The 2023 Toronto International Film Festival has officially come and gone, with this year’s People’s Choice Award going to Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut American Fiction, and Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers (see below) and Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron our runners up. Another film I reviewed last time, Summer Qamp, was the first runner-up for the People’s Choice Documentary Award, which was won by Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make Believe, and the critically reviled Dicks: The Musical won for the Midnight Madness section. Today I’ll be offering up my reviews (and Mama Mordor’s, where available) of the final ten films I caught, as well as some thoughts on the state of TIFF in 2023. 

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Kei Chika-ura follows his feature debut, TIFF 2018 selection Complicity, with the staggering, shattering drama Great Absence, screening in TIFF’s Platform competition. A gut-wrenching meditation on aging, love, loss, and memory drawing from Chika-ura’s own experience grappling with a parent’s dementia during the Covid-19 pandemic, Great Absence stars Mirai Moriyama as Takashi, an actor called home to northern Kyushu after many years away when his stepmother Naomi (Hideko Hara) goes missing and his father Yohji (Tatsuya Fuji) calls a SWAT team on himself. Yohji and Takashi’s relationship, Yohji’s decline, and Naomi’s disappearance are carefully unveiled over 2.5 hours of subdued acting, stunning cinematography, and propulsive editing. 

Between his first and second features, Chika-ura has rapidly matured into a filmmaker reminiscent of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (more on him below!), an expert at leveraging the quotidian impact of slow cinema and the milieu of modern Japanese society to mine the depths of human emotion, the beauty and horror found in the everyday, and the freighted unspoken moments that can bring people together and keep them miles apart. Great Absence is a work of thoughtful tenderness and quiet devastation that reminds us all to hold our loved ones close but not to ignore their flaws at the expense of ourselves and others. 

★★★★★

Mama Mordor: “I only brought one tissue, so I wiped my eyes at first but then I just had to let my tears run under my mask.” 

Also Mama Mordor, sitting between me and, I s*** you not, Barry Jenkins: “The guy next to me didn’t eat his muffin and I really wanted to ask him if I could have it.” 

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Québecois director Sophie Dupuis took TIFF by storm and won the festival’s Best Canadian Feature award with Solo, an eye-opening look at gaslighting, infighting, and familial (and found familial) strife in Montreal’s drag scene. The sublime Théodore Pellerin is at his most angelic as Simon, a drag prodigy and the son of Claire, an emotionally neglectful opera superstar (Québecois acting royalty Anne-Marie Cadieux). Simon is so hungry for any taste of love that he presents himself on a silver platter to Félix Maritaud’s contemptible, manipulative sociopath Olivier, one of the most hatable characters on screen this year. There isn’t a weak link in the cast, and the costuming, makeup, and choreography are – quelle surprise! – superb. Unfortunately those technical superlatives aren’t given quite enough breathing room, with no one drag performance seen from start to finish. Cramming in more performances makes the cabaret feel like a true ensemble rather than Simon (and Olivier)’s show, but it also has the effect of detracting from the suffocating feeling that Dupuis otherwise so effectively inculcates. An incisive look at different approaches to modern queer relationships, how those paths can end up in conflict with one another, and the many ways a toxic relationship can deconstruct a personality.

★★★★

Mama Mordor: “I just wanted to give him a hug and tell him to get away.”

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Niclas Larsson’s Mother, Couch!, starring Ewan McGregor as a man called to an out-of-business furniture store when his mother (Ellen Burstyn) refuses to move from a couch, earns the honor of being the first film I’ve ever publicly booed. It is a stunningly execrable example of filmmaking – mind-numbingly boring, disjointed, desperate to be smarter than it actually is, and an utter failure at living up to the Biblical scale and allegorical finesse of its obvious inspiration, 2017’s mother! The only aspect of Mother, Couch! worth applauding is its scenery-chewing use of Lara Flynn Boyle, chain-smoking and growling her way through a small and underdeveloped role. It’s confounding that this talented a cast (also including Rhys Ifans and Taylor Russell) would assemble for such undercooked surrealist pablum, and I hope that if this marks a broader return to the silver screen for Boyle that she’ll find material more suited to her considerable talents.

