Hopefuls and Hoped-Fors: Is 20 Plenty Or Too Many?

From these twenty films, some of which I’ve seen and others I have breathless hopes for, I’ll likely miss three (for now). Broken down by the festival’s many sections, the 2012 selection is impressive: paying no mind to those distinctions, and looking at the festival as one huge monolith of tastemaking, the level of promise is frustratingly, gratifyingly, even exhilaratingly high. And as we all know, there’s going to be a whole lot more lighting up downtown Hogtown.

1. Après mai (Something Is In The Air)
(Oliver Assayas, France) Drawing from his memories and his memoir, “A Post-May Adolescence: Letter to Alice Debord,” Assayas follows up the epic Carlos with the intimate Après mai, and early reports, including editor Kent Jones‘ closing essay in the superlative monograph from the Austrian Film Museum promise much: it’s the first time since 1994’s L’eau froide Assayas has so directly considered his own autobiography. A largely non-professional cast is led by Lola Créton, whose keen, vulnerable performance elevated Goodbye, First Love, written and directed by Assayas’ partner, Mia Hansen-Løve.

2. The Master
(Paul Thomas Anderson, USA) The Master, shown at TIFF in 70mm, is a crafty, chunky delight: an enigma of ape and ego. So much will be written about it. Much of it will be good.  Earlier, from the first public showing to a paying audience, in Chicago: “The 70mm frame bursts onto the screen with an image that will recur and persist: a gentle slurry of foam that slicks the emerald and azure sea: the coursing of memory. Warm, embracing, drowning, consuming: memory. Can you control it? Does it control you?

As the two and a half hours of mentor-protégé human experiences revolve around the two men’s mano-a-mano, the performances are more physical than traditionally psychological. For instance, Joaquin Phoenix discovers ever more remarkable ways to sort and mass his mouth and jaw, more than even Rodin found to sculpt the human shoulder at stress. This is a carnival of gestural extremes. Explanations are pared away; background for “The Cause” that “Master” represents is implied, hardly ever explained. Motivations of secondary characters are elided. There’s hardly a force onscreen beyond Master and Freddy. Amy Adams, as Master’s wife, has three scenes that show her to be yet another sort of master in the emotional equations. (Husband and wife have an especially close morning moment in front of the bathroom mirror that contrasts power and weakness.) There is seething tumult in the control Adams brings to an unexpected peroration that goes something like, “This city is noise. Just noise and bad living. I know this place. I know its rotten secrets.” [More rotten secrets at the link.]

3. Stories We Tell
(Sarah Polley, Canada) Sarah Polley didn’t know she had a secret, and she didn’t know when she set out to make a documentary what things she would find out about her extended family, and then herself. Fantastic reviews from Canadian reviews who got an early look promise a new level of accomplishment for the Oscar-nominated writer-director.

4. Looper
(Rian Johnson, USA) A few hours from now, just as the lights go down on Looper, my embargo will be over and then my future self may have some truly kind things to say about Rian Johnson‘s [embargoed] [EMBARGOED] third feature.

 5.  The Act Of Killing
(Joshua Oppenheimer, USA) Werner Herzog and Errol Morris Present”: now there’s a promise for the ages. Will Joshua Oppenheimer‘s “surreal” documentary debut, in which “unrepentant, genocidal thugs” from the 1965 Indonesian coup are given the chance to reenact their murders, be lurid and squalid or bold and bravura? And why not both?

6. Argo
(Ben Affleck, USA) Even more than Oscar-winning screenwriter Ben Affleck moving away from genre movies to direct something more adventurous—a suspense thriller-comedy—that’s also a mash note to Jimmy-effing-Carter? Bonus points for enlisting Iranian filmmaker Rafi Pitts both as consultant and in a small role as a grave-eyed consulate factotum.

7. Tabu
(Miguel Gomes, Portugal) I’ve seen the bylines on the raft of raves for this black-and-white arthouse fever dream, and on that basis of that, avoided more about its story. Sold! The TIFF catalogue offers: “A temperamental old woman, her Cape Verdean maid and a neighbour devoted to social causes live on the same floor of a Lisbon apartment building. When the old lady dies, the other two learn of an episode from her past: a tale of love and crime set in an Africa straight from the world of adventure films.” Good, good, go on…

 8. Cloud Atlas
(Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, Germany)

Fine novel. Three ambitious filmmakers, behind Run Lola Run and The Matrix. Cinematography by John Toll and Frank Griebe.  Six time-tangling narrative threads. There’ll surely be loads to toss back at the haters. Novelist Aleksandr Hemon‘s epic New Yorker profile answers a few questions.

