In the last two decades, Toronto has gained a reputation for breaking widely acclaimed foreign and domestic films like Diva, The Big Chill, Chariots of Fire and, most recently, American Beauty. If it breaks in Toronto, the Hollywood hype machines begin to roll right through the autumn and into Oscar season. Like the ultimate focus group, the Toronto International Film Festival has for years provided film buyers, distributors, and industry analysts with an unparalleled opportunity to gauge both public and critical response.
In Toronto, when audiences speak, the industry listens and, more often than not, the cash registers start to roll. Of course, the public isn’t always right when it comes to box office. Remember, just a few short years ago in 1994, Antonia Bird’s Priest won the coveted Most Popular Film award and was devoured by distributors. When Miramax rushed its theatrical release shortly thereafter, the film bombed. It seems the U.S. just wasn’t ready for a witty, subversive and graphic look at Catholicism and homosexuality, particularly when the two are joined so closely at the hip. Toronto was, and continues to be.
Unlike many of the more feted world film festivals – Berlin, Venice, New York, and particularly Cannes – Toronto has enjoyed a reputation as a “people’s festival,” propelled to its current lofty stature through the efforts of fanatical film enthusiasts and a public willing to endure both long queues and the fickle charms of Canadian autumn to experience the thrill of spectatorship. For Toronto audiences, it’s not about the stars, the box office, or the parties; it’s about films, filmmakers and dialogue.
In the last decade, though, as Toronto secured its position as a top-five world festival, it has become a destination for stars, their handlers, and far too many publicists attached to mobile phones. Even more disturbing are the emerging stars — the marketers and buyers that, with the right film and a carefully targeted campaign, can virtually buy an Oscar. Shakespeare in Love, anyone? Contrary to popular belief, its only real star was Harvey Weinstein.
While the stargazers are giving the cinephiles a run for their money, the heart of the festival remains the films. While Hollywood’s angel dust might glitter a little more brightly in the spotlight, once the curtain goes up, the silver screen makes even an in-the-flesh Gwyneth look a trifle, well, ordinary. No matter, for film lovers, this is exactly the way it should be. The undiscovered gems might not get the ink that major Hollywood premieres command, but each year they successfully capture the hearts and minds of Toronto audiences.
THE FILMS
As it turns twenty-five, the Toronto International Film Festival may be a lot more shrewd about the business of selling its wares, but the remarkable thing is that both the quantity and quality of the films remains intact. Many of these – 178 of 329 presented films – were world or North American premieres. That demonstrates the vitality and strategic importance of Toronto as a major venue for kickstarting theatrical runs and buyer frenzy. As long as the stars, the buyers and audiences continue to show up, you can guarantee that this high percentage of premieres will continue to grow, even as competition on the global festival circuit heats up. That’s good news for Toronto, and even better news for the moviegoers.
The Preludes:
So, did the millennial edition go down as one for the ages? Yes and no. Certainly, the celebratory atmosphere of this silver anniversary lent some lustre and a much-needed hook for the press and the public. Its impact on the films was also felt, most directly in the form of the ten commemorative “Preludes” which preceded each of the feature screenings. Designed to celebrate the art, business and emotional history of movie-making and movie-watching, as seen through the lens of Canadian artists, they were largely a hit-and-miss affair. The most notable entries, David Cronenberg’s Camera and Guy Maddin’s The Heart of the World (which has since gone on to win the National Board of Review’s award for Best Experimental Film of 2000), explored serious themes (death and the cinema) and rediscovered genres (melodrama). Many of the Toronto big hitters, including Atom Egoyan’s The Line and Don McKellar’s A Word from the Management, simply didn’t have anything to say beyond nostalgic reminiscence. Only Jeremy Podeswa managed to articulate something emotionally compelling in 24 fps, a moving tribute to both the art form and the remembered loved ones that help to awaken a passion for the cinema. Michael Snow’s Prelude mystified in its formal deconstruction. Mike Jones’ Congratulations, though innocuous on first viewing, irritated in its quaint, east coast charm. A mixed bag, then, but an experiment not without its small triumphs.
The Films that Stuck:
If you’ve been paying close attention to late-season film releases, the big stories are already out of the bag and on many of 2000’s “Ten Best” lists and year-end critics polls. In fact, many of Toronto’s films have already gone on to begin, and in many cases, complete their theatrical runs: David Mamet’s disappointingly bloodless satire of the Hollywood film industry, State and Main, Jon Shear’s unforgettable urban nightmare, Urbania, Cameron Crowe’s sweet, under-appreciated Almost Famous, Rod Lurie’s divisive The Contender, and Robert Altman’s middling Dr. T and the Women.
