TIFF 2019: Day 10 (Patreon)

It Must Be Heaven (Elia Suleiman, Canada/Germany/France/Qatar/Turkey/Palestine): 71

More of the same, except that (a) it’s been 10 long years since our last check-in*, and (b) Suleiman ventures far from Nazareth for the first time*, toting his bemused impassivity (or impassive bemusement) to Paris and New York. Culture-clash gags are occasionally too facile—one sequence has every American in sight packing heat, from pistols to rifles to rocket launchers—but that tendency is counterbalanced by some of his most exquisitely choreographed absurdity: French cops dancing on Segways; emergency personnel who treat the homeless like first-class air travelers; parkgoers battling for the rare empty chair beside a fountain. (Most of the best jokes are Paris-set, now that I think about it. Makes sense, since Suleiman lives there and has had a long time to gather material; he claimed in the Q&A that 95% of his vignettes have at least some real-world foundation, that he merely exaggerates his life.) If this is my favorite of his films, by a hair, it’s mostly because I was so moved by the hopeful/rueful note on which he concludes—a setpiece that firmly believes the children (or young people, anyway) are our future, while also silently observing that the kids are coming up from behind. But he was there.

* Unless you, like me, saw the omnibus project 7 Days in Havana (2012), which included a typical-but-shorter Suleiman segment among a whole lotta dross.

A White, White Day (Hlynur Pálmason, Denmark/Iceland/Sweden): 76

Weeeeee got one! (A below-the-radar triumph, that is. TIFF doesn’t really feel like TIFF unless I wind up loving at least one film for which I had zero expectations.) Pálmason’s first feature, the generally well-regarded Winter Brothers, failed to grab me in its first 10 minutes, but his sophomore effort opens with two magnificent, wordless “movements”: first a car driving endlessly in weather conditions that all but erase the distinction between land and sky, then exterior shots of a ramshackle seaside house over the course of multiple seasons. Humans are barely glimpsed for a while, yet A White, White Day eventually becomes a forbidding character study, addressing stifled grief in some of the most hauntingly oblique ways I’ve ever seen, but without losing sight of human complexity. At one point—and this is merely the most memorable example of many; I don’t want to risk diluting too much of the film’s power—the protagonist’s car runs over a large stone, which he then laboriously pushes off the road and down a hill; the stone’s subsequent journey (witnessed only by us) occupies a small eternity and concludes at the bottom of the sea, transcending mere symbolism, taking on the emotional weight of what remains painfully unexpressed. That Pálmason pulls off such abstraction while simultaneously guiding performances as richly detailed and psychologically credible as those here—I get chills just thinking about the sadistic streak that emerges when Ingimundur tells his granddaughter a bedtime story—makes me very excited about his future. My one big reservation involves the final scene, which seems superfluous (especially following the tunnel shot, which couldn’t constitute a more perfect ending, either narratively or visually), and perhaps even counterproductive. Remove that and this might be my film of the year.

Synonyms (Nadav Lapid, Germany/France/Israel): 28

Lapid may be my least favorite “name” director (by international-fest standards) currently working with whom I did not attend college. Have disliked all three of his acclaimed features to date, and this one—winner of the Golden Bear at Berlin—achieves whole new levels of risibility; were I to list my 10 worst scenes of the year, Synonyms would score at least three and possibly as many as five. Granted, I’m generally unenthusiastic about films that interrogate national identity (no doubt because I’ve never had to struggle with mine; see also “personal identity”), but Lapid’s sensibility rubs me the wrong way irrespective of context, and this is his most bellicose effort yet. Pretty much loathed the lead actor, who appears to have been cast largely for his willing exhibitionism (in every sense of the word) and remains a charisma-free cipher throughout even as Yoav inexplicably seduces everyone he encounters. Meanwhile, the film’s generic French characters just stand around, impassive, while people aggressively hum the Israeli national anthem in their faces on the Métro. Or they studiously ignore a dude yelling parroted ethics questions at random orchestra members. (Don’t ask.) Lapid himself ignores all manner of basic questions, e.g. how Yoav got access to that luxury apartment building on his first night in Paris, or how his new friends can afford to live there given that neither one appears to do anything at all; I can easily concoct plausible answers, but a good filmmaker wouldn’t risk the viewer’s mind wandering in irrelevant directions. Extra demerits for the ludicrously heavy-handed final shot, which echoes the opening scene of It Must Be Heaven minus any hint of comedy.

Dogs Don’t Wear Pants (J-P Valkeapää, Finland/Latvia): W/O

Exotica played straight, as a surgeon uses sessions with a dominatrix to cope with lingering grief and guilt over the accidental death of his wife. Nothing about the first 35 minutes looked particularly interesting to me, and the “meet cute” is so clumsily engineered that I had little faith in Valkeapää’s facility. (Didn’t help that I’d previously bailed on his last film, They Have Escaped.)

One more day to go! Though I’m already mostly through it as I post this and can reveal that there’s probably no further excitement forthcoming. Ending my fest with a second look at the Miike, to go out on a high note.