By David D’Arcy

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) had much to offer this year, once you walked through construction debris to get to the theaters. Here are some films worthy of note. 

Marianne Jean-Baptist in a scene from Hard Truths. Photo: Toronto Film Fest

Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths is what the title suggests it will be, a rough journey through the lives of three characters, harder than one might expect because the husband, wife, and son are locked into an unhappy marriage.

Leigh, 82, hasn’t made a feature film since Peterloo (2018), a look back at a brutal massacre of British protesters by British troops in 1819. He’s in a familiar contemporary landscape in this drama: an uneasy middle-class house. What’s different is that his characters are Black, although that doesn’t seem to weigh visibly on the misery on display. To paraphrase Tolstoy — too broadly — unhappiness is an equal-opportunity condition.

Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a woman who cooks and complains, often loudly, in a sterile home. Her husband, Curtley, is a plumber and her son, Moses, who is usually attached to an electronic device, is without a job. Mostly silent, Moses takes long walks. The men’s lives feel opaque, withdrawn mostly out of self-preservation, and Pansy feels that she’s been wronged by almost everything. She does have a sister with two daughters and they bring some welcome warmth and humor to a family event. When they’re not unscreen, Hard Truths is a grim saga. Cannes, Venice, and Telluride festivals turned it down.

What may be different for Leigh here, besides the short 97-minute running time and the meagre budget (his lowest in years, he has lamented), is the kind of storyline that was distilled from long sessions of improvisation that led to the final script. We are given scant hints of the the family’s backstory. Through scenes shot by veteran DP Dick Pope, mostly in stark white interiors with a frugal tidy look, we’re left to wonder what went wrong in these characters’ lives. It’s a question you could ask of many dysfunctional families. We get that things are hard, painfully hard, but why did they get this way?

Hard Truths is a film that you respect more than enjoy. Pansy’s uncompromising anger might even win Baptiste an award or two. The film will get an Academy Award qualifying release in December and open in early January.

Irish writer Edna O’Brien in her 20s. Photo: Toronto Film Fest

The late Irish writer Edna O’Brien (1930-2024) knew something about family hell. She also had plenty of fun, too, as the party hostess of her day in swinging London.

Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story is a documentary that turned out to be one of Toronto’s surprises. The film charts her rise as a ground-breaking writer and probes her ill-fated marriage to Ernest Gebler, a much older author whose abuse toward her went on long after the two parted.

It’s good luck or great timing that the film was ready for its premiere at TIFF, given that O’Brien died at the age of 93 in July. Sinead O’Shea’s doc plays like a chronological collage, with excerpts from O’Brien’s many books, clips from interviews, and testimony from those who knew her. There are also elegiac musical cutaways (none of them Irish) and long reflections late in life from a frail O’Brien. I left the theater thinking that, given her biography and her output, the film could have been much longer. There is always O’Brien’s memoir, Country Girl (2013), to fill in the blanks.

Born in a village in County Clare in western Ireland, O’Brien said she came from a family that was once rich, then impoverished largely because of her father’s drinking. In 1954 she ran away with the handsome Gebler to the Isle of Man. Her father organized a search party for her that included a Cistercian abbot and a private plane. O’Brien would wonder in later years where he got the money for that. Her controlling husband, who took issue with the description of a road as “blue,” resented her early success with the novel The Country Girls (1960), and his envy only deepened. O’Shea shows us that Gebler annotated Edna’s diaries in red ink, “correcting” not only her recollections but her emotions.

O’Brien escaped Gebler with their two sons, who help tell the story in the film. Gebler tried to undermine O’Brien for the rest of his life. We watch as O’Brien found readers everywhere but in Ireland, where her early books were banned. Later, in London, she became an art crowd party-giver; the guests at her soirees ranged from Robert Mitchum and Sean Connery to Shirley MacLaine and Marlon Brando to Princess Margaret.

As a public figure, O’Brien comes across as composed, confident, and unafraid of an argument when confronted by the many male TV journalists who competed to mansplain life to an attractive woman.

