Toronto International Film Festival 2018 Report Part 9: Cannes You Dig It?

Saturday, September 15th was the beginning of the end. No more press screenings (all weekend screenings were either paid out of my own pocket, or seen using advanced press tickets claimed before the festival began). The lines were shorter (or, in some cases, nonexistent). Scotiabank Theatre was back to being its semi-empty self. The volunteers were probably counting the hours until they could go back to their normal lives, without people like Jeff Wells joking about heart attacks and causing undue panic.

I’m sure the festival mainstays were already silently bidding farewell to this year’s L’Oréal makeup ad, with all its purple, glitter, gratuitous women-straddling-a-car shots and (repeat after me) “Because I’m worth it” slogan. Let’s also not forget the yearly ad honoring the volunteers, this one set to Queen’s “We Are the Champions.” I will always remember you, lovely-toned volunteer who sings the “It’s been no bed of roses” line. Please sing again next year.

One thing I will not miss? Whatever the heck this year’s branding was. The literal manifestation of the Lightbox? A gigantic cube of butter or toffee? I don’t know. The festival’s marketing can be really out there sometimes, and I don’t envy the people who have to brainstorm these things.

Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda)

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s cinema of empathy has produced many gems over the years (Still Walking, Our Little Sister, After the Storm, among others), and now, with a Palme d’Or in hand, he’ll be able to extend his reach with the mellifluous, eloquent Shoplifters. Having seen a selection of the Cannes competition titles at TIFF, I can now see why the jury could not resist giving Kore-eda the top prize. You can feel that he has been working for this moment, building up his delicate examinations of social and domestic life in modern Japan so that they can reach their heights in a more universal tale of tight-knit bonds amid socioeconomic precarity. Or, more succinctly, Kore-eda has tapped into the stories of the modern precariat and freeter classes, doing so without the condemnation (or condescension) less forgiving filmmakers might impose.

Kore-eda gives a Dickensian spin to this tale of a ragtag misfit family, a comparison which other critics have already made, but one that is undeniable. Like Dickens, who famously once said that “Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen,” Kore-eda’s interest is in their fundamental humanity, rather than in the petty thefts they perpetrate to keep afloat. I love how he makes that apparent in the opening prologue, which involves Osamu Shibata (Lily Franky) and his son Shota (Kairi Jō) covertly shoplifting from a grocery store. The crime’s seriousness is mitigated by the affectionate cleverness of their rituals, like Shota’s furtive hand signal before he drops something into his backpack, or Osamu’s ability to role play a paying customer by loading up a shopping cart, and then quietly leaving it behind.

Their lightheartedness shows us that they are not terrible people, and this intuition of virtue becomes a certainty when, upon returning to their crowded hovel, they come across a little girl named Yuri (Miyu Sasaki), who has apparently run away from home and sports suspicious bruises on her body. Rather than leaving her behind, or taking her to a police station, Osamu and his clan welcome her into their fold—something we suspect has happened many times over, as Kore-eda deliberately makes ambiguous the connections between the several people living there. There is little room in the hovel, owned by the old Hatsue (the late Kirin Kiki); all sorts of bric-a-brac clutter the space. But, as is the informal moral of the tale, room can always be made for one more, as no one deserves to get left behind.

People who have criticized Kore-eda in the past for taking an overly sentimental view of the world may argue that he does so again here. The ending seems especially designed to make your heart sink like a stone. To those critics, I would say: give him another chance, because the sentimentality he employs here is never false or unearned. It is a logical outcome of what it means to live in poverty—of how unforgiving the capitalist system is to people who are judged to take more than they give back. You can show all the love in the world to the family you’ve come to know, and yet in a world where prosperity becomes a zero-sum game, it is never enough. Kore-eda navigates this reality with a graceful perceptiveness, a subtle humor, and an inspired precision that never compromises the humanity of his subjects.

Ash is Purest White (Jia Zhangke)

My familiarity with Jia Zhangke’s work is limited, so I’m not going to attempt to read Ash is Purest White in conversation with his entire oeuvre. Some critics see it as necessary to prepare for a director’s latest offering by marathoning everything they’ve not already seen, so that they have the tools required to make a proper evaluation. For me, though, I like to take my time with director filmographies. Seeing their films in close proximity allows you to make a few perceptive comparisons, certainly, but when the well dries up and you realize you have nothing more of theirs to watch, it’s rather dispiriting. So I savor the moments. An unviewed film of theirs every so often gives me something to look forward to for the next time. I am in no hurry to exhaust my resources.

