As longtime readers know, whenever we attend the Toronto International Film Festival, I like to keep a diary of some of the highlights we catch over the long weekend we’re there. This year we saw 16 films over the course of 4 days. Not too shabby. While Hannah is providing coverage of her own, for my part I’m going to be sharing my review entries for each day we were there over the course of this week.
Here’s Day 1, enjoy!
Presence
It’s difficult not to admire Steven Soderbergh and his ongoing commitment to experimentalism. Be it his forays into digital filmmaking, shooting an entire project on an iPhone, or his ongoing toehold into various genres, to call him anything but courageous would be a disservice. That said, his work over the last decade+, a decade hence the time he said he was going to retire, has largely been marked by final products that are more miss than hit.
With his latest, Presence, these two trends continue apace. The pitch is irresistible – a film whose POV is that of a ghost haunting the home of a family that has just moved in. Moreso than any cast member, the camera is the protagonist; moving from room to room and observing this family of four in an ever building slice of life fashion. The ghost swoops in and out of scenes, with only one member of this clan actually feeling its…erm…presence in the house on occasion. It’s a neat trick and each time someone looks directly at the camera, breaking the fourth wall, it adds one extra little jolt that connects character with the audience watching. As an experiment in the fantastical, there’s much to recommend.
The struggle sets in when one observes Presence’s sloppier touches. The script, to be blunt, needs work. There’s dialogue that plays like it came straight out of the first draft with little polish in between. This awkwardness effectively injures critical scenes, where tension is intended to ratchet up, and pulls the viewer right out of the moment. Soderbergh’s adventurousness, for all of its laudatory qualities (both here and in general), has a quagmire of its own creation: with so many long-takes as part of the central thesis, the performances suffer. The script’s deficiencies do not help, of course. But the choice to run a multitude of awkward line-readings where it’s clear there wasn’t a lot of workshopping between takes or even multiple takes at all makes the production look slapdash.
It’s an improvement on the woeful High Flying Bird, Unsane, and Side Effects but Presence is also a good reminder that for all of his considerable mettle, Soderbergh’s tunnel vision can still be his undoing.
2.5 stars
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
While this is Germany’s Oscar entry for the season, Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig is an Iranian film that has come at great cost to its filmmaker. Upon its festival release at Cannes, Rasoulof was sentenced to 8 years in prison and multiple lashings in his home country. He responded by fleeing to Germany, which gives the film its new home.
The common denominator among Iranian productions that make it to the Americas tend to focus on how repressive life is there and The Seed of the Sacred Fig is no exception. Rasoulof’s attention here is centered on the 2022 student protests that spread throughout Tehran for a year. This uprising, not dissimilar from the George Floyd protests of 2020, was catalyzed by the death of a student who was alleged to have been tortured and beaten to death by authorities. Sacred Fig’s takes an intimate view of this social movement through the eyes of a family whose patriarch is employed as an investigative judge within the ruling regime. Contrasting his authoritative role, his two daughters are both school aged, college and high school respectively, and are becoming swept up in the message of women’s empowerment that sits at the center of the demonstrations. Sitting in the middle of this slowly burning strife is their mother, for whom the internal battle between oppressive “traditionalism” and a better way of living for her own children continues to roil.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig succeeds in a number of ways, but its most attractive feature is how it effectively straddles a number of genres in the same way that so many recent excellent crossover international critical smashes have found triumph. It works as a social study (particularly through its judicious usage of cell phone footage of the actual protests and the police brutality that occurred), a chamber drama, and with shocking ease, a tense thriller.
Tension is where the emphasis lies. There’s an overwhelming sense of stress already built into the setup, and as secrets begin to mount. But once a gun goes missing, the proceedings hit overdrive with nary a bit of fat in the first 2+ hours of its considerable running time.
But yes, there’s a but here…Rasalouf’s decision to allow his building generational metaphor to fully envelop the film takes a toll on the exceptional goodwill he builds with the audience. The final 20 minutes strain credulity, with an underlining that feels like somebody elbowing you and saying “do you get it?”
It doesn’t lessen Sacred Fig’s largely overwhelming power, but it’s an unfortunate blemish and one that was deftly avoidable. Imperfect is still better than bad after all.
3.5 stars
Cloud
Having only experienced Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s turn of the millennium output, I only have a limited vantage point on what his films are…basically “a more refined take on J-Horror”. Guys, what can I say? I’ve only seen Cure and Pulse, the former being an outright masterpiece to be clear. But his more recent efforts have skirted past me for no particular reason.
So whatever I expected for Cloud, his newest, it absolutely was not “eBay reseller thriller”. Ryosuke is a scamster that goes by the name Ratel on a Japanese auction site, he doesn’t have much in the way of ambition beyond being his own boss and trying to make as much money as possible while doing it. He’s got a pretty girlfriend, and an okay day job. Then strange things start happening. He notices a tripwire in his way while riding his scooter, which he narrowly avoids. He sees strange figures on the public transit that catch his eye. Even his old boss is showing up at his door at odd hours for no discernible reason at all.
To say much more would give away the fun, but Kurosawa is having a great time here. Kicking things off with a nervy and paranoiac horror tone, shifting gears to a kind of rural suspense Straw Dogs feel, and then polishing things off with a full on gauntlet shoot ‘em up…this was genuinely one of the most unpredictable and fun films I’ve caught this year and that doesn’t even contend with the haunting final shot that pulls the viewer right back into the usual preoccupations that I’m finding are Kurosawa obsessions.
4 stars