Considered by many to be the unofficial start to the Oscar season each year, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) was a little less star-studded than most iterations this past September due to the ongoing Screen Actors’ Guild strike. While that left fewer opportunities to see major Hollywood celebrities ushered into and out of their black town cars amidst throngs of screaming Canadians—perhaps that was the reason that there were fewer films that really felt like major category frontrunners this year—high profile international cinema and major new documentaries were much easier to find. Though by no means an exhaustive list, the following were all buzzed about Toronto titles that will find their way to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art in the coming weeks and months—many as Oklahoma exclusives:
About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey): Ceylan’s (Winter Sleep) latest masterclass in human motivation possesses the thematic density and character complexities of the Russian novelists for whom the director has cited his admiration—with a three-hour-plus running time to match. Structured around a series of nuanced conversations, Ceylan’s rural Anatolian epic teases out accusations of impropriety against two male middle school teachers, before their romantic rivalry, focusing on a new teacher, takes center stage.
Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet, France): The somewhat surprising winner of this year’s top prize Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, if only because it beat out The Zone of Interest (see below), which took home the runner-up Grand Prix, Triet (Sibyl) weaves a sprawling tale of factual and moral uncertainty. Sandra Hüller (Toni Erdmann), who also stars in The Zone of Interest, commands the screen as a celebrated author accused of killing her writer husband in this engrossing courtroom drama. Anatomy of a Fall opens November 10 at OKCMOA.
The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, France): One of two French-language adaptations of Henry James’ novella The Beast in the Jungle to emerge onto the festival circuit in 2023—the other, by Austrian director Patric Chiha, premiered at this year’s Berlin film festival. Suffused with creeping Lynchian dread, Bonello’s The Beast is an icily beautiful, sci-fi inflected meditation on fate, trauma and loneliness. Moving between 1910, 2014 and 2044, it tracks Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay) through a series of successive lives and possible relationships.
The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki, Japan): THE sensation of TIFF, Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki came out of retirement for this new signature entry into his very familiar body of work (My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away). Miyazaki populates his breathlessly awaited return with an assortment of avian attackers, a hive of grandmothers, spritely white spirits and the dodgy heron of the title, all in service of a touching tale of wartime perseverance and reconstituted families. Oh, and there was a Ghibli pop-up store with the festival’s longest lines.
La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, Italy): Set in 1980s Tuscany, this richly textured fable from Italian writer-director Alice Rohrwacher—a 2023 Oscar nominee for the live action short film Le pupille—follows a merry band of amateur tomb raiders, led by a lovelorn British archeologist (Josh O’Connor), as they dig for valuable Etruscan artifacts. Strikingly photographed using a blend of 35mm and 16mm film stocks, La Chimera slides appealingly between slapstick caper and romantic reverie while extending Rohrwacher’s signature interest in modern mythmaking; paying homage to Fellini, Pasolini, and other titans of Italian cinema; and exploring the murky ethics of the global antiquities trade.
The Delinquents (Rodrigo Moreno, Argentina): Sun-dappled and unassuming despite its three-hour running time and invocation of Robert Bresson (also a touchstone for Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves), The Delinquents elevates its heist film premise into a gently philosophical interrogation of the meaning of work, love and life. Following the parallel romantic and personal trajectories of two coworkers after one robs the bank where they both work, The Delinquents, which won the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes film festival, offers an easygoing analogue to Borgesian epics of fellow New Argentine Cinema luminaries Mariano Llinás (La Flor) and Laura Citarella (Trenque Lauquen).
Evil Does Not Exist (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Japan): Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s most visually compelling film to date, this eagerly anticipated follow-up to the writer-director’s Oscar-winning drama Drive My Car developed out of a collaboration with composer Eiko Ishibashi. Winner of the Venice Film Festival’s 2023 Silver Lion Grand Jury prize, it centers on a father and daughter whose quiet life in a forested region of Japan is threated by a proposed glamping site for tourists. Captured in stately long takes against the serene beauty of the snowy landscape, the slow-burn tension between the locals and developers escalates in time with Ishibashi’s simmering score.
Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismäki, Finland): This refreshingly crisp and compressed romantic comedy makes masterful use of the director’s renowned expressionless performance style that fuses very funny Finnish cultural clichés of emotional impassivity with the uber-serious cinema of Robert Bresson. The latter’s L’Argent is one of a number of references that Kaurismäki underlines in what proves a celebration of the director’s sources and such cinematic fellow travelers as Jim Jarmusch. Fallen Leaves was a TIFF favorite of both of this post’s writers, as it has been for many other festivalgoers in 2023.
Menus Plaisirs – Les Troisgros (Frederick Wiseman, France): Following his sweeping observational surveys of London’s National Gallery and New York’s Public Library system, the pioneering documentarian Frederick Wiseman turns his attention to the French culinary world with this lavish four-hour deep dive into the inner-workings of a three-star Michelin restaurant. Tracing the trajectory of delectable dishes from the drawing board to the test kitchen and from farm to table, Wiseman offers an intimate, encyclopedic and immensely pleasurable portrait of the 50-year-old, family-run La Maison Troisgros.
Monster (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan): Featuring the majestic final score by the legendary musician and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, the latest film from celebrated Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters) is an ambitious and deeply moving story that fuses the director’s signature brand of humanist family drama with a riveting Rashomon-inspired mystery narrative. Winner of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival’s Best Screenplay award, Monster peels back the layers of a deceptively simple tale of school bullying and parental intervention to uncover a complex web of secrets, lies, preconceptions and misunderstandings that yield potentially devastating consequences.
The Pigeon Tunnel (Errol Morris, United States): The polar opposite to the aforementioned Wiseman, Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War) verbally engages with his onscreen subject, legendary British spy novelist John le Carré, while favoring dramatic anecdote conveyed through punchy reenactments. However, it is perhaps less Morris’s baroque flourishes than le Carré’s uniquely fascinating first-person narration that makes The Pigeon Tunnel compulsively watchable documentary cinema. The Pigeon Tunnel opens October 20 at OKCMOA.
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, Great Britain): Among the films most likely to endure in the cultural conversation long beyond the awards season, Glazer’s harrowing latest recreates the mostly bucolic home life of Auschwitz’s commandant Rudolf Höss and his family as they pass their days and evenings, literally, on the other side of the infamous prison camp’s wall. The product of meticulous historical research, Glazer’s film uses the language of cinema to tell us what is going on in Auschwitz (through its more and less faint soundscapes) without visualizing the Nazi’s atrocities.
-This post was co-written by Dr. Lisa K. Broad, Head of Film Programming and Dr. Michael J. Anderson, President & CEO
