TIFF 2020 Reviews: Gaza Mon Amour, Nomadland, Under the Open Sky

 The Toronto International Film Festival is currently ongoing. Here are reviews of some of the films from that fest.

The romance at the heart of Gaza Mon Amour is the kind that would be done in a 15 minute short film, had the movie taken place in an ideal world. But the film takes place in Palestine, where simple matters of the heart are made needlessly more complicated by bureaucracies, systematic oppression and other things. 

By a twist of fate, fisherman Issa (Salim Daw) finds himself in the possession of a bronze Greek Statue (and its disembodied phallus). The statue (and its phallus) become the target of the Hamas authorities; indeed, phalluses both figurative and literal become a sort of obsession for them. It becomes a symbol of supremacy or power that is desired, but not easily obtained. Near the end, there is a parade in the streets where a fake rocket (itself a phallic metaphor) is being raised up. One day we'll have a real rocket of our own, one man says.

But this movie is anything but bleak; the film is more a comedy than a drama, mining gold from the absurdity of the situation Issa finds himself in. Despite all the darkness, the characters of Gaza Mon Amour have found laughter and love in their situation.

The economic devastation brought upon by the recession of 2008 has led Fern (Frances McDormand) to live a life of a nomad, riding across the United States on her trusty van, working part time jobs and seasonal work at places like Amazon. It is not an easy life, but it's a life that she has embraced, perhaps partly out of a desire to grieve, but with no real outlet for that grief. It is also in its own way, an indictment of the economic policies that have lead to this scattering of peoples.

The first part of Chloe Zhao's latest film, Nomadland reads like a series of testimonials from real life nomads (the movie is actually adapted from a true life story) who have all hit the road for different reasons. Some are just looking for a place to settle down. Some are looking for a place to die. Some desire freedom, and some take the trip to find themselves. It's a bit of a paradox, actually: where people find community in shelters and trailer camps, but often only in short, transitory spurts.

The second half of the film becomes a character study, where our gaze is directed solely at Fern and the reasons behind her desire to become a Nomad. She's presented with another way out. But wounds don't heal as easily as we'd like to think, and the shadows of a former life sometimes cling to people too tightly. Home may be where the heart is, but what if the heart is itself lost?

Miwa Nishikawa's films often depict people who use lies and deceit to live another life, but in her latest film, Under the Open Sky, Misao Mikami (Koji Yakusho) is a man whose candor regularly gets him in a lot of trouble. This is a man who wears his heart on his sleeve. The problem is in a society like Japan, speaking your mind isn't always the best recourse.

But to the people who do try to understand Mikami, they find someone who is genuinely trying his best to live out his newfound freedom. The film is littered with small acts of kindness from people who genuinely want Mikami to succeed.

In the end, however, Nishikawa throws us a curveball in the film's last minutes. It questions the meaning of living "under the open sky," and whether having freedom but merely surviving is any better than a life well lived, but behind prison. Paradoxically, for a man who tells the truth to anyone he comes across, the only lie is the lie he tells himself.