Toronto fest frustrating for critic

Lady Hideko (Min-hee Kim) is attended by her servant Sook-Hee (Tae Ri Kim) in Chan-wook Park’s The Handmaiden.
Lady Hideko (Min-hee Kim) is attended by her servant Sook-Hee (Tae Ri Kim) in Chan-wook Park’s The Handmaiden.

I know I complain about this every year I go up north to the Toronto International Film Festival. I know it's also the kind of complaint that only the most privileged and pampered kind of film critic would ever levy against what is otherwise his favorite annual cinematic showcase, but why the festival's organizers routinely turn the press screenings on the first day of the festival (this year, it was Thursday) into such a murderer's row is beyond me. Every year I've gone -- and this will be No. 5 -- the first day of the festival is jam-packed with many of the films I'm most desperate to see. Whatever choice I make, therefore, I have a large pang of regret for what I'm missing.

photo

Mildred (Ruth Negga) and Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton), an interracial couple, are sentenced to prison in Virginia in 1958 for getting married in Jeff Nichols’ Loving.

I've railed against this practice with friends and colleagues to the point that I've grown increasingly paranoid about the year's lineup, and try not to know much about what's coming out until the full schedule is released in late August. As it happens, this year's Cannes was such a stockpile of brilliant-sounding films from some of my favorite directors (Cristian Mungiu! Asghar Farhadi! The Dardenne brothers!), that I couldn't help but get excited at the festival's possibilities. That is, right up until I finally checked the press schedule to see what the distribution was going to be. Out of roughly a dozen or so films I am most eager to see, freaking 10 of them are playing on the festival's first day. Bleargh! It actually gets worse: During one hour on the first morning of press screenings, no fewer than five of those films are scheduled on top of each other. Words fail me.

In any event, I shall have no choice but to try and weave together a wildly complicated schedule of press and public screenings, racing from one theater to the next and hoping to get there before the lines get too formidable. If all goes according to plan, I should still get to see most of these, but Toronto International Film Festival, if you're listening, please have mercy: You don't have to be like a young, two-fisting gunfighter, emptying both cylinders at the first sign of movement. Spread out the joy and wonderfulness, and please give us a chance to savor the sublime selections you have procured.

And just in case you think I'm overstating the exemplary assortment of films this year, here is the lineup of 10 playing on the festival's first day:

The Handmaiden: Chan-wook Park's thriller about a young, female con artist in 1930s Japanese-occupied-South Korea who is hired to swindle an heiress out of her fortune but falls in love with her instead. It absolutely slayed the critics at this year's Cannes and, with its purported electric eroticism, promises to turn more than a few heads in Toronto.

The Commune: Few contemporary directors can match the seemingly effortless pinpoint social realism and breathless moral ambiguity of Danish auteur Thomas Vinterberg, whose previous film The Hunt was the best thing I saw in all of 2012. His new film, set in 1970s-era Copenhagen, concerns a successful and worldly couple attempting to start a new way of life by inviting a large group of friends, and a few unknown x-factors, to live in their house.

I, Daniel Blake: Another film that earned much in the way of Cannes raves (and came away with the coveted Palme d'Or), celebrated British filmmaker Ken Loach's drama finds a working-class handyman being denied government assistance after falling ill, meeting a young single mother in a similarly horrific situation, and forming an unlikely familial-type bond. Loach specializes in nuanced humanity and this sounds like an absolute showcase.

Graduation: Back in 2007, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu put out 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, about a pair of young women seeking an abortion in repressive 1980s era Romania. It was absolutely phenomenal. He followed that up with the staid drama Beyond the Hills, about a pair of young female orphans who reconvene after a long while at a nunnery. His new film concerns a well-to-do physician who has very high aspirations for his teenage daughter, only to fret when an assailant attacks the young woman and leaves her distraught right before her all-important exams.

The Unknown Girl: Two years ago, the Dardenne brothers' Two Days, One Night, was hands-down my favorite film of the festival. They return to Toronto this year with a new film about a doctor at a small clinic who ignores a late-night door buzz only to discover to her horror that the visitor was a young woman who later died in the night.

Personal Shopper: The up-and-down fortunes of Kristen Stewart continue their upward trajectory -- following her excellent turns in Clouds of Sils Maria and this year's Certain Women. Here, reuniting with Sils Maria director Olivier Assayas, she plays a personal assistant to a very wealthy woman while mourning the loss of her twin brother and trying to communicate with him in the afterworld.

The Salesman: One of the world's great living auteurs, Iranian legend Asghar Farhadi, returns to Toronto with a Cannes-conquering film about a married couple who endure a violent attack and slowly come apart at the seams in the aftermath. All while they are playing Willy and Linda Loman in an amateur theatrical production of Death of a Salesman. Farhadi has a way with slow simmering tension and the early word on this film is it's a triumph of domestic suspense.

Toni Erdmann: Yet another much-buzzed about film from Cannes, German director Maren Ade's comedy about a rigid, successful management consultant and her joke playing, wildly inappropriate father during an impromptu visit, sounds riotously funny and oddly intense. After some of the heavier films on the list, it might bring a necessary element of lightness.

Loving: Little Rock's own Jeff Nichols, on the heels of the interesting Midnight Special, returns jet-quick to the cinematic forefront with this true depiction of real life interracial couple Richard and Mildred Loving (played by Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga), who were arrested in 1958 for the crime of getting married in Virginia, where such mixed-race couples were banned. Early buzz is very strong and, naturally, there is much talk of the film's place in the forthcoming awards season.

Things to Come: Celebrated French director Mia Hansen-Love, whose previous Toronto festival film, Eden, was a critical favorite, returns with a new film starring Isabelle Huppert as a staid professor whose life is thrown into chaos when her husband suddenly leaves her, eventually leading her to a new connection with a former student, an outspoken communist.

MovieStyle on 09/09/2016

Upcoming Events