Sex, War and Hype at Toronto Festival
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
A.O.Scott, New York Times
TORONTO, Sept. 12 - "So what have you seen?"
This is the standard greeting exchanged by film critics at film festivals. It is a simple enough question, but also a loaded one, which can be inflected and interpreted in many ways. Sometimes, when understood to mean "What have you liked?," it can be a provocation to argue. ("Really? You thought that was good. Ugh. I left after the second reel. What did you like about it?") More frequently, though, the question is an invitation to compare notes, as well as an expression of anxiety. When critics ask one another, "What have you seen?" what they really want to know is, "What have I missed?"
The honest answer - an admission that haunts dispatches like this one, whether or not the author acknowledges it - is "just about everything." This is not a matter of laziness or lack of will, but of simple mathematics. By the time this year's Toronto International Film Festival ends on Saturday, 328 films will have been screened. Spread over the 10 days of the festival, which began on Thursday, that comes to more than 30 movies a day, which means, according to my bleary-eyed calculations, that to see one movie is to miss about seven others, and that the statistical accuracy of any single critic's impressions of the festival as a whole will be roughly 12.5 percent.
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So, what have I seen? I thought you'd never ask. (And be sure to ask me again later this week.) What I have seen, most unforgettably, is not Toronto but Baghdad, as presented by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein in their powerful documentary "Gunner Palace." The filmmakers, who live in Germany, embedded themselves with a United States Army artillery company in Baghdad and produced a raw, intimate and improbably funny portrait of the situation in Iraq in the year after President Bush declared that "major combat" was over. (The soldiers mordantly refer to their dangerous and unpredictable circumstances as "minor combat.")
What distinguishes "Gunner Palace" from the other politically themed documentaries sprouting like mushrooms in this election year is that it declines to argue a political point of view. "For ya'll this is just a show, but we live in this movie," one of the soldiers raps, and the movie sticks close to their experiences, which are far too strange and ambiguous to be encapsulated in any slogan. Mr. Tucker, in one of his intermittent voice-overs, notes that the servicemen and -women in Iraq seem less set in their views of the war than people back home. "Gunner Palace" is so startling because it suggests - it shows - just how complicated the reality of this war has been. It may not change your mind, but it will certainly deepen your perception and challenge your assumptions, whatever they may be. I hope "Gunner Palace" makes its way quickly from this festival to American theaters, because it is not a movie anyone should miss.
