Report from the 30th Toronto Film Festival

Part II of III

After covering the TIFF for four years, I decided to participate in my first red carpet event. I wasn’t expecting much, and it seemed a pretty straightforward and superficial deal. The film premieres at a theater, the stars and top-end crew pull up in limousines and make their way about fifty feet down a red carpet, carefully roped off to keep autograph hounds and photographers a few feet away. The stars pose for photos—being politely shouted at to look in slightly different directions: “Up here,” “This way please, thank you!”—and endure a barrage of strobe-like flashes emanating from both monstrous professional cameras and cheap, disposable ones. They may stop along the way to give a one-minute interview for a TV show, then it’s off into the cavernous theater for preferred seating and royalty treatment.

That’s actually more or less how it went at the two premieres I attended, but there were a few and interesting on-the-ground moments. I showed up at the Elgin Theater on Yonge Street for the premiere of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. I showed my press credentials and took a place on the right hand side of the red carpet, nestled somewhat uncomfortably between photographers. Celebrity photography is mostly a boring, sweaty, tiresome waiting game, a stark contrast to the glamorous final product. By and large, the press photographers don’t know or care about the celebrities they photograph or the films they cover. And, of course, there’s no reason they should: that’s not their job. But it added a layer of surrealism to see photographers clamor over each new person down the carpet as if he or she had just cured cancer or saved the planet from an asteroid, when often they had little idea of who they were photographing.

As we all stood in line, I noticed a sandy-haired, mid-thirties shutterbug to my left dressed in a khaki short-sleeved shirt. He held a very big, very expensive camera in his right hand, supporting its weight with a crooked arm and keeping the camera straps from straining his neck. I watched the rest of the crowd, and turned to see him pretending to wipe his brow with the back of his right forearm, but instead getting a sneaky sniff of his left armpit.

“How was it?” I asked. He grinned sheepishly, and, in a German accent, explained that he had just come directly from covering a film event in Vienna. He had to wash his clothes quickly at the hotel, but he wasn't sure how they turned out. He said that his shirt was clean—really it was, he insisted—but that the wash somehow didn’t “take,” and smelled funky anyway. “Maybe is the fabric?” he mused to me, then perked his head up as his photo op antennae tingled. He turned toward the street to find a well-dressed couple stepping from a limo. A few tentative cameras flashed at first, then as herd instinct took over, a half dozen lensmen clicked away at the anonymous couple. As the cameras flashed, I heard someone whisper, “Is that Tim Burton?” No one really wanted to admit their ignorance, so the clicked away just to be sure they got the shot in case it turned out to be an important yet unidentified celebrity. The couple walked on by, more or less ignoring us.

This actually happened about three or four times, resulting in what must be 60 or 70 photos tossed in a file or photo album somewhere and captioned “Not Tim Burton"s. There were in fact many Not Tim Burtons, including a slightly nebbish-looking redhead named Danny Elfman. The usher kindly whispered the man’s identity to us, though the photographer / reporter to my right asked who he was, and I told her that Elfman was one of the most successful musical scorers in cinema, doing themes for countless TV shows and films including The Simpsons and most of Burton’s films. She scribbled that in her pocket notebook, and I later realized I probably could have told her he was Tim Burton’s personal manicurist and that caption would have appeared somewhere. Johnny Depp, Tim Burton, and a few others finally followed, stopping briefly for photographers before heading into the theater. As the usher pulled up the rear, the hubbub died down, the fans wandered away, and the Funky German leaned against the stone wall and fumbled for some Marlboros.

My second red carpet event was similar a few hours later, for Terry Gilliam’s premiere of Tideland. Jeff Bridges, as always looking like he’s got something in his mouth, smiled for the cameras and autographed fans’ photos. He was followed by Jennifer Tilly, all vamped up for the occasion. A few minutes later director Terry Gilliam arrived, though not before a few duddied-up non-notables strolled regally down the carpet, resulting in quite a few Not Terry Gilliam photos. He gamely posed for the cameras and chatted briefly as he passed. I told Gilliam not to give up on Don Quixote, and he smiled wearily at me and nodded. He seemed pleased that someone knew about his previous film work, and that not everyone there just wanted a fresh photo of him to sell to the papers. (The reference was to his doomed attempt at filming The Man of La Mancha, tragicomically captured in the great documentary film Lost in La Mancha.) After a few more questions, all were inside and the show began.

