Toronto International Film Festival

From Takeshi Kitano's Brother. Photo by Suzanne Hanover/SMPSP.

I’m not quite sure what this says about the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival, but perhaps the best piece of cinema that I saw there was simply a five-minute prelude directed by Winnipeg’s preeminent silent cinema nitrate-deterioration fetishist, Guy Maddin. The "Preludes" were short films created by leading Canadian directors to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Toronto Fest, and they screened before many of the features, largely underscored by the groans of increasingly weary festgoers who were less than enamored with the repeat appearances of the weaker entries (ranging from a bland Atom Egoyan piece to a simply disastrous Michael Jones short).

However Maddin’s prelude, Heart of the World, was nothing short of astonishing, a hyperkinetic Eisenstein—cum—Kenneth Anger silent epic ("the world’s first subliminal melodrama," Maddin labeled it) about Christ, forensic pathology, tormented love, ecological apocalypse, phallic imagery and the invention of cinema that managed to cram more visual and narrative invention into its brief running time than most of the fest’s bloated three-hour features.

Of course, Toronto remains, arguably, the best and most enjoyable film festival in the world, and with literally hundreds of films unveiling in a 10-day span, it always seems rather jaded and ungracious to gripe about the lineup. Yet as one staggered from screening to screening in the city’s Bloor-Yorkville district, it was not difficult to detect a notable absence of discoveries this year. Toronto, after all, is not the most premiere-driven festival, at least as far as world cinema’s leading auteurs are concerned; most of them unveil their films in Cannes four months prior, or even in Venice the week before.

By sheer virture of its more than 300 selections, Toronto is something of a polyglot festival. Everyone who attends Toronto ultimately curates their own personal fest out of the exhaustive choices they are given. For the American media, the Canadian fest is where the studios preview their most critic-friendly fourth-quarter releases. This year’s U.S. premieres were no exception; the results were by turns encouraging (Almost Famous, Best in Show), ambivalent (Dr. T & the Women, The Weight of Water) and positively cataclysmic (Duets, Beautiful). For other critics, Toronto is the place to "discover" important films and filmmakers, like David Gordon Green who generated buzz at earlier festivals for his George Washington. And for the U.S. industry, Toronto is a de facto market for both American independents and crossover foreign-language films. Although there were quite a few sales this year, mainly by Lions Gate (Vulgar, The Weight of Water, Chasing Sleep), which is close to completing its acquisition of Trimark Pictures, and smaller, newer distributors such as Lot 47, the majors mostly kept their checkbooks in their pockets.

For the festival filmgoer looking for the latest American independent or world cinema discovery, Toronto couldn’t help but feel somewhat anticlimactic this year, its most noteworthy titles having originated at other fests. Okay, maybe I am just jaded and ungracious. But if that were truly the case, I might not have been one of the few to respond so enthusiastically to two eagerly anticipated titles that were ultimately greeted with a general note of chilly dissatisfaction.

German director Tom Twyker’s Run Lola Run follow-up, The Princess and the Warrior, again toplining Twyker’s paramour Franka Potente, seemed to disappoint those who expected another techno-fueled MTV adrenaline-rush, but the film – more comparable to the director’s earlier work (Wintersleepers) – remains a singularly gripping achievement, a melancholy meditation on fate and chance which stood as one of the most finely-crafted films in the festival.

If Princess stood as too much of a departure for Twyker’s recent fans, then Takeshi Kitano’s Brother may have felt lamentably over-familiar to his admirers. But although Kitano may be on the verge of becoming a one-trick pony, I have to confess that his fusion of deadpan drollery and stoic bloodshed remains a pretty amusing trick. Brother, which relocates his typical yakuza narrative to L.A., is an ambitious and satisfying entry in Kitano’s canon, its dreadful final scene aside. (The film is also mercifully free of the cloying sentimentality that mars much of his ouevre.) Be warned, though, the carnage would make even Paul Verhoeven blush.

