2021 Toronto Int. Film Fest Diary: Entry 1 - Starting on a High Note

There's a strange atmosphere at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Last year's edition -- which offered digital, in person and outdoor screenings -- suffered from communication issues and bad press, resulting in last minute backtracking on things like offering concessions. From the looks of it, TIFF learned some lessons from that experience which drives a cautious approach this year: digital screenings remain (but with a shortened viewing window), while proof of vaccination and mask wearing are required to participate in any physical screenings.

But try as they might, TIFF cannot do much to relieve the tension surrounding a public festival happening in the middle of a pandemic. Adding to that tension is an obvious strain on the quality and availability of the selections; some distributors and rights holders of films refuse to participate in the digital component, meaning buzzier titles like "Dune" and "Spencer," or Cannes winners like "Memoria" and "A Hero," can only show for people willing to accept the risk of a physical indoor screening. The festival tries its best given the circumstances, but the results feel like a sloppy dance performance, taking steps forwards and backwards to appease the industry and audiences without falling flat on its face. How well they pull that act off over the next 10 days remains to be seen.

To start things off on a high note, I took advantage of TIFF's replays of major festival titles to take in some of the films that competed at Cannes this summer. First up is Mia Hansen-Love's "Bergman Island," where filmmaker couple Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) take up a residence on Fårö, the island where legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman called home.

Hansen-Love splits her film into two distinct parts, with the first offering layers of self-awareness about Bergman and her own life (Hansen-Love was in a long-term relationship with French director Olivier Assayas, although it's hard to guess how much art imitates life here). After hearing about Bergman's complicated relationship with his own family, Chris expresses disappointment in how the cruelty and darkness of his films match his own life, wishing for some way to separate art from the artist.

This exchange doubles as a sort of mission statement for Hansen-Love, as "Bergman Island" tries to tackle dark, emotional subject matter without the harshness Bergman was known for. It's a challenge she pulls off with ease, using the sunny island setting and subtle cracks in Chris and Tony's relationship to create a casual mood with a melancholic current running underneath the surface. And just as "Bergman Island's" first half settles in, Hansen-Love flips the script as it switches over to showing the new film Chris is working on, where a young woman (a fantastic Mia Wasikowska) runs into an old flame (Anders Danielsen Lie) while they attend a wedding on the same island. Fragments of Chris' life inform her story, and more enigmatic parts only deepen the specificity of feelings Hansen-Love's film is able to conjure up. "Bergman Island" may be understated in how it carries itself, but it's a bold achievement in its willingness to take on matters of the heart that rarely get the kind of sensitivity and focus displayed here.

Existing on a completely different register is Bruno Dumont's "France," where the French provocateur sets his sights on the media. Lea Seydoux plays TV reporter France de Meurs, who hosts a successful evening news program where she shows herself covering hot button issues like wars or the immigration crisis. France loves her job and performs it with reckless abandon, whether it's goofing off in front of the French president at a press conference (a combination of seamless editing and terrible compositing that will have audiences howling) or having rebel soldiers pose for her camera like she's directing a film. It's the kind of absurdist humor Dumont has excelled in over the last decade, except this time with a lot more bite given his outright disdain for the infotainment industry.

But Dumont remains an unclassifiable filmmaker, and just as we expect "France" to spend its time giddily attacking the media it swerves into more spiritual territory. After France gets into a minor car accident that injures an underprivileged man, her worldview shatters, turning her into a crying wreck whenever she's not in front of a camera. "France" received a chilly reception at Cannes, which comes as no surprise given how Dumont expects viewers to put in more legwork than they're used to. Seydoux's character remains elusive in giving a clear idea of her inner turmoil, although it's part of the point; how can someone whose entire life is performance be able to let others in? That forced distance can pose a challenge, along with some of Dumont's choices that can look borderline incompetent whether it's bad projected screens during driving scenes or the shaggy dog structure (a cliched hot mic moment leads to a crisis that resolves itself as quickly as it's established). But "France" is a hard film to shake once it's over, as Dumont uses his wealthy, privileged protagonist to examine the irreconcilable difference between feeling contented and living in a world of turmoil. For France, her wealth can afford ritzy distractions as remedies but no resolution.

Winner of the Jury Prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Memoria" is his long-awaited follow-up to 2015's "Cemetery of Splendor" and probably his most ambitious project to date. It's the out director's first film to have him leave his home country of Thailand, placing him in Colombia with acting powerhouse Tilda Swinton in the lead role. With a major star and the backing of distributor Neon, "Memoria" will likely be the first exposure many theater-goers have to Weerasethakul's work; thankfully he hasn't compromised his style one bit.

Swinton plays Jessica, a Scottish expat living in Colombia who wakes up one night to the sound of a loud thud. She can't place the source of it, and no one else can hear it, which leads her on a journey to discover what's happening. Anyone familiar with Weerasethakul's work knows story doesn't matter too much, and that basic description covers almost three quarters of the film's runtime. What matters in "Memoria" is how its story unfolds, through moments like Jessica trying to recreate the sound with an audio engineer (one of the early standout scenes), wandering the streets of Bogota, or going on a venture with an archaeologist.

Weerasethakul takes his time to adjust audiences to his emphasis on nature and the environment, keeping the central mystery of the noise on the backburner (but always throwing it in now and then to give people a jolt). It's only in the film's latter section, where Jessica meets a man scaling fish near a jungle, that "Memoria" finally opens itself up in ways that are surprising at first but end up fitting in perfectly with everything that came before it. Without getting too detailed, "Memoria" tries to move the idea of memory from a subjective experience to an objective one, where people can use nature to tap into sensations outside of their own experience and gain empathy from their surroundings. Weerasethakul's choice to have his central idea click into place so late in the game could be seen as a bit too clever, but there's no point getting picky when the effect works as well as it does here. For those new to Weerasethakul's work and willing to give "Memoria" a chance, it's one of the rare films to leave you with a fresh perspective on everything around you.