Glenn Sumi
This was one of the best festivals in recent memory. I can’t remember when so many people I met praised so many different films. I’m just gutted I didn’t get to see everything I wanted, and often had to change my decisions based on insanely packed Press & Industry screenings.
BEST MOVIE: Under The Skin got under my skin with its disturbing look at empathy, and 12 Years A Slave, besides putting the name Chiwetel Ejiofor on everyone’s lips, will be a film we’ll be studying and enjoying 12 years from now. But Gravity was the picture that demonstrated absolutely weightless filmmaking, evoking gasps, armchair clutching and copious tears. An instant classic.
WORST MOVIE: A tie between the very laboured Labor Day and All Cheerleaders Die, the dull, incomprehensible Midnight Madness opener that made me want to shove crystals in my eyes.
BEST MOMENT: Emma Thompson, goofing around with her Love Punch co-star Pierce Brosnan (which included flexing her muscles and saying she wanted to be the next Linda Hamilton), took a break to explain why she was wearing the #FreeTarekAndJohn button that Sarah Polley gave her.
BEST DISCOVERY: The Venezuelan film Bad Hair, one of the sharpest, slyest coming-of-age films I’ve seen in a while, featuring confident direction by Mariana Rondón and authentic performances by actors Samantha Castillo and Samuel Lange Zambrano. Word is it’s sold to several countries. Don’t miss it if when it plays here.
Susan G. Cole
BEST FILM: Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty has everything you want in a film festival movie: a coherent vision (in this case, a statement on the decline of Italy under Berlusconi), a great performance by star Toni Servillo as a dissipated journalist and a non- stop panoply of spectacular images. Self-indulgent in all the right ways.
WORST FILM: Patrice Leconte’s pre-WWII-set A Promise, about a steel company employee who falls in love with the boss’s wife when he moves into his employer’s home, is glacially paced and saddled with pointless dialogue. Can’t believe this was made by the same guy who gave us Monsieur Hire.
BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT: Meryl Streep was a no-show. Say no more.
BEST MOMENT: In an interview, Tracks star Mia Wasikowska said she wants to work with Sarah Polley, putting the T.O. director in a list with Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders and Jane Campion.
Norman Wilner
I don’t know about everyone else, but I had a great festival. Sure, there were a few scheduling clashes and one truly awful film – see below – but the overall quality of films was excellent, and my interviews were pure pleasure from start to finish.
BEST SINGLE MOMENT: Making Hugh Jackman snort water out his nose during a really great conversation about faith, morality and violence in Prisoners. I regret nothing.
WORST SINGLE MOMENT: About 15 minutes into Matthew Weiner’s You Are Here, when I realized the movie was going to be a serious treatise on the spiritual vacuity of characters we’ve seen Owen Wilson and Zach Galifianakis play in half a dozen other comedies.
OTHER BEST SINGLE MOMENT: Philip Glass lighting up when I told him I’d seen the Toronto performance of 1,000 Airplanes On The Roof at the O’Keefe Centre in 1987. Also, meeting Philip Glass and Godfrey Reggio on the press day for Visitors. It’s not often I get to thank the artists who’ve changed the way I see the world.
ARTISTIC CONNECTION MOMENT: Taking a quick cameraphone photo of French master Claire Denis wearing her Free Tarek And John button, I ended up being directed by her in the framing of the shot and directing her when she decided the first image didn’t look serious enough. I’ve never been so happy to have spent six festivals watching NOW photographers Kathryn Gaitens and Michael Watier work with their subjects as I was in those 75 seconds.
STARS, THEY’RE JUST LIKE US! MOMENT: Maybe two minutes after telling someone that movie stars don’t wander around Toronto any more because they’d be swarmed instantly, Sandra Bullock trots past me on her way down John Street wearing a big pair of sunglasses. No one else notices.
John Semley
Instead of rounding up best and worst stuff I saw and did and didn’t do, I just want to get a few words out about a movie I didn’t have the opportunity to write about: Jia Zhangke’s A Touch Of Sin.
The general line on the film was that it was excellent – it is one of the best films at the festival, for sure – but that it’s blunt, obvious, a departure from the moody ineffability of Jia’s career-making films like Platform and Still Life and The World.
This is ostensibly true (i.e. no other Jia movie is as starkly violent as A Touch Of Sin, for one). But the film’s dearth of subtlety and its potent, shotgun-to-the-face plainness forced me to consider, throughout the festival, the inherent value of stuff like subtlety and nuance. Maybe it’s too critic-y and inside baseball, but there seems to be whole systems of valuation that privilege nuance, delicacy, elusiveness, all these things that pretty much make a filmmaker like Jia Zhangke one of the more feted filmmakers of the past decade-or-so.
All these things are good, and valuable, and taken together can invest something with a quality (or network of qualities) that are worth praising, sure. A Touch Of Sin seems to illustrate the contrary, though. It seems to prove that all these qualities are not necessarily intrinsically valuable. So something subtle can be good, but it’s not automatically true that something is good because it is subtle. I think that critics (myself included, in instances when I’m called upon to function as a critic) tend to (over)value stuff like nuance or intricacy because it tends to flatter their ability to understand, or at the very least recognize, that the thing they’re watching is nuanced and intricate. If something demands that you watch it carefully, and cleverly, being able to do so feels like it’s own reward, providing that buzz of a job well done the sense that you’re performing some vital function.
In a way, that’s part of what the art-as-gift, as exchange between artist and experiencer-of-that-art, is all about: the sense of being brought into a fold, of being received on the same wavelength as someone who has created something. But the esteeming of subtlety-qua-subtlety creates a nastier, more claustrophobic, cultural exchange, where art is being created with deliberate attention to the limited audience that possesses the necessary intellect or attentiveness – or at the very least, the requisite glossary of terms (“patient,” “ineffable,” “laconic,” “moody ineffability,” “Bressonian,” etc., etc., etc.) – to describe it. It creates a system that essentially privileges critics as being on par with the artists they engage with, and not acquiescent to them. Their function becomes that of a necessary interlocutor in the exchange of meaning and value.
Though it’s still essentially a Chinese art film, and not Man Of Steel or something, A Touch Of Sin stitches up this gap. In its brutality and thrilling immanence, it feels like Jia has made a film not for critics, but for audiences – and especially Chinese audiences. A Touch Of Sin feels, rather emphatically, like a film for the people in the film: for the disenfranchised, the desperate, those driven to violence and misery and self-annihilation by the conditions of contemporary Chinese life, which are the conditions of late capitalism.
Where many of Jia’s recent films felt, with their floating camerawork and pseudo-surrealistic yoking of documentary and narrative cinema, like dreams, A Touch Of Sin feels like a wake-up call, suggesting not just alternatives for acclaimed, exceptionally talented, contemporary art filmmakers, but for the people of China. I’ve never seen a film that feels simultaneously like a gift and a sobering slap in the face.
