Anora

The title character of Sean Baker’s Anora notably does not go by that name for most of the film, and appears uncomfortable when male characters tell her how pretty her birth name is. In fact, Mikey Madison’s character prefers to be called Ani, and it plays into the dominant theme of the film, which is how we define ourselves in relation to how others do. Ani is a young exotic dancer working out of a club in Brooklyn not far from the Russian enclave of Brighton Beach. Ani’s gregarious and fast-talking, a hustler if you will; it’s a topless club but she knows if she brings the right kind of big spender back to the private room she can get away with dropping her bottoms as well. She also moonlights as a well-paid escort making private visits to client’s homes where she has sex with them. She is, in judgment-free terms, a sex worker. And yet the surest way to wind her up and get her to act crazy is to call her a “prostitute” (kind of like calling Marty McFly “chicken”). Ani has a strong sense of herself and her worth as a person (and particularly the value of her services), but her perception does not necessarily align with the world’s. Reconciling who a person is deep down versus our impression of them is, when it comes down to it, the very nature of Baker’s film.

Ani quickly becomes the favorite stripper of Vanya (Mark Eidelstein) , a floppy-haired party boy — a child, really, in all but the legal sense — who’s initially smitten with her because she can speak Russian. Vanya is the son of Russian oligarchs whose parents have allowed him to spend his early 20s in America so he can sow his wild oats before returning to Mother Russia to take his place within their organization. Adulthood and responsibility loom imminently, but until then Vanya lives in a mansion in a gated community, has endless amounts of cash to burn through, access to a private jet, and no live-in supervision. When he becomes smitten with Ani, she knows a good thing when she sees it. So begins a whirlwind “romance” in the most mercenary sense of the word. Ani is regularly beckoned to Vanya’s home to have sex for money, which eventually becomes an endless parade of parties, clubbing, and 20-something mischief. Ani may be having a blast with Vanya and his friends, but she hasn’t forgotten herself and she hasn’t taken her eye off the prize: when Vanya asks if he can rent Ani exclusively for a week, she does so for $15,000 cash (and as if to emphasize how transactional this all is, he playfully teases her that he would have paid double after they shake on the deal).

That all starts to change during an impromptu trip to Vegas when, in post-sex repose, Vanya advances an idea that would change both of their lives. If they were to get married Vanya could stay in America indefinitely and Ani would be set for life. When Ani astonishes herself by saying “yes,” it’s unclear whether there are hearts or dollar signs in her eyes. After a quickie wedding off the Vegas strip, the new husband and wife fly back to New York to spend their days idly lounging in a mansion that someone else is paying for, fucking each other’s brains out, and getting high all day. But about that house — that’s where the trouble comes in. As word slowly trickles out that Vanya has gotten hitched to “a prostitute,” a panic sets in across the globe, cracking a whip that’s felt thousands of miles away. Toros (Baker mainstay Karren Karagulian), an Armenian intermediary, is summoned from the middle of a christening — in a supremely awkward scene — to get his arms around the situation and ascertain whether the rumors are true. Toros in turn dispatches two flunkies, his chatty younger brother Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and the more introspective Russian Igor (Yuriy Borisov), to sit on Vanya and Ani until he can get to the house in order to separate the facts from fiction. A seriocomic confrontation ensues with a terrified Vanya fleeing the house on foot and leaving his bride behind, while a confused, practically feral, Ani all but destroys a floor of the mansion while trying to be “gently” subdued by Garnick and Igor. When Toros finally does arrive, after surveying the damage sustained to both the house and his men at the hands of Ani, he lays it all out for her and the viewer: they’re going to find Vanya, get him in front of a judge for a quickie annulment, and buy-off Ani, all by the time Vanya’s parents arrive in the U.S. on a red-eye the next morning.

So begins the long-odyssey-through-the-night aspect of Anora, with the three men and a compelled-by-force Ani searching for Vanya who is drunkenly roaming the hang-out spots of Brighton Beach. This thread, which makes up the bulk of the film’s 140-minute runtime, really does speak to how effectively Baker switches up tones and styles of filmmaking. The first third of the film passes in a blur; a rapid-fire yet somewhat enervating montage of decadence amidst adult playgrounds and well-furnished spaces, lit by red and blue gels and neon (the most memorable composition in the film is during a shot-on-the-fly sequence when newlyweds Ani and Vanya celebrate on Fremont Street in Vegas, their heads framed by the electronic fireworks display on the monitors above them). But the film shifts into something looser and talkier, with characters screaming over one another in a cacophony of agitated voices punctuated by Ani cursing people out and unexpected explosions of vomit (Garnick, you see, suffered a nasty concussion while attempting to detain Ani). The action relocates to the Coney Island boardwalk in the middle of winter, all gas stations and depressing-looking diners. But for all the desperate chatter, there are also a great many moments of prolonged silence as a dejected Ani is shoved into the back of an SUV and reflects on what her life has become, this while the imposing-looking yet ultimately gallant Igor unsuccessfully tries to make polite conversation to cut the tension.

