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TIFF 2025: The Christophers, I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash, Rose of Nevada
Michaela Coel and Ian McKellan in The Christophers (photo by Claudette Bories) Steven Soderbergh’s films routinely fixate on money—who has it, who doesn’t, what (illegally) acquiring it says about personal status and national identity within global capitalism. So, it’s mildly surprising he hasn’t set a film in the contemporary art world prior to The Christophers, though previous works deployed visual art for character definition (Laura San Giacomo’s character in sex, lies, and videotape is a painter) or as a plot engine (the Imperial Coronation egg as Ocean’s Twelve’s MacGuffin). In his latest two-hander, artmaking serves as a dramatic foundation for extended badinage about creative expression as an imperfect vehicle for immortality.
The politics of art appraisal, the economic implications of evaluating talent or identifying hackdom at the behest of an unregulated commercial market founded upon corruption and greed, whether it’s possible for a “soul” (or whatever fuzzy concept you wish to use) to transcend pure technique—these ideas work easily as lenses to examine auteurist filmmaking or Hollywood accounting. “To last in the minds of others,” aging British pop art icon Julian Sklar (Ian McKellan) says about the desire behind his most acclaimed work, the eponymous series of intimate portraits dedicated to a former muse and lover. In the years following the “Christophers,” Sklar’s legacy took a hit when he assumed the catty Simon Cowell role on a reality-competition show Art Fight and sustained further damage when his swaggering, give-no-fucks sensibility eventually transgressed cancel-culture standards. When he’s introduced, Sklar has been holed up in his posh, double-fronted London townhouse, reduced to recording Cameos while donning an affected beret to afford dinner. (He charges an extra fee if he signs off by using his finger to draw an autograph in the air.)
Anxious about their inheritance, Sklar’s fail-children Barnaby (James Corden) and Sallie (Jessica Gunning) hire Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), a disillusioned artist and restorer who operates a food stall to pay the bills, to pose as their father’s new assistant so she can find and complete eight unfinished Christophers to sell at auction. (“You’ll be forging through them,” Barnaby insists in the same breath as he correctly argues that assistants frequently make uncredited contributions to their employers’ works.) After Sklar uncovers Butler’s identity and her devastating takedown of his late-in-life legacy published in an Artforum-like venue, a discursive dialogue opens between the cynical young Black artist and her fallen (white) idol, largely within the confines of Sklar’s cluttered museum-esque home, running the gamut from the slipperiness of authenticity to the weight of influence. Yet, the conversation always returns to an urgent matter: whether the Christophers should line the walls of a gallery or go into the fire.
Ed Solomon lends his script verisimilitude by relying both on memories of his own artist mother’s painting practice as well as heavy research into conceptual art’s heyday in 1960s and ’70s Britain. (In an extended interview in the film’s press notes, Solomon cites Jann Haworth, the co-designer of the Sgt. Pepper’s album cover, as a key consultant.) Since The Christophers is neither a period piece nor an excavation of a specific movement, the realism of its milieu primarily undergirds the writer’s snappy dialogue. It obviously helps that Solomon has strong performers at his disposal. McKellan gives his finest performance in decades by leaning into flamboyant physicality, turning even expositional speeches into master classes of theatrical delivery; Coel appropriately counterbalances the veteran thespian with captivating stillness.
