The star of this year's TIFF? Complicated women working in the arts

A particular theme has emerged at the Toronto International Film Festival, where several of this year's movies paint portraits of women artists forced to grapple with how they — and their art — are perceived by society.

Some are unravelling from the pressures of creating in an industry that doesn't want them to succeed, or their art is being used against them to devalue their humanity.

Atom Egoyan's Seven Veils, for example, is about a Canadian opera director who begins to lose her footing while remounting a piece that her former lover (who was also her much older mentor) staged years before her. In Days of Happiness, an orchestra director's promising career is tightly controlled by her agent-father, and she must choose whether to pursue perfection or happiness.

Then there's Anatomy of a Fall, in which a successful German writer — and her novels — are put on trial for the murder of her husband; while the biopic Wildcat wrestles with southern gothic writer Flannery O'Connor's unwavering belief in her often-contentious work, while it is chronically misunderstood by the people around her. 

These appear to run counter to the mainstream feminist fare that has emerged since the #MeToo movement began, much of which centred, for better or for worse, around heroic women in pursuit of a better world (think Captain Marvel or She Said or Bombshell, or even most recently, Barbie.)

"There was this movement of people — an audience or even filmmakers — being like, 'Oh, we're going to make films about "strong female characters,"'" said Justine Smith, a film critic and the screen editor of Montreal arts and culture website CultMTL.

"Which — I don't know why — soon became a symbol of this caricature of a woman who can do no wrong, who is super strong, super powerful, is literally a superhero in a lot of cases. And it is not a reflection of reality. It reveals no complexity."

"It ends up feeling like an over-correction that erases any complexity to being a woman, to being a human being, even."

The offerings at TIFF suggest that a handful of filmmakers are increasingly preoccupied with a more complex portrait of women — and specifically, women artists. Some are manipulative; some are caught in a cycle of abuse; some have to defend the nature of their art.

"One of the things that emerged out of [the #MeToo era] is what it means to be a woman in the world of entertainment. And we can broaden that to be the world of art," Smith said.

"We're having a lot of very difficult or challenging conversations about how gender plays into the artistic process in general. And so, to me, that is what is kind of fuelling a lot of these types of films."

Justine Triet, the French director of Anatomy of a Fall, discussed her feelings about how she is perceived as a woman in the creative industry, and whether some of that was channeled into her film, in which her protagonist Sandra's novels are picked apart.

"The character in many ways is tracked or surveilled and she's analyzed for much more than her actions. She's analyzed for her [social] mores," Triet said.

Much of the film plays out like a procedural, with excerpts from Sandra's published works presented as evidence in the courtroom. ("Her books are a part of this trial," the prosecutor insists.) The jury is a surrogate for the audience: Do we think she committed murder? What does that say about us?