But that underscores how little we got to know Vanya and, more importantly, how little Ani did. Ani rejects the very notion of being bought off to agree to an annulment — for all of $10,000, which both the character and the audience understands to be an insultingly low amount — standing on principle that Vanya is her husband and they are “in love.” But are they, and do either Ani or Vanya actually believe that? He abandons her at the fight sign of trouble and ignores her frantic phone calls so that he can drink himself into oblivion before facing the music. At the same time, when exactly did Ani supposedly stop viewing Vanya as a meal ticket and rather as her partner? And is she fighting so hard to keep him because there’s really love there or because she knows what life looks like when she has to go back to working on the pole? Has she in fact deluded herself into believing that she can have someone who will care for her and not objectify her, and if so, what does that look like with someone as immature and self-involved as Vanya?

These are the central questions of Anora, and the magic of Madison’s performance is that the more dire the situation looks — when any other person might resign themselves to the inevitability of the odds against a happy ending — the more the character retrenches; pledging loyalty and devotion to someone who’s fundamentally unworthy of her. She’s broken the golden rule of sex work: don’t fall for the fantasy. She is, in other words, a Sean Baker protagonist. Someone streetwise with a harsh edge who has allowed themselves to consider a life beyond their current station, confusing financial stability with emotional support, and there’s real ache to Ani beginning to let go of that dream. For much of the film, the character takes a literal backseat to Toros and his keystone kops antics, but Madison’s always drawing our gaze, silently stewing (occasionally even gagged with an expensive scarf) as the hopes for something better dissipate and her natural light slowly escapes her body. She’s taken money for sex before, but if she agrees to a pay-off simply to go away, can she really deny, even to herself, that she is a prostitute? Is that the final veil to fall away?

As the endless party gives way to the sobering cold light of day and the inescapable reality of what real power is and who actually wields it sets in, Baker’s pragmatic humanism comes to the fore. As he is uniquely gifted at — demonstrated across a filmography consumed with sex workers and those living on the fringes of polite society —, he bestows depth and grace to characters who have been defined, by themselves and others, as less than. The film’s extended denouement walks a precarious tightrope between an unrealistic happy ending and honoring the true nature of these characters who can’t shed their damages like an expensive sable or jewelry. They are flawed and self-defeating, but remain deserving of receiving (and capable of giving) kindness in their own imperfect ways. And that’s what Baker does: he breaks your heart into a thousand pieces, then helps you gather them all up. That’s the miracle of the film. — ANDREW DIGNAN

Emilia Pérez

Just shy of 10 years after winning an ill-deserved Palme d’Or for Dheepan (2015) — a leering intrusion into the lives of a makeshift Sri Lankan family, shunted mercilessly from one violent situation to the next — French director Jacques Audiard returned to the Croisette with his latest exercise in cultural tourism. The Mexico-set Emilia Pérez, which walked away with the fest’s Jury Prize and a Best Actress award for its ensemble cast, has been billed as a telenovela-gangster-musical about a cartel boss who fakes her own death in order to transition to womanhood. If this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is, and Audiard’s latest wastes no time in showing you the full extent to which a film can renege on its logline. Emilia Pérez isn’t just the most perniciously racist and transphobic film to rule the festival circuit in as many years as this writer has been alive (though that alone should have been enough to nip its reign of terror in the bud); it’s also an opera with no sense of musicality, a melodrama with no investment in human emotion, a thriller with no pulse, and a redemption story with no redeeming qualities.

If that seems like an extreme statement, allow a picture to be painted. A light-up mariachi band fades into a cityscape drone shot (the first of so, so many) as an auto-tuned overture guides us toward Rita Mora (Zoe Saldaña), a defense attorney with mixed feelings about the role she is playing in her country’s network of corruption. She proves easily bought, however, when the infamous “Manitas del Monte” — soon to be Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón) — offers her a small fortune to orchestrate her rebirth and tuck Mrs. del Monte (Selena Gomez) and their children conveniently away (the details of Rita’s task are not known to her when she agrees, only the numerical figure). The buildup to Emilia’s transition is excruciating; Gascón (a Spanish actress who feels “Mexican by adoption”) performs in cartoonish brownface as Manitas, and in spite of having already started hormone treatment, the character is constantly misgendered even by those ostensibly working in her best interest. Tellingly, the appropriate pronouns are only implemented in the screenplay once she undergoes SRS, and Audiard stages a ghoulish musical number in a Thai plastic surgery facility that all-too-perfectly encapsulates the cisgendered obsession with biological modes of transition.

