Every year, nearly one million people travel to Toronto to attend the Toronto International Film Festival, Canada’s largest and most important film festival, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last month. I’d always presumed they were taking advantage of the large number of Canadian films programmed; where else can you watch a film in Inuktitut (Zacharias Kunuk’s Wrong Husband) before getting lost in Montreal’s charming indie music scene (Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks)? But as this year’s festival progressed and I spoke to more and more people, I learned that those who traveled from out of town mainly cared for the typical festival fare: buzzy titles that have already picked up accolades at Sundance or Cannes, or world premieres that featured prominent actors gearing up for an awards campaign (one of these very conversations took place in the long line for the press screening of Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, for which we had to arrive hours in advance).
To be clear, I do not fault them at all for this. If I were spending time and money on a trip—and then trying to secure a living space in a city like Toronto whose downtown core has very few affordable hotels—I’d want to make the most of it by choosing the ‘safest’ films, like Sentimental Value and Hamnet, which are sure to be major players as this year’s awards season unwinds. But having the privilege of being a local and living a short commute away from Festival Street, year after year, I’m able to focus on what makes TIFF the most special for me: its varied Canadian programming.
As such, for my dispatch this year, I’ve decided to pair three Canadian films with three buzzy non-Canadian ones. From a hilarious mockumentary to a gripping French-language thriller and a tragic family saga portrayed partly in English and partly in Hungarian, these three Canadian films make for riveting viewing on their own, as well as part of a double feature with an international counterpart.
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I. Two boys travel back in time
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie and Rose of Nevada
Time travel is notoriously tricky in film. When done well, it can bolster the telling of a blistering, disorienting story to help us appreciate the consequences of our actions, but done poorly, through unintentional paradoxes and anachronisms, it can distract from story and character. Luckily, two films that premiered at this year’s TIFF were completely intentional in their lax approach to time travel—and by forgoing the obsession with logic and paradox, were able to mine tragedy and comedy in equal measures.
Our first foray into the past features Canadian comedians Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol, who first played themselves in Nirvanna the Band the Show (2017-2018), a mockumentary sitcom that aired for two seasons on Viceland. The series now serves as the middle part of a trilogy charting Johnson and McCarrol’s hilarious attempts to get their two-person band to play a live show; preceding it is a webseries of the same name, and succeeding it is Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, which played at TIFF after premiering earlier this year at SXSW, and follows the two wannabe musicians as they unwittingly travel back in time.
The premise of all the Nirvannas is always the same: Johnson and McCarrol would like to play a show at The Rivoli, a small concert venue in downtown Toronto—an understandable goal for two musicians, were it not for the fact that they have never recorded a full, coherent song, let alone performed live before. McCarrol would like for them to focus on their musicianship, but Johnson steamrolls him into participating in ingenious publicity stunts and schemes to try to get The Rivoli to notice them. Hilarity ensues, but so does tension, and this latest entry into the two friends’ saga is the best yet. After a failure of a plan featuring the C.N. Tower, Johnson and McCarrol accidentally travel back in time to 2008. Still in Toronto, they find the younger versions of themselves and try to set them on a path which will help them achieve their goal faster, before stumbling upon a question most partnerships encounter in their creative journeys: are they more likely to succeed as a duo or alone?
As a device, time travel allows the two to look upon their relationship in a literal form of retrospect: as the lines blur between their creative pursuit and their friendship, they must come to terms with what it is that keeps them together, year after year, chugging along on their Sisyphean task. For a movie that features countless laugh-out-loud gags, it’s also poignant in its exploration of platonic love and the ways in which our desires to devote ourselves to both our craft and our loved ones conflict and contend.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is also incredible in its visual effects—in a Q&A following the screening, we learned that the scenes which feature the younger Johnson and McCarrol are taken from real footage they shot for their webseries almost 20 years ago, spliced together to make a coherent narrative. They note that they worked backwards—or, rather, forwards—allowing this older footage to give them the direction that their foray into the past would take—which, seeing as there is a very sweet quote from younger McCarrol about not noticing aging when you are with friends, feels incredibly prescient.
