You know October has come to Montréal in a number of ways. The leaves turn an appealing shade of crimson to yellow, the first signs of frost start appearing, the sun makes itself scarcer and most importantly cinephiles start heading downtown for a ten-day bacchanal of world cinema, the Festival du nouveau cinéma. All told, this was something of a banner year for the FNC, which saw old masters treating us to some of their best works in years and young voices stepping up to the plate and announcing their presence loud and clear. It was also the occasion to discover a variety of films from all over the world that upon first look would seem unconnected, coming as they do from vastly different contexts and modes of production. But as always in a festival, the strange alchemy of cinema took over, conjuring links and narratives between the different strands of the fest, letting films resonate and echo each other in unexpected and productive ways.

A number of films this year were united by final moments that radically recontextualized what came before, final leaps of faith from filmmakers that like a sudden flash exploded forward and echoed back giving a new perspective to what came before. This is perhaps most striking in Evil Does Not Exist, a fascinating new creation from Ryusuke Hamaguchi, one of Japan’s most inquisitive young filmmakers. For much of its runtime, it’s a quite mellow affair, laying out its characters and philosophical conflicts at a measured, tranquil pace, following in the footsteps of its placid main character, a jack-of-all-trade finding himself in the middle of a conflict between encroaching, destructive modernisation and traditional living. The film can even seem too debonair at times, too even-handed, until a final, shocking act of violence throws the film into the allegorical in breathtaking fashion, like Hamaguchi pushed us off a cliff.

Los Colonos, a promising debut from Felipe Galvez Haberle about a violent colonial campaign to create a road through the south of Chile at the dawn of the 20th century inverts this dynamic, starting out as a violent anti-western, only to switch gear to a more civilized, if no less seething tone in its epilogue. This first part is well filmed, making use of the stunning landscapes of the Tierra Del Fuego to stage its demented fable of carnage and colonialism. In that, it sticks to the classics with cowboys and soldiers spouting racist epithets and playing games of power, keeping the film at a slow boil until moments of stark violence pierce the tension and lift the veil on this dark past. It presents the dirty works and faces of building a nation with suitable disdain, uncovering the venal and bloody reality hiding behind the myths we teach children. If that’s all it did it would be a fine film, but its finale cleverly subverts a trope often overused in arthouse cinema, the direct look to camera, to at once implicate cinema in the violent myth-making of its first part and make us question the coercive notion of national history, even well-meaning rewritings of it.

Monster from esteemed director Hirokazu Kore-Eda also gains much of its strength from a final act recalibration that elevates the film to ecstatic new heights. The movie tells a Rashomon style story about school bullying from 3 different perspectives. And if the film had stayed at that it would have been a fine piece of filmmaking, slowly uncovering the multiple layers of intrigue and the moral knots at the center of the story, buoyed by Kore-Eda’s gentle humanism and gift for filmic space here making great use of diegetic sound to orient us around events we’ve seen from different perspectives. But Kore-Eda does something truly breathtaking in the film’s final moments leaving behind the moral dichotomy that had defined most of the film so far in an act of pure faith in his youthful characters as if acknowledging the limits of his approach until now and letting them transcend the tired moral dogmatism of the old generations in a blissful moment of pure cinema.

The Beast, a wildly ambitious effort from French director Bertrand Bonello, who was also the subject of a retrospective this year, also benefited from a final scene that exploded beyond the structure the film had previously set up. Taking place across three time periods, 18th century Paris, 2010 Los Angeles and futuristic France, the film weaves a subtle narrative about the death of emotions in a progressively more automated world. It is an unwieldy piece of filmmaking, mixing styles and tones, that threatens to break apart at multiple points but that is possessed of moments of intense, painful beauty and a stunning finale that crystallises everything we just saw into a potent scream about our modern world. At the center of it all are two bodies, Léa Seydoux and George MacKay, set against the vagaries of time, the corporeal becoming the last rampart of humanity and feeling. They are lovers, then enemies, finally twin souls, their bodies never forgetting their wealth of feelings even as the world around them calcifies and maims them. Bonello lets these ideas percolate in a mix of subtle and flashy ways, setting his first story around a doll factory, the beginning of mass production, or inserting an Elliot Rodger analogue in its second part, pushing our capacity for empathy to its limits. The film takes wild swings going from period piece propriety to glitchy social media satire, not afraid to be unpleasant if it means plunging into the depths of the human soul. It is full of jagged edges, sure to cut you if you hold out your hand, but it is all the more honest for it.

