Film festival coverage tends to focus on emerging trends in contemporary cinema, particularly the thematic connections shared by films and filmmakers grappling with modern times. Last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, for example, the presence of Brian De Palma’s Redacted and Paul Haggis‘ In the Valley of Elah sparked an ongoing debate about fictional narrative responses to the Iraq war. At this year’s gathering, I have yet to find a series of films that share a specific tendency related to modern times, but two films have struck me as notably individualistic depictions of recent global concerns.

Joel and Ethan Coen’s Burn After Reading, although a minor accomplishment in light of the sibling filmmakers’ greatest achievements, nonetheless showcases their sly approach to satirizing contemporary anxieties. The movie was panned by Variety after it premiered at the Venice Film Festival shortly before it screened here, but it’s only a letdown if you superimpose the depth of No Country for Old Men or The Big Lebowski, two other Coen brothers films that deal, like Burn, with missing possessions and crime. Burn doesn’t aim for the poetic subtlety of No Country or the goofy generational statement of Lebowski. Instead, the Coen brothers have doodled in the margins of their acclaimed careers, presenting a wild send-up of America’s mangled security procedures and the West’s revitalized fear of it.

Without going into much detail about the plot (because that would defeat the purpose), it’s safe to say that Burn essentially works like a parable. It centers on a disgruntled ex-CIA employee (John Malkovich) whose nagging wife (Tilda Swinton) is cheating on him while he lounges around the house trying to write his memoirs. He doesn’t realize that she’s been sharing his computer files with a divorce lawyer in anticipation of taking off with her lover (George Clooney), and naturally the files fall into the wrong hands. Of course, Malkovich’s character is a total loser, and files have absolutely zero value whatsoever, but the two rather vapid gym employees who find his unfinished memoir (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt, never funnier) don’t know that. A half-assed blackmail plot follows, with nobody ever quite sure what everybody else wants — especially the CIA (headed by a typically amusing JK Simmons), which would rather destroy the case than try to understand it.

Like The Dark Knight, where Batman resorted to wiretapping for the sake of the greater good, Burn explores how surveillance anxieties have begun permeating daily life (although the notoriously reserved Coen brothers would never admit it). Everyone is culpable for the craziness in this paranoid comedy, and that’s the point. The Coens are the ultimate equalizers when it comes to placing the blame.

Speaking of blame, on a drearier note: The harrowing thriller Vinyan, which focuses on two white parents searching for their missing child in Burma six months after he washed away in the 2004 tsunami that hit Thailand, also fictionalizes a recent issue in the headlines. A prolonged exploration of grief in the wake of natural catastrophe, Vinyan places the blame on those unable to comprehend the full nature of the calamity. Hauntingly beautiful, the film horrifically evokes the experience of drowning during the opening credits, using muted sounds and watery, abstract images. It then proceeds to tell the story of the bereaved parents, who remain estranged since their son’s apparent death. The couple’s journey into Burma is a perilous one, but their quest gradually gives way to symbolism, and Vinyan becomes, like Burn After Reading, a parable before all else. In the final act, the parents wind up in wandering through a mangled jungle as horrifically demonic youth — the ethnic equivalent of the Children of the Corn — chase after them. The depiction of these young Thai dwellers, caked in mud and living in the wilderness like savages, clearly has racist overtones, but, again, that’s the point: Much of the world couldn’t see past its own biases to comprehend the vast loss of life when that monumental wave swept across the earth. Directors Oliver Blackburn and Fabrice Du Welz have crafted a metaphoric horror film out of the wreckage, and suddenly the tragedy doesn’t seem so long ago — as if it ever were.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 6th, 2008 at 5:14 am and is filed under Eric, Toronto Film Festival 2008, Reviews, Festivals, Look! New!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.