SCREENINGS & MEANINGS

By Gerald Schmitz

More dramas of distinction from Toronto festival

Given a diverse presentation of nearly 300 narrative features from many countries, overlooking some in compiling one’s personal highlights is unavoidable. Among others, my anticipation grows for the following I wasn’t able to see: The Hunt (best actor prize at Cannes), The Impossible (a family survives the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami), No (the 1988 Chilean referendum on Pinochet’s rule), On the Road (the life and times of Jack Kerouac), Chinese historical epic The Last Supper, and Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep about the fate of fugitive American political radicals in hiding for decades.

Inevitably too there are disappointments, including three “gala” presentations. I expected better from Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Currently in theatres, Canadian Ruba Nadda’s Inescapable is set in a dangerous Damascus (actually shot in Johannesburg) but fails to be very convincing. The Italian family affair Twice Born, despite reliving the Balkan wars and siege of Sarajevo, degenerates into overwrought melodrama with some of the worst dialogue I’ve ever heard in a movie. And then there’s the much-hyped Cloud Atlas, a nearly three-hour endurance trial that, notwithstanding its time-shifting actor makeup Olympics and precocious design, struck me as a monumentally pretentious marathon of absurdities. Among the numerous literary adaptations on offer — including creditable if unnecessary new British versions of Great Expectations and Anna Karenina — this one should have stayed unfilmable.

Although the festival’s range surpasses particular themes, the many varieties, joys and agonies of love is one that emerges in my top picks. Another that surfaces is the arc and endpoint of life’s journeys looking back and forward across generations. TIFF’s closing gala Song for Marion featured British aging acting legends Vanessa Redgrave and Terence Stamp. Another veteran actor, 75-year-old Dustin Hoffman, presented his directorial debut Quartet, a wonderful story about retired opera singers. Canadian Michael McGowan’s Still is a poignant love story about an elderly couple (played by Geneviève Bujold and James Cromwell) facing difficult choices in their rural New Brunswick home.
From the rest here are 12 that most impressed, beginning with two by the master filmmakers who received the Cannes festival’s highest honour in 2011 and 2012.

1. Amour (Love, Austria/France/Germany)
The last years of octogenarian couple Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) in their Paris apartment are anything but golden despite the concerned attention of their daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert). When Anne has a stroke and her dementia worsens, George’s loving care faces the ultimate test. Michael Haneke directs these superlative actors with extraordinary precision, depth and uncompromising realism.

2. To the Wonder (U.S., in English, French, Russian, Italian and Spanish)
Terrence Malick’s followup to The Tree of Life isn’t as ambitious or awe-inspiring but it’s still a wonder for those willing to take the journey. A man (Ben Affleck) and a woman (Olga Kurylenko) fall in and out of love on two continents. A priest (Javier Bardem) struggling with faith finds Christ in the suffering world around him. Amid the fragility of these lives and loves is the mystery of a creation that strives for transcendence. The only American film on this list is as far from Hollywood as it’s possible to get.

3. Everyday (U.K.)
Director Michael Winterbottom’s innovative filmmaking never ceases to amaze. Originally conceived as a television documentary on the prison system, this potent story follows a fictional family of six over an actual period of five years while the husband is incarcerated and contact is limited to brief visits then day passes. The raw, realistic depiction of the everyday challenges encountered by the couple in maintaining their relationship and in raising four young children is simply sublime. (It’s worth noting that Aniello Arena, the star of another TIFF selection, Matteo Garrone’s Reality which won the grand prix at Cannes, is serving a lengthy prison sentence, allowed out only for the filming of this Italian exposé of a false, corrupting and celebrity-obsessed “reality” television culture.)

4. Out in the Dark (Israel/U.S.)
Israeli cinema continues to produce world-class features. Michael Mayer’s accomplished directorial debut is a dangerous love story between closeted young Palestinian Nimr studying in Tel Aviv, whose brother is an armed militant, and idealistic Israeli lawyer Roy. A relationship that seems destined for tragedy leaves open the possibility of hope. (Other noteworthy Israeli dramas at TIFF were Zaytoun and Fill the Void.)