It’s after a four-year time jump, however, that Audiard reveals his full hand; Rita and Emilia are reunited in a posh London restaurant, and Rita is pulled back into Emilia’s orbit when she facilitates the return of her children to Mexico, disgruntled mother in tow. Upon their return, the two women are confronted with the impacts of their former lives on the country they used to call home. A woman wandering the streets handing out missing posters of her dead son — implied to have been murdered by Pérez’s cronies almost a decade prior — inspires Emilia to recover his remains and bring this bereaved mother closure. As Emilia and Rita drift between the former’s obscenely lavish villa overlooking Mexico City and the offices of the NGO they’ve founded together, which expands this process of excavation to a national level, Gomez’s clueless and restless Jessi ditches the children to party with a former squeeze. A slapdash love interest (the underused Adriana Paz) enters Emilia’s life for seemingly no reason other than lesbian optics, and shortly thereafter Audiard pits all of these women against each other in a rush to get to its dutifully violent conclusion.

Aside from the dramatic frailty of its screenplay’s unmitigated wreck of moral conflicts and compromises, Emilia Pérez’s attempts to paint a larger picture of a Mexico in crisis are dubious to say the least. Aforementioned drone shots notwithstanding, it was primarily shot on a soundstage in Paris, per the director’s wishes, and this lends itself to the film’s lack of texture and sense of place. The camera glides over its subjects with an air of condescension and self-righteousness, and these sentiments are matched by the pitiful soundtrack, which clamorously cycles through vague platitudes and shameless stereotypes — during the big “national healing” number, a repentant man asks for his skin to be cleansed of tattoos, and for someone to teach him that one and two make three). Emilia Pérez is a sour, smirking film that touts numerous borrowed labels, and hides behind the PR-friendly faces of actresses who should have known better, in a desperate bid to make its quintessential Gallicisms easier to swallow. — ALEXANDER MOONEY

Grand Tour

Like his 2012 masterpiece Tabu, Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour uses the transition from the silent to the sound era to explore the passage into a post-colonial situation, employing deliberate anachronisms to undercut the imperialist — and in this case Orientalist — trappings of empire. Nominally set in 1917, the film opens in Rangoon, where Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a British civil servant, is awaiting his fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate), who is set to arrive in the Burmese capital after a long-term engagement. When he impulsively hops on a boat to Singapore to flee the impending marriage, however, it becomes just the first stop in a meandering odyssey that will eventually take him to Bangkok, Manila, Tokyo, and Shanghai, among other locales. In the first of the film’s two parts, we follow Edward’s harried peregrinations; in the second, we follow Molly’s intrepid pursuit of him. Throughout, we are made aware of the disjunction between these twined journeys of the colonial imagination and the myriad realities screened out in the process.

The clearest strategy Gomes employs to this end is his interweaving of the film’s dominant black-and-white 16mm palette with contemporary documentary footage shot in color (the latter credited to no less than three DPs). An early passage in Rangoon shows a set of local amusements, such as a small ferris wheel powered not by an automated mechanism, but by two young men kicking and shoving it along. The implication here, at least in part, is not merely the persistence of pre-industrial technologies, but also their continued appeal to the eye of a Western tourist. Perhaps more significant, though, is the way Gomes employs disjunctions between image and sound within the frame itself. The most notable instance of this is a sequence where slowed-down footage of motorcycles and cars rounding a traffic circle in Vietnam is set to the “The Blue Danube,” suggesting a perspective that would equate a journey through Asia with a Kubrickian space odyssey. But there are other, less bombastic instances as well. Apart from her great beauty, Molly’s most notable feature in the film is her uniquely unflattering laugh, which, in showing us what we might have heard if we were present during silent film productions — particularly with those actors who failed to make the transition into the talking era — points up also to the darker histories of early ethnographic filmmaking. Similarly, the fact that all the British characters in the film speak in Portuguese points to the film-historical vagaries of translation, subtitling, and dubbing, and the inevitable infelicities of such practices.

