The Special Presentations description at TIFF is as laconic as it is cogent: “High-profile premieres and the world’s leading filmmakers.” The films in this dispatch boast star all-star casts and tell coming-of-age stories of a sort, but they’re really stories about people who have to accept parts of themselves they’d rather keep hidden, and begrudgingly accept ways community can help ground them while all else spirals out of control.
Chandler Levack’s “Mile End Kicks” is like a song that I liked–but didn’t love–upon first spin, but its melodies and lyrics grew on me to the point where I can’t help but recommend it. “How can someone who is a people-pleaser critique with integrity?” is a question at the heart of her Montreal-set film, and it all-too-relatably explores what happens when we conflate good performance in our work with our goodness as a person.
Levack has always had a knack for crafting characters you are simultaneously infuriated by but can’t help but find comfort in their foibles, and that’s who she’s crafted with Grace (Barbie Ferreira), a music journalist. Grace desires to write a book about the influence of Alanis Morissette (specifically the album Jagged Little Pill), but finds that, as is true when pursuing work as personal as journalism, life’s logistics disrupts our dreams as much as it reshapes them.
As Grace puts it about Montreal, exploring new sights and going to concerts as part of her book research, it’s evident she carries scars from her past place of employment run by her editor (Jay Baruche). Her old workplace constantly found ways to make her second-guess and doubt her work, and she wears that insecurity openly whenever she meets someone new.
The people who become Grace’s community are as colorful as they are underdeveloped, and while it can be hard to care about characters who seem to only have a couple of distinct personality traits, these archetypes serve as a way to further enrich Grace’s journey to accepting her self-worth. There’s her DJ roommate Madeline (Juliette Gariépy, showcasing her range as she plays some decidedly more cheery and decidedly less psychopathic than her character in “Red Rooms”) and two rival love interests: Chevy (Stanley Simmons) and Archie (Devon Bostick). Part of that cocktail of frustration and relatability that carries over so well in “Mile End Kicks” is the pain and understanding of seeing Grace fawn over guys who are not only less interesting than her but who fail to see her for the talent she has. Not that she needs their approval, but it’s evident that she’s someone who’s riddled with destabilizing insecurity, and that’s a narrative she’s inherited from her old place of employment and other men in her life.
I’ll admit I may have appreciated it more if I had a greater understanding of the music world Grace has such easy affection for; for the more cultured eye, they might have appreciated the references on auditory display. Yet I found even this sense of alienation not only an endorsement of Levack’s immersive script that’s imbued with such specificity, but an invitation to go on a journey with her and Grace to discover not only what makes the music compelling, but also to think of art that puts me in a comforted place. Perhaps that’s the greatest compliment I can give to a film like this: it’s far easier sometimes to dig ourselves into deeper holes to justify our self-loathing when in reality, transformation and renewal are just one song and one new undiscovered love away.
Continuing the through-line of embracing characters and their beautiful messes, director John Early’s “Maddie’s Secret” is a film that soars on the fuel of its open-hearted sincerity. In more immature hands, the film could be a stew of bad taste and grating bits, but Early and his team hold such palpable love for its central characters that it’s hard not to be beguiled; you’ll practically want to plunge your hands through the screen to hug everyone within.
Early plays the titular Maddie, a budding foodie who works as a dishwasher in a Los Angeles food content creation company. When a recipe of hers goes viral, she’s given a bigger platform to showcase her culinary skills. Yet what her best friend (Kate Berlant) and loving husband (Eric Rahill) don’t know is that Maddie wrestles with an eating disorder. It’s become almost a liturgical practice that at the genesis of stress, Maddie will voraciously consume a large amount of food, only to throw it up soon after. Her vocation gives her proximity not only to the thing she loves doing but also is a particularly sinister kind of enablement, one that makes it easy to hide. After a particularly life-threatening accident, Maddie agrees to go into rehabilitation, forcing her to confront the source of her pain.
