TIFF '24: A Dozen Capsules and Final Farewells

by Cláudio Alves

PERFUMED WITH MINT was one of many gems in TIFF's Wavelengths section.

At long last, let's close this seemingly unending TIFF coverage, so that The Film Experience can move on to some NYFF reviews, maybe even some peeks into the Lisbon festival scene. Still, before bidding Toronto adieu, a dozen titles need assessment, even if it's through a cornucopia of capsule reviews, plus a personal top ten to close things off properly. Spread out through five different festival sections and four continents, these twelve final films span from the experimental to the conventional, from dreamy stylization to dry dreary realism. There are beautiful sights to appreciate and performances, too, including a pair of wildly different characterizations from Chilean actress Paulina García. 

To open the belated farewell, I propose a look at my favorite TIFF section – Wavelengths. Within its radical offerings, one can find pictures that look like none other, such unique visions as Muhammad Hamdy's Perfumed with Mint and Jessica Sarah Rinland's Collective Monologue…

Wavelengths

PERFUMED WITH MINT, Muhammad Hamdy

You can't run away from the past. It catches up with you and doesn't let go, insidious and tenacious. It can metastasize into trauma, and trauma takes many forms, often beyond comprehension. For Mahdy, it manifests as mint, bright green sprouts all over his body, an odorous infection. Worse still, the leaves' perfume seems to mobilize the shadows moving through Cairo, so deep they feel like they have substance of their own. Mahdy and Bahaa, a physician friend who shares in his hauntings, roam through the Egyptian capital, turned into a city of ghosts under Muhammad Hamdy's gaze. But, no matter what they do, escape is an impossibility.

The cinematographer-turned-director traps his debut's protagonists in a deadened world where flesh-bound spirits trudge without a destination, morosely living in search of some relief that seldom comes. His is a cinema of magical realism and sublime beauty, exploring and expanding the limits and specificities of digital lensing in ways that go directly against the fetishization of celluloid as the medium par excellence. Statue still, a whispered intoxication, melancholic to the bone, Hamdy's Perfumed with Mint plays like a dream that lingers in the mind long after it's over. The waking world is no deliverance.

COLLECTIVE MONOLOGUE, Jessica Sarah Rinland    

When small children find themselves in close proximity, they can verbalize plenty while failing to engage with the other individual. There is the appearance of a conversation, but each child's speech exists independently, parallel soliloquies all around. This idea of collective monologue was articulated by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and serves as a curious conceptual foundation for Jessica Sarah Rinland's homonymous feature. However, she doesn't observe children in failed communication. Instead, her focus is on animals and their human caretakers, stories of captivity and conservationism, varying notions of tending across the zoos and zoological care centers of Argentina.

It's a sensorial experience, first and foremost, full of such indelible marriages of sight and sound the mind reels in wonder. The sensual pursuits go even further than the medium's capabilities, with constant talks of smell in an art form that can't capture them. Yet, there is a deliberate, if ambiguous, purpose to such experiments, one that complicates a purely sensatory read on Collective Monologue. Consider a moment with elephants, when the camera can't quite hide the metropolitan sprawl behind their enclosure. The soundtrack merges the natural hubbub of birds with the noise of cars, construction work. It wavers, and modulates, as if dancing between the contrasting realities that come together under captivity.

Other passages will find elephant trunks shot like Bressonian hands, or pink flamingos crowned with golden wreaths by the setting sun. They're as captivating as the hypnotic documentation of human labor, detailed and rhythmically repetitious. It often appears in interludes of building, restoring and expanding the space the animals inhabit. Only, they're not the architecture of nature. Instead, it's a colonial fantasia of centuries past, perpetuated into tomorrow, a parody of each species' origin, another way of commodifying the beasts. Not that there is judgment in Collective Monologue, merely curiosity, a willingness to ask questions and not define the camera as an authority.

Centerpiece

THE VILLAGE NEXT TO PARADISE, Mo Harawe 

There's something to be said about the importance of beginnings. Mo Harawe's The Village Next to Paradise starts with an outsider's view of Somalia, some English-language report on airstrikes over the region that gives scant context on a complex political situation. It's the expected set-up for some violent tale, a chronicle of survival in a war-torn country that, in truth, has very little to do with what Harawe has in store. In contrast with that opening, the film unfolds in gentle rhythms, tracing a family drama of unusual quietude and persistent inaction. The drones still fly above, their sound intruding upon domesticity. But their threat isn't central to the picture. 

