Toronto 2001

Movies matter too. Not as much, of course, obviously not as much - the very thought seems callous and disgraceful - but it's worth pointing out after the events that overwhelmed (most say "crippled") the 26th Toronto International Film Festival. You could sense it on that topsy-turvy Tuesday, in between the shock and anger, and concern for loved ones back home - a certain guilt, almost contempt for our surroundings ("What are we doing here?"), a sense of inappropriateness. Never mind the view of Art-as-consolation in times of strife, timeless and transcendent, putting our puny human conflicts in perspective : when push came to shove, none of that seemed to matter - all that mattered was being in the moment, milling around like mourners at a funeral, "following developments" (i.e. wallowing in painful shaky-cam footage) on TV. It was all about the scent of Death, and a morbid, almost paranoid sense of our own vulnerability, blowing the niceties of aesthetic debate to smithereens. Suddenly, the only artistic theory that counted was Woody Allen's : "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality by not dying."

Movies matter, though - if only as a mirror to the world, bringing out the tone and spirit of a society. Already some people are wondering how the terrorist attacks (and their repercussions) will change the kind of movies being made in America : Jeffrey Wells, in a recent column, said he feared the advent of a "goodie-goodie wave", movies that are upbeat and spiritually wholesome like "those films colored with rah-rah patriotism that Hollywood made during the World War II years". Yet in fact, for every sugar-coated MRS. MINIVER, the WWII years also brought unprecedently bleak films like THE OX-BOW INCIDENT and THE SEVENTH VICTIM, not to mention tough-minded war dramas like THE CROSS OF LORRAINE - and of course the aftermath of the war found Hollywood at its grittiest and most serious-minded, not just replaying the conflict without prettification (THEY WERE EXPENDABLE, it admitted) but turning also to domestic problems like racism and anti-Semitism. Indeed, Mr. Wells seems to have it ass-backwards : a "baddie-baddie wave" seems a lot more likely, moving beyond the happy endings of the past decade, just like every previous trauma (from the Depression to Watergate) found expression in a harsher streak of American cinema. Only in the 50s, perhaps, have films existed in the kind of peace and prosperity the US has enjoyed for two decades now, and the big-studio films of the 90s do indeed recall that earlier era, with deliberately artificial, predictable narratives and taboos that could never be broached or broken (merely replacing the tenets of conservatism with those of political correctness). Time for another revolution...

Obviously, a lot will depend on what happens next : a quick, surgical strike, or a long-drawn-out "war against terrorism"? Just as obviously, hashing out this stuff at any length is both irrelevant to this piece (don't worry, I'll get to the movies in a minute) and an invitation for egg-on-face when things do eventually take their course. Still, it seems clear that global support for war is currently fragile : a recent Gallup poll found majorities in only 2 out of 32 countries (the US and Israel) for military action against states "harbouring terrorists", and most people seem to be uncomfortable with giving the West carte blanche to take action against unpopular regimes ("Why did Bush decide to attack Afghanistan?" goes a joke doing the rounds in my neck of the woods ; "Because it starts with an 'A'."). Some retaliation is of course inevitable, and probably desirable ; after that, however, it's anyone's guess. Maybe a "second Vietnam", altering the country (and its movie culture) radically ; maybe a war of attrition, and general frustration ; or maybe even - as one unfashionable friend bravely prophesied in between the movies at Toronto - a gradual fizzling-out of passions, with the World Trade Center bombing recalled only in the abstract a year from now, rather like a magnified version of Oklahoma City.

Will anything change? Yes, it will - even for non-Americans. Yanks don't seem to realise how much of a symbol their country is, how reflexively and unthinkingly foreigners use it to assign blame or take random pot-shots : it's like when you're at school and make fun of the teachers, giving them unseen peccadilos and lurid home lives. Suddenly the teacher was humanised, made 'one of us', struck by a real-life tragedy ; for the first time, we felt protective of America - and resentful of Jean-Luc Godard, even those of us who rated ELOGE DE L'AMOUR (70) (dir., Jean-Luc Godard) Bruno Putzulu, Cecile Camp, Audrey Klebaner among the Fest's most stimulating movies. Certainly, the least impressive parts of this dazzling essay are the ones where J-L indulges the reflexive anti-Americanism that comes with being a French intellectual - taking them to task for having "no history" and stealing their name from the continent's other inhabitants, contrasting them with Europeans who "seek the origin" by looking inwards, scoffing that they don't have a past, merely "sell talking images" ; Steven Spielberg may wonder if he's ever unwittingly pissed in Godard's garden, or perhaps bedded his wife, to justify such a withering ad hominem attack (especially in the year when he's made such a brave arthouse movie in A.I.). Even before Tuesday the 11th, these bits might've seemed excessive ; watching it on Wednesday the 12th, they felt downright insensitive.

