TIFF Finale Pt. 2: Oscar Boosts, Oslo August, Wuthering Heights, and Personal Prizes

EDITOR'S NOTE: This post now includes personal prizes from both of our TIFF correspondents, Amir & Paolo. I thank them profusely for all the coverage this year! -Nathaniel R

Amir here, back with the wrap up to this year's Toronto International Film Festival coverage for TFE. The festival ended yesterday with Nadine Labaki's Where Do We Go Now? beating Iran's A Separation and Canada's Starbuck to take the top prize, the People's Choice Award.

For me personally, the festival went out with a bang as on the closing weekend I watched a very entertaining film called. ... wait for it... Where Do We Go Now? before it became the surprise winner. I have Nathaniel to thank because before he pointed this one out among his top 16 curiousities, it was not on my radar at all. On one hand, I'm a little upset that Nadine Labaki took the prize because this means A Separation came second. I haven't seen the latter yet but if you haven't guessed by the number of Iran-related films I covered, I'm from, you guessed it right, Iran. So if TIFF were to give legs to one Best Foreign Language Film Oscar contender, you know which team I’m rooting for. On the other hand, I did contribute to the People's Choice outcome by giving Labaki’s film a 5 star vote after my screening. My five star vote doesn't mean the film is perfect. Far from it, in fact. But I can overlook it's serious dramatic problems in favour of its many merits.

The film is about a group of women in a village in Lebanon who try to ease tensions between the Christian and Muslim men using methods ranging from hash cookies to bringing in Ukrainian strippers. Part comedy, part musical and part exercise in interreligious coexistence in the Middle East, the film should be applauded just for approaching something as controversial as the Muslim-Christian relationship with comedy. But the script also has serious problems, ignoring any development in its male characters and unable to make the profound emotional impact it's aiming for when it ventures, too far, towards the dramatic and serious. But it is consistently funny if contrived, and the musical sequences are marvellous. Best of all, its female ensemble is Volver-level fantastic, equally funny and poignant.

I'm certain we'll see this as a Best Foreign Language Film nominee though I doubt that the critics will fall head over heels. Based on the recent track record of the category, I’d say this film has a good shot at winning the actual Oscar over whichever critical darlings are nominated alongside it.

On the last weekend of the festival I also so quite a double feature: Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Chicken with Plums and Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights.

AMIR & PAOLO's favorites from the festival after the jump.

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TIFF Finale Pt. 1: "Silver Cliff" and People's Choice Winner "Where Do We Go Now?"

Paolo here back with...wait, there are more movies after the awards were announced? Yes, but before we get to that, I was unfortunately reminded by Amir that I saw Love and Bruises. It's a movie about a Chinese woman in Paris named Hua who studies the women's rights movements but hangs around with rapists outside of campus. One of these, Mathieu (Tahar Rahim, who needs to work with better directors), is the jealous possessive type but lets her alone with his skeezy best friend. Cheery stuff.

Silver Cliff

Aarim Ainouz' SILVER CLIFF begins with Djalma (Otto Jr.), a beefy guy who isn't having fun despite swimming on a beach in Rio de Janeiro and making love to his wife Violetta (Alessandra Negrini). He flies to a smaller city and dumps her over the phone. Arriving at the airport too late, she roams around the city, from hotels to beaches, playing his voice message and suspicious of its tone. She meets a father (City of God's Thiago Martins) and daughter with their own back story.

Rio is a city where Brazilians can get willingly lost and here we follow the abandoned halves of broken marriages in Silver Cliff. Though the majority of the film concentrates on Violetta, her scenes neither written nor performed compellingly, Ainouz's choice to begin and end with the male characters is a puzzler.

The People's Choice Winner...

Where Do We Go Now?

After the screening of Nadine Labaki's WHERE DO WE GO NOW? (Lebanon's Oscar Submission), I overheard a festivalgoer telling his friends that 'someone's probably blogging that this is the worst People's Choice Winner ever.' I might be one of those bloggers misconstrued as writing that.

The film's chief merit is its female perspective on Lebanese sectarian conflict. In the spirit of "Lysistrata," a group of village women try to stop men from gunned conflict through pranks. (Some audiences might see this approach as too idealistic since it's difficult for any group who hate each other and unite and pull off miracles.) The director also stars as Amale (Labaki) whose character arc takes her from merely vulnerable and beautiful to someone who can publicly question notions of masculinity and God. But why did the idealistic women have to hire those big city Ukranian exotic dancers? By exploiting them for the men's use these women are taking steps back as they try to move forward. Where Do We Go Now? would have been more effective with less of its irreverent comic tone and musical numbers which only work half the time. The film could still reach the same denouement without trying so hard for its laughs.

