Toronto International Film Festival 2010: Wrap up

TORONTO—North America’s largest film festival shook things up this year, centralizing itself downtown and opening its long-awaited Bell Lightbox building, a sleek five-screen facility with cafés, free Wi-Fi and—because it’s Canada—ample government funding. Through all the street fairs and special appearances, the question of whether the current festival was a good one seemed almost secondary when the audience was so primed to celebrate. Will they keep it up year-round?

The event officially founded as the “Festival of Festivals” has always had a voracious appetite, serving as both a launching pad for Oscar winners and a home for the fringes of the art house. If audience award reliably goes to crowd-pleasers like The King’s Speech, a middlebrow depiction of George VI’s struggles to overcome a stutter, the titles that fare best critically tend to be the ones that bridge the cutting-edge and the familiar—which may be why Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours went over so well. Telling the true story of hiker Aron Ralston—who in 2003 was trapped by a rock in the Utah desert and carved his arm off to survive—Boyle dodges the spatial limitations of the material by directing it as if it were a Bollywood musical, jazzing up the narrative with split screens and fantasy sequences. It’s a serious problem when a movie about someone who can’t move is filmed by a director incapable of sitting still.

In terms of claustrophobic survival films, the festival offered not one but two superior alternatives. One was Rodrigo Cortés’s Buried, opening Friday (see Reviews); the other was Jerzy Skolimoswski’s underestimated Essential Killing, starring Vincent Gallo as a captured Afghan fighter who’s sent via rendition to Poland but who escapes, à la The Fugitive, and has to subsist in snowbound terrain. Ideologically provocative, the movie is riveting simply as action filmmaking. (Much more riveting than Gallo’s own step behind—and in front of and operating—the camera, Promises Written in Water, a meandering black-and-white scrapbook that proves you can only make The Brown Bunny once.)

For the truly visionary, the festival’s biggest highlight was Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, a bleak, gorgeously sustained trance Western set on an unpioneered branch off the Oregon Trail that keeps back story to a minimum and is as much about the landscape’s indifference to humanity as it is about leadership and a clash of civilizations. One of relatively few festival offerings actually projected on celluloid, it features a hypnotic sound design by Gus Van Sant’s frequent collaborator Leslie Shatz. Only Michelangelo Frammartino’s The Four Times rivaled it in sheer formal pleasures. Reportedly inspired by Pythagoras’s theories on the transmigration of souls, this portrait of man and animal in Calabria renders the documentary-fiction line utterly irrelevant; an immersion in a kind of contemporary medievalism, it visually suggests an cross between Brueghel and Jacques Tati.

As always, the festival featured its share of obscure character studies (At Ellen’s Age), often salacious (Brownian Movement, Leap Year). Even Errol Morris’s comparatively lucid Tabloid, a profile of Joyce McKinney—the former beauty queen famous for allegedly manacling a Mormon missionary in 1977 England and then forcing him to have sex with her—might be lumped with these. This comic, entertaining portrait plays like a minor companion piece to the director’s Abu Ghraib chronicle Standard Operating Procedure (2008), examining a different sort of media notoriety.

To watch someone slip over the edge, the best bet was Darren Aronofsky’s ferociously entertaining Black Swan, which essentially combines The Red Shoes and Repulsion, with dash of Showgirls thrown in. Natalie Portman’s chilly blankness has never been put to better use than in this role of a dancer invited by a satanic choreographer (Vincent Cassel) to really lose herself in her role. The movie actually plays to both of Aronofsky’s strengths, with a first half showcasing the restraint he unveiled in The Wrestler and a last act that gives way to the total abandon of Requiem for a Dream.

Less tethered to its protagonist’s inner life, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Black Venus—not technically in the festival but shown at buyers’ screenings—tells the searing true story of Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman (Yahima Torres), a black woman born in what is now South Africa who in the early 19th century was exploited as a sideshow attraction in England and France. The film raises fascinating questions of agency, justice and racial perceptions, as Saartjie is received first as a victim by British high society and then later eagerly debased by its French equivalent.

Shot in a ground-level digital-video style similar to Public Enemies’, Black Venus showed that it’s possible to breathe life into the period drama. (Raúl Ruiz’s impeccably crafted Mysteries of Lisbon provided further evidence still.) Classicism didn’t always fare well, however, with John Carpenter’s well-made but hokey B-movie The Ward subjected to a critical beating and Clint Eastwood’s barely screened Hereafter serving as one of the festival’s biggest bombs. The defense of the film goes as follows: Eastwood’s movies have always been about mortality; therefore, a film in which three characters ponder life after death is inherently of value. But Peter Morgan’s script, employing a tripartite structure similar to Babel’s, is an embarrassment, spinning its wheels in at least two out of three stories and finally hinging on risible coincidences.

More suited to the Man with No Name’s sensibility was Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, a foursquare samurai flick that, like much Kurosawa, gets off to a slow start but eventually gives way to some stupendously muddy action. Wandering up Yonge Street afterward, it was hard not to feel like a survivor of a samurai war—feeling bloody, battered and weirdly exhilarated.

Read our daily reports from the festival.

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