Yet the film is so much more than that - an all-encompassing personal statement, and in fact quite generous in spirit. The "love" that's being eulogised isn't necessarily romantic love, but a love of anything ("l'amour ... de quelque chose", as a flashing caption repeatedly informs us), and Godard is out to "embrace the world in its totality", putting a PICKPOCKET poster next to one for THE MATRIX - which is not to say he likes both equally, merely that his worldview is eclectic, also taking in assorted aphorisms (from Bataille to Ophuls to St. Augustine), unexpectedly lovely shots of Paris by night and a disquisition on the origins of the word "OK" (an American general's report of "0 Killed" during the Civil War, apparently). The point is making sense of Life, and specifically making sense of adulthood : in the three ages of Man (youth, adulthood and old age), he informs us, the young and the old are young and old before anything else ; only in between do we need a story, an identity, which necessitates learning from the past and the wisdom of others. "The days of phrases are over," says Character A to Character B (admittedly, this isn't a movie about characters) - yet B, who pores Godard-like over quotes and "phrases" from the past, is pointed out as "the only person trying to become an adult" in the movie. JLG's argument is that this is exactly what our world has lost (no thanks to Spielberg and Co.) : the power of Memory to deny nothingness, going hand-in-hand with an appreciation of Beauty, whether it's in images (images are "subsidised" now, he grumbles) or the way a poem is recited. Nothing is new, he points out, in what may be a dig at the American emphasis on re-invention : when we admire a landscape, we're merely comparing it to the landscapes we've seen before. It's a truth we forget at our peril.

It's also an old man's truth, and a disillusioned old man's, at that - which is finally why the film works as well as it does. It's easy to see the anti-American sentiments as a product of arrogance, but in truth the film is riven by doubt and uncertainty : asked to choose between a film, a play, an opera or a novel, Character X (there's only one character in this movie) plumps for the novel, not the film. "Films follow trade," says Godard, quoting an American Senator from the early 20th century - film is a business, a tool of global capitalism, always has been, always will be. Even Memory plays tricks, he points out : we build plaques and memorials, but the plaques prettify, dilute. A French Resistance fighter remembers telling people of his wartime experiences, just after the war - and they listened, he recalls, just like people today watching a TV show : you can never really capture the truth. Critics seem to think the film ends with St. Augustine's maxim that "The measure of love is to love without measure", but in fact it doesn't : it ends with Godard's voice slowly fading out as he repeats, again and again, "Maybe nothing was said ... Maybe nothing was said". This after 98 minutes of spilling his guts out (intellectually speaking), trying to encapsulate a lifetime's frenzy of ideas - through a medium he no longer trusts, to an audience who are probably not even listening, their minds already on the next distraction. Is that a loveable old grouch or what?

In the end, the best thing about ELOGE - even better than the buzz of wondering what it was going to say next - was simply its uniqueness. No-one else makes movies quite like Godard (which is probably just as well), especially, it seemed, this year - for, if there was any real trend in the films I saw at Toronto, it was probably the emergence of a new, crowd-pleasing international cinema, poised (perhaps) to break the Hollywood monopoly in the next decade. This was actually quite strange, as one high-profile film after another turned out to be astonishingly accessible - even the Cannes and Venice prize-winners, which in recent years have tended towards the kind of formalism I admire and often love (e.g. TASTE OF CHERRY) but would never dare recommend to a non-hardcore cinephile. On the other hand, I'd have absolutely no hesitation recommending Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN (74) (dir., Alfonso Cuaron) Maribel Verdu, Gael Garcia Bernal, Diego Luna to anyone, and this Venice winner (Best Actor and Screenplay) was among my favourite movies at the Festival - even though I've loathed most of Mr. Cuaron's Hollywood work and indeed resisted this one for a long time, thinking it far too lowbrow, a blatant attempt to beat Hollywood at its own game.

Maybe it is - and it certainly had one Hou Hsiao-Hsien-loving critic comparing it to a Freddie Prinze Jr comedy - yet it's so much more honest (down to the graphic sex) and emotionally richer, not to mention funny. Its two teenage heroes have more than a touch of Beavis & Butt-Head, but their breezy hedonism and "It Only Hurts When I Think" T-shirts carry mixed messages - for the voice-over keeps shutting off the sound, as if stepping away, and giving us the back-story on what's going on around them, looking ahead to the (mostly bleak) futures of supporting characters, RUN LOLA RUN-style, or else picking out a face from the surrounding crowd to relate some hidden tragedy, the site of a massacre, a migrant worker trying to feed his family. It's the reality of Mexico, where the film is set ("a teenage country struggling towards adulthood," claimed Cuaron in the Q+A) and, as the boys go on the road with an older woman (the luscious Maribel Verdu, from GOYA IN BORDEAUX), we gradually realise they're living in a beautiful bubble - living out the last, carefree days of youth, though of course they don't realise it. If the film has a counterpart, it's perhaps STAND BY ME for adolescents (as in that film, Death plays a significant role), but it's actually richer because it goes beyond nostalgia. None of us can go back to childhood, nor would we want to, but this state of fearless engagement with Life is familiar enough to be possible - at least if we could only take the energy and lose the ignorance and self-centredness. "Feelgood" is a feeble term, typically used for nice little films that leave you basking in a warm glow ; this leaves you wanting to go out and party till the break of dawn, then spend the day canoodling with a bevy of beautiful women. "Feelgreat"? "Life-affirming"? We need a new word.

