With over 400 movies on the slot, the Toronto International Film Festival was a feast and a maze. The latest edition of this North American showcase concluded last Sunday, with Damein Chazelle's La La Land winning the People's Choice Award, a bellwether for the bright Oscar season (Toronto, unlike other major festivals, has no prominent juried competition, instead letting the audiences decide the big winner). The festival is known as a launch pad for Oscar hopefuls as well as independent titles looking for distribution. It also features a strong experimental section that casts its radical net far and wide.
There are so many good films from this year's fest to look out for, but these are our picks -- for now.
The Hollywood mainstream
Jackie
Wife, woman, mother, sponsor of the Camelot myth, the perpetually well-coiffed Jackie Kennedy is shaken to the core (visibly, in Natalie Portman's Oscar-ambitious performance) after the assassination of her presidential husband -- then she muscles up and faces down the pressure that assaults her and her White House legacy. Directed by Chilean director Pablo Larrain, Jackie concentrates on the aftermath of Kennedy's death -- the week of intense crisis-management, funeral prep and CIA paranoia -- and the way the film recasts Jackie at the centre of the emotional whirlwind alters our way of perceiving this much-visited historical event (the use of archive footage is startling here). Portman, as Jackie, is in every scene, and nearly in every shot, and the way she makes Jackie at once vulnerable, invincible, weak, strong, confused and inscrutable will be a talking point in the coming months. The film is likely to open here during Oscar season.
La La Land
The darling of the season, this American musical bonbon with Emma Stone, looks dead-set for the Golden Globes' best actress and an Oscar nomination (the battle will be spectacular this year). Well, La La Land is not The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg -- you can't reach that level of sincerity and cinema love at this point in film history, not even when you profess a devotion to the beloved genre and the tooth-aching Technicolor palette -- but still, this is a sweet Hollywood cupcake that will please millions. Directed by Damien Chazelle (Whiplash), the film has Stone as an aspiring actress and Gosling as an ambitious jazz pianist. Both have a dream (who doesn't?) to make it big in Los Angeles, and this simple set-up is narrated through a number of song-and-dance numbers performed earnestly by Stone and Gosling. The film opens here in December.
Nocturnal Animals
Tom Ford (yes, the designer) directs Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal in this crime noir/romance; Nocturnal Animals switches between a lost-love melodrama set in swanky New York and a grimy West Texas revenge tale. This Oscar hopeful can feel uneven, sometimes strained, but it's a tense and entertaining story about identity and life alternatives that also provides a showcase for the two actors. Adams plays a high-society art dealer and Gyllenhaal is her ex-husband; that's in one layer, then in a film-within-a-film the two become husband and wife on a deadly road trip in the American wasteland, where they encounter a group of terrifying thugs. We'll hear a lot about the film in the months to come. It opens in Bangkok in December.
Arrival
Amy Adams again has a shot at the Oscar in this brooding sci-fi drama by Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Sicario; he will head the Blade Runner sequel). In Arrival, Adams plays a linguist enlisted by the military to help establish communication with alien vessels that have landed on Earth. It has something of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, something of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and something of Contact, with a strong dose of liberal worldview regarding humankind's place in the cruel universe. It is a serious film, perhaps a little too serious, and it's Adams' sensitive performance as a woman who may hold the key to the future that keeps us engaged throughout. The film is likely to open here in November or December.
World cinema
The Ornithologist
In this beautiful, fevered reverie, a gay ornithologist gets lost in a Portuguese forest, encounters lesbian Chinese pilgrims, witnesses a tribal ritual and eventually becomes a saint. Jaoa Pedro Rodrigues's film begins like a National Geographic doc and transforms into a psychosexual fable ripe with all the mythical forces of nature, wild and spiritual, primeval and transcendental. It's supposedly based on the life of Saint Anthony of Padua, though in the end it feels like a queered-up Western. Rodrigues, always full of surprises, is certainly one of the most original voices in modern cinema. Let's hope that a film festival brings it to our shores.
The Ornithologist.
Mimosas
The director is Oliver Laxe, a French-born Spaniard, though he works largely out of Morocco, where this film is set. It's the present-day Morocco, but also a medieval one. The narrative concerns two tribesmen who're transporting the body of a dead sheikh across an inhospitable mountain range infested by strange birds and invisible bandits. The two men are accompanied by a Mercedes-driving Sufi misfit, at times ranting, at times preaching the indomitability of faith. Each part of the film is titled after different positions of the Islamic prayer, and the way reality fades into fantasy makes this film an adventure tale as well as a mystical parable about a human quest in the land of God and devil. It's an experience like no other you'll see this year. Again, let's hope it comes to one of our film festivals.
I Am Not Madame Bovary
Chinese director Feng Xiaogang casts superstar Fan Bingbing as a peasant woman who, after being cheated by her husband, goes on a protest spree at various government officials, rattling the hierarchy of the Communist Party from local judges to town mayors and all the way to the Party's bigwigs in Beijing. It's not a comedy, but at times it feels like one: we in this part of the world are accustomed to the absurdity of a bureaucratic system that's designed to help poor people but only ends up hurting them. The title is an English equivalent of the Chinese slang term for female adulterers, and Xiaogang shot the film on a reductive format, making it look as if we're watching the image through a telescope. The Chinese release is said to have been pushed to November, so the rest of the world will have to wait a little longer.
I Am Not Madame Bovary.
Nocturama
This French film will rouse a lot of discussion. The set-up is downright provocative: a group of young French anarchists -- white as well as Muslim -- plan co-ordinated bombings at various sites in Paris, including inside a ministry office. They pull it off, spread terror across a city already on edge, then retreat to hide in a department store all night as the police search for them. Bertrand Bonello's film evokes the radical innocence of May 1968's student protests, though he never judges or romanticises these malcontents, who come together from the rich as well as the poor sides of town. The film has just been released in France and is likely to come to one of our festivals.
