TIFF '24: From the Lido to Lake Ontario

by Cláudio Alves

Dea Kulumbegashvili's APRIL won the Special Jury Prize in Venice.

For many critics who don't attend the big European festivals, TIFF marks their first chance to see some of the circuit's most talked-about titles. This year, I spent a good portion of my time in Toronto catching up with Venice films – the two events overlapped as they usually do – and managed to watch a whopping eleven titles from its official competition. Elisa already reviewed many of the big ones, and Abe also shared his take on Kill the Jockey, so I won't bother with those titles past a capsule. However, there's much to say about the yet-unreviewed April and Vermiglio, two Venice prizewinners that rocked my world. Dea Kulumbegashvili did it with a formalist assault, vicious and visceral, while Maura Delpero opted for a pastoral meditation, as peaceful on the surface as the gradual changing of the seasons…

APRIL, Dea Kulumbegashvili

The proverb goes that April showers bring May flowers, summarizing nature's cycles of destruction and renewal with a sweet saying. In her sophomore feature, Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili considers that same dance of storm into spring, yet eschews the sweet brevity of popular wisdom in lieu of a tale that rhymes the seasonal metamorphosis with a woman's double life. She's Nina, a well-respected OB-GYN who, at April's startling start, loses a newborn in the delivery room. Death provokes some nasty accusations, bringing forth an investigation of particular hostility. Both the father's suspicion and the higher-up's scrutiny are bolstered by the open secret of Nina's illicit actions. She's an abortionist.

That said, neither the writer-director nor actress Ia Sukhitashvili put much weight on idealistic justifications for their character's actions. The language of righteous activism eludes the world of April, where Nina's actions feel more motivated by an assumed responsibility rather than a beatific mission, mercenary intent, or, perchance, an innocent's vocation for simply doing good. Though the end of unwanted pregnancies is usually thought to be the business of nurses, our protagonist feels her surgical expertise is more valuable, a cold reasonable assumption that goes against the current climate of masculine hegemony and well-worn tradition of her surroundings. Then again, no amount of reason will assuage the guilt when something goes wrong.

And so, a sense of oppressive self-doubt pervades April from cryptic opening to symbolic closure, materializing in a fleshy figure of deformed femininity. She haunts Nina. Maybe she is Nina, or at least how she sees herself amid the investigation, now that dreams of having children of her own have been left behind and a consumptive solitude prevails. But then, ascribing insular meanings to Kulumbegashvili may be tantamount to missing the point altogether. There's space for polysemy within April's construction, with Nina's interiority at the center of every enigma. One simultaneously feels a deep knowledge of her and recognizes an invisible wall forever separating the film's audience from its subject.

Reticence metastasizing into ambivalence is found throughout, extending far beyond those glimpses into a nightmare realm of mouthless faces frozen in perpetual screams. Consider the driving scenes, oft presented as first-person experiences down the road and into the unknown, phantasmagoria on wet asphalt. They are absorbing despite little happening, a hypnotic nothingness that beckons numbness before a particular proposition, a violent reaction, zaps us back into consciousness. On another occasion, Kulumbegashvili will document a thunderstorm in real time, swiveling the camera midway through, toward a perilously precise composition, so strenuous you can feel sympathy pain for the cameraperson's aching muscles.

One almost holds their breath, irrationally afraid that the faintest wheeze might collapse the byzantine staging. In that and other passages, the director's formal control invokes primordial reactions from deep within the spectator, circumventing matters of narrative or emotion to tap into something much deeper. As when April's propensity for conducting scenes in one uninterrupted take is broken by a change of angle that does little to minimize the shocking imagery, yet serves to disturb the audience. A cut is all it takes, for, in the temple of cinema, there's no greater force than that of the changing frame, a guillotine over running film, and the grafting of a new perspective.