Y TU MAMA, produced by Good Machine, made by a director with a foot in each camp, typified the trend towards synthesis (quite a Godardian concept, now that I think about it), bringing local culture to the global marketplace - but there were others. Seems the world really is clustering round America, though in fact it cuts both ways : lively pace and a certain narrative slickness may be in vogue, but MONSOON WEDDING (58) (dir., Mira Nair) Naseerudin Shah, Lillete Dubey, Vijay Raaz, for instance (Golden Lion at Venice), takes from Bollywood as well as Hollywood, with its breaks for song and dance (albeit more like singalongs than musical numbers) and its tangy mix of elements. There's FATHER OF THE BRIDE comedy in spades, but also a rather sickly romance for the initially buffoonish "event manager" - plus an unexpected turn into serious drama which at first seems a no-win strategy, but is actually handled rather well. This is a shallow, entertaining, basically sentimental comedy about a wedding, with lots of quarrels and reconciliations, a harassed paterfamilias and a big monsoon at the end, backed by a rambunctious score which sounds like an Indian Goran Bregovic (but is actually Mychael Danna) ; and it's also a snapshot of modern India, caught between traditional rituals and a world of cell-phones, video cameras and talk-shows titled "India.com". The family are keen on the wedding being organised "foreign-style", and everyone talks in a charming combination of Hindi and English - but they're also an extended family with old-fashioned values, and Jewish mothers have nothing on Indian ones when it comes to over-protectiveness. Bit of a sitcom, though there's obviously a new generation of Westernised Indians bidding to satirise the family choke-hold (Zadie Smith's "White Teeth" has a similar sense of humour) ; "This is not America, this is India," says someone - but it's clear the film-makers are familiar with both.

That familiarity is even more unnerving in a film like NO MAN'S LAND (68) (dir., Danis Tanovic) Branko Djuric, Rene Bitorajac, Georges Siatidis, Simon Callow, Katrin Cartlidge (Best Screenplay at Cannes) : slickness is par for the course in a broad comedy like MONSOON WEDDING (or a thriller like OPEN YOUR EYES), but rather more surprising when your subject is the war in Bosnia. At best, we expect the ragged punch of something like PRETTY VILLAGE, PRETTY FLAME - not this skilful black farce, obviously intended as an Idiot's Guide to the conflict (i.e. made with a shrewd eye on the foreign market). Two soldiers, a Serb and a Bosnian, get trapped between the lines in wartime and the situation spirals into an international incident, stoked by the media and clumsily defused by the UN (whose arrival sparks joyful / scornful cries of "Here come the Smurfs!"). The film's genius lies in its even-handedness, building both sides so we don't want to see anyone get killed - at least till it goes insane towards the end, blaming the Serbs for the whole mess in a strident burst of propaganda, meanwhile protesting that even-handedness is impossible : neutrality is complicity where murder is concerned, says Mr. Tanovic - which might be more convincing if he hadn't just spent an hour proving the opposite. He's also prone to caricature, and his English actors let him down badly, hamming it up in Euro-pudding fashion, but there's many a golden moment along the way. The upended cliché of riffling through a dead man's wallet (where we expect to find photos of the wife and kids, but find instead a very swish Postcard from San Francisco!) got the biggest laugh, and the "You started the war" / "No, you started the war" routine - resolved according to the rule of the gun - is going to be the clip they show at awards ceremonies (an Oscar nomination certainly wouldn't surprise) ; my favourite by far, however, was the throwaway gag of the Bosnian soldier reading a newspaper in the trenches, shaking his head sadly and saying to his comrade, "What a mess in Rwanda, eh!". For us armchair liberals following the war - as we do all wars - from a safe distance, objectifying the participants even as we claim to sympathise, nothing resonated more profoundly ; or hilariously.

And still the award-winning crowd-pleasers came, though at least AMELIE (63) (dir., Jean-Pierre Jeunet) Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Claire Maurier won the appropriate award (the Audience Award) and THE SON'S ROOM (57) (dir., Nanni Moretti) Nanni Moretti, Laura Morante, Jasmine Trinca (Golden Palm at Cannes) wasn't really a crowd-pleaser so much as a tear-jerker - and a surprisingly patchy one, though it did some things superbly. "We can't control our lives," psychiatrist Moretti tells his patients, "we just do what we can" - and is forced to live by that advice after a family tragedy, set up with the subtlest of virtuoso scenes (tiny acts of violence - a too-abrupt cut, a girl jostled on her scooter - like little rents in the fabric of reality). He also builds to a moving final sequence, tired but awake at the wheel of a car full of sleeping children, doing what he can as Life moves inexorably on ; in between, however, there are questionable decisions (like having the character actually articulate the great What-If - what if I'd done things differently? - which we know is gnawing at his mind), plus a truly nauseating song tainting the soundtrack not once but twice. Moretti fans should love it, though, for he's obviously the same character as his other films - still wandering through Rome noting small quotidian details, whether a fine old house or a harried woman walking down the street with a big dog and a little dog ; and it even picks up where CARO DIARIO left off, starting with a shot of our Nanni downing a glass of water. Sweet...

