There’s lots of very interesting stuff screening at the ByTowne and the Mayfair in the first half of December.
First, there is a splendid trio of films at the ByTowne starring actors I very much admire—Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, and Timothy Spall.
The most spectacular of the three is TÁR, a searing portrait of (fictional) world-famous classical conductor Lydia Tár. She’s conducted many of the world’s top symphony orchestras and is considered the greatest living composer. Now she’s preparing to conduct the prestigious Berlin Philharmoniker in Mahler’s challenging Fifth Symphony. But her power and perfection are complicated. Cate Blanchett has immersed herself in this challenging role, which showcases the actor’s musical ability and intensity of purpose. She studied classical music techniques and even learned German. She lives and breathes this character.
The second film I’m eager to see is a ghost story about a daughter’s flawed perception of her mother’s past, before the daughter was born. In The Eternal Daughter, Tilda Swinton plays a double role as a mother and her daughter. They revisit the mother’s past while staying in a spooky hotel (a former private estate where the mother spent time as a little girl). This double role would be a challenge for any actor and director, but I suspect that Swinton and director Joanna Hogg have pulled it off.
The third film is The Last Bus, a feel-good film starring Timothy Spall as a crusty 90-year-old who sets off on a challenging road trip, via local buses, from his home in John O’Groats, the most northerly part of Scotland, to Land’s End at the southwestern-most tip of England—over 800 miles. He’s transporting the ashes of his beloved wife to the place they spent their first year of marriage.
Speaking of feel-good films, check out Rosie at the Mayfair. A nominee for this year’s TIFF People’s Choice Award, it’s about an orphaned Indigenous little girl who is dumped on her reluctant francophone aunty (whom she’s never met) in 1980s Montreal. Her new home is chaotic: Her aunty is a struggling artist who creates art from “found” objects, and she’s three months behind on her rent. Then there are her two gender-diverse friends…
Continuing at the ByTowne, Viking is a deft comedy by Québecois cinéaste Stéphane Lafleur. The first manned mission to Mars is threatened due to personality clashes among the crew. Flight control back on Earth decides to create a simulacrum of the spacecraft, stock it with five surrogates who possess the same personalities as the feuding astronauts, have them re-enact the events, then feed back what works on Earth to the folks on Mars. When I saw Viking in November, I enjoyed the subtle humour and was pleasantly surprised by the questions it raised about human nature.
A dark drama, the excellent South Korean film Decision to Leave is back at the ByTowne. Park Chan-wook’s latest psychological thriller follows a detective investigating the suspicious death of a man whose beautiful widow seems to be glad he’s dead. The detective is living apart from his wife because he was recently promoted to a big-city police force. During his investigation, he becomes obsessed with the widow. Decision to Leave won Best Director at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.
If you missed it in November, or want to take friends to see it, Call Jane is at the Mayfair. It’s a terrific drama about the underground movement that—before Roe vs. Wade—helped American women obtain safe (though illegal) abortions during a time when it was virtually impossible to do so—no matter a woman’s circumstances (rape, incest, health, economic straits). Elizabeth Banks plays a housewife who, at risk of death due to her pregnancy, finds help in the Call Jane organization, which is run by a tough broad (Sigourney Weaver). She then becomes a “Jane” herself.
For Stanley Kubrick’s fans, the first film in the Bytowne’s Dark December series is the director’s last feature, Eyes Wide Shut. Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise (who were a real-life couple at the time) play a couple whose marriage is tested when Kidman’s character admits to almost having been unfaithful. Distraught, Cruise’s character wanders about New York, eventually ending up at a bizarre and dangerous soirée.
Also at the ByTowne, there’s the just-released 1971 documentary Neil Young: Harvest Time about the making of his seminal album “Harvest.” It’s rough cinéma vérité, but his fans will hear almost all of the album’s songs, see rehearsal footage, and hear stories from the callow Young.
Riotsville, USA is a much darker documentary. Riotsville was a fake town built at an American military base in the 1960s. It was used to train police on how to handle the anti-war and anti-segregation demonstrations occurring in the U.S. Dressed as civilians, soldiers and police would act out protests, then be shown how to shut down the “unruly crowd” using force. Compiled entirely from archival footage, this is a scary facet of American history. At the ByTowne.
December is the time for holiday film favourites such as We’re No Angels. Three desperate escaped convicts have a change of heart when they fall in with a nice family just before Christmas. Humphrey Bogart, Aldo Ray, and Peter Ustinov star as the scoundrels in this comedy confection. At the Mayfair.
The Mayfair wraps up its program of five decades of Academy Award Best Picture winners to celebrate the cinema’s 90th anniversary on December 5 with 1932’s star-studded Grand Hotel.
Dates, times and tickets for the ByTowne are available here. Dates, times and tickets for the Mayfair are available here.
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