The Toronto festival does its best to balance its dual personalities. But when you find yourself in the thick of this massive, sprawling event — racing from one screening to the next, segueing from the bubbly hijinks of something like In Her Shoes into the intense artfulness of the Dardenne Brothers' L'Enfant (which well deserves the Palme d'Or it took home from Cannes) — even the most stable personality can turn schizoid.
I saw nearly 50 films during my time in Toronto, fueled largely by cups of strong coffee that kept magically appearing in my hand (Starbucks was a proud sponsor of this year's fest, and the stuff was being thrust at you from every street corner). As the days wore on and my body wore out, the festival seemed to go through increasingly wild mood swings, forcing me to keep changing right along with it. One moment I was standing in front of a red carpet where Val Kilmer and Robert Downey Jr. mugged for the paparazzi before the premiere of their wacky Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. The next moment I was staring up at a silent screen where unsmiling art-world enfants terribles Matthew Barney and Bjork were getting their body hair shaved off in Barney's latest filmic communiqué, Drawing Restraint 9.
Double features like these can make everything seem unreal.
Lethal Weapon screenwriter Shane Black is the director of Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, by the way, and the movie turns out to be a wickedly funny satire of all those car-chases-and-stuff-blowin'-up-real-good buddy flicks for which Black is so handsomely paid. It's also a gleefully convoluted and surprisingly clever Get Shorty-esque meta-mystery, featuring memorable turns by Downey and Kilmer (as a cliché-busting gay detective who at one point shoots someone with his penis). Very funny stuff, happily enough, and well worth seeking out when it opens in a month or so.
As for that latest film by Barney, both he and Bjork manage to keep straight faces throughout the proceedings, but not so the audience, many of whom couldn't keep from cracking up at various moments during this often ridiculously pretentious two-and-a-half hour opus. The film is most notable for its dopey, droney Bjork soundtrack and for its shots of her and Barney looking cosmically solemn while lolling about in customized tubs of whale blubber.
Barney and Bjork aside (and since they were the festival's most annoying celebrity couple, outside of Madonna and Guy Ritchie, let's put them far aside), there were some pretty amazing art films to be found in Toronto this year. Alexander Sokurov, the filmmaker who many see as the spiritual heir to Tarkovsky, and who mesmerized Toronto audiences three years ago with Russian Ark, once again transforms history into poetry with The Sun, a fascinating meditation on Japan's emperor "God" Hirohito in the days just after World War II.
Fans of Taiwanese director Hou Hsio-Hsien (Millennium Mambo, Flowers of Shanghai) are likely to be enthralled with Three Times, an ambitious project that extends the filmmaker's lovely, uncluttered style to three vignettes, set in 1966, 1911 (visualized as a silent film) and in the anything-goes present. And Michael Haneke's Caché (Hidden), which tells of an ordinary couple having their nerves systematically frayed by an unknown tormenter, is an elegantly enigmatic metaphor for life in the Age of Terror.
A film almost as arty but far more appetizing than Barney's, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes is the latest live-action feature from those mad geniuses of the moving image, the Quay Brothers (who, despite the best of intentions, still occasionally seem more comfortable working with animated puppets than with flesh and blood actors). A densely cerebral fusion of The Phantom of the Opera and The Island of Lost Souls (kidnapped female singers, mad doctors — you get the drift), Piano Tuner's obscurist tendencies and glacial pacing will undoubtedly keep mainstream audiences far away — but for those with patience, the film is a compelling, hypnotic experience. Outside of Guy Maddin, no one creates worlds so wholly their own as the Quays.
And speaking of Maddin, one of Canada's favorite and looniest sons, his collaboration with Isabella Rossellini, My Dad is 100 Years Old, also screened in Toronto and delighted the faithful with what amounts to a complete history of the cinema in just 16 surreal minutes. At the other end of the temporal spectrum was Phillippe Garrel's sublime, three-hour Les Amants Reguliers, a magnificent black-and-white reconstruction of the white-hot scene that was Paris in May of 1968, from someone who was there and lived to tell the tale.
