Authenticity in film: A yearning for the hyper-reel life

Share

People categorize movies as an escape, but that's not what I seek in them. Especially this week, when all the world is here for the Toronto International Film Festival. I'm looking for fiction films that make me feel cornered, that force me to look at things I don't normally see. (That also applies to documentaries, but that's a column for another day.) I want to dial into lives other than mine, to drill down into them. I don't want real life – I want hyper-real life, where the emotions of years are concentrated into hours. Through that, I hope to get a sense of how other people experience being alive.

Based on the TIFF films I've seen and read about, many people are yearning for the same thing. The word "authenticity" is tossed around with abandon these days. But a hunger for authenticity – to feel like one's authentic self, to live an authentic life – runs through a lot of this year's lineup.

Open the TIFF program book, and stab at random in any of its 456 pages. Odds are, you'll land on a movie with this theme. Page 396: Growing Pains, a 21-minute short from Denmark, about an adolescent werewolf who's trying to be "his true self" – despite his veterinarian mother. Page 253: Charlie's Country, in which an Australian aboriginal (the actor David Gulpilil, who won an award in Cannes in May) bashes off to live in the bush, true to his roots and outside of time. "While the film is not strictly autobiographical," the catalogue copy reads, Gulpilil, who co-wrote the script, admits, "this is my film, about me."

Page 122: Phoenix, from Germany. A newly released concentration camp inmate (Nina Hoss, also great opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman in A Most Wanted Man), whose face has been altered after a bullet wound, struggles to understand who she is now – and whether she ever really knew her husband, who may be the person who betrayed her to the Nazis. Who are you, if you don't recognize yourself, or those you thought you loved?

Right next to that, on page 123: Learning to Drive, from the U.S., courtesy of Spanish director Isabel Coixet, about a woman on the verge of divorce (Patricia Clarkson), who uses driving lessons as a way to figure out how she may have lost herself, and who she'd rather be. In the French co-pro Bird People, Josh Charles plays a man who walks away from his California life while on a business trip in Paris. "I can't keep living like this," he explains via Skype to his crying wife. "I feel like a lump of sugar dissolving at the bottom of a cup."

There are countless films such as Samba, from French directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, that tell stories of migration – in this case, about a man from Mali (Omar Sy, who also starred in Les Intouchables, from the same directors) who's washing dishes in France. Who one is, when one is removed from one's country and language – that may be the most pressing question in our era of unprecedented global relocation. A single, casual shot of Samba's one-room apartment, with its mattress by a microwave, under a rack of clothes, showed me more about one type of immigrant experience than I ever could have conjured for myself.

The list goes on and on. Labyrinth of Lies, from Germany: A prosecutor investigating Nazi war crimes uncovers the truth about his own family. The Imitation Game, from the U.S. and Britain: The true story of the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing (the brilliant Benedict Cumberbatch), who cracked a Nazi code but was forced to shroud his life in mystery. Cut Snake, from Australia; Pride, from Britain; Stories of Our Lives, from Kenya (in the latter, the cast and crew aren't even named, to protect them): All are about the human necessity to live openly as oneself.

There are films that try to depict honestly the struggles of living with mental illness or Alzheimer's: The Dark Horse, from New Zealand, about a bipolar chess champion. Still Alice, from the U.S., which asks, "Who are we if we don't have our memories?" Welcome to Me, about a woman with borderline personality disorder who thinks that public confession is the same as self-knowledge. Infinitely Polar Bear, a daughter's-eye view of her glamorous, heartbreaking bipolar father (Mark Ruffalo), inspired by writer/director Maya Forbes's own childhood.

There are shorts that make explicit how disabled people experience sex (Hole, Take Me). There are films about how women assert themselves in cultures that don't want them to have agency over their own lives (Dukhtar, from Pakistan; Gett, the Trial of Viviane Amsalem, an Israel/Germany/France co-production). There are films, including 99 Homes and My Old Lady, about what happens when you lose the house or the material wealth that you think defines you. There are even two films about trying to end one's life the way one chooses, The Farewell Party and Tour de Force, both from Germany. That's a whole lot of real right there.

It makes perfect sense that authenticity is the subject of the moment. In a remarkably short time, our lives have become barraged by the virtual. We have friends we've never met, and followers whose lives are summed up by hashtags. We play tennis against a Wii machine, and even wage war remotely – the link between video games and drone strikes is made explicit in the film Good Kill, director Andrew Niccol's (Gattaca) latest exploration of advanced technology, starring Ethan Hawke.

"I'm seeing a lot of films about people not accepting social strictures and the status quo," Jane Schoettle, who programmed many of the above for TIFF, told me last week. "They're about what happens when who people think they are clashes with the life they're living."

In real life, that can result in pain, confusion and sorrow; bravery, compassion and wisdom; or some combination of the above. In reel life, it makes for a heck of a week of moviegoing.