Kitano may have shot Brother in L.A. with a partially American cast, but he used his regular crew, and the film is essentially Japanese in origin, solidifying the dominant Asian presence at Toronto this year. Cannes-entry Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon continued to surprise audiences as one of the small group of films fully capable of living up to their advance hype. Ang Lee’s hugely entertaining martial-arts epic deserves to be the specialty-release success of the year if Sony Pictures Classics can surmount its (normally commendable) marketing reticence. If Lee’s film could be trusted to meet expectations, I’m not sure I could say the same for In the Mood for Love, which, its sumptuous visual design aside, was the first Wong Kar-wai film since Ashes of Time that made me wish he had begun the production with a finished script. Shinji Aoyama’s similarly (and largely justifiably) lauded Eureka is a radiantly photographed, emotionally powerful improvement on his unfocused earlier work (Helpless, Chinpira), but I’m not necessarily one who uncritically applauds this Japanese John Ford homage’s 217-minute running time, which I found unwarranted.

Director Chang Yoon-Hyun told me that he didn’t worry about the inherently derivative nature of the serial-killer subgenre when he was directing his thriller Tell Me Something, because nobody has seen those other films in his native South Korea. A straightforward, unaffected approach to genre cinema is a strand that runs through much of the Asian popular cinema that screened in Toronto. Chang’s film prevails through narrative ingenuity and sheer visceral shock value. The Thai crime drama Bangkok Dangerous, however, proved every bit as generic as its title. Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s 6ixtynin9, on the other hand, was a wickedly funny black comedy, a nimble nightmare of mounting corpses and dry wit.

After tumbling through the Hollywood studio meat-grinder for several years, Tsui Hark returned to Hong Kong to helm the cluttered action film Time and Tide. Tsui’s take on multicultural gangsters was surpassed by Japanese auteur-du-jour Takashi Miike’s own take on analogous material with The City of Lost Souls, a comparatively minor work for Miike and no less scattershot than Time, but one that succeeds on wild comic energy alone. (For the record, City contains the funniest computer graphic imagery parody of The Matrix you’ll ever see.) A like-minded anarchic goofiness also infects Wild Zero, Tetsuro Takeuchi’s zombie-populated vehicle for the Japanese punk band Guitar Wolf; I appreciated the Crying Game plot twist, but all the silliness was a bit too shoddy.

With his new film Séance (as in . . . on a Wet Afternoon, the two films originating from the same material), Kiyoshi Kurosawa returns to the same tone of understated creepiness for which he made a name for himself with Cure. Although hampered by an overly prolonged set-up, Séance – originally created for Japanese television – establishes a subtly eerie ambience and some remarkably effective sequences, even if it does feel like filler in the director’s career. (He’s currently working on his most formidable project to date.) I was in the minority in my admiration for Sogo Ishii’s elaborate and extravagant 12th-century samurai action/fantasy Gojoe, which many found bewilderingly chaotic. In my view, it was redeemed by the most eye-popping imagery to be found in any Toronto entry this year.

While Toronto is always filled with a certain amount of feel-good comedies like Universal’s Billy Elliot, it also contains its share of more confrontational work like the French "feminist"/ porn/exploitation hybrid Baise-Moi (Rape Me). Co-directors Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi bring a gutter realism and nihilist drive to their shot-on-video penetration opus, but maladroit technique and male-dominated clichés win out in the end. It didn’t help that the duo were overshadowed – in both filmmaking craft and carnal disobedience – by Catherine Breillat’s extraordinary 1975 study of an adolescent girl’s sexual experimentation, Une Vraie Jeune Fille, premiering now after a quarter-century ban in France. A similarly astute, if not nearly as confrontational, observation of teenage female life could be found in Anne-Sophie Birot’s debut Les Filles ne Savent Pas Nager. The theme of female European directors helming sexually candid fare continued with Asia Argento’s Scarlet Diva. One of the surprises of the fest, the film was raw, funny, stylish and energetic.

After Jang Sun-Woo’s brilliant Lies last year, South Korean cinema continues in the realm of sexual transgression with Kim Kiduk’s genuinely shocking fable The Isle, a simple and often repellent Woman in the Dunes retread whose largely flat visual sensibilities are more than redeemed by the frequently staggering nature of much of its s/m content, including the most interesting use of fish-hooks I’ve seen in quite some time. Hong Sang-soo’s Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, on the other hand, is a numbingly pretentious exercise in sexual juvenalia made all the more tedious by Hong’s decision to replay certain sections of the narrative, Rashomon-style. A comparatively austere approach to potentially lurid subject matter was also a key component of Benoît Jacquot’s Sade, albeit with considerably more rewarding results.

