Each year at the Toronto International Film Festival, I travel the world virtually, moving through space and time in vivid color and in black and white. On the first day alone of this year’s event, which wraps Sunday, movies took me from Mexico to France, Benin, South Africa, the United States, England and Japan. One gift of an expansive, border-crossing festival like Toronto is that it reminds you there is far more to films than those that come out of that provincial town called Hollywood.
It’s been a few rough years in the festival world, which continues to struggle with the aftershocks of the pandemic as well as the back-to-back 2023 actors and writers strikes, which left Toronto and other events with near-empty red carpets. Toronto endured another sizable hit when it lost a longtime major backer (Bell Canada). Since then, the festival has added a fleet of new sponsors and a market for buying and selling movies, a venture backed by major money from the Canadian government. That’s great news for this festival and for the enduring health of the film world, which is sustained and rejuvenated by the kinds of aesthetically adventurous, independently minded movies showcased at Toronto and other festivals.
The other welcome news involves the good and the great, the provocative and the divisive movies headed your way in the coming months. Despite the usual grumblings about the program’s offerings (I’ve heard from other programmers that 2024 is a fairly weak year) and a sense that Toronto seems less vital than in the past, this year’s lineup did what it reliably does each fall. It helped restore my faith that however catastrophic the state of the movie industry seems to be, there are always filmmakers making worthy and even transcendent documentaries and narrative fiction. The forecast is often gloomy in movieland, but visionaries like Mati Diop and art-house stalwarts like Mike Leigh and Pedro Almodóvar are keeping the sky from falling.
In 2019, Diop, a Senegalese-French director born in Paris, made history at Cannes with her debut feature, “Atlantics,” when she became the first Black woman in the event’s main competition. (It won the Grand Prix, or second prize.) A dreamily haunting, haunted tale of love and loss, leaving and staying, “Atlantics” centered on a woman whose male true love leaves Senegal for Europe, a project that Diop likened to “the Odyssey of Penelope” when we spoke at Cannes. In her latest, “Dahomey” — which won top honors at the Berlin festival — Diop charts another fraught course, this time by exploring the political and philosophical questions raised when France returned 26 stolen treasures to Benin in 2019.
“Dahomey” is a stunning exploration of cultural and artistic patrimony in the wake of colonialism; it’s one of the great movies of the year. (It will be at the New York Film Festival soon.) Running a richly complex, perfect 68 minutes, “Dahomey” opens in Paris and wryly announces its themes with a shot of gaudily colored Eiffel Tower souvenirs of the kind sometimes sold by African street vendors. From there, Diop skips over to the Quai Branly Museum where the treasures — which were looted in 1892 by French troops when Benin was known as Dahomey — are being packed up for their momentous trip home. By the time one of the statues began speaking in bassy, hypnotic voice-over, I was thoroughly hooked.
Another of my festival highlights was the documentary “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,” the latest from the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck. (His earlier Toronto entries include “I Am Not Your Negro.”) Engrossing from start to painful end, “Ernest Cole” traces the life, the creative awakening and artistic flowering, as well as the crushingly difficult times, of its title subject, a brilliant photographer who was born in 1940 near Pretoria, South Africa. At once the story of a man and of the country he bravely documented — Cole’s landmark 1967 book, “House of Bondage,” was banned in South Africa and he was, too — the movie gracefully, forcefully reminds you that there is no line dividing the personal and the political.
The British filmmaker Mike Leigh insistently weaves the personal and the political throughout “Hard Truths,” his first movie since the 2019 historical drama “Peterloo.” A drama flecked with laughs both bitter and sweet, “Hard Truths” focuses on two very different sisters, the corrosive Pansy (a monumental Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and the freehearted Chantal (Michele Austin). Set in contemporary London, the story restlessly toggles between the sisters, though tips more in Pansy’s favor simply because of the character’s viperous temperament and Jean-Baptiste’s mesmerizing performance. A study of nature and nurture and what it means to live in an often brutalizing world, the movie can be tough to watch but it holds you tight to the end.
Fresh from winning top honors at the Venice Film Festival, Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” — the first English-language feature for the Spanish filmmaker — centers on two longtime friends, Martha (Tilda Swinton) and Ingrid (Julianne Moore). Although it’s been years since the two saw each other, the friends quickly resume their closeness when Martha announces that she has cancer. What follows is an elegiac, sometimes wryly funny exploration of life, death and the profundities of friendship, those relationships that we willingly choose with people unrelated by blood. The choices that Almodóvar and his stars make are consistently surprising, and I’m eager to experience them all over again.
One of the pleasures of “The Room Next Door” is the loving attention that Almodóvar bestows on his stars, who are both 63 and are showcased beautifully and glamorously. This may not be Almodóvar’s finest movie, but it’s awfully good and they’re great. It’s deeply satisfying to watch Moore and Swinton dig into such nuanced, complicated characters and see two of the finest screen performers play off each other with such persuasive, plaintive intimacy, especially in a story in which husbands and lovers and even children aren’t the point. It’s also, frankly, gratifying to see the delicate lines openly, almost defiantly etched in these women’s faces.
The movies, and Hollywood in particular, have always been embarrassed by older women — though truly by most women — when their faces and bodies don’t conform to certain (absurd) ideals. So, I felt a similar satisfaction watching Amy Adams’s deglammed presence in “Nightbitch.” Written and directed by Marielle Heller (“The Diary of a Teenage Girl”), and based on Rachel Yoder’s novel of the same title, the movie follows Adams’s unnamed character. a beleaguered stay-at-home mom with a toddler and an often absent husband (Scoot McNairy). She’s having a rough time when the movie opens; she’s bored, exhausted, isolated. But things sure do pick up when she notices a strange clump of hair and starts thinking she’s turning into a dog.
“Nightbitch” isn’t a revelatory work, which is fine; it’s consistently enjoyable, often funny and Adams is excellent. Some of Heller’s filmmaking choices are disappointingly obvious, notably her use of visual repetition to underscore the tedium of her character’s life. And some of the more self-consciously didactic diatribes don’t land the way that I think Heller intends. Even so, together with Adams, she has created a memorably spiky character who’s helping expand the repertory of female characters, one you can’t take your eyes off even with her frumpy shirts, ill-fitting pants, Birkenstocks and the food, poop and spittle decorating her clothing. You can feel Adams’s pleasure in this role radiating off the screen.
It’s galvanizing seeing how Heller and other female filmmakers are changing the representation of women and the way we look at these characters onscreen. Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl,” a drifty, expressionistic portrait of a longtime Las Vegas dancer, Shelley (Pamela Anderson), facing her final curtain call. Not a great deal happens in “Showgirl” even as everything changes, but Coppola and her cast — including a knockout Jamie Lee Curtis — keep you watching as does the bejeweled cinematography and the movie’s sense of marginalized place.
Mostly, though, I am still thinking about the scene in which Curtis, in tights and unitard, dances in the middle of a casino as gamblers pass by, scarcely looking at her. She doesn’t need their attention (she certainly does have yours); she’s dancing for herself, a nice metaphor for some of the festival’s most memorable women.
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