Double- and triple-crosses and shady art-market dealings are comparable to twists in Soderbergh’s thrillers, but they’re largely subsumed by Sklar and Butler’s stormy-turned-trusting relationship. Their debates are waged across a familiar generational divide, filled with up-to-date references to Harvey Weinstein (who “ruined the robe for the rest of us”) and throuples (which, again per Sklar, “used to be called infidelity”). But because Solomon keeps the talk firmly in the realm of capital-A Art, it feels more like a natural tête-à-tête between intellectual equals, extemporaneous cultural criticism that person would only deliver to a peer who understands it. Soderbergh’s flexible style and prolific output in a culture that doesn’t generally economically facilitate such abundance renders all of his work de facto compelling, but his post-hiatus work has largely depended on the strength of the scripts. For me, Solomon edges out David Koepp as the more compelling collaborator this decade. Solomon’s caper No Sudden Move expertly balanced an unwieldy ensemble cast across multiple subplots and infused its various twists with a strain of palpable financial desperation that cut through Soderbergh’s downright distracting coke-bottle anamorphic lenses. The HBO miniseries Full Circle, loosely inspired by Ed McBain’s King’s Ransom, sustains some of the strongest narrative plotting I’ve seen on television in years, even if its peak was, at most, two episodes out of five. However, other than Kimi, whose pandemic-era setting and tech-culture satire greatly invigorated the paranoid thriller, the Koepp-scripted films offer fewer, more intermittent pleasures within their genre mechanics: Presence’s supernaturally-inflected visual experiment couldn’t elevate its forgettable suburban domestic drama, Black Bag’s quasi-drawing room-style espionage mystery created the impression of a Soderbergh cover band playing the hits at half speed.
By his own press notes admission, Soderbergh’s camera primarily served Solomon’s script and the performers in The Christophers, with John Schlesinger as a guiding light (“If you watch Sunday Bloody Sunday, it’s very simple, but it’s the simplicity that comes from deep understanding and experience”) and Peter Yates’s The Dresser as an influence on how to film a two-hander. He stays in “studio mode” save for one shot where he deploys handheld to film Butler entering Sklar’s home for the first time to capture the instability of their initial meeting, a visual departure he hopes is subtle. (It isn’t.) “Directorially, you have to, as they say, ‘remember, who brought you to the dance’ and just be secure in that,” he says. “Make sure the camera is in the right place to capture it. But never indulge in any kind of stylistic tropes, out of insecurity, that are going to distract the audience.”
I understand what he means, but I also feel like he’s selling short his contribution by at least a tad. A modern master of visual economy, Soderbergh establishes Butler’s character and career in the opening scene in two shots flat: first, a view of the Tower of London from afar before panning down to someone’s hand expertly sketching the citadel; then, a reverse medium of Cohl sitting on a bench drawing in a notebook before taking a call to set up a meeting, after which she rushes out frame left to slip on an apron and assist a customer at her noodle cart. Later, when he introduces Sklar’s house, he fluidly establishes clarity of inside-space across three separate stories that will be repeatedly trod by four different characters. He alternates between two shots and shot-reverse shot during lengthy dialogue scenes so their rhythm never feels stale, and whenever the camera moves it does so with sinuous, unflashy grace. For a film whose upshot involves returning to one’s genuine self after years spent in the wilderness, it’s fitting that Soderbergh returned to his roots and directed a movie essentially about people in a room.
The Christophers continues Soderbergh’s era of shooting films in London, where he moved sometime after Magic Mike’s Last Dance. Some 240 miles southwest of London lies Mark Jenkin’s birthplace of Cornwall, a predominantly rural English county bordered by the Atlantic Ocean and English Channel. Jenkin has publicly shouldered the burden of being the most prominent contemporary Cornish filmmaker not only by setting his past three features in and around the area but also talking up the county as an “ancient nation within Britain” with a “unique identity that marks you out,” he explains in a recent Hollywood Reporter interview. “When I lived in Cornwall, I never thought about being Cornish. And as soon as I left Cornwall, crossed the border and went to college in England, suddenly I was the most Cornish person in the world, and when I moved home, I kept that with me.”
