This article appeared in the September 20, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Queer (Luca Guadagnino, 2024)

The films I saw at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival offered an array of welcome surprises. Given the brutalities that have beset the world since the festival’s previous edition, Hard Truths, a character study of a high-strung, middle-aged curmudgeon outraged by everything in existence, might sound like a drag through our collective hell, yet it stands as Mike Leigh’s finest work since 2008’s Happy-Go-Lucky—which could be regarded as Hard Truths’s exact inverse. The new film follows the ever-agitated, phobia-addled Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste, star of Leigh’s 1996 masterpiece Secrets & Lies) as she compulsively complains, berates, and stirs up conflict with family, friends, retail clerks, passersby—basically anyone unlucky enough to cross her path. There is tremendous comedy in these encounters, and also pathos: Pansy often itemizes her myriad physical ailments in the film, but it becomes clear over its course that the core issue is one of mental health; she is consumed by some colossal, unarticulated grief. During a visit to their mother’s grave, Pansy’s easygoing sister Chantal (Michele Austin) asks her why she can’t enjoy life. Pansy’s response, which spontaneously catapults from her viscera, is simple: “I don’t know.” After laughing through much of Hard Truths, I found this moment to be harrowing.

With its whiplash shifts from comedy to devastation, the movie could only have been made by Leigh, even though it is set within a Black milieu. The rigorous process of rehearsal and collective composition that’s fundamental to his work makes it so these characters are fully owned and authored by the actors who embody them, which is why their every moment feels lived-in. The brilliance of Leigh’s direction and Tania Reddin’s editing is evident in the way they arrange scenes of dialogue. Rather than fixate on whomever is talking, Leigh and Reddin are careful to direct our gaze toward whomever is changing their mind, often quietly and inconspicuously. There is ample verbiage in Hard Truths, but what I remember most clearly are silences.

There’s a similar magic trick at work in Queer, Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s uncharacteristically vulnerable novel of the same name. Set in sundry Latin American locales in the years following World War II, the story concerns its protagonist’s two preoccupying desires: to cultivate a meaningful intimacy with a handsome, younger man still exploring his sexual orientation, and to find and consume ayahuasca, in the hope that it will grant him the power of telepathy. In a film riddled with counterintuitive casting—Jason Schwartzman as a hirsute, horny, and heavy gay American expat in Mexico City; Lesley Manville as a feral, outlandishly greasy botanist dwelling in the Amazon (with something like a kept lover played by Argentine auteur Lisandro Alonso)—placing Daniel Craig in the role of Bill Lee, Burroughs’s oft-deployed stand-in, pays off wondrously. An eccentric, gun-toting Southerner, Lee, like Burroughs, earns his social capital through talk, especially his “routines,” which are pithy anecdotes or thought experiments that typically involve Swiftian satire and macabre violence. Yet Craig’s finest moments are largely behavioral, made of hesitations, awkward gestures, protracted gazes, or near-inertia. There’s a transfixing scene in which Lee shoots heroin, letting the muted euphoria wash over him while the soundtrack plays New Order’s “Leave Me Alone.”

If such musical anachronisms make you bristle, brace yourself: Queer’s playlist, some of it used diegetically, also features Nirvana and Prince. At times this motif feels like nothing more than the imposition of a directorial signature; at others, it enhances the film’s unexpected air of tenderness. This is a story about the longing to merge, psychically and physically, with another; to bridge the gulf that exists between bodies. “I want to talk to you without speaking,” Lee tells his lover. There’s something else in Queer that goes unspoken: Burroughs’s accidental 1951 killing of his wife, Joan Vollmer. The allusions are easy to spot for those who know the writer’s biography, but might seem opaque to those who don’t. In his evocation of the incident through oneiric, hallucinatory passages, Guadagnino tips his hat to David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991), which revolved around the disquieting notion that Burroughs would never have become an author if he hadn’t been forced to write his way out of guilt and grief.

