Seventh Row

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TIFF15: Unearthing the dead past in Demon

Demon
Courtesy of TIFF.

There’s a troubling absence in Marcin Wrona’s Demon: there are very few Jews in this adaptation of a Jewish story. Protagonist Piotr (Itay Tiran) is a gentile, his intended bride (Agnieszka Zulewska) is a gentile, and all the people in their nameless Polish town are gentiles, too. There are only two Jews in the entire film: a wedding guest and a ghost. What happened to the Jewish population of this town? And why does nobody want to talk about whether a Jewish girl’s bones might lie buried beneath a family farm?

Demon adapts the plot structure of Piotr Rowicki’s 2008 play Clinging while borrowing motifs from the Jewish classic that inspired Rowicki. As in Clinging, a newcomer to a small Polish town unearths bones on his land, causing him to become possessed by a dybbuk — a restless spirit of Jewish folklore that inhabits a living person to carry out a goal — of a Jewish girl killed in the 1940s.

While Clinging focused more closely on the scars left by Poland’s treatment of its Jewish population during the Second World War, Demon incorporates the ghostly love story plot from S. Ansky’s classic 1913 play The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds. In Ansky’s tale, a young Jewish bride is possessed by the dybbuk of the man she loved but was prevented from marrying, so that they can be together forever. In Demon, a young Jewish bride becomes a dybbuk to possess the bridegroom she was promised before her life was cruelly and mysteriously cut short.

We open in the middle of small-town Poland. An excavator rolls through dusty and deserted streets. Whether or not the houses it passes are inhabited, they feel empty. But change is coming in the form of bridegroom Piotr, a Londoner of Polish descent who moves to this backwater, with nothing but his Range Rover, to marry local girl Żaneta. Then Piotr uncovers a skeleton buried on an old family farm that was given to the couple for their new home. The wedding celebrations get complicated when the groom is possessed by the dybbuk of a young woman who believes that Piotr is her intended husband.

Demon, Marcin Wrona
Courtesy of TIFF.

Piotr’s possession starts with discomfort in his body. He scrubs invisible smudges from his lip, stares perplexedly at his hands, and kneads at his face with his knuckles. This culminates in a chilling, back-bending episode where a fully-committed Tiran claws off his shirt as though trying to remove his own skin. (“He just has a touch of food poisoning!” Piotr’s sweating father-in-law insists.) The groom’s malady is only pinned down when he starts speaking in high-pitched Yiddish. It takes the lone Jew at the wedding, a slightly dotty old professor, to identify the voice issuing from Piotr’s lips as that of Hana: a beautiful Jewish girl the Professor knew in his youth who disappeared on the eve of her wedding.

This town is haunted by more than Hana’s single ghostly presence. An uneasy air creeps into everyone, spreading outward from the possessed groom. The wedding slides into a strange bacchanalia where, amidst the revelry, ugliness bubbles to the surface. The film cuts to low-voiced conversations between nameless wedding guests: “In the old days, everyone was Polish… And then the bad ghosts came and divided all the Poles. And then they took Germany, Russia, and finally Israel!”

Demon, Marcin Wrona
Courtesy of TIFF.

Though the ghost story centres around Piotr, the burden settles on his bride Żaneta. Zulewska delivers a wrenching performance as a woman terrified for the man she loves and increasingly horrified by the people around her. By literally digging up the dead past, Piotr exposes something that other characters are desperate to keep hidden from his bride. Nevertheless, Żaneta strides out into the rain to dig, searching for the bones Piotr saw. Seeing this, another character mistakes Żaneta for the ghost-bride herself.

Demon skips from climax to credits without much in the way of denouement. It feels abrupt, like treading on a step that isn’t there. Though the film drops hints about what happened to Hana, it never provides anything concrete: whispers, too-fervent denials, and cryptic drunken allusions are all the clues we get. Demon ends with a callback to the final moments of The Shining: an old photograph of Piotr that, temporally speaking, shouldn’t be possible. On its own, the callback would be cute, but as merely the last of the film’s unresolved mysteries, it’s frustrating.

In Ansky’s play, a group of holy men eventually banish the dybbuk, but in Demon the Professor makes a point of observing where the Synagogue used to stand, and that it is a butcher’s shop now. Unable to exorcise the ghosts of history, Żaneta’s father urges everyone to do the next best thing: forget. It was all a hallucination, a fever dream. This never happened. Let it disappear.

