SBIFF Day 10 | Building on a Two-Shot

A Tribute to Two Actors Plus Three Films Occupy Our Senior Arts Writer on the Film Festival's 10th Day

Moderator Pete Hammond, left, spoke with Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce at the SBIFF Cinema Vanguard Awards on February 13, 2025. | Photo: Ingrid Bostrom

Taking a 360° overview of this year’s SBIFF tribute nights, the general plan heeded the time-honored approach of one actor/one evening. A notable exception was the unusually star-studded Virtuoso Award multi-spotlight, in which the presence of pop stars Ariana Grande and Selena Gomez drew an uncommonly shriek-filled and young crowd.

Adrien Brody on the red carpet at the SBIFF Cinema Vanguard Awards on February 13, 2025. | Photo: Ingrid Bostrom

And then, often its own special corner, there was last night’s double header tribute to Guy Pearce and Adrien Brody — who shared the double protagonist/antagonist building in The Brutalist, one of the most dynamic cinematic pairings since Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix literally faced off in PT Anderson’s masterful The Master.

As the Holocaust-surviving Hungarian architect and a slimy suave uber rich patron, Brody and Pearce brilliantly summoned up a dubious dynamic exponentially greater than the sum of its individual parts. The film, which magically conjures up epic proportions but on an independent film budget, has garnered 10 Oscar nominations and, in my and many others’ opinions, maybe the year’s finest film. (See my review here.)

It has been well represented in this festival. In the SBIFF directors panel, inspired director and co-writer Brady Corbet — who worked on the film for seven years with his wife and co-writer Mona Fastvold (part of festival’s writers panel) — commented that “all my films are about post-traumatic stress… ‘50s post-war psychology and architecture are inextricably linked.”

It made perfect sense that the potent actors and the dual spotlight shared the Arlington theater Cinema Vanguard Award spotlight last night.

Brody, who explained that he was a “professional” magician in his pre-actor youth and kept returning to that theme during the event, commented that the outpouring of accolades for The Brutalist — from critics, Oscar and actual movie-loving citizens — helps “to provide a forum for independent film. We don’t have the means to promote these films, and it is gratifying to have it get such attention.”

Guy Pearce on the red carpet at the SBIFF Cinema Vanguard Awards on February 13, 2025. | Photo: Ingrid Bostrom

On the fast film shoot, 33 days on a mere $10 million budget, Brody said that director Corbet was “very relaxed, as if we had all the time and freedom in the world. But when you hit the floor together, we had each other’s backs, which is a very special thing.”

Moderator Pete Hammond lauded Brody’s impressive Hungarian accent (which was actually aided by AI), saying “you do great accents.” After a beat, Brody quipped “I was a magician.”

In the film clips showcasing the actors, each spoke about their signature films: Brody in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, which won him the Best Actor Oscar, and Pearce in Christopher Nolan’s head trippy, time-leapfrogging Memento. Brody called his Pianist role “one of the most meaningful opportunities I’ve ever gotten. It was a tremendous responsibility to represent that horrible tragedy (the Holocaust). It was life-changing and it opened a portal to understanding life as an adult.” Brody was 26 at the time. He added that “it gave me an understanding of Laszlo Toth (his Brutalist architect character, a Holocaust survivor newly in America) and what he left behind.”

In Memento, Pearce talked about the challenge of grasping the non-linear logic of the piece, but that “I understood the emotional center of it. He was a man in emotional turmoil. Half of it was forward and half backward, and it ends up in the middle. Christopher gives us the buildup and the release. He’s capable of juggling 50 things at once.”

Former magician Brody later said, “magic was the gateway drug to becoming an actor. Acting is an illusion. The whole thing of being and actor is to fill the shoes of others, and it’s exciting to play things that are against type.”

Death as Life Force

Matters of mortality have been part of the artistic discourse at SBIFF throughout its history, perhaps owing to more of an openness to the subject in countries beyond the United States. American cinema, especially via the mainstream Hollywood machine, tends to steer away from the idea that death is an inescapable part of life, deserving of attention and resignation.

Two fine examples of international films grappling with death, with dignity, grace the current program — the Danish My Eternal Summer and the Spanish They Will be Dust.

A quick summary of wonderful My Eternal Summer: it’s an atmospherically lulling etude on impending grief, teenaged angst, and tangled family dynamics, by the sea. We understand from the outset of writer-director Sylvia Le Fanu’s film the central premise and ensemble involved, an ill mother, an agreeable but distant father and a 16-year-old daughter of wavering degrees of depression and elation. The family has settled into a seaside summer home to essentially wait out the mother’s final days.

But the film manages to be less morbid than it is unflinching in its dealing with a subject relevant to us all. It is a subtly conveyed character study that is ultimately life-affirming, partly by accepting the fate of life’s end game, gracefully.

A very different filmic approach is at work, and play, in the Spanish They Will be Dust, which opens with its mortally ill protagonist Claudia (Angela Molina) writhing and moaning with pain, with the contrasting sound of an opera aria in the house. As with My Eternal Summer, Claudia’s end is imminent, and various friends and family arrive to pay last respects, but her approach to death is more pro-active. She plans to go to Swiss clinic for legally planned suicide. Alas, her loving husband Flavio (Alfredo Castro) can’t conceive of life without her, joining her in Switzerland.

Distinguishing elements in the film include especially strong and feisty performance by Molina and surreal moments in which the film bursts into song and dance sequences, ala Emilia Perez. One such sequence, with orderlies in the death clinic suddenly kick into tight choreography, accentuates the bursts of absurdity and lighthearted spirit embedded in Claudia’s persona. Life is a dance, and so can death be.

‘Democracy Under Siege’ | Credit: Courtesy

Facing Facts, Before the Fact

In the course of sinking into the dense schedule of SBIFF, the escapist principle can be part of a fest-goer’s agenda. Some of us prefer to hunker down in the world of cinema, of film screenings and encounters with filmmakers, and avoid the news and current events for 12 days — especially in this time of frightening upheaval and governmental dismantling.

With Democracy Under Siege, writer-director Laura Nix has done a great job and performed a public service with her sweeping film, which details the rise — and return — of Trump but, more importantly, traces the political machinery back to its roots. Although much of the more contemporary material can be wearying and deja vu all over again for those of us who have closely followed political events in the past decade, but what is especially interesting is the film’s focus on the founding fathers’ follies, creating an inflexible constitution (in which this document inscribed “we the people” was penned by “upper class bourgeois white men”) and the deeply flawed electoral college system.

Ann Telnaes (left) from the film ‘Democracy Under Siege’ | Credits: Peggy Grossman

Of course, the film, created for the European market and finished before last November’s election, was a prequel to the impending current White Housed crisis. (Nix is presently raising money to shoot a coda to add to the film.) Another important matter which occurred post-release was Jeff Bezos’ censorship of longtime Washington Post cartoonist Anne Telnaes, who then resigned. A steady flow of witty cartoons by Telnaes helped propel Democracy Under Siege, and her talking head sequences are compelling.

In the post-screening Q&A on Thursday afternoon, Nix was passionate about her desire to have her film prick the consciousness, and expand knowledge, of viewers of whatever political persuasion. “The news is hard to take at the moment, but you can’t be checked out right now,” she said. “Stay aware, stay active.”

And with that, I plunged back into my news-free film cocoon. Just for a few more days.