‘It’s only a film festival’
The Toronto Film Festival is now the world’s largest in terms of the number of films played. It combines the arthouse with the latest Hollywood releases we can expect to see in the coming months
Buying tickets on TIFF Minus One, the day before the start of the Toronto International Film Festival. It’s 7.20 in the morning, but already the line at the Festival box-office (one of two, in different parts of the city) snakes beyond the harried ticket-sellers, out the building and down the street, ending up a couple of blocks away. It’s a grey blustery morning, with faint but persistent drizzle. People unfurl umbrellas and improvise hats out of programme books. “I was here at 5.30,” one volunteer tells another, “and already there were 50 people here”. A few apparently spent the night on the pavement outside the box-office, all to ensure they got tickets for the 300-plus films showing in the Festival.
A local TV crew appears, here to interview punters and grab a couple of quotes. The reporter and his cameraman sidle up to the young woman standing in line behind me. Will she favour them with a few words? She giggles nervously; “What d’you want me to say?” Oh you know, shrugs the reporter – celebrities, movies, that kind of thing. “Nothing serious,” he adds with a smile, “it’s only a film festival.”
It’s by now a clich? to say that Toronto – the world’s biggest film-fair, in terms of the number of titles shown every year – is many different festivals rolled into one. It’s Hollywood and arthouse, glitzy and gritty, geared to film-freaks and casual viewers. On the one hand, you get the people standing in line at 5.30 in the morning. They’re aiming to watch 50 films in 10 days (I watched 48), looking forward to titles like Silent Light, a sublimely portentous drama set among the Mennonite community of Mexico – it shared the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Festival – or What the Water Said, Nos. 4-6, an avant-garde short with lines and blotches scratched directly onto celluloid. On the other, you get folks like that flippant TV crew – or the other TV crew who arrived an hour later (we were still in line, of course) and asked punters, “Which celebrity would you be most excited to see on the street during the Festival?” “Viggo,” replied a rather incoherent student type in front of me. “Viggo Mortensen? Really? And what would you say to him, if you saw him?”. “I’d say … ‘How you doin’, Viggo?’. And he’d be like … ‘Fine. How YOU doin’?’”
That’s one aspect of TIFF, the Festival of big Hollywood movies – titles coming out in the next couple of months, including Eastern Promises, the silly-but-fun David Cronenberg drama which is why Viggo Mortensen was in Toronto in the first place. He plays a Russian gangster in London, and the film is like the final act of Cronenberg’s A History of Violence – the section where everything turned hammy and parodic – stretched to feature length, albeit with a few compensations like the director’s trademark preoccupation with bodies (the gangsters’ life-stories inscribed in tattoos) and Mr. Mortensen baring all for a nude fight in a bathhouse. Promises was already in commercial release as the Festival ended last Sunday, along with other TIFF offerings like The Brave One – a vigilante movie in Death Wish vein, starring Jodie Foster in the Charles Bronson role – and Across the Universe, a dizzy musical drama featuring a medley of Beatles songs sung by its cast, Moulin Rouge-style.
The real news from Hollywood, however, is the advent (finally!) of Iraq movies. It’s taken a while for the studios to handle this particular hot potato, lest they offend the Great American Public – but, with the war now officially unpopular with Americans of all political stripes, films like Redacted and In the Valley of Elah are starting to slink into view. The former is director Brian De Palma’s would-be incendiary war document, based on a true story of Iraqi civilians raped and murdered by US troops (a similar tale forms the basis of Battle for Haditha by British documentarian Nick Broomfield, also showing in Toronto). The latter is set on the home front, with Tommy Lee Jones – his mournful grizzly presence also lent gravitas to the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men – as a dad investigating the murder of his Iraq-veteran son.
Neither film is very good, but what comes through powerfully is American indignation over the war, a very different beast to 60s indignation over Vietnam. That was idealistic outrage, threaded with conviction that America was wrong to fight the Cold War in South-East Asia; this is isolationist outrage, depicting Iraq as a “fucked-up place” and “shithole” making life hell for US soldiers. The troops in Redacted are a microcosmic platoon trying hard to cope with the heat, the hostile locals, their own incompetent superiors; the crime is carried out by a couple of bad apples – one of them tells the story of his brother, a homicidal maniac – which is partly why the film has no bite. In the Valley of Elah goes even further, employing a David-and-Goliath analogy (the titular Valley is where that Biblical battle took place) with US troops apparently equated to David, which will come as news to geopolitics scholars everywhere. On this evidence, America’s outrage is perilously close to self-pity, and shot through with protective support-the-troops sanctimony – a soccer-mum’s righteous rage at the careless school that sent her kids on a dangerous field-trip. Strange days indeed.