Picking up loose ends, Gabriel Byrne surveys her literary precursors in Dublin – few women among them – and Walter Mosley talks of studying fiction writing with O’Brien at CUNY in Manhattan where she taught when money was scarce. Mosley remembers O’Brien as a dedicated teacher who inspired her classes when she read students’ work aloud. “You could think it’s just about somebody’s life,” he said of her writing, “you would never think that this is actually a revolutionary manifesto.”

Or, as the writer Anne Enright put it in 2012, “For some decades, indeed, she was the only Irish woman to have had sex — the rest just had children.”

In a late interview, O’Brien said that she wished her life had been funnier. “I do not want clichés,” she stressed, “and I do not want domestic ordinariness served up to me on a dinner plate.” Her life, like her work, was anything but ordinary.

A scene from Anora featuring Mikey Madison. Photo: Toronto Film Fest

Also far from ordinary: the darkly chaotic Anora, the latest from Sean Baker, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Anora is the given name of Ani (Mikey Madison), a dancer and sex worker in Brooklyn.

Baker’s films tend to be about people, mostly women, stuck on the margins. Anora is just that, and a twist on a Hollywood Cinderella fantasy — a young woman performing lap dances ends up marrying a billionaire client, for a while, a short while. Fantasy as farce.

But the marriage lasts long enough for Baker to let his characters loose on a wild chase in Brooklyn, as Ani, the grand-daughter of Soviet immigrants, goes up against the zillionaire oligarch parents of a spoiled young customer who falls for her between snorts of coke and video-game sessions.

Things click with the two after Ani’s strip club assigns her to young Ivan because she speaks some Russian. Sloppy-drunk Ivan proposes, and the two wed in Vegas. Once the couple returns to Brooklyn, Ivan’s local fixers find out and inform his parents, who jump into their jet to undo things.

What follows in Anora is classic Baker – a headlong race through one over-crowded room after another to annul the marriage, led by the incompetent Russian and Armenian chaperones who took their eyes off the boy. It’s a bumbling comedy of errors and a satirical lens on the gilded beneficiaries of Russian corruption. Ivan’s moneyed, well-tailored parents stumble through the legal obstacles necessary to bring their son under control. As with everything else, they can afford it.

Standing in the way is Ani, who insists on the sanctity of a marriage contract. By chance, she found a way to leap up the food chain, and she won’t let go. Ivan’s fixers and his parents are not about to let that stand – i.e., he’ll never snort coke unaccompanied in a Brooklyn strip club again. As always with Baker, his films are thick with wild characters, and this film offers them in abundance, most of them speaking limited English with incomprehensible accents, usually while eating or while drunk. If you thought that a strip club setting might be the ultimate site for physical comedy, try a Brighton Beach restaurant where the food is served already falling off the plates.

Embeth Davidtz and Lexi Venter in a scene from Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. Photo: Toronto Film Festival

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, the veteran actress Embeth Davidtz’s directorial debut, adapted from the memoir by Alexandra Fulller, is anything but satire. It’s a sober look at the end of white-ruled Rhodesia (Zimbabwe since 1980), as experienced by a white mother and daughter. The mood is tense as white and Black Rhodesians prepare for their first biracial election. Whites carry rifles everywhere. Blacks wait impatiently for an end to subservience, while still working for whites who stanch their own fears of the inevitable with alcohol — “waiting for the barbarians,” as the old saying goes. On a remote farm, Nicola (Davidtz) is armed to the teeth like everyone else. Her daughter Bobo (Lexi Venter), precocious and bold at age 8, drives a motor-scooter and rides horses around the magical grounds, too young to grasp the enormity of the moment but aware that the family’s Black workers, some of whom raised her, can’t wait to take their land back.

Emotions are far too raw to be suppressed in a taut drama located in a spectacular setting. Behind the camera, Davidtz serves up a combustible mix of beauty and dread; as an actress, she’s vulnerable but stolid as a woman watching the erosion of a privilege that can’t be justified, much less preserved. Venter is equally impressive as a child without fear. The ensemble cast is brimming with apprehension. Dogs is a real surprise.

David D’Arcy lives in New York. For years, he was a programmer for the Haifa International Film Festival in Israel. He writes about art for many publications, including the Art Newspaper. He produced and co-wrote the documentary Portrait of Wally (2012), about the fight over a Nazi-looted painting found at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.