With this sleight of hand, the director has prepared the audience to understand how political unrest often exists in people's lives, on the background, seeping poison into the day-to-day existence without defining it. The Village Next to Paradise is more concerned with a boy's dreams, his gravedigger father's feelings of parental ineptitude, and an aunt who seeks freedom through divorce before the path to financial independence goes through a loan exclusively given to married women. It's a patient observational film, lucid and clear-eyed, though it sometimes errs on the side of languor. Still, it always comes back to a sincere investment in its characters, their sacrifices and self-doubts. And at the end, there's even the mercy of a smile to send you off the theater, into a world where such grace notes are hard to come by.

THE EXILES, Belén Funes

An actor's choices, sometimes their mere presence, can change a character. From there, a narrative may be put through total metamorphosis. Tone, too, and in no time, the entire edifice they construct. Belén Funes' The Exiles is a good example of this phenomenon, shapeshifting around its leading lady and her flinty approach to what could have been a commonplace mother-daughter drama, haunted by the memory of a paternal entity that's no longer in the picture. His absence bears grief, and the pragmatic matters of death only add to it. A house to sell, even if it's full of memories, and an Andalusian land suffused with hope, now withered but still alive.

Yet, she perseveres. She is Delia, a Chilean immigrant living in Spain with her adult daughter, Ana. She is played by Antonia Zegers, the miracle worker at the center of it all, ready to deepen Funes' generous character study and add an edge that's live and razor-sharp. She carries the generational burden of people who went across the Atlantic in search of a better life, calcified by struggle and unable to relate to a daughter born in the Old World, made wild and unpredictable by a thespian of uncommon verve. Vulnerable and easy to bruise, Zegers' characterization commands attention while never differing from Funes' cinema of empathetic social portraiture.

BELOVED TROPIC, Ana Endara Mislov

Stories of inter-class bonds are usually riddled with clichés, tending to privilege the character with more social power and economic proximity to the intended audience. Beloved Tropic is no different, though it starts by following Ana Maria, a Colombian immigrant trying to survive in Panama City, whose days are often spent in hospitals and care facilities, tending to the elderly. That line of work lands her a job in the house of a wealthy matriarch, Mercedes, whose ailing health and collapsing psyche leave her helpless, in need of help yet reluctant to accept it. Between dementia and class prejudice, secrets and lies, the two form a peculiar friendship.

Director Ana Endara Mislov builds her film on contrasts, even at the very start, when she cuts from a natal ward bursting at the seams with newborns to the nursing of people at the end of their lives. Those tendencies extend to the film's narrative and visual construction, but they don't necessarily give equal attention to the opposing elements. Beloved Tropic becomes so enthralled with Mercedes that it lets Ana Maria evanesce, losing a necessary perspective along the way. Then again, it's hard to criticize Mislov when she has Paulina García firing on all cylinders as the lady of the house, unafraid to show the character's ugly side, looking for humanity while never asking for the spectator's pity. She makes the project worth watching, alright.

Discovery

HORIZONTE, César Augusto Acevedo

A man wanders out of a cemetery and into the naked field where more graves are being dug, pockmarks of upturned black earth in the green expanse. Where is he going? A shack seems to be his destiny, but César Augusto Acevedo's Horizonte does little to contextualize the movement. His mother is inside, but she doesn't recognize him. Or does she? Mystery prevails in this search for the missing, the dead. But then, they're all dead, for this is a ghost story set across a Colombian landscape made into the purgatory for lost souls. They are Basilio and Inés, a son and his mother, the guilty soldier, a killing machine, and the one who wants to help him expiate.

In ways reminiscent of Tarkovsky and Davies, Acevedo's camera seems capable of panning across time, unearthing the ghosts of yesteryear that most filmmakers leave invisible or carefully closed within a flashback device. And so, the two protagonists wander through a world where their past seems to come to fruition in material terms, where they are haunted and made to interact with parts of a reality they wish would disappear. The geographic inconsistencies and contractions, not to mention the text, give the feeling of walking through a lucid dream where the mind may have clarity but the environment is ruled by oneiric irrationalities.

Horizonte is a dark night of the soul. Only, it's not night, and it's not day either. Just a painful odyssey where our gaze into the cinematic cosmos is but another companion, making the mother-son duo into a trio of sorts. We get to know them intimately, and at a distance, too, guided by another amazing Paulina García turn. In the end, she'll help the film pass the threshold into existential terror and a cinema of horror. There's no attempt to fright, though, merely a confrontation with things that cannot be forgiven nor forgotten. And where do we go from here? Maybe there's no way of overcoming what was done. Yet, the mother tries. She must. How can an embrace and tears feel so violent? Yet, they do.