In Rose of Nevada, Cornish director Mark Jenkin’s latest feature film, Nick (George MacKay) and Liam (Callum Turner) board a small fishing boat and go out to sea just off the Cornish coast. Unbeknownst to them, they’re on a boat that mysteriously disappeared 30 years ago and are about to be transported back in time to just before its disappearance. When they dock back at port, they realize the failing fishing village they’d left is now prosperous, with merchants lining the streets and piling into the pubs. What’s more, the village takes them to be the two fishermen who had initially disappeared on that boat. For Nick, this is a terrifying shock—he left behind a wife and a young daughter in the present. Liam, however, gains a family, as the wife and daughter of his fisherman counterpart welcome him into their home as the head of the family. The two men were not friends before they boarded the boat, and their opposing feelings about their time travel only further sow dissent and anger. One wants to get back to the present, the other wants to stay in the past.
In his disorienting tale, Jenkin asks us what role the past plays in our moving forward: must we satisfy our demons to achieve progress, or is it possible to leave everything behind and start anew? It’s not an original point of inquiry, but Jenkin’s use of visuals, showing us the procedural elements of fishing (reeling, gutting, icing) as well as the alarming nightmares that plague Nick, elevates his time travel tale into something extraordinary. Much like Enys Men, Jenkin’s previous effort (which happened to be my favourite movie of 2022), Rose of Nevada marries nature with nightmare to insist that our impact—on our world, our surroundings, our loved ones—is only as tangible as the things we leave behind, be they children or engravings on a wooden panel.
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II. When status is survival
The Cost of Heaven and No Other Choice
No Other Choice, the winner of TIFF’s inaugural International People’s Choice Award, sees South Korean director Park Chan-wook return to a theme he’s explored several times before in his impressive filmography: desperation. In Park’s vision, desperation often takes the form of self-sacrifice, depicted most notably in his Vengeance Trilogy, whose characters are willing to sacrifice anything and everything to attain revenge. In No Other Choice, he charts family man Man-soo’s (Lee Byung-hun) attempts to maintain his family’s upper-middle-class status. It’s a desperation that leads him to murder, thrice over.
We meet Man-soo just as he is about to be laid off from his work, usurped by an underling in a company recently bought out by Americans. His job tethers his family to their luxurious lifestyle, allowing his wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin) to go to tennis and dance classes during the days, his children to keep two dogs, and the four of them to live in a big, beautiful house. His layoff does not mean his family will be out on the streets, it simply means that they would have to downgrade their life, but this prospect is unconscionable for Man-soo. Feeling that his main adversaries are not those that stand above him but those that are level to him—meaning, other men that are searching for new jobs—he decides that he has to eliminate them one by one and be the last man standing, thereby regaining his grasp on a life that allows his family leisure and comfort.
Man-soo’s desperation to maintain his family’s lifestyle is mirrored by Nacer’s (Samir Guesmi), the center of Québécois director Matthieu Denis’ latest film, The Cost of Heaven (though the original French title Gagne ton ciel literally translates to “win your heaven”). Set in Montreal and based on a real story, Nacer’s delusion that he will make it big as a trader leads him to use money he doesn’t have to give his family a life of luxury. At one point, he steals from his local Muslim community center to pay off his children’s tuition at a high-end Christian school, before trading in his dingy car for a shiny new Lexus. When those to whom he owes money realize they have been fleeced and demand to be paid back, Nacer decides to kidnap the child of a billionaire to demand ransom money, reasoning that $500,000 would help him out of his hole but would be just a drop in the bucket for a billionaire.
