TORONTO — In my dream film festival, I would program Lucrecia Martel’s historical fiction “Zama” on a double bill with Louis C.K.’s contemporary comedy, “I Love You, Daddy.” Ms. Martel is an Argentine director best known on the festival circuit; Louis C.K., of course, is the American standup behind the televisionshow “Louie” and the web series “Horace and Pete.” Shortly after “Zama” opens, a man spies on a group of naked women enjoying some kind of 18th-century spa day. When the women catch him, they shout, “Voyeur, voyeur!” And when one grabs him, he slaps her, which made the whole scene read like a metaphor for our gendered movie moment.
“Zama” and “I Love You, Daddy” are two of the best movies I saw at the Toronto International Film Festival, which ends Sunday, and they could not be more different or more unwittingly in sync. Based on the novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, “Zama” tells of one Don Diego de Zama (a soulful, funny Daniel Giménez Cacho), an administrator for the Spanish empire who’s stationed in a remote Argentine outpost and gradually losing his grip. Beautiful, hypnotic, mysterious and elliptical, “Zama” is a story about a man at odds with a world that he struggles to dominate, which becomes a lacerating, often surprisingly comic evisceration of colonialism and patriarchy.
Put differently, “Zama” is about male power in crisis, which works as an apt description for “I Love You, Daddy.” A big-screen provocation that was made relatively quietly, the film had its world premiere at Toronto and very rapidly became yet another flash point in the larger fractious discussion about men and women. A brutally and often uncomfortably funny comedy, it dances around female victimization and male exploitation, and plays with the ostensibly blurry line between the personal and the public. That makes it feel like a near-documentary about the entertainment industry, as well as a kick-me sign pinned squarely on its creator’s white, male, middle-aged posterior.
The laugh is on him, though this being Louis C.K., it’s also on us. The story involves a wildly successful television writer-producer, Glen, whose cosseted life and sense of self goes sideways when his 17-year-old daughter, China (Chloë Grace Moretz), becomes involved in a vaguely intimate relationship with Leslie (John Malkovich, never better), a celebrated auteur and notorious predator four times her age. If that doesn’t trigger you, the old-fashioned big-band score and richly textured black-and-white cinematography will. (It was shot on 35-millimeter film.) The reference to Woody Allen by way of his putative classic “Manhattan” is entirely intentional.
Much of the narrative tension in “I Love You, Daddy” involves not just the parameters of China and Leslie’s icky relationship, but also how Glen navigates that ick in view of his own longstanding adoration of the other man’s work. At heart, the film is a multipronged debate that circles, again and again, around the question of whether it is possible, permissible and morally justifiable to love the art and loathe the artist. Yes, no, maybe so.
If Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” is this year’s defining American movie on race, “I Love You, Daddy” may prove its corollary on sexual politics, a bountiful and oh-so-topical Trump-era piñata waiting to be whacked open. That Louis C.K. has been accused of sexual misconduct only makes “I Love You, Daddy” more intriguing. Is it a debate, a confession or perhaps something along the tricky lines of “Stardust Memories,” yet another black-and-white Woody Allen film? “You can’t control life, it doesn’t wind up perfectly,” Mr. Allen’s unhappy film director says in that great self-pity party. “Only, only art you can control – art and masturbation, two areas in which I am an absolute expert.”
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Cinema has long served as a vehicle for male onanism, a space in which male fantasies about sexual power over women are expressed on screen and enacted behind the camera. More and more women in entertainment, along with critics and journalists, have been engaged in an increasingly vocal fight against the industry’s entrenched sexism. Some institutions have signed on to the fight, including the Toronto festival, which this summer introduced a fund-raising initiative in support of female directors. The amount it’s seeking to raise is just 2.5 million in American dollars, chump change by big-studio standards, but every dollar counts as does the festival’s support of women.
Toronto has long showcased female directors and its backing has never come across as merely an opportunistic response to criticism. This year it offered the latest from the titan Agnès Varda, who was back with her meditative documentary “Faces Places,” which she made with the artist JR. Ms. Varda, often called the godmother of the French new wave, is one of the great directors – female or male – working today. Yet as a female filmmaker who’s been active for decades, she was long part of a very select group of women whose numbers remain stubbornly modest, one reason that it’s exciting that Greta Gerwig has joined this sorority with “Lady Bird.”
An actress and occasional screenwriter best known for her work in Noah Baumbach’s movies, Ms. Gerwig turns out to be a natural filmmaking. Her solo directorial debut, “Lady Bird” is flat-out wonderful, as well as one of the best coming-of-age films since Amy Heckerling’s 1982 classic “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” An ideally cast Saoirse Ronan plays Christine McPherson, a Sacramento teenager stumbling through her senior year. Having given herself an aspirational, creative new identity – Lady Bird – Christine rails, though sometimes just pouts and frets, against conformity, the world and her family, especially her mother (a touching Laurie Metcalf). Generous, lived-in and pleasurably real, it is a portrait of the artist-in-the-making from an artist who has already arrived.
“Lady Bird” will eventually open in American theaters, and keep an eye out for two other festival favorites, “The Guardians” and “The Death of Stalin.” Directed by Xavier Beauvois, “The Guardians” tracks a small group of women – Nathalie Baye is superb as the matriarch — struggling to keep a family farm going during World War I. With narrative restraint and a lapidary visual style, Mr. Beauvois opens up this isolated world with stirring emotional force. It’s a stark contrast to the savage frat party that is “The Death of Stalin,” Armando Iannucci’s hilarious and horrifying take on events around the time that Stalin keeled over. A burlesque — Steve Buscemi, New York accent intact, plays Khrushchev — it’s a vision of totalitarian madness as shudderingly pertinent as it is outrageous.
Men in crisis are nothing new and were certainly in abundance at the festival, including in “Battle of the Sexes,” Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton’s enjoyable fictional gloss on the tennis-court showdown between Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) and her self-declared male-chauvinist pig rival, Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell). More male malaise could be found in Alexander Payne’s uneasy comedy “Downsizing,” about an existentially restless nice guy (Matt Damon) who decides to shrink himself into a wee man. Going small allows him to live far beyond his big-life means, though in time he learns that it’s not all about him and opens up to other, poorer people of assorted hues and with wincing accents. Like Louis C.K.’s hapless hero, he learns but clearly still needs help.
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