On the other side of the spectrum, there were a number of films that luxuriated in the simple beauty of the moment, making a virtue out of simplicity and tranquillity, letting their gentle charms and humble curiosity carry them along. Here from Bas Devos was one such film and an absolute highlight of the fest, a calming idyll in the middle of Brussels taking its time alongside its characters and really building a relaxed, empathetic space with its sun-dappled images of the city. Following a Romanian construction worker and the few lazy days preparing his oncoming trip back home, the film is like a breath of fresh air, unspooling gently along the streets of the city, soaking up its stories, its greenery, pausing to look down with a seed scientist in an extended pas de deux in a public park. Devos makes enchanting use of 16mm photography and natural light to inject his chlorophyll filled images with grace and lightness. Truly a lovely experience.

Perfect Days from Wim Wenders was a return to form for the German master returning him to his earlier obsessions, rock and roll and freedom, here in a more world-weary form if no less potent and charming. Following Hirayama, brought to simple, glorious life by Koji Yakusho, a Tokyo toilet cleaner staking out a simple, leisurely life amidst his routine. Wenders chronicles this looking at the little things, letting the simple rhythms of everyday life guide the story along. It is a film of little things building into a bittersweet symphony on finding joy on one’s own terms that knows every moment of bliss is gently suffused with regret.

This tranquility extended to Lois Patino’s Samsara, a gently experimental film following the life of a young Lao monk and the soul of an elder parishioner along her journey of reincarnation, always with a Zen-like calm. Everything from its beautifully evocative 16mm photography to its sound design conjures up peacefulness and repose, letting us marvel at the beauty of the Laotian countryside and its vivid colours. The film gets playfully experimental in a beautiful sequence that asks us to close our eyes, but never forgets its down to earth charms. The questions it poses about life and death are met with the same peaceful humility that permeates the entire film making for a deceptively profound meditation on the endless cycle of life and death.

Perhaps the simplest film of the fest In Our Day, continued Hong Sang-soo’s hot streak with one of his loosest effort in years. Leisurely covering a day in the life of an actress and a poet both visited by younger disciples come to ask them questions, the film lets scenes play out with a gentle humour, following conversations around food and drink and little distractions like a missing cat. Hong devotees will no doubt decipher the autobiographical notes within the work as well as the director’s continued interest in the fraught relationship between generations in a changing Korea. It is also his most honest about aging and the travails of a life dedicated to art, his usual circular, boozy conversations broken through by the headstrong elder poet on one side of this diptych. Upon leaving the cinema one is left with the feeling of a lazy autumn afternoon punctuated by a charming, honest discussion. And yes there is a zoom.

We also got to check back in with Italian master of romantic crankiness Nanni Morreti with his new pamphlet on the state of cinema, A Brighter Tomorrow, a film that manages to be, like its maker both bitter and hopeful, wizened and youthful. Moretti’s work has always had a declamatory feel (so has his acting), shouting out his ideas to a world that now seems less and less willing to hear him out. Following an aging film director (played by Moretti) as his new film and family start falling apart, the parallels to Moretti’s life are inevitable, his films being both highly personal and highly engaged politically and artistically. For him, as is dramatized in the film, there is no real divide between those concepts anyway. He is probably the last filmmaker who can make pronouncements about the ethics of cinema and feel like he truly means it, that making a dumb, loud film is wrong on a moral level. This is immensely refreshing in these times of moral relativism and surface level art criticism. That the film can be this angry, saddened and ultimately hopeful about life and cinema is a testament to Moretti’s undying humanism and humour.

Perhaps the most emotionally wrenching movie of the fest was Totem from Lila Aviles; a small marvel of a film that truly stands at the height of its characters, in this case a little girl, Sol, living through a devastatingly monumental day. As her family is trying to set up a farewell party for her dying father, Aviles skillfully sets up relationships and conflicts through overheard fragments and elusive glimpses alongside Sol slowly piercing together adult secrets kept from her. The film makes great use of its central location, having the multiple siblings ricocheting off each other and the walls in their quest to think of anything else but their feelings of grief. Everything is suffused in a sense of proximity, of people having known the place and each other all their lives and this feeling of a love that will remain no matter what hardship may come makes this film truly special and moving.

