The big one at the Film Festival today is Jojo Rabbit, the much-written about satire about fascism. Hitler is a boy's imaginary friend in this one. It was the audience favorite at the Toronto Film Festival but good luck getting in here. It’s sold out, pass holders will show up early and your only bet could be the standby line. Or the film’s return on Oct 18.
Meanwhile there are so many good smaller possibilities today and tomorrow, I can only cover a fraction.
Who You Think I Am, Young Ahmed, Song of Names, Lara,
Jordan River Anderson, Amare Amaro and We Are Not Princesses
More on Friday, including Cherry Blossoms and Demons, which will be worth watching for.
WHO YOU THINK I AM: Drawing on a French novel and graced with a typically superb acting performance by a French icon, this film takes on an aspect of modern life with mixed effect. The subject is on-line dating, in this case for the mature set. Juliette Binoche is the icon, not someone you’d imagine would need to search for men to spend time with her. But here she is Claire, a mother, an academic, in her fifties and alone. Her husband has left her for a much younger woman.
Claire takes on the name Clara, puts her profile, but not her picture, out on the internet and attracts a jock (Guillaume Gouix) and then his roommate (François Civil) for on-line texting, flirting and some heat. She declines to meet in person and when pressed for a picture posts one of a much younger woman. The film discusses all the issues around this. Generational differences, the concept of cougars, which one friend imagines should really be applied to men not women, and the status of women in general today. That comes up in repeated chats with a therapist. It’s a smart film, witty and funny, especially about social media and gender privileges. Then it strains to become a thriller. Forgive that and you’ll like this one. (Screens Thurs evening)
THE SONG OF NAMES: Quebec’s François Girard, who moved us with The Red Violin, the sublime film he made over 20 years ago, is engrossed with music once more, and on the violin again, but doesn’t manage to equal the emotional impact. That’s even though the central theme here is much deeper and more wrenching: a boy’s grief over the loss of his family in the Holocaust.
The story is from a novel by the English journalist and BBC host Norman Lebrecht. A young boy sent from Poland, before the Holocaust, to England, to live with a music teacher, proves to be a violin prodigy but fails to show up for a concert that was to introduce him to the public. The teacher’s real son is like a brother to him but has no idea where he went. Thirty five years later, now played by Tim Roth, he tracks him down, finds him in Brooklyn, N.Y., now played by Clive Owen and now profoundly committed to the Jewish religion. The reason is slowly eased out like a mystery and includes a trip to the memorial at the infamous Treblinka camp. The song of the title is a memorial itself and is performed with high drama and at length. In its most effective sections the film invokes tradition, obligations and deeply felt loss. Other parts are flat and lackluster. (It screens on the two Thursdays, Oct 3 and 10)
YOUNG AHMED: The Dardenne Brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, won the best director award at Cannes at Cannes this year for this tale of a young jihadist. No wonder. This is another example of the social realist dramas they do so well; I’m referring to their best films like L’Enfant, 14 years ago, and The Kid With the Bike, six years later. They explore the pressures on and motivations by ordinary people caught in society’s harshness. Ahmed fits that scenario but I don’t find it as believable. The Dardennes don’t seem to know his world as well.
He’s 13, a school boy in Belgium and more and more drifting into the sway of a radical imam at the mosque he attends. He rails against Jews, insists on doing all the required prayers and argues with his mother, accusing her of driving his father away. But when he’s motivated to try and kill his teacher his story goes beyond the typical. He fails at it; is sent to a juvenile detention facility, but keeps working on his plot. He seems to mellow when he becomes friends with a girl at a farm he’s sentenced to. Not so however. The film shows how his religious extremism grows but doesn’t have much to explain why. One imam isn’t enough, I would think. Well-made, though, as usual, and engrossing, it plays again this afternoon.
LARA: This one from Germany is low-key but it keeps your interest. Partly that’s because of a steady, inspired performance by Corinna Harfouch. I didn’t know of her work but it goes back over 40 years and for this role won her a best actress award at an important film festival in Europe. She plays a retired civil servant whose husband has left her, her son won’t return calls and, as she learns, she was disliked by the people she worked with. But it’s her birthday so she buys her own mom a cake, which is rejected. Her son (Tom Schilling) is to play a major concert (of his own composition) so she buys up the last 22 tickets to bring people important in his life to come and listen.Gradually, through meeting them, more and more of her story and her personality are revealed.
She had been a music teacher; taught her son too, and in a short encounter manages to make him anxious about the music he wrote and is to play publicly for the first time. Her own music teacher (played by an actor named Volkmar Kleinert) recalls she had been “insanely ambitious.” Her ex-husband says to stop being so bossy with her son. She doesn’t feel she is; she’s just a mother with good advice, she thinks. It swirls into a climactic concert and a pleasing aftermath. Mothers with grown children will especially get this film. It screens Thurs early afternoon.
JORDAN RIVER ANDERSON, THE MESSENGER: With all the talk these days about reconciliation with indigenous people in Canada, this film really is as VIFF puts it “essential viewing.” It details an injustice most of us have never heard of and frankly seems incredible. Veteran documentary maker Alanis Obomsawin exposes it with all the anger it is due.
Canadians get free medical care. There was an exception. If a person on a remote reserve can’t get the needed medical attention there and has to be sent for treatment elsewhere, usually a big city, who pays for it? Aboriginals are a federal responsibility; but off-reserve the cost is provincial. For years the two levels of government wrangled over who should pay. When Jordan died in 2005, there were protests, a human rights ruling and an order to the government to fix the system. Then, remarkably, for 15 months, no compliance. The film cites details and explains all, raising your ire as you watch and leaving the message that “justice is possible.” It screens Wed morning and Thurs evening.
AMARE AMARO: That means Bitter Love in Italian, which is only an oblique reference to anything going on here. This is a modern version of Antigone, the Greek play by Sophocles. It is now set in Sicily and has been changed and modernized. Instead of a king disallowing a soldier’s proper burial because of his disloyalty, a local mayor won’t allow a dead man to be buried in the graveyard beside his mother. Why? He was drunk and died when he smashed his car into the local bar, killing two passengers, one of whom was the town priest. That’s multi-level shame. The mayor is a woman in this version. The man’s brother fights her power to get a proper burial and there are complications. The brother was half-French and thereby always under suspicion and an outcast. The accident appears not so straightforward when analyzed; it has a backstory. The film is zippy and entertaining. It screens Thurs afternoon.
WE ARE NOT PRINCESSES: Antigone figures in this documentary too. A group of Syrian refugees are rehearsing to perform it in Beirut. We see the grim realities of their lives in the camp and bit by bit come to appreciate what this ancient play can mean to them. They discuss what democracy means, whether women have to submit to the orders of men and the ethics of defying the people in power.
More than that, though. We listen to four of the women talk about their lives. It may be the first time. The play has given them the courage. They recall oppression and strict control, sometimes with animated sequences accompanying their words if they don’t want to go on camera. “In this exile we’re stronger because we’ve lost so much,” one says. That’s even though they describe the camp as “a sealed area of poverty and misery inside the city.” Horror stories of what they left behind are even worse. The film feels easy-going but the words are strong. It screens Wed evening and Fri morning)