So the festival is just about over, and there are basically no press screenings left, and I don’t have any tickets to public screenings, and the ones I’d like to see are sold out. Enter: rush lines. I spent much of my Saturday standing in the long rush line outside the Scotiabank Theatre. A hellish notion for some, I’m sure, but standing hours and hours in line comes with some nice benefits. Mainly, being outside on a nice day, and also meeting and talking to other people in line. Sometimes you see those people ago, more often not, but either way, it’s such a nice form of connection. Usually it starts with talking about what you’ve all seen at the festival so far, the highlights and all that. If you’re in line long enough, the conversation shifts to learning where people come from, what they do for a living, what other hobbies and interests they have. If TIFF is “The People’s Festival,” then standing in line is one of the areas that’s most true.
I’ve also gotten quite good at rushing movies over the years. I tend to have a keen sense for both what will have seats open, and how far back in the line I can be before the wait is unlikely to pay off. On Saturday, my original plan was to attempt rushing three films in a row, but I realized coming out of the first film that the line was already too long for Sirāt—and too full of people who wouldn’t get into Sentimental Value, and thus would be happy to get into Sirāt as a consolation prize—so, not worth it. I went with an alternate plan.
For the first film of the day, though, I was finally able to catch Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a hilarious, intense, hilariously intense movie starring Rose Byrne as a mother and a therapist absolutely losing her shit under the stress of it all, and the fact that having a kid to begin with may have been a mistake in her case. The camera is close up on Byrne’s face almost the entire time, and in a nice conceit, the child is essentially never seen on camera. She’s always been a great actress, but Byrne leans in so incredibly hard on this one. It’s a performance if you’ve ever seen one, and a great one of its kind. Both too much, and perfectly subtle where it needs to be. The increasing twitch under Byrne’s eye as the film goes on is one of the best pieces of technical acting I’ve seen all festival. She’s supported by some great co-stars, including an impressively deft turn from Conan O’Brien—my hero!—and the year’s big rapper-turned-actor surprise, A$AP Rocky. Comparisons to Uncut Gems make sense, given Bronstein’s association with the Safdies (Josh has a producing credit on this one) and the funny-intense style, though If I Had Legs goes for something very different in the end, and it’s a total blast. Dark, of course. But a dark blast.
After getting out of the film, I made the decision to skip Sirāt, but luckily I had the best possible backup plan available.
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and it even got an IMAX re-release a couple weeks back, which I attended and which was awesome as hell. But it’s Jaws, I can watch Jaws over and over and over, and it’s always the best shit ever. So how could I not take the opportunity to see one of TIFF’s screenings of the film on 35mm. In fact, I’ve seen Jaws a couple times in theatres before, but never on film. What a god damn joy. A couple weeks ago, I had a somewhat viral tweet about the movie. “Film school should just be people strapped to the Clockwork Orange chair,” I wrote, “forced to watch Jaws over and over and over until they understand how a real movie works.” I stand by that comment wholeheartedly, and don’t have much else to add.
After Jaws it was back to the Scotiabank rush line for a long wait with friends and new faces to get into one of my other most-anticipated films of the festival.
The thing about German director Christian Petzold is that I love everything he does. I had already been a fan of his, from films like Phoenix and Barbara. A while back, though, the TIFF Cinemetheque did a comprehensive retrospective of his work, including films he’d made for television decades ago now, which are almost impossible to find, but were screened on gorgeous 35mm prints. What I discovered was that I loved every single one. That’s not to say they’re all masterpieces, though he’s made a couple of those, certainly. Rather, I discovered that I am so deeply on Petzold’s wavelength, that even his most minor work totally delights me. He’s a European art house filmmaker with a strong political eye, and deeply influenced by Hitchcock. Kind of a perfect combo. My ideal filmmaker, in a way. That every film is in some ways a remake of Vertigo is just beautiful. More filmmakers should be remaking Vertigo at every opportunity.
Miroirs No. 3 is yet another of Petzold’s Vertigo riffs, and one most at the festival have dutifully called “minor.” Minor my balls! Well, already. It is actually a pretty minor film for Petzold. An 86-minute picture starring Paula Beer as a woman who gets into a car accident with her boyfriend, who is killed, and ends up staying with an older woman who lives in a house nearby the crash site. Soon, she finds herself increasingly embedded in this woman’s life, each of them living a kind of fantasy detached from the sadder aspects of their actual realities. The film never pops off in any extreme way, but there’s so much pleasure to be had in watching the dynamics between the film’s central characters, and how the plot’s Hitchcockian aspects will eventually reveal themselves. Like I said, my ideal filmmaker making my ideal sort of film. Plus, it features an incredible use of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons’s song “The Night.”
After the movie, I hung out at the Town Crier with my good friend Mark Asch, talking shop and having a few drinks (and some French onion soup!), before heading off home to bed to rest up for my final day of TIFF 2025.