Festival Season Reds (Patreon)

A few more brief remarks on films I'm screening for TIFF, etc.

Spirit of Ecstasy (Héléna Klotz, 2023) [TIFF]

A fairly conventional film in punk attire, Spirit of Ecstasy suggests what might have happened if Lisbeth Salander had decided to go into finance. Claire Pommet, the singer-songwriter professionally known as Pomme, plays Jeanne, a 24-year-old military brat with an icy demeanour and a dizzying facility with applied calculus. They’re trying to secure an analyst position at a number of hedge funds, and finally appears to have transformed an unpaid internship into their shot at the big time. Jeanne is middle-class but, in their stolen designer suit, aims to remake their image as one of the “boys.”

She Came to Me (Rebecca Miller, 2023) [Viennale]

A wry comedy in the tradition of Alan Rudolph and Peter Bogdanovich, She Came to Me centres on Steven (Peter Dinklage), a modern opera composer whose previous opus resulted in an emotional breakdown so severe, he ended up marrying his therapist Patricia (Anne Hathaway), an obsessive-compulsive clean freak. On her recommendation, Steven takes a walk to clear his head and meets Katrina (Marisa Tomei), a tugboat captain and recovering love and sex addict. An ill-advised tryst turns Steven’s world upside down, but also provides the inspiration for his production: the story of a murderous tugboat captain who lures men to their deaths. [Note: this is a catalogue blurb, so it's merely descriptive. She Came to Me has its moments, but is mostly twee and forgettable.]

Inshallah a Boy (Amjad Al Rasheed, 2023) [TIFF]

Al Rasheed’s debut feature is quite elegant. With an unobtrusive realist style as its bedrock, Inshallah brings Nawal’s emotional conflicts forward in an impressive manner. Neither didactic nor implicitly affirming, the film details the impossible position that women occupy in Jordan, a relatively liberal Muslim state. Most of the people Nawal turns to for help critique her instead, telling her that if she were only more cooperative and less visibly frustrated with patriarchal privilege, she would be facing fewer difficulties. This pervasive attitude includes significant horizontal violence, as well-meaning women insist that the more Nawal demands her rights, the worse her situation will become. Surprisingly she finds her lone ally across class lines, forming a bond with her employer’s daughter Lauren (Yumna Marwan), an educated, secular woman who is also in need.

The Mother of All Lies (Asmae El Moudir, 2023) [TIFF]

The governing formal conceit for Asmae El Moudir’s feature debut would have been more impressive had Rithy Panh not beaten her to the punch ten years ago. In working to explore the gaps in her childhood memories, as well as the history of oppression in Morocco under Hassan II, El Moudir reconstructs her old neighbourhood in cardboard, plastic, and clay, populating this miniature timescape with meticulously carved figurines, representing herself and the others who were living there at the time. The Mother of All Lies does in fact expand on Panh’s The Missing Picture (2013) because El Moudir recruits her entire family, all of them taking part to some degree in this reclamation project. It’s in these fraught dynamics, and their relationship to the so-called Years of Lead, that Mother truly distinguishes itself.