Perhaps the biggest – and most deserved – success this year is Ang Lee’s magnificent martial arts epic, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, winner of the People’s Choice award. Limiting this film to the martial arts genre does it a major disservice. One of Lee’s biggest accomplishments is the seamless narrative integration of Yuen Wo-Ping’s (The Matrix) kinetic, balletic choreography in the action sequences to the epic love story that both grounds the film and, magically, elevates it. The film is at once dynamic and contemplative, accessible and elusive, physical and spiritual. There really is something here for everyone, and it appears that this time around both critics and audiences are paying attention. That’s gratifying for Lee given the ecstatic reception to his previous film, The Ice Storm, at once the most praised and ignored film of 1997.
Starring Asian film stars Chow Yun-Fat as Li Mu Bai and Michelle Yeoh as his undeclared love, Shu Lien, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon‘s story is centred around the legendary Green Destiny sword, warrior Mu Bai’s weapon of choice for the most spiritual and elusive of martial arts, Wudan. Bequeathed, stolen, reclaimed, stolen again, and finally discarded, the sword is the symbolic heart of the film: the weapon around which the parallel love stories develop and deepen, and lifelong jealousies and betrayals grow more poisonous.
It’s a brilliant narrative device that serves to set up the film’s astonishing action sequences (walking on water, leaping across rooftops, dancing on supple bamboo treetops, among others); reveal the characters’ motivations and passions; and explore the many nuances of restrained, mature love (the long-undeclared romance between Li Mu Bai and Shu Lien) and wild, youthful ardour (the incendiary passions of the young lovers in the desert). Concluding his film with a successful act of revenge, a heartbreaking declaration of love and a moving leap of faith, Lee never takes the easy way out, somehow managing to sustain the fine balance of his respective genres. It shouldn’t work, but Lee’s uncanny intuition and unerring attention to the emotional stakes of the simplest actions, makes it soar.
Toronto audiences nailed this one as a winner (as did Cannes), and its subsequent platform release strategy is proving effective in leveraging critical praise in major markets before the film breaks through in wider release. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is the type of film that Toronto embraces as its own, clearly the defining film of the 2000 festival. Yo-Yo Ma’s rhapsodic score is merely icing on the cake.
Worthy Contenders:
True, there was only one Crouching Tiger, but there were many worthy films, some of which were by some of international cinema’s masters. Although still in his thirties, Olivier Assayas is rapidly developing the kind of filmography that directors die for. Known to Toronto audiences for the widely acclaimed l’eau froide and fin août, début septembre, as well as the more widely released (but not as good) Irma Vep, Assayas’ career continues to follow the trajectory of Francois Truffaut – an edgy, contemporary tale of disaffected youth followed some years later by a lush, intensely emotional costume drama. Truffaut triumphed with Two English Girls in 1971, and this year Assayas scored with Les destinées sentimentales.
At more than three hours and glacially paced, the film’s advance notices were less than enthusiastic, but these proved unfounded. Exploring the intersection of spiritual faith, familial obligation and secular love, Assayas film, starring Charles Berling, Emmanuelle Beart and Isabelle Huppert, packs an emotional punch that is as subtle as the palest and most refined porcelain finishes. At once the family business in the film and a serviceable metaphor for the struggle for earthly and spiritual perfection, the fine china here is not merely decorative. Assayas uses it shrewdly, to both delineate his characters emotional terrain and mark subtle shifts in social hierarchies. Unlikely to make much of a dent at the box office and too subdued in tone to become a mainstream critical favourite, Les destinées sentimentales is nevertheless one the highlights of the festival.
Of the new generation of heralded filmmakers, three were well represented in Toronto with interesting departures and reliable masterpieces, all from Asian directors (see more in the Asian sidebar, Page 4): Wong Kar-wai with In the Mood for Love, Edward Yang with Yi Yi (A One and a Two, winner of the director’s prize at Cannes), Tran Anh Hung with À la verticale de l’été.
Eschewing the kaleidoscopic visuals of his previous films (Fallen Angels, Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express), Kar-wai here explores the emotional vicissitudes of a volatile romance between two married neighbours in a crowded apartment building. The hook? Their respective spouses are themselves having an affair, a fact that is humorously conveyed through a number of coincidences (familiar handbags and neckties exchanged between the adulterous lovers) and the gradual, aching realization of the cuckolded spouses, played by Asian sex symbols Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. For Kar-wai, the stylistic shift (measured takes in slow motion, repetitive use of musical cues) serves to energize his story and break new aesthetic ground (new at least for this director). In its bittersweet conclusion, Kar-wai’s characters achieve a dignity and grace in their abstinence, in their inability to succumb to the very real passions that lurk beneath their marital detective work.