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TIFF15: Masterful 3D is vital to the domestic drama in Every Thing Will Be Fine

Courtesy of TIFF.
Courtesy of TIFF.

Whether it’s making you feel like you’re gazing at the Chauvet caves in Southern France in Cave of Forgotten Dreams or making you aware of how small a boy is in a big, scary, Dickensian adult world in Hugo, 3D can be an essential tool for storytelling. Ever since Wim Wenders started using the technology, to great effect in his dance film Pina, he’s used it to tell stories where the story of space itself is integral. In Pina, he replicated the stage as close as possible on film, by putting the 3D behind the cinema screen. He gave us dance numbers in the three dimensions for which they were designed. Last year’s Cathedrals of Culture, his short about the Berlin Philharmonic, brought you into the building and made you very aware of the space: where the walls are, what the auditorium was like from different seats, and how the building felt.

With Every Thing Will Be Fine, Wenders has proved that using 3D need not be confined to documentary filmmaking, but that it can be absolutely vital to drama. As a story about a man, Tomas (James Franco), who frequently seems to be sleepwalking through his life, the juxtaposition with his three-dimensional surroundings, which are so alive and vivid, is powerful. As Tomas walks around without real purpose, we watch the the three-dimensional snow flakes falling, and we notice the spaces he inhabits. The first shot of the film is of his writer’s notebook that he’s struggling to fill, and its very three-dimensionality makes it feel important and his paralysis all the more palpable.

Through more fault of the screenplay by Bjørn Olaf Johannessen than Franco’s, Tomas rarely has any expression other than one of severity and seriousness. When we meet him, he’s having trouble connecting to his girlfriend Sara (Rachel McAdams with a tragic Québécois accent), from whom he’s about to split. As they sit on opposite sides of their dining room table, his inability to reach across and touch her hand feels like an inability to cross a giant chasm because it’s unfolding in three dimensions. The space between people in this film can feel like an un-crossable gulf.

Near the beginning of the film, Tomas gets into a driving accident on a country road, where he worries he may have accidentally killed a boy. When he finds a boy alive and well in front of his car, he decides to walk him home down the street. Their walk is slow and calm, and that short distance to the house feels long — enough time for them to bond. When he gets to the house and realises the boy’s brother is missing, he and the boy’s mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) run back down the road at full speed. Because we’ve walked that road in three dimensions, our awareness of the distance, and just how quickly they’re traversing it this time, heightens the drama. It helps us understand the degree of the mother’s panic and the seriousness of the emergency.

That accident will haunt Tomas throughout the film, even as he tries to move on, finding a new girlfriend Ann (Marie-Josee Croze) and even a step-daughter Mina (Julia Sarah Stone), who is close in age to the boy he almost killed. Even as his domestic life seems to be becoming idyllic, he’s still unable to fully connect with his loved ones. Here, as before in the film, walls start to seem like barriers, and we’re aware of just how closed off he is because of the spaces he inhabits.

We spend time with Tomas in his station wagon, where Wenders makes us aware of exactly how small it is. When he ends up in the hospital and Sara comes to visit, and she closes the curtains around him to create a room, we feel how it’s a temporary makeshift space, which is what their relationship together has become. In Tomas’ beautiful house, Wenders pulls back to a wide shot to let us see Tomas in one room while Ann and Mina spend time together in the adjacent room. They’re in such separate spaces that we feel the emotional schism.

What Wenders does here is effectively turn the screen into a stage: that sense of well-defined space, of distances having meaning, is something inherent to live theatre. Here, Wenders creates that same immediacy and intimacy on film. It’s something that only a master of blocking could pull off — I’d have liked to see what Kurosawa could do with the technology. It’s literally a new dimension to explore and to emphasize spacial relationships.

It’s wasted on this script though, which takes itself far too seriously for the limited insight and obvious plot points it provides. Most problematic, though, is Tomas who is so dull it’s hard to care about his emotional problems let alone believe he’d be capable of penning a successful novel. He comes alive when with children — curious for a man who claims not to want them early in the film — but he’s standoffish and cold, occasionally inscrutable when among other adults. Wenders scores the film with such self-serious strings that they serve to undermine rather than underline the drama.