Comprised of only 74 shots, Visitors takes viewers on a journey to the moon and back to confront them with themselves.”
Next, from the team behind the unique, unforgettable and energetic U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (in which Bizet’s Carmen was adapted to a cigarette factory outside of Capetown and performed in Xhosa) comes a Xhosa version of Benjamin Britten’s opera, Noye’s Fludde, again directed by Mark Dornford-May and again starring South African opera star Pauline Malefane (this time as Noah!).
Atom Egoyan’s new film Devil’s Knot dramatizes the fallout from the notorious 1993 West Memphis murders marks Toronto-based composer Mychael Danna’s first film score since his Oscar win for Life of Pi. Danna, who began his career with Egoyan, has scored all his films. On paper this one looks promising as it harkens back to the director’s masterpiece, The Sweet Hereafter. As Piers Handling, CEO of TIFF puts it: “Egoyan is a master at telling tales about deeply misunderstood outsiders, their families and communities, and their darkest fantasies. In Devil’s Knot Egoyan is completely at home sketching the small-town lives of ordinary people befuddled and angered by the senseless killing in their ostensibly safe town.”
Only Lovers Left Alive features a rich and diverse soundtrack, something that we’ve come to expect from Jim Jarmusch. Only Lovers Left Alive is a comic bonbon that will no doubt prove addictive to global lovers of cinema. It never wavers from its core love story between two vampires living a bohemian lifestyle, even as it’s stuck in a 1970s rock star groove that spins vinyl.
Talking about the film’s soundtrack on the Greek website Flix, Jarmusch explains: “Music is of primal importance for the film. It was composed by Jozef van Wissem, a historian of the lute, but also a guitarist and avant-garde composer, with a well-defined rock and roll side. He is the main auteur of the film’s music. Additionally, Carter Logan, Shane Stoneback and I have a band called SQÜRL, and we’ve contributed to the film’s score, even though van Wissem called the shots.”
“There are also some beautiful original songs heard in the film, some songs by Yasmine Hamdan, whom I admire. I fell in love with her music from the very first time I saw her perform in Morocco and I couldn’t believe what a wonderful creature and extraordinary musician she was. All her songs mean something to me. I really like Denise LaSalle’s R&B song ‘Trapped In this Thing Called Love’ which the film’s protagonists dance to in a crucial, sort of make-up scene in the film. And of course Wanda Jackson’s ‘Funnel of Love’ which we treated with a kind of remix, while preserving its main elements.”
“Of course music couldn’t but have a central part in a film whose main hero is a musician. But music is very important to me anyway. All the vinyl albums that you see at the hero’s house didn’t make their way there by chance. Almost all of them are mine.”
Watermark is Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky’s follow-up to Manufactured Landscapes. Three years in the making, it connects 20 diverse stories that take place in ten countries all dealing with how we use water and how water uses us. It’s also the third part of Burtynsky’s water project, which includes a book and a major photographic exhibition. From a WholeNote vantage point Watermark has a dynamic (mostly) electronic soundtrack that makes major use of Gavin Bryars’ (Room 021) Cuisine (Trio) and One Last Bar Then Joe Can Sing as well as four excerpts from the ambient, modern classical and drone world of the Dutch musician known as Machinefabriek. Moondog’s Introduction and Overtone Continuum and parts of works by ambient musician Tim Hecker, multi-instrumentalist Aaron Martin and sound manipulator Andrew Chalk help set off the film’s stunning images.
Gabrielle, the title character of Gabrielle is a young woman with Williams syndrome, a genetic condition characterized by learning disabilities, among other medical problems. She has a contagious joie de vivre and perfect pitch (exceptional musical gifts are a positive blessing of Williams syndrome). Gabrielle and her boyfriend are members of a choir that is preparing for an important music festival. In the film’s press notes, writer-director Louise Archambault discussed the emotional impact of the choral singing on the crew, calling it “raw emotion mixed with love and hope.”
She also spoke of the interaction of professional actors with the choir members most of whom were non-actors. The actor who played the choir director, for example, had a musical background and a brother who was intellectually disabled so he was attuned to that world. He also took the time to observe the choirmaster of Les Muses (the actual choir in the film from the Montreal school that offers training to artists with a disability). The special appearance of Quebec legend Robert Charlebois is an additional treat.
In Gloria, a Chilean 50-something divorced grandmother hasn’t lost her zest for life and music. She hangs out at dance clubs and sings along when she drives her car. Camilla Egan of ExBerliner interviewed the director Sebastián Lelio shortly before his star, Paulina Garcia, was awarded the best actress prize at the Berlin film festival earlier this year.
