By Leonard Klady Klady@moviecitynews.com

Confessions of a Film Festival Junkie: Shape of Water, The Florida Project

The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro’s enchanting fairytale that won the top prize in Venice, could well garner the audience award that concludes the Toronto International Film Festival each year. It’s another work of extraordinary imagination, and despite a few graphic and shocking sequences, a disarming, emotional tale suitable for all ages.

Mute Eliza (Sally Hawkins) works as a cleaner at a high security government lab during the Cold War. The installation gets a new “asset” and Eliza winds up seeing something she shouldn’t. The research subject is hybrid man-amphibian resembling the 1950s Creature from the Black Lagoon. While the G-Man jailer (Michael Shannon) uses brute force to suppress the being, the woman treats him compassionately in a variation on Beauty and the Beast. The Shape of Water is dreamlike, referencing not only the Technicolor palette of the 1940s and 1950s but also the kind of programmer musical studios could have cranked out in the 1940s. Only a very cold heart would not respond to this material.

As the festival winds down, the weather is sunny and warm. Despite Toronto becoming a city for the very well off, it was shocking to see homeless sleeping in the middle of downtown streets atop a warm grate.

TIFF is evolving, too, but no one knows what changes are in the wind. It’s difficult to pinpoint how scaling back the program translates into the overall experience. Nonetheless, Toronto’s program feels less exhaustive than in the past, while crowds seem larger. The traditional Tuesday exodus of industry and press seemed to pass a day later this year, but it’s clear the event has a long way to go if it wants pros to stay beyond opening weekend.

One of the delights of any film festival is stumbling into a screening and finding a gem. This year, that was The Florida Project. I was in line for a French film when it was cancelled and this was its replacement. A fellow queuer said, it’s the new Sean Baker, and people love it. I’d seen Baker’s earlier MTV series “Greg the Bunny” and his L.A.-by-iPhone Tangerine but they didn’t prepare me for this: a documentary-like view of poor people who inhabit a residential motel in Orlando, only a few miles from Disney World. The leading character is a 6-year-old girl named Moonee with a wicked streak of mischief that infects her two friends. The adults are consistently down on their luck, including Moonee’s mother, who sometimes sells perfume at hotel entrances to pay the weekly rent.

Willem Dafoe’s low-key performance as the motel’s kindly manager grounds the film in fiction. Rich on incident and observation rather than plot, The Florida Project keeps you engaged and connected to the characters.

Another surprise was the French film Les Gardiennes, another of my wild stabs in the dark when without a scheduled film. A young woman secures a job on a farm during the First World War; it’s harvest time and apart from the very old and the very young, the able-bodied men are at the front. It’s another low-key experience, but precisely observed. The creation of bygone times is exquisitely rendered. Later I realized that the director Xavier Beauvois had previously made another exceptional film, Of Gods and Men, about French monks in a remote area of Algeria that find themselves caught up in civil war and forces that would challenge their faith.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon