TIFF '15 Part One: High and low

The Toronto International Film Festival moved its base of operations downtown a few years back with the grand opening of TIFF Bell Lightbox, an elegantly designed five-cinema arthouse multiplex, complete with offices, restaurants, an art gallery, a bookstore and, wink-wink, a high-end optometrist. Being at the corner of King and John places TIFF smack-dab in the heart of one of many Toronto urban zones that, like urban zones the world over, is being rapidly overtaken by high-rise apartments—in fact there is a high-rise apartment building attached to TIFF Bell Ligthbox. It’s thus all too apropos that one of the most highly anticipated films in this year’s Festival is a film about a high-rise, one that harkens back to the early days of this particular architectural-lifestyle phenomenon while looking forward to the rampant, violent psychopathy the phenomenon obviously engenders.

Based on one of the late J.G. Ballard’s most essential novels and directed by Ben Wheatley (Kill List, A Field in England), High-Rise is, naturally, a horror movie. The story, faithfully adapted by Amy Jump, Wheatley’s partner in life and cinema, follows the same trajectory of many Ballard narratives, obsessed as they are with the way that civilization and capitalism reach critical mass and plunge us back into primitive anarchy. Set in the 1970s, the film is brilliantly designed, often outrageously funny, and features excellent performances from Tom Hiddleston, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans, Elizabeth Moss and Jeremy Irons as the titular high-rise’s architect, who near the film’s end wonders if perhaps his creation “will become a paradigm for future developments.” (That line got a big laugh at the screening I attended today.) It’s not easy to make a well-shaped narrative film from Ballard, and High-Rise does indeed run out of steam in the second half—and then gets it right back again in a beautifully gauged finale.

From High to low, both with regards to economic status, architectural latitude and geography: Bleak Street is the latest film from the great Mexican auteur Arturo Ripstein. Based on a true story about two midget wrestlers accidentally murdered by two middle-aged sex workers in a dingy Mexico City love hotel, the film is one of Ripstein’s finest, most eerily beautiful explorations of the strange and sad destinies of the down and out, captured in spectral black and white camerawork that floats adrift through the poor places where the sun only enters from very high above and the residents struggle always to get by. The film brims with black humour, yet it also carries with it a peculiar compassion that is the opposite of sentimentality—Ripstein, like his one-time mentor Luis Buñuel, refuses to make the marginal into saints, but by telling their stories with focus and fascination, he brings them closer to us.

Closeness and the ways in which time and truth-telling can eat away at it is central to 45 Years, Weekend director Andrew Haigh’s slow-burn stunner of a relationship drama. The film features magnificent performances from Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay as an elderly English couple whose preparations for their wedding anniversary party are curtailed by the news that the remains of a woman Courtenay loved and lost before he and Rampling met have been discovered. Constructing his film from many quiet, exquisitely composed scenes where much drama goes unspoken, Haigh achieves the very impressive feat of conveying how a couple who have lived the majority of their lives together could be tossed into an emotional tempest by events that took place five decades ago. 

The present is also impinged upon by the past—the long, long, long-past past—in Thai maestro Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s haunted and haunting Cemetery of Splendour, which largely unfolds within a small, improvised hospital in which a group of soldiers suffering from a mysterious sleeping sickness are cared for by nurses and volunteers and overlooked by these weird and beautiful luminous tubes. We learn early in this latest film from the director of Syndromes and a Century that the hospital has supposedly been built on top of a centuries-old cemetery for kings—and their spirits may be involved in the onset and alleviation of the enigmatic affliction. In one of the most imaginative and moving sequences I’ve seen in any film this year, a psychic gives one of the hospital volunteers a tour of a building that no longer exists.

Such sequences cast the real world about the cinemas in new, more vivid shades. As I wander the streets of Toronto after another triple-feature, already over-caffeinated and somewhat dazed, it’s films like those listed above that make me pause to consider the allure of something as ephemeral as the changing autumn light. Movies are commonly thought of as machines of fantasy, but they can also make the world more real. I’m not just saying that because I stood beside Mathieu Amalric at the bar of the Bovine Sex Club, saw Jia Zhang-ke dine with his family at a mediocre Chinese restaurant, or got to share come canapés with Laurie Anderson. It’s the images and sounds infusing our collective psyches as we sit and watch film after film here: they change us. And if I try to watch the good films and avoid the stupid ones, I sometimes believe that may be changing me for the better.

   

Lovers rock

The movie opens turning, the night’s stars unstuck and blurring, the 45 of Wanda Jackson’s ‘Funnel of Love’ loping on the turntable, the twin images of our far-apart lovers reclining in their respective nests. For some minutes, everything moves clockwise. (If only the screen were a circle!) It’s an ingenious way of getting us thinking about time in broader terms. It also gets us literally into the groove of Jim Jarmusch’s latest seriocomic cosmic concoction, a blend of genre mischief, thing/place/notion fetish, corny comedic routines, ruminations on time, science, civilization and technology, and the sort of normally neglected incidentals that Jarmusch has always aspired to construct movies from—few filmmakers so clearly enjoy just watching people do stuff: roll a cigarette, dance, play dominoes, select books to travel with. Only Lovers Left Alive is itself a trip, an appropriation of vampire lore as a way to address the nature of long-term love. It’s been done before but, in my experience, never so resonantly and, despite a heavy-handed moment or two—the historical references get a little old—so lightly.

