The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki, 2023).
Those attending the Toronto International Film Festival since its center moved downtown to the impressive Bell Lightbox cinema complex in 2010 can’t fail to notice the skyscrapers and new developments sprouting up around the neighborhood. They’ve been replacing older and lower edifices, redeveloping railyards and more industrial areas, filling in the gaps between Queen Street West and the Lake Ontario waterfront like an invasive species. Each year you think the transformation should be complete, and then again encounter new monoliths in once-familiar places and additional construction that blocks old shortcuts. Such gentrification—and the affluent residents it attracts—might be appealing to a festival like TIFF, but these towering and glassily characterless surroundings evoke TIFF’s own identity crisis: as it vies for profitability, its program is voluminous and contemporary, but it lacks a perspective. A festival cannot be a meaningful event without a point of view, a vision; though TIFF has weathered the pandemic, its personality is obscured. TIFF’s selection has always been plentiful, but it’s much more challenging to find its defining rewards.
If you are reading the signs, TIFF appears to be in trouble. The institution hemorrhaged programmers over the last three years. Its major sponsor, Bell, will stop supporting the festival after this edition. Bell’s corny, cringe-inducing pre-screening commercial radiates sarcastic disingenuousness about the audience, and many other pre-film spots—a land acknowledgement, an ad for Bulgari, and an homage to the volunteers—are identical to those that played last year: a small but telling detail that seems a warning about funding, organization, and interest. And the ongoing WGA and SAG strikes have prevented Hollywood stars, character actors, and writers from bringing red carpet publicity and in-person fizz to this edition. No doubt the slinky, confidential chemistry between Bencio Del Toro and Alicia Silverstone and the white-creep vibe of Justin Timberlake in Grant Singer’s debut Reptile would have been more thrilling if the actors had been present to introduce the film. The heavy-lidded, wonderfully lugubrious Del Toro—heir to the smoldering sleepy minimalism of Robert Mitchum and Victor Mature—is very cute with Silverstone as casually collaborating detective and wife in this sub-Gone Girl (2014) mystery. The Netflix logo feels rightly matched for prestige streaming’s à-la-mode conflation of the sinister with the serious, and its attendant dramaturgy of myopic fixation and brooding. With its finely etched extended cast and atmospheric suburban Oklahoma interiors, precisely evoked by the great cinematographer Michael Gioulakis, Reptile is never less than interesting, albeit baggily paced and liberally dosed with easy cliché. While you won’t get a chance again to see this in cinemas, it’s hardly a waste of time and I’m keen to see what Singer does next.
While TIFF’s larger operating financials report published this spring suggests a healthy state of affairs, across the pond a controversy at the Berlinale, which is forcing its pro-cinema artistic director out, exposes the extreme precarity of the festival world. Decisions like this indicate that the overseers of festival stewardship—decision-makers who rarely have the art they ostensibly support at the heart of their motivations—are laying out votes of no confidence. For many industry professionals, these developments brought an atmosphere of cynicism and sarcasm to a notably diluted TIFF program. There seemed to be fewer important films or ones of strong possibilities, and fewer out-of-town visitors attending. TIFF's usual cacophonous magnitude, whether good or bad, felt somewhat dampened.
Yet festivals are not dying; they are, in fact, thriving. After the chaos of the pandemic, Toronto’s attendance has steadily climbed year on year. Moreover, festivals provide an experience that most multiplexes and streaming evenings cannot: they foreground an active community, a diversity of cinematic offerings, the hip excitement of world premieres, and the capacity to surprise and delight. As audiences become conditioned to abandon habitual cinemagoing for VOD, I imagine that festivals will be the premier in-person setting for filmgoing as an event. Rocky as TIFF's curatorial approach may be, it's hardly in danger—it's just changing along with the times.
For many, the reason to attend Toronto this year was simply this: the international premiere of The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki's first film in a decade. This majestic animation ignores most of the pedagogical youth novel it’s based on, Genzaburō Yoshino’s 1937 How Do You Live?, in which a schoolboy’s quotidian struggles are commented upon in diary entries written by his uncle, connecting them to lessons in history, physics, and philosophy. Leaping dramatically away from this beloved book, Miyazaki considerably simplifies matters, yet expands the frame. His version focuses on a similar boy who faces nightmarish guilt over his mother’s death (an astonishing, apocalyptic vision of fire unlike anything Miyazaki has done) and rejects his father’s new wife, his mother’s hauntingly similar-looking sister. Miyazaki’s boy finds a passage to a fantastic alternative world hidden in the Japanese countryside, a place of windswept, barren ruins and empty castles, populated by a few lone, strong-willed women and many dangerous birds. In this strange place removed from reality’s wartime struggles, he faces and processes his filial angst. Typical Miyazaki flair—particularly the film’s avian focus, including a grotesque goblin-like creature masquerading inside a heron’s skin, and hulking, carnivorous parakeets—brings metaphysical phantasmagoria to Yoshino’s unusual but strait-laced educational novel, whose tone calls to mind the films of Ghibli’s resident realist, the late Isao Takahata. But the motifs and rules of this imaginary world seem conveniently conceived on the fly, rather than fully realized and explored; as a result, this adventure lacks consequence, which undercuts its poignant and clearly personal stakes.