At this year’s film festival, I saw 15 films, including A History of Violence, Tideland, and others. Here are some highlights:

• The French film Marock tells a wrong-side-of-the-tracks love story set in modern Casablanca, Morocco. Rita, a teen from an upper-middle class Muslim family, catches a glimpse of Youri, a hot guy around town. He’s new—but he’s a Jew. This of course does not sit well with her overprotective, fundamentalist brother and family, causing predictable familial and culture clashes. The film is ultimately a rather pedestrian entry into a well-worn Romeo and Juliet genre, though it does have a few interesting aspects to it. One is the Westernization it shows, and the striking opening scene shows a Muslim praying to Mecca amid a sea of imported, ritzy sports cars. The other is that the film depicts non-extremist Muslims, at a time when fanatical Muslims are prominent in news and entertainment. Just as many, if not most, Christians are only nominally observant and routinely violate the Ten Commandments, not all Muslims follow their rigorous religious proscriptions. The acting is good and natural, but director Laïla Marrakchi steeps the film in melodramatic cliches (a few too many shy, flirty glances are exchanged between the lovestruck pair, and of course we have a scene showing Rita staring out a classroom window dreamily, her mind on her man instead of her math). The teens prove their macho with street racing, which struck me as a foreigner’s caricatured and antiquated idea of what epitomizes American bravado.

• A fake music doco in the vein of This is Spinal Tap and Fear of a Black Hat, The Life and Hard Times of Guy Terrifico uses pseudo-archival footage to tell the story of the rise and fall of Guy Terrifico, a nominally talented, alcoholic, and self-indulgent Canadian country singer. Folks like Merle Haggard and Kris Kristofferson have cameos, relating stories of what a wild and crazy guy Terrifico is (or was). The idea is cute, and the film has flashes of inspiration, but the execution suffers. Terrifico’s myriad drunken mishaps and antics (his signature stage show isn’t setting fire to his guitar, it’s humping the drum kit) and musical gaffes are amusing but wear thin after about 40 minutes. The film gets one point right off the top for including a dwarf (who is a cameraman, explaining why a lot of the footage seems shot from knee-level).

• Brothers of the Head takes what should be a compelling topic—conjoined British twin glam rock musicians—and manages to screw it up. At first glance, it bore a resemblance to Twin Falls, Idaho, crossed with The Life and Hard Times of Guy Terrifico. The film is an often-impressionistic and at times funny but fatally meandering story that explores issues of sibling rivalry, media exploitation, identity, being a freak, and loyalty. But all these are done so superficially that little takes hold. The problem is not the acting, which is uniformly very good, including by twin brothers Luke and Harry Treadaway, and Bryan Dick as the hard-edged roadie and music teacher. The problem is script and direction, both of which lack focus and inertia. The end credits of Brothers of the Head claim that the film was edited by someone named Nic Gaster, though I saw little evidence that any editor had looked at the print. The story was much too slow, and the repetitious use of unfocused, blobby colors and images sink the film. Oddly, the same directors created one of the best documentaries in recent years: Lost in La Mancha. If Brothers of the Head is any indication of their direction, perhaps they should stick to documentaries.

• One of the best Spanish-language documentaries at this year’s festival was Toro Negro (Black Bull), about a young bullfighter in southern Mexico. Barely out of his teens, the young man fancies his life a soap opera (telenovela) and himself a brave matador. Yet his dreams clash with the stark reality of his life: he—and most of his town—is living a sub-poverty existence. What money he does have goes to fuel his alcoholism and a few scraps for his two estranged children (by different women, of course). In between fights and reconciliations with his wife in their concrete room “house,” the filmmakers follow the young man’s life and explore the culture of violence, machismo, poverty, and life in this tiny Mexican town. It’s easy to suggest that he is driven to such a reckless life because of poverty, but in fact we sense that he would be the same regardless of his circumstances. Toro Negro is an outstanding piece of work, and one of the best documentaries I have seen this year.

• Toro Negro stands in stark contrast to Monobloc, a spectacular misfire from Argentina. The film, shot in bleak, washed-out colors, is numbingly slow in telling its tale of an amusement park Minnie Mouse character who is fired from her job. She spends her days in a barren and desolate concrete apartment, moping despondently and getting blood transfusions because of some unidentified disease. Her daughter is apparently a prostitute (I say apparently because no men are seen). The setting may be post-Apocalyptic, but the film is so muddled it doesn’t seem to know. A bad film is one thing, but a slow bad film borders on torture. I have never been to a screening where two-thirds of those in attendance walked out by the halfway point; this was the first. I stayed out of a morbid curiosity to see if the film could possibly get any worse. When I finally gave up, over an hour into it, there were about five people left—and two of them were sleeping.