Arguably the most intriguing aspect of Grand Tour, however, is the way it explores — and exploits — our sense of time, which remains unstable throughout. The sight of the human-powered ferris wheel in Rangoon, or of an open-air hotel in Singapore, for instance, may well have existed in 1917, whereas the view of towering skyscrapers in Shanghai, or of a cell phone dropped in a bamboo forest, immediately pulls us into the present day. And as we follow Edward and Molly across the continent, such anachronisms proliferate. The cumulative effect is to prompt us to continually reconceive how we are meant to link together, both spatially and temporally, the various stops of this Asian “grand tour.” In so doing, Gomes points up to the unstable conditions under which we are even capable of placing ourselves within a historical timeline. If Grand Tour nonetheless stands as a lesser entry in Gomes’ body of work, however, it is because the film does not, in the end, do much more than gesture. The film’s peripatetic structure was significantly shaped by pandemic-era constraints, with Gomes directing various passages remotely and recreating others on artificial soundstages — but for all its concept-forward flourishes, it mainly resonates for how its production rhymes with the touristic gaze of Edward and Molly’s journey. Like a second-rate magic act, it leaves one not with a lingering sense of wonder, but only with a faint curiosity about how the trick was done. — LAWRENCE GARCIA  

Bird

Andrea Arnold is not without talent, but she has some of the worst instincts of any allegedly major director. Take Fish Tank, for example. Not only does the film feature an honest-to-goodness fish tank, but the young protagonist continually posts hip-hop dance videos of herself, hoping to be discovered and rescued from poverty. See? She’s reduced to a spectacle to be observed behind glass. Or in American Honey, a group of wayward teens travel the country conducting a magazine-subscription scam, which Arnold presents as if it were an act of punk defiance. Are we still pretending that the hustle is transgressive, and not just an even bigger scam perpetrated against the working poor?

Bird, Arnold’s latest, is yet another dip into carefully art-directed British destitution. In the opening scene we’re introduced to Bailey (Nykiya Adams, a strong newcomer), standing on a bridge using her phone to record flying birds. (The bird somehow stays in the center of her shot even as we see her holding her phone still.) Then, lo and behold, a highly symbolic seagull walks right up to her. “Hey! I’m a symbolic bird! Squawk!” It seems that Arnold’s admirers appreciate that she departs from the Ken Loach/Alan Clarke template of council-flat realism, but she inflects that televisual style with dollops of magic realism that never quite gel with the rest of the project, making these fillips seem like special pleading. Strip away the coming-of-age restlessness and culture-of-poverty apologetics, and what we have here is really just a grungy, shaky-cam version of Pete’s Dragon, where a mysterious stranger (Franz Rogowski) with a hidden supernatural alter-ego — he flies! — shows up to protect a child living in squalor and relative neglect.

At first it seems like her dad Bug (Barry Keoghan) is going to be the problem. But then the story shifts to Bailey’s mother (Jasmine Jobson) and her three small siblings, all endangered by Mom’s latest violent drunkard boyfriend. When Bailey feels empowered, a white bird follows her movements and even seems to respond to her needs. (It helpfully delivers a message to Bailey’s brother’s boyfriend.) But when trouble is brewing, a black crow starts shadowing her instead. What’s most disappointing is that Bird has a few graceful moments, mostly having to do with paternal tenderness and unexpected bursts of celebration. (A Coldplay sing-along, one that begins ironically but ends in sincerity, is a cute interlude that recalls the “Tiny Dancer” scene in Almost Famous.)  But Arnold is so besotted with her very particular image of Britain’s urban poor that, despite her best intentions, Bird is classist and condescending. The United Kingdom’s not perfect, but it deserves a better grade of auteur. — MICHAEL SICINSKI 

Friendship

Over the course of three seasons, I Think You Should Leave has cemented Tim Robinson as a genuinely iconic comedic performer. With episodes under 20 minutes packed with sketches lending themselves to repeated viewing and intense memeability, Robinson’s distinct comedic and literal voices have pervaded culture. It took six years after being fired from Saturday Night Live for Robinson to get such a showcase, and with the disappearance of the studio comedy, it’s taken until now for him to lead a film.

Written and directed by Andrew DeYoung, a frequent collaborator of Kate Berlant and John Early making his feature debut, Friendship is clearly Robinson’s film despite appearing across a much more established star in Paul Rudd. When Austin (Rudd) moves in down the street from Craig (Robinson,) they briefly hit it off before Craig alienates Austin by being untenably annoying. Though Robinson doesn’t have a screenplay credit, the film’s rhythms are defined by his absurd voice and total disconnect from reality. Though his characters on his show and in this film all bear different names, it’s not dissimilar to Paul Reubens portraying Pee-Wee Herman in both his own projects and ones initiated by others.

