One Last Toronto Roundup: Herzog in 3-D, Squabbling Comics and More

I found myself completely charmed, and in the end quite moved, by Michael Winterbottom's The Trip, a freewheeling riff of a movie in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (who appeared together in Winterbottom's marvelously out-there 2005 Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story) play semi-fictional versions of themselves, two friends taking a food-junket trip through the Northlands. The Trip, technically, isn't a proper movie at all; it was shot as a BBC television series, and this feature-film version consists of the six episodes edited together. But even when downed in one sitting, this collection of sketches works: Brydon and Coogan needle and challenge one another, trying to one-up each other with their dueling impersonations of the likes of Michael Caine, Sean Connery and Woody Allen. And in the end, they get at some profound but subtle ideas about the nature of friendship and connection -- and miraculously, they don't even kill each other.

My final film at Toronto 2010 was Werner Herzog's 3-D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, in which everybody's favorite jolly German takes us on a journey through the Chauvet caves of France, the walls of which are decorated with charming, expressive, wholly alive animal drawings that are some 30,000 years old. The picture is so low-key and soothing that more than a few exhausted and overworked critics I know admit to drifting off, carried away on line-drawing dreams of ancient bison and stampeding, whinnying horses. (The movie's gloriously spare but rich score, by Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger, sure couldn't have hurt.)

But Cave of Forgotten Dreams captivated me, and though Herzog's use of 3-D technology sometimes threatens to cause a shaky-cam headache, when he and his crew are shooting in the caves, showing us these astonishing ancient works of art, the effect is dazzling. Herzog's technique shows us how these old-time artisans used the dimensional contours of the cave wall to add life and movement to their drawings. Calcite crystals embedded in those walls glitter like diamond sawdust; stalagmites'n'tites, looking like far-out coral branches or freeform home-made maple sugar candy, spring from the wall's floors and ceilings.

Herzog's running patter is alternately a form of wry stand-up comedy and a heartfelt commentary on how these drawings, made ages ago, connect us with a long and winding thread of humanity. He points out how a rhino is drawn with sketched-out multiple legs, to give the "illusion of movement, like frames in an animated film." And in the movie's weird little coda, he introduces us to a group of albino crocodiles -- they thrive in the radioactive glow of a nearby French nuclear power plant -- who, he muses, might someday make their way over to the Chauvet caves to blink their heavy-lidded eyes at these wondrous drawings. In a manner of speaking, between the Venice and Toronto film festivals, I've seen some pretty wondrous drawings myself these past few weeks. Now all that's left to say is, Arrivederci, Toronto.

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