TIFF '24 Day Eight

A few words about expectations

Anora

One of the great joys of going to a film festival is seeing movies without any prior expectations. You see an interesting title, or a still, and that leads you to read the programme synopsis, which you invariably forget amid all the other synopses you’re reading, so you walk into the movie relatively cold and get to have a pure experience, shall we say. But then there are the films you’ve really had your eye on. Maybe it’s a director you like, or it’s got awards buzz, or a friend recommended it, and you’re simply more aware of what you’re getting into. The usual expectations game, even without having seen a trailer.

Before the festival, I got to see a few of the TIFF selections at advanced screenings for press. All films I had been anticipating to different degrees in different ways. Anora, for example, the new, Palme d’Or-winning film from Sean Baker, a director I am fully in the tank for. I thought the film was pretty great. Its story of an erotic dancer pulled into the wild world of a young Russian living on his oligarch parents’ dime in New York is rendered with Baker’s usual liveliness, beautiful photography, and wicked heart. I was also surprised that this, of all his recent films, was the one to garner such universal feeling of arrival for the filmmaker. Perhaps it’s simply that it’s the most straightforwardly crowd-pleasing, but in a stew of expectations, I can’t help puzzling over the annointing of Anora, even before considering the film on its own terms, by its own merits. Like something was lost to me on this one thanks to all the acclaim, and perhaps my own investment in Baker. That’s why rewatches exist, of course.

Presence

On the other end, there’s Steven Soderbergh’s new film Presence, which I’ve heard a few critics trash, but which I quite liked. It’s another film I’d been anticipating, because I love Soderbergh’s experiments, and this is one. A ghost story, told entirely in POV shots from the ghost’s perspective. The result is something less horror, more family drama, except that the script here, by David Koepp, is quite strange. Odd character details, dialogue that sounds almost deliberately like nothing that would ever come out of an actual human being’s mouth, and a plot that goes in perhaps the silliest of directions. And yet, to me, that’s all just part of what’s interesting and entertaining to me about Soderbergh’s filmmaking. He knows how to make a movie, and certainly he’s trying to make those movies good, but what is “good”? Is Presence “good”? I don’t even know how to answer that. I think it is, but probably not for the normal reasons. What’s more true is I find it interesting to watch and interesting to consider as a bit of formal play from a prolific master fending off boredom and excited about weilding the myriad tools of cinema, and that’s more than good enough for me.

Then there are the experiments gone wrong, like Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End, a movie that I’d been greatly looking forward to based on the director’s previous work, the documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, the two of which together form one of the great filmmaking feats of last decade. His narrative feature debut, unfortunately, reaches no such heights. Not even close. In fact, I felt embarassed on his behalf. It’s the story of a wealthy family living out the post-apocalypse in a beautifully adorned house in an underground salt mine, starring Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, and George MacKay. It’s also a musical, a fact I knew, but I don’t think I’d understood as quite so literally. It is, literally, a musical, not just a film with some musical elements. Unfortunately, the songs are bad, which is a problem. Bad songs, sung badly, existing not to move the plot forward as such, but to stop the narrative every few minutes to expose the sad inner feelings of its characters. At 148 minutes, it’s a painful slog, and that’s not even addressing the matter of what the film is about. The entrance of Moses Ingram, a survivor from the surface, who is also a black woman, is meant to shake up this cloistered, privileged family, challenging their complicity in the world’s destruction, but in an overall sympathetic way. All that does is make apparent the unbearable liberl-ness of the whole endeavour. I thought a lot about Get Out, and how this might be the kind of movie Allison Williams’ family in that would have loved (or at least said they loved), because it does nothing to actually challenge their position. Unforatunetly, all the shots from inside the salt mine, beautiful as they are, cannot overcome the vapidity of what Oppenheimer has created. My ears are also owed an apology.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

My other pre-TIFF screening was Mohammad Rasoulof’s Cannes Jury Prize-winner The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a movie that came with its own unique set of expectations thanks to its behind-the-scenes story. Dealing with the 2022 wave of protests in Iran following the killing of Mahsa Amini, Rasoulof, long a target of the Iranian government, fled into exile after being sentenced to eight years in prison and flogging when the movie was annouced aas a Cannes selection. The film itself is, in my opinion, very good. It’s a study of a family torn apart by the political forces of the country, lead by a patriarch who works as, essentially, an executioner for the state. It’s also an allegory for all that strife, while featuring real cellphone footage from the protests. Its third act veers into something resembling The Shining, without the supernatural elements, and I gather this is where the film loses some people, but it felt like an appropriate culmination to me, Benny Hill-style door gags and all. Am I grading on a curve given the background? I don’t know. Maybe. Is that such a problem?

