Double Features

Six films at the Toronto Film Festival that go together (plus one for good measure)

Buffalo movie-lovers are a truly blessed bunch: They have one of the world’s best film festivals sitting right in their backyard. We may think of a film festival simply as an opportunity to pack in a lot of movies over a few days, but the Toronto International Film Festival is more than that. It’s a special and intense experience, a fantasy-like pocket of space and time devoted to complete and exhilarating immersion in cinema, morning to night.

Jerichow

Surfacing from this immersion, I always realize how these movies refuse to fall silent in my mind. Instead, they begin to ricochet off each other, making links, sending out echoes. The films I saw in Toronto this year did something unusual—they aligned themselves into perfect double bills, each with its own connecting thread.

Trains:

Claire Denis, from France, is perhaps my favorite filmmaker working anywhere today. A highlight of the festival was her new film, 35 Shots of Rum. It’s a startlingly simple and direct story of the tender bond between father and daughter. He’s a train driver and she’s a university student; they live together in Paris. The movie features a nearly all-black cast and is a hushed, poetic homage to the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu.

RR (short for “railroad”) is the new work by James Benning, one of America’s leading experimental filmmakers. Each shot of RR shows a landscape. A train enters the frame and traverses it completely, the camera remaining static. Cut to a new landscape and a new train. This repeats for over 40 different trains of varying shapes, sizes and colors, each in a different American rural landscape. I realize this must sound utterly boring, but without exaggeration, it turned out to be the most spellbinding and meditative film I saw in Toronto.

Sneaky Thrillers:

Jerichow is the latest film by Christian Petzold, who is fast building a reputation for himself as part of a resurgence of new German cinema. On one level, the movie is a tough-as-nails film noir, a virtual remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice. On another level, it’s a savage critique of the way capitalist values and power games play out in sexual relationships.

Wendy and Lucy

The Belgian filmmaker-brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are among the most respected of art film directors; they have twice been awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Their new movie, Lorna’s Silence, comes as a surprise: It’s a flat-out thriller, tense and suspenseful. In it, a young Albanian woman in Belgium becomes involved in a marriage of convenience and an immigration scam. Slowly, a deeper layer emerges, an exposé of the dehumanizing effects of globalization.

Crazy (i.e. Normal) Families:

French director Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale is a family reunion drama starring Catherine Deneuve as a matriarch who discovers she has a rare blood disease. I know what this sounds like: the perfect recipe for a sentimental, “uplifting” tale. The movie turns out to be nothing of the kind. It’s a monstrously funny send-up of family dysfunction, a French Royal Tenenbaums, and every bit as strong as the Wes Anderson movie.

Still Walking, from Japan, is a blood relative to A Christmas Tale. It’s a frank and acerbic depiction of an average Japanese family. Accustomed to the decorous family dramas of Ozu, I was pleasantly taken aback by the gleeful ribaldry of this movie and the earthy “messiness” of its characters. How comforting to discover that eccentric families are a fact of life in every corner of the world.

Finally, even though it doesn’t fall into the “double bill” theme, I must mention Kelly Reichardt’s remarkable indie film, Wendy and Lucy. Michelle Williams—in a brilliant, minimalist performance that is certain to attract recognition and pick up awards--plays a drifter (Wendy) who loses her dog (Lucy) in a small town in Oregon. We are shown, simply and vividly, Wendy’s desperate search for Lucy. It’s a movie perpetually poised on the edge of heartbreak. I’ll be stunned if I see a better American movie this year.