When I started to write this, Toronto’s film festival had only been over for a week.  Those ten days for me are almost an alternate universe.  Closing night always brings a mixture of relief that I won’t have to queue up for a 9:00 am screening and ennui that it’s all over.

Events of the past month in transit-land have preoccupied me, and now, in early October, I am finally getting to the business of converting rough notes into fair text.  Over the next few weeks, I will publish them aiming for completion before my personal deadline of Thanksgiving weekend.  (For those who don’t know the background, I started this practice back in 1986 when “online” meant a single-line dialup BBS with an entirely text-based interface.  The world of online reviewing is huge now, but I keep up the tradition both for friends who ask “what did you see”, but tire after I have spoken for 20 minutes and show no sign of stopping.)

The 2008 festival, for me, was good, but not great.  Three stars.  Lots of solid, worthwhile films, a few gems and a few dogs, but there was no day where I went from screening to screening buoyed on the cumulative effect of what came before.

This post contains general comments about the festival itself together with reviews of:

• Plus tard, tu comprendras
• Passchendaele
• 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould

Pre-festival time is always chaotic, and it’s amazing that TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) manages it as well as they do.  The detailed schedule comes out on the Tuesday before Labour Day, and there is always a huge queue waiting for the box office to open.  The process repeats again on Labour Day itself when everyone comes to pick up their ticket orders.  (The entire process of ordering TIFF tickets is well understood to festival veterans, and every year we help out the newcomers.  I will not burden readers with this subject.)

This year, TIFF moved from College Park to Dundas Square, their temporary home for a few years until the new “Bell Lightbox” TIFF centre opens at King and John. (Bell is TIFF’s lead sponsor and got the naming rights.)  The pickup line went completely around the block, and many of us missed the setup at College Park where it snaked through the courtyard and you could actually see the entire line in one place. 

Passersby marvel at the lineups wondering “what’s it for” because the festival-to-come is not yet part of Toronto’s conscience.  Visitors from afar marvel at how orderly everyone is, and the cameraderie of TIFF audiences starts to build for another year.

2008 was the first year in quite a while that I didn’t buy a festival poster.  The image is a soft-focus shot of something (you can get an idea from the banner on the TIFF website), and its purpose wasn’t revealed until we saw the standard TIFF header for each screening that overlays stills from many films onto this background.  The design may not have worked well for a poster (too busy, not enough room for text), and that’s a disappointment.  Posters may be archaic to some, but they’re a tangible reminder of the festival.  The good ones hang on walls long after the last show.

TIFF has a new URL (fortheloveoffilm.ca), but it takes you to the main TIFF website.  The name is an ironic choice because cinema is moving away from film to digital cameras and projection, and all those artefacts of film projection — the whir from the booth, the changes in focus as the ardent projectionist tweaks the lens, the cue marks for the reel changes, the stacks of film cannisters in the lobby — are disappearing. 

Over the years, I’ve watched the digital technology mature and it’s now very good.  “Films” shot on low resolution cameras show all their technical warts on the big screen, but this is no different than the days of Super-8 documentary footage blown up to 35mm.  The visual challenge will come when even inexpensive cameras can shoot feature-quality images, and the shorthand of “it’s grainy, it’s shaky and blurry” won’t be available to distinguish “real” and “low budget” footage.  Even “footage” itself is a term whose meaning is completely changed — gigabytes rather than spools of film.

There is a new TIFF verb “to yargghh” (the spelling is not yet codified by an entry in the Oxford Dictionary) brought on by the opening text at each screening advising audiences that film piracy is a very bad thing.  The regulars have seen it all before, and a chorus of “Yargghhs” rings out in response.  TIFF audiences are very well-behaved, and this is our one chance for rowdiness before we settle down for the show.

Another TIFF sponsor is Motorola whose ads this year brought us great moments in early cell phone movies plus two variations of page flip animation.  Cadillac, sponsors of the People’s Choice award, used the idea of endless takes by a director trying to get the perfect two-second performance from increasingly frustrated actors.  To their credit, this is the first in many years that these ads did not become utterly boring by the third day of the festival.

