The only festival film that Swedish filmmaker Axel Petersén has made time to get to, other than his own, is fellow Scandinavian Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive. "It's the most beautiful action film I've seen - it's so f--king sexy!"
I then remind him that Refn also made Valhalla Rising. "Which was not so great," he concedes with a chuckle. "It was gruesome, eh? It was like Viking porn or something."
"I like cars, I'll admit," Petersen says. (Indeed: As we talk and walk to his hotel, Petersén suggests that we duck into the white stretch limousine idling out front of the hotel to do the interview. Problem: the limo isn't his.)
Petersén arrived in Toronto directly from Venice, where he was presenting Tracks of My Tears 2, an experimental documentary that grew out of the thesis video installation he made last spring. That short is about the red Ferrari Testarossa that disappeared from Saddam Hussein's garage in 2003.
"It's very obscure, not at all like [Avalon]," he explains. "They never found that car, it's still ghost-riding around the desert, roaming."
He details another poetically interminable road trip - a couple of years ago, while Petersén was on a class trip (he studied at FAMU and the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts), he went with a group of classmates to Texas and they drove to Marfa. "It's a sevenhour drive from anywhere," he recalls appreciatively.
A fast car also plays a key role in Avalon, Petersén's feature debut, screening in TIFF's Discovery program. It's a red convertible recklessly driven by Janne (Johannes Brost), an aging former club promoter looking for a big payday. His sister Jackie, fuelled by copious helpings of boxed red wine, is along for the ride and calamity, not hilarity, ensues. It's the last week before Janne's new club Avalon opens in Båstad (a summer resort town in Sweden that likes to party) and further complicating matters, his business partner Klas isn't who he used to be.
There's also a dead body and stolen money, but it's not a heist movie. Instead, Avalon rests in the grey area between the usual meandering, existential Swedish fare and the chilling Nordic crime blockbusters like Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. Avalon is something of a hybrid, a meditative and very Scandinavian film, but it's not just a matter of combining Jo Nesbø, Henning Mankell and a dash of Lars von Trier. Instead, it's about knowing when it's time to leave the party, a story inspired by Petersén's aunt, who still lives the party lifestyle.
Bars never look as good during daylight as they do at night, and one beautiful long scene shows Janne tripping the light fantastic and lost in a swaying reverie to the titular song, the lush, ambient Roxy Music anthem of 1980s hedonism.
Running just 76 minutes long, the drama was heightened and intensified by what was taken out, Petersén says - namely, all traces of humour. "Some scenes were just too comical and couldn't be done differently, no matter how we edited it was often just too absurd and hilarious stuff. On a script level it all fit but when we found the tone of the other part of the movie, half of that had to go."
I wonder if there's an analogy in those who stay too long at the party, some commentary that the directors and others who control Sweden's film funding purse strings should cede control to the next generation. "People who were born in the '40s, they do run Sweden," Petersén will allow, choosing his words carefully. "And it's a lot of them. And they are ... it could be an analogy, yes."
"I think in the beginning I wanted that a lot, that there should be a sort of manifesto saying maybe it's time to leave," Petersén continues. "But then a lot of the people who worked on the film with me have that philosophy of life - live fast, die young - but they're like, 65!"
In Avalon, the characters' lust for life took over, and while that criticism remains an undercurrent in the film, it's a different story than it might have been. "My whole critical point of view of go home, retire and let us prosper changed," Petersén says.
And, he adds with a mischievous laugh, "In the end I got the money!"