Whether perturbing the viewer or soothing them into a false sense of security, gazing at the cobalt twilight or a galaxy of pink blossoms, April is cinema depurated. Take one element out - Jacopo Ramella Pajrin's editing, Arseni Khachaturan's cinematography, Lars Ginzel and Tina Laschke's sound design, among others – and it all comes tumbling down. This is that perfected mechanism, like Swiss clockwork made film, where every gear has its place and not one inch of celluloid goes to waste. Some may find such workings inhumane, especially when applied to such hot-button topics. As for myself, I can't help but see April as the maximum expression of what this art form of time and movement can achieve, telling a story of lost autonomies and slipping agency by taking complete control over the medium.

VERMIGLIO, Maura Delpero 

Up in the Italian mountains, in the winter at the end of the Second World War, a family wakes from their slumber. They're the household of Vermiglio's most erudite man, the wizened schoolteacher whose progressive ideas can sometimes shift the moral center of his community. Words of wisdom will surely be needed to persuade the gruffest villagers to accept a pair of soldiers, runaways from the battlefield. One is a familiar face, while the other, Pietro, proves a stranger of Sicilian provenance, as handsome as he is mysterious. Gossip erupts and away from prying eyes, young love blossoms in the snow, a winter rose. But will it survive the spring, when warm wind shall thaw the landscape, white to green? 

Whatever the case, Delpero and DP Mikhail Krichman will capture it all in pristine fashion, every frame a painting and then some. It starts in wintry murals, long swaths of white like a canvas left untouched. Compositions arise from negative space, and light itself gains a contradictory quality, both warm and chill, the sun's kiss with a frosty bite. As spring comes, then summer, and fall, color stories change, but the exquisiteness of the images remains beyond reproach. There's something uniquely exciting in the ways Delpero updates an aesthetic so tied to the realist painters of yore, bringing an old movement to the crispness of today's cinematic frame, its plastic qualities and inherent tensions.

Take the cineaste's preoccupation with stillness in Vermiglio's visual construction, and how it can be disturbed. Even the occasional static shot reframes for a gesture or trembles in place. For the quiet is a comfort, but comforts can be smothering. Yet, when movement completely takes over the camera for one notable moment, the wished-upon release feels false, even malignant. What should be a joyful departure rings a death knell before we even know its dark truth. Here we see that, as much as the Alpine landscape and period trappings suggest a postcard, the emotions lying in wait are a ravaging violence, a laceration that bleeds without the merciful outlet of a whimper or squirm.

But even in pain, the heart asks for pleasure first – the young heart most of all. Sadly, the norms that rule society decree the opposite. So, a girl who did nothing wrong except fall in love finds herself disgraced, and another who studiously tries to excel, sees all her efforts turn to dust. That latter figure also lives her tragedy intersected with a sad comedy, masturbatory urges paid with secret humiliations, an appeal to religious dogma when the desires lurking inside are too queer to fathom. Even those who win out can't clamor their glory in this quiet little town, where happiness and the pits of despair walk hand in hand down the street, every day sowing smiles and tears.

Through it all, Delpero maintains a humanist warmth, burning gently at the heart and hearth of her film. It manifests in elegant mise-en-scène and the ways in which the most dolorous dramatic beats happen between cuts, a generous touch for the characters' benefit. It's a beauty found in design elements that provide as much punctuation as they do temporal diffusion, making Vermiglio into a place out of time. If not for the talks of war and the roar of planes overhead, you might suppose Delpero had done like Ermanno Olmi once did, and dramatized a long-lost 19th century rurality. But no, this is the 1940s, and the scars of war are everywhere, still bleeding in many cases. Oh well, life goes on as it must, and, against all odds, hope survives the season's change. That's the way things are, and as Vermiglio details, the way things have always been – human nature a constant across the long sprawl of history.

And finally, here are some capsules of films covered elsewhere at The Film Experience. They run the gamut from skeptical to effusive...