NBC Universal sponsors the volunteer program at TIFF, and there is always a big round of applause when their spot comes up at the start of a screening.  At times, there seem to be volunteers everywhere, almost to excess, but they’re important to giving directions and information (mostly accurate) and wrangling the crowds.

The reviews appear in the order of my screenings.  The titles are hotlinked to the TIFF page with full details from the program book.

Thursday, September 4

Plus tard, tu comprendras (One Day, You’ll Understand)

Directed by Amos Gitai ***

Amos Gitai introduced his film with a story about the author Jérôme Cléments whose autobiography is the basis for the screenplay.  Normally each year, Gitai meets Cléments in his role as a producer of films to review scripts Gitai was working on.  This time, however, Cléments had a story of his own. 

Plus tard, tu comprendras is about memory and the unexpected force of history.  It is a tale of the Holocaust as an event that touches more than its immediate victims and, by extension, all of us.

We begin in an apartment where an old woman is tidying up while the television plays.  It is 1987, and the trial of Klaus Barbie (a Nazi who escaped capture and trial for decades) is on the screen.  Madame Rivka Gornick (Jeanne Moreau) really prefers not to listen, but she can only close the doors on her TV cabinet.  Even when she moves to the window, the street noise cannot completely block the voices from the trial.

Cut to an office where Victor, her son (Hippolyte Girardot), is assembling family papers trying to learn about his past while ignoring his real job.  The Barbie trial plays on a TV there too in the background.  Although Victor was raised as a Catholic, he knows his family is part Jewish, but the full impact of this won’t come until much later.

Victor learns that the Gornicks hid in a hotel in a small town near Lyon, but they were denounced just at the end of the war.  Even though Germany was close to defeat, the apparatus of the Holocaust took priority.  A long flashback to the capture and deportation begins Victor’s realization of what happened to his family.

Back to present.  Rivka doesn’t talk about her past and Victor’s attempts to fill in the blanks gain nothing.  His wife, Françoise (Emmanuelle Devos), visits, but the meeting is a bit distant as the two women don’t see each other much.  They address each other as “vous”, not “tu”.

After the war, Rivka had raised her children as Catholic so they would be accepted in French society, but now, at the end of her life, it’s time the truth came out.  Rivka takes her grandchildren to shul, and explains to them that she is a Jew.  The day is Yom Kippur, a day to pray for the dead.

We jump forward a bit to Rivka’s funeral, a process Victor is not prepared for either emotionally or culturally.  So many people were part of his mother’s life, such variety, a side hidden to Victor.  Her apartment is full of valuable antiques, some of them amazing to the appraiser who knew Rivka as a customer.

Finally, Victor finds himself in the office for war reparations, an agency not created until 1995 when France decided to acknowledge the role of the Vichy administration and pay reparations.  The scope of what was lost overwhelms Victor.  The family he never knew had so much — a shop, property, valuables.  Victor will do very well out of this death, but he cannot absorb his newly lost family.  Victor has been touched by the Holocaust 50 years after the fact, and we share his journey.

This was a dark, reflective film for my opening screening at the festival, but also a deeply moving one.  Jeanne Moreau carries the role of Rivka, a woman enjoying her life despite its dark past, with strength and calm, and even after Rivka’s death, she haunts the film.

Friday, September 5

Passchendaele

Directed and Written by Paul Gross **½

I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to feel noble, proud, Canadian, or what after this film that marks (celebrates really isn’t the word) the battle of Passchendaele, Begium in WWI, a place where many Canadian soldiers fought and died.  In November 1917, after a siege begun by the British at the end of July, Canadian forces finally took the town and their objective, Hill 52.  Sadly the ground they gained was lost back to Germany only weeks later.

There have been many war films, but this is Canadian and it tries to salute those who fought without the chest-thumping of our friends to the south.  For that, you need to watch The Hurt Locker which I will get to later in these reviews.

Paul Gross yearned to make a film of this story for a long time, and his connection was deeply personal.  His grandfather, Michael Dunne had fought in that war and had told the young Paul of his experiences.  Gross plays Sgt. Dunne, a man with his own demons and hardly perfect, but inspiring to his men all the same.  The story is not biographical, but contains some elements of the real Dunne’s war.