Not as sweet as AMELIE, however, which is roughly 70% intensely annoying, 30% truly magical. Most of the magic comes in the opening half-hour, scattering connections deftly and hilariously, with a bit of magic also at the end, when normality starts to re-assert itself - the mystery man reveals his prosaic identity, romantic love turns to bickering, even the gnome comes home - and the wildly imaginative heroine finally screws up the courage to move on in her life, daring to live in the here-and-now instead of creating alternative realities for other people (much like the wildly imaginative Jeunet himself, overtly creating this particular reality through relentless style and a wry voice-over). No other film at the Festival brought me so close to tears while I was watching it - yet it causes no particular twinge when I think about it now, mostly because its undeniable highlights are smothered in cuteness. Even homeless people are cute, politely refusing money because "I don't work on Sundays", and there's photos that talk and clouds shaped like teddy-bears, and all the cosy just-so beauty of the home-made - cutting paper dolls, playing music on wine glasses - and garden gnomes and a love of dinky, artless things, like in Philippe Delerm's "The First Sip Of Beer" (a catalogue of Life's little pleasures, like the one mentioned in its title, that's become something of a cult in France) ; personally, I was reminded of a less prestigious lineage - those postcards and coasters with inscriptions like "Love is ... Scratching his back on a Sunday morning" - though I did like the domino effects and Rube Goldberg devices, pretty much confirming Jeunet as the mastermind behind DELICATESSEN. That was a comedy about cannibalism ; this, with its all-white cast and nostalgic Paris of bars and bistros, is perhaps cannibalism of a different kind...

[March 2002 : Having now seen the film again, I don't disagree with the above - but I do think it's wildly inadequate. In fact, AMELIE (which brought me close to tears once again) is one of those rare self-reflexive films that questions its own style - an exuberant film about deeply unhappy people, an obsessively-detailed film about the joys of spontaneity, a hermetically over-elaborate film about simple connection. Amélie is indeed like a director herself (as mentioned above), and the Pinon character is even more obviously controlling, taking notes on his girlfriend's every 'suspicious' comment, incl. date and time uttered - much like the voice-over, giving us precise dates for everything that happens - yet control is also seen as self-destructive, longing for the looseness of a JULES AND JIM. The tension between style and theme is palpable, like the tension surrounding Princess Di (short-sighted critics talk of Amélie's infatuation, but in fact she (and Jeunet) spends most of the film casting doubt on her ‘idol’ : "Why are we only interested in beautiful young princesses?") - emotional openness is great, but it's not that easy. Rating unchanged, because a lot of the second hour just isn't very good - Amélie punishing the nasty grocer doesn't work at all - but I think the backlash critics should take another look. It's a lot more interesting than they give it credit for - and a lot less smug and more self-doubting (hence more affecting) than THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS. Also, the visual gag culminating with Kassovitz as a mujaheddin is some kind of genius.]

Did I mention I liked AMELIE? No, really : in a different kind of Fest, it might've been my oasis of feelgood in a world of arthouse miserabilism. But it just wasn't like that. At least for me (and at least cinematically) this was a remarkably buoyant Toronto - partly, I suppose, because many of the names commonly associated with the slow and turgid were conspicuous by their absence. No Bela Tarr, who was here last year with WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES. No Sokurov, TAURUS having failed to wow them at Cannes. No Kiarostami, more surprisingly (based on the generally warm reviews for ABC AFRICA). No Angelopoulos, Akerman, Straub / Huillet, Monteiro. Catherine Breillat seemed almost sentimental ; Manoel de Oliveira seemed positively hilarious - as did Tsai Ming-Liang's WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? (62) (dir., Tsai Ming-Liang) Lee Kang-Sheng, Chen Shiang-Chi, Lu Yi-Ching, at least to some people. I enjoyed it too, though it's kind of the anti-AMELIE - mildly 'Pro' when I saw it, liking it more as I think about it, especially as it becomes clear how its various strands link up, mingling various facets of Time : Time as the difference between two places, but also between a memory (viz. the memory of the girl) and its source, then between films and life - Jean-Pierre Léaud in the flesh in Paris, in THE 400 BLOWS in Taiwan - then between Life and Death, the father's spectral presence in Taiwan magically mirrored in the old man strolling round the park in Paris (all connected by his watch, acting as a rabbit-hole or portal from one plane to another). In his quiet way, Tsai is very rigorous, though I wish he wasn't quite so visually rigorous : at the risk of sounding like a Philistine, what's wrong with moving the camera once in a while? (As a wilful rejection of the film-maker's tools, it makes about as much sense as Mike Figgis' stance on editing.) It's as though he's deliberately trying to downplay his goofy sense of humour ; fortunately he doesn't succeed, with the fish-and-cockroach gag bringing down the house (saying more would spoil it) and a dozen other moments getting big laughs. This is Tsai-as-Jarmusch, though of course his own traits are well to the fore - and yes, water (whether drinking it, passing it or sitting beside it) remains a recurring motif.