½

Mama Mordor: “What the hell? Why did they make this?”  

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The human cost of war is dissected from several angles in Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s poignant but ultimately flinching Shadow of Fire. A boy (Ouga Tsukao) barely hanging on by stealing food from local merchants forms a dysfunctional found family with the owner of a ramen shop-turned-brothel (Shuri) and a discharged soldier suffering from PTSD (Hiroki Kono); when things go horribly wrong, he undertakes a mysterious mission with a flamboyant vagrant (Mirai Moriyama). Each section of the film is compelling on its own as a vignette showcasing the depths to which people will go to survive, but taken as a whole the film lacks an emotional through line. Tsukamoto can’t decide if he wants the audience to marinate in the horrors of post-war Japan or cultivate a sense of optimism for humanity and hope for these characters. While these can certainly coexist – and do at times, particularly in the short period that the boy, the brothel owner, and the soldier are living together and during the boy’s mission with the vagrant – the choppy nature of Shadow of Fire and its relatively brief 95-minute runtime somewhat undermine both.

★★★½

Mama Mordor: “Where did they find that little boy? He was so cute!”

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Christmas vacation turns bittersweet in Alexander Payne’s uproarious new dramedy The Holdovers. As Massachusetts boys boarding school Barton Academy shuts down for the holidays, despised ancient civilization teacher Mr. Hunham (an acerbic Paul Giamatti, at his sad-sackiest) is tasked with watching after the students who are stuck on campus over the holidays, most prominently dejected troublemaker Angus (pithy newcomer Dominic Sessa). They’re joined by the school’s cafeteria manager, Mary (a quick-witted and no-nonsense Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who is coping with her son’s death in Vietnam. The script is extremely sharp, even by the standards of a Payne film: David Hemingson’s writing is thrumming with energy and humor, and my audience was cracking up continuously from the first scene to the last. The screenplay perfectly engages with the cinematography it’s supporting, capable of shifting the wintry New England landscapes from sun-dappled and bucolic to icily isolating in the space of a single scene. As the three central characters are unwrapped, they reveal seemingly endless layers of trauma and disillusionment, to a degree that can at times feel like Payne is laying it on too thick; it’s to his (and his cast’s) credit that this trio of misanthropes remains believable and investable, but one wonders if a tighter film could have been just as impactful. The racial politics suggested by Mary’s position and her son’s fate go underdeveloped, but not fully ignored, with some particularly insightful – if understated – commentary peppered throughout, though it’s one aspect of the film that Payne could have done to unearth further. Bonus points for giving Carrie Preston a meaty role as the school president’s secretary and host of the hottest holiday party in town.

★★★★

Mama Mordor: “That was hysterical, but really makes you want to sit down and think about it. I think that’s my favorite so far. My tears were running down into my mask and tickling me but I wouldn’t take it off because of that man who kept coughing!” 

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Last Summer, Catherine Breillat’s remake of May el-Toukhy’s 2019 Queen of Hearts, finds Anne (Léa Drucker) – a married mother of two young adopted daughters and lawyer that we see representing exclusively young women in difficult situations – entering into a torrid and dangerous affair with her 17-year-old stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher). It’s a discomfiting twist on a classic summer romance, and – while one can certainly question why remaking this of all stories drew Breillat to direct her first feature since 2013’s Abuse of Weakness – Breillat’s commitment to exploring Anne’s pleasure (this approaches overcommitment on more than one occasion, with several minutes-long sex scenes that can verge on comedy after a few too many thrusts and moans) and the moral gray areas Anne finds herself in certainly manages to justify the remake of such a recent film. As strong as Drucker is, she can’t carry the entire film herself, and Kircher struggles with believability as an angry bad boy who’s resentful of his estranged father, much less one who’s able to seduce this powerful and confident woman with everything to lose.  