The exploration of morally transgressive material was also a critical factor in the Kevin Smith-produced clowns-and-anal-rape "comedy" Vulgar, though to what discernible purpose I was unable to determine. Far slicker if no less empty was the gimmicky Memento, Christopher Nolan’s Following follow-up: Nolan takes a premise better explored in an old "SNL" skit (Guy Pearce as a short-term-memory amnesiac investigating his wife’s murder), and repetitively Resnais-refracts it until much of the humor that could have been this central conceit’s saving grace is drained dry.

Exemplary American independent cinema could still be discerned in Toronto, most memorably in the form of David Gordon Green’s resplendent George Washington, "discovered" by the American mainstream press in Toronto after previous appearances in Berlin and the L.A. Independent Film Festival. Writer/director Michael Walker also concocts an ingenious first film with his unnerving thriller, Chasing Sleep, a Polanski-tinged exercise in unrelenting dread, with Jeff Daniels slowly unraveling following the disappearance of his wife. With its claustrophobic house-bound setting and increasingly hallucinatory structure, Chasing Sleep could very easily have gone horribly awry; that Walker consistently keeps the proceedings so tightly enthralling makes his inaugural effort all the more arresting.

The grisly Australian biopic Chopper came to represent a uniquely fest-based experience: I caught director Andrew Dominik’s debut film my first day in Toronto, and although this fictionalized account of the notorious criminal Mark "Chopper" Read was undeniably engrossing, I had assumed it would not be one of the more substantial films screened by week’s end. Yet as the fest continued, I found myself unfailingly plagued by images from Chopper – which used a silver retention printing process to create high contrasts and vibrant hues – and particularly by Eric Bana’s transformative performance, which alternated between kindness and brutality, making the film a rewardingly incisive inquiry into masculine rage and self-destruction.

In the Perspective Canada section, John Fawcett’s clever post-Buffy teen horror film Ginger Snaps led the pack. A sharp-witted genre exercise that advances lycanthropy as a menstruation metaphor, Fawcett’s oddball effort deserved the local plaudits.

Similar exclamations of discovery, on a non-Canadian note, were also offered for Jonathan Glazer’s British thriller Sexy Beast, Baltasar Kormákur’s Icelandic youth comedy 101 Reykjavik and Hillary Birmingham’s American indie The Truth About Tully.

"It seems I’ve finally made a movie people want to see," was the introduction given by Australian eccentric Paul Cox for his new film Innocence, a quiet, tender drama of an elderly couple rekindling their romance after decades of separation. Cox may be right, as Innocence turned out to be one of the sleeper successes of the festival as well as his best work since Golden Braid. The film is an admittedly modest achievement, but in a cinema climate where passion is stringently designated as the exclusive domain of the young, Innocence can’t help but feel like a virtual revelation.

On second thought, maybe the Maddin prelude was just the second-best piece of cinema I viewed in Toronto: the films of Hungarian director Béla Tarr leave little room for neutrality in opinion, and his newest venture, The Werkmeister Harmonies, will certainly do little to alter that situation. There are those who find Tarr’s long takes, stately compositions and studied pacing to be maddening, and then there are those – myself included – who find his work to be achingly beautiful and hypnotic, among the most purely transcendental cinema being made today, along with the works of Alexandr Sokurov and Tarr’s underrated collaborator, György Fehér. Werkmeister’s tale of a village under the discordant thrall of an enormous whale carcass (no, really) serves as the basic framework for some of the most unforgettable correspondences between music and image that I’ve ever seen in a film (and fans of Sátántangó should be notified that, yes, peasants do become inebriated and beat one another in this film, but nobody tortures any cats). There’s nothing "difficult" about this film unless you consider its ability to transport a viewer so completely an inherently "difficult" process. Even if Tarr’s masterpiece had been the only good film I’d seen all week, it would have made the entire experience worth every minute. – Travis Crawford.