That being said, I know enough about Jia’s films and their concerns to recognize Ash is Purest White as another sterling offering from the Chinese master. There’s a biting sarcasm to the way he views China’s plunge into a capitalist modernity, wonderfully exemplified in surreal scenes like a ballroom-dancing couple showing off their moves during a murdered property developer’s funeral service (as the developer, just a few scenes earlier, admitted that his two greatest loves were ballroom dancing and animal documentaries). But what is admirable about Jia’s deployment of the satiric mode is the way he also leaves room for lengthy rumination, as well, so that he is careful not to devalue the psychological depth of his characters.

The one he cherishes most here is mob moll Qiao (an incredible Zhao Tao), whose cushy coexistence with gangster boyfriend Bin (Liao Fan) is savagely disrupted when, during a violent confrontation with a rival gang, she fires an illegal weapon and takes the blame. As an underworld consort, she drinks, dances, and roughs it up with the men who gamble alongside Bin. Meanwhile, in the town where she lives, mineworkers strike against threats to their job security, but Qiao takes little heed. She is more content on making her chauffeur drive for an hour to eat dumplings than concern herself with labor matters.

A change comes after five years in prison (a stint Qiao serves to shield Bin). The carefree decadence of underworld life is no more. Indeed, the China she knew is no more—and that includes a China devoid of Bin’s love. With an astonishing degree of control, Jia flips the film in the midsection, doing away the bright colors and surreptitious pleasures of Qiao’s old life to present us a new one drained of excitement, purpose and belonging. The steady pace of the beginning transforms into a crawl out of the pit of Tartarus and into the Three Gorges Dam, where relics of the old age are already disappearing from view.

As the running time of Ash is Purest White ticks away, Jia meditates on the purgatorial hellscape that ensues when modernity outpaces and overtakes you, leaving you struggling to find the gnosis of the new age. There is still a tincture of comedy to keep the tone from sagging into comatose misery (as well as to keep one’s interest in the venture from sagging, especially after the switch in pace). There are also exquisite and sweeping shots of China’s picturesque vistas that are more than enough to keep you transfixed by Jia’s spell. The ride may be long with this one, but it’s worth it.

Gwen (William McGregor)

Folk horror is making a comeback. To give you a brief lowdown, these are films that eschew your typical bogeymen (zombies, poltergeists, bloodsuckers, and what have you) and really zero in on the darkness of society itself: the ways in which it isolates itself through superstition and hysteria; the myriad stories it proliferates to scare its populaces into submission; the religious zeal that runs amok among the credulous; and the psychogeographical dérive that anchors people to certain areas indefinitely, as if tethered magically to the land, are but some common characteristics. The tradition has spanned decades, from early classics like Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man to modern goodies like Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England and Robert Eggers’s The Witch.

I’m happy to say William McGregor’s debut feature, Gwen, will fit snugly in this new wave of folk horror. Set in the early nineteenth century, as the Industrial Revolution encroaches upon the windswept Welsh region of Snowdonia, it tells the story of the titular Gwen (Eleanor Worthington-Cox), a farming girl who lives with her protective mother Elen (Maxine Peake) and sister Mari. With the man of the house away at war, the women are left to care for the farm on their lonesome, and it’s a task that gets significantly harder when sinister things start happening. A cholera outbreak kills their neighbors. Their potato crops begin to rot in the soil. Someone (or something) slaughters their entire flock of sheep. And Elen’s health soon begins to rapidly deteriorate.

McGregor is wise enough not to fall into the typical pitfalls of the genre, choosing, for instance, not to explain away all of the film’s mysteries (a decision which has disgruntled a few people, including some who left my screening). Whether or not there is a supernatural force at work here matters less than the looming peril the women face from the men of the village, who clamor to drive the women off their land, gentrifying it in the process.

This is especially disturbing when you consider Gwen’s family are the only women of note in the entire picture, subsisting in the absence of the patriarch and yet being throttled by a patriarchal sense of greed and entitlement that leaves no room for the female laborer. Hence, their sense of hysteria: they are the last daughters of Eve being razed from Paradise, and they have nothing to save themselves. As the modern age approaches, the last remnants of antiquity cower in the fading light. It’s a powerful analogy.