KILL THE JOCKEY, Luis Ortega

The seductiveness of Kill the Jockey's first act might convince you of its merits, but the ensuing feature will soon reveal that optimist is naught but the highest folly. In some ways, Luis Ortega never varies his approach, so there's no pinpoint shift to carry the blame for the film's failures. It remains stylishly cryptic from end to end. However, when early mysteries reveal too much of themselves, the strategy stops reading as iconoclast irreverence. Instead, it comes off like a crutch. One that can't sustain the body leaning on it, as concepts of transformative queerness and fluid identity, there and back again, explode all over the screen and weigh down on the flick with little rhyme or reason. Some graphic strengths prevail, but not many. The unsettling image of a gangster always holding a babe is a reasonable provocation, and eyeshadow expanding like a bruise has its glamorous appeal. An upside-down walk on the ceiling is another striking look, yet, as with everything in Kill the Jockey, the high is awfully ephemeral, quick to pass and quicker still to sour. Before you know it, dissatisfaction has taken the place of euphoria, and the next fix is too far away to contain the pains of withdrawal.

THE BRUTALIST, Brady Corbet

With a length exceeding three and a half hours, you'd expect a film to snap into place before its very last scene. The Brutalist regards that expectation with scorn aplenty, spits on the viewer who dares say it, and then shows everyone how it's done, all while flashing a smirk on the edge of a sneer. Yes, Brady Corbet's third feature becomes something else altogether once it arrives at its 1980-set epilogue, reframing what came before with a political twist that will divide audiences like a VistaVision litmus test. Is the story of brutalist architect László Toth defined by the trauma he spent a lifetime evading, only to immortalize it in his art? Or is this a tale of one who always reached for something beyond the personal, who saw art as a purpose in itself only to witness its weaponization at the end of his life, suffering overtaking the creative impetus and rewriting history along the way? Whether you agree with the former or the latter, The Brutalist will inspire deep reflection. In other words, it's the dictionary definition of a rich text, towering over much of its contemporary American peers like a concrete cathedral. Or is it a gymnasium, mayhap a library? A reading room? Whatever it might be, it's decidedly awe-inspiring.

QUEER, Luca Guadagnino 

With I Am Love, A Bigger Splash and Call Me By Your Name, Luca Guadagnino created what he came to call his Trilogy of Desire. With Junkie, Queer, and Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs penned a tightly bound tryptic that may have never been thus baptized but could easily have been named a Trilogy of Addiction. When it came time to adapt the middle chapter in Burroughs' autofiction-like odyssey, Guadagnino remained loyal to his hedonistic predilections yet made sure to center dependency as the base upon which all of Queer is built. That might displease some of the auteur's longtime fans, but it makes for an exciting meeting of minds. Living flesh and ghostly legacy become wrapped in an all-consuming tryst that will leave audiences flat on the ground, panting their way from madness back to sanity or the closest they can get to it. Anachronism in sound and design contributes to the febrile mood, as does a lackadaisical sense of rhythm and the exulted artifice of a world sealed within the confines of a movie studio. Daniel Craigh aces the flop sweat, as pathetic as he's ever been, while Drew Starkey is a revelation, as aloof as he is tempting, a dangerous cipher whose spit tastes of ambrosia laced with cyanide.

BABYGIRL, Nicole Kidman 

Mainstream American cinema hates sex. It's always been the case, even when it feigned interest to better sell the macabre delights of erotic thrillers – I love them, but I can't deny this fundamental aspect of their genesis. No wonder Dutch director Halina Reijn found herself drawn to such poison-pilled pleasures when looking for reference points for her latest project. And yet, Babygirl is no erotic thriller, nor is it trying to be. It might flirt with their audiovisual idioms, their signifiers of lust and domination, their commercialized views of erogenous display. In the end, Reijn is more interested in the dramatic properties of sexuality as they pertain to a character study. Go deeper still, and you'll find an experiment on how to depict permutations of power that come to contradict each other across the barriers of private and public life, domestic allowances, and outright transgression. At the center of it all, Nicole Kidman delivers her best work since Birth, so vulnerable you'll want to look away. But you can't, for her magnetism beckons too strongly to resist. Even in abject degradation, she's a movie star in full command of the screen and the spectators before her.

Which of these Venice titles most entices you? Are you dying to see April or Vermiglio? Mayhap the promise of a Nicole Kidman tour de force sways your favor? Sound off in the comments.