Jenkin had two films at TIFF, the Cornwall-set feature Rose of Nevada and short film I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash, the most traditional entry in the Wavelengths shorts programs, which chronicles snippets of his travels to Dublin, the Isle of Man, Brittany and Los Angeles over the past 25 years, filmed on 11 or 12 rolls of Super 8 film. Over the fragmented footage, Jenkin speaks in stream-of-conscious voiceover either about the various settings or uses them as springboards to talk about avant-garde film festivals or the best way to watch Apocalypse Now. In case you’re interested: the first half, followed by John Milius’s The Big Wednesday (because both its protagonist and Sam Bottoms’s character in Apocalypse were inspired by real-life surfer Lance Carson), then the second half. At its best, Jenkin’s voiceover resembles the ramblings of an erudite, pop culturally-literate barfly with time on his hands. Mileage will inevitably vary depending on whether you find it compelling or exhausting to hear such verbosity for 17 minutes, and whether Jenkin’s corresponding imagery—filmed in his now-patented disjointed, associatively-edited style—still feels productive or has ossified into creative paralysis. Personally, I found the voiceover oft-edifying and continually funny enough to overlook the unnecessary self-reflexive framework (random chapters from an unpublished autobiography), and his images remain colorfully resonant, frequently framed by streaks of leaked light.
In I Saw, Jenkin films a red boat on the horizon and mentions it as inspiration for his next film. He obviously fudges the truth here, as he came up with the idea for Rose of Nevada years after filming that boat, and that unreliability makes its way into the feature. The film’s title refers to the name of a Cornish fishing boat that went missing thirty years prior. When it mysteriously reappears on the shore of an unnamed fishing village, sans original crew, without any warning, the boat’s owner decides to send it out again to try to reenergize the economically depleted area. Nick (George MacKay), a family man with a caved-in roof, joins penniless, taciturn drifter Liam (Callum Turner) and a grizzled sea captain (Francis Magee) on a fishing voyage that portends doom even before departure via an ominous message carved into the boat next to Nick’s bed: “GET OFF THE BOAT.”
The section prior to the Nevada’s departure, when Jenkin introduces the small ensemble with zero exposition and conveys information primarily through cryptic dialogue and Nicolas Roeg-like interconnective insert shots, represents the film at its best. I’m a sucker for narrative films that confidently drop viewers in the dark before slowly accumulating coherence, and Rose of Nevada’s first half hour fits that description to a T. I went into the film cold and mostly enjoyed the experience of being mildly perplexed as Jenkin’s wind-up Bolex-captured shots are assembled into unity after the fact.
Of course, for his first film that features two name-brand actors, such obliqueness has a short shelf life. I was initially going to talk around Rose of Nevada’s main twist because it kinda floored me, but considering that The Hollywood Reporter and Variety reviews give the game away in their headlines, there’s not much point. [Spoilers ahead.] After a successful expedition, the boat returns to the village where it’s suddenly 1993, the year the boat disappeared. The clothes are brighter instead of anonymously dull, the empty dead-end bar is packed to the brim, a bustling supermarket has taken the place of the future’s sad food bank. Nick initially walks around the unfamiliar environment in wide-eyed confusion that directly recalls Marty McFly’s first destabilizing trip back to 1955 in Back to the Future. He’s more appalled when he realizes his neighbors the Richards, aged and depressed in the future, believe that he’s their son, who died on the Nevada’s final voyage. Meanwhile, Liam contentedly takes the place of husband and father to Tina (Rosalind Eleazar) and her daughter, also lost on that journey.
After the twist’s initial shock wears off, Rose of Nevada unfortunately doesn’t have another gear to shift into, so it mostly digs into Nick’s existential terror of being the only one who perceives (or cares) about the time shift. The film inevitably hits a narrative breaking point where repetition says nothing new and thus relies on Jenkin’s photography and editing to sustain interest. He can also get a little cute with the foreshadowing, such as an early shot of The Dead Zone on a television, as well as some elements of thematic communication: a ghost town…filled with ghosts!.
While Bait captures a portrait of Cornish fishing post-Brexit, when the promise of increased fish stock soured in the face of more expensive bureaucracy, Rose of Nevada takes viewers back to a time before overfishing decimated the industry by the end of the 1990s. Nick’s growing realization that it’s better to live a lie in a time when there was still plenty of optimism than to exist truthfully in a world without a future lends Jenkin’s film some serious teeth as it reaches its foreseeable home stretch. This melancholic takeaway might scan as obvious to some, but upon exiting the theater, I overheard a TIFF moderator all but ask Jenkin to communicate his film in “mainstream” terms. I appreciated his efforts even more.
