Years ago, back when branding was a word many of us still associated with cattle, the Toronto International Film Festival, which ended yesterday, was known as “the festival of festivals,” a reference to its identity as an event that gathered hits and misses from more prestigious festivals.
It had the flavor of a provincial affair then, a sprawling version of the current New York Film Festival, only with fewer black-clad patrons and more smiles. Somewhere along the line, though — say, 1999, the year that American Beauty was shown here and began its life as the “it” movie of the season, culminating in a best picture Oscar — the festival blew up big.
Today the aggressively branded Toronto festival (or TIFF) is second only to Cannes for industry noise. This is where companies like Fox Searchlight Pictures bring their Oscar contenders, like Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, about a ballerina (a febrile Natalie Portman) pirouetting close to the void, and Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours, quite possibly the funniest, most buoyant movie about a man (an appealing James Franco) sawing off, oh so slowly, one of his limbs.
Each movie had played elsewhere, including Venice and Telluride (which showed both). But those festivals’ locations and other contingencies — unlike most festivals, Telluride doesn’t provide free media passes — limits their media bang. And while Telluride showed 24 features in its main program, and Venice trotted out 86, this year Toronto flooded us with 258.
Toronto is also where a Fox Searchlight can throw down the gauntlet, as it did when it announced on Sept. 9, the festival’s opening day, that it had acquired Tree of Life, the latest from Terrence Malick. With the film’s projected release next year, you might be reading about this feverishly anticipated feature from the meticulous Malick at the next Cannes ... or Toronto. Meanwhile, to judge from the quality of the films at Toronto 2010, as well as the relatively brisk acquisition wheeling-and-dealing, there will be plenty to keep moviegoers engaged over the coming year.
Certainly much will be written about Black Swan and 127 Hours, which explore life’s sorrows while remaining outlandishly entertaining. Each turns on a tragically isolated character whose story is partly expressed through the extremes visited on his or her bleeding, battered and palpably vulnerable body. At one point in Black Swan, an impresario (Vincent Cassel) announces that he wants to create a Swan Lake that is “real and visceral,” a twinned aim shared by Aronofsky in a movie that draws on inspirations as expected as The Red Shoes and as surprising as Raging Bull. For his part, in 127 Hours Boyle uses every digital trick to bring you into both his character’s head and traumatized body.
The movies have long made a spectacle of human suffering, but digital technologies now make it possible to get cinematically under the skin in ways we’ve never seen before (and might not want to see). And while scenes of torture are nothing new at the movies, such scenes have become familiar in art-house offerings, not just in horror and action flicks, as integrated into our representational landscape as into our political one. The female inmates in John Carpenter’s The Ward, an enjoyably formulaic riff on the “final girl” horror film (in which the female victim survives), are subjected to the usual shiny, pointy instruments of death. But so is the central character in Leap Year, which won a prize at the last Cannes festival.
Directed by Michael Rowe, Leap Year involves a lonely Mexican woman, Laura (Monica del Carmen), who, amid overlong, often wordless interludes of her doing nothing of interest — an oft-abused art-cinema strategy — partakes of increasingly brutal one-night stands. Finally she meets the man of her dreams and presumably our nightmares: a man who, with her encouragement, subjects her to sexual violence. Rowe might be trying to say something about alienation in the modern world: when she’s not staring at the television or eating, Laura works as a business journalist and chatters about markets and the like. But it’s hard to care about a filmmaker’s intentions when you’re watching yet another fiction about a woman’s brutalization and, as important, watching another actress exploited under the rubric of art.
Much has been made in recent years about the big studios’ pulling out of the art-house business. Yet this retreat has been followed by the formation of assorted modest upstarts, some run by only a handful of individuals, a few of whom once worked for the studios. These companies, along with traditional outlets like museums and cinematheques — and of course festivals themselves — can be counted on to continue to bring noncommercial, nonobvious, nonmainstream movies to audiences hungry for something other than the familiar multiplex fodder. So keep your eyes open for At Ellen’s Age and The Sleeping Beauty, two of my Toronto favorites.
In The Sleeping Beauty, French filmmaker Catherine Breillat, much as she did with her last movie, Bluebeard, deconstructs a classic fairy tale with her customary intelligence, eccentric wit and predictably unpredictable ideas on sex and gender, men and women. In contrast to Bluebeard, this time Breillat wanders far from the original source material. Her Sleeping Beauty, for instance, spends much of the movie in the form of a pugnacious if wholly charming prepubescent princess whose desire for adventure finds her traveling the world and maybe her dreams. Among those she encounters are an older boy she grows to love, an albino prince and princess who lavish her with sweets and a knife-wielding Gypsy girl. (Breillat is fearless in all things, including using stereotypes.)
The titular adventuress in At Ellen’s Age, played by French actress Jeanne Balibar, travels some similarly unlikely roads. A flight attendant working for a German airline, Ellen begins her journey by fleeing a landed, locked plane, though unlike Steven Slater, she uses the stairs. Suffering from assorted problems (relationship woes, catastrophic illness), she begins to drift, floating into several orgiastic encounters with other flight crew members, then into a vegan commune made up of earnest young animal-rights activists. As she moves Ellen into the world, director Pia Marais creates an intimate character study that eventually and quite touchingly opens into a larger story about the pathos of our search for purpose.
At Ellen’s Age is the sort of movie that might turn up at the Toronto International Film Festival’s new public film center, the TIFF Bell Lighthouse, which opened early in the festival amid a whirl of publicity. An ambitious endeavor, the Lightbox is a bright, light, five-story, five-screen building that will serve as the permanent home to the festival’s organizational side and its wonderful cinematheque. The high-story condominium that sits on top of the Lightbox is still unfinished, the area behind it hidden by construction walls and some advertisements for the condo, including “Wrap yourself in a cinematic lifestyle.” The condo, TIFF logos and ubiquitous advertising, including the sponsor ads that run before every movie, inspired jokes, groans and curiosity about the center’s sustainability, but it also provoked sighs of envy.
In the end, despite all the branding and the starry distractions, the Toronto International Film Festival remains an essential and committed platform for the movies, the purest example of its dedication being its excellent Wavelengths selections. Programmed by Andrea Picard, the Wavelengths series tends to be a showcase for some of the greatest films of the festival and was again this year, notably with several silent works from avant-garde filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky, including Pastourelle. Dorsky calls these nonnarrative films — which are filled with images of brilliantly hued flowers shot with a hovering camera — “devotional songs,” and there is something truly lyrical about their ephemeral beauty. There is the world that we see, and then there is the world that artists like Dorsky see and generously share.
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