Review: Not even Léa Seydoux and Catherine Deneuve can save “Gentle Monster”

by Cláudio Alves

Sometimes, the story behind a project’s making can be more interesting and engaging than the finished product. Such is the case of Gentle Monster, Marie Kreutzer’s latest and the follow-up to her critically acclaimed Corsage. Its development started during the production of that 2022 Sissi pseudo-biopic, when the Austrian director began contacting police, psychologists, and other experts who could help her develop a script inspired by the pedophile ring scandal that had been revealed a couple of years earlier by the Die Zeit newspaper. But what was born as an attempt at exploring the complex realities hidden in the sordid story took a turn when, after Corsage’s successful run, it was discovered that one of its stars was involved in similar criminal activity.

Florian Teichtmeister played the emperor to Vicky Krieps’ empress, and was sentenced to a suspended two-year prison term for possession and production of the sordid materials. For Kreutzer, an examination of realities far away from herself suddenly became a matter too close for comfort. The director considered scrapping the whole thing but instead reinvented Gentle Monster as a gesture of self-reflection cum self-therapizing through art. The main question put forward is one about how much we truly know those we believe to understand beyond measure, those closest and most beloved. The unknowability of “the other” is central and terrifying. Yet, the reckoning with this and other ideas remains frustratingly shallow, as if we’re witnessing a film still trying to find itself…

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Best Actress in the Post-War: An Alternative Oscar History

by Cláudio Alves

Olivia de Havilland won Best Actress twice in the late 40s. First, for Mitchell Leisen's TO EACH, HIS OWN in 1946, and, then, for William Wyler's THE HEIRESS in 1949.

At long last, after a month of endless TIFF and NYFF reviews, the Alternative Best Actress series makes its grand return. For now, let's ease back into pre-fall festival season rhythms with a write-up that considers only four Oscar years, 1946-49. 

They were those of the immediate post-war, when the Best Actress queens of the decade's first half - Garson, Davis, Hepburn - seemed to lose the Academy's favor, while new favorites emerged. In one of Old Hollywood's most infamous and contested family feuds, Fontaine won the Oscar before de Havilland, but Olivia finished the 40s with two little golden men to her sister's one. Rosalind Russell thought it was finally her time to win gold, but the Academy had other ideas, like a newfound fondness for preposterous Scandinavian accents and Loretta Young. Jane Wyman won for a mute performance, while Susan Hayward shouted and wallowed her way to multiple nominations. Finally, having grown tired of one red-headed English Rose, AMPAS turned their eyes to another, with Kerr closing the decade with the beginning of her "always the bridesmaid, never the bride" run of Best Actress nominations.

But that's reality, actual Academy Award history. What about my own version? If I had a ballot, some things would've gone differently, to say the least...

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TIFF 51: Jury of Two, Part III

Though the NYFF reviews may continue to pervade our page like an invasive species that just won't quit and go away, it's time to give a proper ending to the longest TIFF coverage we've ever done at The Film Experience. Though all good things must come to an end, it need not be a bitter one. So, let's go out on a fun note, with Cláudio Alves and Eurocheese back for the third and final part of their Jury of Two chat.

Diego Calva's hot social worker from CLUB KID welcomes you to the end of our TIFF 51 coverage.

CLÁUDIO: Well, it's been fun to analyze the many films we watched at TIFF (screeners included, I'm almost at 70!), yet I'm hankering for some silliness now. Some Canadian-flavored silliness at that, so be ready for a lot of nonsensical Heated Rivalry references. In my mind, the Far North used to be the realm of Cronenberg perversions and Maddin madness, but it's now all about the Hockey boys, the Hockey gays, and the Hockey romance. Picture that a Tim Hortons and one of Church Street's most outrageous gay clubs had a love child. That's both the Canada of my sick, sick mind and the venue for this imaginary awards ceremony. In that spirit, our first category is…

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TIFF 51: Latin American Gems, Part III – The Everlasting Return

by Cláudio Alves

Last but not least, in this miniseries of Latin American highlights from the 51st Toronto International Film Festival, we have a quartet of films that ponder return, whether to a place or a time, perchance a cultural root or the depths of literary history.

You have Lisandro Alonso’s Double Freedom, premiered at Cannes to rave reviews and which, effectively, marks a sequel, quasi-remake of the director’s quarter-century-old debut. The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs considers the work of Sara Flores, a Peruvian painter from the Amazon, while Life of Jorge Luis Borges is another madcap proposition from El Pampero Cine, focusing on director Mariano Llinás’ investigation into the titular writer. Also, it’s five and a half hours long and the funniest film at TIFF 51. Finally, Where the River Begins follows three youths in contemporary Bogotá as they leave behind their lives of urban misery and return to the Indigenous riverside village of their past, their shared legacy, their dreams…

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NYFF 64: “London” and “The Loneliest Man in Town” blur the line between fact, fiction and portraiture

by Cláudio Alves

When one’s engagement with cinema happens mostly through mainstream productions, it’s easy to fall into the false belief that narrative and documentary film are two strictly separated categories. However, almost since the medium's birth, the line between the two has been blurred, the barrier porous and permeable. One might go as far back as the Lumières’ artificial staging for their shorts, or perhaps relitigate the authenticity of Flaherty’s Nanook of the North for the millionth time since it hit theaters in 1922. Perchance we might reflect on the cinematic traditions of Portuguese post-revolution cinema, or the Iranian auteurs who kept pushing boundaries with their hybrid works in the 80s, 90s, and beyond. At the 64th New York Film Festival, many films fell between the binary of fact and fiction, with two doing so by appealing to the portrait as a cinematic model.

They’re both Austrian projects that vied for the Golden Berlin Bear earlier this year – Sebastian Brameshuber’s London and Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s The Loneliest Man in Town…

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