Also much like Pee-Wee, it seems a bit improbable that such a one-note persona could sustain an entire feature. Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure pulls off the trick by combining Herman’s amiability with the visual invention of early-career Tim Burton. DeYoung’s direction exceeds mere competency, but it isn’t going to blow anyone away, and Robinson’s energy is on the opposite end of the likability scale. There’s also nothing to escalate; the scenarios may become more intense, but Robinson is by design always operating at 100%, and so after a point nothing Craig does comes as a surprise.

Where Robinson and DeYoung manage to mine some dynamism, then, is by playing with status. Though Robinson frequently plays detestable cucks, and that’s generally what Craig is, he’s also able to propel himself to a higher status by sheer force of will (think of his character as a Season 3 sketch with Beck Bennett who is the leader of a cult like “friend group”). Rudd’s charisma generally lends itself to the opposite, and as a local weatherman he is indeed vastly more popular than Craig, but cracks in that persona also allow his and Robinson’s dynamic to shuffle back and forth to some extent. Kate Mara plays Craig’s wife Tami and gets about as much screentime as Rudd, and though she gets to deadpan a few strong laugh lines, the role ultimately hews too closely to the archetypal thankless wife: no amount of agency within the confines of the film could ever explain why Tami would fall for Craig, and it’s tougher to watch such a relationship play out over 90 minutes than four.

That being said, what matters most is that the film is funny. Robinson is cilantro as a performer, though no one who already can’t stand him is going to be won over by Friendship; everyone else is likely to get what they want out of it. The screenplay has plenty of actual jokes to go with Robinson’s performance, including one subversion of an exhausted trope that approaches actual genius. Even in a screening for press and industry at TIFF, several scenes received laughs well beyond their conclusion, and at other points spontaneous giggles became outright contagious. Conner O’Malley, a comedian with an even more intense if also more niche cult than Robinson, makes a characteristically unhinged cameo, and Carmen Christopher, another ITYSL performer, gets a memorable moment during the film’s climax. Which all goes to say, Friendship may not be the mainstream comedy classic this decade lacks, but Rudd’s presence at least provides a bridge for a new generation of comedic talent to a previous era. Hopefully the currently undistributed film is a sign of things to come rather than an outlier destined to languish on some streaming service. — JESSE CATHERINE WEBBER  

Youth (Homecoming)

Analyzing a Wang Bing is never such a small feat, regardless of length; and Youth (Homecoming), the final entry in the director’s Youth trilogy, premiering at Venice following similar premieres for Hard Times (225 mins) and Spring (212 mins) at Locarno 2024 and Cannes 2023 respectively, is little different despite its comparatively brief 150-minute runtime. The nature of the task of criticism here is due in part to the reality that the viewer can now bring to bear something of an anatomical analysis of this latest documentary series from one of filmmaking’s most intractably principled and resolutely patient directors. Prior to the Youth series, Wang had last released work in Dead Souls (2018), an eight-hour long assessment of state abuses where he interviewed survivors of the Gobi Desert work camp Jianbiangou, where accused rightists were sent to die as they purportedly dug out paradise… — MATT MCCRACKEN   [Read the full previously published review.]

An Unfinished Film

Set in the year 2019, An Unfinished Film is a fictional documentary about a film crew that reunites to finish a queer feature from 10 years ago. There are many reasons not to revive the project, as the film’s former lead Jiang Chen (Qin Hao) points out. An arthouse queer romance is neither commercially viable nor even possible within the ambit of Chinese censorship. Nonetheless, the crew feels bound by a sense of obligation: a duty to relieve their queer characters with an ending once and for all.

Although An Unfinished Film is a convincing fiction packaged as a non-fiction, it has plenty of allusions to the real. In 2009, Lou Ye released Spring Fever, a queer romance also starring Qin Hao. The film was a radical creation not only because it spotlit homoerotic desire — which was hitherto taboo in China — but also since it was produced during Lou Ye’s official banishment from cinema, as imposed by China’s State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television. With this interweaving of real and unreal, past and present, there’s a sense of time out of joint in An Unfinished Film: as if it were gestated in an alternate timeline where Spring Fever never manifested.

Once the crew is assembled, they dive straight into production. We get a privileged look behind-the-scenes; the night before the final shoot, the cast is seen frantically making last-minute preparations in a hotel. Through a shaky camera, we follow different characters — a P.A handing out call sheets, the film’s director, and Jiang Chen — as they assemble for the hypothetical next day. But the imagined ‘tomorrow’ never arrives. Amidst the behind-the-scenes clamor, news of Covid shutdowns begin to circulate, causing essential crew members to pack up and leave. Soon, the entire hotel is put on zero-Covid lockdown and the remaining cast is forcefully confined to their rooms. Just as the film-within-a-film is about to finish, it unravels.

