Totally TIFFed

>> Sights and highlights from this year’s
Toronto International Film Festival

by MARK SLUTSKY

Here are some of the things I’ve seen so far at the 2007 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival: screaming fans outside the Four Seasons and Park Hyatt hotels, waving at celebrities I’m too far away to see; Roger Ebert, making the screening rounds, bandaged but seemingly unbowed; hundreds of iPhones; Emily Mortimer clutching a Chanel bag and chattering excitedly into a Blackberry. An elderly woman in a skintight dress with the words “SLIPPERY WHEN WET” printed on it in big block letters, staggering down the stairs at a fancy Yorkville mall; Stephen Dorff eating a cheeseburger; line-ups; crowds; Tony Leung’s testicles.

Oh yeah, and movies. Lots of movies. Not as many as some, though. I thought I was being ambitious when I planned to screen some 30-odd movies in one week; when a Toronto critic told me he’d already reviewed 66 films (thanks to pre-screenings), I almost fainted. Maybe I’m just being selective, or it could be dumb luck, but most of the movies I’ve seen so far at this year’s fest have been pretty good. Some great, some okay, but there have been very few disappointments so far.

Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men blew in on a cloud of Cannes buzz, and it was as good, even better, than I expected it to be—their best in over a decade. An adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel, it’s a spare, violent, and visually beautiful thriller set mostly in Texas, featuring excellent performances from Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem (as an amazingly bad bad-guy), Josh Brolin and Kelly Macdonald, who pulls off a mean West Texas accent.

One of the films I’d been most looking forward to at TIFF was photographer Anton Corbijn’s Control, a biopic of the late, lamented Joy Division singer Ian Curtis. Featuring the excellent, until now unknown, Sam Riley in the lead role (with Samantha Morton as wife Deborah), and shot in gorgeous widescreen black and white, it’s a captivating, often touching portrait of the artist.

The next day, I interviewed Corbijn. At the end of our talk, he asked me, “You’re from Montreal, yes?” I replied in the affirmative.

“Do you know the Arcade Fire?”

Mixed nuts

Also highly anticipated was Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, especially after Variety panned the film before it played at the fest. Even with two theatres open for the press screenings, the lines still went around the corner and down the fire stairs; guess no one could resist the combination of bad press and scandalous, explicit sex scenes. Starring Tony Leung and terrific newcomer Tang Wei, the movie is set in China during WWII, with Wei playing a resistance fighter sent to infiltrate collaborator Leung’s inner circle. It’s like Black Book Goes to Shanghai. The movie is quite long and perhaps too subtle—except in those sex scenes of course, where yes, you do get a glimpse of Leung’s balls. You really couldn’t bring up the movie in conversation without somebody mentioning them.

A Jury Prize winner at Cannes, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is an animated film based on the Iranian artist’s graphic novel of the same title, telling of her coming-of-age in Tehran and Europe. It’s a beautifully constructed and illustrated film, faithful to the books, though they’ve obviously revamped it, and well, for the screen. Voice actors include Chiara Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve.

Less heavy than either of those films, by an order of magnitude, was Jason Reitman’s Juno. Starring Canada’s Ellen Page (in a terrific, star-making performance) as a teen girl knocked up by Michael Cera, the movie also stars Cera’s Arrested Development castmate Jason Bateman; it’s a likeable, funny rom-com with spunky dialogue by writer Diablo Cody.

Guillermo del Toro doesn’t have a film in the fest this year, but he did produce an early favourite, El Orfanato (The Orphanage), a Spanish horror movie directed by Juan Antonio Bayona about a woman who returns to the home where she grew up and discovers some dark and scary secrets. It’s a spooky but sweet film with deliberate echoes of Peter Pan. That’ll open here later this year, though New Line has just announced plans for an English-language remake.

Boners and Bogdanovich

MADDIN’S MANITOBA: My Winnipeg

Guy Maddin brought another delightful presentation to the festival this year (after last year’s live-Foley-enhanced Brand Upon the Brain!) with his new documentary, My Winnipeg. At a screening at the Winter Garden Theatre Friday night, Maddin himself took the stage to narrate the film, a brilliant, inventive and hilarious portrait of his hometown involving a recreation of his childhood home, elderly hockey players, dead horses and something called “The Dance of the Hairless Boners.” A truly inspiring movie and one of the year’s funniest, My Winnipeg will likely show on the Documentary Channel and is rumoured to be making an appearance at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma.

For his work in film preservation, Peter Bogdanovich was presented an award, followed by a film screening; he chose Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, truly one of the finest films ever made. Bogdanovich gave a sweet speech where he showed off a pretty good Renoir impression, and I later overheard him talking about the ending of The Sopranos (he was in favour). After the screening, a guy sitting next to me leaned over and asked, “Excuse me, do you know when this film was made?”

“1938, I think.”

“1938? Are you serious?”

“Uh, I think so...”

“They’re showing a movie from 1938 at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival?”

“Well yeah, they actually show a bunch of old movies.”

“How are you supposed to know?”

Herzog encounters

I was pretty stoked to see that Roy Andersson, the Swedish director behind 2000’s incredibly funny and bleak post-apocalyptic Songs From the Second Floor, had a new film in the fest, his first in seven years. You, the Living isn’t quite as amazing as Songs, but it has comparable moments of sheer exuberant awesomeness. Like Songs, the film consists of vaguely related scenes, each made up of one (or sometimes two) wide-angle shots in which a set-up plays out, usually with some kind of punchline. To be honest, I couldn’t really give you the full effect of his tableaux without ruining them, so I just hope the film will eventually open in Montreal (its distribution is unclear at this point).

SWEDE EMOTION: You, the Living

Not sure whether the new Werner Herzog will be in theatres in the 514 either. I saw Encounters at the End of the World on a rainy early Sunday morning at the Royal Ontario Museum, and noticed that Ebert had made it out for the screening that inhospitable day; it was a scene that seemed extra poignant at the end of the film, which closes with a dedication to the critic. The movie itself is basically Werner Herzog Goes to Antarctica (it’s produced by Discovery Films), and near the beginning, he intones, “The National Science Foundation had invited me to Antarctica, despite their having no doubt I was not going to come up with another film about penguins.” Actually, some penguins do make it in (the movie’s funniest scene involves a deranged one), but also volcanoes, undersea creatures, and lots of wandering souls who’ve found themselves at the bottom of the world. As usual, Herzog’s laconic narration anchors the movie—one of his more aimless, though no less enjoyable for it.

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