There’s a sliver of confusion that permeates the air between Queen and King and East of University in Toronto. That’s the new hub of the Toronto International Film Festival – about four subway stops South of where it resided for three decades. Reasonably speaking it shouldn’t exist and one imagines the wafting of anxiety will dissipate in a day or two. It’s just tough for some to break old routines and one can imagine veterans organizing a ceremonial march from the Sutton Place to the ManuLife Centre to commemorate miles logged in pursuit of the hot new film.
I’ve been told by people who know this sort of thing that orange is the most disturbing hue in the color spectrum. They say that it’s a shade that the eye naturally travels to and if you rest there too long it will make you ill at ease. So, the festival isn’t doing itself a favor by selecting orange for the t-shirts its hundreds of volunteers sport. It’s particularly disconcerting this year with the temporary staffers going out into the streets to distribute flyers on fest events and the organization’s new home – The Bell Lightbox – that opens officially this weekend.
“Have you been inside?” asked local filmmaker (and opera director) Atom Egoyan who I ran into on the street. “It’s great,” he enthused.
I confessed that I wasn’t yet at his enthusiasm level. However, my Lightbox experience to date had largely consisted on trying to get from point A to point B without being thwarted by confused throngs.
Still I’m favorably disposed to the new venue and reminded that TIFF has evolved into the template for what a contemporary film festival can and should be doing. I’ve read too many pieces (including a clutch by this scribe) over the years about the evolution and relevance of film festivals.
Pondering on those questions today, I’ve become convinced that film festivals ought to be the engine for other pursuits during the 50 weeks between annual programs. Sundance (even though its festival followed several years after the Institute’s establishment) does this rather well with such things as an eco-friendly consumer catalogue and selling its brand to cinemas and the like to maintain workshops and outreach programs all over the world.
Toronto has also evolved along these lines. It runs arguably the best programmed cinematheque in North America, touring film programs and underwrites scholarly research and publications that otherwise would be marginalized. The Lightbox marketing employs the catch phrase: The House That Film Built and, considering past good works, it should be a home base that’s both state of the art and sturdy.
Meanwhile back at this year’s festival, the opening day program proved to be quite half hearted in large part the result of its un-serendipitous alignment with the Jewish New Year. The official curtain raiser Score: A Hockey Musical strived to be Glee on ice but it’s one of those unfortunate tuners that lacks a single memorable song. It also doesn’t help that its writer-director Michael McGowan decided to write the song lyrics. My most haunting memory of the picture is trying to remember what word he chose to rhyme with “saliva.”
Considerably more compelling was an unheralded Russian film titled The Edge that cannot be easily log lined. Set in Siberia after the Second World War, it truly conveys the physical and emotional devastation that lingered after the German surrender. It’s hard to explain how an abandoned train engine threads through the story and gives this complex tale cohesion … but it does.
Black Swan, like such diverse films of recent time as Brokeback Mountain, Redacted and Slumdog Millionaire, arrived in Toronto fresh from heated (mostly positive) response in Venice. One can carp at some of the metaphoric devices employed in the staging of a re-imagined Swan Lake, but the film’s very audacity is essential to what makes the it work. Ballet is cinema’s short hand for obsessive, often destructive, artistic behavior and the intensity filmmaker Darren Aronofsky exacts is both difficult to watch and brilliantly realized. If there’s a more original and potent vision this year, I haven’t seen it.
