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Toronto International Film Festival

In describing the leviathan growth of the Toronto International Film Festival, John Anderson of New York's Newsday noted, "Precisely because it is so big, no one can get a grip on the entire event." Perhaps the only place this sprawling festival actually appeared like a single coherent event was on the public access television channel that ran a steady stream of press conferences, interviews and clips. After continually missing this film or that party, I could always return to the hotel to watch the film festival on TV.

John Hurt and Jason Priestley in Love And Death On Long Island photo: C. Reardon
And while local Torontonians dutifully sold out theaters, the most overwhelming cinematic event was again a television broadcast -- the live simulcast of Princess Di's funeral at Sky Stadium. And if the festival as an event seemed hard to apprehend, the festival as barometer of current cinema was equally hard to fathom.

The sense of the "next-big-thing" gave way this year to reaffirming the success of personal favorites. The opening night gala for Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, following the film's Grand Jury Prize win at Cannes, simply cemented the popular adoration of this local boy done good. Likewise, the fanfare for David Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner, a tightly wounded enigma of deceit and desire, merely confirmed for his fans his talent for plotting and language. The kudos for Curtis Hanson's remarkably lucid adaptation of James Ellroy's epic of Hollywood corruption, L.A. Confidential, mainly stemmed from the comforting sentiment that after having made so many so-so films (The River Wild, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle), this time he got it right.

Perhaps it is simply that as Toronto grows more institutionalized, so too do the filmmakers it presents. Indeed with so many mid-career films, middle age, not youth, marked the subject matter of many of the filmmakers. Sally Potter's The Tango Lesson, a quietly wise film about a filmmaker (played by Potter herself) who loses her vision only to find her body and self in tango, was one of the best examples of this trend. One of the worst was Philip Haas embarassing adaptation of John Hawkes' erotic novel, "The Blood Oranges". And in between were an array of people halfway through their lives being forced to reconsider both their fate and bodily functions -- from Antonia Bird's crime thriller Face, about a career criminal growing tired of breaking the law, to Enin Dignam's resonate romantic tragedy, Loved, to Hollywood's mandatory queer-closet comedy, In & Out. Even the indie poet of reckless love, Hal Hartley, returned with a more sober tale of regret and bewilderment in Henry Fool. Perhaps the most telling and hilarious of these mid-life crises was Love and Death on Long Island, Richard Kwietniowski's updating of Death in Venice.

While such films focus personal reflection and memory, the most prevalent genre this year picked up the same themes historically with historical and literary period pieces. Of the 46 films shown as Galas and Special Presentations, 14 were period pieces, with literary adaptations coming from seemingly unlikely directors: Iain Softly (Backbeat, Hackers) soups up Henry James' "The Wings of the Dove" and Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris, best known for her insightful contemporary feminist perspective, takes up Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway."

While such period pieces revisit the past, an emerging cannon of science fiction films are bent on the future. Two feminist time-travel projects -- Lynn Hershman Leeson's Conceiving Ada and Hilary Brougher's The Sticky Fingers of Time -- were both daring and inventive. In Ada, a computer programmer constructs a digital way to reconstruct the life of Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, who invented one of the first computer programs in 1843. In Sticky Fingers, Brougher makes a poignant and witty no-budget time-travel film in New York's East Village. And while not technically a science fiction film, Thom Fitzgerald's The Hanging Garden deploys a similar cinematic manipulation of time and reality.

Indeed doing something new with a camera seemed vaguely lacking in most films this year. Perhaps the most controversial film of the festival, Gummo, is also the most cinematically advenuresome. For whether one liked it or not, Gummo was capable of doing the one thing desired in a festival film -- provoke strong, visceral emotions that compel people to talk. And the conversations, rather than listing projected markets, box office or critical reception, argued quite passionately ethical and aesthetic questions -- and at a film festival no less!
 
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© 2005 Filmmaker Magazine