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.

   

Hush, hush, 15-foot slithering demon tongue

“What is the supernatural?” Oxford professor Joseph Coupland (Jared Harris) posits the question to his students in that vaguely condescending, more or less rhetorical way that bespectacled smarty-pants Englishmen do in the movies. Coupland has some strong opinions on the subject, strong enough to justify confining young Jane Harper (Olivia Cooke) to a single room and essentially torturing her for her own ostensible good. Jane seems to be the source of some rather nasty paranormal activity—“Her brain waves are off the charts!”—and Coupland’s aim is to harvest her “negative energy” through séances, isolation, sleep deprivation and other punishing techniques, to extract the bad vibes the way a surgeon might extract a tumour.

After his superiors at Oxford cut their funding for the project Coupland decides to whisk Jane and a team of student volunteers away to some creaky old country manor where they can continue their work without the interference of the academy or anyone with a lick of common sense. Jane’s “manifestations” and their accompanying revelations about their origins come in dribs and drabs over the course of The Quiet Ones. In the meantime, Coupland gradually proves his scummy ruthlessness, some randy youths get busy, and hunky cypher Brain (Sam Claflin) captures the whole process on 16mm—the story is set in the 1970s. Brian likes to watch, and not much else. He’s something of an empty vessel, our Brian, a Christian, if we’re to go by the tiny cross hanging from his big neck, his vacuousness/innocence making him vulnerable to mad scientists and evil spirits alike, and to the allure of poor Jane, those eyes, that gorgeous smile, the undulating 15-foot demon tongue slithering out of her mouth.

The Quiet Ones is, we’re told, “based on true events.” What appear to be photos from said true events—an experiment conducted by the Toronto Society for Psychical Research in 1972, which you can read about on the webs—are displayed at the film’s end, as if to say, “See! What’d I tell you? True events, guys!” Had scenarists Tom de Ville, Craig Rosenberg, Oren Moverman and director John Pogue adhered more closely to the source material they’d likely have made something far more intriguing and provocative, but this Hammer production’s many concessions to genre only serve to render The Quiet Ones more, well, generic, predictable, and a little dull. Among those concessions is some dopey looking CGI and an entirely tokenistic use of found footage. It’s a shame because there are items of interest here: Harris, most obviously, a fine actor too rarely used to full effect (though he was wonderful in seasons three, four and five of Mad Men); Coupland’s use of peculiar technologies like Kirlian photography and Brion Gysin’s dreammachine; the dissonance between the film’s hoary setting and the deployment of Slade and T-Rex records to keep Jane awake; and the battling parapsychological theories regarding the source of paranormal activity. Perhaps somewhere during the film’s genesis someone wanted to make something more sophisticated—then the evil demons took over.

          

The two Jakes

For all the compelling enigmas permeating Quebec director Denis Villeneuve’s latest and finest film (all arachnid appearances are duly noted), there is something pleasingly unambiguous about its title. Mining an anxiety so primal as to require no explanation within the film itself, Enemy is about the terror of seeing yourself duplicated, of discovering another with your face and voice trespassing upon your singularity, a forced mirror relieving you of the consolations of uniqueness while reminding you of all your failures in this life. But it’s also, very cleverly, a movie about the psychic perils of watching movies, making it that much more apt that it features an American movie star at its double-centre. Identify with the hero at your own risk.

Loosely adapted from José Saramago’s The Double—or, to translate its original Portuguese title literally, The Duplicated Man—by Javier Gullón, Enemy follows Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal), a history professor, as he distractedly goes about having unintentionally rough sex with his girlfriend (Mélanie Laurent) or lecturing on dictatorships and their control over individual expression. What’s distracting him? Maybe it’s his burgeoning depression, some new unease with his seemingly anonymous existence, exemplified above all by his boxy apartment, a place that barely seems inhabited. Desperate for even the most fleeting escape, he accepts a co-worker’s advice and rents an inane comedy on DVD. He watches the movie, goes to bed, and dreams of the movie. It’s only when replaying the movie in his dream that he recognizes the actor in the miniscule role of a bellboy. His name is Anthony St. Clair (Jake Gyllenhaal), and he looks like Adam and sounds like Adam, and Adam immediately understands that he’s no choice but to find him.