GÜLIZAR, Belkıs Bayrak 

Like many a young person, Gülizar wants freedom, striving for a more independent existence beyond the parental home. When one considers her upbringing in a strict and traditionalist Kosovar family, that desire is only made more understandable. Still, for all that she pursues a fraction of liberation, Gülizar goes about it by the avenues prescribed and preferred by a patriarchal rule. She'll leave her father to create a new home, married to the Turkish Emre, with whom the bride hopes to find marital bliss. She follows the rules of a system that takes power away from women, she does what she's told, and even then, Gülizar falls victim to its violence. Obedience is no protection.

On the way to her future husband, she's assaulted, precipitating a nightmare that only grows thornier as the young woman meets her new family. Director Belkıs Bayrak tells her story with absolute restraint, risking coldness and detachment, yet unbending in their refusal of melodrama. In this and various framing choices, the film is always attuned to Gülizar's experience, inward bound and on the verge of disassociation, rather than what one might want out of her. Perfect victims are lies and this project isn't out to deceive. Human messiness thus collides with formal severity, a feat of perfect casting with Ecem Uzun's Gülizar, and a disarming supporting turn by Bekir Behrem as the groom, a man who tries but is tragically out of his depth.

THE COURAGEOUS, Jasmin Gordon

Switzerland is a rich country with a high cost of living to match its general wealth. Yet, to suppose everyone who lives there prospers is a terrible mistake. In her feature debut, Jasmin Gordon shines a light on the plight of the Swiss dispossessed. Her protagonist is Jule, a single mother in her 40s who struggles to survive and raise her three small children in the postcard-pretty landscape of the Valais region. Following her, sometimes breaking POV to consider the kids' limited understanding of their mother, The Courageous works with a constant push and pull, the tension between the joys of parenthood and feelings of inadequacy, bucolic scenery and human chaos.

Some early sequences, alone with the brood after Jule disappeared for one stressful afternoon, have a near thriller quality to them. Her return is scored like light breaking through the clouds, heaven blessed, only for another day's struggle to pit the movie into horror. It's the anxiety of a stranger waiting for you, perchance asking for money you don't have. It's the vision of grocery store aisles shot like prison wards, a labyrinth of humiliation and paranoia at every corner. Remaining a social realist exercise, The Courageous is slippery when it comes to tone, sturdy when it stands on the shoulders of its leading lady, a remarkable Ophélia Kolb. I confess I wanted more from it, but there's much to appreciate about the project's brevity and willingness to leave the viewer feeling shaken, as uncertain as the characters on screen.

BOONG, Lakshmipriya Devi 

The circumstances around the making of Lakshmipriya Devi's Boong are more interesting than the film itself. You might suspect as much when the kid flick lark with a sentimental streak a mile wide opens with the epigraph "to love, friendship and peace in Manipur." It turns out that, a week after filming wrapped, an ethnic conflict broke out in the region. As the closing title card reveals, locations turned to battlegrounds, the town of Moreh completely destroyed, Various members of the team, both in front and behind the camera, fell victim to the chaos. Some escaped, many are now refugees. Perchance to them, Boong is a precious snapshot of a world lost, a last echo of laughter where now sepulchral silence reigns, if not weeping.

Sadly, I can't bring myself to celebrate much of what's on-screen between those two blocks of text. Boong is akin to one of those 1930s Hollywood flicks about rapscallion youths that always ended in sappiness. It's the story of the titular boy who lives alone with his mother, the patriarch far away and, after a while, assumed to be dead. In pursuit of the truth, Boong and his best friend go to the city, a pilgrimage built on lies and schemes, full of funny happenings, Madonna fandom, and a bizarre treatment of queer themes. The form is solid enough, though the score is too cutesy by half. The saving grace is the pair of lead actors. Gugun Kipgen is an instant superstar in miniature form, commanding the screen as the modern equivalent of Jackie Cooper. His scenes shared with Bala Hijam as the boy's mother are especially moving, bolstered by enough emotional depth to make up for the schmaltz found elsewhere.

THE PARTY'S OVER, Elena Manrique

From Senegal to a false Spanish Eden, a young immigrant crossed the Atlantic in search of a better life only to find herself hidden in a wealthy estate, terrified of the police patrolling the area. As she continues to live in the shadow, the noise of other people's merriment becomes a vexing reminder of privilege beyond one's grasp. The opportunity to relax, to laugh, to make noise and claim space for oneself are unreachable fantasy for those struggling. For those who can't be seen or heard. But then the film expands its scope, making a lead out of the proprietress, a figure of old wealth that's all too excited to play the part of white savior.

