The Toronto International Film Festival has returned in near-full force. Even if the options are somewhat more limited for those not attending the festival in person, there remain plenty of intriguing possibilities to take in.
Herewith, the final batch of films from the festival's main week.
"The Rescue": Celebrated documentarians Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, whose last film, "Free Solo," won an Academy Award, have previously focused their work on various forms of mountaineering, with dedicated, half-mad climbers ascending incredible peaks.
For this film, they turn their attention instead underground, specifically, to the long, winding caves of Tham Luang Nang Non, in Thailand, where, back in 2018, a young soccer team (the Wild Boars) and their coach were trapped after a monsoon filled the narrow passageways with water. With the world on notice, Thai officials desperately scrambled together a team of their own Navy SEALS to try and save the 13 people trapped there, but without specific cave-diving experience, the SEALS were flummoxed.
Enter a pair of Brits, Rick Stanton and John Volanthen, long considered the foremost cave divers in the world, to lend an assist. They, in turn, called upon some of their friends from around the world to form a sort of Dream Team of cave-diving hobbyists (all of them have regular full-time jobs outside their passion for crawling in dark, water-filled, underground passageways). Together with the SEALS, many hundreds of other military members and civilian volunteers, the team comes up with a dangerous plan to save the group, now having been trapped for more than two weeks, and with further monsoons threatening to make further attempts impossible. It is breathlessly tense stuff, composed of a mixture of carefully laid out re-enactments combined with real footage of the rescue attempt, and interviews with many of the divers themselves.
Even if you know the outcome, the pressures facing everyone involved with the operation, and the danger to the children -- many of whom, in photos and video of their predicament, keeping a brave face for the world to see in utterly heartbreaking fashion -- becomes almost overwhelmingly emotional to watch. Vasarhelyi and Chin smartly employ computer graphics to lay out the extreme difficulty of the operation -- just getting to where the soccer team was holed up required a 2.5 hour dive, to say nothing of how much longer it would take to bring them back out -- so every facet of the incredible obstacles in their way are made heart stoppingly clear. The film also includes a bit of a contextual framework for Stanton, Volanthen, and the others, and what drives them to spend their weekends cave-diving. For many people, myself included, the idea of swimming in tight, narrow passageways underwater and deep underground, sounds like the worst form of torture, but as one of the divers puts it, that's only one way to look at it. The other way is to say to yourself "My world is this small passage, OK!"
"The Hole in the Fence": In an idyllic spot somewhere in the Mexican countryside, Centro Escolar Los Pinos, a camp for the boys of wealthy, high-society Mexican families, welcomes a school bus arriving to deliver a batch of campers, there to learn self-reliance under the auspices of a director (Alfredo Flores), a heavyset man of religion (Enrique Lascurain), and a minimal staff.
Once unleashed, the boys predictably act horribly to one another, picking on the darker skinned "scholarship" kid (Gabriel Fritsch), beating up anyone who falls out of line, and acting with the insolence of youth and wealth in ways both predictable, and confusing. Underlying this archetypal setting -- anything we needed to learn about what happens when adolescent boys are banded together with minimal supervision, we got from "The Lord of the Flies" -- director Joaquin del Paso adds additional elements of mystery and threat: The titular rip in the perimeter fencing, designed to help ward off the more unsavory elements in the neighboring villages around them, rumored to be controlled by drug cartels, becomes like a portal to the outside world.
The peculiar goings-on build into a climax as the campers play an all-out version of Capture the Flag that eventually bleeds out into a nearby village, as the boys become more frenzied after they realize one of their compatriots has disappeared. The mercurial soundtrack, which shifts tonally from slow strings to a giallo-like menacing synth wave, suggests the film's layered approach, as the surface action leads to many deep, dank subterranean passageways. It's like a Shirley Jackson story by way of Dario Argento.
"Unclenching the Fists": Ada (Milana Aguzarova), a young woman living with her younger brother, Dakko (Khetag Bibilov), and domineering father, Zaur (Alik Karaev) in a remote village in the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania, can't get away from the demands of men all around her. Zaur keeps her under literal lock-and-key (he possesses the only key to their flat, which is needed to get in or out), and watches her every move like a hawk. He has reason to be worried: She is a survivor of a horrible (all too real) school hostage situation, in which 1100 students were held by Chechen terrorists, 330 of whom died during the Putin-ordered rescue operation. She still has wounds, and physical and emotional damage from the experience, even after her father moved the family up in the mountains in an attempt to get away from further danger. But in his zealous protection of her, he has trapped her in an emotional cage, such that she lunges at any opportunity for escape, either by hooking up with a sweet, but immature delivery boy (Arsen Khetagurov), or trying to convince her older brother, Akim (Soslan Khugaev), to take her with him back to the city where he's now living. Kira Kovalenko's film, which won the Un Certain Regard at Cannes, concerns the long-term effects of trauma, on both the victim -- Ada, still dealing with the damage to her body from a bomb blast during the attack, has to wear diapers -- and the victim's family, as her grim-faced father tries to protect her by closing her off completely from the outside world. It's a portrait of familial love, on one level, as the siblings try to cope with their father by banding together against him, and of tremendous loss, as the brutal disruption in their lives plays out between them.
"Ali & Ava": After a plethora of high-stakes dramas, and powerful documentaries, it's not an unpleasant time to watch something a bit more low-stakes.
Clio Barnard's engaging middle-aged romance takes its cues from early Mike Leigh films -- unfussy production, verite-style shooting, and focusing on the intricacies and complicated family structures of Britain's working class -- and scores a genial, sensitive portrayal of a newly hatched romance between two world-weary people who've already been through the lot. Indeed, a huge difference between young romantic love affairs, and those between older people, is all the detritus and rubble they've accumulated along the way.
Ava (Claire Rushbrook), is a single mom with several grown kids, one of whom, the grim-faced Callum (Shaun Thomas), still lives at home, alternately, with his baby daughter. She works at an elementary school, where she runs into Ali (Adeel Akhtar), a friendly landlord with several nearby properties, who offers many of his tenants a kind of taxi service getting their kids to school on time. Ali is married, but his wife, Runa (Ellora Torchia), has separated from him, even though they remain living in the same house to keep up appearances. The usual sorts of complications ensue for the burgeoning couple -- Callum, still hung up about the death of his dad (a racist and abusive man, Ava had long since divorced him), takes huge offense to her dating an Indian man; Ali's feelings for Runa remain tender, even as she pulls farther away from him -- but the characters are so well defined, and the performances so lived in, it all feels fresh and revelatory, anyway.
The script, written by Barnard, makes much of their musical differences -- Ava loves country music; Ali, a former DJ, digs punk and electro -- and the way they begin to incorporate each other's taste in their lives, as a metaphor for the gradual social and cultural assimilation that goes on between couples. This tendency can get a little overplayed (as with a pair of his dad's old National Front boots that Callum still treasures), but it's still a well-conceived portrait of a couple who, upon first blush, might seem a bit of a mismatch, but connect in ways -- including their shared, highly social nature and their love of family -- that make perfect emotional sense by the end.