He affirmed the importance of music to his film: “Music was always very necessary for this film. All the songs that you hear are always coming from within the scenes. From radios, from the discos, or sung. They are all songs that I love. From Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love,’ to the more Hispanic romantic ballads that Gloria sings in the car. Or the bossa nova, which was in a way at the heart because for me... The film itself is like a bossa nova: a bittersweet poem about daily life.” As for Unberto Tozzi’s original version of ‘Gloria,’ which has a prominent place in his film, Lelio called it “a cheesy pop masterpiece.”
Toa Fraser, fondly remembered for the delightful Dean Spanley, returns to the festival with Giselle, featuring the Royal New Zealand Ballet’s performance of an updated version of the celebrated ballet with music by Adolphe Adam. Adding another layer, Fraser imagines a love story between the principal dancers à la Carlos Saura’s Carmen, which he conveys through his imaginative images.
Jóhann Jóhannsson, the composer of Denis Villeneuve’s highly touted thriller Prisoners, will be performing music from the film at the Music Gallery September 8, two days after it has its world premiere at the Elgin Theatre. Jóhannsson, who will be joined by the ACME String Quartet for his concert, has been described as an “intrepid musical enigma” by the BBC while the Music Gallery notes that he “frequently combines electronics with classical orchestrations and fuses diverse influences including minimalism, baroque music, drone music and electro-acoustic music.” (Jóhannsson has also written the score to another TIFF film, Le Grand Cahier, a Hungarian film adaptation of Agota Kristof's acclaimed novel, which recently won top prize at the Karlovy Vary film festival.)
For the first time since his fondly remembered busker love story, Once (2006), writer-director John Carney returns to the musical scene with Can a Song Save Your Life? Kiera Knightley, Mark Ruffalo and Catherine Keener star in this drama about an undiscovered young singer and a washed-up producer who meet, see something special in each other and ultimately make beautiful music together
According to Piers Handling, MARY Queen of Scots, Austrian director Thomas Imbach’s bio-pic is “amongst the most thrilling treatments of a historical subject I have ever seen.” That may be, but from a WholeNote perspective, what has caught my imagination is the music credit by the 81-year-old Sofia Gubaidulina. For someone who earned her living as a young composer writing film scores for the Soviet movie industry, one can only imagine how divine her return to the big screen might be.
All Is By My Side shows us Jimi Hendrix before he was famous. As TIFF artistic director Cameron Bailey puts it: “It’s a portrait of the icon as a young man that features charismatic hip-hop star André Benjamin (one half of OutKast) as a sensitive, struggling guitarist on the verge of becoming a rock legend. Director and writer John Ridley makes wonderful use of archival footage that contributes to both the film’s authenticity and its emotional impact. Contemplative conversations on the class and racial politics of the 1960s rock world illuminate Jimi’s hippie perspective, balancing the more intense moments that reveal his neuroses. But Ridley’s master stroke was casting Benjamin. Entirely natural in his performance, he knows how to allow the camera in, and can convey both the inner struggle of this troubled genius and the electric personality that would make him a star.”
Robert Lepage’s first film since winning the tenth Glenn Gould Prize is Triptych, which he wrote and co-directed with Pedro Pires. Based on Lepage’s theatre piece Lipsynch, the film explores the unexpected connections among three characters, one of whom is a jazz singer.
In Quebec filmmaker Catherine Martin’s Une Jeune Fille (A Journey) which is directly inspired by Robert Bresson’s classic Mouchette, a teenager (Ariane Legault) runs away to the Gaspé where she meets a quiet 30-something man (actor/musician Sébastien Ricard). They bond over classical music.
Attila Marcel, Sylvain Chomet’s first live-action feature film (he’s best known for the ingenious Triplets of Belleville), centres on a mute pianist who lives with his two eccentric aunts in Paris. It’s said to invoke comparisons to Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati but Chomet’s track record in itself is incentive enough to see it.
In Young and Beautiful, François Ozon (The Swimming Pool) portrays a 17-year-old girl in four seasons and four songs, all by the great Françoise Hardy. They are “L’amour d’un garçon” (The Love of a Boy), “A quoi ça sert” (Why Even Try?), “Première rencontre” (First encounter) and “Je suis moi” (I Am Me).
One Chance is based on the true story of Paul Potts, the amateur opera singer working as a mobile-phone salesman who rose to fame by winning Britain’s Got Talent and became a YouTube sensation.
And in the trivia department, Rolfe Kent (composer of the theme of Dexter) has scored three films in this year’s festival: Dom Hemingway (starring Richard E. Grant and Jude Law), Bad Words (Jason Bateman’s spelling bee comedy) and Jason Reitman’s serious new film, Labor Day (featuring Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin).
Individual tickets to TIFF 2013 are available as of September 1. Consult tiff.net for information.
Check The WholeNote blog after the festival for a report on TIFF 2013 with a special emphasis on films that used music in interesting ways.
Paul Ennis, The WholeNote’s managing editor, is a Toronto-
based, classically trained musician who has spent many years programming and writing about movies.
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