★★★½

Mama Mordor: “There were a few too many of…those scenes. Why did we need all that? Well, it was better than the couch one.” [an hour later] “The sex scenes were like what the hell? This isn’t porn in the back room! They could’ve come up with more plot than that, I counted like four.” 

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Léa Seydoux and George MacKay are star-crossed lovers through time and space in Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, a fascinating dissection of the ways that technology has brought people together and pushed them apart since the beginning of time, and will continue to do so well into the future. We see Gabrielle (Seydoux) and Louis (MacKay) circling each other in 1910, 2014, and 2044, with the latter serving as our anchor as Gabrielle undergoes a procedure to purge the emotions of her past lives in order to earn better employment from our AI overlords. These futuristic sections serve mostly as entrées to the other time periods, doing little to advance the idea that Gabrielle and Louis are fated but delivering a clear vision of a not-too-distant dystopia; the 1910 scenes, taking place around the Great Flood of Paris, never quite deliver on the promise of the flirtation or the threat of Gabrielle’s husband looming in the background. It’s the 2014 sequences where The Beast comes to life, with Gabrielle a budding model and actress unknowingly under threat from Louis’s incel vlogger, and it’s an impressive display of MacKay and Seydoux’s chemistry that it works within Bonello’s broader message, to the point that you almost wish it were the entire film.

★★★½

Mama Mordor: “The beginning really dragged but I got into it in the middle part. I wish we’d seen more of her husband in the first part, I bet he was fooling around on her.”  

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Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s latest meditation on the human condition, Evil Does Not Exist, follows the rustic life of single father Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), living on the edges of a rural community several hours north of Tokyo as a talent management company seeks to destroy their lifestyle with a poorly-designed glamping resort. Like much of Hamaguchi’s recent work, Evil Does Not Exist proceeds extremely deliberately, its slow pace creating a lived-in, vibrant, and subtly detailed world that is carefully observed and gorgeously rendered. At a relatively brief 106 minutes, that deliberate pace is regardless given plenty of time to breathe and establish character, conveying the routine, repetition, beauty, and occasional danger of Takumi’s lifestyle, as well as the ignorance, disruptiveness, and threat of the big-city interlopers. Where there is a tension between Hamaguchi’s slow cinema and the film’s length is in the third act, which picks up the pace significantly, leading to an abrupt and ambiguous ending whose literality and metaphor, while keeping with the film’s broader themes and in particular Takushi’s observations about the slower-paced, methodical, nature-attuned life he and his neighbors lead, feels out of step with the film leading up to it.

★★★★

Mama Mordor: *literally snoring in the middle of the Scotiabank IMAX, sorry everyone* 

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John Carney (Once, Sing Street) returns with Flora and Son, a subtle variation on the themes and plots that he’s been exploring for decades – music as a mode of expression, connector, and uplifter; broken and found families; etc. Eve Hewson’s Flora is the standout, a chain-smoking, wine-guzzling mother trying to keep her son out of jail and perhaps reunite with his estranged musician father along the way. Flora buys her son a guitar for his birthday in hopes that an interest in music might help keep him afloat, but his interests lie in electronic music, so she keeps the guitar for herself and starts taking online lessons from acoustic philosopher Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). If you’ve seen any of Carney’s previous films, you know exactly where this goes: Flora and her son learn to express themselves through music, music connects them music uplifts them, their broken family evolves, they find new family, etc. The stakes are never too high, the laughs and tears come easily, the music is omnipresent but unlikely to leave you humming a new tune, and…well, it works as well as any other Carney film. 

