Funny how opinions change over time.

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Martha Marcy May Marlene

Somehow, this riveting, suspenseful, intelligent, and gorgeous film about anxiety, family, and loyalty is a directorial debut. Somehow. Easily my “best of the fest”, Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy shows us the ugly underbelly of a self-sustaining cult community as well as the good old upper class American community. The film strangely begins in the middle of it’s narrative where both strands unveil themselves simultaneously immediately disorienting the viewer. Pushing two plots in a loosely-chronological way is a challenge, doing so while deliberately disorienting the viewer but still allowing them to maintain interest and focus is another completely. Not treating the cult-life as flashbacks, Durkin shows Martha (played by a great Elizabeth Olsen) finding challenges in separating her new life with her sister and her husband, from her former life in a small rural-based cult where the action seamlessly cuts between “lives” or “realities” as I like to call them. There are no gimmicky cloudy edges to illustrate memory or dream, just the heavy subject matter that shows the intense contrast between worlds. Although free of her traumatizing experience, Martha is brought to a cottage home that feels like it could be around the corner from the cult’s farm. The grey water and thick forest practically invite the imagination to create boogeymen to fill the dark spaces, and naturally, that’s exactly what Martha does. Here she finds herself equally as vulnerable yet more unwelcome as her sister and brother-in-law show their frustration with dealing with her anxiety as well as her being at odds with their personal values. Thoughts of returning to Martha’s welcoming “family” are frequently interrupted by commonplace instances that trigger fears that the cult is circling in on her. Like Martha’s own troubled mind, we are never immediately sure which place we are in when a new scene begins, her distortion is our distortion and as her anxiety builds and builds, ours does as well. It is uncommon to see a character projected so richly from screen to the mind of the viewer, but when it happens it’s a rare accomplishment worth savouring. A

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The Artist

A beautiful love letter to an era long since past, The Artist is a boldly old fashioned picture that could have slipped through a wrinkle in time, were it not for it’s very modern disposition. The closest comparison I can make to The Artist is not Modern Times or A Star Is Born, but a Quentin Tarantino film. Only Tarantino matches The Artist’s sense of place in the lexicon of cinema while maintaining a very self-reflexive attitude. Taking place and filmed as though it were from the 1920’s where Hollywood was heading into its golden age, the film focuses on the relationship between a silent era star who is a pioneer of a largely unknown new medium and a fan who becomes a star of the “talkies”, the new speaking motion pictures. Brilliantly taking advantage of the tropes, techniques, and technology of the times director Michel Hazanavicius creates a film that is astutely aware of the world it exists in (or at least pretends to). We are forever burdened to a lack of foresight and will always fail to understand the gravity of certain art and technology until they are antique, which is what makes The Artist such a gorgeous experiment in time-travel. It is able to be a part of an era while doubling as an analysis. It is a decidedly old fashioned film to the point of using an era-specific conventional plot that deeply rewards the film buff, but is accessible enough for anyone to enjoy. Hazanavicius may not have many narrative surprises in store but his immaculate attention to detail and creative directing plants several “wow” inducing sequences that are so much fun to indulge in, any worry of the sustainability of a modern day silent film are instantly laid to rest. A-

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Kill List

One of the most divisive films of the festival, Kill List is sure to draw a fiery response from anyone who sees it. I have never seen so many walk-outs at a TIFF screening, but I have also rarely seen such impassioned discussion. Director Ben Wheatley could have settled for a conventional hitman story, but he is far too smart for that. Kill List exchanges genre elements seemingly on a whim, making each new turn in it’s plot unexpected and constantly nerve-wracking. It’s deliberate, and sometimes frustrating pacing may turn away some viewers, but Wheatley knows just what to show to get the right reaction. Savvy viewers able to take the abstract clues and find their relation will certainly take more out of Kill List than it even appears to offer. It’s the perfect kind of horror film, the type that naysayers will disregard as another exercise in sadism, when it’s really a shrewd exploration of psychology versus sociology. Even the violence, which is gruesomely naturalistic, is justified by the context of the material. Wheatley proves himself an incredibly brave and bold director by shying away from expectations of exposition for its central and constantly mysterious cult, but most significantly by taking the hard road and delivering material that seems specifically designed to piss off a good percentage of his audience. Wheatley lays all the trapping for later clarification and then simply doesn’t offer it. It’s maddening, confusing, disorienting, and revolting, which is exactly how you should feel by the film’s end. The Wicker Man this certainly is not. B+

