Director Lone Scherfig (“An Education”) finds the romantic
and aspirational in “Their Finest,”
a period drama about the British wartime film industry set during the Blitz of
London. Catrin (Gemma Arterton) is assigned to help bring a female perspective
into the war propaganda films at the Ministry of Information’s film division. Her
screenwriting partner, boss and mentor is the encouraging, bespectacled Tom
(Sam Claflin), who, for the most part, sees her as an equal in the
screenwriting team.
The film features a mix of different genres, ideas and
storylines that beautifully blend together: rom-com, historical war drama, the
creative process of writing, the zoo-like atmosphere on set, our human need to
hear stories, and most importantly, women’s rights. The comedic relief of Bill
Nighy, who plays a haughty famous actor aging into increasingly decrepit roles,
is the icing on the cake, though without it “Their Finest” might have been a
little too dry and depressing. Of course, British humor does favor the dry side,
and all kinds of characters do get at least one opportunity to chime in with a
quip (my favorite line describes the organization’s wasting of film celluloid
akin to using loo paper).
The film is very empathetic towards the myriad issues facing
women in the workforce of that era, and what will happen to their positions
when the war is over. “Their Finest” seamlessly addresses the issues of women
being paid less than men and husbands admonishing their wives for being the
breadwinners. These gestures never feel pointed and the film builds in a very
realistic normalization of women’s inequality. For example, Catrin’s
out-of-work painter husband demands she quit her job, but his offense at her
paying the rent is nowhere near as ridiculous as when he accepts a touring
exhibition and expects her to quit the film production to keep him company
abroad. “Their Finest” reminds me of “Mad Men” in these portrayals, but
Scherfig’s film is even more adept at moving fluidly through the constant
onslaught of micro-aggressions Catrin must face in her work. She is reminiscent
of “Mad Men'”s Peggy Olson, in many respects. Catrin’s ambition to write the female
characters who help save the day by actually doing some physical work ends up
being incorporated into the script in a clever meta device, one that comments on the
historical and necessary role so many women workers provided during WWII.
“Maudie” is
another historical drama about the inspiring work of women, and it takes place
just before the war on the other side of the world, in Marshalltown, Nova
Scotia. The titular Maud (Sally Hawkins in quite possibly her best role yet)
has rheumatoid arthritis. People call her a cripple and cast her off as wasted
space—even her aunt and brother. So Maud decides to take life into her own
hands, responding to a cleaning lady ad from a fisherman, the mostly silent and
easily disgruntled Everett (Ethan Hawke), who’s also convinced she can’t be
useful. But Maud is a force of life when she has a brush in her hand, and as
the two acclimatize to each other, finding some sort of comfort in both being
social outcasts, she begins to paint figures all over his house and on anything
she can find: walls, doorframes, windows, pieces of discarded wood paneling.
Anything. She paints flat, vibrant images of flowers and animals and sceneries.
Soon her artwork is discovered by a visiting New Yorker and she becomes
somewhat of a famous name, with her art even hanging in the White House.
Based on the true story of Canadian folk artist Maud Dowley,
“Maudie” is the kind of biopic that hits a nerve and then has you crying
throughout the rest of the film. Even in scenes that run slightly contrived,
Hawkins’ presence and portrayal of this strange, warm, funny little woman is
almost too much to handle. Maudie is the story of a life. It’s the story of a
way of life, even. Dowley was deemed unfit for society but she stubbornly
fought for her own dignity and way of life. It’s the story of an artist who had
nothing, and who needed nothing, except for a brush and some paint. “Maudie” is
not the kind of movie that needs much to prove itself as poignant, it’s the
kind of film that does just fine giving us a glimpse into a humble life of
someone who lived it to the fullest. I don’t think I’ve ever cried so hard at
TIFF before, so thank you Ms. Hawkins, for that breathtaking performance.
“Their Finest” and “Maudie” are twin movies in a sense, and
the same is true of “Colossal” and
“Catfight.” These two films move in the opposite direction, tonally, into a
place of pointless irreverence and violence. Nacho Vigalondo (“Existential”)
creates a somewhat-inexplicable world in “Colossal.” Anne Hathaway plays an
alcoholic writer name Gloria. We find out by the end of the film why she’s so
glorious, so yes, the name fits pretty perfectly. But at the beginning of the
film, Gloria has hit rock bottom: kicked out of her boyfriend Tim’s (Dan
Stevens) apartment, she moves into her parents’ old empty house in her
hometown, where the dust has settled quite finely. But a childhood acquaintance
named Oscar (Jason Sudeikis, who’s brilliant in both sweet-guy and
pure-evil-guy roles) offers help in the form of a waitressing job at his bar
and some hand-me-down furniture to get her by.
Things start to get very strange, however, when Gloria
realizes that her actions have some strange connection to the monster attacks
taking place in Seoul, South Korea. The movie is strange, yes, but it’s got a
more down-to-earth vibe. This is not the kind of blockbuster-y diegesis where
aliens or zombies can take over the planet. The attacks, much like the rest of
the movie, are silly, and the mechanics of Gloria’s inexplicable connection to
the creature also rest heavily on the film’s comedic logic. This is not the
kind of movie you’re supposed to think too hard about. It’s better to just sit
back and enjoy the burgeoning rivalry between Gloria and Oscar, whose
playground antics take on life-or-death stakes of a global proportion.
Onur Tukel’s “Catfight” also
works best if you just sit back and watch the catfights between its two leads,
Veronica (Sandra Oh) and Ashley (Anne Heche)—based on a petty school rivalry
that continues to renew itself into adulthood and beyond. The diegesis of
“Catfight” is more absurd than in “Colossal,” but it’s heavily tied to Big
Ideas About How We’re Fucking Up Our World.
There’s a late-night talk show that serves as our Greek
chorus in delivering the latest devastating news about the war on terror—a
satirical send up of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Much discussion between characters
explores how the war on terror is good, or bad, or both (this backdrop is a
little heavy-handed, but presumably built into a larger point about how
violence manifests into one-on-one microcosmic catfights).
Veronica is a trophy wife whose husband sells weapons or
something or another to the US government, and Ashley is a lesbian modern
artist whose work doesn’t fare well in the art market, deemed too angry for the
current political climate. When they end up in the eponymous fisticuffs after
bumping into each other many years after college, they begin a series of
perennial revenge-seeking chronicles that structure the film in hilarious and
repetitious ways. Its conclusion is a little weak, especially as the wildly
stylized stage-fighting bores into redundancy, but “Catfight” is one of those
movies where its narrative structure, form, and ideas play second fiddle to the
stunning chemistry between Oh and Heche and the extremely satisfying punchy
dialogue (no pun intended).
I sat beside a woman who was laughing so hard she nearly
began to hyperventilate. “Catfight” is also proof of the evolution of
female-to-female dialogue, as it perfectly captures the wit, pettiness and social conditioning of women when dealing with their own gender. The
no-bullshit bravura of Oh’s character with regards to her drinking addiction
reminds me of Nancy Botwin from “Weeds,” while the cynical dispirited view of
the world Heche carries with her is something we rarely see in cinema—the
soul-crushing commercialism of an artist is so ubiquitous in its male perspective;
here we see it from a refreshingly lesbian POV. I don’t know if it’s the kind
of film that you can carry with you, but one can’t forget the petty kineticism
in Heche and Oh’s delightfully nasty repartee. If you cut out the rest of the
film and pasted their exchanges into a new Netflix sitcom, I’d watch that thing
forever.