The rest of the drama showcases how the crew adjusts in quarantine. Typical of a Covid film, An Unfinished Film formally shifts to incorporate the Internet to represent the “new normal.” Split screens and screen recordings show how characters adjust to their isolation; expressions of love and uncertainty of the future are texted, not quietly whispered, on Wechat; drinking with friends is mediated through boisterous video calls; Qin Hao connects with his newborn daughter through silly photos and vlogs. Ironically, the unknowable Internet becomes the site for personal intimacy. In addition to the private, the film also shows how China’s public discourse was reshaped during the pandemic. Peppered throughout the film are references to media that defined national forums, from popular memes — such as Douyin famous dances — to politically potent videos showing the Urumqi apartment fire in Xinjiang: an incident that catalyzed a series of protests demanding an end to the lockdown.

There’s a feeling of tension and civil unrest throughout the film. During the start of lockdown, for example, Qin Hao attempts to escape the hotel, but is caught and dragged back to his room; during this scuffle, fists are thrown, and the lead actor is left bleeding. This sentiment crescendos at the film’s penultimate sequence; through montage editing, the crew is seen being attacked by the police for leaving their rooms for a New Years’ party. Lou Ye is a director drawn to dissent and protest, despite operating in a production system hostile toward it. Although formed out of necessity, his dual consciousness is precisely what makes his work interesting: rather than explicitly addressing Chinese politics, he uses metonyms and metaphors as a vehicle for critique. In that sense, An Unfinished Film feels the most direct out of his oeuvre. It’s abundantly clear that he thinks of China’s zero-Covid policy as a moment of oppression and confinement.

Some of Lou Ye’s liberal aspersions of the state ring true. His insistence on individual freedom and political expression, for example, are understandable in works such as Suzhou River (2000) — which criticized the rapid deterritorialization of China — and Summer Palace (2006) — which bravely addressed the Tiananmen massacre: a terrible blight on the Communist Party’s record. However, in the context of Covid, Lou Ye’s position feels untenable. It is unfair to frame lockdown as apocalyptic — tonally and formally — when it saved the lives of millions of people in China, a population with one of the fastest growing aging populations in the world. An astute Covid film finds ways to express the individual hardships faced during the pandemic, while also being mindful that the precaution was rooted in collective care: An Unfinished Film certainly fails on this front. — VICKY HUANG  

Sad Jokes

As he did in his directorial debut, the excellent Bones and Names (2023), Fabian Stumm mines the details of his own life and adapts them, to varying degrees, in his sophomore feature, Sad Jokes. Stumm plays Joseph, a filmmaker in the development trenches for his next film, who copes with the challenges of co-parenting his son, Pino (portrayed by his real-life son, Justus Meyer), with his best friend Sonya (Haley Louise Jones) who has returned prematurely from a stint at a mental health clinic. Across two films now, Stumm has assembled something of a stock company who inject his cool, antiseptic vision of contemporary Berlin with genuine warmth. This convergence of opposites conveniently mirrors Joseph’s creative ambition in Sad Jokes, to make a sad and funny movie, and in turn makes a sad and funny movie out of Sad Jokes itself.

It’s no surprise, then, that Sad Jokes swings for the tonal fences. Stumm is interested in the ways human beings try, and sometimes fail, to preserve their dignity in the face of humiliation, struggle, and social impropriety. Often, Joseph is the poor guinea pig on whom Stumm tests the limits of grace and poise. After an early confrontation with Sonya about her departure from the clinic, Joseph meets with his producer. Their mannered conversation revolves around Joseph’s upcoming project, until a bizarre moment when the producer takes a dog treat out of his pocket, puts it in his mouth, chews it up, and gives it to his dog. The turn plays out with utter nonchalance, while Joseph, perhaps dependent on remaining in the man’s good graces, pretends everything is fine, and that yes, indeed, there must be something wrong with the dog’s teeth that prevents him from chewing his own treats.

Other bizarre indignities and social faux pas pad out Sad Joke’s loosely formed narrative. The stars of Joseph’s last film have a very public fight after the premiere, and Joseph ruins a date with Dominic, the handsome nude model from his art class, after romantic expectations collide with parental responsibilities. Earlier, when Joseph gets his fingers stuck in a vending machine, his only help is an awkward woman who fusses over what snack to buy so they can open the receptacle door, and ponders uselessly over whether the police, ambulance, or fire department will be most helpful to them. Each scenario, ripe for and attuned to comedy’s absurd and pathetic potential, tests the limits of Joseph’s ability to pretend everything is fine.