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Shame

From the opening frame, Shame presents itself as a gorgeous piece of visual art with vivid colours and stunning cinematography. It’s a refreshing opening for a film that gets extremely dark extremely quickly. Fassbender stars as an upper-class yuppie type who shares much in common with Patrick Bateman, only his compulsive, socially-unacceptable addiction isn’t killing hookers, it’s just having sex with them. A lot. Focusing on an addiction often mocked by popular culture is a bold choice indeed, but director Steve McQueen treats the subject with great sincerity highlighting the confusing divide between an addiction that is hidden due to shame, but shared due to necessity. Fassbender’s compulsion is pushed by a society that encourages it and peers that unknowingly enable him. His situation becomes problematic when his needy sister asks to stay at his place, turning his fortress of solitude into a house of glass. This potentially therapeutic relationship encourages Fassbender to seek out a meaningful relationship, but when he reaches the bedroom and his old foreplay rituals come out, he descends back into his hole. Shame constantly rides the line of being brilliant or tedious, rarely but sometimes falling into the latter when the mostly honest examination of our darkest impulses slips into conventional addiction rhetoric when the manageable addiction abruptly tailspins into chaos. Even the relationship between the brother and sister, significantly improved by Fassbender and Mulligan, can feel familiar and dilute the complexity of the material. McQueen’s unorthodox directorial style includes demanding long takes, sometimes only cutting at the beginning and end of scenes which puts great demand on the actors who constantly rise to the occasion and deliver stunning performances. McQueen’s bold direction comes with some stubbornness, such as one scene where he refuses to pull his camera off a close-up for the entire duration of Sinatra’s “New York, New York”, but largely, McQueen proves himself a visionary and as with his debut Hunger, is able to find a way to turn even our most unsavoury bodily fluids into art. B+

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Melancholia

For anyone who knows Lars von Trier movies, they know they are in for an intense, emotionally rough two hours. Those who don’t know him might find Melancholia a good place to start. Taking place entirely at a country club getaway that hosts Kirsten Dunst’s wedding reception and country home for his sister and brother-in-law, Melancholia serves as a deep meditation on crippling depression where Dunst breaks down slowly, then rapidly in a vicious cycle. This illness finds a thematic companion in a distant star that turns out to be a planet headed on a collision course for Earth moving in correlation with Dunst’s mental collapse. Largely free of the explicit nature of past von Trier films, Melancholia focuses entirely on the directors signature approach to overwhelming mood, in this case, melancholy. While Antichrist suffered slightly from its graphic imagery distracting from its insights, Melancholia is on the other end of this spectrum, where the monotonous narrative could use a boost from more of those lush images seen in the opening prologue. The grounded character depression element often finds itself at odds with the fantastical planet which seems to serve as a foil to Dunst’s inner struggle, but then at other times it is literally injected into the plot, only then to be pulled back from. Even the themes are often clumsy, such as naming the planet “Melancholia”, a hammer-on-the-head note unexpected from a seasoned as von Trier. The planet arc is never engaging, and although problematic it is necessary to break from the nearly intolerable depression eating away at the characters. I have always disregarded Dunst as an actress, but Melancholia changes that, her intense performance is what keeps the movie from falling apart. Lars von Trier often toys with audience sustainability through graphic violence or uncomfortable scenarios, this being his most intimate seeing as he suffered from this very illness himself. This is one point where the planet serves the story well, it’s complete lack of identity makes it less threatening to the audience, so by contrast Dunst’s depression feels like another league of horror – the use of earth’s destruction as a tool to show how much more horrible depression is is likely what makes the performance and the illness more poignant than most other stories about depression. This might make the otherwise tedious planet arc worth it, but it sure is a cumbersome compromise. Melancholia can be an often frustrating experience where every element that works is offset by something that doesn’t whether it be Dunst’s deep understanding of her character compared to everyone else’s seeming lack of effort, or the gorgeous opening shots replaced by wobbly steadicam. There are just too many conflicting ideas going off at once, worst of all the ideas aren’t all that insightful, but perhaps that is the point. It’s intimate character study mirrored by a grandiose universe of emptiness makes Melancholia a great companion piece to this years similar “The Tree of Life”, only while that film reveled in the blessing of life, this one is revolted by it making Melancholia simply a nihilistic version of The Tree of Life. B-

