DOXA
That’s what you get for loving Gord
T
by Mike Usinger
he goal was a daunting one for directors Joan Tosoni and Martha Kehoe when they got famously enigmatic Canadian icon Gordon Lightfoot in front of the camera to tell the story of his life. “We really, really wanted to get something more than what people have heard already,” Tosoni says, in a conference call with Kehoe from Toronto. “And we knew that would take some time, because he needs to trust you. He’s an inscrutable man, and we were aware of that from the beginning.” The fascinating thing about Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind is the way that one of the greatest storytellers in the history of pop music—Canadian or otherwise— seems at once totally open, and yet at the same time leaves one thinking there’s plenty going on inside that he’s never going to share. That’s hinted at by Lightfoot’s peers. At one point in If You Could Read My Mind, Murray McLauchlan suggests that Bob Dylan and Lightfoot have more in common than a mutual admiration and respect for each other’s talent. “Murray says if two enigmatic people could be in a perfect marriage, it would be Bob Dylan and Gordon Lightfoot,” Kehoe says with a laugh. “That’s really true. I was very gratified to hear his drummer say, ‘You could drive across the country with Gord and he’d never say anything poetic.’ He says everything that he has to say in his songs.” If all this makes it sound like Lightfoot is unwilling to pull back the curtain on his career, it shouldn’t. Fans whose working relationship goes back to the long-running CanCon staple The Tommy Hunter Show, the directors began seriously working to get Gordon Lightfoot: If You
A famously enigmatic (and cranky) Canadian icon tells you everything you wanted to know, and some things you didn’t, in Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind.
Could Read My Mind off the ground a half-dozen years ago. That’s when Lightfoot let them know he was ready to tell his story. “I think he had a fear that he never wants his career to end,” Kehoe says. “He didn’t want to do a comprehensive film as if it was over. I think, at this point, he’s getting on, and he feels a responsibility to his body of work. So he wants to bring attention to it, and this is part of that.” If You Could Read My Mind starts off in the present day, with Lightfoot looking back at footage of his younger self performing his ’60s hit “For Lovin’ Me” and being appalled. Not by the fact that it showcased him as a monster talent who’d rack up an endless string of monster hits over the coming decades, including “Sundown”, “Rainy Day People”, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, and too many others to count here. Instead, right before declaring “I hate this fucking song,” he confesses “I guess I don’t like who I am.” His reason? The song is an almost painfully autobiographical account of a messed-up-on-multiple-fronts
What also emerges is Lightfoot’s deep respect for his craft—as much as he had a golden touch that’s seen his work covered by everyone from Elvis to the Dandy Warhols, he’s also taken a meticulously workmanlike approach to the business of songwriting. What ultimately emerges is a picture of a deeply conflicted and perhaps tormented artist, whose life includes a long path of failed relationships and the profound regrets that come with them. No matter how big a Lightfoot fan you might be, you’ll learn things to the point where you’ll never listen to the timeless “If You Could Read My Mind” the same way again.
“He really is an artist, first and foremost,” Kehoe says. “But also within that headspace there’s the workman, there’s the dreamer, there’s the lover, there’s the crabby guy. All these different characters are there within Gord. And then there’s also this guy from Orillia, and that’s who he feels he needs to be a lot of the time.” With that, Tosoni jumps in with, “He’s very, very unpretentious, but not pretentiously so. He’s basically got a very Canadian personality.” g Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind screens at SFU Woodward’s on May 4 and the Vancity Theatre on May 12.
