French family fun
After a surfeit of Hollywood hype, talking to a couple of no-B.S. French film directors was a great mental tonic. Olivier Assayas's new film, Summer Hours, begins with the gathering of a multigenerational family. They are, uncharacteristically for a movie family, well-adjusted.
Assayas said he wanted to avoid the “dramaturgical stereotype of the family that gathers together, where one of the adult kids uncovers some horrible crime perpetrated by one of the parents. This is pure generational narcissism, this idea that we can speak the truth that our parents repressed, a particular kind of modern stupidity.” He was thus pleased to see Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale, which he described as “far more sophisticated” than similarly themed films. The movie is about a deeply disordered, highly cultured family that is reunited at Christmas because the mother (Catherine Deneuve) needs a bone-marrow transplant.
Desplechin is the kind of guy who both runs marathons and smokes, and thinks Knocked Up was one of last year's best American films. He says the script for A Christmas Tale was partly inspired by a book by a French doctor, about psychiatric disorders in bone-marrow transplant patients. What kind of person reads medical texts for script ideas? “I'll read anything,” explained Desplechin. “I don't read everything, but I will read anything.” Liam Lacey
Krishna's creation myth
The revelation came not in a cinema, but on the street, as the Hindu goddess Kali revealed her multiple heads, the elephant face of Ganesh nodded to me, and the creation myth unfolded before my eyes. This utterly breathtaking video installation by Toronto-based filmmaker Srinivas Krishna, located outside the Royal Ontario Museum, was far and away the strongest work in an especially strong TIFF, causing pedestrians to stop and gape. Genius. Guy Dixon
I must remember this
I'm a sucker for a great screen kiss, especially a first kiss, and especially between adults in films that have taken the time to really let us get to know the characters, who aren't kissing in haste or by accident, but because they're risking love. There's a first kiss between Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz in The Brothers Bloom that does all that, and deliciously slowly.
They're sitting on the floor, two feet apart. They look at each other. Their eyes hold. And hold, for those significant extra seconds that we give only to our lovers or our children. Still slowly, he slides over to her, and before he goes in for it, he takes one extra, shivery beat.
Watching it, I shivered, too. What makes this specifically a TIFF moment is that the very day after I saw that kiss, I was in a room talking with the people who created it, writer/director Rian Johnson, Brody and Weisz, and their co-star Mark Ruffalo. I got to ask them all about it, and listen in as they talked to each other. I heard how carefully they planned it, and what it meant to them to get it right. And that made me happy, because no matter how many films I see, I go to (almost) all of them genuinely hoping they'll move or touch me in some memorable way. I root for them all. Lining up with thousands of TIFF-goers every year, I'm always reminded of how many others feel the same. Johanna Schneller
Asking Alec for love
When the army of publicists promoting films at TIFF descends upon the city every year, the Intercontinental Hotel on Bloor Street becomes its temporary base of operations. Stars strut through the first-floor Proof bar and the adjacent outdoor patio, treating it like their own personal green room, and are led like sheep through the second, third and fourth floors, where publicity firms' cramped command-and-control centres alternate with makeshift TV studios set up by happy-talk interview programs waiting for their five-minute slots with the celebs.
Earlier this week, during a lull in the proceedings, a handful of TV interviewers stood outside their doors on the third floor, looking like nothing so much as ladies of the night waiting for customers in the red-light district. “Can't anyone give me some love?” murmured one Canadian host, who shall remain nameless, as Alec Baldwin walked by glumly without meeting her gaze. “I'm feeling neglected.” Simon Houpt
Mark Ruffalo in tears
Mark Ruffalo's, Ethan Hawke's and director/actor Brian Goodman's Q&A with the media redeemed TIFF's sorry press conferences for me. I've come to dread them, slinking down farther in my seat when reporters ask things like, “Do you like tacos?” (That question was directed at Renée Zellweger, who appears in the western Appaloosa, shot in New Mexico). I almost walked out.
Goodman wrote, directed and starred in the film What Doesn't Kill You, which is about his early, stormy life in South Boston, where he was a coke addict, jailed thief, and all-round lousy dad/husband. It's a raw, compelling film that Ruffalo – a good friend of Goodman's for the past 10 years – told the crowd he was terrified to act in. (He plays the badass Goodman, who is now reformed and sober.)
You could hear a pin drop in the presser as the three men explained – Ruffalo in tears, and Goodman close to it – how the film was a wrenching (and for Goodman, therapeutic) journey. The questions were smart and insightful. The answers were honest and heartfelt. It was an exchange of mutual respect, an increasingly rare occurrence at TIFF pressers of late. Gayle MacDonald
Williams on a budget
You don't need $10-million. You don't need $1-million. It's easy to be seduced by the siren song of red carpets and bright smiles that attend the splashy galas, but some of the best films I saw at TIFF were among the least trumpeted and least expensive – Samira Makhmalbaf's Two-Legged Horse (shot amid hugely difficult circumstances in Afghanistan); Sergey Dvortsevoy's Tulpan, set on the bleak and arid steppes of Kazakhstan; and Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt's deceptively simple story – I think there are six actors in total – of a young woman and her dog near the breaking point.
Of course, it doesn't hurt to have an actress as emotionally communicative as Michelle Williams in the lead role, but it was made for $300,000, a pittance in film terms. Great storytelling only need be that. Michael Posner
Finding Keats in the Globe
Cover enough film festivals, as an editor and a writer, and eventually Alan Alda is Alan Alda is Alan Alda, Susan Sarandon is Susan Sarandon is Susan Sarandon. They're no longer stars, celebrities; they're people you're passing in a hallway or spending time with in a hotel room and isn't it nice that they look like their photographs in People?
Occasionally, though, someone, something, breaks through. It happened last year when I met Max von Sydow. There he was, in his legendary 78-year-old flesh, the evil brewmeister from Strange Brew and the knight who played chess with Death in Bergman's The Seventh Seal!
It happened this year, too. But it wasn't an in-person moment. It came courtesy of a photograph on the Sept. 8 front page of this newspaper: the one of a radiant Anne Hathaway, all mouth, teeth, hair and bared shoulders, heading into a screening while people looking a lot like you and me took her picture or begged for an autograph. Sure, I thought of the final pages of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust but I also thought: Beauty is truth, truth beauty, and in a sometimes cold and crappy world, what's wrong with affirming that? James Adams