Despite its World War II setting and its roots in parental traumas and emotional alienation, the film is surprisingly cool to the touch. Like Miyazaki’s last movie, The Wind Rises (2013), this one has notes of its maker’s autobiography, not only in the fire-swept city of the boy’s childhood and the deep importance of his mother, but also in the vague but nevertheless moving figure of a wizened man who presides over the creation of the film’s hodgepodge parallel universe. He keeps it in balance and claims to be trying to build it for the better, and looks to the boy to be his world-creating, world-improving successor. Thus this different reality is not only the story’s own, but also a memory-rubble of Miyazaki’s creations. By the film’s end, the boy has overcome his grief and maternal conflict, but rejected the role of creator. Even though Miyazaki’s own son has turned to filmmaking, this feels like a conscious surrender of the wearying, isolating aspects of Miyazaki’s world-building in favor of a life that is down-to-earth and emotionally rehabilitated. Which all sounds healthy if The Boy and the Heron ends up being the great animator’s final work. But Miyazaki, like Steven Soderbergh, has in the past failed to deliver on promise of retirement—much to the relief of audiences—and if he continues to make films, the wistful, final release at this film’s climax might take on a different meaning.
Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023).
Also concerned with a Japanese boy’s recovery from wartime trauma was Shadow of Fire, which follows Killing (2018) as another stripped-bare period film by multi-hyphenate filmmaker Shin’ya Tsukamoto examining the pain surrounding human violence. Set in the days of ruin, trauma, and brutality following the end of the Second World War, Shadow of Fire is essentially a story with only two settings: an eerily spartan, fire-scarred bar, in which a grief-numbed young widow sells sake and herself; and a countryside forest, traversed by a veteran desiring to commit a mysterious crime requiring only four bullets. The film’s two halves are connected by a thieving orphan boy who has to learn the ways of the world through the behavior of his surviving guardians. The claustrophobic prison of the film’s first half, driven by the raw nerves of actress Shuri and the temporary war-orphan family unit her character forms with the boy and a shell-shocked soldier, is more focused and intense than the fresh-air vengeance of the second half. A haunting finale underlines how closely aligned Tsukamoto’s motivation is with that of Genzaburō Yoshino, despite the film’s violence—namely, asking how experiences should inform a child’s (and therefore their nation’s) sense of how to live.
Rounding out TIFF’s contingent of Japanese auteurs was Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, shown hot after winning a second-place prize at the Venice Film Festival. The attention that the box office success and Oscar victory of Drive My Car (2021) may have brought to this truly idiosyncratic but delightful filmmaker has hardly changed or dulled his pleasures. Like that film, Evil Does Not Exist contains unexpectedly extended sequences of driving, group discussions (about the local impact of glamping!), and a calm yet disquieting ambiance. His imagery and tone is suspiciously nonchalant, placed as it is on the uneasy edge of both the arty and the beautiful, an odd approach particularly in this film, which is broadly about the ethically fraught incursion of an exploitative business into a small country village, and therefore highlights the gratifying scenery and lifestyle of the countryside. Over time, the power of the film’s minor tensions aggregates, and its thematic throughlines are then complicated by ruptures in the story—the perspective abruptly switches from that of a villager to that of a company agent—and unusual stylistic flourishes (long tracking shots of tree canopies; a shot from the point of view of a wild ginger plant). And while these distinct directorial choices never disrupt the surface calm of the film, they crucially suggest the metaphysical enigmas of the characters and their world. The new film is also pleasurably chill with a laid-back pace, accented by Eiko Ishibashi’s ensconcing score. You sink in, perhaps zone out, and start taking things for granted—and that’s when Hamaguchi gets you, moving more quickly or more patiently than you expect, shifting positions, questioning what you’re seen so far, moving diagonally—or even, at the film’s cryptic, violent ending, in a direction you can’t quite follow. Regardless, the mystery remains—and any film that conjures mystery ensures its longevity.
