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TIFF(ty) 2025: The Fence, To the Victory!
Matt Dillon in The Fence In the 1999 mini-series Storm of the Century, a malevolent stranger (played by noted Canadian Colm Feore) shows up outside Stephen King’s longtime fictional community of Castle Rock and repeatedly says “Give me what I want and I’ll go away”—but he doesn’t tell anyone what he actually wants, instead telepathically manipulating people into suicide and other grisly events until finally unveiling his ask. Obviously this made a big impression on me when I was 13, but I’m told the series was in fact terrible, which isn’t hard to believe, and it’s definitely not what should have been coming to mind when watching a new Claire Denis film.
Her worst feature and it’s not even close, The Fence seems to be an inexplicably faithful adaptation of a bad play, Bernard-Marie Koltès’s Combat de nègre et de chiens. Written in 1979 and first directed on-stage by Patrice Chereau in 1983, this is a musty allegory of colonialists getting their comeuppance. In artificial-bordering-on-Brechtian English, we’re quickly introduced to construction foreman Horn (Matt Dillon), standing across that titular fence from Alboury (Denis staple Isaac de Bankolé), whose brother has died on-site. Alboury wants to be given the body and then he’ll leave, which is what he keeps repeating with minimal variation; that, coupled with the implication that he may have murdered the dog of Horn’s assistant Cal (Tom Blyth), put me in my unexpected Stephen King mindset. Looping back a bit, the film re-introduces Cal earlier in the day picking up Horn’s just-arriving wife Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce) from the airport. Denis straps an iPhone to the right-side passenger window and observes in real-time as he drives her back; in an era of endlessly fake-looking rear-projection driving shots, it’s really refreshing to see Blyth really driving, his arm unforcedly jostling in time with the road.
But that is, unfortunately, the last nice thing I can say about this film, which gives me no pleasure; as much as her French contemporaries Olivier Assayas and Arnaud Desplechin, Denis was a formative filmmaker of the ‘90s and ‘00s and had a mighty run. As juiceless confrontations play out between all four parties (Dillon is actively bad), I was momentarily roused when Leonie and Horn, standing across from each other in close two-shot, move still closer; she ducks under his shadow and suddenly they’ve both gone from being brightly lit to an intimate shared darkness. I’m sure there’s many, many shots like this in Friday Night, 35 Shots of Rum et al. that I never bothered to break down to this extent because I was actually interested in what was happening. Watching somebody attempt to sporadically play the hits to lesser effect is dispiriting; it certainly feels right that the Tindersticks score likewise just recycles a cue from White Material for the end credits. The Saint Laurent production-money component manifests as a red dress shellshocked Leonie wears while wandering disconsolately through the compound like a designer Dorothy Vallens.
Give them what they want or they’ll go away: TIFF continues its downward spiral that, year-by-year, makes the idea of it being “the people’s festival” particularly unconvincing marketing copy. Access to screenings from the press-and-industry side is definitely harder; there are no longer two P&I screenings for each title, just one, one day fewer of P&I screenings overall and a much greater difficulty level for getting into public screenings. For the public, the festival is also expensive; collective disenchantment structured many of my on-the-ground conversations. The endless saga of former board member Barry Avrich’s Oct. 7 “documentary” ended with a film that screened only once somehow winning the People’s Choice Award for best documentary; Daniel Fienberg’s unimpressed Hollywood Reporter review notes that “The implicit hope is that if you retain that laser focus on a terrifying and heroic thing that happened on October 7, 2023, nobody needs to think of anything that came before or after. I highly doubt it will work.” And while the sponsor bumpers here are infamous brain-rot, this year’s spot thanking volunteers almost broke me. An eager-beaver Scotiabank wrangler decides to coin “TIFFty” as a neologism to commemorate the fest’s fiftieth birthday and bombards her peers with it. “Melissa, quit trying to make TIFFty happen,” her co-volunteer says, but then a miracle: an unnamed celebrity, seen only from the neck down, wishes them both “another TIFFty years.” This commercial kind of says it all: forced jollity manifesting as corporate sloganeering, a jokey “we’re serious but not serious (unless you like it)” sensibility speaking to a lack of core principles and the idea that a festival’s main task is to allow audiences awestruck proximity to famous people—not even a specific one, mind, just the general idea of a “celebrity.”
I beat this dead horse every year out of love and (no, honestly) optimism: a thriving TIFF is good for the ecosystem, a stagnant and dysfunctional one is a meaningful loss. And I certainly had my positive moments, notable among them Platform-section award-winner Valentyn Vasyanovych’s To the Victory! His 2019 Atlantis had 28 shots in 108 minutes; now Vasyanovych has ramped down to 23 shots in 104 minutes, so progress of some kind is being made. Taking the acting lead, Vasyanovych and his crew run a Symbiopsychotoxiplasm playbook for scenes that repeatedly undercut and draw attention to their own construction. Imagining a post-war Ukraine (optimistically slated for next year), Victory!’s landscape is still battle-ravaged; a long car shot is thrown off because of a bombing-caused pothole, while highlight shot number nine finds a very unpredictable moment to deploy a mine. The mode is black comedy, with lots and lots of drinking, and whether or not you’ll like it depends as much on your tolerance for Ukrainian men getting hammered and skanking to Madness as your interest in master-shot compositional excellence. I found it all very funny and sharp, with the good:bad ratio improved from Atlantis, and broadly support the Vasyanovych project, which in this manifestation sort-of picks up where Hong Sang-soo left off before pivoting to making bad movies. This was a world premiere, so all’s not lost yet.
