Bad Faith fails on every level: as a thriller, as film noir, as black comedy, as a murder mystery. Even its title is erroneous, if one assumes that bad faith really does mean “an intentional or malicious refusal to perform some duty or contractual obligation, or where the rights of someone else are intentionally or maliciously infringed upon.” Self-preservation generally precludes malice or malicious intent, at least in legal terms as I understand them, and the two leads in this story are so wacky that one can hardly accuse them of anything that hinges on the contractual.
In fact, I am left to wonder how many holes a plot can contain before it turns in on itself, somewhat like a bedbug infestation that devours its way through Egyptian cotton, leaving the fabric pitted and shred.
While I am as keen as the next person to sit on the edge of my chair (as it seems I have been doing throughout this season of festival films), I don’t remember the last time, if ever, I have practically nodded off in the cinema – certainly never before during a movie where little kittens are suffocated, eyes are gouged out (actually, that’s not true. They’re bayoneted in), and serial killers run rampant through the dark and daylight of the city (in this case, Gothenburg), their crimes witnessed repeatedly by the female lead, played to order by a withering Sonja Richter.
Furthermore, I am never one to shy away from coincidence. Truth be told, Thomas Hardy is one of my favourite writers, and he knows a thing or two about coincidence, having been sorely criticised for the same by half the people I know. That said, just how many murders can one woman happen upon in one week, let alone during an evening stroll? And how many times can a person witness a crime – no one in sight for miles, it seems – and manage to repeatedly escape the killer? And is it me, or is Sweden rife with only the crazed, the crazy, the rude and misogynistic?
Right from the film’s start, I was reminded of the hilarious Ingmar Bergman parodies I have seen (SCTV and French & Saunders leap to mind) (oh, if only Bad Faith had come close to the same vicinity as Bergman), and I missed John Candy more than ever, thinking what he might have done with this film and all of those ‘staring’ bits. Very scary!
No matter, I can’t get enough of going to the movies, especially during the Toronto International Film Festival week. And as a middle-aged urban-dwelling ESL teacher, I think I understand a thing or two about cultural differences, which is why I generally love documentaries and World Cinema films more than anything else. Even when a film doesn’t rank a ten out of ten, I can often overlook what for me are (that is, arguably) its weaknesses and focus on the music and the cinematography, which, in the case of tonight’s movie, were (or could have been) truly captivating.
That said, Bad Faith is one of the worst films I have paid to see in a long time. Its cynical, gratuitous, pretentious, illogical and working so hard to be so many things all at once that it fails to make its mark in any way at all. If great cinema is what you want, you are far better off spending your money on any of the other films I have had the pleasure of seeing this week: Behind Blue Skies; Tears of Gaza; The Human Resources Manager; Aftershock; Big Picture; Another Year, and my absolute favourite, Home for Christmas.
Tomorrow we are off to see The Trip and Jack Goes Boating. I have every good faith that these films are going to make me forget that every once in a while even the Toronto Film Festival slips a deploringly bad film past its viewers. Anyway, they can’t all be great, or even good movies, and the disappointingly bad one makes all the others shine that much more brightly by comparison.