Bringing grief back down to earth, Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s eponymous adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend is a wise and witty, though somewhat staid, study in loss and companionship. Set in New York’s literary scene, it features—I say this without a hair of hyperbole—one of the greatest nonhuman performances in cinema history. Revered author Walter (Bill Murray) dies, leaving his beloved Great Dane, Apollo (the amazing Bing), in the care of old friend Iris (Naomi Watts). Apollo is a huge imposition on Iris, in part because her Manhattan apartment building doesn’t allow pets, but the pooch entered Walter’s life with uncanny kismet and goes on to ingratiate himself into Iris’s busy existence as a kind of canine embodiment of Walter’s irascible spirit. It sounds corny, and maybe it is corny. But McGehee and Siegel handle each turn with clear-eyed, unpretentious elegance, while Bing’s Apollo, who cannot understand that Walter isn’t coming back, conveys a spectrum of emotions many human actors can only aspire to.

The echoes of those who have passed on also feature prominently in Measures for a Funeral, the latest—and, thus far, lushest—in Sofia Bohdanowicz’s series of autofictional films concerning Audrey, an academic embodied with great precision and minimal affect by co-writer and longtime collaborator Deragh Campbell. Chronicling Audrey’s pursuit of knowledge of the life of Kathleen Parlow, the underappreciated early-20th-century Canadian violinist (and mentor and teacher to Bohdanowicz’s grandfather), the film travels from Toronto and the womb-like allure of its university archives to the U.K. and Norway, where the outwardly aloof Audrey is confronted with people and places that force her out of her comfort zone. Curiously, Bohdanowicz’s most ambitious work echoes the films of fellow Torontonian Atom Egoyan in its foreboding camerawork, its investment in cultural heritage, and, rather surprisingly for a filmmaker whose works typically embrace enigma, a great deal of expository dialogue, which repeatedly announces the film’s themes in highly articulate, and artificial, exchanges.

Yet this profusion of talk does not preclude a wealth of potent images or activity. Among Campbell’s many talents is her capacity to enact bold actions without superfluous expression. Audrey frequently repeats the gestures and follies of the ghost she’s chasing in a manner that is engrossingly disconnected and strange, while the diversity of landscapes she visits speaks to the transformations occurring within Audrey as she attempts, and fails, to flee from personal troubles. The film ultimately circles back homeward to Montreal for a cathartic, stunningly beautiful, wordless sequence anchored by a concert of a composition written for Parlow that had previously been presumed lost (and featuring an exhilarating performance from Spanish violinist María Dueñas). This sequence, whose images shift locales while its soundtrack remains firmly in the concert hall, is itself a piece of music: its dynamics feel guided by rhythm, variation, and accumulation, and by a willingness to surrender narrative and character development to the dictates of emotional suspense and release.

No one has ever accused Nicolás Pereda of excess exposition. His latest Mexico City–set film, Lázaro at Night, adheres to the Mexican-Canadian filmmaker’s cryptic trajectory with a plot loosely revolving around a love triangle—if love isn’t too strong a word for the casual sexual and emotional connections among the three central characters, all of whom share varying levels of ambition as writers and actors. Two of them show up to audition for a film director who claims to dislike auditions, choosing instead to observe his prospective actors performing quotidian activities—which results in him talking one into looking after his cat and the other into washing his dishes.

Throughout the first two-thirds of Lázaro at Night, its characters meet in apartments and houses, concert halls and restaurants, negotiating their relationships and trying to inch forward in their careers. These scenes, which play out in sly repetitions and variations, are frequently very funny: I’ve long held that humor is Pereda’s most underappreciated gift. In its last third, the film takes a wild detour, initiated by an audio recording of an interview with a literature instructor, before transporting us to a realm in which Lázaro, now inhabiting the role of a famous literary character, traverses a series of chiaroscuro scenes taking place in a dreamlike landscape. Even if spoilers weren’t a concern, I would have a hard time articulating the exact nature of where Lázaro at Night lands. Let’s just say that, for all its literary allusions, it’s a space that could only exist in the cinema.

José Teodoro writes criticism, plays, and literary works, and is one half of the musical entity Applied Silence.