The late Finnish writer-illustrator Tove Jansson is immortalized in the wide world of children’s literature for her series of fantastical yet relatable Mumin Troll books. But she also pinned some important books for adults, including the mesmerizing The Summer Book, a touching and faithful screen adaptation of which is one of the prizes of the SBIFF crop this year.
Director Charlie McDowell beautifully transposes the charm, salty wisdom, mortality awareness, and family bond in his film, with help from a quietly powerful performance by Glenn Close and suitably impressionistic music by Polish pianist-composer Hania Rani. The film, like the book, plumbs depths of meaning and character from a purposefully limited palette. There is deceptive simplicity in the story of a feisty grandmother (Close), her precocious young granddaughter Sophia (Emily Matthews), and a father recovering from “the stink of grief” following his wife’s death.
They are summering on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland archipelago and basking in solitude. Sophia occasionally bumps into ennui, as when she prays, “Dear God, I’m bored as beef. Please give us a storm or something.” Sly humor, pathos, reverence for nature and pocket-size revelations emerge, but never in a ham-fisted way. Count The Summer Book as one of this festival’s gyms, albeit one blessed by understated Nordic beauty.
From the “Whatever happened to Crispin Glover?” files comes the wild ride quirk of a film, Mr. K. In writer-director Tallulah H. Schwab’s dream circus of a film, Glover — best known for his left-of-normal roles in Back to the Future, River’s Edge, and Wild at Heart — appears as a magician who finds himself trapped in a world of comic and cosmic trickery. In this absurdist scenario, with the spirits of Kafka and Beckett in the inspirational wings, our hapless hero checks into a rickety old hotel and can never leave, it would seem.
A ragtag brass band shows up at random times and hounds him, a crazed chef tries to lure him into apprenticeship, and he tries to induce an uprising of hotel guests/inmates, but they transform into needy zombies. Meanwhile, two proper but mischievous elderly women appear as coffee-offering former sprites. Ever have a dream like that?
An exit strategy ultimately involves a supernatural oracular intervention. Just as the hotel is a place he gets lost in, so does the film allow us to lose ourselves in, leaving logic at the door. Suffice to say, Glover is ideally cast.
House Bound
The Knife, an engrossing film written and directed by and starring young filmmaker Nnamdi Asomugha, wins points for its fresh sense of innovation and social merit. With its abundance of tight close-ups and a suitable sense of choreography, the saga unfolds over a few hours in the middle of the night, and in a single location — a Black family’s home after a violent encounter with an intruder. Help is on its way, along with different levels of hurt, in the form of a persistent homicide detective (Melissa Leo, perfect for the role) and her crafty interrogation techniques.
Slippery subplots and ambiguities complicate the story, and elevated beyond only the black and white cultural friction built into the scenario. This tough but tender indie movie is deserving of its slowly building circle of influence.
A seasoned actress of film and TV — including the respected series Homicide and many other police roles — Leo showed up for a post screening Q&A as herself, projecting a tough but tender persona in the theater spotlight. She spoke about how Asomugha avidly sought her out for the role after seeing her in Flight, with Denzel Washington. After reading the script and speaking with him, Leo eagerly signed on. As she said, “what you’re watching is something you have not seen — a Black family dealing with this situation.” As a kind of anti-hero figure in the tale, she noted how someone in the Tribeca Film Festival audience said, “I hate you!” She smirked, saying, “what you think of me or me as detective Carlson, I could care less. She did her job, and I did mine.”
So there.
App to the Stars
On the basis of a quick synopsis, the film O Horizon might smack at least a bit like soft-serve sci-fi woo woo. In the premise, the scientific researcher Abby (Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova, most recently seen in The Apprentice) who has been charting the brain waves of a monkey and is grieving the death of her father (David Strathairn). She channels his spirit in real time thanks to the AI-based intervention of the “Seeking a Friend” store. These days, they have an app for everything.
Along the way to reconciling with her father’s passing, she and her boyfriend bump into none other than beloved singer-songwriter Amee Mann in the forest, and she sings a couple of inspirational songs by the campfire, lending another surreal cinema moment reminiscent of the bizarre singalong in Magnolia.
Somehow, all the threads of this fantastical tapestry come together in a magical way thanks to the special vision of writer-director Madeleine Rotzler, aided by a consistently creamy-dreamy visual palette and the ethereal yet grounded presence of actor Bakalova. In effect, the film takes its place in a slender genre of magic realist sci-fi hybrids which includes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Her, but in a kinder, gentler, and more woman-centric modality.
In a genial Q&A session moderated by programming director Claudia Puig at the Riviera, Rotzler explained that she originally conceived the piece as a fable but found it had modern-day relevance, especially in the COVID era, when families were deprived of contact with dying loved ones. Hybrid genre-wise, Rotzler explained she was interested in “treating the sci-fi elements as fantasy rather than the future.” She has found that viewers related to the premise of longing for contact with those passed. “Everyone saw themselves in it. The most important thing was to make it universal.”
Behind, Before and Inside the Scenes
While other days/nights on the SBIFF calendar cast the spotlight on household name brand celebrities, Saturday’s attentions, in terms of filmmakers, was on those critical parties whose names are far less well-known but vital to the art of cinema. Saturday morning’s ever-popular Writer’s Panel brought out an A-list of writers currently being courted by Oscar, while the prime time Variety Artisans showcase celebrated artists in various and unassailably important capacities of the filmmaking process.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to work the Variety Artisans program into my dense schedule (partly because I had to catch the unnervingly fine and adrenaline-overloading Danish film The Quiet Ones, about the biggest heist in Danish history, in 2008).
But I did lap up the writer’s confab gab, and rushed to my laptop to jot down some memorable overheard comments.
Mona Fastvoid, who co-wrote the remarkable epic The Brutalist with her director husband Bradley Corbet, talked about the pair creating this film about an architect — they have architects in their families — and a brutal patron. They insisted on keeping the epic three-hour duration, with the novel inclusion of an intermission. “We wanted to dream big,” she said.
Jesse Eisenberg (A Real Pain), the hyper, comic fizz factor on the panel, spoke about his complicated method of writing, launching into a project without first knowing if it would be a play, short story, essay, or film. He claims he writes on an old computer, in email drafts which automatically save. “If I wrote in Final Draft,” he said, “it would feel too much like ‘ok, now I’m committing to making a movie. That’s too much pressure.”
Peter Straughan (Conclave) noted that a central theme of the film was contained in a line from Ralph Fiennes’s keynote homily scene, “certainty is the enemy of unity,” which he said “relates to what’s happening in the world right now.” He also spoke about the variations of expectations between audiences knowing a film is a comedy versus “an ecclesiastic drama.”
Tim Fehlbaum (September 5) spoke about the tight quarters of the film, about the Munich Olympic tragedy viewed from the ABC sports compound, noting “I like the idea of working in a limited space. Hitchcock did that. What you don’t see is part of the story.”
Speaking to a larger issue about the state of film, Joslyn Barnes leaned into a half-positive perspective. “Society is judged by two things — it’s about its brutality or its art. It’s really true.” Our minds drifted once again to the elephant in the White House, but that’s another story, at least in part.
Fehlbaum also uttered a familiar phobia amongst writers of all stripes: “There’s nothing I hate more than staring at a black screen with the cursor blinking.”
The end.
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