David MacKenzie is the talent who directed the excellent Hell Or High Water and pretty damn good Outlaw King, so when I saw he had something new here at TIFF I made a point of catching it. This picture is a pure thriller of the sort we sadly rarely see these days — a movie with a lock-tight plot, compelling characters, and a detailed and vivid urban environment. Riz Ahmed is a kind of broker, a man who helps whistleblowers unload their important documents and/or collect the money they have coming to them from aggressive, often homicidal corporate types. It’s an interesting gig, and makes you wonder whether that job actually exists. He communicates with “clients” on either side of this divide by using a relay service — he types on a machine that an operator reads over the phone to another person, that way he’s untraceable and no one ever gets to hear his voice.
In this case it’s Lily James who has files pilfered from a biotech company that reveals their new genetically modified superfood has terminal side effects. She was going to go public, but has now decided to not bother, to return the documents to her former bosses provided her security can be assured. The problem is she’s not very good at this corporate espionage, and Ahmed’s character has his hands full with heavies including Sam Worthington and Willa Fitzgerald. The Empire Podcast has a great expression for movies where someone is super-capable at their jobs and we just get to enjoy watching them do their thing — “competence porn.” That’s Relay in a nutshell — it’s wonderfully slick and fun, with a hell of a third-act twist.
It took me awhile to warm up to Edward Berger’s Conclave. The director of the recent German version of All Quiet On The Western Front is a talented filmmaker and brings all his visual panache to bear in this story of what happens with a group of cardinals when a pope dies — the one who has been designated the manager gathers them all and they vote on who will get to be the next Pope. It’s very much a portrait of Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), the manager who doesn’t want to be pope but may have to be anyway as the cardinals shuffle the deck and pull power plays on one another — also starring John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci, and Isabella Rossellini as the only woman in the movie with a line.
My initial reaction was, hey, we know this story and have seen it before — it feels like a high budget TV drama, fantastic production design, costumes, and a bombastic score upping the drama artificially. But as we go along, the plot machinations bring not only some humour but a few genuine surprises, too. This feels like another big awards contender, when the time comes.
Queer is Luca Guadagnino’s new film, adapting a William Burroughs story and starring Daniel Craig as Lee, a terminally soused ex-patriot American in Mexico City in the ’50s who spends his days wearing wrinkled white linen, drinking tequila, and hitting on men in bars. Only his pal Joe (and unrecognizable Jason Schwartzman) really knows him — this is a lonely fellow. He then falls hard for Drew Starkey’s Allerton, who won’t confirm his sexuality, nor whether he’s genuinely interested in Lee, even when they trip into the jungle together for an hallucinogenic adventure.
Guadagnino gave us gay first love in Call Me By Your Name and the passions in a love triangle in Challengers — this is nothing like that. This is about the crushing truth of unrequited obsession, with Craig giving a surprisingly physical performance as someone addicted to booze, to drugs, and to someone who will never truly return his affection. It’s a deeply sad film, and one that’s strangely in conversation with David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, another Burroughs adaptation that like Queer is largely shot in a studio — with Cronenberg it was a Toronto warehouse doubling as North Africa, with Guadagnino it’s the massive Roman studio Cinecittà standing in for Mexico. The new film is much more colourful and less dour, but similarly uninterested in plot and more in states of mind and the deep pain of living.
