Blog From The Bench

Toronto Film Festival 2007

So my initial goal in writing from Toronto was to submit some thoughts every 24 hours or so… considering that I’m now finishing my third day and this is my first entry should say something about how the last 72 hours or so have unfolded. That and it’s been impossible to get the internet—there are certainly internet cafes to be found, but I’ve yet to find one that doesn’t frown upon using your own laptop. *sigh* So Starbucks and their insanely priced wireless it is… until I find a better option, at least.

-jesse

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 08

My adventures on Canadian soil (this is my first time visiting our northern neighbor) began at about 9:00 am Toronto local time… the opening day of the festival! (Indeed, a major planning mistake on my end.) But my friend who is graciously hosting my boyfriend and I during this trip met us at the airport and escorted us to his house in the suburbs east of downtown Toronto where we promptly dropped our bags, turning right back around to head downtown to the festival box office.

And what fun times ensued! I’ve been calling my experience in getting tickets for this festival a comedy of errors—and I’m honestly not exaggerating much. After a quick dash down to an internet café to retrieve the confirmation number for my festival pass (they wouldn’t give it to me without it), I waited about 45 minutes in line to be handed a credit-card sized pass in an envelope. And as I feared, this was only the beginning… I was sweetly told that because I hadn’t selected tickets yet (there was some confusion regarding passes and I missed the option for the advance draw for tickets) so I had to go wait in the other line to select my tickets. So to the end of the line we went as I scrambled to assemble some kind of viewing schedule from the giant boards indicating ticket availability. Thankfully—my first real lucky break of this whole ordeal—most of the films I had wanted to see anyway are not necessarily the most sought-after tickets in town, and with the notable exceptions of Naomi Kawase’s Cannes-awarded The Mourning Forest and Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, an hour or so later I had tickets in hand for most of the film I had wanted to see in the first place.

But by that time everything had been sold out for Thursday evening so my friend did an abbreviated walking tour of the city, pointing out the location of most of the theaters in the festival which proved to be a major help in the days that followed. The evening ended over plates of pasta at my friends house… concluding day one in Toronto.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 07

After another stop at the festival box office for tickets to fill in some of the gaps in my schedule, my boyfriend and I headed to the nearby Ryerson Theater for our first screening of the festival, Hou Hsiao-Hsein’s La Voyage du ballon rouge (Flight of the Red Baloon). I’m hesitant to write much about Hou’s delicately-calibrated mood piece at this time, considering that his films tend to really reveal their impact at a much-delayed date (back in 2004 when I attended the London Film Festival I had initially considered his Ozu homage Café Lumiere the least of the films I caught there; looking back now it’s the film I retain the most fond memories of). Interestingly, La voyage du ballon rouge is also an homage film, this time to the 1956 classic French children’s short Le ballon rouge, which is invoked several times by one of the main characters, a young Beijing University student filmmaker who has taken up a nanny position while studying in Paris. Soft spoken and reticent, Song (newcomer Fang Song) stands distinctly apart from the tempest of activity and emotions that swirl around her in the form of frazzled puppeteer Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), the mother of the thoughtful young boy Song has been hired to look after. This trio of characters serves as the foundation for a number of issues and dichotomies that are subsequently explored throughout the film, chief among them childhood idealism vs adult realism, fantasy vs reality, cinema and performance vs life, East vs West, etc. This might make the film sound a bit didactic, but the film is anything but—it is a seemingly modest study of characters and mood that achieves an unexpected buoyancy through a number of beautiful, subtle little grace notes that surface constantly throughout the film in the form of bits of conversation, facial expressions and unexpected motions of the body. This is not to say that Ballon rouge is a departure from the aesthetic rigorousness that marks Hou’s previous films—indeed, the entire film is composed of elaborate ten-minute takes, which is the all the more impressive considering the bombshell the ever-elegant Binoche revealed in the audience Q&A that concluded the screening, informing a gasping audience that it was all the dialogue and action was improvised, and what’s more, that the first takes were the only takes. After that revelation, the film more than ever seems like a happy cinematic miracle to treasure all the more. An excellent way to kick off the fest.

My second screening of the day also happened to be the film I had been anticipating the most coming into the festival—Les Chansons d’amour, the latest collaboration between director Christophe Honoré and actor Louis Garrel. The team that brought us the almost universally reviled Ma Mere in 2004 (my review for DVD Verdict is probably one of the only positive ones you’re likely to find), Les Chansons a’amour has been likened in nearly every review I’ve come across to Jacques Demy in his mid 1960's musical mode. Admittedly, in some ways the comparison is apt—this film is also young, exceedingly beautiful French stars constantly breaking out in song about love and loss—but Honoré’s film inevitably has a darker edge than Demy’s sparkling confections, and unsurprisingly concerns much of its time with exploring different forms of sexuality. The film revolves around a threesome (composed of Garrel, Ludivine Sagnier and Clotilde Hesme, Garrel’s costar from last year’s Regular Lovers, which I’ve also recently reviewed) and an unexpected tragedy that shatters their uneasy ménage-a-trois. After the enchanting, Nouvelle Vague-inspired opening credits the film lurches about, swinging from one situational extreme to the other with a jarring frequency, and the film takes an entirely unexpected direction (well, maybe it shouldn’t have been all that unexpected, all things considered) when shy Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet shows up and begins eying Garrel. I can’t and I won't claim the film is compeletely succesfull, but just like Ma Mere I found it fascinating—and it reinforces my opinion that Honoré is one of the most interesting young directors currently working in France. Can’t wait to catch up with the Honoré/Garrel collaboration Dans Paris which is currently in release in American theaters.

I was hoping for more… but Starbucks is kicking me out! À demain…