This theme of the necessity of letting love survive is also at the center of Japanese master Shinya Tsukamoto’s new film Shadow of fire. Showing us two visions of hell in post-war Japan, first a dilapidated bar, then an eerie countryside as a young boy must learn to survive and keep his humanity as the worst and the best of humanity parade before him. Tsukamoto’s directorial presence is most keenly felt in the way he films bodies, quite literally human rags, barely hanging together from trauma and lack of food but finding a way to forge ahead in an hellish bombed out Tokyo.

One of the best film of the fest, Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of The World (Radu Jude) was a shotgun blast to the face, an unrelenting assault on all the ugliness of the modern world that manages to be gross, juvenile, smart and deeply self-accusatory about the role images have played in getting us to where we are now. Like a particularly profound graffiti in a toilet stall, the film mixes high and low art, the profane and the sacred in its portrait of a film gig worker and her Odyssean trek through Bucharest. The film is so bursting with ideas that simply listing them would probably get me to my word count, but for such an unwieldy work, Jude achieves a surprisingly high batting average. Even his most out there ideas like the addition of a misogynistic Tik Tok influencer played by the main character with a face filter manage to both shock and question. That the film is also gorgeous to look at, with high-contrast black and white making the most of Angela’s shimmering clothes is just another example of Jude’s having his cake and eating it too ethos, to make a masterpiece of the rot and decay of our modern hyper-capitalist dystopia.

Less successful if still interesting was The Human Surge 3 from Eduardo Williams. The film is a definite experience that explodes into something magical in its final third but is perhaps too meandering on its way to getting there. Williams’ previous film was anchored by its tactile relationship to place and context, here we find the opposite, a landmark-less drift into a virtual, magical world where wisps of story are doled out in conversations taking place in multiple languages and across multiple locations. This is quite literally a film without borders, with characters coming in and out of being, dropping out of the edge of the frame only to be reencountered in a further pan. The entire movie, filmed with 360 cameras and then edited using VR goggles, has this floaty aura, the camera gliding over foggy hills, the frame morphing and contracting, lending everything an oneiric, half-asleep feeling. Williams plays on this in betweenness, the film being this ultimate product of our digital, connected post-physical world, but still being edited by the director’s body. This floaty feeling is perhaps too hard to maintain over two hours and risks losing many viewers, but it perhaps encourages this, the audience’s daydreams becoming another space for the film to wander around in.

A definite highlight was May December from Todd Haynes. Loosely based on an old tabloid story about a teacher seducing her student and then marrying him after getting pregnant, the film follows an actress entering the family 20 years later in order to research the role. Haynes and screenwriter Samy Burch concoct a story so layered and deliciously compelling, it reminded me what a good American script can look like. The characters do not announce themselves or blurt out their motivations, we come to know them and understand the depth of their feelings through their actions and the way they interact with the world. Haynes, always at a somewhat ironic remove, knows perfectly what notes to hit to make every mask crumble and expose the rot at the heart of bourgeois all-American existence but doesn’t spare himself and the parasitic nature of art, unravelling the layers of manipulation and deception animating each of his characters.

And so as the different theaters of the city returned to their regular programming, the festival came to a close, leaving us with an especially strong vintage and a few theories about the state of movies. Firstly, if some films tended towards the bleak and the pessimistic, it seemed to me like a greater number preferred to focus on the positive with narratives of people finding joy and fulfillment in the little things of life. I very much enjoyed those movies for their gentle vibe and often gorgeous cinematography, letting me bask in the sounds and colours of faraway metropolises or tropical forests and take joys in the minutia of daily living. But another part of me wondered if this turn inward wasn’t a sign of some political retreat, a rejection of collective fighting to instead find fulfillment in the individual, the rest of this doomed world be damned. And is it so bad? Has cinema reached its sinking boat era? I guess we’ll find out next year.

Festival Reports   festival of new cinema   fnc   japanese cinema   montreal festivals