TIFF Dispatch 1: Catching Up with Big Prize Winners and Finding Smaller Surprises

Going into this year's edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, no news is good news. My prior dispatches over the years usually began with an acknowledgment of the dark clouds hanging over opening day: the COVID-19 pandemic shutting most of the festivities down, blowback from the festival's implementation of protective measures, frustrations over TIFF's obsession with premiere status, and last year's dual strikes putting a dimmer on the presence of megastars. This time, things are a bit more neutral. The festival has done a good job of keeping a low profile as well as addressing issues from 2023, like the absence of high profile titles from other major festivals. The most prominent criticism I've seen this year has to do with TIFF's outrageous ticket prices, and while the prices are ridiculous ($90 for a premiere screening is, in diplomatic of terms, hard to swallow), complaints about affordability are nothing out of the ordinary for an event like this.

As it goes every year, screening options are limited at the start of TIFF for the simple reason that nothing has really screened yet. This means more opportunity to watch and talk about films that come to Toronto from a premiere earlier in the year, like "Anora" by Sean Baker, which took home the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival. By far Baker's most ambitious effort to date, it stars Mikey Madison as the title character, a sex worker whose young, rich, and new client Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) falls for her, then pays her to be his "girlfriend" while he treats her to his lavish lifestyle. They get married during a brief getaway in Vegas, but when his oligarch family back in Russia hear about the wedding, they try anything they can to annul it.

It's no surprise that "Anora" impressed audiences and the jury at Cannes, since this is both Baker's most broadly entertaining film to date and his most digestible in terms of politics. His prior films, like "Tangerine," "The Florida Project," and "Red Rocket" stayed within the realm of its characters' social and economic class, while "Anora" tackles class relations head on via its brash, fast-talking protagonist entering the world of the elites like a bull in a china shop. Any concerns I might have had about Baker compromising himself too much vanished by the film's second half, where all the build up of the first half's romantic, whirlwind tone pays off in spades. The introduction of Ivan's family throws "Anora" into a completely different rhythm; more manic and violent, extremely funny, and a brilliant distillation of power dynamics between the rich and poor. Baker is too good of a director and storyteller to take the easy way out and reduce his ideas to binaries. Sure, "Anora" has its villains in the form of the billionaire family Madison's character marries into, but Baker prefers to spend his time on the people in their orbit, who may appear as evil but turn out to be in just as much of a dependent and compromised position as her.

Far more political and about as entertaining is "Rumours," the latest effort from Canadian filmmakers Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson. Maddin has made a name for himself since the late '80s with his eccentric and irreverent films that owed plenty to the early days of filmmaking. "Rumours" doesn't have the same stylistic showmanship as Maddin and the Johnsons' other works, although this is far from a conventional experience. Set during a G7 summit in Germany, the heads of state for the United States, Canada, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Japan spend the evening going over what to put in their provisional statement (if you weren't aware that these statements exist, that's part of the film's point) when some sort of apocalyptic event finds them stranded in the nearby woods getting hunted down by supernatural creatures.

Before the horror elements of "Rumours" kicks in, the directors make it clear that nothing in this film should be taken seriously. Cate Blanchett plays the chancellor of Germany with such an exaggerated accent it sounds like a total joke, until the U.S. president (Charles Dance) speaks with a British accent. The Canadian prime minister (Roy Dupuis) has a manbun and mopes around over his impending divorce, a convoluted scandal in his home country, and getting rejected by the U.K. prime minister (Nikki Amuka-Bird). The other world leaders act like buffoons in various ways, and when faced with crisis all seven of them act exactly as they are: privileged, insulated from the real world, and unable to lead their way out of a paper bag. The satire itself is obvious because its targets don't deserve the gift of intelligent satire, since doing so would probably make them look smarter than they actually are. Maddin/Johnson/Johnson are making a comedy here (and on that front they succeed), but they smile with gritted teeth. Their rage at the Western world's deadly complacency shines through every moment of "Rumours," but as comedians they can only use the tools they have to address the horror of what they're acknowledging. If it's all just a matter of time before we meet our self-imposed, inevitable fate, we might as well have a laugh on the way out.