AFTER TOMORROW
TIFF concluded with a press release announcing awards, which I discovered bleary-eyed checking my e-mail post-wedding amidst mounds of wrapping paper and some truly awesome freshly-baked cinnamon sticky buns (a collaboration between the grooms’ mothers). It was fabulous to be able to add to the moment of celebration with three excited cheers for Before Tomorrow, which won the CityTV Best Canadian First Feature Film.
But the shebang wrapped up with a free screening (first come, first served, in one of the vertiginous AMC screens) of the People’s Choice award film, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, which shares half a title, a cute child protagonist and a manipulatively feel-good story with his earlier Millions, with the added Benetton politics of an Indian slum location. It’s a film made to win audience awards – and it makes me think about how Boyle’s career highs can be defined by feel-good endings. Choose life, good audiences of TIFF, choose life. Unlike Cannes, Berlin and Venice, Toronto doesn’t give a Best Film award, but its People’s Choice award has been seen as a barometer for success, with past winners including Tsotsi and Eastern Promises. Disgrace won the FIPRESCI award, for which I’m damn glad I wasn’t on the voting panel, as I left the press screening after half an hour feeling revolted by the combination of Coetzee, Malkovich and dead dogs.
Shelagh Rowan-Legg signs off with a statement that sums up my feeling about Disgrace: “I think I could have gone through life quite well without ever having seen this film.” For Shelagh, that film was Martyrs: “When the French decide to give a film an 18+ rating, you know it must be pretty terrifying (after all, this is the country that produced À l’Intérieur and Haute Tension). And in that respect Martyrs does not disappoint. Lucie lives in an orphanage after having experienced a terrible trauma about which she cannot speak. Anna, who has also suffered abuse, befriends her and the two girls form a tight bond. But Lucie is haunted by a terrible specter, manifested in the figure of a naked female monster (which seems to be quite a Midnight Madness theme this year). This monster might be a manifestation of her subconcisous, but it can physically harm her, making it all the more terrifying. Flash forward 15 years later, and Lucie is about to exact her revenge on the people she believes responsible for her torture. Anna is caught between her love for Lucie and her own sense of right and wrong. The first half of the film is horrifyingly brilliant. While the violence is extreme, it is understood in the context of the character’s psychology. It is impossible not to feel Lucie’s pain and regret at her actions, or the desire to scream at Anna for enabling her friend’s behaviour. Director Pascal Laugier uses the space of the modern and isolated house, with its large windows and concrete walls, to reflect both the girls’ exposure to their actions, and the hardness that comes with memories of unimaginable abuse. But at the halfway point, it becomes a completely different film. The story of the girl’s friendship disappears and the story spirals into an excuse for torture porn. Although the script tacks on a theme at the very end that would seem to explain the latter half, it is too unbelievable and last-minute to justify the violence.”
And who needs unbelievable violence as the festival plays out against the US presidential election (is Sarah Palin not more terrifying than any naked female monster?) and scenes of devastation caused by Hurricane Ike. Which brings me back to The Dungeon Masters (which follows one subject, Liz, who saw out Katrina on the Gulf of Mississippi), the only festival film I saw that deals – even implicitly – with the damage done to the US by Bush, apart from the straight-talking LA sequence in Les Plages d’Agnès.
Keven McAlester told me that his documentary has a “political undercurrent – if you look back at ’60s and ’70s documentaries, by directors like DA Pennebaker and Frederick Wiseman, you get a sense of the times, but contemporary documentaries rarely have that. In my film, the political context is like the parents in the Peanuts cartoon – it pops up, says something almost incomprehensible, and then goes away.” The subjects’ response to the radio broadcasts that dot the film is almost minimal, even though Richard is a military veteran and reservist; “The reason the subjects turn to fantasy worlds rather than politics is right there in the film.” Their engagement with the world outside them – its economic frustrations, social disenfranchisement and political insecurity – comes through D&D, which the film shows as a creative response, much like filmmaking. McAlester agreed absolutely that he identified with his subjects’ expressive ambitions, particularly debut novelist and public TV broadcaster Scott: “what ended up being most interesting was the stuff I identified with most – the film only works because of that emotional honesty. With Scott in particular, there were moments of intense identification. Our ambitions may be different in scope, but the intention is similar.”
McAlester describes his film as looking at “small moments in big ways… big imaginations and real lives.” It’s a soundbitey summation of what I liked most at TIFF, what set apart films whose scope was different from the crowd- (or critic-) pleasing (or revolting) mainstream. It’s totally unthinkable to me that the FIPRESCI critics could have overlooked Varda’s and Denis’ films, among others, in favour of a pretty standard adaptation, or that audiences looking for a contact high didn’t salute Maria Govan’s far more compelling and unusual (and beautifully shot) escape-from-poverty narrative, Rain.
But then TIFF is a sprawling festival where no two audience members (many of whom had taken their holiday leave to ‘do’ the festival) I spoke with had seen the same films. I heard rave reviews of White Night Wedding (Baltasar Kormakur), Valentino: The Last Emperor (Matt Tyrnauer), Good (Vicente Amorim), Pontypool (Bruce McDonald)… the list is almost endless and confirms one of the major strengths of TIFF: it’s not a festival for critics or industry (despite the 3000 press and industry delegates registered), but for audiences looking for the diversity, choice and originality too often absent from multiplexland. Now if TIFF could persuade the AMC to screen Les Plages d’Agnès or Before Tomorrow on their actual (devoutly-to-be-hoped-for) releases…