Nacer and Man-soo share two main qualities: their desperation for status thrums with the ferocity of a desperation for survival, and they fail to consider the humanity of their victims. To Man-soo, the men he murders are nothing but personified resumes, their skills and experiences standing as active threats to him and his family. To Nacer, the child he kidnaps is an embodiment of wealth and a tool for bribery—that this little boy could be disturbed or traumatized by this experience doesn’t cross Nacer’s mind. Neither of these two men punch up at the main source of their strife; they tackle equal or weaker opponents to try to achieve their aim. Park and Denis are in agreement about the alienating effects of social climbing and the addictive property of achieving a higher class; once you reach a new height, the risk of death and imprisonment are worth it to stay stagnant—or, in other words, everything that can be done must be done to avoid moving back down.
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III. Who will help the youth?
Blue Heron and Steve
Tim Mielants’ Steve moves with the urgency of recent cooking dramas like Boiling Point (2021) and FX’s The Bear, though it trades in a kitchen for a school and chefs for teachers. Cillian Murphy plays the titular Steve, a headteacher at a reform school for boys with behavioral difficulties. Though housed in a beautiful building in a sprawling countryside, the school is understaffed and resources are withheld, leaving the small staff to deal with their students’ educational, emotional, and physical needs. We enter the school on a busy morning as the faculty are in the midst of welcoming a documentary crew who say their aim is to raise awareness for the work the school does, but are really interested in breaching the students’ privacy and getting salacious material—while, at the same time, the teachers learn that their building has been sold off and the school will have to close or move in less than a year.
Steve explores the blurring of the lines between institutional and personal support: there is only so much a teacher can do for a troubled student without having access to resources, but at the same time, resources are only as strong and effective as the workers that administer them. Steve’s day takes him outside of the classroom more than it leaves him inside, where he revels in teaching his students about geology; he runs through the hallways to break up fights and cool off hot tempers, while also, on this particular day, trying to protect his students’ privacy from the snooping documentarians. He focuses on Shy (Jay Lycurgo), a student who experiences sharp mood swings that make him a danger to himself. The staff is spread thin, and we see the close brush with tragedy they experience with Shy, who feels increasingly abandoned by an indifferent world outside the school’s walls, as well as by the chaotic one within them.
Whereas Shy is part of a cohort of young men having trouble adapting to a society that would rather hide them away in a countryside than acknowledge their hurt and struggle, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes)—the eldest of four children in the family at the heart of Blue Heron—is on his own. Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari’s debut feature centers on similar themes as her 2020 documentary short, Still Processing, which explored her grief at the death of her brother.
In Blue Heron, Jeremy and his family are recent immigrants to Canada from Hungary. When we’re first introduced to his antisocial behavior, it’s easy to write him off as a child struggling with adjusting to a new language and country. But before long, we realize that what’s troubling Jeremy is something much deeper than cultural displacement; he has undiagnosed mental health issues that cause him to act out and alienate himself from his family and their new neighborhood. His parents try their best to meet him at his level; they leave him alone, comfort him, encourage his artistic talent, and then, finally, call in child services, who recommend that Jeremy be placed with a different family. We see all of this unfold from the sensitive perspective of Sasha (Eylul Guven), Jeremy’s younger sister, who herself is only offered small glimpses of the crisis besieging her family—something she will later aim to get clarity on as an adult by creating a documentary, a possible metatextual inclusion, given Romvari’s previous short documentary about her own familial tragedy.
Both Steve and Blue Heron follow struggling young men with people in their life who desire to support them, but don’t have the resources or information to provide them with the individualized help they need. Both films incorporate documentary as well—in Steve, it’s an invasive medium that seeks to further exploit the boys, while in Blue Heron, it’s a mechanism for clarity and catharsis. Their pace is polar opposite: Steve is shot in a frantic, overwhelming manner, while Blue Heron is slow and melancholy. Both, however, get at the same rot that has rooted itself into society: a veneer of shallow concern, hiding a flippant disregard for the needs of troubled teens and their families.