Roseanne Liang's Shadow in the Cloud is a great fit for TIFF's Midnight Madness section: a wild, sometimes silly, sometimes hamfisted mishmash of genres that is entertaining as hell, as long as you suspend your disbelief.
Monsters of all kinds haunt WWII pilot Maude Garrett (Chloe Grace Moretz) as she undertakes a top secret mission, and if we are to follow the film's rather overt messaging, the worst monster of all is the patriarchy. The disbelief, skepticism and casual sexism Garrett has to endure over most of the film is reflected in the claustrophobic space of a bomber's turret where she is physically squeezed into the frame.
The proceedings evolve (or devolve, depending on your suspension of disbelief) into more familiar genre trappings by the film's third act, something that will either make or break one's appreciation of the film. But Liang makes it all supremely entertaining, and she knows exactly what kind of film this is and rolls with it.
An artist's journey to master his or her art is often fraught with difficulties, stemming from any number of personal, social and even spiritual factors. But while many take the journey, very few can truly reach the enlightenment at the end. The question that Chaitanya Tamhane's The Disciple then asks is, what happens to all those artists that are left behind?
Both languid and introspective, The Disciple takes us through one such journey. Aditya Modak plays Sharad Nerulkar, a practitioner of traditional Indian music, specializing in a specific type of improvisational performance called Raag. His journey begins through childhood, and is shaped through many mentors. But he begins to suspect that among those climbing the mountain of artistic enlightenment, he belongs to those who will never reach its peak.
This deep existential crisis constitutes most of the film and is compounded by a number of other socio-cultural problems: for an artistic field whose practitioners are drawn towards more modern, contemporary forms of art, the idea that one is unable to contribute directly (and meaningfully) to that field is particularly devastating.
During my initial viewing of the film, I found myself frustrated at the film's eventual solution, something that I figured could've been resolved in far less time. But it's a sunk cost fallacy, in a way: when engaging in a lifetime of work towards an unattainable goal, it might look easier to just keep going than to stop, take a step back, and take a new path.
An inevitable, horrifying force propels the viewer through Jasmila Žbanić's Quo Vadis, Aida?, a heartbreaking and harrowing account of the Srebrenica massacre through the eyes of a UN interpreter. This inertia towards an inevitable outcome makes the proceedings all the more heartbreaking. This is a film that stays with you.
There are a number of things that Žbanić manages to pull off; the film does not glorify or stylize the atrocities that occur, electing instead to put the focus on the victims, and it does not pull its punches when it shows the inaction and thus, the complicity of the UN forces to the events that occur.
Aida uses her unique situation to try to help her family, trying to game a system obsessed with following regulations to the letter. The UN forces, meanwhile, are naive at best, and foolish at worst to think that they can take a war criminal's word as truth.
And then, a masterfully written coda adds a further kink to the proceedings, showing us that the enemy are not aliens or invaders from another land, the perpetrators of this brutal violence were (and still are) countrymen, neighbors, co-workers, and students, most of whom have not been held liable for their crimes. There are no mustache twirling villains, only evil men following orders, an Arendtian waking nightmare for those who survive. But instead of despair the end is hopeful, echoing the film's title: a reference to an apocryphal story where Saint Peter, on the run from Roman authorities, meets the risen Jesus on the road. Jesus' words compel Saint Peter to be brave and return to Rome, to certain crucifixion. Sometimes, in the face of despair, with nothing to lose, the best thing to do is to be brave and live on.
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