Quotes of the Day
On Yonge street, not far from theaters exhibiting the cinematic goodies of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), is a sex shop whose four-story sign proclaims it "The Largest & Nicest Love Boutique in America."
That phrase could define the festival. Now in its 27th year, TIFF has succeeded by its size, which is less boutique than warehouse (this year's 10-day event showed an indigestible 455 hours of films), and by its persistent good humor. Even the occasional eccentrics—like the tough guy at a screening of Kim Tae Gyun's Volcano High who was moved to shout, "Korean movies rule!"—show more cheer than menace. There are no tiffs at TIFF. "Nice" is a compliment Torontonians don't care for, but until they start mistreating the film professionals who come here from across North America, Europe and Asia, they are stuck with it.
Last year's TIFF was not so festive. The terrorists of Sept. 11 severed the 10-day convention in half: five days of illuminating fun, five days of mourning from which the movies provided only fitful distraction. This year Toronto returned to its root functions as film showplace and star magnet (there's Dustin! there's Denzel!). But on Sept. 11, 2002, the programmers presented two films that explicitly confronted the attacks and their aftermath: Jim Simpson's The Guys, a conventionally heart-rending meeting of a journalist and a New York City fire captain, and the much more ambitious and provocative 11'09"01: September 11.
Still, the dominant mood in 11'09"01 is finger-pointing. The contribution by India's Mira Nair documents the agony of a Muslim boy in Brooklyn accused of conspiring with terrorists when he had actually gone to ground zero in a rescue effort. Several of the pieces—set in Chile (Ken Loach), Israel (Amos Gitai), Bosnia (Danis Tanovic)—make a single hectoring, helpful point: our countries have suffered atrocities for years, decades, centuries; welcome to the club, America. Egypt's Youssef Chahine argues that Islamic militants have the right to kill civilians in the U.S. and Israel because these are democracies, where the people choose their leaders and thus are responsible for policies that enslave the world. The film polarized Toronto audiences: at one screening, the anti-U.S. segments were booed; at another they were cheered.
Love it or hate it (U.S. audiences will not get the chance to do either since no distributor has picked it up), 11'09"01 is the perfect microcosm of a smorgasbord festival like Toronto's: impassioned visions colliding with one another, shouting or mewling for the attention of the browsing movie lover. And unlike other fests, this one has a longtime fondness for Asian films. In the '80s, Toronto introduced North American audiences to Hong Kong's top action directors, John Woo and Tsui Hark; in 1994 it ran a retrospective of Mani Ratnam's Tamil-language politicized melodramas.
This year a special 10-film section was devoted to South Korea's flourishing film industry. A few cinematic Seoul-mates were disappointed that the list did not include Korea's megahit romantic comedy My Sassy Girl. But the copious selection nonetheless offered a fair overview of the country's artier auteurs—from Lee Chang Dong's long-fuse, then combustive Oasis (it won the Best Director prize at this month's Venice Film Festival) to Jeong Jae Eun's Take Care of My Cat, which, while it does not live up to its beguiling title, paints a quirky fresco of twentysomethings on an identity trip in Inchon.
For the kind of turbo-pop, ultra-gory movie experience that has won Korean action films a place in the hearts of all action fans, Torontonians had to stay up late for the screening of Volcano High in the Festival's Midnight Madness section. A high-octane cocktail of apocalyptic nightmare and high-school problem drama, Kim's movie has outsized teen demons, punishing stunt sequences and gaudy special effects that kept the night owls' eyes bugged open. At Midnight Madness, school's out forever.
In world-movie terms, Korea is today. Hong Kong is five years ago—July 1, 1997, to be exact. Coincidental with the handover from British to Chinese rule, the territory's thriving film community lost much of its spark. For decades, domestic product out-grossed the big Hollywood offerings, but Hong Kong has become just another struggling local mini-industry. Part of the problem is the brain drain to the U.S. of directors like Woo and top stars Chow Yun-fat and Jet Li. Even the great cinematographer Christopher Doyle, the Australian Emigré whose bold, painterly eye set the palette for Wong Kar-wai's moody dramas, has gone traveling again.
Doyle had two excellent films at Toronto, both directed by fellow-Aussie Phillip Noyce: The Quiet American, an acute adaptation of Grahame Greene's Vietnam novel with a lovely performance by Michael Caine; and Rabbit-Proof Fence, about aboriginal girls abducted into white families. Doyle's cinematography is a work of art—you have never seen a Saigon night so seductively menacing, an Outback sky quite that shade of blue—but it is not, alas, Hong Kong art.
The two Hong Kong movies in Toronto displayed what is left of a once-vital film form. Fruit Chan's Public Toilet wanderlusts from India to New York City with its young, blond, Chinese hero, who is named Public Toilet because that is where his mother gave birth to him. With the success of Made in Hong Kong, Little Cheung and Durian, Durian (which Toronto showed two years ago in Italian subtitles—how's that for arty?), Chan has become Hong Kong's emissary to film festivals; he seemingly cannot take a Polaroid snapshot without getting an international prize for it. His new movie fits into his gritty, emotive but not sentimental style without enriching it. It is best seen as the notebook of an observant traveler momentarily between inspirations.
