#TIFF23 Review: The Movie Teller (Special Presentations)

By John Corrado

★★★ (out of 4)

The 2023 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 7th to 17th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.

The latest film from Danish director Lone Scherfig (An Education), The Movie Teller is a solid, old fashioned drama about the magic of movies. Based on the novel La Contadora de Películas by Chilean author Hernán Rivera Letelier, Scherfig’s film serves as an unabashed celebration of classic cinema, through the eyes of a girl who becomes the designated “movie teller” in her working class town.

Set in a mining town in Chile’s Atacama Desert during the 1960s, the story centres around María Margarita (played as a child by Alondra Valenzuela, and as a teen by Sara Becker, in wonderfully complimentary performances). María has had a love of movies instilled in her by her mother (Bérénice Bejo) and loves going to the local cinema, with her father (Antonio de la Torre) taking the whole family to see new movies starring John Wayne and Charlton Heston.

When her father loses his job in the saltpetre mines, and they are no longer able to afford all going to the movies together, they choose one family member who will go see the show and recount the story to the rest of the family. After her three brothers (hilariously) fall short at conveying what they have seen, that duty falls upon María, a gifted storyteller with the power to make her retellings come alive. So much so that they become the talk of the town.

Early on, the family has a dinner table conversation after seeing The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence about the quote “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This sets the stage for a film about the power and importance of storytelling, as both an art form and as a way to process difficult emotional truths. The film is maybe a bit tonally uneven in places, with some darker turns in the second half that do feel a bit abrupt compared to the more sentimental tone of other parts.

But the performances and overall reverence for film itself carry it through, and when The Movie Teller works, it’s kinda magical. Scherfig works in a number of classic film clips (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Apartment, Spartacus, etc.), followed by delightful scenes of the kids reenacting the movies they have seen to the rest of the family. We watch these films come alive again through them.

The film will inevitably draw comparisons to Belfast and The Fabelmans (which also featured The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence) as another movie where the young protagonists fall in love with movies by going to the cinema. It’s fine company to be in, and The Movie Teller is often something pretty special in its own right.