Forbidden passions are also at the centre of Taiwanese director Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (A One and a Two), his epic but intimate domestic study of an extended family in a period of crisis. Following the stroke of Min-Min’s mother, her husband, NJ Jian, begins to explore an abandoned relationship of his youth, only to find that his feelings for his ex-lover have been reawakened. Their son, a deeply curious but not offensively precocious pre-schooler named Yang-Yang, is left to his own devices to make sense of this unravelling world. At once poetic and emotionally transparent, the film employs long, silent takes of its characters in real time, never rushing the development of emotional roadblocks or small epiphanies.
As it follows the charming life experiments of Yang-Yang, it seems as though some benevolent force is watching closely, protecting his innocent life even as the adults must chart their own escape from complicated domestic entanglements and lifelong disappointments. An example of bravura directing that takes a completely different approach from Wong Kar-wai’s more broad stylization, Yi Yi is a masterpiece of the acutely observed details that constitute messy, fully lived yet unfulfilled lives.
For Tran An Hung, acclaimed Vietnamese-born French director of the lyrical The Scent of Green Papaya and the chaotic Cyclo, adultery again looms large in À la verticale de l’été (The Vertical Ray of Summer). Like all of his films, this latest work is masterfully shot – each frame is painterly in its appreciation of light, colour and composition. Through this beautifying lens, which renders even the most painful moments rapturously, Hung explores the complex family dynamics of three sisters and their brother. In its most harrowing moments, the film focuses on the double life of the eldest sister’s husband, a man plagued with guilt and regret as he negotiates the demands of two families: a legitimate wife and family, and the clandestine lover and child he surreptitiously visits while away “on business.” Enhanced by the daily rhythms of waking and intimate familial dialogue set to the soundtrack of, surprisingly, The Velvet Underground, Hung’s film looked and felt like nothing else at the festival.
More of the Best
The sad thing about a festival is that you can’t see all the films (really a blessing in disguise). There are reported gems (Kim Kiduk’s The Isle, Canadian Gary Burn’s prize-winning Waydowntown, Denis Villeneuve’s Maelström, and the epic Japanese film, Eureka, that escape you or that don’t fit into even the most tightly orchestrated schedule. The happy side of this is the discoveries that you make by accident, through trusted word-of-mouth or because of a director’s past track record. They may not be award-winners prior to Toronto, but given the high number of premieres, that’s not unusual. This year a number of films fell into this category, films that didn’t come with heavy expectations, but surprised and gratified all the more for it.
101 Reykjavik, by Baltasar Kormákur, put its dubious slacker hero, Hlynur, in centre of Iceland’s otherworldly beauty to discover the humour and pain of love and responsibility. Poor chap – he falls in love with his mother’s lesbian lover, played with characteristic gusto by Spain’s Victoria Abril. Careering between farce and pathos, the film is an often bleak, yet comic look at youth culture in Iceland. It’s a compelling vision by a first-time director.
On the other end of the scale is Gohatto, by legendary Japanese director Nagisa Oshima (In the Realm of the Senses). Oshima has created a highly stylized yet archly humorous meditation on forbidden passion and betrayal among young Samurai recruits and the teachers that covet their affections. Its final frames, of a whispered betrayal and a severed cherry tree in full blossom, are haunting and powerful, proving that Oshima’s penchant for confronting the sexual mores of the Japanese is still very much alive.
Francois Ozon’s Sous le sable (Under the Sand) features a luminous performance by Charlotte Rampling (one of three at the festival in a veritable Rampling renaissance) as a grieving widow who reanimates the spirit of her departed husband. Finding her way through the rubble of lost love and her husband’s probable suicide, Rampling has the courage to tinge unbearable sadness with an unhinged sense of humour that keeps its audience off guard yet deeply sympathetic.
Another fine French film, Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien (Harry, He’s Here to Help), by Dominik Moll, took the unhinged to new extremes in its disturbing tale of an old high school chum from hell. We all know friends like Harry, the old acquaintances with an uncanny ability to sniff out our vulnerabilities and prey upon our well-hidden disappointments. In Moll’s vision, the friend from the past leads to a murderous Hitchcockian plot, disturbing doppelgangers, and finally, bloody redemption. In the final sequence, the restored family unit seems almost sinister, its own secrets now literally buried at the family cottage.
