Fascism, Feminism and the big buzz movies at TIFF19

Movies: #TIFF19

The Toronto International Film Festival is the equivalent of Christmas morning to a movie critic, and oftentimes, the most appreciated gifts are the ones in humble packages, writes critic Katherine Monk

By Katherine Monk

TORONTO — For film critics, the Toronto International Film Festival feels like waking up on Christmas morning. Pretty, promising packages bathed in sparkling light and and a tangle of reflected tinsel have arrived at the foot of the Bell Lightbox, just waiting to be torn open. They will either be loved and cherished, or completely forgotten, disposed of with the next day’s trash.

There’s no way to predict the reception, but after a few decades of scrolling through schedules, pondering publicists’ press releases, and reading between the glowing lines penned by festival programmers, you start sifting, and making lists.

The first list is always the buzz sheet: What movies are coming to the festival with some advance hype — either from previous fests or the studios’ marketing megaphone. You know, the big movies you’ve no doubt already heard of: the adaptation of Donna Tartt’s bestseller The Goldfinch, Tom Hanks playing Fred Rogers in Mariel Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, Renee Zellweger’s turn as Judy Garland in Judy, Joaquin Phoenix donning the creepy clown makeup for The Joker, and Ford vs. Ferrarri — an homage to the glory days of the internal combustion engine starring Christian Bale and Matt Damon as the high-revving Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles.

Those are the big boxes with yards of tinfoil wrapping. But my buzz sheet also has a few lower profile titles that boast big names, such as The Laundromat, a new Meryl Streep movie directed by none other than Steven Soderbergh that takes a sharp probe to the Panama papers, or Blackbird, a family drama from Roger Michell starring Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet and Mia Wasikowska.

Big names make easy buzz, but the more you stare at the offerings, the more they fragment into thematic clumps. And that’s when a film festival starts to feel like more than a random sampling of movies. It starts to feel like a meaningful reflection on the current moment as individual voices braid together, giving shape and definition to the Zeitgeist.

Big names make easy buzz, but the more you stare at the offerings, the more they fragment into thematic clumps. And that’s when a film festival starts to feel like more than a random sampling of movies. It starts to feel like a meaningful reflection on the current moment as individual voices braid together, giving shape and definition to the Zeitgeist.

This year, themes of fascism and feminism appear to be at the fore. Alejandro Amenabar (The Others) returns to TIFF with While at War, set in the early days of the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Franco. Israeli filmmaker Yaron Zilberman documents the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by the ultra-right in Incitement, and in case you couldn’t get enough of the three-hour musical, there’s a modern day remake of Les Miserables destined to be marching to a theatre near you. Perhaps the most prescient take on the current body politic is The Barefoot Emperor, Jessica Woodworth and Peter Brosens’ satirical take on a post-EU Europe run by an arrogant autocrat.

But that’s not all. Even the Midnight Madness program is engaged with The Platform, a story about “a future dystopia [where] prisoners housed in vertically stacked cells watch hungrily as food descends from above — feeding the upper tiers, but leaving those below ravenous and radicalized.”

The feminist themes offer a different take on the same political anxieties, pointing out the inadequacy and structural injustice of the status quo. The Perfect Candidate is Haifaa Al-Mansour’s drama about a Saudi doctor so frustrated by the system she runs for political office. Black Bitch picks up the same themes, only in an Australian context as Rachel Griffiths plays an Aussie Prime Minister who enlists a female indigenous senator in a bid for re-election, but discovers the potential for real political change. Even the film itself is committed to a new model: The program doesn’t list any director, just three “creators” — with actor Griffith joining the listed ensemble alongside Darren Dale and Miranda Dear.

Perhaps the most immediate example of how women experience the world differently, and offer creative solutions is The Cave, the opening night film in the documentary program. Directed by Feras Fayyad (Last Man in Aleppo), The Cave takes us beneath the streets of Ghouta, outside Damascus, where teams of women doctors treat the sick and injured in underground labyrinths they’ve turned into makeshift treatment centres.

Strong women are a prominent feature in this year’s program, with biopics on the likes of Helen Reddy in I Am Woman, as well as Marie Curie in Radioactive. Even the legendary filmmaker Agnes Varda felt she was worthy of her own time, and created a documentary about herself: Varda by Agnes.

Perhaps the most interesting new wrinkle in the feminist film canvas is the focus on women in space. Not only is TIFF hosting the premiere of Lucy in the Sky, featuring Natalie Portman as an astronaut struggling with terrestrial duties, it also invited Eva Green in Alice Winocur’s Proxima, another tale of a female astronaut trying to reconcile her role as a mother with her need to explore the stars.

It’s a fascinating shift away from the apex of machismo that defined space movies as a masculine world where it’s all about having The Right Stuff. These films are more concerned with what it means to be a human being on earth than what it means to win the “race.” Sure, they’re smaller in scope, and feature more talking than pyrotechnics. But they’re undeniably human, and in this tiny film festival frame populated by stars and fame, finding our collective frailty in humble packages can often be more powerful than finding individual strength in the prettiest box.

The Toronto International Film Festival runs to September 15.