A man sees his doppelgänger in a movie. I said to be wary of identification, but the truth is that our surrogate in Enemy isn’t Adam but, rather, Helen (Sarah Gadon), Anthony’s pregnant wife, the only person in the movie able to fully appreciate the uncanny resemblance between the men. One of the smartest things in Gullón’s script is the space left in the story for Helen to occupy; one of the smartest things in the casting is the selection of Gadon, who’s of late turned up in numerous high-profile Canadian films yet never to such marvellous effect. Her Helen is both alarmed and complicit in the meeting and negotiations between the two Jakes. She’s highly active yet in a state of shocked suspension. Gyllenhaal is in excellent form, offering an array of incrementally layered reaction shots—several of which are reactions to his own actions. Villeneuve and editor Matthew Hannam allow their lead to hog the screen, as though trapped in a hall of mirrors. It’s less a stunt performance than a perfectly gauged exercise in an actor’s most solipsistic nightmare.

But the real masterstroke of Enemy might be the casting of Toronto—a sort of enemy city for many Canadians, not least among them Quebeckers. There’s not a single glimpse of Toronto’s charms or history or funk in Enemy. Instead, Villeneuve maximizes the hard, monolithic coldness of the Gardiner freeway, of the financial sector’s blandest skyscrapers, of the University of Toronto’s brutalist campus, rendering Adam/Anthony’s world one of looming eeriness and reflective surfaces. The world of Enemy is highly subjectivized, perfectly recognizable yet strange. Did it become strange because of Adam/Anthony’s chance encounter? Is this town not big enough for the both of them? 

         

TIFF' 13: Huddled together in the darkness

The Missing Picture

It is Monday morning. The September sun raised itself up via a lumbering crane shot over an overexposed Toronto shivering with cinema withdrawal—a Toronto as unseasonably chilly as Donald Rumsfeld’s smiling evil grandpa eyes, which twinkle eerily and often in Errol Morris’ The Unknown Known. The 38^th Toronto International Film Festival came to a close last night. Morris’ problematic, unmissable, semantically obsessed feature-length interview with the former Secretary of Defense was just one of several new works that, like the sadistic levels of air conditioning in most TIFF venues, left my teeth chattering and my soul on ice. Sometimes in a very good way.

Bastards

The best way? How about Claire Denis’ Bastards? This bleak masterpiece and true contemporary noir, with elements drawn from William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, follows a French naval captain as he absconds from his errant seaman’s life to move into a vast Paris apartment and plot revenge on a business tycoon he blames for the defiling of his niece, the collapse of his family’s business, and the suicide of his brother-in-law. Denis regulars (Vincent Lindon, Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin) help seal the film’s seductive doom, but it’s Chiara Mastroianni’s haunted, enigmatic performance as the tycoon’s wife that most perfectly captures Bastards’ choked air of desperation and inevitability. Nearly as good as Mastroianni—and not nearly as famous—is Leandra Leal as the femme fatale in Brazilian director Fernando Coimbra’s inventively structured kidnapping drama A Wolf at the Door, one of this year’s most welcome surprises.

You Are Here

Denis’ filmmaking is so sensual and intoxicating that, truthfully, Bastards didn’t leave me nearly as cold as, say, the ostensibly heartwarming but catastrophically misguided You Are Here, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s blunt stab at helming a movie. This fumbling, cynically conceived bromance that turns into a rom-com stars Owen Wilson as a womanizing weatherman and Zach Galifianakis as his nutjob buddy. It is bracingly unfunny, fussed-over and forced, with a ludicrous lovers’ resolution. You’ll have better luck buying into the romance in Spanish director Manuel Martín Cuenca’s drearily immaculate Caníbal, which is about—you guessed it—a cannibal. In love. Things don’t go so well. It’s hard to give a shit. But Granada looks gorgeous. Better yet, just watch Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive, which may be my favourite vampire movie ever. It's certainly the only one I know of that is mostly about aggravating in-laws coming to visit. I have a feeling you'll be reading a lot more about this one here fairly soon. 

Gravity 

Things lighten up, so to speak, with Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón’s 3D astronaut survival chamber drama in which Sandra Bullock and George Clooney get walloped with debris while floating in space and struggle to find safe haven while their oxygen supply plummets. The visuals and soundscapes are absolutely astounding: I have never seen such sequences, in which the camera’s trajectory is so disorientingly aligned to that of the objects and people drifting helplessly onscreen. The opening 20 minutes or so make you feel as if we could go anywhere. If only Stephen Prince’s score wasn’t so annoyingly overblown and the character development wasn’t so disappointingly earthbound.