Toronto is usually a destination for North American premieres of major films from international festivals, like Evil Does Not Exist While there were numerous omissions this year—several so obvious one must blame either the industry strikes, the films’ strategic pathways through the festival circuit, or disappointing programming taste—several gems from Cannes were presented here. One highlight was Kidnapped, Marco Bellocchio’s dramatization of a real 19th-century case in which the Catholic church abducted a six-year-old Jewish boy in Bologna who had been secretly baptized without his parents’ knowledge. After this nightmarishly institutional antisemitic violence, Bellocchio follows both the family’s continued attempts over the years to secure the boy’s release, desperately calling upon help from the press and international Jewish community, and traces his induction into and education by the Church, including the personal attention of Pope Pius IX. As it narrates this particular case, Kidnapped scathingly portrays the Catholic Church as dogmatically uncompromising and cruel, all while its power was besieged by the secularizing threats of Italian unification. Although the film is rooted in this specific era, this historical example of youthful indoctrination and radicalization feels bracingly contemporary.
At 83, Bellocchio is one of the last virtuosos of classical cinematic storytelling left standing, and Kidnapped is a forceful example of both populist and political filmmaking. It is less interested in the psychology of the drama—for example, the process of the boy’s conversion as he ages further away from his family and Jewish upbringing—than in carrying us fluidly through an astonishing series of events that indicate how far those in power will go to propagate their influence and eradicate enemies. Equally bravura is Fabio Massimo Capogrosso’s intense score, which practically turns the film into a tragic opera of tactical religious warfare waged on one Jewish family—a carefully articulated historical example that we’re intended to read, via Bellocchio’s sweeping stylization and time jumps, on a contemporary canvas.
Kidnapped (Marco Bellocchio, 2023).
Another Cannes gem was literally presented on a bigger canvas: The Daughters of Fire, a new short film by Pedro Costa, is a three-screen musical about residents leaving the Cape Verde island of Fogo due to a volcanic eruption. Echoing Abel Gance’s radically innovative use of three screens nearly one hundred years ago in Napoléon (1927), each panel of The Daughters of Fire features a woman who is unified with the others through singing: they intertwine two vocal lines, a lament of loss based on Biagio Marini’s “Passacalio, Op. 22” and a traditional Ukrainian lullaby, into a single piece. One woman walks onward toward no certain destination; one is stuck lying prone on the ground; the other peeks from behind a panel. (The short is rooted in a larger performance piece of the same name first shown in 2021 at Lisbon’s Biennial of Contemporary Arts.) Costa, whose astonishing digital work in shadow and color is almost totally unprecedented in cinema, leaves realism even further behind here, as two of the panels use rear projection to lay behind and under the women coal-like textures of hellish embers, suggesting a permanent state of scalding. The world is smoldering as the women sing together, their separate melodies cohering despite their isolation. The women are sisters in isolation, each held unreleased by their frame, but also sisters in expression. The film ends with footage of a 1951 volcanic eruption on Fogo; its faded colors and outdoor landscapes offer not only a visual respite from all that came before, but also a potential origin story for how these women ended up living in a prison of fire. The use of a Ukrainian folk song throws a lifeline of compassion from the Cape Verdean refugees to the victims of the Russia-Ukraine war, a gesture which opens up this solemn film to a larger world beyond it.
It is heartening that TIFF is still a safe place to champion work like Costa’s, or risky new works on cinema’s cutting edge, like Eduardo Williams’s boldly conceived The Human Surge 3, whose use of 360-degree camera footage seems to bend space and create wormholes between different countries. The murky identities and relationships between the people who transgress these spatial boundaries likely add up to a kind of post-melodrama, possibly post-human cinema, but their vagueness ultimately felt under-conceived, abstracting the stakes and urgency of a visionary aesthetic approach. Even wilder was Harmony Korine’s Aggro Dr1ft, a fatuous and ecstatic fusion of the seemingly opposed pleasures—and absurdities—of Terrence Malick and Grand Theft Auto. It was perversely incantatory in its insistent repetition of mawkish maxims about its hitman protagonist’s vocation, weapon, and love for his family, as well as its array of showboating, exultant masked faces—both allied and threatening. Predominantly shot in digitally manipulated and AI-filigreed thermal video, it is likely the most startlingly beautiful film at TIFF, and certainly the most juvenile; it left me levitating in a giddy space between silliness and sublimity. While Korine’s extremities already have some audiences aggroed—a gaming term, referring to the intentional provocation of an antagonist—I drifted out of the cinema with companions who floated in a shared headspace. We didn’t know what to make of this foolhardy, new-media novelty—only that we had a great time. The festival had clearly reached its climax with a film that blended artistic risk with risk of ridicule. The vibe was electric, and the future was flaring hot and bright in our altered vision.