The day started well with Winter Of The Crow from filmmaker Kasia Adamik. It’s a moody, expressionistic visit to Warsaw in December 1981, behind the Iron Curtain.
Lesley Manville is Joan, a British academic, a researcher into psychiatry who’s speaking at an event at the local university when the students protest the regime. Martial law quickly follows, leaving Joan stranded in an apartment block outside the city, the greyest, most brutal, wintry place in the universe — somewhere the sun hasn’t shone in years.
I really enjoyed the grit and texture in the film — it goes beyond realism to something more like a chilly nightmare. The plot demands that Joan take a lot of polaroids, which she justifies as part of her work, but it’s a stretch to believe when she witnesses the killing of an activist student her first instinct would be to snap a photo. Interesting, potentially fatal choice to subtitle the Polish speakers even though Joan can’t understand them, which puts us in the audience a step ahead of her. It turns out these machinations don’t impede suspense as the picture rapidly transforms into a Hitchcockian spy thriller. Good stuff.
The less said about The Ballad Of A Small Player the better. It’s the first out-and-out disappointment at this year’s festival, it’s from Edward Berger of Conclave and All Quiet fame, he’s a capable filmmaker, which shows in the lavish production design and love of neon glaze.
Colin Farrell plays an Irish fellow putting on airs as Lord Doyle — he’s a gambler on a bad luck streak (do we ever meet super successful gamblers in movies?) living in a hotel in Macao, and he can’t pay his bills.
A local hostess (Fala Chen) has a soft spot for him, while an English detective (Tilda Swinton in anti-glam, full-on Michael Caine accent mode) tracks him down to recoup money he stole when he left the UK. I kept waiting to care about any of the characters here, or find an ounce of humanity, or humour, in any of it. It’s meant to be a slick neo-noir, and it has the trappings, but absent any level of emotion beyond pity. Dead on arrival.
I’m a fan of Oliver Assayas, especially his pictures with Kristen Stewart (The Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper). He introduced his new film, Wizard Of The Kremlin, by saying his movies are usually pretty simple, but this one is complex. He’s not wrong — this adapts the geopolitical novel by Giuliano Da Empoli detailing the rise of Vladimir Putin. It starts way back at the fall of the Soviet Union, profiling the life of a fixer, the political animal Vadim Baranov, played by Paul Dano. He’s a composite of a number of different people, but the actor holds the film together with his unruffled charisma. We meet him in the 1990s Moscow art scene as a theatre director, moving onto TV, and eventually into politics while we witness the rise of the oligarchs — including Dmitri Sidorov played by Tom Sturridge — before Putin (an entirely credible Jude Law) steps in and assumes a new level of control.
It’s almost painfully episodic and may have really benefited from having been a six-episode miniseries, as well as, frankly, more sex and violence. The script is fascinating, cerebral, and almost scuppered by too much exposition. Poor Alicia Vikander gets the flashiest role and then remains offscreen for big chunks of time as Baranov’s on-again-off-again love and biggest critic.
There’s the suggestion the movie is about Baranov’s struggle to save his soul while bathing in power, but really he’s enjoying his work far too much. It ends in a way you might predict, but without nearly enough context. The picture still gets a cautious recommendation simply because it’s never boring, and because it also features the always excellent Jeffrey Wright.
Paul Dano and Olivier Assayas at TIFF
