The 2008 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival felt a mite shrunken. That, I hasten to add, applied only from the selfish perspective of the film press corps. The citizenry of Toronto still had a gloriously abundant and amazingly well-run festival to experience for 10 days in September, with upwards of 300 astutely chosen movies from every corner of the globe, every imaginable genre and budgetary level - in other words, still the most comprehensive and valuable film festival in North America.
But for TIFF's professional guests (take that phrase as you will), there were cutbacks. Press and industry screenings started an hour later in the morning than in previous years and stopped a couple of hours earlier at night - a factor that helped reduce my customary annual film tally from 30-32 titles in seven-and-a-half days to 24. (It would have been 25, but on opening night I stood in line 45 minutes for a 7:30 p.m. press show only to be shut out.)
Then too, a lot of films one expected to find on the schedule weren't. TIFF mostly forfeited its nearly decade-long role as designated kickoff of Oscar season. Last year four out of the five eventual Academy nominees for best picture were prominently featured at Toronto; however, only "Juno" went on to do well at the box office (unlike "Atonement," "Michael Clayton" and eventual winner "No Country for Old Men"), so this year the studios, apparently fearing that festival prestige might have a downside for multiplex fun-seekers, held some likely 2008 contenders back. Ears strained in vain to catch the vaunted "Oscar buzz," at least until Venice Film Festival winner "The Wrestler" appeared in mid-fest (Kathleen Murphy will comment on that next week).
For one film, anti-buzz prevailed. "The Brothers Bloom," the much-anticipated second effort from Rian ("Brick") Johnson, met with such ambivalence that its release was set back till early 2009. This globe-bestriding fable of con-artist siblings (Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo) executing ornate and twisted schemes amply showcases Johnson's sharp eye and dark comic talent, but the thing is so aggressively picaresque - or is it just piecemeal? - that it annoys as often as it charms. The you-are-having-soooo-much-fun music doesn't help. Wonder whether we saw the same film that will get released next year.
Also much anticipated was "The Burning Plain," the directorial debut of screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, known for the wraparound, multi-narrative intricacies of his films with Alejandro Gonzàlez Iñàrritu ("Amores Perros," "21 Grams," "Babel"). Arriaga hazards a similar gambit here, introducing us to the gorgeous, compulsively promiscuous manager of a destination restaurant on the Oregon Coast (Charlize Theron) and then leaping back and forth through time and space to establish her connection to a tortuous history of love and betrayal in a Mexican border town. At the heart of the tale is a mystical image worthy of Rossellini - an adulterous couple (Kim Basinger and Joaquim de Almeida) taken by fire while joined in the act of love, and literally burned together. Unfortunately, Arriaga turns out to be one of those gifted screenwriters who absolutely needs a real director to translate his stories into tensile, cinematic reality. "The Burning Plain" never combusts.
I passed up a movie I was eager to see, Ed Harris' "Appaloosa," because I knew I could catch up with it soon back home, and it was scheduled opposite "Four Nights with Anna," the first film in 17 years from Jerzy Skolimowski. Skolimowski wrote his film-school classmate Roman Polanski's "Knife in the Water" back in 1962 and went on to direct such mysterious beauties as "Deep End," "The Shout" and "Moonlighting" (as well as some of the most mystifyingly misbegotten movies ever). "Anna" finds him back on home ground, both geographically - his native Poland - and artistically, focusing in on a weird loner who works in a hospital crematory (Artur Steranko) and becomes obsessed with a nurse living across a scraggly field from his hovel. No, it doesn't exactly sound like fun, yet Steranko's performance is zanily concentrated and Skolimowski's absurdist vision is razor sharp from the first brazenly enigmatic images. This is a movie forever taking one's breath away, partly because it's a challenge to laugh and gasp at the same time.
One of the best films at Toronto was made just down the road in Portland. Kelly Reichardt's "Wendy and Lucy" is a spiritual, though not literal, sequel to her well-regarded "Old Joy" of a couple of years ago. And yes, Lucy is the same (wonderful) dog who lent yeoman support in the earlier movie. The key difference is that this time Reichardt has a real actor, Michelle Williams ("Brokeback Mountain"), to invest the quietly desperate Wendy with an intensity and specificity of emotion beyond the reach of "Old Joy"'s leads. Wendy's driving from her family home in Indiana with a view toward finding work in Alaska; then her beater of a car conks out on a Portland side street, and suddenly not only mobility but everything in her carefully budgeted existence is at risk. Astute in its appreciation of human behavior, beautifully attentive to its settings without ever being picturesque, this small, uninsistent film takes a grip out of all proportion to its modest means; it will break your heart and begin the work of healing it, too.
There's scant healing in "Three Monkeys," the fierce domestic drama that won Nuri Bilge Ceylan ("Climates") the best-directing award at Cannes. On a rainy night at an isolated location, a rich Turkish politician hits somebody with his car, then arranges for his usual driver to take the rap in exchange for a payoff. It goes without saying that the bargain leads to multiple betrayals by all parties concerned, including the chauffeur's wife (Hatice Aslan, the director's own wife) and their chronically unhinged teenage son. This is the kind of film in which it seems a murder could, quite understandably, be committed at almost any moment. It's also filled with great weather, which you can almost feel on your skin as well as see and hear. Wow.
There goes my 1,000th word, and I haven't yet said zip about Mabrouk El Mechri's "JCVD," a funny, exciting and even thought-provoking account of how Jean-Claude Van Damme, the "Muscles from Brussels," back home after having become a direct-to-video has-been of a movie star, wanders into a post office at the wrong moment and becomes part of a hostage crisis (one of the bad guys is a Van Damme fan, and does a hilarious riff trashing John Woo). Or "The Burrowers," a pretty good fusion of Western and horror film from JT Petty (whose master's-thesis film "Soft for Digging" was a highlight of SIFF - not TIFF - '02). Or "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist," one of those playtime breaks essential to the festival-goer, with Michael Cera "taking a mental health day" off from school to (though he doesn't know it) fall in thrall with the enchanting Kat Dennings. Or Gyula Pados' meticulous gold-leaf cinematography of "The Duchess," which, along with some deft comic timing on Ralph Fiennes' part, almost makes the overstuffed Keira Knightley vehicle worth sitting through.
But I will say something about TIFF '08's most unexpected delight, Barbet Schroeder's "Inju, the Beast in the Shadows." Its source is a novel by Edogawa Rampo, the Japanese writer of the 1920s through '50s with one foot in Edgar Allan Poe territory and the other in Black Mask-style pulp fiction, and at its core is yet another (imaginary) author, Shundei Oe. It seems that Oe's twisted tales of murder and no morality or retribution whatever are international bestsellers. But now he has a rival in the French novelist Alex Fayard (played by Chabrol regular Benoît Magimel), who's imitated and adapted his style. Fayard is on his way to Japan - and, of course, to becoming part of an elaborate real-life plot devised by the mysterious Oe, whom (oh, didn't we mention that?) no one has ever seen. From its opening reel, which sucks us right into the climax of an ornate murder melodrama, "Inju" rediscovers the tale-spinning élan of the early serials by Louis Feuillade and Fritz Lang's Doktor Mabuse cycle. Fumio Ogawa's production design and Luciano Tovoli's cinematography are ravishing, turning the modern world into a nightmare universe without making a big deal out of it. What a trip.
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