TIFF '24 Day Nine
It happened. After eight days and more screenings than I care to count right now, going into the ninth day, I felt worn down. I had a number of screenings planned, but when it came time, I started skipping some, feeling quite exhausted. Until that point, I had been tired at various points, certainly, but exhaustion is different. It’s like your core shutting down. You can’t really keep going at the same pace and you no longer want to. This happens every year, and it kind of doesn’t matter how many films I see. This year was… too many, but I remember even at festivals long past, when I might have seen about half the number of movies or less, feeling finished by the time we were entering the second weekend. Sometimes even earlier.
Despite that exhaustion, I still saw four movies. The first of them was the 4K restoration of Sohrab Shahid-Saless’s Time of Maturity, a 1976 German film by an Iranian filmmaker whose work is sadly not well known enough among cinephiles. Years ago, a friend got me to watch his brilliant, 1974 Iranian feature Still Life, as well as his even earlier film, A Simple Event. Both excellent, and Still Life specifically became one of my favourite films. His style is spare, slow, and observtional. Something akin to what Akerman was doing in films like Jeanne Dielman, though the first two films predate Akerman’s masterpiece. Time of Maturity tells the story of a young German boy going through his daily routines throughout the day, while his mother works at night as a sex worker. The two are often like ships passing in the night, missing each other, the boy on some level raising himself, sometimes stealing candy from classmates, or loose change from the blind woman for whom he helps to buy groceries. But as that woman says repeatedly, he’s “actually a good boy.” The film, shot in black-and-white, takes a non-judgemental view of both the boy and his mother, showing great sympathy for them in their lot. If it doesn’t reach the power of the earlier Still Life, it’s only because that film’s greatness would be difficult for anyone to match.
I had another movie on the docket next, but I decided to skip it in favour of lunch with a friend. The same friend who introduced me to Still Life, in fact, and had joined me for Time of Maturity. It was a nice break, and then I went home for a quick, unsatisfying nap before my next screening.
Raj Kapoor’s 1951 drama Awāra is one of the most famous, most successful, and most beloved works in all of Indian cinema, and had long been on my watchlist. Thankfully, I got to see it for the first time on the big screen, in a new restoration. It lived up to the hype. An absolutely ravishing, gripping, emotional film about crime and poverty in India. It tells the story of a boy, a man, accused of attempting to murder a judge. But that judge is, in fact, his father, who had turned his wife, the boy’s mother, out of his house after she was kidnapped and then released, suspecting her of having being pregnant with the baby of her kidnapper. The boy grows up in the depths of poverty, under the cruelty of India’s caste system and classism, pushing him into a life of crime. There’s much more to the story, including the woman with whom he once had a budding romance as a child, and the kidnapper, whose vendetta against the judge drives much of the plot. This is cinema at its best—though I wish I could say the same about the audience, one of the most intolerable I’ve experienced in a while, from the elderly couple talking at full volume throughout, to the guy next to me with the meanest case of halitosis, to the snickering laughter throughout the third act, during its many melodramatic but heartfelt moments. Thankfully, the power of the film shone through anyway.
I then went home again, this time to watch a screener of the festival’s most controversial film, Anastasia Trofimova’s documentary Russians at War. The film’s public screenings at the festival were cancelled after protests from Ukrainians on the street, denouncements from members of cabinet and parliament, the pulling out of production backers, and what TIFF has said were threats to safety. The charge by its destractors (almost none of whome have actually seen it) is that the film is propagandistic, humanizing the experience of Russian soldiers in their war with Ukraine, while selling the Russian line on the invasion. I won’t say too much here, as I will be writing about it professionally in the coming days, but having now seen the film, I am even more dismayed by TIFF dropping it from the schedule. This is a bracing film, and a deeply sad one, about the real experience of a war none of the soldiers on that side really understand why they’re fighting. It acts as a direct call on Russia to end the war, and if it soft-pedals some things Ukrainians would rather see condemned outright, it’s only because the film steadfastly avoids political debate, staying always at ground level, with the experience of the soldiers and their personal feelings, justifications, and dillusionment.
Finally, because I was in need of some kind of pick-me-up after Russians at War, I trekked down to the Royal Alexandra for the Midnight Madness screening of Nick Toti and Rachel Kempf’s It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This, a faux-documentary, found footage-style horror film about a couple who buy a house for next to no money in a dying small town. Their intention is to use the house to shoot a homemade monster movie, the kind they’ve been making together since the VHS days, but something sinister seems to be going on with the house, and things soon turn legitimately scary. Nick and Rachel (and their friend and collaborator Christian) play themselves, and in fact the setup to the film was entirely real. They did buy the house to shoot a monster movie (it was cheaper than renting a house, go figure), and when they started filming they were actually just documenting the process. Where reality ends and fiction begins is a little blurry, which adds to the film’s engrossing power. This is a movie that its creators say they only intend to show in theatres, that they never want to see end up online. Before TIFF, they’d been playing it mostly at small regional festivals, though I suspect the attention it’s now getting will give it a wider platform for some kind of theatrical run, perhaps similar to all the one-off events done for Hundreds of Beavers over the last couple of years. A very good film, its patience is its greatest assest, as is its willingness to push scenes far enough to have you question even the personalities of its central characters.