Bell and Bulgari are gone as sponsors, but Listerine is one of 37 new ones at TIFF 2024. This year, the defining image of the fest’s early days has been the 95-milliliter bottles of Listerine Total Care (Mild Mint) neatly arrayed on mini-shelves next to the sinks in the washrooms of the festival’s Lightbox headquarters. There, the walls are branded with mock-movie poster key art for “Listerine: The Movie,” with a bottle of that pink liquid sandwiched between five-star laurels for “Refreshing Plot Twist” and “Breath of Fresh Air.” An employee stocking those bottles estimated that over a thousand are being distributed per day; if I were Listerine, I’d be thrilled, and certainly mass mouthwash distribution isn’t the worst thing that could happen at a film festival. As for revenue from this and other partnerships, the organization isn’t disclosing any numbers, but CEO Cameron Bailey says the amount is “enough to do what we need to do” (sounds like a lot of work for staff!) and that the attending public “will see the confidence the business community holds in…TIFF.” Confidence in the festival’s programming is, by definition, another matter altogether.

For the press and industry corps, much of day one is taken up by catching up with festival premieres from earlier in the year, whose programming fulfills the “Festival of Festivals” name/mandate TIFF started with. Some are, obviously, bigger draws than others; despite a stern screening guidance email from the fest (“Thirty minutes early is on time. Fifteen minutes early is late.”), there were maybe 16 people in the auditorium when I arrived for the P&I screening of Nicolás Pereda’s FIDMarseille premiere Lázaro at Night. Prior to 2020’s Fauna, I’d seen two of his features—2010’s Summer of Goliath and 2015’s Minotaur—so couldn’t speak to how that very disparate pair represent Pereda’s dozen previous overall, as well as numerous shorts he’s made since beginning to release work in 2007. But I can safely say that neither feature was intended as humorous, so something seems to have shifted along the way and for the better; generic festival cinema has become something funnier and more distinct. 

Lázaro at Night doubles down on Fauna’s self-reflexive and increasingly elliptical cringe comedy while reconfiguring the small acting troupe Pereda’s worked with from the very beginning, a method which presumably adds resonant meta-layers to each subsequent characterization for viewers who’ve kept up. Given that aspect, as well as the fact that much of this film’s plot is about infidelity and a director casting his next film, and that this film itself is a conspicuously low-budget endeavor, it’s fair to say that while I don’t know if Pereda is deliberately courting Hong Sang-soo comparisons, he’s definitely earned them. Both are reasonably prestigious arthouse directors whose films regularly premiere at major world festivals and who work repeatedly with trusted performers on visibly strained budgets, so it’s unlikely that Pereda hasn’t thought about this at all. As a Hong true believer turned disappointed skeptic, I think Pereda’s now lapped him; from thematically comparable and equally technically simple building blocks, he’s created something of greater complexity and impact than Hong’s last five years of work. 

Lázaro begins with a simple kitchen scene in which a woman tells a man that she’s going to inform her boyfriend about their affair. The man’s seen first, drinking water in the center of a kitchen while resting against a back corner that gives the frame depth before the woman enters from foreground right. Their careful blocking, necessary for actors in a small space both in relation to each other and to the camera, is so skillful as to call attention to itself, undercutting the naturalism presumably being sought—a move confirmed as deliberate when the next scene reveals this to be from a to-be-made film we’re now watching a third performer audition for. The 72-minute Lázaro spends about 2/3 of its running time unpredictably and non-chronologically alternating between pre-production and, if not the film itself, presumably a vision of it; both those narratives center around infidelities, albeit not contemplated/committed by the same characters.

The pivot point in both plotlines is (of course!) the director himself (Gabriel Nuncio), who meets two of his would-be performers in a coffee shop. With both, he talks a big game about how he doesn’t want to force people into characters but instead imperceptibly make the two one, which is why he disdains auditions. “Just watching how you drink water tells me everything,” he tells Gabino (Gabino Rodríguez)—in this case, that the director doesn’t want to actually cast Gabino. With Luisa (Luisa Pardo), he drops the same spiel, then invites her to come “try on some costumes”—but his wife/co-writer (Clarissa Malheiros) is still at home. The following scene—in which she pretends to believe her husband’s excuse for why he brought a young woman back and forces Luisa to drink water, then wash dishes while pretending to observe (and find displeasing!) her affect—is a masterpiece of sustained group tension: the husband squirming in the background, Luisa’s body language spiraling towards greater depths of mortified self-effacement.

