I’ve been going to advance screenings for the Toronto International Film Festival for two weeks now, as have my local colleagues. (This is our one leg up until TIFF officially starts on Sept. 9, at which point the U.S. media will stampede in and trample us.) And I have to tell you, I’ve been feeling pretty weird. Stirred up. Restless. Sad. My work pals have been experiencing the same thing. Finally, one of them nailed what was happening to us.
“You go to all these movies,” she said, “and they make you feel all these emotions.”
Bingo. The other 354 days a year, with the exception of a few indie and foreign films, we moviegoers see what the folks in Hollywood deem marketable enough for us to see. More and more, those are megabudget, tent-pole films that traffic in sensation rather than emotion. The kind that skate smoothly over your eyeballs, demanding nothing in return.
TIFF, however, is chockablock with the opposite kind of films: the ones that aren’t so easy to market, that need the push that a film festival can still provide – and that TIFF, especially, has become renowned for providing. The films that are tetchy and difficult. The ones that demand a response.
Couple that with the fact that I always seem to find an overriding theme in any given TIFF (or it seems to find me), and that this year it’s “Ah, look at all the lonely people.” No wonder I’m sad. I’ve already seen so many loveless souls aching to connect that I’d be tempted to open a vein had I not also seen a couple of actual, open veins onscreen that gave me pause. Here’s a smattering, in alphabetical order:
Amazon Falls: A soft-core porn actress longing to go straight puts up with a hideous gigolo “boyfriend” and tragically creepy “producers” in pursuit of her dream – which we know from frame one is never gonna happen, and which breaks our hearts because she tries so hard.
Daydream Nation: “I had all this love and no one to give it to,” says our heroine (Kat Dennings), who may be in high school, but who, we just know, will continue to feel these kinds of excruciating feelings her entire life.
Heartbeats: A young woman and her gay best friend (the alarmingly talented writer/director/actor Xavier Dolan) – both the kind of prickly people who are fun to go to lunch, but hard to have a relationship, with – project all the love they yearn for onto an unworthy Adonis. The film also includes testimonials from other terminally lonely people, who say things like, “If someone died every time I hit ‘refresh’ hoping for an e-mail, there’d be no one left alive.”
Jack Goes Boating: Two pathologically inert single people (Amy Ryan and Philip Seymour Hoffman, in his feature directorial debut) imbue a dinner-party date with so many hopes and dreams that you just know it’s going to go awry, and you watch with your fingers over your eyes, more tense than in any thriller.
Trigger: Two former best friends (Molly Parker and the late Tracy Wright, who are both working at the peak of their powers, to heartbreaking effect) spend 90 minutes trying not to show each other how lonely they are and how much they miss each other. “You are the only person who knows me,” Parker’s character finally admits.
Which reminds me. On a side note, I’m feeling a positive emotion – delight – about how good so many Canadian films are this year. I feel that it’s all coming together: the decades worth of skills amassed by our crews; the dearth of mid-range-budget movies in the U.S., impelling good actors to come north and sign onto the kinds of films we’re making here, with juicy parts in scripts that are about something.