The story begins in a battle in a war ravaged town.  Dunne and a few of his men are pinned down by sniper fire from a church tower.  The Canadians win, but not without an act, the bayonetting of a young German soldier, that would haunt the real Dunne for the rest of his life.  Moments later, thanks to “friendly fire”, they are badly injured.

Cut to a hospital in Calgary where Dunne and many other wounded are recovering.  He may be physically better, but still suffers flashbacks to the war.

Nurse Sarah Mann (Caroline Dhavernas) tends to Dunne among many others, and a fondness grows between them.  Later Dunne will find who she is and where she lives, and romance will bloom.  Cue the music.  Yes, this is the mushy bit complete with footage that just screams “Alberta Tourism”, but this will pass.

Calgary stands in for, well, Calgary, thanks to a chunk of downtown that can be dressed to look more or less period.  If I have any complaints, it’s that everyone looks as if they just bought new clothes.

Once Dunne is on the mend, he is assigned to help with recruiting.  He’s a real hero, and the British Major Bingham (Brian Jensen) running the shop is far too full of himself.  He may have been in the Boer War, but probably spent it sitting behind a desk.

Meanwhile, Sarah’s brother David (Joe Dinicol), ridiculed for being a coward, tries to enlist, but is constantly rejected due to asthma.  I won’t go into the details of how he finally makes it into uniform safe to observe that Calgary’s stuffed shirt society doesn’t come off too well in the story.  Dunne decides to return to the front to look after David if he can.

A further complication arises when the locals discover that Sarah’s father was killed in the war, but he was German and fought on the other side.  This ends Sarah’s nursing career, for a time.

This first half of the story seems rather contrived when I tell it in retrospect and there are just too many co-incidences for comfort.  Once we get back to the front, however, we’re in a serious war movie. Sarah is there too.  She falsified her past and signed up for nursing duty again to be near both Michael and her brother.

The action through the battle is relentless and bloody.  Everything is mud.  Somewhere in Alberta, there is a field that was turned into a battleground, and these are no tourist views.  Exploding shells send bodies flying through the air.  Dunne has seen it all before.  If anything, he has less respect for idiots in senior command the second time around, but he gets the job done.

I won’t burden you with the rest of the plot.  The war scenes are intense, and they are meant to convery the horror of war, not any sense of glory.  There is dedication, valour, but also an immense feeling of lives wasted.

Passchendaele spends a bit too much time back in Calgary setting up the romance and the back story of the major characters, and by the one-hour mark I was getting restless.  Judicious editing could have brought us back to the front sooner, but maybe all that Government of Alberta money invested in the film dictated that we stay there as long as possible.

A tip of my hat to two snippets.  First, at the opening, the traditional “Alliance” header we’re so used to in Canada with its soaring mountains and music appears here in black-and-white with stormy weather and the rumble of distant guns.  Second, the chief of the rednecks living across the road from Sarah Mann, a group who will eventually trash her house because of her German parentage, that chief is named “Mr. Harper”. It brought chuckles in the audience from the Canadians who know our Prime Minister’s antipathy to the arts.

Passchendale opens in Toronto on October 17, 2008.

32 Short Films about Glenn Gould

Directed by François Girard (1993) ****

The only “Open Vault” presentation at this year’s festival was a freshly struck copy of a 15-year old classic. 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould is part biography, but much more an impression of Gould’s character, a story told in sketches. The title and the structure refer to the 32 Goldberg Variations, a work with which Gould is inextricably linked. Each sketch, each movement in this film is accompanied by a Gould recording with the episodes all timed to fit the music.

Girard’s intention was not to reproduce Gould, but to give a sense of the man. Colm Feore portrays Gould with such force that I have almost an “alternate Gould” stuck in my memory from this film. He has a wonderful presence, and his sense of Gould comes through in a delightful segment where Gould interviews himself.

When he started on the film, Girard thought its unusual structure would be difficult, but came to see that it’s really a classic three-act piece with Gould’s youth, the height of his art and career, and his decline into poor health.

Alas, we must wait for this great film to become available on DVD as the music rights are tied up with Sony, and they show no sign of interest in untangling the situation. Meanwhile, if 32 Short Films shows up on CBC or TVO, don’t miss it.