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Toronto film fest offers sex, love and hype

By A.O. Scott
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, TORONTO
Tuesday, Sep 14, 2004, Page 16

Like last year, sex is a big theme at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Shown above is a scene from last year's hit The Cooler. PHOTO: NY TIMES

"So what have you seen?"

This is the standard greeting exchanged by film critics at film festivals. It is a simple enough question, but also a loaded one, which can be inflected and interpreted in many ways. Sometimes, when understood to mean "What have you liked?," it can be a provocation to argue. ("Really? You thought that was good. Ugh. I left after the second reel. What did you like about it?") More frequently, though, the question is an invitation to compare notes, as well as an expression of anxiety. When critics ask one another, "What have you seen?" what they really want to know is, "What have I missed?"

The honest answer -- an admission that haunts dispatches like this one, whether or not the author acknowledges it -- is "just about everything."

This is not a matter of laziness or lack of will, but of simple mathematics. By the time this year's Toronto International Film Festival ends on Saturday, 328 films will have been screened. Spread over the 10 days of the festival. That comes to more than 30 movies a day, which means, according to my bleary-eyed calculations, that to see one movie is to miss about seven others, and that the statistical accuracy of any single critic's impressions of the festival as a whole will be roughly 12.5 percent.

What this suggests is that the Toronto festival, which has become, during the last decade or so, the most important such event in North America, is really eight or 12 or 35 festivals gathered under one roof. (The numbers are wildly imprecise, and the roof is metaphorical, because the screenings are in shopping-mall multiplexes, college auditoriums and concert halls scattered across this city's sprawling downtown business and entertainment districts.)

The official program acknowledges this multiplicity and tries to put it in some kind of order, which only serves to make the heterogeneity of the festival more dizzying. Some selections are categorized by nation or region, as in the National Cinema Spotlight program, which focuses this year on South Africa a decade after the end of apartheid.

There are also programs devoted, straightforwardly enough, to first features and to documentaries, but after that the categories become looser and more impressionistic. The Masters category offers "the latest works from famed directors," though such directors may also have their work presented in the glittery Gala program. Galas are not to be confused with Special Presentations, a program which (according to the festival guide) "features high-profile sneak previews by world-renowned filmmakers."

No sane movie lover would stay within the confines of a single program, and in Toronto there are as many festivals as there are festivalgoers.

If you were so inclined, for instance, you could fill your days and nights with films about or including sex. You might go from Kinsey, Bill Condon's supremely intelligent film biography of the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey (played with sensitivity and wit by Liam Neeson) to A Dirty Shame, John Waters's supremely silly attempt to corroborate some of Kinsey's more controversial findings. You could then find your way -- proceeding, like Kinsey, in a spirit of dispassionate scientific inquiry -- to the lyrical hard core of Michael Winterbottom's Nine Songs, the unblinking gynecology of Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell and the soft-focus teenage Sapphism of My Summer of Love, an utterly lovely film from the Polish-born British director Pawel Pawlikowski.

When you encounter a movie as captivating and strange as My Summer of Love -- which I did in a packed multiplex screening room on Saturday night -- you forget about all the movies you aren't seeing.

Toronto is hardly immune to the media hype and film-industry politicking that dominates the international film festival scene. Its placement on the map and on the calendar has made it the starting line in the Oscar race, a place where ambitious English-language art-house films come to generate early buzz.

Important as this festival is, it also has the distinction of being one of the least self-important. It does not take over the city so much as nestle into the rhythms of its everyday life, offering Torontonians and visitors a cinematic menu as diverse, democratic and unpretentious as that metropolis itself.

Sure, there are movie stars around, parties cordoned off by velvet ropes and autograph seekers patiently waiting outside restaurants for Annette Bening or Zhang Ziyi (章子怡). But for a first-timer whose impression of film festivals has been formed by the glamour and swagger and hauteur of Cannes, the easygoing atmosphere of Toronto is refreshing and a little startling. It seems to be organized around the radical idea that a film festival should be a place where people can see as many movies as possible with a minimum of hassle.
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