Toronto Stories
• Directed and written by Aaron Woodley, Sook-Yin Lee, David (Sudz) Sutherland and David Weaver
• Starring K.C. Collins, Joris Jarsky, Carly Pope and Gil Bellows
• Classification: 14A
Over the years, Toronto has been a favourite Hollywood location, standing in for New York, Chicago, Washington, Baltimore, Detroit, London, Beijing or even a lunar colony ( Pluto Nash). The city has also played itself in many successful Canadian movies, from Nobody Waved Goodbye through the cinema of David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan, but most of its screen time has been as a city in disguise.
The omnibus movie Toronto Stories, conceived by directors David Weaver and Aaron Woodley, is an attempt to redress that issue. Following the model of omnibus films focusing on Paris, New York and Tokyo, it attempts to add some cinematic lustre to the city. That the resulting film is so uninspiring surely can't be entirely blamed on Toronto.
Things get off to a dubious start with the device of a young boy (Toka Murphy) who arrives at Pearson Airport apparently without identification or the ability to speak English. Somehow, the boy manages to jump a tour bus into the heart of the city. From then on, he appears briefly in each story, though mostly exists as a presence on the television, as a missing child.
The first story, Shoelaces, by Aaron Woodley ( Rhinoceros Eyes), takes us to the Riverdale area and Don Valley, where the boy is introduced and quickly forgotten as the film follows two other kids, an outcast boy and girl, in search of a mythical Cabbagetown monster. There's a suggestion of Guillermo del Toro's films about children ( Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone) in this story of kids turning real-life fears of bullying and abuse into dark fantasies about bogeymen. For the most part, however, it feels like an enigmatic after-school special.
Sook-Yin Lee's The Brazilian is probably the high point, a deadpan, mildly amusing two-hander about a single woman (played by Lee), who lives in Kensington Market and is trying to woo a pathologically non-committal man (Tygh Runyan) over the course of some months. Most of the film is shot in interiors, including scenes in the Royal Ontario Museum and Toronto Reference Library, and the course of the relationship is marked by the comings and goings of body hair.
Moving north to the Vaughan-St. Clair West neighbourhood, David (Sudz) Sutherland's Windows stars K.C. Collins as a window washer whose bumbling criminal friend, Doug (Joris Jarsky) meets him after getting out of jail. The story later moves to the nearby wealthy neighbourhood of Forest Hill, where Doug takes his angry ex-girlfriend (Carly Pope) hostage. Somewhere between an American cop show outtake and a buddy tale, Windows leaves little emotional resonance.
Finally, in Lost Boys, Gil Bellows plays a drug-addicted homeless man who sees the lost boy at Union Station, but can't convince the authorities that he's telling the truth. With heroic tenacity, he manages to help rescue the kid. Bellows offers a good performance, but it's difficult to get past the contrivance of this story about a down-and-outer finding improbable redemption.
The entire exercise feels like a missed opportunity. Pico Iyer, in his book The Global Soul, called Toronto "the city as anthology" a collection of neighbourhoods and cultures intrinsically suited to this sort of collection, but Toronto Stories is too tentative and idiosyncratic to begin to represent one of the world's most vital, diverse cities.