I admire McGregor’s chilly atmospherics most of all, which draw out the right notes of unease as the story builds to its powerful conclusion. He gives modern horror aficionados a few choice jump scares to keep them happy, but Gwen is all about that certain mood common to most folk horror films: a darkening eclipse of dread as the evils of the collective begin to spill out into the night. Set your sights on this one, horror folks, because I think you’ll be looking at a new favorite come its release.

Summer Survivors (Marija Kavtaradze)

I am a good Lithuanian boy. I will watch any Lithuanian film that comes to TIFF, as I did last year when I caught (and later reviewed) a film called Miracle. I wasn’t too hot on that one, so I was understandably a bit apprehensive about Summer Survivors—especially when reading the festival writeup. It mentioned things like mental illness and road trips and John Hughes, and goodness me, none of that sounded like a fine mix. Anything to do with mental health gives me pause, because it’s so easy to get wrong. Some films become overwrought; others oversimplify and miss the mark. Still others have the right intentions, but try so hard that their efforts become laborious. I was afraid Summer Survivors would fall into one of these categories.

Imagine how I impressed I was when it didn’t. That, instead of using mental illness as a cheap gimmick to service a quirky story, it made the story malleable, presenting a vision of mental illness that rightly cannot be accommodated in any standard filmic narrative, with standard arcs and five-act structures. What Summer Survivors does so well is show us the extent to which mental illness is a merciless vortex. It’s one that can, at times, be hidden by a smile and a joke, but one that continues to spin, regardless of the survivor’s best efforts to stop it. There is no relief, no pause, no release from its pull. The survivors constantly struggle to remain on its edges, but there is never a guarantee that they will stay there.

Oftentimes, the brink of collapse occurs suddenly and without warning, like a rushing wave of despair that overtakes you in the middle of a road trip. When one character, a girl recovering from a suicide attempt named Justė (Gelminė Glemžaitė), experiences this very thing, the confusion she expresses in the moment is upsetting. She cries out and begins to hyperventilate over an onslaught of bad feelings, but she doesn’t know where they’ve come from, or why they’re coming now. It happens without warning, and all she can do is hope that those feelings pass. The moment is sudden, brief, and yet does not ring false. Survivors who are reading this, can probably recall dozens of similar moments, when the darkness overtakes you within seconds and you are left nearly drowning in an inescapable pit of hopelessness.

The film has a light touch, as the writeup promised. On its face, it’s about a young woman (Indrė Patkauskaitė) who slowly begins to shed the stigmas she holds against the mentally ill when she has to chauffeur two psychiatric patients to a different facility. There’s Justė, of course, and then there’s Paulius (Paulius Markevičius), a bipolar survivor. Markevičius is particularly exceptional, his frequent mood swings always ringing true, with a smile that is as wide as it is fragile, hiding ravages of a barrenness that comes to light in quick spurts. The actors crack silly jokes and relish a running gag involving their accompanying nurse. There’s even a sweet moment of impromptu karaoke that harkens back to the mention of John Hughes and his penchant for blending modern music into his narratives.

Kavtaradze never lets the insidiousness of mental illness fall by the wayside, however. That’s what clinches it for me. If this were truly a John Hughes throwback, then after the road trip ends, everyone will have learned something insightful about themselves, and life would go back to normal. But the pervasively melancholic tone that Kavtaradze so adroitly controls allows us to brace for an outcome much less idealistic. Because there is no fairness in this war. It takes, and it takes, and it takes, no matter the defences we put up and rely on. To win it, we need proper initiatives, better funding, better care, more awareness, more services, greater access, and sympathy on all sides. If the ending of this film doesn’t light a fire in your belly to do more, then I don’t know what other film can.

Toronto International Film Festival: Next Time

I wrap up coverage of this year’s festival with a final day of screenings that brought me to such places as a rural Indiana town, Communist Poland, and Marseille in the grips of mass migration. I also take a look at my first ever programme of short films.

Do you have certain criteria for how filmmakers should approach delicate subject matter like mental illness? Let us know in the comments below!

The Toronto International Film Festival ran from September 6^th to the 16^th.