TIFF Dispatch 3: 'Queer' and 'Emilia Pérez' Disappoint but Other Films Excite
If we're looking at only queer-focused titles at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, two films would be considered the hottest tickets in town. The first is Jacques Audiard's "Emilia Pérez," which took Cannes by storm and took home both the Jury Prize (think of it as second runner up for the Palme d'Or) along with a shared Best Actress prize for its four female leads, including Selena Gomez. It's a massive gamble of a film, mashing up a pop opera with a Mexico-set cartel thriller before changing into a "Mrs. Doubtfire"-esque story to tell an epic tragedy. It's about as baffling as it is entertaining, until it's neither.
Despite the joint award for its four actresses, the obvious lead character is Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a defense attorney who's good at helping guilty clients avoid guilty verdicts. She impresses cartel leader Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón) who kidnaps her in order to offer her millions of dollars. The offer has to do with a secret no one can know: Manitas is transgender, has been on hormone therapy for two years, and needs Rita's help to find a surgeon willing to help Manitas get gender confirmation surgery. Rita succeeds in her mission and gets her big payday, while Manitas fakes their death and emerges from surgery as Emilia Pérez.
Cut to four years later, when Emilia reaches out to Rita again with a different request. She misses her wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their children, who went into hiding in Switzerland after Manitas' fake death, and so Emilia asks Rita to bring them back to Mexico so they can live with her. Since none of them know Emilia's true identity, she poses as a distant relative of Manitas. Audiard directs these first acts with a level of commitment so intense that most of the criticisms one could lob at the premise bounce off by its sheer wackiness. After all, here is a film by a French director who doesn't speak Spanish, shot almost entirely on soundstages in France, that deals with Mexican political and social issues, as well as a title character who's transgender. By the time we see a musical number where doctors and nurses sing the various types of surgeries Emilia will receive, including the line "penis to vagina" belted out with zero irony, you can't help but throw your hands up and go along with it. Audiard isn't navigating a minefield of hot button issues so much as he's off in another galaxy doing whatever he wants.
For a good amount of time, it works as a piece of eccentric entertainment. Opinions on the main performances have varied since it premiered, but in my eyes this is Saldaña's film and her best performance to date. All four performances, from Saldaña to Sofía Gascón to Gomez and Adrianna Paz, who plays a love interest of Emilia's, are commendable, although Sofía Gascón is the only one to come close to matching Saldaña's skills due to having more to work with. But for as much fun as Audiard has building out this world and its characters within it, he has no follow-through. A rushed last act creates a conflict designed to bring the film to a tragic, inevitable conclusion, all at the expense of everything interesting that came before it. I'll give credit to Audiard for pulling off as much as he does here, but "Emilia Pérez" amounts to a flashy mess. By the end, I came away a little bemused and happy to go along my merry way while it does its own thing.
The other hot ticket at TIFF was Luca Guadagnino's "Queer," his adaptation of William S. Burroughs' novel of the same name. Set in Mexico City in the early '50s, it focuses on Burroughs stand-in Lee (Daniel Craig), one of many American men who find themselves in Mexico to take advantage of the cheap cost of living and freedom to indulge in their desires. William spends his days shooting heroin, drinking from one bar to the next, gabbing with other queer expats, and desperately trying to bed any man who strikes his fancy. Guadagnino leans into artifice from the start to get at the ambivalence of queer existence at the time, from Stefano Baisi's production design (most of it was shot on sets in Rome) to Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's cinematography (plenty of surrealist imagery and CGI establishing shots that looks like elaborate miniatures at times) and an anachronistic soundtrack with songs by Prince, New Order, Nirvana, and others. All of these elements purposefully don't come together, like trying to fit together jigsaw pieces from different puzzles. The soundtrack does the most heavy lifting in conveying how these men exist outside of time, their true feelings reduced to fleeting moments of passion when they can get it. There's no option where they can live as they wish. They can only exist in a constant, destructive state of limbo.
Guadagnino filters these ideas through William, who soon falls hard for the young, handsome new arrival in town Allerton (Drew Starkey). Lee eventually succeeds at getting Eugene into bed, and while there's a passion between, them it's a doomed romance from the outset. That's where "Queer" settles itself into a forlorn slog, as Lee foolishly tries to make Allerton fall in love with him through a paid arrangement and, eventually, a trip to South America in search of ayahuasca in the Amazon. It's difficult to see why Guadagnino takes the romantic route given the flat execution. His direction is too fussy to ever be felt, a series of highly curated choices that doesn't translate to anything passionate on screen. Not helping matters is the overbearing score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which doesn't pair well with Daniel Craig's forced performance and Drew Starkey's blank slate of a role.