Producer turned director Elena Manrique is out to make the Mediterranean Parasite, weaving a satirical tapestry by concentrating a tale of class, economic, and ethnic inequality within the limits of a beautiful property. There are many great observations, sharp bits of insight and some take-no-prisoners jokes, with witty design to frame it all nicely. Despite that, The Party's Over is often too broad, enamored with the spectacle of its antagonist – cartoonish to a detrimental degree – and prone to forgetting the more dispossessed characters who should be at its center. Or, at the very least, should be humanized and given opportunity to be a multidimensional entity. The ending is the worst part, as if underlining that this isn't the immigrant's story. It never was.

Platform

THE WOLVES ALWAYS COME AT NIGHT, Gabrielle Brady 

It starts with the musical synergy of instrument and nature. The flute and the horse's breathing, hard gallop against the earth, a rhythmic beat – they make for a symphonic overture, gorgeous and almost theatrical despite the sun-bleached realism of the piece. Gabrielle Brady's The Wolves Always Come at Night takes its audience to rural Mongolia, where a young couple tries to continue the traditions they were born into, always connected to the land, in body and spirit. "Bright golden earth; let us offer thou fresh tea; protect our family from sickness and suffering" they pray and chant, the sun against their faces and the camera lens, like the manifestation of the divine of Pasolini's Oedipus Rex transposed to the Bayankhongor Province.

But cycles of renewal, death and birth, are rudely interrupted by a sudden sandstorm. The weather has been changing in the past few years, violent and destructive when it once created and sustained life. But even then, nothing could prepare the herders for the recent cataclysm, throwing them asunder and into a state of affairs where they must consider the unthinkable. Though these people's identity is inextricably bound to the place they have inhabited for generations, the family may need to leave, go to the city like so many others who, once gone, never returned to their ancestral home. Indeed, in a deepening of landscape cinema, Brady makes sure we get to know the people through their land, just as much as we know the land through their interaction with it.

Departure is painful, like a surgical cut without anesthesia, yet the film remains faithful to its melancholic ways and unromantic pastoralism. It sings a lament and articulates a poem, willfully intent on repetitions that shock when they break. The Wolves Always Come at Night finds haptic reverie in the brushing of a horse's mane, comfort in a couple's nocturnal conversations. On the other hand, when animals run into their doom or must be herded away from those who love them, when a man spends the evening alone in the karaoke club, missing a family he can only reach through phone, the cinematic form seems to cry. Brady has created a treatise on the effects of climate change that evades cliché and the tenets of common discourse, going for something more visceral – a farewell to a way of life.

Special Presentations

SHEPHERDS, Sophie Deraspe

Like a fictional French-Canadian take on Into the Wild, Shepherds follows the journey of a discontent young man who abandons his cozy life in Montreal to pursue dreams of faraway humility. From an executive, he becomes a shepherd, herding sheep in the region of Provence, where he's made to face the realities of rural life. In the collision of coddled expectation and hard work, director Sophie Deraspe seems to grasp a greater maturity than similar stories, reckoning with her protagonist's failings as much as she exults his stabs at transcendence. Furthermore, the cineaste breaks convention, portraying nature as something that's not inherently fair or benign, nor there to aid in a person's self-actualization.

At best, the wilderness is neutral, undefined by human notions of good and bad, right and wrong, evil. If only that sentiment prevailed throughout Shepherds instead of vacillating the closer one gets to the finish line. Oh well, it's not all derivative disappointment. In spite of a touristy gaze, the film's form is quite attractive, impressive and immersive enough to justify the music's crescendo into orchestral euphoria. Moreover, Deraspe's camera has a great love for the sheep of Provence, treating them with respect and wonder, a good deal of generosity that remains steadfast even when the plot demands their suffering. For her troubles, the director won the Best Canadian Feature Film Award at TIFF.

And that marks the end of this TIFF '24 coverage. For the curious, here's my top ten...

01. GRAND TOUR, Miguel Gomes
02. ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT, Payal Kapadia
03. PEPE, Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias (review coming soon, NYFF coverage)
04. VIÊT AND NAM, Truong Minh Quy (review coming soon, NYFF coverage)
05. APRIL, Dea Kulumbegashvili
06. BABYGIRL, Halina Reijn
07. CAUGHT BY THE TIDES, Jia Zhangke
08. VERMIGLIO, Maura Delpero
09. DAHOMEY, Mati Diop (review coming soon, NYFF coverage)
10. I'M STILL HERE, Walter Salles

Honorable mentions go to Mike Leigh's Hard Truths, Wang Bing's Youth double feature, Alain Guiraudie's Misericordia, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cloud, and the short-form delights of John Smith's Being John Smith, the funniest film of the festival.

The NYFF coverage comes next, starting with a glimpse into the desirous conundrums of Nicolás Pereda's Lázaro at Night, maybe Mati Diop's Dahomey. Stay tuned for more!