Already Been, Coming Soon
In addition to these, several other films captured the attention of filmgoers and critics alike. Some of these will never see the light of day in your local cinema, while others have already been released:
- Baise-Moi (France, Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi)
- Face (Japan, Junji Sakamoto)
- Faithless (Sweden, Liv Ullman)
- Girlfight (USA, Karyn Kusama, released)
- The House of Mirth (UK, Terence Davies, coming soon)
- Sexy Beast (UK, Jonathan Glazer)
- A Time for Drunken Horses (Iran, Bahman Ghobadi, released)
- Before Night Falls (USA, Julian Schnabel, released in major US centres, opening soon in Canada)
- Shadow of the Vampire (USA, E. Elias Merhige, released in major US centres, opening soon in Canada)
- Signs and Wonders (France, Jonathan Nossiter)
- The Truth About Tully (USA, Hilary Birmingham)
The Prize Winners Of The 25th Toronto International Film Festivals
- Benson & Hedges People’s Choice Award — Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Taiwan, Ang Lee). Second Place Runner-up: The Dish (Australia, Rob Sitch). Third-Place Runner-up (tie): Innocence (Australia, Paul Cox), and Billy Elliot (UK, Stephen Daldry).
- Volkswagen Discover Award — George Washington (USA, David Gordon Green); 101 Reykjavik (Iceland/Norway/Denmark/France, Baltasar Kormákur)
- FIPRESCI Award — Bangkok Dangerous (Thailand, Oxide and Danny Pang)
- CITY Award for Best Canadian Feature Film — Waydowntown, Gary Burns; Honourable Mention: Maelström, Denis Villeneuve
- CITY TV Award for Best Canadian First Feature Film — La moitie gauche du frigo, Philippe Falardeau
The films reviewed below are either from Asian countries or those that explore Asian issues. These films betray few common themes, but a fashionable amount of style came to the surface. Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood For Love showcased a different aspect of his work, with the majority of scenes confined within the walls and corridors of a building. Oshima’s gay samurai epic, Gohatto and Kidun’s The Isle were moody contemplations of the existence of love in the oddest places. Aoyama’s Eureka is an extremely satisfying, exquisitely photographed film full of quiet and moving touches. The reviews below provide ample proof that beyond the major Asian films at the festival, art house cinema is vibrantly alive in Asia.
Brother (USA/Japan/UK 2000) ***
Directed by Takeshi “Beat” Kitano
Brother returns actor/writer/director/editor Kitano to his early Violent Cop days where ultra-violence and deadpan humour rule. Kitano plays ex-Yakuza top brass banished from Tokyo to L.A. only to land into more trouble with the local hoods. There is less improvisation compared to Hanna B. and Fireworks, two later works, but Kitano still incorporates the need for kinship, a characteristic found in all his work. Neatly edited, entertaining and action-packed, but with hardly any depth.
Eureka (Japan 2000) ****
Directed by Shinji Aoyama
A busjacking results in everyone dead except the bus driver (Yakusho Koji from Shall We Dance and The Eel) and two children passengers. As a result of the experienced violence, the survivors can no longer function normally in society. Two years pass and the three eventually go on a bus trip hoping to find some meaning amidst the madness. Aoyama’s detailed and effective study on trauma is a black-and- white epic that takes a full 217 minutes (the longest film of the festival) to unravel. The film is full of beautiful images. Director Aoyama’s assured and controlled direction makes this a remarkable debut that is worth the time spent.
Face (Japan 1999) ****
Directed by Junji Sakamoto
The murderess attempts to escape from the cops by riding a bike. Only thing is that she does not know how to ride and falls flat on her face. She runs around a large portion of the film with a swollen face and hence the film’s title. Director Sakamoto has made his name by making action films like Scarred Angels and Boxer Joe but his latest tale of a chubby loser is hilarious and off-beat. For example, our heroine is raped twice and the second time, she helps by unbuttoning the dress herself, so they don’t get ripped off. Sakamoto emphasizes the need for independence and love while making some keen observations about the Japanese lifestyle from different walks of life.
The Iron Ladies (Thailand 2000) ***
Directed by Yongyooth Thongkonthun
This film that chronicles the rise of a national volleyball team composed of gays and transvestites is all over the place and amateurishly made. But somehow, by sheer spirit of the filmmakers and actors, the film works as an amazing crowd pleaser. Who cannot help but root for the butch queen with the nickname ‘iron pussy’? And the film is based on a true-life team of the same name.
The Isle (South Korea 2000) ****
Directed by Kim Kiduk
From South Korea comes another original sexual film after Lies put the country on the international film map. Kiduk’s is a love story between an ex-cop and a mute gamekeeper of a secluded lake resort. But this is not the romantic, charming love comedy one would expect, even though the film is filled with lush photography and surrealistic images. One key scene has the girl insert three-pronged fishhooks into her vagina only to have them pulled out one by one by her boyfriend using a pair of pliers. Repulsive, weird and compelling.
