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Sex, Madness and Hero Worship

James Toback, a puzzle other directors try to solve.

Dorothy Woodend 7 Apr 2006TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend is the culture editor for The Tyee.

She has worked in many different cultural disciplines, including producing contemporary dance and new music concerts, running a small press, programming film festivals, and writing for newspapers and magazines across Canada and the U.S. She holds degrees in English from Simon Fraser University and film animation from Emily Carr University.

In 2020, she was awarded the Max Wyman Award for Critical Writing. She won the Silver Medal for Best Column at the Digital Publishing Awards in 2019 and 2020; and her work was nominated for a National Magazine Award for Best Column in 2020 and 2021.

Woodend is a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the Vancouver Film Critics Circle. She was raised on the East Shore of Kootenay Lake and lives in Vancouver. Find her on Twitter @DorothyWoodend.

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Taste is a curious thing. Do you like the salty tang of classic American nacho machismo, or the subtler flavors of French cheese? Both have their charms; some people might hate the slightly semenish whiff of brie, while others like it. To each their own, you might say. The pairing of James Toback's 70's stunner Fingers and the French remake The Beat That My Heart Skipped from director Jacques Audiard points out not only that tastes are different, but also that some things have changed, while others have stayed just the same. The streets are still mean whether in Paris or 70's New York, men still want women, women want them right back and Bach is still Bach.

Fingers, Toback's directorial debut, features a lean, menacing Harvey Keitel as Jimmy, a wiry little tough with Beatle boots, tight pants and a silk scarf. Keitel cuts a figure of cool, although his nervous tics and quirks undercut the seamlessness of this persona. His French equivalent is renamed Tom (Romain Duris) and he is also a bad boy with a touch of Gallic darkness. But unlike Keitel, who seems genuinely within the realm of madness, Tom is a more controlled creature. The story remains the same -- a young lowlife in thrall to his dissolute daddy, aspires to something better within the precisely ordered world of Bach piano toccatas. Both characters look, at first glance, like thugs with delusions of grandeur.

But the really interesting difference between the two films is their interpretation of female characters; it seems some things have changed in the intervening years. Keitel's character, based perhaps on Toback himself, is a relentless pickup artist who backs women up against bathroom walls for hard, fast encounters. The women all seem happy enough to go along with this, whether they're gangster molls or zombie hookers (as played by Tisa Farrow, Mia's sister). Somehow, these female characters seem never fully human; they function more as objects, things to be used and then discarded. But the character of piano teacher Miao-Lin in The Beat That My Heart Skipped is a gentle, yet ferociously disciplined woman who offers a form of redemption unavailable in the earlier film.

Crafted camp

The campy edge that marked Fingers is also missing from the French film, which is a much more crafted affair. Even the story itself -- a mobbed up pianist with prostate problems (try saying that ten times really fast and see what comes out) seems ridiculous. Still, there is a edge of danger in the Toback movie that the French remake can't quite capture -- a reckless, loose energy that threatens at any moment to spiral into total goofiness, undercut with a razor edge of genuine menace. This relentless, manic energy -- composed of sex, music and madness -- makes the French remake seem a rather genteel affair, more the gentle touch of toccata than a fugue state of violence and porn.

Nothing embodies (I mean, really embodies) this quality in Fingers like the figure of Dreems, a giant pimp played by ex-football star Jim Brown, who wears tight white pants, no underwear and a pink t-shirt. Jim Brown is the real sex object in Fingers and attracts a level of hero worship that is lifted directly from Toback's own life. The director and the football star shared a house together, as well as a number of other things, if Toback's orgy-filled book Jim: The Author's Self-Centered Memoir on the Great Jim Brown is to be believed.

The sex scene in Fingers has that telltale quality of something real, redepicted for the big screen - two women and one big bad Brown end up with a head-butting incident of the worst kind. It walks the teetering edge between lunatic and ludicrous. The laughter dies in your throat, especially in the final scene of Fingers. The existential crisis of this final moment is not one that is repeated in Audiard's film and this is, perhaps, the greatest loss, since it is this final sequence that is most profoundly shocking. Keitel's open faced stare at the camera seems to state that when you look into the void, it looks into you too. The subjective and the personal sense that sustains the wall between the viewer, the artist and the audience only exists because it is easier that way for everyone, but it's a fictional wall.

Biased objectivity

Also screening next week at the VanCity theatre is The Outsider, Nicholas Jarecki's documentary about James Toback himself. As a young man, Toback came of age, quite literally in the 60s and 70s. Educated at Harvard, he was (and still is) a creature of high culture attracted to the seamier side of things -- such as drugs, gambling and sex, sex and more sex. Much of Toback's obsessive, self-indulgent doodling dates from his time at Harvard, especially a nine-day long acid trip, during which, the self that was James Toback vanished into the void. What came back from this long, strange trip went on to make films, stopping off along the way for an extended visit at the bacchanalia that was Jim Brown.

Jarecki's documentary is a little too fawning for its own good, and while Toback is a curious creature, he is needful of a more critical eye than this young documentarian is willing to give him. But Toback's approach to gender politics is an interesting one. He is often touted as a director of women, but the talking head interviews with such luminaries as Woody Allen, Robert Downey Jr. and Norman Mailer, don't do much more than simply brush the surface of things.

The Outsider is a first film and it comes with all the problems of a novice effort. It needs a firmer hand in the editing room and misses much of the point about what makes Toback so much an outsider in the Hollywood system. What we get is a lot of famous faces saying what they think about James Toback, while the man himself struts and frets; this gives the film a laudatory, facile and cameo-laden feeling that never really gets down to the heart of the matter. If you interview someone's friends, they're probably not going to give you their unvarnished opinions. It might be better, perhaps, to interview their enemies. Of course, then you might not have a film at all.

Fizzy nihilism

The Outsider was filmed largely during the 12-day-shoot of Toback's most recent feature When Will I Be Loved? a film which is made more interesting in light of the director's ongoing obsessions. The triangle of sex, money and power is revisited through the intersections of three people -- a young hustler, a horny old goat and the Machiavellian mistress of them all, playing one off against the other.

Toback's jazzy riffs on sex and philosophy sometimes sing and sometimes howl, but the personal obsessiveness of each subject gives his films an immediacy that is never less than interesting. Wu-Tang Clan and Glen Gould all inhabit the Toback universe, and while this can seem opaque, sometimes willfully so, there are still moments which pop out and burn themselves into your brain. Even a chamber piece like Two Girls and a Guy, filmed in one apartment, appears straightforward, until it swerves entirely off the road into a ditch that you never saw coming. Just like life. It is this deliriously loopy, over-the-top approach, taken directly from Toback's own experience, which sticks with you.

For all its rough-hewn extremity, Fingers is still the film for which Toback will always be known. It is singular, in the same way as Patti Smith singing "Do you know how to pony?" It is doo-wop mixed with Dostoyevsky, nihilism with a fizzy chaser, meaninglessness with the void and all sweetened with a pop sensibility and a heaping dose of sex. Inexplicable, really. But as Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg once said "the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless." The movie doesn't have any answers, only the mad, dizzy energy of the universe looking back at itself. It is glorious and ridiculous in equal measure, much like Toback himself.

If you'd like a more informed critical approach on the Toback universe, LA Weekly and Variety critic Scott Foundas is giving a lecture at the VanCity Theatre (April 15th, 7pm) followed by a screening of Fingers and The Beat That My Heart Skipped.

Dorothy Woodend reviews films for The Tyee every Friday.  [Tyee]

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