But enough about what I saw before the festival. I’ve now done eight proper days at TIFF 2024, and this was another “light” one—just two!—though its films were anything but. Both were films I was massively anticipating. Both held up to expectations in interesting ways.

All We Imagine as Light

The first was All We Imagine as Light, the narrative feature debut from Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia. In 2021, when TIFF was still doing the social-distancing and half-online thing, I attended a lightly attended screening of her documentary, a Wavelengths entry called A Night of Knowing Nothing, about the student protests in India. It blew me away. Rather than approach the material straight, Kapadia had crafted a poetic meditation on life in modern, Modi-led India and the weight of activism. As with Oppenheimer, I was excited to see how she would do with a fiction film. It was the first Indian film in competition at Cannes in decades, and Kapadia took home the Grand Prix, so my anticipation levels may have actually been sky high. Rather than simply meeting them, the film surprised me. It was, somehow, not what I’d expected. All We Imagine as Light is the story of two roommates, nurses who’ve moved to Mumbai for work; one middle-aged and on what she seems to feel is the downward trajectory of life, the other a young and more excitable. Their friendship, and their struggles and agonies are sketched in with tender detail, patiently filmed against a bustling backdrop. It’s a story about immigration of a kind, and the isolation of city life, and the feelings of being trapped by space and society, and it’s about acceptance of self. Kapadia mixes in striking moments of documentary that open up the film’s dramatic context, and a late dose of surreality acts as an unbearably moving counterpoint. This is the emergence of a major filmmaker, I think.

Then we get to the big boy: The Brutalist. The new film from director Brady Corbet seemed to take Venice by surprise, though I had been anticipating it for a while thanks to an inside scoop from a friend who’d seen it well in advance. Three-and-a-half hours long, with a 15-minute intermission, shot on VistaVision, presented on 70mm. This is a film by a director clearly announcing his ambitions. Granted, his previous films—The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux, both received mostly poorly, with accusations of pretentiousness—also had “ambition” written all over them. The surprise here is only that Corbet, along with his wife and co-writer Mona Fastvold, was able to pull it off. The Brutalist is an attempt at a Great American Epic, in the vein of The Godfather and There Will Be Blood (I am not the first to cite these, don’t come at me), about a Hungarian architect, László Toth, who escapes Europe after WWII. In a dizzying sequence at the start of the film—it perhaps deliberately resembles the final scene of The Childhood of a Leader, the emergence of fascism sending the camera literally spinning through crowds—Toth arrives at Ellis Island and begins his American immigrant story.

That arrival shot, which culminates in an upside-down Statue of Liberty, is a very plain indication of the intentions here. This is a film about the twisted realities of American life, the ugliness barely hidden under the surface of capitlist striving and new world aristocracy. Adrien Brody, the best he’s been in years, plays Toth across decades as he struggles to find footing before coming into the orbit of a wealthy magnate, played by a fantastic Guy Pearce, who tasks him with building a grand community centre, a monument to his late mother. Toth, meanwhile, has been trying to find his wife and rock, played by Felicity Jones, passage to America. His very modern ideas about architecture and design—What better description of a cube can there be than its own construction? he explains at one point—reflect a lack of trust in the ornate adornments of a world built on lies. His experience of a roiling pre-war Europe, the war itself, and of assimilation in America all guide his brutalist instincts: Simple spaces, made from concrete, their nothingness directing attention only to their own form.

I can already see the complaints mounting from detractors. Not merely pretentious, but obvious, simplistic even in its depiction of the difficult immigrant experience and its portrait of the sick bigotry and monied depravity at America’s heart. In fact, it is simple. It is direct. The film’s coda literally spells it out, with both a revelation of Toth’s true intentions in the design of Pearce’s very Protestant concrete cathedral to his own ego, and a direct address to the camera about what it all means. This is, in fact, form meeting content. The journey of the film, its epic span, its reality so detailed—I spoke with fellow audience members who were convinced Toth had to be a real historical figure, protesting my assertion that no, it is all a fiction—is a means to an end, like Toth’s architecture, directing attention to its own form. The remarkable thing is that the form speaks volumes, often unsettling, confronting the audience with the contradictions of a country, of people, of the Jewish experience, of love, and art, and nature, and industry. And while I suspect many will read into the film only simple condemnation, one must only look at its form and its end to see it is a film about transformation and the meaning inherent. It is, actually, a great American epic.