Making things worse is Guadagnino's inability to manage tonal shifts from somber drama to heightened surrealist fantasy once the two men head off into the jungle and eventually dabble in hallucinogens. Lee states that part of why he wants to try ayahuasca is due to reading about its telepathic properties, which allows the opportunity to communicate without speaking. It ties back to Guadagnino's overall portrait of Lee, and Burroughs, as a man who can only suffer his way through life, where the pursuit of his passions comes with high risk and exposure. There is, naturally, plenty to mine from here, but Guadagnino isn't the one to do it, nor is screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (who, based on this and "Challengers," has an allergy to subtext). If the dull, sluggish pacing of "Queer" doesn't make that clear, the embarrassing finale will, with its arduous "2001" inspired moments making me wish that surrealism would put out a restraining order against Guadagnino.
With both films letting me down, I ended up finding highlights elsewhere, and in the spirit of variety I wanted to share a few words on two highlights. The first is Jia Zhangke's "Caught by the Tides," which also premiered at Cannes this year, and for about half of its runtime had me thinking I was witnessing a new masterpiece. Jia has established himself as a top tier auteur since the 2000s with films starring his wife and muse Zhao Tao, including "The World," "Still Life," and "Mountains May Depart" among others. His latest is a bold, radical effort that dates back about two decades. While filming in the 2000s, Jia would shoot different scenes he'd come up with despite having no real purpose for them at the time. These outtakes make up the majority of "Caught by the Tides," where he strings them together through extended montages and a narrative where Zhao plays a woman searching for a man (Li Zhubin) she loves. What Jia and his three editors construct is a downright incredible series of montages that's like watching an epic romance, a documentary, and an essay film on the changing landscape of China in the 21st century all at once. The film's final act, set in 2022 and filmed with both Zhao and Li to tie everything together, operates in a more conventional manner than the awe-inducing material of the first two acts. But it's hard not to be moved when these two characters reappear and reunite decades later, in what feels like a culmination of ideas that Jia has been exploring throughout his filmography.
The other film shares some surprising similarities with "Caught by the Tides," although both films couldn't be more different from each other. Rachel Kempf and Nick Toti's "It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This" also mines footage filmed since the 2000s, only this time it's to construct a slippery hybrid of documentary and found footage horror. Kempf and Toti more or less play slightly different versions of themselves, who live in rural Missouri and buy an abandoned, rundown duplex for a dirt cheap price. They intend to use the space as the primary shooting location for a film they're working on, but the house is covered in satanic symbols, and people keep inexplicably standing outside and staring at the house for hours in a zombified state. In a normal situation, Nick and Rachel would go running right back to their realtor, but the two horror aficionados think they've hit a goldmine so they begin to document everything.
Much of what I described is what really happened. Kemph and Toti moved from Los Angeles to Missouri in 2020 to make films and bought the duplex as a shooting location, then began to document the house once they realized how unsettling it is in its dilapidated state. From that point on, "It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This" becomes more ambiguous in its blending of fact and fiction. While Nick takes on a passive role as the cameraman, both him and Rachel treat the strange goings on as a lark rather than evidence that they're stumbling on to something dangerous. It puts the whole film in an unsettled state, where you're questioning both the reality of every scene and the motivations behind Nick and Rachel's irrational behavior, and it makes every second unpredictable and compelling.
It's also divisive, since the blurred lines and Nick and Rachel's abrasiveness makes "It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This" porous and prickly, especially when their obsession over the house begins to cross certain ethical lines. It may look aimless and slapdash, until Rachel's gay best friend Christian shows up for the two to perform a seance in the house. The seance itself leads to a major shift in the film, where the use of silence and duration makes you realize how much the film's busier setup was a trick. The aftermath of that seance, along with where the story ends up, makes for a tense and unnerving payoff meant to get under one's skin.
(A quick final note regarding "It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This" — the inclusion of real footage of Kempf and Toti and the overall hybrid format has made them decide to never release the film online, meaning it will only be shown theatrically. To make matters more complicated, the screening I attended showed a slightly altered version of the film that wasn't supposed to be shown, however the differences were not significant enough that I couldn't share my thoughts on it.)