15/09/2023 - A distraught mother tries to steer her teenage son back towards heterosexuality in a fierce and sophisticatedly realist film directed by Carolina Markowicz

"I don’t like all this shady stuff, but there’s nothing a mother wouldn’t do for her son’s well-being." We’re in the state of São Paulo in Cubatão, a town darkened by the visual and aural omnipresence of oil refineries, forming a highly evocative backdrop for the two protagonists’ (a mother and her son) misadventures in Toll [+see also:
trailer
film profile], the second highly accomplished feature film by Carolina Markowicz (much remarked upon last year via Charcoal). The movie was unveiled in the Centrepiece section of the 48th Toronto Film Festival (where the Brazilian filmmaker has also been honoured with the TIFF Emerging Talent Prize) and is soon to grace the Horizontes Latinos line-up in the 71st  San Sebastián Film Festival.

"It’s more than most mothers have to endure in their entire lives." Suellen (the charismatic Maeve Jinkings, notably well-received in Aquarius [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] and Neighbouring Sounds), who works in a motorway toll booth, is horribly ashamed of the videos her son Antonio (Kauan Alvarenga) uploads online: "You know what people are saying? That you’re turning trans". But this 17-year-old teen who dreams of being a diva, raises his eyes to the sky, sighs, lies low and carries on filming himself miming along to Baby Won’t You Please Come Home (Dinah Washington’s version), while suggesting products to buy and stealing make-up from his single mother, who loves him deeply but who’s desperately trying to find a way to steer him back to heterosexuality.

"It’s not by lighting a virility candle on top of a cliff at 5 o clock in the morning that you’re going to solve this problem", "once he’s an adult, it will be too late, there’ll be no going back"… Suellen’s colleague and friend, the incredibly pious (in appearance) Telma (Aline Marta Maia) recommends signing Antonio up to a supposedly miraculous programme organised by a pastor-guru from Europe (Isac Graça). Backed into a corner, Antonio agrees and a stupefying "bioenergetic resignification process" begins. But this cure is beyond Suellen means, so she decides to approach her former lover, thief Arauto (Thomás Aquino)…

Interweaving several guiding threads (the difficult life of a lower class, working, single mum, the hopes of a young gay man who’s on the threshold of emancipation through adulthood, the endearing, emotional relationship between the two main characters, Brazil’s own brand of “delirious” religious pressure, generalised delinquency), the filmmaker patiently brings about a highly personal kind of harmony, both incredibly realist and intimate (for example, the home cooking scenes, the conversations in the cafeteria between Suellen and Telma…), dipping into genre film (robberies on motorbikes and meetings between thieves and receivers of stolen goods) and using a staggering number of strikingly beautiful shots (thanks to the talent of Venezuela’s Luis Armando Arteaga heading up photography). Additionally incorporating a subtle tableau of Brazilian society where "some things never change" - though these things aren’t necessarily the things you’d immediately think of - Toll confirms the clear expertise (still somewhat concealed by the bittersweet dimension of this story which plays on repetition and unhurried plot development) of a director to be followed very closely.

Toll is produced by Brazil’s Biônica Filmes in co-production with Portugal’s O Som e a Fúria. World sales are entrusted to French firm Luxbox.

(Translated from French)