After last year’s 25th anniversary celebration, which took a fond look back at this increasingly important festival’s impact on world cinema, the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival presented a number of unique challenges. At this stage it would be easy for the festival and director Piers Handling to go the safe route: bloated Hollywood premieres and road-tested international fare that has already played the festival circuit.
To his credit, Handling appeared to be taking a riskier approach that harked back to the festival’s origins. Make no mistake, the festival’s celestial bodies – and their sizeable entourages – were shining in full force, but Handling and his programmers took steps to ensure that the real stars in the Toronto sky were the films. And for the first half of the festival, it all appeared to be working its typically engineered magic. That all changed dramatically on the morning of September 11th. The relative merits and faults of a film festival were certainly put into perspective against the global impact of the terrorist attacks on the United States.
Having successfully negotiated the growth of the Toronto festival during its most critical period, festival organizers now had a far more difficult decision to make: continue with the parade of stars, press conferences, parties and films, or cancel an event that would almost certainly devolve into a grim reminder of just how inconsequential such commercial and aesthetic celebrations really are in the face of unimaginable horror and grief.
With the death of irony heralded by the events of September 11th, it was doubly ironic that most media and eyewitness reports likened the disaster to a Òmovie,Ó particularly when going to the movies should have been the last thing on anyone’s mind. The last thing on our minds, yes, but evidently the first thing burned into our collective psyches – only movies could possibly envision such horror and with such effortless realism. Most festival-goers I bumped into on the morning of the attack couldn’t imagine continuing with the festival, the moment of shock too fresh as escape from the downtown core became the only real priority.
Now in the midst of a communications crisis, the first step – suspension of screenings and press conferences – was a foregone conclusion. The bigger decision was to come next, and it must surely have been the most difficult in the history of the festival. By continuing in a subdued manner – with the screenings and canceling all of the celebratory festival trappings including major parties, press conferences and awards festivities – organizers made a gutsy, potentially controversial decision. The most surprising thing was the consensus that this was the right, in fact the only, decision that seemed to make sense.
Attendance at screenings didn’t appear to suffer, and from my vantage point, audiences seemed especially engaged in both the films and in making meaningful contact with the filmmakers. The seriousness of the films, and of filmmaking as an art form, assumed a new level of credibility. And something tells me it was more than the fact that we were all looking for diversions, though this was certainly true. It was more that, as human beings, we were looking for representations of the world that would help us to better process and understand the events and forces that shape us as a culture.
The subject or genre of any given film was irrelevant. In fact, I would argue that it was as much about the ritual of collective immersion in darkness – and in dream – and emerging out of that darkness to come to terms with what we have witnessed. In these times, we look for corroboration, for others that share our points-of-view, to validate and confirm our experience. As if each film were a dream, as moviegoers we were forced to reawaken into a new reality. With each film, it became just a little easier to accept that, perhaps, we could dream again.
It was in this very different place that the second half of the film festival emerged, at first tentatively and then with increasing confidence.
Rewind: Back to the Beginning
The opening night gala, Bruce Sweeney’s dark relationship comedy, Last Wedding, demonstrated that the festival is committed to breaking Canadian film, in Canada of all places (and boy do we need it). This wasn’t a radical step, but it demonstrated that TIFF (as it has come to be known) has no intention of abandoning its Perspective Canada mandate or resting on its international laurels.
Taking a look at this year’s line-up, the programming was typically diverse, with as much emphasis as ever on emerging national cinemas (Singapore, Bosnia, and others), established hotbeds of reliable art-house fare (France, Iran, China, Japan and the UK), and lumbering, increasingly bloated studio systems (USA). In other words, it was really business as usual, but with a gutsier, on-the-edge agenda.
It was a smart move that simultaneously gave the festival a whiff of hunger and credibility, while sticking with the cleverly disguised formula that has become its calling card. There’s nothing transplanted film aficionados love more than embracing their commitment to non-commercial, difficult foreign films while reveling in the sheer crush of frenzied media and their Hollywood prey. This brilliant collision has worked wonders for the festival, and each and every year it works like a charm.
With the formula in place and a balanced schedule that guaranteed at least a few discoveries, I, like many others, tried to retain some critical perspective outside of the events of September 11th. It was a struggle to resist reading each film within of the context of these events, but some weeks on and with the benefit of time it’s easier to look back and reassess the films that managed to find their own way to critical appreciation.
Expectations, Discoveries and Disappointment
By the time certain films reach Toronto, of course, they have played one or a number of festivals, including Sundance, Cannes and Venice. This year, five such films – Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le fabuleux destin d’Amelie Poulain, Todd Field’s In the Bedroom, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste – arrived with significant critical buzz already attached. At Cannes alone, Moretti’s film won the Palme D’or, Lynch won for direction, and Haneke took the runner-up Grand Prix. Earlier in the year at Sundance, Field’s In the Bedroom was cited as an early contender for the 2002 Oscars. So how do they stack up?
Moretti’s The Son’s Room and Todd Field’s In the Bedroom both deal with an explosive domestic subject – the death of a child and its devastating effect on family dynamics – but with dramatically different outcomes. Moretti, a playful diarist recognized at Cannes before for Caro Diario, takes the time to establish an intimate family portrait, focusing on the relationship between the therapist father, Giovanni (played by Moretti), and his teenaged son. Consumed with guilt when he discovers that his son has died in a diving accident, Giovanni becomes obsessed with replaying the fateful course of events – mindlessly scanning a CD backward in time as if to replay key moments, or questioning his decision to go in to work on a Sunday rather than spend time with his son.
