From the Iranian film A Separation

The Toronto International Film Festival doesn’t begin for another couple days, but local critics have been in fest mode since mid-August, when the onslaught of advance screenings began. For the first time, I’m among those critics, and I have to say I’m still trying to come to grips with the experience. On the one hand, I’m getting to see gobs of upcoming movies in advance and for free (as many as three a day), but on the other hand, I’m enjoying the experience of movie watching less. I know—boo-hoo, get a real job, etc. I’m not looking for sympathy, I’m simply trying to point out the inherent pitfalls of reviewing films in a festival environment. It’s not just the overwhelming number of screenings and the corresponding lack of time to reflect on what I’ve seen (although that’s implicit). It’s the existential problem of temporarily losing all sense of what movies—and the arts in general—are for.

I’ve always felt that you go to a film when you need to step outside your own life; when you want to see how other people live theirs, or how an artist interprets the world. (And sometimes, of course, you go for a much simpler reason: to escape into shiny Hollywood fantasy.) But when movies become your life, as they do for a critic during fest time, they no longer function as the psychological release-valves they’re meant to be. Watching so many of them, you begin to feel decadent, and unless the movie’s a real visceral grabber you end up staring at the screen wondering what it’s all for and why you should care. Which helps explain why bombastic pictures like last year’s fest entry Black Swan got critics buzzed and excited, while quieter, more thoughtful films like The Trip or Beginners received only mild applause.

Fred Schepisi's The Eye of the Storm

So far, one film amongst the dozen or so I’ve seen completely cleared away the brain fog, and it towers over the rest: Fred Schepisi’s The Eye of the Storm. Adapted from the 1973 novel by Nobel Prize-winning Australian author Patrick White, the film evokes classic class-conscious pictures like Renoir’s Rules of the Game, Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, and Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, but it has a blunt, affectionate comic tone all its own. Judy Davis and Geoffrey Rush play upper-class siblings who return to Sydney from Europe in order to visit their dying, flinty matriarch (Charlotte Rampling), mostly in the hopes of ensuring their inheritance. As the three re-open old wounds, the house staff look on with mounting anxiety, knowing full well their livelihoods hang in the balance.

For a long while, the film entertained me without feeling substantial enough—the characters seemed too ridiculous to attain real substance. But then, almost imperceptibly, they reveal other sides to themselves, and the scope of the movie broadens from one unhappy household to all of Australian society. It’s a marvellous, deeply enjoyable picture, and Davis and Rampling do some of their best work in it. (Rush is also very good in what is ultimately more of a supporting role.) Do see the movie if you can get a ticket. It doesn’t have a North American distribution deal yet, so who knows when you’ll get another chance.

A Separation

Another highly worthwhile festival entry is the Iranian film A Separation, which looks at a small but intractable domestic dispute that spirals out of control. Nader and Simin are a middle-class couple barely hanging on in modern-day Tehran, and the film opens with their appearance before an unseen magistrate, who refuses Simin her request for a divorce. Simin doesn’t particularly want a divorce, but she does want to leave the country for the sake of their 11-year-old daughter’s future, and Nader won’t go because he has to take care of his aging, senile father. This one scene—which shows us two completely reasonable, well-intentioned people at cross-purposes with one another—sets the tone for the entire movie, which grows to include a whole cast of characters imprisoned by good intentions and “reasonable” anger. All of the performances here are excellent, and the movie gains in force like a well-structured play. In fact, it shares a lot of similarities with The Crucible, but in the end its take on personal responsibility and integrity couldn’t be more different.

Take Shelter

Take Shelter, a hit at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is an intelligent, handsomely shot, beautifully acted film, but it’s yoked to a dumb conceit. In a small midwestern town, construction worker and family man Curtis (Michael Shannon) begins seeing signs of the apocalypse: freak storms, rust-coloured rain, dead birds falling from the sky. No one else sees these things, not even his wife (Jessica Chastain) or his hearing-impaired little girl. Fearing he may be some sort of prophet, he begins shovelling the family’s meagre savings into building a massive underground storm shelter. All the signs point to paranoid schizophrenia, and to a large extent the film works as an unsettling look at a man in the early-onset stages of the disorder. But director Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories) keeps undermining Curtis’s derangement by teasing us with the possibility that the apocalypse really is coming. I’m sure Nichols thinks he’s adding ambiguity, and thus depth, but he’s really just weakening good material with empty reality vs. illusion games. Anyone who’s dealt with schizophrenia knows the real fear isn’t that the ravings might prove true—it’s that the sufferer may be forever lost to his delusions.

Miss Bala

I was stoked for the Mexican film Miss Bala, which I’d heard was a new-style crime picture and searing social critique along the lines of City of God. The movie is stylish, but it’s also shallow and one-note. Stephanie Sigman plays Laura, a teenager trying to escape the slums of Tijuana by winning the Miss Baja California beauty contest. (The title is a play on words—”bala” means “bullet.”) On her way to rehearsal, Laura finds herself in the middle of a gangland shoot-out, then ends up in the clutches of one of the gang leaders. From there, she becomes a helpless pawn ushered from one bad scenario to the next, and before long she’s so mired in the country’s drug war that it’s clear there’s no getting out again.

Sigman is literally the entire show here—the camera almost never leaves her stricken face, even when bullets are flying and people are being killed all around her. There aren’t any other characters, just nameless entities acting upon her. But then, Laura’s not really a character, either—she’s just a passive victim for director Gerardo Naranjo to manoeuvre about the frame. The movie has its heart in the right place; it aims to show us how innocent people get chewed up and spit out by Mexico’s drug trade. But once you register the obvious trajectory of the character, there’s practically nothing left to respond to.

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Brought to you by the Alliance Film, Warrior, in theatres September 9th.