Festival of Lights

For 10 days every September, the city of Toronto turns into a madhouse of visiting filmmakers, glamorous starlets, hungry show-biz wanna-bes and bleary-eyed movie geeks. The Toronto International Film Festival is more than North America’s largest film festival. It’s an eye-filling smorgasbord of the coming year’s releases, from major-studio award-bait like the Philip Roth adaptation The Human Stain to exciting discoveries like the exhilarating martial-arts knockout Ong-Bak Muay: Thai Warrior, recipient of a rare standing ovation.

Why are you reading about it in a Nashville newspaper? Because Toronto shapes what you’ll be seeing for at least the next 12 months. Whale Rider, still playing local plexes, screened at Toronto in 2002. The event’s influence trickles down to our own growing film festival. Nashville Film Festival programmer Brian Gordon spent his week in Toronto making contacts and scouting movies—several of which you’ll likely see next April. So consider this rambling, sleep-deprived dispatch a glimpse of the future.

That future arrives this weekend with the first of the major Toronto discoveries. In some ways, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, which opens Friday at Green Hills, resembles a week’s stay at a film festival: a parade of flickering images, passing celebs and shiny surfaces, marked by a general air of disconnection. Coppola’s film is a delicately observed comic reverie about a faded American action star (Bill Murray) and a photographer’s neglected wife (Scarlett Johansson), drawn to each other in a sensually disorienting Tokyo. The culture-collision comedy can be woefully sophomoric, but Coppola’s touch with actors is unfailing. Murray gives what is likely the performance of the year, and maybe his career. The bone-tired longing he puts into a karaoke version of Roxy Music’s “More Than This” could make you laugh if it weren’t so nakedly sad.

The best films at Toronto this year merged cultural specificity, deep feeling and wild imagination. Sylvain Chomet’s animated French fantasia Belleville Rendez-Vous is a short, surreal piece about a champion cyclist and his protector grandmother; it follows the moody and occasionally grotesque trail blazed by the likes of Jacques Tati, Winsor McKay and Gerald Scarfe. Jafar Panahi’s chilling, darkly comic Crimson Gold goes backward to show what led a resentful Iranian pizza man to steal for his fiancée the kind of expensive jewelry he sees on his customers. Abbas Kiarostami wrote the cutting script, perhaps in ironic response to critics who say he only shows his homeland in poverty.

Though Toronto lacked last year’s bounty of excellent Asian films, some standouts emerged. Defying his rep as a shock artist, Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-Duk offered the lovely Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring, a bracingly pure Buddhist parable about a boy’s journey to wisdom through his periodic visitations to a temple floating in a mountain lake. Raptly attuned to every detail of the changing seasons, Kim’s film delivers an unambiguous, often painful lesson about the ways humanity is tragically bound by personal relationships. Every bit as life-affirming, in its crazy way, is the exuberant excess of Takeshi Kitano’s audience favorite Zatoichi, a slice-and-dice samurai Western that morphs thrillingly at the end into a tap-dance musical.

When this many movies reverberate off one another, common threads appear. The tension between real and fake worlds was particularly strong this year at Toronto. Errol Morris’ documentary The Fog of War works as an interview, biography and psychoanalysis of Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, as well as a study of how brilliance can be systematically co-opted. But it also boldly contemplates “counterfactuals”—the term for a revisionist history based on what might’ve been. This became one of the fest’s recurring themes. Nowhere did it appear more potently than in writer-director Billy Ray’s crackling docudrama Shattered Glass. Ray turns a somewhat arcane scandal—the fall of New Republic story-faker Stephen Glass (played to pathologically puppyish perfection by Hayden Christiansen)—into a riveting psychological thriller and a lament for the print media’s shift from hard news and substantive analysis to glitzy yarn-spinning.

Counterfactuals also figure in Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin!, about a dedicated East Berliner who goes into a coma before reunification and awakens afterward—at which point her family shelters her by painstakingly re-creating the former East Germany. It’s a modest, funny and well-plotted film, made poignant by its vision of how Soviet Bloc nations might’ve maintained their ideals. Richard Curtis’ sprawling romantic comedy Love, Actually serves up another counterfactual fantasyland: a robust England where the prime minister (Hugh Grant) stands up to the boorish U.S. president, everybody loves everybody, and dopey Britpop has rich meaning. Employing every British actor from Emma Thompson to Rowan Atkinson, Curtis crams about a dozen upmarket love stories into one boisterous, irresistible (if too cute) package.

Back in the real world, cinematic journalism proved strong in this year’s documentary slate, which featured some of the festival’s most accomplished storytelling. Good luck finding fictional thrillers this year more gripping than Jose Padilha’s Bus 174 and Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised—docs that make their activist agendas as urgent as gunfire. The former, an account of a disastrous Rio de Janeiro bus hijacking, unfolds in unnervingly intimate TV footage. The latter starts as a profile of populist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, then explodes as the country’s corporate-backed media and military launch an overt coup with the apparent approval of the oil-hungry Bush II administration—and with the filmmakers in the thick of the snipers and bombs.