Lightfoot walking out on his wife and young family. Consider that a heads up that Kehoe and Tosoni don’t just focus on the highs in If You Could Read My Mind. Little moments make it clear how deep the filmmakers dug for the film: an early Lightfoot interview with an impossibly young Alex Trebek; scratchy audio of his earliest live performance, as a choirboy in church in his hometown of Orillia, Ontario. Mixed in with modern-day interviews and performances is a treasure trove of crazily obscure historical moments (Lightfoot as a bit player on the ’60s CBC show Country Hoedown), snaps of old posters and rare archival photos (star-studded ’70s house parties in Toronto where you can almost smell the Crown Royal), and auxiliary interviews with peers and insiders that put his career in complete and important perspective. The 80-year-old is deservedly feted in the film by a long list of artists that includes Steve Earle, Sarah McLachlan, Geddy Lee, Alec Baldwin, Anne Murray, and a clearly thrilled-to-bethere Greg Graffin of Bad Religion.
The real Don Corleone revealed
I
by Adrian Mack
t’s more chilling than The Godfather, grislier than Goodfellas, and all true. The blood-drenched rise and fall of Salvatore “Totò” Riina gets the epic documentary it deserves with Corleone, in which some of the most notorious Mafiosi in Sicily’s brutal history go on-camera to describe the slaughter they committed under the command of the “Godfather of Godfathers”. During the gang wars and escalating tensions of the ’80s and ’90s, nobody in Palermo was safe. “The whole story of this poor peasant reaching the highest position in the Mafia in such a bloodthirsty way—this is impressive. Impressive,” says DOXA Documentary Film Festival programmer Thierry Garrel in an excited call to the Georgia Straight. “Italians, of course, remember because the whole state was shaken and was under threat, month after month, for years. Before, the Mafia was not attacking the powerful. They were extortionists, taking advantage of any money circulating, or drugs, things like that, but the fact that they started having policemen, then judges, then politicians killed…” Killed publicly, and in spectacular fashion, which the archive-raiding doc presents in gruesome detail. It might be director Mosco Levi Boucault’s crowning achievement as a filmmaker. His career-length excavation of crime and politics Italianstyle receives its first-ever retrospective as part of Garrel’s Italia Italia series, running at this year’s festival. In Boucault’s grand, novelistic approach, both sides of the law emerge as natural storytellers—including the killers. In one incredible moment, the man who blew crusading prosecutor Giovanni Falcone and his wife to
Killers, commandos, prosecutors, and cops go on the record to tell the story of the most vicious of Sicily’s mob bosses, Salvatore “Totò” Riina, in the epic Corleone.
smithereens in ’92 recalls his hesitation at detonating the bomb. As with 2011’s They Were the Red Brigades, also coming to DOXA, Boucault is drawn, in Garrel’s words, to “the threshold, the limits of what humanity should be”. Adds the programmer: “There’s a dimension of tragedy inside the darkest human being.” Perhaps. One of Riina’s commandos describes the boss as “pure criminal”, a “man of honour” who rewrote all the rules of the Cosa Nostra in the blood of his enemies, and then his friends. He was unique in his absolute psychopathy. When he’s finally captured in 1993 after 24 years on the run, Riina’s performance in front of a jury is a masterpiece of operatic dissembling, as the twinkle-eyed monster insists that he’s merely a humble farmer from the town of Corleone. The mask slips when he’s confronted by a rival boss whose children were killed on Riina’s orders. The Godfather of Godfathers laughs in his face.
Totò Riina died in 2017, still denying his guilt, after another 24 years in solitary confinement. But organized crime didn’t die with him. As we see in another of Boucault’s films, Berlusconi: The Mondadori Affair (2006), the hot nexus of political, corporate, and underworld corruption thrives in Italy—and elsewhere. Garrel, a Paris native now living in Vancouver, remarks: “Berlusconi, he was the first real populist leader, coming from the corporate world, and cynical. Remember, at that time we were looking at Italy across the Alps and saying, ‘Well, this is quite significant. What is happening there will happen here.’ ” With Trump to the south and the graft being exposed within our own institutions, might we look across the ocean and say something similar? g Corleone screens at SFU Woodward’s on May 5, preceded by a master class with Mosco Levi Boucault at the same venue. Corleone screens again at the Vancity Theatre on May 10.
APRIL 25 – MAY 2 / 2019 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 17