Of course, Joseph can’t pretend that everything is fine. Luckily, his art teacher, Elin (Ulrica Flach), whom he asks to sculpt a large likeness of his face for his new film (about a man who’s afraid of large, human-like statues), provides both Joseph’s life and Sad Jokes with a grounding presence. Stumm’s ability to add weight to an otherwise breezy film — Rohmer is clearly an inspiration, and early in the film is evoked explicitly — finds its most potent outlet in the scenes between Joseph and Elin. Flach is phenomenal in her first film role, exemplified by the ease with which she embodies casual, warm authority while teaching her portrait class; as well as her devastating recitation of a Joan of Arc speech, given from memory as proof of her former ambitions to be an actor. Stumm expresses an affinity for his actresses throughout Sad Jokes, but nowhere as powerfully as when he directs his camera toward Elin’s face mid-monologue; for a moment the spirit of Maria Falconetti threatens to take over.

Stumm’s aesthetic sensibilities may lean toward the cool and distant; there is sometimes a limit to how much fluorescently lit, statically framed compositions can affect us emotionally. Thankfully, his actors counterbalance these tendencies, and come to represent that intangible thing in the film we might call soul. They embrace the thematic interests of the film with ease by portraying fallible human beings with interests and quirks and insecurities and emotional blind spots. It’s our privilege that Stumm recognizes this, and guides their vital role in his films with deft, sophisticated hands. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM   

Front Row

Until 2019, the Toronto International Film Festival had a section called Masters. As you might assume, it was a space for major filmmakers with significant track records: Godard, Breillat, Jia, Ceylan, and the like. During the 2020 Covid pause, the festival dropped the section, seemingly because the name of the section, Masters, felt impolitic. In addition to its presumption of a coherent cinematic canon, the word has unavoidable connections to the history of slavery. (If you watch TV shows about real estate or home design, you’ll notice that what was the master bedroom is now called the main bedroom.) Starting last year, TIFF adopted a new term, Luminaries, which is not so much a section as a designation. Certain directors’ films presented in sections like Centrepiece or Special Presentations are also labeled Luminaries: Wang Bing, Hong Sang-soo, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa this year, but oddly not Paul Schrader, David Cronenberg, or indeed, Jia Zhangke.

The other designated Luminary this year is Algerian director Merzak Allouache. As the program guide notes, Front Row is Allouache’s 19th feature film, making him one of the most prolific filmmakers currently working in the Arab world. But longevity, while noteworthy, isn’t everything, and although this writer has seen only one other Allouache film (2018’s suicide bomber drama Divine Wind), it’s hard to fathom why any major film festival would screen Front Row, much less award it a special designation. This film is a wacky family comedy so broad it makes Paul Blart look like Maurice Pialat. It’s the sort of film one can only really engage with by checking off the cliches. If there’s a beloved pet parakeet in a cage, it will escape and fly away. If there’s a vain man in a toupee, it will fall off at a particularly embarrassing moment. And so on.

Front Row is really just a compendium of slapstick antics and petty grudges played out over a single day at the beach. The “front row” of the title refers to the coveted spot on the sand closest to the ocean. Zohra (Fatiha Ouared) is the loud, somewhat tacky matriarch of one family, and she and her five children happen to take a trip to the beach on the same day as her snooty neighbor Safia (Bouchra Roy). Adding to the complications, Zohra thought her husband (Kadar Affak) was staying home, but he shows up later. This disrupts Zohra’s planned canoodling with her brother-in-law (Idhir Benaïbouche), with whom she’s carrying on a poorly concealed affair. Also, Zohra’s son Rayan (Medhi Sadi) and Safia’s daughter Souhila (Hanaa Mansour) are in love, adding a touch of Romeo and Juliet to this heady mix.

Every culture and every nation is entitled to its dumb, unsophisticated comedies. When it comes to national cinemas for which there is a large North American demographic, a lot of these films open commercially: India, China, the Philippines, and others. But they don’t debut at film festivals, because regardless of who directed them — gray eminence or tyro helmer — showcasing such films in this manner is little more than a category error. In a few months, Front Row will find its proper place amid the content slurry of Netflix offerings, and you may wonder why the title sounds familiar. Thanks, TIFF. — MICHAEL SICINSKI 

Aberdeen

Aberdeen offers unfortunate proof — not that any was really needed — of how hard it is for well-intentioned films addressing important subject matter to nonetheless transcend other limitations. Child abuse, racism, homelessness, white ethnocentrism, alcoholism, queerness, the foster care system, cancer: all of these potential ills of Indigeneity are important in real life and in Aberdeen, a new drama set in and around the Peguis First Nation near Winnipeg, Manitoba, co-directed by two First Nations directors. If films were judged on nothing more than the discursive weight of their themes, it’s difficult to imagine there being many more important films to premiere this year. It’s regrettable that the film as a whole — from the skeleton of its script all the way through the performances — can’t hold a wick to directors Ryan Cooper & Eva Thomas’ evident ambition. Perhaps it’s still an important film, but it’s not particularly good.