Taiwanese directors seemed a little out of it, actually, sticking to austere master-shot stylistics while the world was bustin' out all over - and MILLENNIUM MAMBO (50) (dir., Hou Hsiao-Hsien) Qi Shu, Jack Kao, Chun-Hao Tuan left even some Hou fans scratching their heads. In brief : gorgeous visuals, rather obvious treatment of youthful anomie (with techno soundtrack), some incredible moments (loved the audacity of the flickering orange flare right in the middle of the frame while the heroine's engaged in loveless sex, our increasing discomfort reflecting hers), barely 10 minutes of daylight in the whole two hours. Hou's a hell of an image-maker, but by the end I was identifying strongly with the character called Doze - not to mention the post-film anguish of trying to figure out what the hell we'd just seen. Charles "King of Toronto" Francois pointed out that the heroine's voice-overs (invariably describing scenes we were about to see) always described everything precisely but left out some significant detail, implying a study in self-delusion - while the estimable Shelly Kraicer (who's seen the film twice) noted that the narrative might not actually be shown in chronological order. It's stated, for instance, that heroine and lover met in a bar, then a few scenes later we see them meeting in a bar for what could be the first time (it's that kind of movie) ; shuffled chronology would also explain why the whole film is narrated by the girl 10 years after the events onscreen, i.e. as a hint that Time is fractured throughout. Why Time is fractured throughout I'll leave to better minds than mine...

Maybe Shelly can explain - though I foolishly forgot to get his take on the other Burning Question of the Festival, sowing consternation in the ranks of local 'Net critics (the abundance of cyber-friends was by far the best part of TIFF for me, and may well explain my enthusiasm for the films on offer) : "What are Canadians really like?", I asked, causing Alex Fung to slink away, promising he'd get back to me. "Fuzzy on themselves," hedged Froilan Vispo in typically Canadian fashion ; "Always having to define themselves against something else". Any other views? "They're not polite," muttered Skander Halim unpatriotically. "That's just a stereotype."

He was wrong, of course, for they are polite - awe-inspiringly, almost surreally so. This is a country where the cars wait for you to cross the road before turning at an intersection (you return the favour by never ever jaywalking, ever). It's a city where you get on the subway not by swiping a card which activates a turnstile but simply by dropping a paper square or a couple of coins in a kind of collection-box, mounted within sight of a ticket clerk who is however sitting on the other side of the glass and probably busy with a customer anyway (whether the paper square is in fact a ticket or just a brightly-coloured piece of cardboard - and whether the coins are in fact C$2.25 or just 0.0001 cents in Ecuadorian small change - is, it seems, up to you). This is a country where people stand in line for everything - even at the Reception desk in my hotel, standing a respectful distance behind the customer being served - and rarely seem to raise their voice in public. Coming down in the elevator from the relatively low Lookout Level at the CN Tower, one of the other visitors (a Canadian) had a bone to pick with the elevator girl : he and his family had bought tickets for the very top of the Tower, but discovered such a crowd waiting for the elevator they were forced to turn back. "They should have told us at the bottom," grumbled the man, surrounded by a fierce-looking wife and passel of sniffling children. "That was unsatisfactory," he added darkly, which of course is Canadian for "You people are incompetent assholes". The elevator girl looked properly mortified.

Canadians themselves seem to view the place with a mixture of awe and self-deprecation. "Heard about the new Canadian board game?" runs an entry in the "Big Book of Canadian Jokes", browsed in a second-hand bookstore ; "It's called Monotony". "Why did the Canadian chicken cross the road?" runs another. "To get to the middle". Just around the corner, though, on the shelf marked "Politics", was a different kind of book altogether : "The Efficient Society : Why Canada Is As Close To Utopia As It Gets". Or maybe that was a joke as well...

Still, better Canada than Austria - at least if that country's film-makers are any guide. Just as Taiwanese directors seemed stuck in asceticism, their Austrian counterparts seemed to be vying for the title of Most Unpleasant Misanthrope - incidentally upending the Festival Winner = Crowd-Pleaser trend, because both DOG DAYS (49) (dir., Ulrich Seidl) Erich Finsches, Maria Hofstatter, Alfred Mrva and LA PIANISTE (72) (dir., Michael Haneke) Isabelle Huppert, Benoit Magimel, Annie Girardot had won prizes (second prize, in both cases) at Venice and Cannes respectively. Mr. Seidl even had a Retrospective of his work showing at Toronto - which makes sense, because he's clearly talented, yet this SHORT CUTS-type tapestry (various strands that semi-coalesce) is shot through with condescension and gratuitous nastiness. The view of suburbia, pale sagging flesh in rows of identikit deck-chairs, is clearly contemptuous, and Seidl presumably sees himself in the autistic girl hitching rides with the various characters, making them uncomfortable with her awkward questions ("Do you still have sex? Are you too old?") - though she still comes to a bad end, as does everyone else in the movie. It's a bleak, individual vision, but it seems to revel in its violence - especially against women, shown with a casual cynicism which is just unconscionable.