9. Anna Karenina

(Joe Wright, UK) Oft-underestimated filmmaker Joe Wright (Atonement, Hanna) directs a Tom Stoppard adaptation of the Tolstoy novel that appears, from its early footage, steeped in the extravagance of some contemporary theater’s boldest, best mindbenders.

 10. Spring Breakers
(Harmony Korine, USA) How to stuff a wild enfant terrible: the 39-year-old Harmony Korine‘s set up shop with Gaspar Noé’s cinematographer Benoît Debie and  composers Cliff Martinez and Skrillex for a story about Florida girls on a bikini-clad crime spree. Some think Korine’s tastes tend to trash, and often it’s just because it’s not their cup of comic transgression. Megan Ellison‘s Annapurna Pictures acquired U. S. distribution rights this week with plans to announce a partnership for release soon. [My first encounter with fellow Southerner Korine was at TIFF97, talking about Gummo for the Sundance Channel.]

11. Barbara
(Christian Petzold, Germany) I’ve eagerly awaited each new sleek, cool film from Petzold since discovering The State That I Am In at 2000’s San Francisco IFF, and each successive picture, including Something to Remind Me, Ghosts, Yella and Jerichow have gone from strength to strength, ofter starring Nina Hoss, who stars in this East German-set period thriller, Germany’s Foreign Language Oscar submission. The German jury that chose the film wrote, that Barbara is “convincing in its great formal clarity and strong female figure, who, torn between the contradiction of individual freedom and social responsibility, has to make a personal decision.”

12. Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out
(Marina Zenovich, USA) Before Roman Polanski: Wanted And Desired, Marina Zenovich inserted herself into pursuit documentaries like Estonia Dreams Of Eurovision! (2002) and Who Is Bernard Tapie? (2001), and her wry, persistent personality was a highlight (and delight). She’s reportedly returned in her second take on Polanski, made after the release of Wanted and Desired and contemplating the international fracas that followed, in courtrooms and the press.

13. To The Wonder
(Terrence Malick, USA) So did Malick spend only a year thinking over this one, or was it more like forty years, since the 1970s time of its autobiographical events?

14. Byzantium
(Neil Jordan, United Kingdom-Ireland) The smell of trash or the smell of Jordan’s essential sexual fabulism from the versatile, ever-stylish novelist-writer-producer-director, after the fashion of Company of Wolves? Smells good from here. Even his less popular films, like Ondine (2009), have passages of inspired lyricism. Plus: bloody gothic by the seaside with Saoirse Ronan and Gemma Arterton? In the TIFF catalog, Piers Handling finds it toothsome: “The film fluctuates between gory mayhem and melancholic reflection… The story is wild, the effects are stunning, the gore is plentiful and the actors are game.”

 15. No
(Pablo Larrain, Chile) In 2008’s Tony Manero, Larrain showed a gift for visual textures, and No takes it farther, in a story of an ad exec (Gael García Bernal) recruited to shape the message of the political opposition in 1988 Chile when dictator Augusto Pinochet’s reign is put to a national vote. No is shot in 4:3 ratio, using video equipment that would have been used at the time.

 16.  Frances Ha
(Noah Baumbach, USA) I sure would like to see a movie that lives up to that image of Greta Gerwig dancing in front of the fountain. Can she and her director-co-screenwriter Noah Baumbach flee from twee and rise to Manhattan-styled ambition? Some say yes. Others have run for the hills.

 17. Boy Who Ate The Bird’s Food
(Ektoras Lygizos, Greece) Greek minimalism: how small can it go? Metaphorical weight with modest means is promised in a story inspired by  Nobelist Knut Hamsun’s 1890 novel “Hunger,” updated to the present day in that small, beleagured countruy. (We’ll see if it can live up to the catalogue copy referencing Camus and Bresson.)

18. Ginger & Rosa
(Sally Potter, United Kingdom) Shoestring production about two teenage girls’ political coming of age  in 1962, highlighting performances by Elle Fanning, Alice Englert, Christina Hendricks, Annette Bening and Alessandro Nivola, got fantastic reviews from Telluride. Potter’s hanfdul of movies, from Orlando to The Tango Lesson, from Yes to Rage, are all stylish singularities.

19. Everyday
(Michael Winterbottom, United Kingdom) Winterbottom is not the only director making extended-shoot, longitudinal fiction features—Lars von Trier and Richard Linklater are as well—but Everyday is the first in memory, a documentary-style story of five years in the life of a family separated by the father’s prison sentence. What’s life like inside? What’s life like inside? We watch as they grow apart, grow older. Even when Winterbottom misses the mark, there’s always he and producer Andrew Eaton‘s speed, diligence and effort to admire.

 20. Peaches Does Herself
(Peaches, Canada)  Those five words alone.

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