As the family struggles to work its way through profound grief, a letter arrives from the boy’s unknown girlfriend. Seizing the opportunity to regain contact through this outsider, for whom the son is still alive in memory, the family meets with her – a final act designed to convey the tragic news, and in the process reach a place from which they can move, ripped apart but intact, into the future. The Son’s Room is very good, but slightly disappointing after the incredible hype of Cannes.
In Todd Field’s In the Bedroom, a more harrowing and profoundly emotional film, the death of the beloved son is deferred until almost the mid-way point of the film. In carefully crafting the domestic milieu – gifted son of respected middle class family struggles to choose between a promising academic future and a new relationship with an older, recently divorced mother of two with a violent ex-husband – Field affords his characters the time to establish complex emotional relationships. Though the boy’s parents, played brilliantly by Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson, are concerned about their son’s choices, they allow him the freedom to make the right decision – up to a point. When it becomes clear that the choice is love and a blue collar career as a fisherman, the mother intervenes against her husband’s wishes.
After their son is murdered by his girlfriend’s estranged husband, the couple struggles to work through their grief. The story is played out Òin the bedroom,Ó but also in the public halls of justice and community. The climactic scene in which both husband and wife unleash decades of resentment and recrimination is astonishingly frank and brutal, a torrent of suppressed rage that obliterates what appeared a rock-solid marital foundation.
It’s at this point the film takes a disturbing turn into a revenge story in its final act. Though unexpected, the film’s final act of revenge is wholly credible, a shattered family’s desperate – and probably failed – attempt to reclaim control and end the cycle of grief. Unlike Moretti’s more optimistic vision in The Son’s Room, In the Bedroom suggests a far more uncertain future for its family. There will likely not be a finer American film released this year.
Agony, Mystery, and Finally, Love
The agony continues in Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste, yet another chapter in this director’s exploration of human torture and suffering. Isabelle Huppert, winner of the Best Actress prize at Cannes, is typically mesmerizing in her courageous, egoless portrayal of an emotionally damaged piano teacher grappling with self-hate and sado-masochism. Haneke’s film is unflinching and difficult to watch, but we cannot take our eyes off Huppert. Amazingly, she makes us understand her character’s suffering, the undercurrent of humanity in her abuse of love, and her need to be hated in the same instant she demands to be embraced.
David Lynch’s hypnotic and unexpectedly affecting Mulholland Drive, yet another very strange odyssey through this director’s familiar subconscious landscape of desire, has to be seen to be believed – and seen more than once to be understood. This much is clear: a young, hilariously earnest blonde named Betty (a stunning Naomi Watts) leaves Deep River, Ontario to become a star in Hollywood. She no sooner arrives than finds a voluptuous, brunette amnesiac named ÒRitaÓ (after Rita Hayworth) settled into her aunt’s apartment. Wide-eyed and eager to help unravel the mystery of Rita’s identity, Betty risks losing her own – and what Lynch does in revealing the layers of this mystery is both utterly absorbing and confounding.
Thinking back to its opening images – a disorienting montage of burgundy bed sheets and the heavy breathing of a dreamer lost in a nightmare – we realize that the film exists as Betty’s dream of idealized love. She falls for Rita (a surprising twist that somehow makes perfect sense), but what happens at the moment of tremulous consummation sends the film down the rabbit hole and through the other end of the looking glass.
The key to the mystery is, in fact, a key – a blue key that fits a mysterious black box that holds the answers that Betty, Rita and most of all, Lynch’s audience, so anxiously seek. The point of revelation, however, is the most confounding of all. As Lynch turns the narrative on its head, we must reinterpret everything we’ve seen in the context of an alternate universe with the same performers playing different roles. Mulholland Drive is Lynch at his most compelling, by turns silly (enough with the dwarf oracles!) and serious, always treading the very fine line between frustrating his audience and holding them in rapt attention. If it’s any indication, two months later I still find myself tumbling over the possible solutions to this very addictive cinematic puzzle. Somewhere, David Lynch is smiling.
Magonia, by first-time director Ineke Smits, was the festival’s biggest surprise, an unheralded, exquisitely crafted triptych of Òshort storiesÓ about the possibilities of escape in the face of social, religious, and psychological barriers. The small narrative diamonds Smits mines from these stories demand an attentive viewer, but the emotional and aesthetic rewards are worth it. In the imaginary world of Magonia, a man slightly out of touch with reality teaches his son that stories provide their own escape, in myriad forms, from the limits that keep us from reaching the things we most desperately seek. Intricate, emotional and held aloft for its entire duration, Magonia renewed my faith in the possibility of a true festival discovery undimmed by the Hollywood machine.
And finally, the love. It’s no surprise that Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le fabuleux destin d’Amelie Poulain has emerged as a huge hit in France and continues to win audience awards (including Toronto) around the world. If you don’t succumb to Jeunet’s vision of an idealized Paris and the moving tale of Amelie and her search for love, you might as well check your pulse. Alive with amazing set pieces, absurdly labyrinthine personal histories, apocryphal newsreels, and lonely characters in search of human connection, Amelie starts at light speed and slows down just long enough to allow us to feel the sadness that motivates its characters’ unlikely journeys.
After the events of September 11th, Amelie seemed to bring some relief, for however short a period of time. Jeunet’s film, is, in the very least, a moving personal scrapbook that is incredibly difficult not to fall in love with.