Under the Skin

Yet, just when you’ve recovered from Cuarón’s extraterrestrial traipsing, life on Earth suddenly seems exotic all over again in Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer’s hypnotic science-fiction in which Scarlett Johansson’s lovely body is inhabited by an ebony alien stalking horny young men in Scotland before eventually getting stalked herself. A substantial portion of the film was made without the participants’ knowledge: Glazer put Johansson in a black wig and a white van and had her drive around and try to pick up unsuspecting Glaswegians. Presumably these guys figured out they were in a movie by the time she led them into a dark house where they stripped down and slipped into some obsidian interstellar goo from which they never emerge. Anthropological and austere, Under the Skin is an intentionally alienating experience for much of the first two-thirds, before its central character goes incrementally native and places herself in danger. All dialogue is virtually incidental and much of Johansson’s performance is designed to remain remote, but the film isn’t anywhere near as baffling as some reports have made it out to be. It is a hugely inventive story about a stranger in a strange land and the perils of empathy.

Night Moves

One more hostile intruder: who’s that guy Jake Gyllenhaal’s stalking in Enemy? Why, it’s Jake Gyllenhaal! Quebec director Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of José Saramago’s novel The Double is perversely withholding and surprisingly effective. It makes Toronto look like nothing but high-rises and freeways, the perfect backdrop for this tale of a lonely professor who spots his doppelgänger playing a bit part in a movie and decides that there can be only one. TIFF 2013’s other doppelgänger movie—double doppelgänger!—which is actually titled The Double, stars Jesse Eisenberg. I didn’t see it. Figured if I was going to get stuck with two of somebody I’d rather it be Gyllenhaal. I got a good dose of Eisenberg’s chronic slouching in Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves, which also stars Peter Sarsgaard and Dakota Fanning and concerns an eco-terrorist plot that goes awry. Eisenberg gets on my nerves but he fits the role. The film is very good, if not quite the revelation of Meek’s Cutoff.

Stray Dogs

Festivals at their best remind us that cinema is meant to be a collective experience, so let’s embrace a few films about families—most of which, oddly enough, were part of Wavelengths, the experimentally minded and most dependable program at TIFF. A candidate for this year’s single best film, Tsai Ming Liang’s Stray Dogs—said to be the Malay-Taiwanese auteur’s last(!)—follows a family of three scraping by on the streets of Taipei. It is another masterwork of sumptuous tableaux laden with intense, burgeoning emotion and frequently accented with quietly mischievous humour.

The Strange Little Cat

Swiss director Ramon Zürcher’s beguiling feature debut The Strange Little Cat limits its scope to the preparation and execution of a simple family dinner, yet is full of clamorous life, seemingly normal until some cryptic comment or event intrudes before slipping away again. It may be the weirdest most seemingly normal movie I’ve ever seen. Cambodian documentarian Rithy Panh’s autobiographical The Missing Picture meanwhile attempts to chronicle a childhood spent pining for something the rest of us would consider normal. Panh was 11 when the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh and sent Panh’s family to a work camp. Panh wanted to tell the story of his adolescence through pictures, but because the visual documents of this era are almost entirely composed of propaganda, Panh decided to render his memories through elaborate claymation sequences.

     

12 Years a Slave

      

Running out of space here, so let me leave you with two favourite moments at TIFF ’13:

1. Toward the end of Hunger and Shame director Steve McQueen’s surprisingly conventional—but still totally grueling—12 Years a Slave, there is an odd scene in which the film’s star, Chiwetel Ejiofor, appears on screen in close-up, very still, and for a surprisingly long time. The previously rapt, reverent audience suddenly became very noisy when some asshole’s cellphone went off, and looking up at Ejiofor’s enormous head, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was waiting for everyone to shut up.

A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness

2. My last film of TIFF ’13 was the tripartite A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, by Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, another Wavelengths title. The film begins almost documentary-like, examining life at a Estonian commune, then follows musician Robert A.A. Lowe as he finds tranquility in the Finnish wilderness, then roams a gig in a small club performed by Lowe’s heavily made-up Finnish black metal outfit. The camera movement as sinewy and lovely as the music is crushing, harsh and, at times, a little silly. The final moments are perfect: Lowe exits the stage before the band even finishes, immediately and efficiently sets about wiping off his white make-up, puts on his coat and goes out the back door. I love this ending because. It is an eloquent reminder that this is all a show, that the darkness still looms, but that we can cast cinematic spells, use thunderous moments of art to keep it at bay, before shaking it off, going back out into the open air and getting on with the rest of it all.