People often ask me for recommendations for the Toronto International Film Festival. "What's good at TIFF?" they say. "Anything I should see?" I usually mumble something non-committal, halfheartedly recommend a big Hollywood movie I've seen at an advance screening and not hated, or try to remember the title of that little doc that wasn't so bad.
There are almost 300 feature-length films at TIFF this year plus more than 100 shorts; if I'm lucky I have seen about a dozen features before the festival starts. This means I have only a 4 per cent advantage over the average film buff with a TIFF catalogue. Besides, my record as a TIFF tipster is abysmal.
Take, for example, my first TIFF experience, when I lined up to see an experimental American art house flick that happened to star a well-known musician in what did not turn out to be the start of his next career. I thought it was the most pretentious piece of twaddle I had ever had the misfortune to sit through – and I was a pretty pretentious undergraduate at the time so my tolerance level was high. I was all ready to write off the experience as an anomaly, but darned if Toronto audiences didn't vote the smelly thing the people's choice award.
Some years later, I queued for what seemed like hours to snag a seat in the middle of a very wide row to see some Danish drama that was probably executed according to a rigorous Scandinavian cinematic philosophy with which I wasn't acquainted. The film was as compelling as billed but the pathetic plight of its protagonist and the hand-held camera work made me feel nauseous and after I had fought my way out of my awkwardly central seat, I spent the rest of a very long running time sitting in the lobby waiting for my date.
As TIFF grew, I become more and more puzzled as to how to approach the festival: Was I supposed to be elbowing others out of the way to see a film by a Korean director of whom nobody in Toronto had previously heard – or to get a glimpse of George Clooney?
That's not to say that I am not, as always, looking forward to TIFF. Just because I can't pick them, doesn't mean the festival is not full of fascinating and rewarding films.
The work I am most excited about seeing is the Arabian Nights trilogy by the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, in which a cowardly documentarian played by Gomes himself gives up trying to film his country's misery and hands the job over to the mythic storyteller Scheherazade. The circularity of 1001 Nights is ever delightful and I'm always interested in attempts to reinvent its storytelling devices in a contemporary setting. Plus, the six-hour length of the film appeals to me – you can see it in three parts or in a one-day marathon Sept. 17 – because I like the idea that occasionally the audience, as well as the artist, has to work for the art. But, more to our purposes here, the film comes highly recommended by audiences at the Cannes Film Festival.
I can't possibly say that I was looking forward to seeing Son of Saul, another recommendation from Cannes, where it won the Grand Prix. Who looks forward to a Holocaust film? But having seen it at a screening this week, I can attest that, if you have the courage for it, it is sure to be one of the most remarkable films at TIFF 2015. Set in Auschwitz, it is filmed from the narrow perspective of a prisoner who cleans the gas chambers, and becomes determined to give a proper Jewish burial to a body he believes to be that of his son. It is a rare thing – an honest movie about the Holocaust that does not offer the viewer false hope or facile comfort.
I've also seen The Lobster, an English-language debut by the outrageous Greek satirist Yorgos Lanthimos. The film has what must be the best premise of any festival movie this year: In the near future, single people have 45 days to find a mate or they are turned into animals. Lanthimos's absurdist dystopia, set in a luxury hotel and the dark woods around it, doesn't disappoint.
Similarly, the best title of 2015 is surely Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton. The 30-minute film by Canadian director Guy Maddin and co-conspirators Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson is a behind-the-scenes look at Paul Gross's Afghanistan movie Hyena Road (also playing at the festival). It also riffs off Sam Peckinpah's notorious flop Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Only in a film community as small as Canada's would a director as weird as Maddin team up with a mainstream sentimentalist such as Gross. I'm intrigued to see the results and since the film is screening free and continually in the lobby of the Bell Lightbox, they'll be hard to miss.
Perhaps the encounter between François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock featured a more weighty reflection on the nature of cinema: I am also much looking forward to Hitchcock/Truffaut, a documentary based on the audio recordings of the young French filmmaker's 1962 interviews with the master of suspense.
And every TIFF-goer needs the occasional guilty pleasure, too. Last year, I stupidly picked a French bourgeois comedy about cross dressing; La Cage aux Folles, it was not. This year, I am hoping to do better with Belles familles, a farcical drama about a prodigal son and a legal dispute over the family château, starring the ever-charming and omnipresent Mathieu Amalric.
If you are moved to see any of these films and wonder why you bothered, you can't say I didn't warn you. On the other hand, if you love them … you read it here first.
Kate Taylor