5. The Attack (Lebanon/Qatar/Egypt/France/Belgium)
A respected Palestinian surgeon living in Israel as a citizen is receiving an award while he thinks his wife Siham is visiting relatives in Nablus in the occupied West Bank. Called to treat victims of a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv, his world is shattered when the identity of the female suicide bomber is revealed.

6. Underground (Australia)
Of the five world cinema presentations accompanied by discussions with academic experts this was the one that gripped me the most. Director Robert Connolly (last at TIFF with the brilliant Balibo) does a superb job of capturing the turbulent formative years of controversial Wikileaks founder Julian Assange as an audacious teenage hacker (and father) in Melbourne. Heralding a new era of radical cyber-activism, his challenges to established authority began early and often.

UNDERGROUND — Director Robert Connolly (left) and Ron Deibert, an expert and adviser on cyber security, cyber crime, freedom of expression and access to information, discuss the film Underground at the TIFF Bell Lightbox Sept. 10. (G. Schmitz photo)

7. Dans la maison (In the House, France)
Director François Ozon’s adaptation of a Spanish play is a ferociously clever and witty dark satire in which a 16-year-old student, with his teacher’s complicity, turns a school writing project into an increasingly voyeuristic and emotionally tangled account of what takes place in a classmate’s family abode. Kristin Scott Thomas as the teacher’s sharp-tongued wife brings an added edge to the affair. Winner of the FIPRESCI (international critics’) prize at TIFF.

FILM PREMIERE — In the House director Francois Ozon with Kristin Scott Thomas at the TIFF showing of the film, an adaptation of a Spanish play. (G. Schmitz photo)

8. Hannah Arendt (Germany)
Director Margarethe von Trotta explores the life of another remarkable woman, the eponymous German-Jewish political philosopher who escaped to America from Nazi Germany. Played by the great Barbara Sukova, the focus is on Arendt’s famous coverage of the Jerusalem trial of Adolph Eichmann and the controversies that erupted over her concept of “the banality of evil” to explain how “nobodies” could commit some of the century’s worst crimes against humanity. (Another excellent film, Lore, tells the story of three children of Nazi parents, abandoned following the collapse of the Third Reich, who must undertake a harrowing cross-country journey to find refuge.)

9. Beyond the Hills (Romania/France)
Another masterwork from director Cristian Mungiu based on an actual case of a girl from an orphanage who has become integrated into the austere regimen of a remote Orthodox monastery. Her sheltering of a troubled childhood friend proves fatal when the priest and nuns treat the latter’s violent psychological breakdown as a demonic possession to be exorcized.

10. White Elephant (Argentina/Spain)
Ricardo Darín and Jérémie Renier are outstanding as two Catholic priests, Rev. Julián and Rev. Nicolàs, whose pastoral ministry to the needy and suffering is tested daily in a real-life Buenos Aires slum menaced by murderous drug gangs, corrupt police, greedy developers and politicians. Dedicated to the memory of a priest assassinated there in 1974, director Pablo Trapero brings the gospel to the streets with great sensitivity and explosive power.

11. Road North (Finland)
When Leo, the incorrigible and long absent father of Timo, a concert pianist estranged from his wife, suddenly shows up it leads to an unexpected uproarious road trip of revelations and regrets that ends with a bang. It’s an irresistible ride from Mika Kaurismäki, brother of renowned fellow director Aki.

12. Après Mai (Something in the Air, France)
Incorporating elements from his own experience of the radical student movement and cultural ferment that rocked France after May 1968, director Olivier Assayas (best screenplay at Venice) evokes the tempestuous atmosphere of the times — from revolutionary politics to sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll, to experimental art and cinema. He also explores these themes in two brilliant essays recently published in English as A Post-May Adolescence.

TIFF was blessed by other fine new works by major French directors — notably Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone, Claude Miller’s Thérèse Desqueyroux (based on a classic François Mauriac novel), and Laurent Cantet’s first English-language feature Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang adapted from the eponymous Joyce Carol Oates novel and filmed in Sault Ste. Marie.

Schmitz is an ambassador member of the Canadian Film Institute.