If the director is a sleaze, Pereda still takes his ideas seriously, as his own longtime troupe tends towards faultless naturalism. (Per the director: “I tend to find realism when a human, animal, landscape, or thing, is actually there, rather than pretending to be there.”) Storytelling through body language and almost nothing else reaches an unexpected apex when the finale redirects towards a pared-down retelling of Aladdin in which Gabino, now recast as the young thief, and his mother (Teresa Sánchez) eat large amounts of genie-provided food in a working example of narrative being conveyed through Akermanian minimalism. Pereda’s recent work includes a short styled as an open letter to the late filmmaker, Dear Chantal, and a scene in Gabino’s room—he argues with his mom as car headlights which are clearly artificial lighting move past his window frame—nods to a similar nighttime moment in Jeanne Dielman where that character’s living room walls are passingly illuminated by lights suggesting “passing cars” in an equally naturalistic/artificial-bordering-on-abstract way. As a whole, the film’s a meta-cinematic comedy which argues for the tradition it emerges from by practicing it while building to something just past the rationally decodable, a mixture I’m particularly susceptible to. 

Mike Leigh’s work, dependent as it is on close collaborations and intensive workshops with actors in pre-production, has often been classified as intensely realistic, but that’s an oddly pervasive misperception of work that has leaned heavily for decades into (per David Simon) “The Dickensian Aspect.” His characters are big and often broad, magnifying recognizable traits into outsize comedy and scenery-chewing—a mode that’s often fallen flat for me. Leigh devotees may well be more taken than me with Hard Truths, which reunites the octogenarian director with Secrets and Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Her character here, Pansy, is miserable, and therefore prone to making everyone around her miserable, but Leigh makes sure to introduce her waking from a nightmare and quickly thereafter show her manifesting OCD while cleaning a spotless couch. There are reasons for her misery, she’s suffering more than anybody who has to deal with her and the film’s ultimate mission is to get us to to care about her empathize with all those in similar pain.

The film is a roughly bifurcated 97 minutes. In the first, Leigh alternates scenes of Pansy and her family with the cheerful and well-adjusted existences of her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin, also returning from Secrets) and her daughters. This “compare and contrast normalcy and its opposite” structure isn’t new for Leigh. In Another Year, Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen’s serene middle-class marriage is set into relief by the increasing flailing indignities of their friend Lesley Manville, whose alcoholic despondency is tied to her single status, a correlation of relationship norms and desperation that comes off as judgmental and moralistic. Here, Leigh is after something trickier, showing Pansy at her most abrasive while trying to get audiences to finally embrace her. Her constant irritability and anxiety manifest themselves in motormouth jags which are everyday draining noise for her husband Curtley (David Webber) and son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett); helpless before her logorrheic flow, they silently endure. But Pansy’s biggest scenes in the first half involve her getting into it with every single stranger she encounters in scenes that are explicitly staged for comedy. The effect is like Bad Santa with clinical depression as the prompt rather than alcoholism.

These faceoffs had my P&I audience howling with laughter, creating an amplifying roar that went away when Pansy finally cracks and retreats into a near-silent nervous breakdown, an act of emotional hostage-taking taking the movie’s momentum along with her. That depression renders the audience literally quieter and therefore sucked into Pansy’s own wounded silence, which is a neat trick (and a canny testament to The Communal Filmgoing Experience) but one I’m skeptical of. Pansy’s vocabulary is large, her sentences lacerating; her misery is funny, but in truth people like this are often a much less eloquent agony to encounter and I couldn’t derive any comic glee from her monologues while I thought about the grim actuality. This, of course, is part of Leigh’s propensity for deliberate caricature towards strategic storytelling ends; by making Pansy entertaining, he can then bring us to find a sympathy for her we might not otherwise. If he didn’t underthink anything, I still couldn’t go there with him. The film is, however, absolutely an earnest demonstration of the need for the NHS to keep functioning properly and avoid the rapaciousness of privatization—people like this need affordable help!