The end of Toronto?

>> In which the International Film Fest almost shuts down

by MATTHEW HAYS

"This is like some sort of fucking movie," cursed one film industry executive on Tuesday at high noon. By this point, the news had hit those streaming out of screenings at the 26th annual Toronto International Film Festival. And the images were starting to sink in. The movie of the day, the one everyone was watching, had become CNN. People were shocked, gathering around TV sets as all of the screenings, both press and public, came to a halt by early afternoon. Now came the question: should the festival even bother to continue?

The question was debated among the press corps in a scene that felt entirely surreal. Looking depressed and forlorn in the lobbies of the Hyatt and the Four Seasons were Brian De Palma and Richard Harris, among others. Harris expressed his horror at the events unfolding. There are over 1,000 journalists here; a good chunk of those were from New York. Many of that contingent had retreated to their hotel rooms. Since no one could leave by plane, hotels were trying to figure out how they were going to accommodate hundreds who would otherwise have been checking out. "This is like a David Lynch movie," I said to another in the press corps. "No way," he corrected me, "Lynch couldn't think something this weird up."

"The making of movies seems pretty bloody insignificant right now," I overheard one producer saying. An amazing statement coming from a member of the notoriously self-involved film community.

Piers Handling, fest director, faced a daunting dilemma. Some argued that, out of respect for those dead in New York, Washington and Pittsburgh, the fest should shut down. As well, many of the films booked for the rest of the week were due in from New York, and obviously weren't going to make it in time. Others pointed out that shutting down the fest would only mean caving in to the terrorist action.

At the first of several press conferences held during the day, an emotional Handling said that fest organizers were holding an emergency meeting and by 4 p.m. would announce whether or not the festival would continue on Wednesday. Handling said the fest had never faced such a quandary. He alluded to the shock and horror of the death of Princess Di, which also occurred around the time of the fest, but said that was shocking but couldn't compare to the scope of this event.

A sci-fi reality

Hundreds of journalists packed the Hyatt, waiting to hear Handling's verdict. "This is like four or five movies packed into one," another journalist said to me. "Like a science fiction movie," said another. "If you put this in a script, no one would ever believe it." And so on. Being smack in the middle of a film festival heightened the sense of disbelief around the entire thing.

Handling spoke to a packed room at 4:30 pm. The verdict was that the film fest would resume in the morning, but the fest parties, at least the ones run by the fest itself, would cease. Where they felt necessary, security would be heightened around certain screenings, though Handling wouldn't state which screenings they were concerned about.

But talk of shutting things down wasn't over yet. The shell-shocked fest officials said they would continue to feel the pulse and, if necessary, they would pull the plug if they felt it appropriate. At press time, however, the show was still going on.

As a film critic, the terrorist attack raises issues about where filmic storytelling goes from here. Hollywood producers have consistently imagined traumatic scenarios that could throw characters we could relate to into danger. But Tuesday's tragedy makes anything conjured up by Hollywood--from the Disasters of Irwin Allen to the Die Hard movies--look like a walk in the park. It may seem irrelevant right now, but I wonder: after these images have been unleashed and burned, via rerun, into our collective consciousness, where does what Susan Sontag once called "the imagination of disaster" go from here?

The day before the day after

The following was the article I had begun to write on Monday, prior to any of the news from Tuesday, above. It contains my reflections on what I consider the best of the festival thus far.

The most talked-about film at the fest at half time is undoubtedly Mulholland Drive, the latest from David Lynch. The film opens with a spectacular car crash which results in one amnesiac (Laura Herring) desperate to figure out who she is and who was trying to kill her. Particularly noteworthy is Lynch's casting, which includes Hollywood golden era actress Ann Miller as a nosy landlady.

The best film I've seen thus far is Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone, the filmmaker's follow-up to Mimic, an effort many see as his ill-fated foray into English-language filmmaking. Now he's back in his native tongue, and for those starved for some brilliant Gothic horror, this film will come as a revelation. The man behind Cronos sets this bizarre ghost story about revenge and survival in a Spanish-Civil-War-era orphanage. For del Toro, it was important to rescue the horror movie from all the pop self-referentialism he thinks has gone too far. "Scream was fun in the beginning," he tells me. "But typically, they carried it too far. Simply referencing other horror movies isn't enough."

Waking Life is Richard Linklater's animated version of Slacker. The feature is a series of vignettes, which were shot digitally, then painstakingly painted over by an army of animators. Linklater says the film was a labour of love and confirms that Slacker was his model for the film. Waking Life has a series of people reflecting on the meaning of our existence, including segments featuring Steven Soderbergh and Ethan Hawke.

Cancon can be found in Century Hotel, the directorial debut of David Weaver, an ambitious film about seven interwoven stories at the elaborate inn that unfold throughout the 20th century. It's not a perfect film, for sure, but Weaver delivers some engaging moments with the help of his able cast (including Colm Feore and Mia Kirshner), and I feel the film was handed an unfair blow by Toronto's Now newspaper, which declared it a dog on the opening day of the fest.