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It was not so long ago that it was almost impossible to make a film about "difficult" women. Aggressive heroines refused the audience, which usually meant that the studio men imagined it. It started to change. There is still a long way to go, of course, but that says something that this weekend at the Toronto Film Festival, the most interesting films I've seen were women breaking the rules.
The hottest ticket of the group was for the world premiere of widows– A great title! – A feminist revenge-heist thriller directed and co-written (with Gillian Flynn) by Steve McQueen as an extension of 12 years of slavery. While the story serves more twists than a pasta factory, the configuration is simple. A team of Chicago-based professional thieves led by Liam Neeson is killed while doing a job. They leave behind a group of widows threatened by a gangster (the awesome Brian Tyree Henry of Atlanta), whose money was stolen and destroyed during the crime. Led by the character of Viola Davis, Veronica, these widows – including Michelle Rodrigues and an excellent Elizabeth Debicki – plot to take the lead, targeting a tortuous local politician played by Colin Farrell whose family runs an African-American parish. the city for decades.
While it may look like your kind image of garden variety, McQueen clearly wants it to be more than that – he wants his garden to display high-level orchids. And so the film takes itself very seriously. The action is superimposed on rather heavy political themes: the emancipation of women, the murder by the police of young black men, the sociology of the poor communities of Chicago. But none of this is as serious or convincing as what you've found in, say, Thread. That's because McQueen and Flynn also want to make the film shiny and exciting, so there are big surprises, huge betrayals, hammer blasts (Robert Duvall has a big one) and violent murders . "Look how I did that!"). All this showbiz stuff does not really match the highest aspirations of the film or the performances deeply felt by Debicki and especially Davis, whose performance occupies an emotional universe different from that of the soulless murderer played by Daniel Kaluuya.
This is not to say that widows is not good. It's a lot of fun, at moments of real power, and McQueen knows how to shoot striking scenes you've never seen before – Sean Bobbit's cinematography is very beautiful. The film could be a success. Yet, it also feels like a thriller designed by a director who feels superior to the material chosen. He wants to "raise" a genre good enough for much bigger directors.
The scale is smaller but the more savage heroine in Can you forgive me?, a comic drama of real life by Marielle Heller (Diary of a teenage girl) that the Toronto crowd has approved. Based on a successful memoir, it stars Melissa McCarthy as Lee Israel, a misanthropic celebrity biographer who dreams of becoming a great writer like Dorothy Parker. But no one wants to buy her books, so in the 1990s she began writing letters from Parker and Noel Coward. Encouraged by her gay boyfriend, Jack (Richard E. Grant's best role at the time), she is more successful as a forger than she ever was as a writer. Again, what she does is illegal.
Now, Lee is far from being a friendly heroine – she is piquant, messy, cold for those who want to get close to her. And in truth, his life is a little, well, stupid. Although not very impressive, the film can boast wonderful jokes and remarkable performances (Grant and Dolly Wells are great), and above all, McCarthy has achieved a revealing performance in a role different from that of the star. Lee's role allows her to show her impeccable timing – no one can better shoot a zinger than she does – but she also reveals a whole new emotional depth, a secret raw melancholy that had previously remained hidden in her work. "I did not know she was such a great actress," said the woman next to the premiere.
Nobody will ever say that about Natalie Portman, whose talents are now acquired. Yet she has never played a character like the one she's doing in Vox Lux, a film that presents itself as the diabolical twin of A star is born. It was written and directed by Brad Corbet, a 30-year-old American who I mocked for being a budding European author. I was unfair Even when it's infuriating (and it can put you to the test), this impetuous, extremely inventive and sometimes aggressive film is the most ambitious film I've seen in Toronto so far. .
Put simply, Vox Lux is a satirical portrait of a representative 21st century figure: a young pop star, Celeste. As told with great wit in the voice of Willem Dafoe, his story begins in 1999 with a shooting in the school strangely resembling that of Columbine. One of the survivors is 14-year-old Celeste (14-year-old English actress Raffey Cassidy), who, at the funeral, sings a song that her sister wrote about this experience. With the help of a clever manager (Jude Law, really good), the song becomes a big hit, an American anthem of healing and launches Celeste's career, turning this quiet and devout Christian girl into a pop star whose songs (written for the film by none other than Sia) makes people feel good. Cut in 2017 and the adult, Celeste is now a monstrous diva performed by Natalie Portman, who, as Portman does, launches into her stylized role brilliantly: delirious hair, a thick and sad accent of Staten Island. body in Madonna dance routines, even hitting the floor in a drug-induced stupor. Meanwhile, terrorists seem to borrow ideas from his videos.
I'm not sure how big the audience is for this film, which is, among other things, how real trauma turns into a packaged and reassuring emptiness. But whatever. Vox Lux it's really something. It is bristling with ideas and cinematic invention, whether it's the interaction between Sia's catchy songs and Scott Walker's brilliantly jarring score, the fun riffs on modern America and the creation of ABBA, the daring cast of the daughter of Celeste and Celeste, Albertine Celeste's last extravagant concert, whose highly costumed robotic dance moves, are choreographed by Portman's true husband, Benjamin Millepied. Needless to say, the film divides the audience. Needless to say, he wants it.
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