TIFF usually has several biographical documentaries, and this year was no different, with films about Julia Child, Alanis Morissette, Oscar Peterson, Kenny G, and Jacques Cousteau. I caught three of those five (missing out on the Peterson and Kenny G films), and while they’re all worth your time, I liked the Cousteau film wildly better than the other two. Certainly subject matter is part of it; I just intrinsically find sea exploration more fascinating than cooking or angsty ‘90s rock.
But Becoming Cousteau is also a phenomenally made film. Two-time Oscar nominee Liz Garbus has the gift of approaching documentary filmmaking as the act of asking questions. Sometimes that’s overt, and with her excellent 2015 film What Happened, Miss Simone? the question was literally right there in the title. What Garbus did with her Nina Simone film and now again with Cousteau is eschew portraiture in favor of an investigation into both what made someone tick, and why that person significantly altered course midway through their career.
At the other end of the biodoc spectrum is Julia, but I don’t mean that as a qualitative spectrum. It’s more like a spectrum of ambition. Julia is a perfectly watchable and enjoyable portrait of its subject, beloved American chef Julia Child, but a portrait is really all it is.
‘A Hero’, ‘Compartment No. 6’, ‘Attica’, ‘Hold Your Fire’ – TIFF 2021 Review
Directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West also worked together on 2018’s hugely successful RBG, which took a similarly boilerplate approach to both its subject and its genre. That’s not a knock—there’s nothing inherently wrong with a biodoc treating its job as essentially creating a more engaging version of a Wikipedia page.
I love Wikipedia, and probably use it every day, so I’m being genuine when I say that a documentary coming off as a visual Wikipedia page isn’t such a bad thing. But Wikipedia pages mostly just tell you what someone did, without necessarily providing the best understanding of who they were, and that’s the chief difference between Julia and Becoming Cousteau.
Existing at the mid-point of those two films is Jagged, which celebrates the 25th anniversary (actually 26th, but time is a flat circle) of Alanis Morissette’s legendary Jagged Little Pill album and tour. To Jagged’s credit, it does try to be more of an investigation than a portrait; it just doesn’t totally succeed.
The day before Jagged made its Gala Premiere at TIFF, Alanis Morissette publicly called the movie “salacious” and disowned the finished product, no-showing the TIFF premiere and saying she wouldn’t help to promote the film in any way. (Of course, a headline like that probably brought more attention to the film than any intentional promotion could have, but whatever.)
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Because I read that story only three hours before attending the screening, I was vividly watching the film through the hyper-specific Hmmmm, which part pissed off Alanis? lens, but I walked away with almost no clue as to what she took issue with. Yes, there was one short bit where she talked about her experiences with sexual assault, and one brief scene where her drummer on the tour (Taylor Hawkins, of the Foo Fighters) talked about all the groupies he and his male bandmates shagged, but that’s it. Alanis narrates nearly all of Jagged herself, and the film clearly comes off not as a story being told about her, but as her telling her own tale.
The fact that it’s so difficult to identify what Alanis could’ve taken umbrdge with in Jagged certainly makes her own reaction to the film pretty confusing, but it also helps clarify why the film feels so sedate. To put it simply, if you watch a movie about a globe-trotting rock and roll tour and you can’t identify why someone might be offended by it, that probably means it didn’t dig deep enough.
Of course that’s not to say I think there was some scandal that the film swept under the rug; far from it. But for an album that gained its monumental reputation largely on the back of its confessional nature, the film disappointingly never tries to mine the same sort of emotional truth that the album made its bread and butter.
Becoming Cousteau didn’t have that problem. It was produced by Nat Geo, and an easy point of comparison is probably another Nat Geo film about a legendary scientific figure, Brett Morgen’s excellent 2017 film Jane. Both films involve bringing their figures to life through an immense archive of historical footage (which looks gorgeous on the big screen). But while Jane tended a bit more toward hagiography, Becoming Cousteau isn’t afraid to shy away from its subject’s disappointments and failings.
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In that sense, Becoming Cousteau probably reminded me the most of one of my other favorite films of 2021, the Anthony Bourdain documentary Roadrunner. Both are about men who lived public lives of adventure and heartbreak, and who constantly travelled the globe and both lost and found themselves in the work that filled them with so much meaning. While watching Julia made me want to eat, and watching Jagged made me want to listen to the album, watching Becoming Cousteau made me want to live a better, more fulfilling life.
Of course Toronto had many other types of documentaries on offer, one of which, Attica, I already wrote about last week (it’s brilliant). But two others also made quite an impact on me; one is a granular investigation into the past, while the other is a cry for help about something happening right now. Let’s start there, mostly because I can’t bear to let that be what we end with.
Burning, by director Eva Orner (who also made the 2019 Netflix doc Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator), is a pleading call to action about the recent wildfires that consumed much of Australia, and it’s about as harrowing a portrait of the consequences of climate change as I’ve ever seen. And I’m struggling with what to tell you about Burning, because on the one hand I want people to see this invaluable document of a very serious global issue.
But on the other hand, I feel duty bound to warn you of something that will almost certainly make you stay as far away from the film as you possibly can. And that, of course, makes me feel incredibly guilty, because I want people to see this movie. But I also can’t, in good conscience know what you’ll be exposed to and not warn you. So, I guess, maybe don’t read the next paragraph? Or maybe do? I dunno.
‘Belfast’, ‘Dune’, ‘Last Night in Soho’, ‘Titane’ – TIFF 2021 Review
Okay, I’m just gonna say it. You see a charred and probably dying koala crawling through a fire, and then another koala loudly crying from severe burn wounds. To say I was traumatized is an inadequate description. I have been scarred for life by this movie, and I will literally—in the correct definition of the word—never forget these images.
But that’s the point. An entire continent on fire should be scarring. Eva Orner wants the viewer to be traumatized. The point wasn’t to make a movie that gets the viewer to say, “Aww, that’s so sad,” and then immediately go back to bingeing The Office. The point was to deeply fuck us up. So, I guess good job?
Anyway, you should all see this movie, though I know none of you will now, which is obviously my fault. But also, please vote for politicians who support combating climate change. And no more incendiary devices at gender reveal parties. Come on, people.
Well then, now that we’ve got that depressing imagery stuck in our heads, let’s lighten the mood by travelling back to late-1930s Poland. Three Minutes – A Lengthening is adapted from a book by Glenn Kurtz, about his discovery of home movies in his parents’ Florida basement that contain footage his grandfather shot on a trip through a Jewish community in Poland in 1938, the year before the Nazis invaded the country.
Three Minutes hauntingly begins with the complete titular footage, unadorned by any narration or context, and then proceeds over the next hour (it’s a short movie) to methodically investigate everything contained therein—every face that could be identified through painstaking research, every business that would soon close forever.
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Kurtz and director Bianca Stigter (wife of Steve McQueen, who served as an executive producer here) carry out a moving anthropological excavation of a community that didn’t know it would soon be destroyed, and one still-living survivor was even located outside of Detroit, who appears in the video as a 13-year-old boy.
Three Minutes – A Lengthening is, in some ways, a perfect example of why documentary film is such a vital, essential art form. Prior to the discovery of this footage, this community had essentially ceased to exist, not just in the contemporary world, but historically as well. Few records about this town and its Jewish population survived the war, and many of the buildings didn’t make it through fully intact either. Nearly all of the 153 people seen on camera during the three minutes of footage were murdered within the next few years. But now they have survived, preserved forever in a beautiful document that will continue to be studied, an innocent few moments of hope and life captured for all to see.