Which is more or less how the anti-Hanekes justified their hatred of PIANISTE ("hatred" being the operative word) ; I'd heard a lot about the film having divided the Cannes jury, but it hadn't sounded especially controversial - the Austrian master standing back from his Statements on violence and society (FUNNY GAMES, BENNY'S VIDEO) to focus on one woman's misery. Watching it, however, all became clear : it may not be thematically offensive, but this is a film that offers nothing, no redemption, no consolation ; it's a film you want to spit on, the better to reject its sadistic worldview - at least if you don't appreciate its formal control and fascinating dynamics, not to mention the no-holds-barred performance by Isabelle Huppert in the title role. She's a piano teacher, pushing middle age but still in thrall to her domineering mother - albeit not so much oppressed as co-dependent : this is not the monstrous gorgon of something like NOW VOYAGER, but a PSYCHO-style, girl's-best-friend-is-her-mother deal, with the added twist that both women behave as if they know they're playing a part, fully aware of their unhealthy relationship (they even sleep in the same bed). Huppert pushes Mom, provoking her coquettishly, locking herself in her room with young Magimel so her mother can come banging on the door like a jealous lover ; when they fight, it's with the mechanical blows of a married (but dysfunctional) couple, already looking forward to the hugs and rueful smiles when they make up later : "We're a hot-blooded family"...

What its critics seem to have missed is that this is a love story : it's just that, for the self-loathing heroine, love necessarily equals control - the same control her mother has on her, the same control she exercises over her pupils as a piano teacher. She's unable to love in the ordinary sense - the act of love disgusts her - yet she craves love like a dying plant craves water. When Magimel makes a play for her, she's immensely interested - and immediately ups the ante, hence their encounter in the ladies' room where she physically seeks to control him (as she does all her young pianists). It works, so she ups the ante again, doing the most romantic thing she can think of - opening her heart to him with the long, brutally honest letter. It's a declaration of love - and, had he managed to reciprocate, would have been the film's happy ending (that she wants him to beat her is almost incidental, though of course it fits her psychological profile ; it could've been anything). Alas, he rejects her, forcing her to try again on his terms, i.e. to relinquish control - which of course is the worst thing she can do, and the one she's least equipped for. She's a control-freak (and voyeur) forced into emotional masochism - and the effort destroys her.

The result is tragedy - and a messy, sometimes tedious second half that could (admittedly) have been shorter. Haneke does have an appetite for degradation, but it goes with his brutal sense of honesty : "Don't look," begs Huppert when she throws up in front of Magimel - but Haneke makes sure we look, because that's our job (just as showing it is his job). Only music offers some relief, and a quote from Schumann is appended ("Music is what you cling to when you're losing your mind"), but it can't be allowed to offer false hope. Music disappears in the second half - just as Schumann did in fact go crazy in the end...

One other country offered similar delights. If Austria was the 'sick man of Europe', Japan was the 'sick man of the East' - not exactly a surprise, if you believe what you read in the papers : decade-long recession, demise of the salaryman culture, thousands of young kids dropping out of Society to live as urban hermits, playing videogames and watching TV (the so-called hikikomori, literally "people who withdraw"). Still, ICHI THE KILLER (67) (dir., Miike Takashi) Tadanobu Asano, Nao Omori, Shinya Tsukamoto came as something of a shock - then, after the shock wore off, a twisted delight for the strong of stomach (barf-bags were apparently handed out at its midnight screening). Admittedly, scenes of people hung up by meat-hooks or cutting off their own tongues aren't generally described as 'delightful', but the EVIL DEAD-ish gore - also including a needle through the jaw and a man neatly cut in half (lengthwise) - is excessive enough to be cartoonish, and there's clearly some satirical intent in Takashi's madness : the cut-off tongue, for instance, is performed as an act of penance, preceded by the very Japanese desire to make "a sincere apology" ; later, a couple of hitmen appear at the sound of a gong, wearing Kabuki masks, while later still a gangster defends his profession as being "better than a salaryman". As in AUDITION, the director seems to have an eye on the seismic shifts in Japanese society even as he happily plays gorehound - and supplies visual and aural stimulation at every turn. Scenes like the kid watching his father being killed, with harmonica-like music wailing on the soundtrack, are as close to Sergio Leone as anyone's currently getting.