There comes a point in relationships where living apart emerges as a viable option. In the case of Eve (Tilda Swinton) and Adam (Tom Hiddleston) it may have taken a century or two. Only Lovers begins with Eve in Tangier and Adam in Detroit—an undead city if ever there was—where he holes up in a dilapidated house making smoldering anonymous records he may or may not want people to hear. She embraces life and modernity, he’s a recluse despairing at the world’s entropic idiocy, obsessively accumulating objects from the past—though it’s notable that only Eve can carbon-date these objects with a mere touch. Adam’s gloom burgeons to the degree where suicide becomes a consideration. Eve, sensing this—there is some discussion of spooky action at a distance—takes a chain of redeyes to come meet him. But Eve’s arrival is followed by an unexpected visit from her little sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska), also a vampire. For a time the film becomes, of all things, a comedy about annoying in-laws who invade your place, touch your stuff, put the moves on your buddies, and drink all your blood.  

From Down By Law (1986) to Dead Man (1995), Jarmusch’s films have always transmitted ambivalence toward narrative, something he seems to regard largely as scaffolding through which he can weave digressions. Only Lovers has just about the friendliest balance of story and incident in any of his later, woozier, formally looser works. Ava’s tempestuous entrance and an eventual crisis involving dwindling blood supplies give the film enough midpoint momentum to support its loveliest, less urgent passages, the White Hills concert, or a wee-hour tour of the Motor City, complete with a visit to Jack White’s house and the Michigan Theatre, a movie palace-turned parking lot, on the site where Henry Ford built the first car. (The building recently featured in Peter Mettler’s The End of Time.)

What else? The revenant fashions are to die for, the angular drones of Jozef Van Wissem score drape scenery in aural smoke, and the typically eclectic cast, which also includes Anton Yelchin, Jeffrey Wright and John Hurt, accentuate the film’s supple tonal shifts. Eve is the anchor in the central relationship, but Hiddleston is the anchor in the cast, embodying both the gravity and mirth generated by this film made by a mature artist who, I’d guess, is reflecting on his own experiences negotiating love over the long term. Only Lovers is, in a sense, about the special pleasures of revisiting what’s known: books, records, friends, lovers. Or the work of beloved irreverent filmmakers who endeavour over time to keep finding new routes to explore, while adhering to certain old ideas about what their art should be, regardless of changing fashions. 

                                                  

A deep kind of blue

In a coal-smeary London still recovering from the Blitz, in rooms of hanging smoke in which despair nestles in the wallpaper, in the backseats of cars and back corners of bars, in the lonely hollows of tube stations and the yellow gloom of side streets we find this unnervingly gorgeous, desperate woman struggling to find something to do with the most potent item in her possession: desire. Neither gender has it very easy when it comes to the expression, much less the fulfillment of real longing in postwar England, but the women, those meant to be desired rather than to do the desiring, hold a special challenge (a theme you'll find fleshed out in greater depth by our articulate friend over at Feminéma). 

This is the milieu of The Deep Blue Sea, Terrence Davies’ adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play. It begins, in a sense, where Davies’ adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth left off: with a woman alone in a room with suicide. This, what we used to call a woman’s picture, is a story of transgression as recklessly valiant as it is inevitably destructive: Hester (a particularly brilliant, courageous, and sexy Rachel Weisz) is married to William (Simon Russell Beale), a judge, portly, much older than she, a mama’s boy, and very tender-loving in a way that has nothing to do with passion. Hester leaves William for Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), a lanky former RAF pilot who happens to be a war hero, a would-be bon vivant in silly ascots, a guy who lets a woman know when she gets his engine running, and a cad, neglectful, and not much more sensitive to the scope of Hester’s needs than William. So, if you’ll forgive the blunt language, this is about a woman trying to choose between a man who forgets her birthday and a man who forgets to fuck her. And it’s just about perfectly realized by Davies and his collaborators, at once raw and elegant, generous and merciless: people have their reasons, and Davies finds reasons to sympathize with everyone.

1950s England is also the milieu where Davies seems most at home, the milieu of his childhood, the one that allows him to stage people singing the good old songs in pubs (the director’s favourite on-screen activity). Shot by Florian Hoffmeister, the film glows with mostly muted colours under flickering penumbra—for the first 20 minutes I wondered if the projector’s lamp was burning out—and the elegiac strains of a Samuel Barber violin concerto. The décors, the details in behaviour—the lick of a shoulder, or the bowed head that accompanies the giving of an achingly ill-chosen gift—are all so much of a piece. But I think what I admire most about The Deep Blue Sea is its delicate balance of the subtle and the explicit. Hester’s curtains are freighted with symbolism, and characters actually speak aloud phrases like “Beware of passion.” Yet in the hands of these fine actors even the most on-the-nose dialogue brims with subtext. At its best, Davies’ work exudes an intuitive understanding of the richness of melodrama, that potentially sublime interplay between surface and depth. Even in the film’s seemingly straightforward bookend device we can trace an over-arcing lyricism: in the final shot the camera pulls back from Hester’s window, glides down the face of her rooming house, then down the street, then toward this rubble where there was once a building, and I couldn’t help but notice: that bomb just missed her.