Rendezvous With Madness Film Festival 2008Running Nov. 6-15 at the Workman Theatre (1001 Queen W). Box office: 416-583-4339, or go to
www.rendezvouswithmadness.com for schedule and ticket info.
It’s curious that Lucia Puenzo’s moody 2007 debut feature XXY (***; Nov. 13, 7pm) is screening at Rendezvous With Madness, as it pivots on a dilemma that is as palpably physical as it is psychological. Its protagonist, Alex (Ines Efron), is a sullen 15-year-old hermaphrodite contemplating —?or perhaps dealing with her family’s contemplation of — a surgical resolution to her situation. Puenzo never quite gets us underneath Alex’s skin, although it’s not for lack of trying: at times, her probing, bobbing camera achieves the sort of intimate proximity associated with fellow Argentine Lucrecia Martel.
If the film’s symbolism is at times a bit florid (Alex’s flailing but well-meaning father, Kraken, is named after a many-armed monster of Greek legend), it should be noted that XXY is the rare film that understands the difference between sentimentality, which it lacks, and
empathy, which it generates in spades for its variously conflicted and imperfect characters.
There’s no debating the subject-matter bona fides of Johnny To’s Mad Detective (****; Nov. 7pm). The proof is in the title, which provides a succinct description of the film’s main character: Bun (Lau Ching-wan) is indeed an investigator and he’s absolutely insane, as is first evidenced by his odd choice of a parting gift for his retiring boss. Bun’s instability is probably the reason that his colleagues are unconvinced when he reports that he’s being followed by strange characters whom he insists are the mental projections of a cop (Lam Ka-tung) whose partner disappeared under mysterious circumstances 18 months earlier.
To’s disorienting direction warps our perception of events until we’re convinced that our demented hero is on to something. The action scenes have the wit and economy of vintage To, while the Orson Welles–inflected climax, set in a hall of mirrors that turns a mano-a-mano showdown into a kind of crazed doppelgäng-bang, gives eloquent visual expression to the idea of a fractured subjectivity.