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“We Ascribe this Cuteness to Older Women”: Sarah Friedland on Familiar Touch
Kathleen Chalfant in Familiar Touch
Depicting aging and diminishing mental acuity, with increasing candor about same, essentially has become its own subgenre—the drama of descent or disappearance. Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch feels like something different, eschewing the conventions of linear decline to stay rooted in the present-tense bodily experience of its protagonist: Ruth Goldman, played by a galvanizing Kathleen Chalfant. Beyond the subjective design of the filmmaking—comprising not just what we hear, but how we understand the premise of any given scene—this is a catalyzing collaboration between Chalfant, storied veteran of both stage (Wit) and screen, and Friedland, a student of choreography who sought out a movement-based approach to the subject matter. Chalfant’s Ruth is a sharp, witty, appealingly regal writer of cookbooks; the actor has… Read more
TIFF 2024: Cloud, The End
Tilda Swinton in The End
Waiting for Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud to start, I wondered how much time I’d spent over the years watching his signature warehouses, offices and apartments. The man loves a purpose-built soundstage set, the drabber the better but counterintuitively showcased under unrepentantly artificial lighting—one rung down from “Lynchian” in terms of overt ominousness but similarly ready to radiate menace. Those sets’ simplicity offsets his films’ often elevated eccentricity levels, though by Kurosawa’s standards Cloud is comparatively sedate insofar as it has a fully explicable plot: Online reseller Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) offloads one too many shoddy knockoff goods, attracting the ire of ripped-off customers who band together to take disproportionately bloody revenge. Kurosawa divides this 123-minute work into two very differently paced… Read more
“The Process Was More Important Than the Result”: My First Film Star Odessa Young, Back To One, Episode 308
Odessa Young is only 26, but she already has a truly impressive body of work behind her. Assassination Nation, A Million Little Pieces, Shirley, Mothering Sunday, The Stand, The Staircase, Manodrome, in each of these projects, she seems to have an effortless command over her character, each unique, never forced, always true. Now she stars as Vita, the lead character based on Zia Anger in My First Film. On this episode, she talks about the need to “cultivate an obsession” as character preparation, recent musings on “how much an actor should act to the camera,” why she never worries about being misinterpreted, the importance of “kindredness with creators,” and much more. My First Film is currently streaming on MUBI. Back To… Read more
“It Sounded Like a Good Title”: Jeremy Saulnier on Rebel Ridge
Jeremy Saulnier on the set of Rebel Ridge
In Jeremy Saulnier’s breakthrough films Blue Ruin and Green Room, the writer-director thrust protagonists into violent cacophonies they weren’t equipped to navigate. With his new Netflix actioner Rebel Ridge, Saulnier centers his story on a hero much more adept at meeting force with force. The film stars Aaron Pierre as a Marine hand-to-hand combat expert who comes to a small southern town to bail out his cousin. Before he can do so, his bail money is confiscated by the corrupt, militarized local police force (led by chief Don Johnson) via a bogus civil asset forfeiture claim. Confrontations—both verbal and physical—ensue. Rebel Ridge had a difficult path to completion. The original start date of April 2020 was scrapped shortly before production began by… Read more
“Ordinary People Who Become Very Violent”: Kiyoshi Kurosawa on Cloud
Cloud
The J-horrors that catapulted Kiyoshi Kurosawa from reliable gun for hire under the Japanese studio system to internationally revered auteur saw terror as indissolubly bound with tech. Conceived at the turn of the millennium, they spoke to those years’ paranoias about digital life: ghosts pouring out of dial-up internet (Pulse, 2001), senseless murders upending pristine cityscapes (Cure, 1997), and lives aremodeled by perfect doubles (Doppelganger, 2003). Cloud, his latest, offers a new equation, no longer anchoring dread to media but capitalism. It’s not that computer screens are nowhere in sight; the film’s hero, Yoshii (Masaki Suda), is a hustler who makes a living buying all sorts of stuff and reselling it online at exorbitantly higher prices. But the horror this time… Read more
TIFF 2024: Lázaro at Night, Hard Truths
Lázaro at Night
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… Read more
Resurrecting Kathleen Parlow: Sofia Bohdanowicz on Her TIFF-Premiering Measures for a Funeral
Deragh Campbell in Measures for a Funeral
Around a decade ago, Sofia Bohdanowicz began what would become a cycle of films, encompassing the features Never Eat Alone, MS Slavic 7 and A Woman Escaped (co-directed by Blake Williams and Burak Çevik) and the shorts Veslemøy’s Song and Point and Line to Plane, starring Deragh Campbell (who is often credited as cowriter or codirector) as Audrey Benac, a sort of fictional alter-ego who has encounters with art, and in particular with the artistic legacy of Bohdanowicz’s forbears. In Veslemøy’s Song, Audrey travels to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to listen to a haunting vintage recording of a piece composed for Kathleen Parlow, a once-famed, now largely unknown Canadian violin virtuoso who taught Audrey’s grandfather… Read more
“My Father Started Using the Hidden Camera to Send Messages Expressing What Seemed Like Regrets”: Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc on their TIFF-Premiering Doc Tata
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Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc’s TIFF-debuting Tata originated with a cry for help from a migrant worker being physically assaulted by his boss. The Romania-based filmmakers, partners in life and art, are both veteran investigative journalists in their region — Vdovîi an award-winning reporter from the Republic of Moldova who’s been nominated for the European Press Prize, Ciorniciuc a co-founder of the first independent media organization in Romania — so worker exploitation was a familiar beat. More troubling, however, was the familiarity of the man video messaging the duo from Italy: Vdovîi’s dad, a father who she’d long been estranged from, having grown up in a household rife with domestic abuse. Thus begins a fraught, country-hopping journey, one in which the… Read more