The other Hong Kong entry, The Eye, has been a huge hit throughout Southeast Asia—which proves only that the audience is desperate for Sixth Sense-style thrills, whether or not they make any other sense. A young woman (the fetching Angelica Lee), blind since childhood, has her sight restored with a pair of eyes from an unknown donor. Suddenly she sees ... dead people. Twin brothers Danny and Oxide Pang, who directed the spiffy actioner Bangkok Dangerous, settle this time for stock characterizations and flabby scare devices. The only thing that jolted audiences out of their seats was the sudden deep rumbling of the Dolby sound system whenever a ghost appeared. It must have been the Ghost of Hong Kong Movies Past, keening over the poor quality of this latest horror-movie hit.
Two spirits from the mainland's glory days materialized in Toronto. Tian Zhuang-zhuang and Chen Kaige both made their international mark in 1993: Tian with The Blue Kite, Chen with Farewell My Concubine. Both films won festival prizes abroad; both were banned at home, and Tian was forbidden to make movies for seven years. His comeback film, Springtime in a Small Town, is a remake of a 1948 film by the Shanghai director Fei Mu. A young married couple lives in a kind of genteel torpor, broken by the arrival of the wife's ex-lover. More a still life than a drama, Tian's gorgeous portrait of anxiety and anticipation gains power in part from its time and place (China a year before Mao's Revolution), in part from the director's own tiptoeing through a minefield of political metaphors. The film's own happy ending: it was shown publicly this summer in China.
Chen, the first member of his country's vaunted fifth generation of moviemakers to receive international acclaim, made his reputation with sumptuously detailed stories of stern teachers and yearning students. His latest work, Together, is another fable of pedagogy, but with a much lighter touch—there cannot have been a more charming, disarming movie in Toronto. A 13-year-old violin prodigy arrives in Beijing with his father, who is determined the boy will have the very best teacher—the one, that is, with the clout to make his son famous. This scenario risks stumbling into villainizing or bathos, yet Prof. Chen (who plays one of the teachers) is as sure of cinematic foot as the boy is of virtuoso fingers. Together offers a delightful scherzo of emotions.
Toronto abounded with tales of innocence protected, propriety defiled. In the precise, grisly A Snake of June by Shinya Tsukamoto (renowned for his heavy-metal Tetsuo thrillers), a sensible career woman receives a package containing photos of her masturbating. The unknown photographer exploits her sensual sin by forcing her into ever-more provocative situations in Tokyo malls and subways. The moral: in a society where everything is recorded, only a saint could elude blackmail.
The other major Japanese film shown in Toronto, and arguably the most sublime film on view, was Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, the animated fantasy that broke Japan's all-time box-office record a year ago and is now opening in North America. The People's Choice Award, voted by the festival's audience members, went to Niki Caro's Whale Rider, the New Zealand saga of a Maori girl who dreams of being her tribe's first female chief. It is an old-fashioned story smartly told, and enchantingly played by young Keisha Castle-Hughes.
Movies from India—whether Satyajit Ray's art classics or Bollywood's dizzy musicals—have often centered on children's quest for self-expression within the family hierarchy. Bollywood Hollywood, an Indian-Canadian musical comedy from controversial director Deepa Mehta—she made this film after her Fire-Earth-Water trilogy was shut down due to protests and threats on her life—is at heart a story about young people making their parents happy while finding some joy on their own.
The two best Indian films in Toronto explored the pain of girls growing up: one escaping her awful destiny, another finding her troubled heritage. Buddhadeb Dasgupta's A Tale of a Naughty Girl is set in rural Bengal in 1969, the summer of the moon landing, but the feudal culture it defines could be today's—or that of hundreds of years ago. Lati, a pretty 14-year-old, hopes to slip out of an arranged marriage with an old goat, thinking it the worst of all possible worlds, while village women in the sex trade speak of their jobs with the weary humor of those resigned to desperation.
At what age must a child be shaken awake from her dream life into reality? Nine, says Ratnam's haunting new film A Peck on the Cheek. Amudha (the sweetly precocious P.S. Keerthana) is celebrating her birthday, secure in the love of her Madras parents, a writer and a TV news reader. They have chosen this day to give the girl startling news: she is adopted, and the identity of her birth mother has been lost in the carnage of the Sri Lankan war.
In earlier films (Roja, Bombay, Dil Se) Ratnam has set personal stories inside the cataclysmic events that have marked India's past decade. Here he suggests that no one, not even a bright, questing child, is safe from their taint. But this being a Bollywood-style musical—though with a Southern accent—a war-torn world can still sing, dance and hope. In that sense, A Peck on the Cheek suited the festival perfectly. It is an art film that is also tender entertainment. It shows people coping with national tragedies. And, like Toronto, the movie is—in the very best sense—nice.
- richard corliss / toronto
- 9/11 overshadowed last year's Toronto filmfest. Now it is back as a bright showcase for provocative cinema