TIFF Reviews: Cannes prize winners The Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall & more

The 2023 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival began on Sept. 7 and runs through Sept. 17.

Anatomy of a Fall

This year’s winner of the Palme d’Or features an instrumental version of “P.I.M.P.” by 50 Cent played on a loop. Sandra (Sandra Hüller), Samuel (Samuel Theis) and their visually impaired son Daniel live in an isolated fixer-upper in the French Alps. As the film opens, Sandra entertains a literature student interviewing her about her new book. They’re both drinking wine, and there’s a vague air of flirtation and tense evasion. It’s not long before the unseen Samuel, renovating the upper floors, begins playing a deafening “P.I.M.P.” upstairs on repeat. Sandra laughs it off as she guides the literature student to the door. Perhaps, she says, they should meet again in the city. Not long afterward, we watch as Daniel and his dog, Snoop, go on a walk through the snowy wilderness. When he returns, his father is splayed dead on the snow, suffering a traumatic brain injury after an apparent fall.

Was it an accident, a suicide or a murder? Sandra becomes an immediate suspect. She is the only one in the house, and as the film unfolds, the outwardly happy marriage is revealed to be rife with tensions and resentments. Part mystery and part courtroom drama, the film zeroes in on the impossibility of summing up the complexity of a relationship. Hüller delivers a fascinating performance — bilingual, contradictory and often selfish, she portrays a writer who puts her work above all else. She might be a bad wife, but does that make her a killer? Her husband only appears in flashbacks and descriptors, but even these images are unreliable and incomplete. Not to be taken as naturalistic, the film sparks reflection related to the creation of art and the concept of truth — when we cannot know something absolutely, what we choose to believe shapes possible outcomes and the tenor of our spiritual lives.

Anatomy of Fall is due to be released in Montreal this fall.

The Zone of Interest

The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s long anticipated follow-up to Under the Skin, has to be seen on the big screen. His first film in a decade is vaguely experimental and likely off-putting to a mainstream audience — rarely has a filmmaker working within the mainstream embraced such radical tricks of alienation. Set just outside the Auschwitz extermination camp, commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig strive to build a dream life for their family in a suburban house next to the camp. The film is structured as an increasingly unnerving interpersonal family drama, where the couple go about their daily lives as the horrors unfold within the walls that are on the peripheries.

The film opens with an extended sequence of darkness, as a guttural chanting soundtrack overlays ambiguous inorganic noises and overwhelming sounds of nature. Throughout the film, narrative momentum will be interrupted by black, white and red screens that burn into the viewer’s eyes, staining the proceeding images — lingering long after the action resumes. The film showcases a view of Nazi Germany that manages to unlock new, mundane horrors.

The framing, which emphasizes artifice and alienation, highlights the backdrop of the camp: towers, walls and billowing smoke and fire. Suppose cinema can be understood as a medium of movement, and at least within narrative cinema, capturing the relationship between bodies and space — in that case, Glazer’s emphasis suggests both control and discord. The Höss family exercises dominance over people and space while similarly displaying a complete disregard for the organized violence beyond their walls. Their relationship to the space they live in is far from harmonious, and the framing — which evokes a kind of twisted Antonioni, particularly the atomic images of L’Eclisse, and Franju’s haunted documentary, Le sang des bêtes, about the disguised slaughterhouses that hint at humanity’s capacity for mechanized death — signals more than just an ambivalence towards the suffering of others, but an opportunistic violence rooted in misplaced respectability and order.

Rather than a mere exercise, Glazer makes sure to return to reality, mainly through a short but powerful sequence towards the endpoint of The Zone of Interest, which breaks crucially from the chronology up until this point — a masterpiece.

The Zone of Interest is due to be released in Montreal before the end of the year.

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed

Structured around different chapters and relationships, Joanna Arnow stars in, writes and directs The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed. A hilarious and surprisingly earnest portrait of millennial desire, Arnow plays Ann, a young woman caught in stagnation. Monotone and relatively unexceptional, Ann still yearns to be important. She’s in a dry and strange BDSM relationship with an older man, Allen (Scott Cohen), who demonstrates only vague interest in her life. Anxious over a growing feeling that the people around her barely recognize her existence, she branches out to find a real connection with new people, hoping to finally be seen.

The Feeling that the Time For Doing Something Has Passed never takes itself too seriously. About and also mocking millennial narcissism, the film follows Ann’s journey towards self-actualization as it also pokes fun at her overwhelming need to make an impression on the world. Arnow’s deadpan but ultimately vulnerable performance challenges lines of identification as it utilizes autofiction while subverting the confessional mode through ironic humour and distant, alienating framing. It is a genuinely laugh-out-loud, though incredibly cringy experience. Not since Lena Dunham brought us Girls has someone captured the unique terribleness of white millennial women with the same level of insight, care or comedy.

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed does not currently have a release date.

Music

A retelling of the myth of Oedipus, Angela Schanelec’s Music opens with the view of a Greek mountainside. Fog obscures the image, and the ambient sound of a thunderstorm contributes to a sense of dread. In the film’s first cut, a woman cries against a nearly dark screen. We see the faint figures of bodies in the grass. Her voice, louder than thunder, carries through the space — she’s wailing in despair. It’s not long before a child is found in a small fort made of stone, rescued from certain death. The sequence, as with most of the film, is nearly wordless. One image builds on the next, with vague chronology notes, as the film’s structure eschews expected scene construction that typically establishes context before meaning.

Music brims with minor miracles of light and movement, and the film’s slow pacing allows the viewer to become witnesses to sketchy impressions that evoke ideas more than emotions. The experience of watching the movie may be more alienating than engrossing. Still, the rigour and magic of Schanelec’s vision produces something akin to David Lynch in that it’s guided by an internal logic that feels intuitive if inaccessible to the audience. The Oedipal framework is only vaguely alluded to in the film, as are other references such as references to paintings like Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat, which similarly echoes different famous interpretations of La Piéta, itself a mythological (and occasionally incestuously tinged) depiction of mother and son, this time, the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Music will be frustratingly abstract for many audiences, but it promises incredible rewards for those willing to be hypnotized.

Music does not currently have a release date.

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