As usual, I’m abominably behind with my festival reviews, so rather than continuing in chronological order of what I saw—I’m slapping myself that I couldn’t even make it to Day 2—we’ll switch over to thematic entries.
Here, then, are my thoughts on what are probably the four most anticipated films I saw at TIFF: Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, and Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or winning Titane.
In the few days between Telluride ending and TIFF starting, I voted in a Twitter poll about which Telluride film was most likely to win Best Picture. And I picked Belfast, not because I had any feeling at all about how good it (or any other Telluride film) was or how much I would like any of them, but because the possible Belfast narrative just amused the hell out of me.
For the Oscars to vote against ROMA in favor of a pacified white fantasy like Green Book in 2018, only to then award Best Picture to the pacified white version of ROMA just three years later seemed so hilariously perfect that I could practically smell it. And look, I say all that as someone who truly adores the Oscars and has made his professional reputation (humor me here) writing about them. But know thyself—the Oscars continue to have some race problems.
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Anyway. Now I have seen Belfast, and I can confirm the hilarious narrative outlined above still totally exists. But I can also confirm something else: Belfast is a beautiful film that I absolutely fell in love with every frame of, and if it wins Best Picture (which feels like a safe bet at this moment), it will do so on pure merit at least as much as it does so on the back of racial biases among Academy voters.
And look, I’m already doing a disservice by even calling Belfast “the White ROMA.” I do, of course, understand where that shorthand comes from. Belfast is a black and white period piece about the filmmaker’s childhood in a foreign city, so the ROMA comparison is some seriously low-hanging fruit. But in terms of scope and tone, the comparison is all wrong.
Belfast, with its focus on the young boy as observer to a community spinning out of control with violence, and a mother who keeps him in check, is ultimately much more like an Irish Jojo Rabbit, mercifully absent of any Hitler impressions.
But Belfast also reminded me a lot of Fellini’s 1974 classic, Amarcord, in the way that much of the film eschews hard plot in favor of the many vignettes that compose how we remember our childhoods. And that’s what’s so interesting in regards to the Jojo Rabbit comparison.
In as much as I think it’s a valid comparison, the difference is where you can really get to the heart of why Belfast works so well. Because Jojo was set in Germany during WWII, it was immersed in a world that even a child simply couldn’t be unaware of. But Belfast, which is set in 1969, at the dawn of the Troubles, skillfully combines both a child’s awareness of the political turmoil around him with a child’s basic un-awareness of, well, most everything.
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And so Belfast is able to lovingly bounce around a child’s life and memories, from just trying to obtain the best chocolates to being held hostage in a political siege of his family’s street. And this tone works perfectly because it feels intrinsically real and honest. It’s ultimately not about a child living through war, but about political and military turmoil coinciding with a fairly normal childhood, and the way the adult who eventually resulted from that time might remember them all as a swirl of stuff that just kind of happened.
Sometimes preparation is a bad idea, and it’s far better to fly blind. Dune is one of those cases. I made the horrific mistake of rewatching the 1984 David Lynch adaptation (which remains just shockingly bad and unwatchable) a few days before TIFF, and it was so fresh in my mind while watching Denis Villeneuve’s new adaptation that I spent nearly the entire film quietly asking myself terribly distracting questions like, “Is this the sparring scene that had those atrocious effects in the Lynch movie?” and “Is one of those dudes the one Sting played?” (The answers were, respectively, Yes, it was that scene, and No, none of those blokes was Sting.)
So, if this review has the magical ability to convince you of any one thing, please let it be to definitely not rewatch the 1984 Dune before seeing the new one.
But what of the new one, you say? Oh yes, it’s quite impressive. As a work of craft, Dune can be fairly called a masterpiece. The cinematography, production design, visual effects, original score (Hans Zimmer at the top of his game), sound design, and costume design could easily all win their respective Oscars, and they would (probably) all be highly deserved. See this movie on the biggest screen you can find and just soak in it.
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And yet. As a narrative, Dune left me a bit cold. And it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why. Thinking about the Lynch adaptation was certainly part of it, but I also think part of the problem was the other bit of prep work I did before TIFF. You see, I also rewatched the excellent 2014 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune—which I highly recommend if you haven’t seen it—and there’s such an insane, drugged-out creativity to the way that failed project is described that it prepares you in all the wrong ways for the almost clinical sterility of Denis Villeneuve’s vision.
