Toronto Film Festival Dispatch #2

A misfit family of Japanese thieves. The Nazi occupation of France, set in 2018. An Arkansas teen caught in a gay conversion therapy program. A rock’n’roll singer-songwriter in a L.A. drag bar.

Those stories are at the center of a few of my favorite movies thus far from the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which Westville resident and Madison Art Cinemas owner Arnold Gorlick and I have been at since Wednesday.

On Friday and Saturday, I saw nine movies made in six different countries, told in five different languages. I know that Arnold has seen just as diverse a cinematic bounty.

Some have been big-budget, high-production value pictures that are already garnering awards season buzz. Some have been much smaller, more modest flicks made by well-respected international auteurs.

There’s still plenty to look forward to: new movies by Steve McQueen, Barry Jenkins, Damien Chazelle, and Claire Denis, to name a few.

Shoplifters

A modest, gentle, heartwarming masterpiece, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters tells the story of a family of social outcasts and petty thieves living in a small, ramshackle home at the center of a large Japanese city.

One of the many remarkable things about Kore-eda’s film, which took home the top prize at this year’s Cannes film festival, is how honestly it takes on the wealth of contradictory feelings and experiences that makes up family life: happiness, anger, ambivalence, confusion, loyalty, rebellion, companionship, misunderstanding.

The movie takes its title from the one trade that Osamu, a middle-aged itinerant laborer, feels he can pass on to his young son: through cryptic hand gestures, silent stares, and a ritualistic seriousness, the two work together to pocket candy bars and cups of instant noodles from nearby corner stores.

On their way home from one successful bout of shoplifting, the two discover a five-year-old girl abused by her parents and abandoned in the cold. They decide to bring her home as well to join a ramshackle home already full with Osamu, his son, his wife, his wife’s mother, and his wife’s sister.

In Shoplifters, every aspect of the filmmaking, from the detailed deep focus of its cinematography to the gentle acoustic guitar score, emphasizes the deliberateness with which these family members live their lives. As the movie progresses, we learn that they are not necessarily connected by biology, but by choice.

Even amidst the anxiety and distractions and hardships of life on the margins, that intentional bond between family members who have chosen to look after one another shines through as a bond perhaps stronger than the obligations of blood.

Transit

Austrian filmmaker Christian Petold’s Transit, based on a World war II-era novel by Anna Segher, imagines the rise to power of a fascist Nazi regime in Germany, the invasion and occupation of France, and the extermination of Jews and other minorities, all playing out in 2018. This is no historical time piece. This is the fascist military invasion of France set in the present day.

Following up on his World War II Vertigo riff Phoenix from 2014, Petzold presents another stylish, shifty, enigmatic continental mystery this time focused on one German refugee’s attempts to escape from Marseille before rapidly progressing fascist forces take control of the French port city. 

Transit is a self-consciously literary movie, interweaving a dead writer’s manuscript with a voiceover narration with other refugees’ attempted escape stories, all colliding in a port city where, as the movie says explicitly, everyone has a story that they need to tell to someone.

But the magic and desperation of Transit is not lost in its wordiness. Instead, the mysteries surrounding Georg’s frenzied flight bear all of the hallmarks of a story by Franz Kafka: at times opaque, grotesque, insistently symbolic, but overwhelmed by a very specific dread and very specific lethal consequences that clarify in tone whatever may be uncertain in story.

After the movie ended, a woman behind me in the audience whispered to her friend, ​“When are they going to remake that in the United States?” With the rise of fascist political groups throughout Europe and with neo-Nazis newly emboldened right here in the United States, this movie could not feel more dreadfully timely.

Boy Erased

In Boy Erased, a new movie from actor-director Joel Edgerton and based on Garrard Conley’s 2016 memoir, Lucas Hedges plays the 18-year-old son of an Arkansas minister who is sent by his parents to a gay conversion therapy program where pseudo-psychologists, evangelist ministers, and militarily-disciplined ​“graduates” work towards changing his sexuality to one more suitable to their religious beliefs and social expectations.

Edgerton’s movie is remarkably restrained in its depiction of the violence of the program: there are veiled threats and slips of verbal abuse from instructors (including one played by a menacingly tattoo-sleeved Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers), as well as one climactic ​“exorcism” scene that ends with a fellow enrollee literally beaten with a Bible to rid him of his alleged sins.

Instead, the trauma that the movie so poignantly depicts derives almost entirely from the cruelty of telling teenagers again and again and again that there is something wrong with them because of their sexuality, and that anger and ferocity and conviction and repression are the only keys to passing back into the realm of the normal.

A Star Is Born

There is no reason why A Star Is Born, actor Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut co-starring pop superstar Lady Gaga, should be any good. One watch (or several watches) of the trailer should reveal that this movie is a kitschy, corny, sentimental mess.

Which it’s not. Well, it is kitchy and corny and sentimental at times, but it’s also a riveting and emotionally honest love story between two talented artists whose creativity and affections sustain one another, but whose ambitions drive them apart.

The story is a cinematically familiar one, having been told under the same title at least two times before.

Cooper plays Jackson Maine, a successful rock’n’roll singer-songwriter whose disaffection with stardom exacerbates his alcoholism and pill addiction. Looking for a drink as he drives to the airport to fly to yet another festival gig, he stumbles into a Los Angeles drag bar, where he watches a waitress played by Lady Gaga perform Edith Piaf’s ​“La vie en rose.”

The movie could have ended right there and I would have been satisfied. Lady Gaga gives an electrifying performance, playful and yearning and sensual and intensely personal. Cooper’s camera captures every moment of it. Not in the glitzy, frantic style of a music video, but with patience and charm and captive attention, the same attention with which the audience and Cooper are watching, and the same attention with which Lady Gaga invests her craft.

Fortunately, the movie doesn’t stop there. It goes on to show the requisite rise and fall of the couple, and, admittedly, the come up is much more engrossing than the plateau and the come down.

And yet, throughout the movie, the two leads and the team behind the camera succeed in convincing everyone watching that these two uniquely talented individuals actually care deeply about one another. It’s more than just on-screen chemistry, which there’s plenty of as well.

A Star Is Born feels like it is truly showing the love, of music, of performance, of a partner, that love songs are written for. And with the narrative so centered around the message that artists must first and foremost be true to themselves and honest with their audiences during their brief opportunities to communicate with the world through their craft, that emotional honesty in the movie itself seems a fitting accomplishment.

Overheard at TIFF

Following are snippets of dialogue that your handy reporter overheard while waiting in line for the next movie to start.

“There needs to be a shhh equivalent for visual distractions.”— one film critic indignant about just how many audience members look at their smartphones over the course of a movie. And it’s true. Nothing is more effective at pulling one’s eye from a movie screen in a dark theater than a pinprick of light in the lap of the person three rows in front of you.

“This is a short film by Wiseman-standards.” — one critic commenting on the new two-and-a-half-hour documentary Monrovia, Indiana from director Frederick Wiseman. Wiseman’s films are legendary for taking comprehensive, interview-free looks at how large, diverse, complex institutions function: hospitals, high schools, colleges, even neighborhoods like Jackson Heights, Queens, and, now, small midwestern towns like Monrovia. His films are also notorious for being two, three, sometimes even four hours long.

“The lovemaking scene was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.” — one critic talking about the new Swedish movie Border. I haven’t seen the movie yet. But I’ll take his word for it.

Independent reporter Thomas Breen (@tomwbreen) hosts the film program ​“Deep Focus” on WNHH FM.