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You know October has come to Montréal in a number of ways. The leaves turn an appealing shade of crimson to yellow, the first signs of frost start appearing, the sun makes itself scarcer and most importantly cinephiles start heading downtown for a ten-day bacchanal of world cinema, the Festival du nouveau cinéma. All told, this was something of a banner year for the FNC, which saw old masters treating us to some of their best works in years and young voices stepping up to the plate and announcing their presence loud and clear. It was also the occasion to discover a variety of films from all over the world that upon first look would seem unconnected, coming as they do from vastly different contexts and modes of production. But as always in a festival, the strange alchemy of cinema took over, conjuring links and narratives between the different strands of the fest, letting films resonate and echo each other in unexpected and productive ways.
A number of films this year were united by final moments that radically recontextualized what came before, final leaps of faith from filmmakers that like a sudden flash exploded forward and echoed back giving a new perspective to what came before. This is perhaps most striking in Evil Does Not Exist, a fascinating new creation from Ryusuke Hamaguchi, one of Japan’s most inquisitive young filmmakers. For much of its runtime, it’s a quite mellow affair, laying out its characters and philosophical conflicts at a measured, tranquil pace, following in the footsteps of its placid main character, a jack-of-all-trade finding himself in the middle of a conflict between encroaching, destructive modernisation and traditional living. The film can even seem too debonair at times, too even-handed, until a final, shocking act of violence throws the film into the allegorical in breathtaking fashion, like Hamaguchi pushed us off a cliff.
Los Colonos, a promising debut from Felipe Galvez Haberle about a violent colonial campaign to create a road through the south of Chile at the dawn of the 20th century inverts this dynamic, starting out as a violent anti-western, only to switch gear to a more civilized, if no less seething tone in its epilogue. This first part is well...