Days 1 and 2

pro:

La Pivellina (Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel)

Plays admirably loosely with latent tension for most of its running time, then ends, astonishingly, on exactly the right note. Covi and Frimmel (apparently their own 2-person crew) get one of the most amazingly natural and dynamic child performances I've seen, along with several adult ones to rival it. The "invisible" Dardennes-esque handheld camerawork, never in the wrong place, cements the team as naturals. I'm slightly unsure whether the various character threads pay off structurally, but the feeling upon exit was that they did.

Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo)

Starting to feel as if Hong, as of late, is caring less and less about structure and more about good scenes. Which is fine--much of the first half of his latest is, for this Hong aficionado, hilarious, deriving considerable laughs from awkward sycophantic encounters, and the dream sequence here is his finest yet--but I left with the vague feeling that I wouldn't have trouble indicting Hong for self-plagiarism, and much of the inventiveness of his early/mid-00's work stemmed from the experience of stepping back and looking at the big picture, which is all but non-existent here. Also, what is with the ever-so-slight zooms? For what little they add in precision, is Hong ignorant of or merely indifferent to their strangeness?

Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont)

Best scene of the festival and perhaps all year is the bar conversation between Yassine and Celine, which is as low-key as it is intensely moving. Few works of art so evocatively straddle the thin line between spiritual and carnal love. However, the Nassir material is nearly all either clumsy or deeply flawed, tainting a rigorous Bresson imitation like a, well, chatty pedagogue. Why does Dumont go out of his way to make Celine appear relatively normal and socialized only to well... y'know? I'm also uncertain that Dumont was wise to begin treating his lead actress like Maria Falconetti. Nevertheless, this picture is front- and back-loaded with beautiful stuff, and speaking of intensely moving, it's nice to see the oft-maligned Dumont be applauded at a TIFF screening for (perhaps) the first time ever.

mixed:

Face (Tsai Ming-Liang)

Most of the pleasure I took away from this movie involves imagining the phone call Tsai gave Mathieu Amalric, explaining the nature of the latter's "cameo," itself a self-contained Warholian short. Otherwise, WTFOMGBBQ.

con:

Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos)

Inscrutably pretentious, or pretentiously inscrutable. Either way, forced touches like jump-cutting non-diegetic music, deliberately obscure dialogue, and deliberately obscure camerawork a la Lucrecia Martel add flame to the fire. Can't figure out whether the film's defenders find it absurdly funny or incisive: the humor seemed to me akin to the joke in Period Film X when Character Y remarks that Real Life Event Z would never actually happen, and as far as taking the movie seriously, I found the actors so mysteriously mannered that the audience must either A) invent an unseen Big Brother type or B) diagnose every character as severely autistic in order to grant performance tone meaning.

CON:

Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar)

Almodovar appears to have replaced any productive irony or distance from melodrama with irritating, tongue-in-cheek asides. The maturity of his late style has apparently molded into smugness. Will he find his way again? I’m tempted not to find out…

L'enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea)

The psychedelic screen tests surely merit a “huh,”; but I’d follow that with a prompt “let’s move on,” which Clouzot fanboy Bromberg heartily delays. As someone who’s just wrapped his first feature, it’s insulting to be fed anecdotes of the director’s borderline-incompetence—Clouzot appeared nervous and evasive, retook and reshot scenes endlessly—along with the implication that these qualities are somehow beneficial. If they are, prove it, rather than relying on the facile notion that madness = genius. The footage we see here, albeit out of context, is certainly less than phenomenal; a single YouTube clip of Josef von Sternberg’s unfinished I, Claudius struck me as more promising than anything here. Attempts to recreate the original L’enfer also ring hollow because Claude Chabrol, whom many cinephiles, including myself, consider superior to Clouzot, has already made it in full.