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From up on Poppy Hill

Living in the shadow of his father, director Goro Miyazaki has his work cut out for him. His directorial debut, Tales from Earthsea did little to differentiate himself from his animation powerhouse father, Hayao Miyazaki. This time around, Goro opts for traditionalism with a story that fits into our own world and familiar animation that won’t spin any heads, but in typical Ghibli fashion is beautifully fluid with a wide colour palette. Starring unspectacular, average characters finding their place and purpose in 1960’s Japan, Goro moves away from the defined heroes and lucid dreamscapes of his father’s work, allowing him to find a groove of his own under the Studio Ghibli umbrella. Fascinated with a titular time in Japanese history when the country was transitioning from an outdated era coming out of World War II towards a more resourceful modern one, Poppy Hill tells the story of a school and the determined students within it who seek to preserve a creaky old study building when the administration seeks to tear it down. It’s a thoughtful allegory and works nicely within the story, the problem arises when it gets sidelined by a more mundane love story. The two protagonists who lead this march naturally fall for each other, developing a story of adolescent love and all the confusion that comes along with it. The twists in this initially standard-fare love story give it a boost of fresh energy but Miyazaki flip-flops between delivering a final note on love as crushing disappointment or love as a happy ending. Poppy Hill is always more interesting when it focuses on the clubhouse, a labyrinth like mansion without any apparent end to its spiralling staircases that houses the dusty history of Japan and the enthusiastic students who try to carry that with them into a modern age. It’s admirably heartfelt, but lacking a strong sense of conviction making it easier to forget about than it ought to be. B-

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ALPS

Reaction to Dogtooth, the last film from Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos, was decidedly mixed thanks to it’s absurd and creepy concept. Lanthimos’s followup, ALPS, mimics Dogtooth’s uncomfortably detached family story but this time the unnatural element comes from outside the family rather than inside. In some bizarre, robotic other-world, special nurses that are a part of a secret organization named ALPS wait on patients to die, only so they can offer a special service to the grieving families: they will fill in for them by wearing their clothes and participating in their activities. Like Dogtooth, my reaction to this concept was utter bafflement, if there is one thing Lanthimos is good at, it’s maintaining that his audience will always be surprised. Unfortunately, that proves to be the greatest demerit to ALPS when you don’t deliver on that surprise. Surprise on it’s own is a fine place to start, but when that wears down it needs a new emotion to take it’s place, in this case that would be boredom. It’s clear, as it’s explained with some clarity early on that the organization within ALPS is supposed to be invisible, but its service can not be. This internal contradiction at the heart of the film tries to suggest that you can go on pretending your loved one is still here, but that only makes the grieving worse, they’re superficial elements remain but they are gone. Like Dogtooth, the characters and world that they inhabit are extremely rigid and robotic as if everything is on auto-pilot. The families mechanically integrate the actor into their lives without strong emotion one way or the other, while the actors robotically fill their role. While these concepts could be strong, Lanthimos doesn’t take them anywhere. ALPS plays for more jokes than Dogtooth, instantly hindering its effectiveness. While Dogtooth was black comedy without the nudge, ALPS is black comedy with a neon applause sign; it’s obvious and stilted. ALPS is painfully one-note where the initial joke is repeated, and repeated, and repeated until you discover the film is over when you were still waiting for it to begin. D