TIFF 2019: Day 2 (Patreon)

Guest of Honour (Atom Egoyan, Canada): 45

Easily his dumbest wholly original script: the trashy-yet-ponderous tale of a persnickety health inspector and his bizarrely self-righteous/-castigating daughter, needlessly told in flashback to kindly priest Luke Wilson. Little of what happens makes much emotional sense, and only one of the key actors—Laysla de Oliveira, previously unknown to me—understands that naturalism doesn’t play in Egoyan’s work, productively pushing her somewhat deranged character into absurdity (or at least over-intensity, which does help). Still, there was no rescuing this one. It’s just a silly idea that an artist in his prime would either reconceive or just refrain from inflicting upon the world.

About Endlessness (Roy Andersson, Germany/Norway/Sweden): 65

Once more, encore, to the second floor! Latest iteration of his signature style avoids the sheer unpleasantness that repeatedly surfaced in Pigeon, while not returning to outright comedy, either (apart from one pretty hilarious bit in a dentist’s office); weary resignation is front and center here, with several vignettes barely lasting long enough to justify the time and expense involved in their creation. Main innovation is a recurring unidentified female voice who narrates the “action” as if answering Dylan’s question “Oh what did you see, my darling young one?” We see what she tells us she saw, but the distancing effect (which generally arrives late in the sequence) provides a slightly different, tangy flavor to what might otherwise now feel a tad rote. And at a mere 75 minutes, it’s over before you can even start to wonder when it might be.

First Love (Takashi Miike, UK/Japan): 72

Improbable comparison, but I kept thinking of Raising Arizona—specifically w/r/t gags being quietly set up and then abruptly exploding into mayhem later on (like the chain-trailing dogs showing up in the supermarket when H.I. stops for Huggies). Slow to get underway—that’s where the Coens’ verbal dexterity came in handy—but the second half is one long escalating oft-hilarious free-for-all, with an ostensibly sweet-natured relationship at its core except even that gets repeatedly undermined by the young woman’s (involuntary) raging drug addiction. Screenwriter Masa Nakamura has been working with Miike for two decades (he previously penned Dead or Alive 2 and Sukiyaki Western Django) and knows what the guy excels at...and when he throws in something nobody could possibly execute without Fast & Furious money, Miike just shrugs and switches to animation for 30 seconds. It’s that kind of funhouse blast.

Beanpole (Kantemir Balagov, Russia): 52

A superlatively made historical bleakfest with which I sadly never quite connected. Think I got thrown early on, when something truly devastating happens and Balagov opts to just kinda skip past it; the small leap forward in time didn’t bother me, but the relative lack of emotion when one character tells another (revealing a crucial detail in the process), and the subsequent matter-of-fact efforts to procure a replacement of sorts, did. My aghast pal and TIFF roommate Scott Tobias argues that this is Beanpole’s very point, viz. coping with one unimaginable trauma on the heels of an entire nation’s unimaginable trauma (this is Leningrad just after WWII), and he may be right, I may be crazy, ho! Can’t pretend that I didn’t experience pretty much the entire film at a remove, though. Just never felt vital to me.

Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa, Portugal): 59

Reminded a friend as we waited in line that I’m not a big Costa fan, and he then reminded me that I did quite like Ne change rien, the gorgeous concert film Costa shot some years back (unfortunately held back from greatness by Jeanne Balibar’s mediocrity as a chanteuse). This film, too, consists of one hauntingly beautiful shot after another, and there’s comparatively little of the confessional, non-professional monologuing that drove me nuts in both Colossal Youth and Horse Money. Costa remains much, much more interested in Ventura than I am, and the funeral that serves as an inciting incident here, inspiring various reminiscences about the merits of Cape Verde vs. Portugal, never became as important to me as it clearly was to Ms. Varela. But this is a movie you could very happily watch with the sound turned off. Hell, I might go back and rewatch his other films that way.