During a panel discussion at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, the independent American filmmaker Alex Ross Perry talked about the delights of creating an alternative universe for himself on a movie set removed from all the distractions of daily life. “It’s transportive,” he said. “It’s my favourite thing. … I get to live in it for a year; most people only get to live in it for a couple of hours.”
Viewers of Her Smell, Perry’s intense drama about a disintegrating 1990s punk rocker played by Elisabeth Moss, might feel thankful they only had to spend a couple of hours backstage with Rebecca She, the foul-mouthed, combative and paranoid entertainer at the centre of the story. The first 75 minutes is built from three prolonged scenes during which Rebecca viciously insults colleagues and family members, dallies with a witch doctor and allows her toddler to witness all the mess. The performance is impressive; the results are exhausting.
Elisabeth Moss appears as a foul-mouthed, combative punk rocker in Alex Ross Perry's Her Smell.1996-98 AccuSoft Inc., All right/Courtesy of TIFF
Her Smell was one of 12 films in the Platform program at this year’s TIFF, and its idiosyncratic and demanding vision was typical of the selection curated by outgoing festival chief executive Piers Handling and his assistants. Even as TIFF has embraced Hollywood, Handling identifies himself as a champion of independent director’s cinema and you couldn’t ask for a lineup of more singular visions than this year’s Platform. (Now in its fourth year, it’s the festival’s only juried category and awards a $25,000 prize.)
The film that opened the selection typified the take-no-prisoners approach: Tim Sutton’s Donnybrook follows Jarhead Earl (Jamie Bell) as he travels through rural Ohio with his young son to reach the titular fight: a no-rules, bare-knuckle cage brawl where the last man standing wins $100,000. Jarhead wants the money to get his opioid-addicted wife into rehab. The fight itself is staged and filmed to great effect, capturing the audience in the adrenalin of the moment. It’s the violent scenes preceding it, involving a sociopathic drug dealer and his much-abused sister, that are hard to stomach. Sutton’s point – and he doesn’t make it subtly – is that, in the contemporary United States, it’s kill or be killed.
If any theme emerged from the eclectic mix of films that followed that aggressively topical opening it was, rather surprisingly, the use of historical period to make contemporary points. The program included two historical costume dramas, both of them exquisitely styled pieces set in the 18th century. Emmanuel Mouret’s minutely detailed Mademoiselle de Joncquières is a social satire with a plot reminiscent of Dangerous Liaisons: A beautiful widow takes her revenge on a former lover. The dialogue reproduces torturously repressed 18th-century French syntax, but the observations on love and gender relations are highly contemporary.
Tim Sutton’s Donnybrook follows Jarhead Earl (Jamie Bell) as he travels through rural Ohio with his young son to engage in a no-rules, bare-knuckle cage brawl with $100,000 on the line.1996-98 AccuSoft Inc., All right/Courtesy of TIFF
Similarly, Markus Schleinzer’s Angelo, has topical points to make about cultural imperialism with the 18th-century story of a young African who is captured as a slave and raised to become a “court Moor” – entertaining the Viennese aristocracy with his perceived exoticism. From the very start of the film, where fluorescent lighting and electrical wires are clearly visible in the room where Angelo is selected, Schleinzer, who appeared at TIFF with his debut film Michael in 2011, is determined viewers understand we cannot truly know the past nor feel Angelo’s experience. In a later scene when his European wife asks him how he got the scars on his body, Angelo replies only by reciting the fanciful tale of his origins, with which he entertains the courtiers – as the director questions the conventions of emotional identification.
If these historical settings provide artistically productive laboratories for the directors, the recent past can do the same – and perhaps make the themes more accessible to an audience. Both the Latin American films in this year’s Platform turned the clock back only a few decades. Rojo, by the Argentinian director Benjamin Naishtat, is set during the period of Argentina’s Dirty War: Claudio is a small-town lawyer who, after a pointless altercation in a bar, winds up tossing a body in the desert in what becomes the first in a string of disappearances. Following the anxious Claudio in an almost Hitchcockian pursuit that never becomes overtly political, Naishtat reveals how the state’s immorality inevitably spreads to its citizens. Claudio’s office may be a model example of 1970s teak panelling, but the theme is utterly pertinent.
Talking about The Good Girls in that panel discussion, Alejandra Marquez Abella said she didn’t want her film to draw attention to its 1980s setting, but rather for viewers to simply enter the period as though they were there – a marked contrast to Schleinzer’s approach. A social satire set during the Mexican debt crisis of 1982, The Good Girls charts the downfall of a wealthy socialite as her husband’s business goes bust, and cleverly captures her life of shopping, tennis and parties – and all the perfect outfits in which she lives it. Abella may not be looking to create period thrills from an age of excess but, still, there is that moment where Sofia very pointedly removes the shoulder pads she is wearing.
The Good Girls was my runaway favourite in the Platform program, but I make no prediction as to which title the jury, comprised of veteran filmmakers Lee Chang-dong, Bela Tarr and Mira Nair, will have picked when the winner is announced Sunday. With visions this eccentric, subjectivity reigns.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Margarethe von Trotta, instead of Mira Nair, as the third member of the Platform jury.
Kate Taylor