Around the world in 10 days
The Toronto Film Festival is really a festival of festivals, satisfying everyone from the art crowd to the multiplexes with its view on 21st century reality
Cannes for glamour, Venice for atmosphere. Thessaloniki for convenience, at least if you’re a cinephile in Cyprus. Most film festivals have something to recommend them, but none is bigger than the Toronto International Film Festival – which ended last week, having shown 352 movies from 61 countries – or more committed to linking worthy films with wildly receptive audiences. The snaking lines outside theatres, punters waiting in the cold drizzle (the weather was wintry this year, albeit not by Canadian standards), translate into packed-full houses, giving the lie to cynics’ frequent lamentations that Hollywood now rules the world – though TIFF is by no means anti-Hollywood, on which more later.
All films screen twice, and just about every film gets sold out; even Trance, a 2-hour Portuguese meditation of relentless opaqueness (something about a Russian – yet not quite Russian – girl sold into whoredom), left just a handful of empty seats in a 300-seat cinema. But the undisputed hot tickets were D.O.A.P. and Borat, which have little in common except in being (a) scabrous British peeks at America Today, and (b) loaded down with such deafening buzz that finding a ticket was all but impossible. D.O.A.P.
actually stands for ‘Death of a President’, and the film – a mockumentary about the assassination of George W. Bush by a lone gunman – whipped up such a storm of pre-festival protest the organisers were forced to issue a public statement: “The film is not exploitative in any way and treats what would certainly be a great tragedy respectfully and un-cynically,” they claimed – truthfully, as it turned out, because D.O.A.P. (actually a British TV movie co-produced by Channel Four) takes no cheap shots, laying out the supposed aftermath of the assassination soberly, if unflinchingly. Civil liberties are further eroded, ‘President’ Cheney rises (or sinks) to the occasion, and a late twist blames the usual mid-00s demon: the Arabs.
Sacha Baron Cohen – a.k.a. Borat, Kazakhstan’s biggest TV celebrity – had other ideas. “I blame the Jews!” he shouted out (in character) when a projector breakdown forced the postponement of the Festival’s most-awaited comedy. In Borat (or, to give its full title, ‘Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan’), the outrageous, Freddie-Mercury-moustachioed cretin travels from Central Asia to the Land of the Free, falls in love with Pamela Anderson – a creature of charm, beauty “and the asshole of a 7-year-old” – and takes off across America in pursuit of his beloved, hoping to “make romance explosion on her stomattch [sic]”. Cohen’s previous big-screen outing was the ill-fated Ali G movie, but this time he’s enlisted top US talent to ensure he breaks through in the world’s biggest market. If the Toronto press corps were representative of the mass audience, the film would make 100 zillion dollars (the journalist next to me was literally whimpering with laughter); alas, they’re not – but it still looks like a surefire hit.
TIFF is actually quite schizophrenic – a ‘Festival of Festivals’, bringing the best from Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and Venice, but also an early-autumn showcase for the Hollywood studios looking to give fourth-quarter product some free publicity. The Festival is star-studded, and the famously phlegmatic Canadians are acting increasingly star-struck. Emma Thompson (of all people) was spotted craning out through the sun-roof of a stretch limo, giving the royal wave to a coterie of screaming young girls permanently camped outside the Four Seasons. Brad Pitt’s press conference for Babel inspired such pandemonium that hacks literally had to take a number, only allowed in one at a time after the room had been filled to capacity.
Nice press conference, shame about the movie. Babel – an overheated triptych of vaguely-linked stories set in Morocco, Japan and California, founded on the bromide that the First World does not understand the Third – was one of several hits from Cannes, where it won Best Director for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Other Cannes prize-winners in Toronto included Volver, Pedro Almodovar’s latest (and most acclaimed) drama of resilient women, and the Golden-Palm-winning Wind That Shakes the Barley, Ken Loach’s account of Ireland’s fight for independence. This was attacked in the tabloid UK press for its depiction of atrocities committed by British soldiers – but the tabloids, as ever, missed the point. The film starts deliberately simplistic – Ireland united against a foreign invader, “the shame of foreign chains around us” according to the title song – only to get more complex as the Irish Free State (a political compromise) sets off a bitter civil war between hardliners and pragmatists. “It’s easy to know what you’re against, quite another thing to know what you are for,” notes someone – which might also be shorthand for politics in Cyprus. Hopefully the Friends of the Cinema Society (if not the multiplex) will eventually bring this worthy film to local audiences.
