It’s very late now on TIFF 2023 Day 2 and all of my screenings are starting to blend together already. I saw three films today and wanted to make sure to get these mini reviews out for The Boy and the Heron, Finestkind, and Les Indésirables. I’ll likely expand these in the future, especially the final film in that list which I think is just extraordinary.
The Boy and the Heron
Hayao Miyazaki has been the arbiter of so much wonder and imagination that it can kind of feel sacrilegious to say that this film didn’t move me as much as I felt it was going to given how the film starts. Beautifully animated film that very much feels like the idea of a movie with depth. I don’t mind that filmmakers ask the audience to fill in the blanks but Miyazaki’s latest movie feels like it is requiring me to do so just so the film will feel complete. The ending feels incredibly abrupt for as grand a journey as we went on during the film. Even with these quibbles, there’s some fascinating ideas floating about in this movie regarding grief, malice, and family that make for a movie that’s never boring.
Finestkind
Despite a very game cast, this movie fails them at almost every turn and plays much too broadly for a film with the kind of specificity it wants to have. There’s so many competing elements in this film: a coming of age story, “love” story, broken and mended families, drug lords, fishing…and they all feel like separate entities rather than being part of a blended whole. There’s also some incredibly mixed approaches to the accent that does nothing to ground us in regionality and make some emotional moments very comical.
There are som fun quotable moments (shout out to the Sesame Street joke given Ismael was once on the show).
Les Indésirables
Now this is what I want to see! The finest film I’ve seen in my first two days at TIFF, Ladj Ly’s film is a searing portrait of gentrification, politics, and race. Every single aspect of the film is good to great, from the brilliant performances (Anta Diaw in her film debut is spectacular) to the script that piles injustice on top of heartbreak and humanity. Ly’s experience of growing up in an area like this in Paris certainly informs the world and he shoots the film with the intensity and care of someone with the utmost empathy. I felt fully engrossed with this picture, and even when I wanted to turn away or curse, I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.