TIFF Award Winners

The list as they came in [thanks to The Lost Boy]

BEST CANADIAN FIRST FEATURE Edwin Boyd, directed by Nathan Morlando (Paolo's review, Amir's review)
BEST CANADIAN FEATURE Monsieur Lazhar, directed by Philippe Falardeau
BEST CANADIAN SHORT FILM Doubles With Slight Pepper by Ian Harnarine
PEOPLE'S CHOICE MIDNIGHT MADNESS The Raid, directed by Gareth Huw Evans
PEOPLE'S CHOICE DOCUMENTARY The Island President by Jon Shenk
INTERNATIONAL CRITICS SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS The First Man, directed by Gianni Amelio
INTERNATIONAL CRITICS DISCOVERY SECTION Avalon directed by Axel Petersen 

And the biggie, the PEOPLE'S CHOICE AWARD, which often signifies Oscar attention in either Best Picture or Foreign Film categories is WHERE DO WE GO NOW? the musical from Lebanon which is from the director of Caramel. It was recently submitted for Oscar consideration for Best Foreign Language Film.

UPDATE: Here's the international trailer.

It's officially one to watch now, a very likely nominee if past awards are indication. Runners up in this category were Iran's very buzzy marital drama A Separation and Ken Scott's Starbuck. 

TIFF: "Himizu," "Lovely Molly," "...Nightmare" and "Union Square."

Paolo here, back with yet more TIFF films from the final weekend.

The first film today is Sion Sino's HIMIZU, using the backdrop of the March 11 earthquake to tell the story of fifteen year old Yuichi Sumida's (Shota Sometani) violent dreams and reality. One of his dreams puts him in the Fukushima rubble, where he finds a pistol inside a washing machine and when he wakes up, he checks his own washer to see if it's true. What ensues is school absenteeism, stalking from a lovesick and excitable girl, abuse from his father (who tells him he should drowned him in a river) and beatings from Yakuza loan sharks. 

At one point he has convulsions, a reaction to his unbelievably painful life. It's a raw and forceful performance from Sometani that might be ignored by larger audiences because of world cinema ghettoization. Sino's approach in telling Sumida's story meanders after the point when Sumida stands up to get revenge from these adults.

I feel snobby when I miss films from TIFF's Midnight Madness programme but fortunately, they play them again days after their premieres. Yesterday brought us LOVELY MOLLY from BLAIR WITCH director Eduardo Sanchez. It starts with the young titular character (Gretchen Lodge) explaning, teary eyed, that the actions that her body is committing is not really her. Her seemingly perfect marriage and childhood home disintegrate because of an incubus that haunts her. It is a competent horror film with the occassional excellent moment, especially those in which Lodge confronts her inner monster or becomes one. Lodge, in a debut performance, commits to the role with both eloquence and ferocity.

The transitions between regular film and video cam equipment are smooth.The scares aren't cheap but the intervals between them are far too long. While we're waiting for either the invisible ghost or Molly to attack, we're left with watching close-ups of furniture while eerie music plays on the background. The film can't rely only on great sound design to make its house look creepy. And why does the house have a security system but not proper lighting?

New Isabelle Huppert and Mira Sorvino movies after the jump.

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TIFF: "Jeff...," "Hysteria", "Take Shelter" and "Amy George."

[Editor's Note: Apologies from Nathaniel, I've been under the weather and Paolo, who has been so dependable at sending capsules and reviews our way, now has a log jam of them. So many movies to discuss. Enjoy. TIFF wraps this weekend. -Nathaniel R]

Paolo here, discovering that HYSTERIA, a film about inventing the vibrator, isn't based on the recent Broadway play "In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play" although they tackle the same subject. However, some scenes here still look like you might see them in a stage play, set in offices of upper middle class Londoners. These are  perfectly designed offices, with the requisite deep trendy colours of today's period films. The character played by the unrecognizable Rupert Everett is an electricity geek. A generator occupies his office, a Rube Goldberg like thing connected to a feather duster. However, protagonist Mortimer Granville (a composite of three actual doctors played by Hugh Dancy) sees something else in this feather duster.

The comedy in the film is repetitive; how many 'strong hands' jokes can one take even if Jonathan Pryce, playing Mortimer's boss Dalrymple, delivers them so capably? Dalrymple's daughter Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal) enters the plot, a welcome break from the 'paroxysms' of Mortimer's clients. Her story line gets dramatic when her East End connections land her in prison but there isn't enough of a struggle to convince us that something bad might truly happen to her. Gyllenhall plays Charlotte with an optimism rarely seen in her darker films. She's also required to speak in a West End English accent alongside real English actors but she's not enough to elevate this film into a genuine crowd pleaser.

HICK, based on Andrea Portes' novel, is a movie set in the middle of nowhere and ends up there, despite the wishes of a thirteen year old girl named Luli (Chloe Moretz). Luli is very knowledgeable of her  provenance, her mother Tammy (Juliette Lewis) giving birth to her in a bar. Her father's no different, the kind of guy who drives into playground monkey bars without hiding the bottle of whiskey in his hand. She decides to run away to Las Vegas even if she's too young to be part of the workforce. The film from this point forward becomes a road movie,  taking place inside cars or at pit stops.

Chloe's child acress 'rite of passage', Take Shelter Oscar buzz, and endless potato boiling after the jump.

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