Gail Maurice is Aberdeen, the titular woman from Peguis, and her life is a wreck. Across the film, we watch as she enters full destructive mode. Her addiction to alcohol, propensity to belligerence, and stubbornness make even her closest of friends and family distance themselves from her for their own good, and as we meet her she is in desperate need of proof of identification to begin the process of taking custody of her grandchildren. Maurice plays the role with an uneasy edge, where even the slightest inconvenience causes a theatrical eruption of emotion that often comes across as unearned. Her queer friend Alfred is played by Billy Merasty, and he’s the only person she can go to during her bad spells or troubles with the law — and even he eventually has too much of her shenanigans and pushes her away. (Though he does at least come back into her life when she truly needs a friend.) It’s a relief for reviews, too, because his presence as the stereotypical flamboyant drama queen is tough to watch in its reductive presentation. Merasty’s performance has the same quickness to arrive at its intended impact that plagues Maurice’s Aberdeen, though, which makes it far likelier that the script and not the acting talent is more fully to blame for these characters’ shortcomings.

Speaking of the writing, Aberdeen is just a short 83 minutes (it feels much longer), and it’s not certain that three hours would have been enough to apparently and effectively resolve all of the thematic cans of worms opened here. Cooper and Thomas throw social issues at Aberdeen like kids playing catch at recess. Her brother has cancer, addiction hangs like a noose around her neck, her grandchildren are in the care of a white family, the Canadian state bureaucracy (Indigenous Affairs) seems set to specifically target her and make her life miserable. Her hellscape living — partly of her own doing certainly, but only in so as much as she’s reacting to systemic problems that unfairly inflict First Nations people — with its listicle of social ills insists upon itself a representational reading that hurts the film; by having one character go through so much, the script almost begs her to represent an entire community — and that’s an impossible (and dangerous) ask. And heavy as they are on Indigenous communities, the very pedagogical themes churned about here make it impossible for an emotionally balanced viewing experience, the two elements hindered by each other. The only two checklisted issues that stick around long enough to provide some sort of fulfilling payoff are Aberdeen’s struggles with alcoholism and her navigation of the foster care system, and it’s possible to imagine an even more rhetorically persuasive film were these the main focus and several other dangling threads excised.

The film’s worst scene takes place in a public park somewhere in Winnipeg. Aberdeen, Alfred, and Alfred’s white “boy toy” Raven (Liam Stewart-Kanigan) beg for money. The white boy keeps messing around and ruining the painful chore that the two Indigenous characters clearly have much more experience with. A white woman taking a jog through the park comes up and snottily shouts at them to “get a job” and proceeds to call them useless savages. Her Karen-ignorance sets off a pandemonium that doubles as a pissing contest for the worst line-read. It also clarifies the film’s likely intended audience in a way that was probably already clear to most viewers: white Canadians.

It’s not all this bad, thankfully. Cooper and Thomas do show some potential as directors (if less so as writers), and a treaty-money scene here easily delivers the film’s best moment. Aberdeen and Alfred go to pick up their treaty money on Treaty Day and are forced to suffer a tedious line. Alfred, his proud head held high, is informed that since he didn’t pick up his money last time, he will receive double now. The woman hands him his $12 and he smirks, this before tricking her that Raven, his very white boyfriend, is, in fact, his son — he doesn’t actually have one — and thus due money as well. The reveal of the essentially useless amount delivers both humor and pathos, the small-scale grift resulting in a lousy sum that still genuinely matters to both Alfred and Aberdeen.

Perhaps the best one can say about Aberdeen, then, is that the next time Cooper and Thomas set out to make a film, this viewer will still be interested. There are too few Ojibwe filmmakers telling their stories, and even fewer directors writ large capable of constructing something as layered and effective as the treaty day scene. In the meantime, maybe Aberdeen will remind its viewers and aspiring filmmakers that miserabilism, even when punctuated with humor, is rarely the way, and the useful art-to-good-art trajectory takes more than a mere self-reflection. — JOSHUA POLANSKI