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Movies & TV

Canuck conundrum

CANADA’S TOP TEN at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King West), from tonight (Thursday, January 5) to January 15. topten.ca. See listings.


Imagine, just for a moment, that Canada’s Top Ten closed its doors to established filmmakers and just considered first-time directors. Could we find 10 films that people might be persuaded to see? Or does the allure of TIFF’s program lie in its celebration of established stars?

Announced in December with the usual hoopla, TIFF’s selection of the nation’s 10 best features and shorts – chosen by a panel of critics, filmmakers and programmers – starts screening at the Lightbox this week. Special guests will be in attendance. Directors Guy Maddin (Keyhole), Nathan Morlando (Edwin Boyd) and Jason Eisener (Hobo With A Shotgun) sit down for a panel Saturday night (January 7) about the crime and gangster genres, which their movies sort of fit into if you squint.

Star presence is represented by Sarah Polley’s problematic but genuinely felt Take This Waltz and David Cronenberg’s origins-of-psychoanalysis drama A Dangerous Method. Canada’s Oscar hopes are present in the form of Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar, our submission for the best foreign-language film prize.

Quebec is further repped by Ken Scott’s arrested-develop-ment dramedy Starbuck, Guy Edoin’s moody farm drama Wetlands, Sébastien Pilote’s Le Vendeur, and finally Jean-Marc Vallée’s outstanding Café De Flore, the only film on the Top Ten that I feel actually merits that designation.

And here we have the problem with Canada’s Top Ten. It’s indicative of a larger tendency in Canadian cinema, which is that we have a habit of elevating our filmmakers to Great Cultural Hopes as soon as they wow a festival or win a prize, never reassessing them once they’re up.

When someone like Cronenberg has an off year, his picture still gets in because the potential media outcry if we exclude the country’s most esteemed working filmmaker would be unimaginable. But what if that exclusion led to an honest conversation about the way the Canadian entertainment media pander to the idea of national treasures?

When we exalt filmmakers into icons, we stop seeing them as artists who have hits and misses. If you can do no wrong, you can never be challenged, and any perceived failings in your work must be the failings of the audience.

To take this beyond our borders for a moment, look at the ongoing squabbling over Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, which is tying its supporters in theoretical knots as they argue for the film’s value as both a weightless fable for children and a heartfelt statement about film preservation that can only appeal to adults.

As for Cronenberg, well, here’s the thing. I do believe he’s a legitimate artist and a Canadian treasure, and it’s wonderful that he’s followed his own curiosity rather than making mercenary studio product. Everyone’s heard the stories about Hollywood offering him Flashdance and Top Gun in the 80s he chose to make The Fly and Dead Ringers instead, and put himself on a far more interesting path. I look forward to each new project that bears his name, and always will.

But I’ve seen A Dangerous Method twice now, and though its biggest problems lie in Christopher Hampton’s stagy, declarative script, I have to be honest: it’s a dud. It’s a stately and well-acted drama, sure. But it’s also inert and schematic and doesn’t illuminate its subject. Pretending it’s one of the year’s best films does no one any favours. It just makes it look like TIFF is playing favourites – and why wouldn’t they? Cronenberg’s name guarantees media coverage.

Curiously, the exclusion of Atom Egoyan’s Chloe caused not a ripple in the media, though TIFF finessed that beautifully. The movie was deemed ineligible for 2009 voting, and by the time the 2010 awards came around, its brief theatrical run was long forgotten.

I’d argue that leaving out a lesser work by an established filmmaker might actually generate a conversation this country needs to have about how we see our cinema. Far too often, we assign merit to a project based on the talent attached or the source material.

The buzz on Passchendaele and Barney’s Version was whipped up by friendly newspapers for months before the films reached theatres, the better to convince the public that seeing these films was an act of patriotism. Never mind that the actual films were at best competent stabs at complex material that desperately needed an artistic vision behind them we were supposed to overlook those flaws because they were passion projects, damn it!

I’d much rather see an awards list that celebrates the actual passion expressed by younger, hungrier filmmakers. First-timers like Morlando, whose Edwin Boyd is absolutely the work of someone who’s found a way to tell a familiar story in a complex and cinematically vivid fashion. Or Eisener, whose Hobo With A Shotgun tucks a terrific Rutger Hauer performance inside a raucous, deliberately offensive recreation of a late-80s Troma revenge picture.

It’s good to see their names make the 2011 list it’s also good to see that the jury didn’t fall for the Important Subject argument around Mike Clattenburg’s unwatchable Afghan Luke. But it’s frustrating that this year’s list doesn’t include a single documentary. Whither David York’s Wiebo’s War or Léa Pool’s Pink Ribbons, Inc. or Ingrid Veninger’s i am a good person / i am a bad person, one of the best Canadian films I saw at TIFF 2011?

Full disclosure: Veninger and I are friendly, and we were both on the Canada’s Top Ten jury in 2009. And, yeah, you can write all of this off as a critic cranking about how the 2011 list doesn’t properly represent his values or opinions. But before you do, ask yourself whether it represents yours.

normw@nowtoronto.com

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