Ichi himself, by the way, is a baby-faced teen, making this (albeit indirectly) another Japanese movie about disaffected youth ; there's a lot of them about, and they seem to divide into horror films and straight dramas, with PULSE (52) (dir., Kiyoshi Kurosawa) Haruhiko Kato, Kumiko Aso, Shinji Takeda, Koji Yakusho joining RING and ICHI in the former camp (with EUREKA poised somewhere in between). Not that Mr. Kurosawa's non-violent ghost story has anything to do with Takashi's excesses, though it is quite reminiscent of RING, down to the ghosts arriving via technology (computers, in this case) ; I haven't really liked either film, but I guess I'd say RING is more viscerally effective whereas this is more interesting to think about, positing a tale of ghosts trying to draw us into their world which might also be a metaphor for human interaction. Like the dots on a computer screen, human beings are drawn to one another - everyone in the film falls victim to the spooks by trying to follow someone else into the "forbidden room" - but can't get too close without being destroyed, an intriguing statement of our basic aloneness : "I definitely know I'm alive," says our young hero, existentialism being the sole defence in a shifting world of broken families and treacherous technology (the ghosts flicker as though made of electricity, and we learn that the "realm of souls" has a fixed capacity, like a computer disk!). It all gets increasingly abstract, ending with an unexplained chase through a deserted city, yet it's all so drab and uninflected I soon found myself tuning out ; only a bit where a female ghost snakes towards our hero in a kind of ritualised shimmy had me breathing fast - and even that was elegantly creepy more than anything...

More tuning out in HARMFUL INSECT (36) (dir., Akihiko Shiota) Aoi Miyazaki, Seiichi Tanabe, Ryo, which is also a Japanese film (albeit not a horror film) about disaffected youth - and a film I honestly can't talk about, since I never developed the remotest interest in these characters (the only thing I noted was whether their favourite scam - faking auto accidents - might be a coded reference to Oshima's BOY). Yet I also know there were moments when I might have responded, had I not seen very similar moments in another Festival film just a few days earlier - and I also know that Mike D'Angelo, who loved this film (and may even write about it someday), hadn't seen the earlier one. Take my dissension with a grain of salt, in other words...

The earlier film was ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU (74) (dir., Shunji Iwai) Hayato Ichihara, Shugo Oshinari, Aymi Ito, which contains various points of contact with INSECT - a scene with a choir, intertitles made up of correspondence between the characters, contrast between classical piano music and the harshness of Life - and which even now I can't think about without tearing up a little. Which is not to say it's perfect : fans of A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY will undoubtedly cry 'rip-off', and Iwai's style is terribly flashy, laying on the shaky-cam to suggest punkish nihilism - which he then undercuts with gauzy light and ethereal piano music (lots of Satie and Debussy). The teenage characters love a (largely unseen) pop singer named Lily Chou-Chou, and the film's tone seemed for a while rather scornful, in line with the older man who says "Kids these days are very scary" : look at these stupid kids, it seemed to say, loving this Chou-Chou crap when they should be listening to "Clair De Lune". Yet in fact classical piano is equated with the shadowy Lily (it's what we hear when the kids switch on their Walkmans), because Beauty is Beauty - what's important is making the connection, finding something larger than yourself. What's important isn't Lily but the process of clustering around her, as in the Internet chat-group that provides the aforementioned intertitles.

All the characters are lost in LILY CHOU-CHOU, all hunting desperately for a connection, some kind of beauty in their lives ; they're funny and passionate when they talk (using pseudonyms) in the chat-group, yet can't seem to find each other (or realise how similar they are) in real life. They lapse into aggression and alienation - yet there's beauty all around them, in the film's luscious visuals and ethereal soundtrack ; they just can't see it, which is what's so heartbreaking. It's a long, self-indulgent film, and it does get repetitive (nor did I like how the chat-group comments get increasingly high-flown) ; for a while you wonder when (and whether) it's ever going to end, as one virtuoso sequence follows another - first the trip to Okinawa, then the kite-flying, then the concert, then Hoshino's silent scream. Any one of those could've been the climax - yet it finally ends when you least expect it, on the gentlest of shots and the tenderest of codas. I swear, I'm welling up just writing this...

Maybe it's a question of context : 'seeking Beauty' is kind of a wussy term to describe the Toronto Experience but there was something CHOU-CHOUesque to the whole Festival deal, seeking escape both from daily life and Hollywood escapism. The crowds were incredible : staggering up Yonge Street for an 8.30 Press screening (that's 8.30 a.m., on a weekday), I was always amazed to find a long line of ticket-holders stretching round the block for the public screenings at 9 o'clock - folks who'd woken up half an hour earlier just so they could get a better seat when the theatre finally opened - sometimes even a Rush line of folks who didn't have tickets but had turned up hoping for the best (at 8.30 in the morning!). Not critics or journalists, just ordinary filmgoers ; the mind boggles - but it seems Torontonians do appreciate the Festival, and do turn into film geeks for a week or so every September. "The most we've ever done [in a single Festival] is 54 films," the chap behind me informed his friends at one of the public screenings ; not in a boastful tone, just matter-of-fact - as if 54 might well be found inadequate in the reply.

