Film Fest Produces a Surprise

By Jeff Simon

I was running late, so I actually ran to the screening of a Jean- Claude Van Damme movie — and, in a light rain, no less. Yes, Jean- Claude Van Damme.

The only time before that I’d broken out into a dead run at a Toronto Film Festival was to get to the world premiere showing of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” from the festival screening of Bertrand Tavernier’s haunted jazz film “Round Midnight.”

You have to understand something: I have only had to review a movie starring “the muscles from Brussels” once before. Up to now, I’ve been able to assign the man’s entire cinematic career to others (an eminently responsible female colleague of many years is an unabashed Van Damme partisan) and catch up later, as desired, on cable. He was, by far, the least of Steroid Cinema’s reigning trio of muscle boys (the others being Schwarzenegger and Stallone.)

And yet, of the three of them, he has just given what is, by far, the finest performance on film. The movie is called “JCVD,” made in Van Damme’s native Belgium by director Mabrouk El Mechri, who admits growing up in the ’70′s worshipping Van Damme. There is a moment in the film that is truly stunning, as if John Cassavetes, Bertolt Brecht and Sidney Lumet had suddenly decided after a few beers to collaborate on a scene that might actually convince the world that a previously ridiculous movie star was an extraordinary film actor. It’s a scene that few will ever forget and no one can take away from him.

While the camera remains in dead close-up — and the set moves — this formerly worshipped icon of bicep action and glute performance looks at the camera and pours out his despairing wounds at us, all the consequences of too much idiot fame, too many women, too many drugs and too many courtroom child custody battles. It is the centerpiece of a movie which is one of the cleverest and wittiest meditations on the real meaning of film fame that anyone has made in years. He plays himself, a hero for boys and the permanently immature and a box office big shot, now ravaged by inconsequence and a life lived very stupidly.

And as I watched this film — a smash hit at Cannes though consigned by the Toronto Festival to its Midnight Madness series — I completely understood fully how badly the world needs film festivals, even in an age where a good part of an entire generation of American movie critics was wiped out by buyouts caused by daily journalism’s ongoing nervous breakdown.

More than half of the critics I saw for years were gone from the Toronto Film Festival this year. The truth is that no matter how much I liked some of them, only one critic I actually enjoyed reading disappeared from the scene, the Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter, whom I’ve known since he covered television for the Baltimore Sun and who has always written mystery and intrigue novels (some of them filmed) along with his day job.

The best that the Internet’s Babel can provide is “buzz” (for which see all the advance hoopla for “Snakes on a Plane,” and subsequent minuscule box office.) It can’t recognize something as amazing as Jean-Claude Van Damme’s sudden emergence as a powerful and affecting film actor the way the mainstream press at a film festival can.

There is no big studio money behind “JCVD” (which opens in limited American release in November.) It was made by a troubled star at a career nadir returning home for his own reasons. It is a wickedly funny film and smart and exciting and not entirely like any other star vehicle you can name.

So while the Toronto Film Festival now deals with big movie world changes — and charges that donor “eliticism” has been allowed to overshadow what was always a “people’s festival” — amazing movies are being discovered, and by people likely to care about them most and say so wherever they can.

-mail: jsimon@buffnews.com

Originally published by ARTS EDITOR.

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