Day 3: September 10

Mr. Tree (Han Jie) W/O

Gave this rigor-free study of a misfit around 30 minutes, around which point
Shu (Baoqiang Wang) had waxed moody about his traumatic past, made violently awkward advances towards the cold mute Xiaomei (Zhuo Tan), fallen into reveries and roughed up kids, to our presumed mild chuckles and mild pity. I didn’t detect a through-line or coherent style, apart from approximating Shu’s mania and wooziness as innocuously as possible.

The Ides of March (George Clooney) B

If Clooney the director loses focus now and then, he still succeeds at giving Clooney the actor an opportunity to riff on moral contradictions—his Governor Morris's interview segment on the death penalty outdoes all of Into the Abyss as an audaciously liberal appeal—and, though he’s no Otto Preminger, and Ides no Advise and Consent, to call out idealistic campaigner Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling) on his every weakness. It’s a light, sharply written and acted movie, conceding to some conventions (Evan Rachel Wood is good in quieter moments and a distraction when called upon to provide tears) and disdaining others, particularly the expectation not to adopt double standards in a competitive realm. Morris and Myers are infused with a balanced dose of demagoguery and self-aware charm; other characters, like Philip Seymour Hoffman’s speechifying Paul Zara, present similarly. Anyone who’s watched a Clooney interview won’t marvel at the mixture: the film resonates as autocritique as much as satire.

This Side of Resurrection (Joaquim Sapinho) W/O

Opening titles, in which DV-shot sylvan and Christian imagery is scored to loud clanking, promise something like a Straub short hijacked by Gaspar Noe; I wasn’t frothing at the mouth. What follows includes listless amateur surfing footage, a well-written and acted breakup, general restraint from Sapinho and his actors, but all the shapeless ennui is so much noodling, and the characters are as sketchily defined as the interior scenes are underlit.

Goodbye First Love (Mia Hansen-Løve) A

A number of split-second moments from Hansen-Løve’s masterpiece outclass entire films at this year’s TIFF: Camille (Lola Créton, so fine in Bluebeard but so much better here) dropping Sullivan’s hand when he renounces dependency as an excuse for not seeing her—a gesture that secures her guilty affection and denies her long-term power; Breillat-like, offhand deployment of everything from nudity (Camille pulling back her yanked sheets from Sullivan, in an early scene, has the filmmaker delicately keeping truth and exploitation in check) to tears (without a trace of mockery, their wetness is more prominent on Camille’s face than her emotions). Her autobiographical love story is like a kindhearted variation on Pialat’s We Won’t Grow Old Together, where sensitivity represents its author’s downfall. Camille’s goodness and intelligence make her romantic nature all the more intractable. But just as the film’s saddest images follow bliss, such as Camille’s shyly disconsolate spasm in Sullivan’s arms following a fine outing, hesitant steps towards intellectual discipline and mutual romantic fulfillment, and the reflection they provide, save Hansen-Løve from committing Camille to doom.

Last Winter (John Shank) W/O

With its Shank's camera following Jacques’s (Carlo Brandt) tedious existence, while spelling out the terms and lineage of his existence in voiceover, Last Winter immediately struck me as what might occur if Lisandro Alonso adapted a Per Patterson novel. Not unappealing, in my book. But as soon Johann began to righteously stand up for preserving local farming policy, its fair-minded but flavorless consideration of complicated issues started to resemble Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men, another well-intentioned, proficiently made movie I bailed on.

Free Men (Ismaël Ferrouki) C+

Ferroukhi’s Le grand voyage was an eccentric animal, dishing out dime-store homilies with one hand, incisively picking apart ideological excess and immaturity with the other. I approached Free Men, a bigger-budget project hewing to real-life heroism, with equal parts hope and trepidation, assuming that one side of Ferroukhi would fully emerge. But the new movie produces precisely the same unwieldy mix as the last one. Like Le grand voyage’s Reda, Younes (Tahar Rahim) is a lazy, childish protag capable of doing good, but frequently embarrassing himself. If anything, it’s awkward how little Ferroukhi’s men get away with on charm alone: the conventionally handsome Rahim seems miscast as a man-child. Though Younes’s transparent wretchedness is a little misplaced, without it the film would have little to work with, and it lends a certain ambiguous power to his heroic acts, which Rahim’s deer-in-headlights look effectively drains of righteousness. I can’t vouch passionately for Free Men or Le grand voyage, but I do fear Ferroukhi’s unusual virtues will be misunderstood. He’s a good director who happens to value pat moral lessons and visual anonymity; more power to anyone who can actually pull that off.