Personally I saw 36 (the other 20 may be found here), plus a medium-length doc, an older film (THE HIRED HAND, from 1971) and a couple of extra-Festival movies in commercial cinemas ; and I also managed a couple of celebrity sightings, though I only caught a glimpse of Claire Denis and Vincent Gallo (coming out of the TROUBLE EVERY DAY Q+A) after they'd brushed past me, missed Arsinee Khanjian altogether and didn't register Ben Kingsley till the guy in front of me (in a ticket line) loudly broke the news to his indifferent companion and most of Cumberland Street. "You know who that was, right? Ben Kingsley!". Indifferent companion looks round indifferently. "See? Right there, in the jacket!". Indifferent companion glances round again, nods phlegmatically. "Look! You can still see him! It's Ben Kingsley!". And so on.

It was of course, said TIFF Director Piers Handling sombrely, "a different kind of Festival" ; there was no forgetting the events in New York and Washington ; yet, in many ways, a film festival was the best vantage-point from which to witness History unfold. It made the real-life terror more surreal, as many have noted - the scene did unquestionably look like Hollywood, and the whole scenario sounded like a movie someone was describing, maybe an obscure gonzo thriller in Midnight Madness. Yet watching films also raised the possibility of answers, filling the terrible vacuum of just the terror and CNN : here was a world spread out, filling out the length and breadth of Life - good as well as evil. Images and characters ; above all, ideas, striving to make sense of it all, all the multitudinous life the terrorists sought to destroy.

Creation comes from striving, says a character in WAKING LIFE (77) (dir., Richard Linklater) With the voices of Wiley Wiggins, Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke - or perhaps a 'character', just as this was the best 'film' I saw at the Festival. Is it really a film, or just a collection of rants, lecture notes and philosophical exegeses? Does it really matter, though, when the result seems so inexhaustible? To my shame, I couldn't really work out a theme on first viewing - there's just too much going on - but it hardly lags at all, getting in a couple of classic scenes (the 'Holy Moment' is the obvious crowd-pleaser, with the final scene running it a close second ; what is it with Linklater and pinball machines, anyway?) among the rattle of ideas and a Chris Marker-like delight in eclecticism (though the animation is surprisingly samey, given the vast array of contributors). The main conceit is the "Pincher Martin" notion of Life being merely a dying man's memory, like those dreams we have that seem to last forever but are actually over in a few seconds ; what if "waking life" were just a dream, asks the movie - to which we may append, what if waking life were just a movie? I look forward to seeing it again, owning the DVD, etc, and may well decide to make the following my personal motto: "Don't be bored. This is absolutely the most exciting time we could've chosen to be alive. And it's just starting..."

WAKING LIFE was the best film I saw at Toronto - but there's also a film with a deeper, darker hold on my memory. Even in my dotage, when I'm old and decrepit, I'll be up and running every time anyone mentions OFFICERS' WARD (55) (dir., Francois Dupeyron) Eric Caravaca, Denis Podalydes, Grégori Dérangere, Sabine Azéma, telling my old tedious story of how I saw it at 11.15 a.m. on September the 11th, 2001. There were only a dozen people at the screening, which surprised me (the film had played Cannes, after all), but I put it down to its being French and unfashionable ; also in the audience was fellow 'Net critic Gabe Klinger, who went outside for a cup of coffee just before the start - and returned ashen-faced and coffee-less, to announce that the World Trade Center had just collapsed. I shot him a yeah-right look but popped outside for a moment anyway - caught a glimpse of the burning tower on TV and assumed it was just a fire or something ; came back in, reassured Gabe, and we settled back to watch the movie.

It was good, not great - set mostly in a hospital during WW1, yellow-filtered for that sepia look ; but Sabine Azéma had a thankless role, and the general dynamics were a bit too close to THE WATERDANCE (only not as sharp) to be very impressive. Gabe liked it more than I did, and at 1.30 p.m. our gang of innocents trooped out of the cinema, talking mainly about the movie - at least till reality caught up with us. The rest is dreamlike : bits and pieces filtering in from different sources, astonishment giving way to numbness, finally a walk to the Press Office, packed with journos massing and milling. Sense of guilt and a sense of helplessness - and a weird sense of triumph, because we were witnessing the Big One, something we could talk about someday to those still unborn ("This is absolutely the most exciting time we could've chosen to be alive..."). I saw my old film school professor in the lobby, whom I hadn't seen in nearly a decade ; he's an Israeli, and talked about the horrors with weary resignation ("....and it's just starting"). Meanwhile Gabe, in a sure sign of the Apocalypse, was accosted by the Fourth Horseman - a.k.a. Pauly Shore, who tried to pitch him his latest movie, YOU'LL NEVER WIEZ IN THIS TOWN AGAIN. It was a strange day.

For a moment, I admit, movies didn't seem to matter anymore ; but only for a moment...