And that’s really the problem—everything that’s so blazingly impressive about Dune’s visual and aural craft is also, simultaneously, a bit emotionally distancing. There’s such a grandeur of scope combined with a grandeur of desolation that they effectively counteract the film’s very capacity for a grandeur of wonder.
Or, perhaps more accurately, these things counteract a grandeur of absorption. For nearly every frame of Dune, I was dazzled by what I was seeing and hearing, but I was constantly and actively thinking about the cinematic craft that I was experiencing. I was never able to lose myself in the story or characters or the mythology that was being built. And there was no scene where our floppy-haired hero thinks about his destiny while staring off into the twin sunset of Tatooine (as the music reaches an emotional crescendo) to help get me there.
I have praised films before for constantly shifting shape, becoming something different than what they started as. Burning immediately comes to mind; Lee Chang-Dong’s 2018 masterpiece began as a meet-cute romance before slowly morphing into a mysterious thriller. Unfortunately, Last Night in Soho takes the opposite path. There is, for sure, a transition in what kind of film we’re watching, but it’s a transition that significantly narrows the film’s scope rather than expands it.
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Last Night in Soho begins as one of the most effective and trippy mysteries I’ve watched in quite some time. Thomasin McKenzie (Jojo Rabbit, Leave No Trace) plays Eloise, a small-town girl in contemporary Britain who moves to London to pursue her dreams of becoming a fashion designer. Once there, Eloise begins having visions and dreams of a beautiful young woman named Sandy (Anya Taylor-Joy, of The Queen’s Gambit fame), who seemed to have lived a sort of double life to Eloise during the height of ‘60s Swinging London.
And let me tell you, that movie, which comprises about the first half of Last Night in Soho, was riveting. The style was infectious, with exciting, inventive visuals and some truly inspired needle drops, as director Edgar Wright has become known for (see Baby Driver and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World). But sadly, that wasn’t the movie that continued to play out.
Around the halfway point, Last Night in Soho becomes a disappointingly conventional horror thriller. And it’s still pretty watchable—Wright is just too talented a filmmaker for anything less—but you eventually realize that everything you spent the first half completely falling in love with was actually in the service of a somewhat blah genre story that you didn’t even know you signed up for. So it’s not that Last Night in Soho didn’t stick the landing; it’s that the plane landed at the wrong airport, in the wrong city.
When mother! came out in 2017, IndieWire critic David Ehrlich said that he loved it but didn’t like it, and that’s kind of where I’ve landed with Titane. Except that I also didn’t really love it. I loved it, like, from an existence point of view. I’m happy it’s out there and people can see it, if that is indeed a choice they’re really sure they want to make for themselves.
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Okay, back up. Titane is one of those movies where saying literally anything about it feels like a spoiler, so let’s see just how cryptic I can be while trying to give you something. In no particular order, Titane features an unexpected (in more ways than one!) pregnancy, a foreboding car crash, an impromptu killing spree, sex with inanimate objects, a missing child, nipple piercings, stolen identity, familial longing, and lots and lots of breasts and motor oil. Makes sense, right? Don’t worry, actually seeing the movie is only of marginal help in that regard.
French filmmaker Julia Ducournau became only the second woman (after Jane Campion in 1993) to win the Cannes Palme d’Or for this truly insane work of body horror and loneliness. Ducournau’s only previous film, 2017’s Raw, was also a gruesome parable of body horror and emerging female sexuality, but for all of its daring stylistic weirdness, it was a fairly conventional narrative. Titane, on the other hand, is one of those movies where things just happen, and you’re either along for the ride or you’ll want to stop watching as soon as possible. I was about to add “with almost no inbetween” to the end of that previous sentence, but somehow I am that inbetween.
I wouldn’t exactly say I was along for the ride, and it would be quite a stretch to say I was enjoying what was unfolding on the screen in front of me, but at the very least, I was wayyyyy too curious where it was going to even consider not finishing the movie. So there’s that.
The reaction of the crowd was distinctly two-sided between the “Masterpiece!” set and the “What in the actual fuck did I just watch?” set. I was pretty firmly in the latter. While I really liked Raw, I just couldn’t get there with Titane. To be sure, there is some brilliant—and certainly bravura—filmmaking going on, but it cares way too much about shocking the audience and way too little about, well, most anything else.
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