It’s a strange feeling roaming the wilds of TIFF, realising (once again) just how much is Out There. Bamako hailed from Mali, another slow-burner, another film that starts off didactic – based around a trial, with “African Society” as the plaintiff and “International Financial Institutions” as the defendant – only to become richer and richer, taking in the life of the village where the trial is being held (shot on lustrous celluloid, while the courtroom shenanigans are shot on hazy video), adding songs and even scenes from an imaginary African Western, Death in Timbuktu starring Danny Glover (who shoots it out with various shady cowboys, presumably representing the IMF, World Bank and so forth). To Get to Heaven, First You Have to Die was a hugely accomplished drama from Tajikistan, with a calf-eyed teenage hero struggling against both organised crime and sexual impotence. Other exotica, which I didn’t see, included Twilight Dancers (Philippines), Rain Dogs (Malaysia) and Hamaca Paraguaya (Paraguay, unsurprisingly).
Romania was big this year. Germany was back with a vengeance, from the solid virtues of The Lives of Others (Stasi agents spying on suspected dissidents in the old East Germany) to the startling Requiem, a sober take on The Exorcist. France came through as usual, pick of the bunch being Alain Resnais’ Private Fears in Public Places, an elegant distillation of an Alan Ayckbourn play. China offered Still Life, winner of the Golden Lion at Venice. Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang made the underrated I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, a pointedly (and deliberately) heavy visual metaphor for the weight of physical existence, the exhausting burden of having bodies to carry around with us. Abeni was a product of “Nollywood”, Nigeria’s answer to Hollywood. Japan had the best title in Big Bang Love, Juvenile A. Greece came up with The Wake. I went from Denmark to Italy, and watched three Korean films in two days.
My brace of Festival faves were opposites, stylistically and indeed geographically: from Thailand came Syndromes and a Century, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul – who calls himself ‘Joe’ and makes films like no-one else, deceptively casual meanders that turn into funny, magical encounters with … God, I guess, or in any case the ineffable. At the other end of the visual-density scale, Guy Maddin hails from Winnipeg, Manitoba and makes fever-dream japes, often in the style of Silent movies: Brand Upon the Brain! is the latest, a delirious, hilarious faux-Victorian tale of lighthouses, abused orphans, Oedipal passions and organ-harvesting scams in search of a mysterious youth nectar. This was a one-off presentation, with live musi
c, narration and even foley artists doing sound effects (actually smashing plates to simulate the onscreen smashing of a plate); presumably, the film will eventually be released in more conventional form.
Not everyone was watching such esoteric fare. “I haven’t really kept up with the more obscure movies,” admitted a fellow hack when I listed my discoveries. No matter: Toronto is many different festivals and it’s entirely possible to fill its 10 days with nothing but English-language films – mostly big-studio fare, though one should be wary since the studios aren’t going to risk bad publicity on their strongest films. Most of the glitzy TIFF entries are either potentially controversial, hoping to bolster their chances with good critical buzz (Brokeback Mountain premiered here last year), or else problematic, hoping to boost their profile with TIFF publicity and disguise the awkward fact that they’re Not Very Good.
Bobby (which I didn’t see) is apparently Not Very Good, despite a glittery cast that includes Anthony Hopkins, Lindsay Lohan, Helen Hunt, Ashton Kutcher and director-star Emilio Estevez, all getting on with their lives on the day of the Robert Kennedy assassination. The Fountain, a Time-spanning chunk of murky fantasy, is certainly Not Very Good, despite the presence of Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz and cult director Darren Aronofsky, of Requiem for a Dream fame. Breaking and Entering (Jude Law as a successful architect with a problem daughter) is Good, but not much more. Infamous (with a cast including Sandra Bullock and Gwyneth Paltrow) is unnecessary, the story having already been told in last year’s Oscar-winning Capote.
Venus won some good notices on the strength of 73-year-old Peter O’Toole, in his strongest role in decades, but A Good Year – starring Russell Crowe as an Englishman in Provence, based on Peter Mayle’s bestseller – was said to be dull and cutesy. The Last King of Scotland sports a great performance by Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin. All the King’s Men, despite another dazzling cast – Sean Penn, the aforementioned Law and Hopkins, Kate Winslet, James Gandolfini – is apparently a leaden disaster.
Does it matter? In the end, the potent magic of a festival like Toronto lies not in any individual film but the films as a whole, speaking to each other, forging their parallel reality. You can see it in Zidane, a 21st-Century Portrait – though the French title is better, Zidane, a Portrait of the 21st Century. This is avant-garde of sorts, a single football game (Real Madrid vs. Villareal, April 23, 2005) viewed through the prism of Zinedine Zidane, Real’s moody genius. On one level – actual reality, what happens on the pitch – Zizou mostly stands around observing, waiting for a pass, occasionally shouting for the ball or getting briefly involved. On another level – mediated reality, processed by TV and the fact of our viewer-ship – Zidane is an icon and the match becomes a spectacle, with commentators going wild over the goals (Zidane himself barely notices). That’s the 21st century, reality tweaked, polished and reflected back to us, made exciting, turned into theatre. The hardest thing about Toronto is coming back – or down – to the real world.
