TIME PACIFIC September 11, 2000 | NO. 36
Mounting a movie banquet Toronto's
film fest turns 25 this year; TIME's critic, a longtime fan, prepares himself
for the tastiest movie binge in North America
By Richard
Colrliss
Twenty-five,
says marilyn monroe when she is asked her age in Some Like It Hot. "That's nearly
a quarter of a century. Makes a girl think." As the Toronto Film Festival nears
its 25th annual session this week, it makes a veteran moviegoer think about
how this festival has grown, matured and filled out nicely--just like Marilyn.
For Toronto is now one of the world's most prominent film events, and certainly
the continent's niftiest movie binge.
I have traveled
from New York City to attend perhaps half the 24 previous bashes. I've schmoozed
with local friends and fellow critics, picnicked on director Norman Jewison's
farm with loads of other cinephiles, holed up in five different hotels and met
a few famous folks. But mostly I'm there on the pleasurable business of seeing
movies--five to eight a day, which I have selected carefully, then desperately,
from the 300 or so on display. From 8:30 a.m. till 2 the next morning, I am
either sitting in a theater or rushing to get into one. And, reader, I love
it!
I'm not alone.
Each year the festival fills half a dozen theaters with 250,000 bodies; from
Sept. 7 through Sept. 16, Toronto will be a resort destination for serious (and
frivolous) cinema. Unlike the Cannes Film Festival or Sundance, Toronto is not
tailored to film professionals, though they are welcome and well treated. It's
not for the Hollywood studios, though they happily bring their big films there.
Toronto is a people's party. And because the programs are chosen smartly (by
a committee under the gentle direction of Piers Handling) and administered smoothly
(by managing director Michèle Maheux and her staff), the very orderly mob of
festival devotees has a cool time while being painlessly edified.
For its silver
jubilee, Toronto is offering the North American premieres of Cameron Crowe's
Almost Famous, Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Robert Altman's Dr.
T and the Women (with Richard Gere) and the Terence Davies adaptation of Edith
Wharton's The House of Mirth. The opening-night film is Denys Arcand's faux-video
documentary, Stardom, with bosomacious newcomer Jessica Paré as a troubled celeb.
Two Cannes prizewinners will be missing: Lars von Trier's Björk-starring musical
Dancer in the Dark was snagged by the New York Film Festival, and the Chinese
censors have banned Jiang Wen's Devils on the Door-step. But that leaves a few
more hours to scavenge for hidden treasure in a festival that has shown some
6,000 films since Cousin, Cousine, its opening-night gala in 1976.
The brainchild
of Bill Marshall, a public relations whiz who had worked in Ontario politics,
and Dusty Cohl, a real estate lawyer, the Toronto fest began as the Festival
of Festivals. The idea was to show the cream of Cannes, Venice, New York and
other established film conventions. The festival's founding coincided with a
push by the national government to make Canada a prime movie-making nation,
not just a farm team for Hollywood. Marshall and Cohl had eyes for being part
of Canada's entrepreneurial surge. They wanted to produce movies more than festivals,
but saw glamour and utility in both. Synergy too: a festival could promote the
Canadian film renaissance.
That ambitious
scheme was not to be realized; the government cut its subsidies after a few
years, and the vision of Toronto as Hollywood North was quickly occluded. Marshall
bowed out of the festival, and Cohl retired to permanent "accomplice" status,
later concocting a biannual movie marathon at sea called the Floating Film Festival.
(In Brian D. Johnson's newly published history Brave Films, Wild Nights: 25
Years of Festival Fever, I am cited as one of Cohl's "cronies"; I happily accept
the compliment.) But the Festival of Festivals, which in 1994 changed its name
to the Toronto International Film Festival, kept growing until it was, for many
cinephiles, the festival of festivals. Its secret? A capacious variety of films
on display--American, European, Australian and Asian, high, low and serious middle--and
the voracious appetite of the Canadian audience to consume them.
It's not just
the number of available films that makes Toronto so appealing (or overwhelming);
it is also the democracy with which they are programmed. The festival holds
gala presentations at Roy Thompson Hall, but the real action is often elsewhere--in
the Contemporary World Showcase, in the annual tribute to a single director
or in the midnight-madness unspooling of cinematic oddities. (This year's record
nine Australian movies include the premiere of Samantha Lang's Monkey's Mask,
the testosterone punch of Chopper, and Shirley Barrett's deliciously droll Walk
the Talk, a black comedy set on Queensland's Gold Coast.)
The mark of
any successful festival is that its audiences will beg to get into films you
couldn't pay them to see at any other time of the year. At Toronto I have witnessed
such stampedes: in 1979 for the documentary Best Boy (which later nabbed an
Oscar); in 1994 for the gay drama Priest. Both these films won the festival's
People's Choice Award, as did Chariots of Fire--the audience's favorite picture
(whose success in 1981 helped secure Toronto its rep as a venue congenial and
helpful to commercial films)--and last year's American Beauty.
It's pleasant
for a festival to have bragging rights to premiere showings of films that became
Oscar winners. But it's more important that it shed a systematic light on whole
film cultures, worthy but unknown to the plex-going public. With its pioneering
Asian-film sidebar (overseen by the late supersleuth David Overbey), the fest
was crucial in developing North American interest in Indian musicals, the existential
splatter films of Takeshi Kitano, the burgeoning Thai and Korean cinemas and
especially Chinese-language dramas; the premiere of John Woo's The Killer can
be said to have established Hong Kong movies as pre-eminent cult items in North
America. Other series concentrate on African movies, documentaries and first
features. There is even an affirmative-action program of Canadian films. Most
of these series are perennials, so they bring both continuity and adventure
to the movie lover's continuing education.
It isn't all
solitary research. People come out of a screening, strike up a conversation
with a stranger, exchange prejudices, perhaps meet with the director. It's fun
for the filmmakers too. They see their works with large, knowledgeable, supercharged
audiences. Then, instead of doing meetings with some big studio's senior-vice-president-in-charge-of-doing-meetings,
they can shoot pool with the locals--as the famously reclusive Jean-Luc Godard
did when he attended in 1996. Maybe this year some lucky festivalgoers will
wind up playing darts with Altman.
Me, I won't
have time. (And I'm not sure I trust Altman with sharp objects.) I'm already
putting my schedule together, and I still have a few slots left to fill. Let's
see ... between the screenings of Claude Chabrol's Merci pour le chocolat and
Blaine Thurier's Low Self Esteem Girl, I might have just enough time to catch
Michael Kalesniko's How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog.
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U R O P E FRANCE:
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F RI C A SOUTH
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President Thabo Mbeki discusses the continent's challenges
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T
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Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas spins his own version of the story of Bill
and Monica and Ken and Linda CINEMA:
Richard Corliss goes on a film bender in Toronto MUSIC:
Elastica ends a five-year silence with The Menace