It may be tempting to read Early’s playing of Maddie as a sort of trans commentary or a larger story about the fluidity of identity. I won’t discredit those readings, but I also find it fascinating that it’s thematic territory that Early himself never seems keen on exploring. Maddie can deceive those around her into thinking she’s okay when she knows she still has demons she’s trying to exorcise, and it’s refreshing to see Early play Maddie as fully-formed without needing to be defined by a particular identity. Early’s and Director of Photography Max Lakner’s shooting style is facetious, often employing crash zooms into the faces of characters when they’re mid-line delivery, which gives it a sitcom effect. At first, it read histrionic (and at times, inappropriate given the severity of the issue being explored), but I found myself viewing them as Early’s invitation for us to behold and cherish his characters in all their foibles and virtues, and to be that cloud of witnesses when Maddie herself is unable to.
It’s refreshing to see Early explore the topic of eating disorders, body image, and self-worth so nakedly on-screen. There’s nothing quite as lonely or terrifying as not feeling proud or at home in your own body, and “Maddie’s Secret” isn’t afraid to show the destructive consequences of someone who can’t accept the love of people around them. It’s moving the way that the film reframes self-love, not as an insular, feel-good mentality, but as an act of almost holy defiance. In a world where there’s often a direct correlation between how good you look and how well you’re treated, “Maddie’s Secret” challenges us that we don’t have to follow the world’s recipe for success; we’re capable and beloved well enough that we can freestyle on our own and still be whole.
The gap between a galvanizing question like “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and the monotony of one like “What do you do for work?” is a bridge we all have to cross from youth to adulthood. Thankfully, director Maude Apatow (last seen in front of the camera in “One of Them Days”) has made a film to help us walk across that divide in “Poetic License,” which reaffirms that it’s never too late for reinvention. It may be a tad overlong (few, if any of her father, Judd’s, films have been shorter than two hours, so perhaps fittingly, Maude is only following in her father’s footsteps), but it is heartwarmingly sincere and radiates with an enlivening warmth.
Quite simply, “Poetic License” celebrates the miracle of human connection; it revels in the way that three disparate people, with their own pursuits, dreams, and questions, can somehow find a way to form friendship across differences in age and disposition. The trio in question is Ari (Cooper Hoffman), Sam (Andrew Barth Feldman), and Liz (Leslie Mann). Best friends Ari and Sam are in a poetry class that Liz is auditing, and while they strike up a friendship, Ari and Sam, in their own ways, fall for Liz.
If the table sounds like it’s set for a raunchy, age gap sex comedy, that misdirect may very well be intentional. Apatow’s film is much more concerned about the ways we give up too easily on our dreams, how society, after a certain point in time, forces us onto our prescribed path, and the harrowing alienation of realizing that there’s no escape from living the wrong life. Liz recently moved to Ari and Sam’s college town due to her husband’s (Cliff Smith) acceptance of a teaching position; while Liz mourns the loss of home, her melancholy is doubled as she mentally prepares to part with her daughter (Nico Parker), who’s preparing to go to college. She’s recently lost her job as a therapist but hasn’t been able to tell her family; her blossoming desire for stability amidst the novelty rises to meet Ari and Sam’s feelings of anticipation for graduation.
This is also a film that’s steeped in the coziness of Autumn: Apatow and Cinematographer Jeffrey Waldron take special care to highlight the colorful sweaters, crunchy leaves, and the airy, transient headspace that often accompanies the fall months. It garners plenty of laughs from its trio and the situational misunderstanding that befalls them, yet I’ll remember it most for its moments of quiet triumph and humanity: the ways Liz delivers a poem that she and the boys co-wrote, the vociferous belly laughs the trio share, or even the awkward yet hard conversations they have when Liz catches on that Ari and Sam are interested in her. Maude Apatow has crafted a film for those who feel like life has crushed their ability to dream but who desire to recapture their wanderlust.
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