Greta Gerwig and art house absurdity at TIFF

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
 
The inevitable had to happen — I had to fuck up. Head out to get some lunch and suddenly you’re traipsing halfway across the city because you can’t tell the difference between a 3 and a 5. The mistake cost me a movie (only saw three on this day, a pitiful score if I’ve ever seen one) but it did get me to the official premiere of Eden, which led me to my first legit celeb sighting of the fest (unless you count dorky film critic dudes that I recognized from the Internet and that one guy that I thought was Jared Leto but could also have just been a non-famous guy who apparently chose to look like that). While I can’t say that watching Greta Gerwig introduce a movie from 40 feet away was in any way a highlight of the fest so far, it certainly was a thing.

I will say that spirits are high as day two comes to a close. While I haven’t been blown away by anything I’ve seen in theatres here (my two top picks remain Leviathan and Deux jours, une nuit, which I saw earlier), the quality has been remarkably consistent. I’m increasingly mourning the screenings I’ll miss on the days I have to report back to my 9-to-5, but the more disturbing notion is that even if I were here every day, I couldn’t possibly see everything I want.
 
Gemma Bovery

I have to say that I generally have trouble mustering up excitement for modern retellings of classic literature. While some have been good (and some have been so out there that they’re hard to ignore), they tend to draw their parallels very broadly and wind up looking dubiously like a checklist of references rather than a fully-formed narrative. Anne Fontaine’s Gemma Bovery (based on a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds) certainly draws pretty broad parallels, but it does so in such a knowing, self-reflexive way that it’s hard to fully fault its broad-side-of-a-barn high school lit-class allusions. Fabrice Luchini stars as Joubert, a baker in rural Normandy who becomes inordinately obsessed with his comely neighbour Gemma Bovery (the luminous Gemma Arterton) after he realizes her life and loves closely mirror that of Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, his favourite novel and one that does not end well for its heroine. Despite the heavy origins of Flaubert’s novel, Gemma Bovery is a fairly light comedy of manners in the purest Gallic tradition, anchored by Arterton’s performance. It isn’t exactly transcendent cinema, but it’s quite enjoyable in its modest pursuits.

 
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

Roy Andersson’s films defy easy categorization: they’re absurdist, sure, and they’re sometimes funny, but they’re definitely not traditional comedies. They’re starkly Swedish, but Andersson has more fun in him than Bergman. I’ll fully cop to the fact that I don’t really get Andersson; as I walked out, I spied a woman with tears streaming down her face while her friend consoled her and described the film as “harrowing,” so clearly his work means different things to different people. Using static tableaus and bizarrely ghoulish actors, Andersson puts forward 37 one-shot sketches of sorts, with the central theme of “existence.” The closest thing to a protagonist is a couple of itinerant Beckettian novelty joke vendors who come turn up regularly in the film, but otherwise it’s is a series of outlandish vignettes that almost plays like an animated painting (or a Far Side cartoon reimagined by Fellini). I can’t say it did much for me, but it’s the work of an auteur with a truly singular voice.

 
Eden

It may disturb some of you to learn this, but the French house scene that bred Daft Punk (who appear as minor characters in this film – the joke being that no one ever recognizes them without their masks) has now been part of culture long enough to have its own nostalgic homage. I personally have no relationship with house music or really any kind of electronic dance music, but that doesn’t prevent Mia Hansen-Love’s Eden from being a highly entertaining and kinetic film.

Based — heavily, it seems to me, but we’ll get back to that — on the life of her brother Sven, it follows a young DJ named Paul (Félix de Givry, practically an unknown before landing the role) as he falls in love with garage music (electronic dance music with soul vocals, basically) and builds his life around DJing and keeping the scene alive. Like most autobiographical films (Sven also co-wrote with his sister), it tends to linger on unnecessary tangents and include things for the sake of including them, resulting in stretches of the 134-minute film feeling rather padded out. Still, de Givry is an appealing lead and Hansen-Love has enough respect and distance from the scene not to turn into a complete sapfest. It doesn’t paint as infectious a portrait of the scene as something like 24 Hour Party People, but Eden is hardly going to make you kick your Frankie Knuckles 12’’ into the garbage.

P.S.: Gretaphiles, take note : the lovely Miss Gerwig only appears in this film for about 10 minutes. ■
 
Read our reports from TIFF day one and day two, feat. reviews of Jean-Marc Vallée’s follow-up to Dallas Buyer’s Club and Marjane Satrapi’s follow-up to Persepolis.