Following on from part one of our Toronto International Festival review round-up, Artistic Director for Film Jason Wood is back with more thoughts on the festival’s best film film offerings. Read his reviews below…
Harmonium
Marital life is uneventful for Toshio (Kanji Furutachi) and Akie (Mariko Tsutsui). Each day goes by as if according to a well-known script. Toshio runs a machinery workshop out of his house, and the only time he spends with his wife and young daughter is when the family sits together almost wordlessly around the dining table. They go on this way, seemingly content to live as strangers to one another, until one day when, in front of Toshio’s shop, there appears a clean-faced man in a white shirt. It’s Yasaka (Tadanobu Asano), an old friend of Toshio’s who has just gotten out of prison. His gentle manners cannot conceal his disquieting presence; he is clearly a harbinger of dark times. The winner of the best film in Cannes Un Certain Regard 2016, I found this to be an utterly fascinating work that displays a moral complexity worthy of Dennis Potter.
Moonlight
The second feature from writer-director Barry Jenkins (Medicine for Melancholy) follows its young protagonist from childhood to adulthood as he navigates both the dangers of drugs and violence in his depressed Florida neighbourhood, and his complex love for his male best friend. An impeccably crafted study of African-American masculinity from a vital creative voice in contemporary cinema, this synthesis of Boyhood, George Washington, Killer of Sheep and the multi-sexual lyrics of Frank Ocean is one of the finest festival discoveries I can remember. Structured according to the life cycle of its main protagonist Little/Chiron, this is a complex and audacious work about the black experience, the transition from childhood to adulthood and sexuality. Trevante Rhodes is a sensation as the older Chiron in a meticulously made work that will echo and reverberate for some time to come.
One Eyed Jacks
Beautifully restored thanks to the efforts of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, Marlon Brando’s only film as director is a brilliant and idiosyncratic revenge western about a betrayed bandit (Brando) hunting down the partner (Karl Malden) who left him in the lurch. The film joins Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, Peter Lorre’s The Lost One, and Barbara Loden’s Wanda as ill-fated “one-shot” directorial debuts by celebrated actors. Producing the film through his company Pennebaker Productions (named after his mother), Brando also took over directing duties after Stanley Kubrick decamped to make Lolita. Unsurprisingly, Brando’s indulgent approach proved the opposite of Kubrick’s chill perfectionism, bloating the budget (and the running time), flummoxing the studio, and exasperating the crew — the director-star reportedly waited days for just the right Monterrey wave to roll in. Featuring a roll call of celebrated character actors (Timothy Carey, Ben Johnson, Slim Pickens) and the last film to be shot in VistaVision, One Eyed Jacks makes virtue of its coastal location and its famously improvised nature. An extremely sadistic work, it’s idiosyncratic and utterly beguiling.
The Untamed
Cannes prize-winning director Amat Escalante (Heli) combines family drama and social commentary with science fiction and horror in this hypnotic and utterly enthralling tale, about an unhappily married couple whose life is turned upside down when they encounter a mysterious creature that is both a source of pleasure and a force of destruction. Beautifully shot and paced, this feels like a much more mature work from Escalante that looks at a chauvinistic society characterized by homophobia, misogyny and an appetite for self-destruction. The film’s originality is a little blunted by memories of Zulawaski’s Possession but this still stands as sensual, erotic, and uncompromisingly out there.
Heal the Living
Ivory Coast-born filmmaker Katell Quillévéré adaptation of Maylis de Kerangal’s novel begins in innocence as a French teenager leaves his girlfriend’s apartment and joins his friends on a road trip to a seaside surfing spot. In another town, a woman receives the news that her heart condition has become more serious. Elsewhere, medical staff at a regional hospital work through the critical daily details of saving lives. Quillévéré threads together these interconnecting stories with skill and sensitivity as she ruminates on chance, consequence and the precariousness of life and this is certainly an emotional experience but I found the film less satisfying than the director’s Love Like Poison and at times felt myself a little manipulated.
Prevenge
Ruth (writer-director Alice Lowe, Sightseers) is seven months pregnant, and like many expectant mothers believes that her baby is speaking to her through an inner voice — the only difference being that her unborn child is telling her to go on a killing spree. Still mourning the death of her husband just months before, Ruth allows her baby to coach her on murder techniques and push her onward in a quest to dispatch people who stand in her way, from a pet shop owner to a lonely businesswoman (Kate Dickie). Utterly gleeful in its depiction of carnage and vengeance, this dark, dark and very funny comedy confirms Lowe, who was over seven months pregnant herself while filming this post-feminist revenge film, as a major talent in the Julia Davis vein. A fucked up synthesis of American Psycho, Child’s Play and Rosemary’s Baby, the film has some lovely reach outs to horror classics such as Don’t Look Now but also, behind the gore, makes a serious point about natal depression and grief. Also, how can you not like a film in which a bald man takes his wig off and sicks up into it?
La La Land
An ambitious jazz pianist (Ryan Gosling) and an aspiring actress (Emma Stone) fall in love while pursuing their dreams of stardom, in this dazzlingly stylized homage to the classic Hollywood musical from Whiplash director Damien Chazelle. Drawing upon studio-era spectacle, La La Land ushers the musical into the 21st century in all its brightly coloured, anamorphic splendour, I so wanted to dislike this film it’s untrue but it’s impossible not to be beguiled by something that has such love for all the good things in life. Stone and Gosling are terrific and Chazelle’s integrity and respect for jazz also shines through so very brightly. A love letter to cinema (especially Rebel Without A Cause), and to the concept of love itself, the atrociously titled La La Land is adrenalin shot for the head and the heart.
Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey
The debut documentary from Terrence Malick chronicles nothing less than the history of the universe. A years in the making ode to the wonder of creation, it is impossible not to stand awestruck at the images of this film and visually it approaches perfection. It is however also overbearing and boorish in its religious evangelism. The solemn voiceover from Cate Blanchett is crass and interminable. This is the last Malick film I will ever see.
Salt and Fire
And then another crushing disappointment. Michael Shannon, Gael García Bernal and Veronica Ferres star in a genre bending eco thriller about a scientist and a corporate CEO who must overcome their ideological differences in order to avert potential disaster from a volcano on the verge of eruption. Shot on Bolivia’s awe-inspiring Uyuni salt flats, Salt and Fire takes its tonal lead from this barren and otherworldly setting and has a few Herzogian flourishes, such as a perfectly healthy man who uses a wheelchair. Shannon aside, it also has the smallest cast of male actors since Even Dwarves Started Small. Ferres is a void in the central role and the dialogue feels very stilted.
Ma Rosa
Filipino firebrand Brillante Mendoza (Slingshot, Kinatay) incisively explores the street-level corruption of the Duterte-era Philippines with this tragicomic tale about a low-level drug dealer (Jaclyn Jose, Best Actress winner at Cannes) on a desperate search for cash to pay a bribe to the local cops. Taking aim at the government’s opportunistic crusade against the drug trade — an issue that reputedly got strongman Rodrigo Duterte elected president earlier this year — and the effect it has on the powerless in Filipino society, Mendoza takes on a hellish if darkly comic journey into his country’s underbelly in which he brilliantly demonstrates that the drug trade is less an evil unto itself than it is a symptom or side effect of endemic poverty and corruption.
All reviews by Jason Wood, Artistic Director for Film.
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