★★½

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I wrapped up my TIFF 2023 experience with Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, a fable following Arthur (Josh O’Connor), a British archaeologist freshly let out of jail, as he falls back in with the grave-robbing crew that got him put there to begin with. As Arthur uses his mysterious ability to dowse for Etruscan tombs to enrich the group and pay off his debts, a seedy underbelly of tomb raiders supporting a global crime ring slowly comes into focus, as does Arthur’s doomed romance with Beniamina, one of the many daughters of local music teacher Flora (a very game Isabella Rossellini). La Chimera is one of those films that works as much as you’re able to allow it to wash over you. Arthur is a closed book – the blurb summarizing the film on Letterboxd reveals more about his motivations than the film does until its closing moments (so don’t read it if you don’t want to have the ending spoiled!) – and other than Flora and her new student Italia (Carol Duarte), the supporting cast is mostly variations on the same character, but that works to underline Arthur’s natural and voluntary othering. What Rohrwacher delivers is a beautifully shot, funny, kooky film about ownership of the past and the ways it drags you back again and again.

★★★½

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Although Evil Does Not Exist is the definition of slow cinema, it turns out that Mama Mordor’s snoring during its second screening likely had a lot to do with the fact that she’d contracted her first ever case of Covid while in Toronto. We both masked on our respective modes of transportation to the festival and throughout every screening, but when screenings are jam-packed with people grappling with everything from seasonal allergies to run-of-the-mill colds to RSV, flu, and Covid who can’t be bothered to stay home when sick, mask, or even cover their mouths when they cough, it’s inevitable that illness will spread like wildfire in such close quarters. In fact, I asked TIFF staff before our screening of The Beast if they could make an announcement asking people to mask if they’re sick, and they said that they aren’t allowed to comment on Covid or masking anymore. Mama Mordor is in her 70s and immunocompromised, but has thankfully had a mild case; that said, the constant worry from being coughed and sneezed on in cinemas, to say nothing of actually contracting Covid, has her saying this may be her last TIFF. 

Beyond the ignored literal plagues circulating through its screening rooms, TIFF also finds itself plagued by the funding issues I mentioned in my last article, and seems to have decided to offset those by passing the cost on to their members and the paying public. Not only have TIFF memberships – an absolute necessity to have any chance at getting into the highest-profile screenings – rocketed up in price, but for “premium” screenings (historically those with big-name directors and starry casts in attendance, though this year many had no talent present whatsoever) TIFF introduced an opaque tiered pricing structure that in effect meant almost every seat at premium screenings cost CAD$88 this year.

Since TIFF chooses to do most of its ticket sales through Ticketmaster, many tickets to buzzy films got snatched up by bots and scalpers, with seats for The Boy and the Heron and others listed on Stubhub for as high as $1200 before lower-tier members and the public had even had a chance to try for them. Is it insane to even think about spending that much on a movie? Yes, absolutely, but the bigger issue at hand is that TIFF does nothing to address this problem and repeatedly gets egg on their face for it: at my opening night screening of TBATH, which was sold out almost immediately when sales opened up for high-paying members (I lucked into a ticket during a special pre-sale for Visa Infinite cardholders), entire rows, for which TIFF had gotten their CAD$88 per seat, sat empty and unsold on resale websites while dozens of people outside in the rush line were told there wasn’t space for them. The same happened at nearly every high-profile screening throughout the festival. TIFF doesn’t benefit from this in any way – they don’t get a cut of those jacked up resale prices, and talent (when talent is present!) isn’t exactly happy with half-empty cinemas. If TIFF stands a chance of remaining “The People’s Festival,” they need to take a serious look at how they’re treating – and allowing their partners like Ticketmaster to treat – their members and their neighbors, healthwise and economically.

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That’s a wrap for TIFF 2023! Whether it’s at TIFF or another festival, I’ll see you next year (with or without Mama Mordor) with plenty more thoughts on the fall festival season and the year’s hottest acquisitions and Oscar hopefuls.

You can find more of my reviews (and musings on the Oscars) here on The Avocado, and on Letterboxd.