Usually, we catch up at TIFF the film crowned with the Golden Lion of Venice, and it’s the crush in its theaters or online (since the pandemic), celebrated in its wake as in 2020 Nomadland by Chloé Zhao. Alas! The great winner of the region, who deals with abortion, The event by French filmmaker Audrey Diwan, is not part of this Toronto program between flashes and failures.
To celebrate the seventh art and generate a slightly festive atmosphere at the end of the week, tributes to cinema greats, including Alanis O Bowsawin, Denis Villeneuve and Jessica Chastain allowed each winner to recall their joy in non-virtual encounters. And Denis Villeneuve was able to declare once again his unconditional love for the big screen, he whose spectacular Dune will be released jointly to its deep disappointment on the HBO Max platform, where it will lose its luster and texture.
The range of TIFF films is so vast. Some are powerful, like Night Raiders by Cree Canadian filmmaker Danis Goulet. Its dystopia, against a backdrop of native struggles married to the specter of residential schools and a renewed traditionalism, sheds light on the new avenues of First Nations cinema, despite unequal interpretations. The lack of indigenous actors explaining these gaps.
Significant works stand out, often resulting from feminine proposals, very inspiring this year. Thereby Silent Land by Aga Woszczynska, a sharp look at a couple of chic and blond Polish tourists in deep Italy, indifferent to the fate of a worker drowned before their eyes, whose corpse will come to haunt them little by little. It is all the contemporary disconnection from the misfortunes of the world, that of so many tourists on this wounded planet, which unfolds in beautiful ironically solar images, then in inner doubts in this patient, thrifty and blood-curdling hard-hitting film.
Echo missed on September 11
In these terrible birthday times, I could finally see The Guilty by the American Antoine Fuqua, Netflix offspring, remake of the Danish film Gustav Muller in 2018. The action centers on the dark day of a police officer (Jake Gyllenhaal) a distress call dispatcher in New York, September 11, 2011 , when everything collapses in the big apple. But the film gets bogged down in a lack of vigor, emotion and style. Even the gifted performer loses his tone. This adaptation manages to lose the charge of such an explosive subject. The reports on TV for a week on these attacks and their consequences generally appear much stronger than this poorly completed Fuqua film.
Disappointing also by its convoluted scenario, but with a Benoît Poelvoorde always formidable in the dramatic register, Inexorable, an erotic and horrific thriller by Belgian director Fabrice Du Welz, pretended to shake up the festival hut. Here, after a famous broken-down writer moves in with his publisher wife and their daughter to the glitzy parental mansion, everything breaks down when a troubled young woman (Alba Gaïa Bellugi) opens up the wounds of this haunted man’s past. Terror sets in, secrets come out of the cupboards, the film rushes towards its bloody end. The Belgian actor sits at the top of the film, but obviously feels very lonely there …
A little chaotic but colorful, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain by Briton Will Sharpe. The film stars Benedict Cumberbatch (lead actor of The Power of the Dog by Jane Campion) as a psychotic artist camped on a note sometimes bewildered, sometimes agitated. Between glory and insanity, to the psychiatric hospital then a retirement home, this biopic of the English painter and illustrator straddling the 19th and 20th centuries Louis Wain, is steeped in English humor. Will Sharpe surfs on his subject beyond his colorful and imaginative staging. Remember that Wain has remained famous for his drawn anthropomorphic bestiary, populated especially by big-eyed felines, which we would have liked to find in the spotlight elsewhere than in the credits.
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