FNC 2024 Reviews: Matt and Mara, A Traveler's Needs, Grand Tour, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

Our reviews from the 53rd Edition of the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (FNC 2024), running from Oct. 9 to 20.

Matt and Mara

Mara (Deragh Campbell), a creative writing teacher, has been caught in a rut. Her marriage, rife with tension, makes her home life difficult. She hasn’t been published for a while. After she reunites with a friend from undergrad, Matt (Matt Johnson), a controversial writer, the sparks of desire momentarily light up her life. Filmed in a loose, spontaneous style and reviving one of the greatest cinematic subgenres — the not-love-story between two attractive people — Matt and Mara showcases a new take on Canadian cinema that embraces minimalism and innovation. Equal parts a meditation on literature and on the nature of love, the film follows the waves of Mara’s wistful ennui; working its way through swinging lulls of frustration and boredom, with momentary bursts of explosive yearning.

The film’s effectiveness lies very much in the casting. Campbell and Johnson have opposite but complementary performance styles. Where Campbell is interior, alive in reaction, Johnson is exterior, a restless activator. They represent not only what the other doesn’t have, but a dream of what might have been. The attraction to each other transcends lust, but embodies a desire to return to an earlier time when everything seemed possible. Their differing styles similarly apply to writing and the production of art. To “make it” in this industry, is provocation a necessity? What kind of lives do authors live and how does it shape the work that they make? Mara, a teacher and also a mother, lacks the freedom of Matt; but perhaps his dilettante life is more common and pedestrian than hers. What shapes fiction? The world around us, or the one that exists inside? The film features many non-actors, including writers like Emma Healey (Best Young Woman Job Book) and Marlowe Granados (Happy Hour), both of whom challenge, through auto-fiction and persona, the line between author and subject. Are we the art we make? Or does it exist outside of us?

Matt and Mara screened twice at FNC and is scheduled for a Nov. 1 theatrical release in Montreal.

A Traveler’s Needs

Prolific and esteemed Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo increasingly embraces humility and simplicity in his approach to filmmaking. Even with a major star like Isabelle Huppert in the film (it’s her third collaboration with the filmmaker after Claire’s Camera and In Another Country), the crew remains minuscule; the director also shot, edited, scored and produced the movie. Built around three distinct sections, A Traveler’s Needs follows the life and lessons of Iris (Huppert), a French teacher who has developed her own style of teaching language built around strong emotions and poetry. Nearly the entire film unfolds in English, the second or third language of most of the actors and characters. Loose in structure and style, the film embraces a profound and playful approach to language. Forced to communicate in discomfort, cultural differences and similarities rise to the forefront; the subtleties of communication are amplified and also reduced due to fears of miscommunication.

Gestures and glances become essential communicators of internal worlds. Iris has her particular quirks: leaving the room when someone begins to play an instrument, a flirtatious giggle when dealing with a client’s husband and a languid but forceful walk. The movie’s compositions facilitate long takes and extended discussions that force characters and the audience to sit in patience as words are slowly summoned from the ether. The patterns that emerge work for comedic effect, but also speak to a kind of deeper truth in Iris’s unconventional approach. Throughout the film, I found myself falling into French thoughts and how new languages can form new ways of feeling and seeing. In a world that feels so enslaved to optimization and efficiency, it’s beautiful to watch a film that feels like a grand tribute to the unhurried beauty of poetry.

A Traveler’s Needs screened twice at FNC. It doesn’t currently have a Montreal release date.

Grand Tour

One of our greatest working filmmakers, Portugal’s Miguel Gomes, captures with his films, a sense of dreaming. With his latest, Grand Tour, which won him the Best Director Prize at the recent Cannes film festival, he tells an epic love story that spans the Asian continent. Blurring the line between eras, locales and documentary, he creates a hybrid account of an absurdist love story turned tragedy. The film begins in 1917, as British diplomat Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) gets cold feet for his upcoming marriage and undertakes a journey across Asia to escape his fiancé Molly (Crista Alfaiate). Shot (mostly) in black and white, like Gomes’s previous films Arabian Nights and Tabu, period locales are intermixed with contemporary documentary footage as a means of invoking a dreamlike impact. As if characters are self-aware of their own fictional framings, they too seem to drift in and out of sleeping, fevers and environments, stumbling out of time.

While on one hand an incredibly straightforward love story, these interruptions and tangents contribute a sense of melancholic motif to Grand Tour that elevates it above a more conventional approach. With hints of Max Ophuls films, particularly La Ronde and Madame de…, the rhythm and patterns of going around in circles undercuts the love story of a couple who never share the screen. Footage of grandiose balls are contrasted against roundabouts in contemporary cityscapes; the circles of love and loss rebound through time and space. Featuring layers of narration, which are epistolary, confessional and intimate, the movie embraces humour as a means of creating an absurdist parable about desire. Laughter and music fill out the frame, creating an experience that overflows with pleasure. The embrace of artifice amidst so much nonfiction, points to fiction’s capacity to unveil truths about our inner world, unavailable to the realm of documentary and reportage. It’s only through art that love can overcome death.

Grand Tour screens for a second time at Concordia’s Hall Building (1455 de Maisonneuve W.) on Friday, Oct. 18, 6 p.m.

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

Raoul Peck’s Ernest Cole: Lost and Found unearths an archive of more than 60,000 35mm negatives discovered in a bank vault in Stockholm. With a narration pieced together from diaries, letters and interviews, the movie paints a portrait of the South African photographer’s life up until his ultimately death in 1990. Exiled from his homeland after creating a photobook documenting the extent of Apartheid in South Africa, Cole went on to shoot more photography in the United States and Europe before his health problems became too overwhelming. While much of the film uses Cole’s photography, the movie intercuts several talking-head interviews, some archival footage and contemporary footage of the migrant crisis to tell the story of a condemned man. The film’s underlying tension lies in the notion that, even after death, Cole’s work remains under the control of others.

The subject by itself is enough to sustain interest in the film, even if the approach doesn’t always work. The Ken Burns style of using zooms and reframing in order to “optimize” the drama of Cole’s photographic work ends up feeling cheap. While the effect is used to emphasize the contrast present in photos, replicating the way eyes might glance over a scene, the impact is gimmicky — a way of forcing attention to an overstimulated audience who cannot sit still with an image. While it’s meant to underline the political weight of Cole’s work, it often undermines the artistry of his approach as it shifts importance away from framing towards unnatural movement that recontextualize meaning. That being said, the subject overcomes this aesthetic choice, and the film stands on its own as a powerful political object.

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found screened twice at FNC and is scheduled for a Montreal theatrical release in Nov. 2024.

For the complete Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (FNC) 2024 program, please visit their website.

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