Stranger still, of course, was the (huge) number of critics treating the Fest as an Oscar preview (Atonement, starring Keira Knightley, is a Best Picture favourite), drifting from one English-language film to another. This made sense, in a way, since most of the best films were indeed in English – but there was also, for instance, Import Export, not just a European film but an ambitious film ABOUT Europe. A diptych of separate stories – a nurse coming from Ukraine to Austria, a rather thuggish young man going the other way, from Vienna to Slovakia – the result is a panorama of Europe as a two-tier continent, the old Iron Curtain replaced by a Money Curtain. The West is literally ‘Old Europe’, our heroine ending up in a nursing-home where the senile and infirm – Europe’s looming demographic crisis – gaze up from their deathbeds in diapered derangement. The East is a land of Stalinist concrete blocks and sexual exploitation (one graphic scene provoked a number of walkouts). The film works in isolated set-pieces more than flowing narrative, making its case more devastatingly with each new nugget.
Europe actually did quite well this year (certainly better than 2006, a weak vintage). Spain came through with The Orphanage, a wildly effective ghost story in the spooky-mansion style of The Others. France had new films from a couple of old Masters, a crisply ironic Balzac adaptation from director Jacques Rivette – the title translates as Don’t Touch the Axe, though the ‘official’ English title is the much blander The Duchess of Langeais – and The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, a limpid rural fable with a 17th-century setting that’s apparently going to be the final film from 87-year-old Eric Rohmer. Britain’s slate included Nightwatching, a Rembrandt biopic (of sorts) from director Peter Greenaway. Italy came through with Days and Clouds, a little-seen but delightful comedy-drama about a middle-class couple falling on hard times when the husband loses his job. Watching something like Days – charming, recognisable, entirely accessible – was enough to make you weep for the disproportionate attention paid to the big guns from Canada’s southern neighbour. Why do films like this, or Persepolis (a coming-of-age French-Iranian cartoon), or The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly never play the multiplex in Cyprus? There’s nothing remotely ‘di
fficult’ about them – except of course they speak to grown-ups and deal with real-world subjects, which is apparently enough to relegate them to one-off screenings at the Friends of the Cinema Society.
I’m not unreasonable. The single best film of the 48 I saw was undoubtedly In the City of Sylvia – which is set in Strasbourg, made by a Catalan (director Jose Luis Guerin) and as abstract as it’s beautiful. Not everyone liked this wispy masterpiece, and not everyone should. The plot, such as it is, has a young man following a young woman through the streets of the city, convinced she’s someone he met six years before; Guerin uses the frame for sly jokes, people-watching and a sense of missed connections, divergent eye-lines in the same shot visually suggesting the gulf between people. Achingly romantic yet also ambivalent about its obsessed hero, it gives a sense of inexhaustible humanity and playfully-traversed urban spaces. It’s also slight, almost dialogue-free and often snail-paced. Clearly, a film like this has no place at the multiplex.
Fair enough; yet there’s so much to choose from! Once again – as at every festival – I end up inspired by the huge variety of movies being made, and frustrated by the tiny sliver we get to see in Cyprus (and not just in Cyprus; I only found a couple of cinemas in Toronto playing the kinds of films shown every year at the Festival). There’s even space – why shouldn’t there be? – for the Hollywood behemoths, and indeed two of my favourites starred bona fide celebrities, two of the biggest stars on the planet. A fearless Nicole Kidman plays dislikeable in Margot at the Wedding, another dazzling dysfunctional-family comedy from Noah Baumbach (who made The Squid and the Whale a couple of years ago), while Brad Pitt plays the titular outlaw in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Margot is pushy, obnoxious, a bad sister, a terrible mother. Jesse is a charming killer with a hair-trigger temper. The films take risks, the first an edgy comedy with some incredibly painful scenes – as when the brutally honest Margot tells her 13-year-old son that he used to be graceful but now he’s just a lump (the boy just gapes at her, looking ready to cry) – the second a sprawling, lyrical Western with ‘box-office disaster’ written all over it.
Pitt won Best Actor at the Venice Festival for his Jesse James, but he’s actually the weakest part of the movie; he’s become too languid to project much danger – too much the smoothie, too much the star – thinning out the paranoia in the film’s second half. The real star is Casey Affleck as Bob Ford, a lifelong loser with dead eyes and would-be endearing smile, but in fact Assassination is great all round, great to look at (it’s gorgeously photographed) and great to listen to, with quirky-poetic use of language – “wrought up”, “shabby first impression”, “grind it fine in my mind”. Hollywood meets arthouse, I rejoiced. One film to rule them all – all the various TIFFs, the gritty and glitzy, the film buffs and celebrity-watchers.
Or so I thought. But on Day 5 or thereabouts I happened to stray into a late-night gyros place (all that sitting in cinemas makes a person hungry) and got to talking with the owner, who turned out to be Greek and beamed with joy when he learned my nationality. Had he been to any Festival screenings? His smile faded slightly. Yes he had, he replied – he’d been to see the “new Brad Pitt movie”, this Western, this Jesse James. The gyros man shook his head gravely. “Too slow,” he pronounced, with the air of a man who’d taken a wrong turn, learned a painful lesson and would certainly be more careful next time; “Too slow”. I guess even Toronto can’t please everyone.
