Reporting the Start of a Season: Toronto International Film Festival B. Ruby Rich
In the postwar era, there used to be extended hand-wringing on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, especially along what was once called the Northeast Corridor, over the urban sprawl that threatened to turn Boston–New York– Washington into one extended megalopolis. A film festival version of that sprawl has built up in recent years, under the radar, with no proper declaration. Initial film-festival skirmishes between Telluride and Toronto, and New York’s demand for opening, closing, and midfestival film exclusives, were just opening salvos: yesterday’s competition is today’s convergence. By now, all three are in fundamental ways the same festival, sharing a large percentage of films as they tailor the rest to local audiences and the trimmings to particular institutional needs. I don’t know whether it makes much sense for the press to give credit for breakout films (Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, anyone?) to the one with the earliest calendar date, when all three are showing it. Do not misunderstand me: I love all three festivals for their distinct identities and audiences. But the actual film programs on offer are far less different than the locations, theaters, and publics in/for which they play: they are the exhibition/ distribution stream writ large. That said, this writer attended TIFF (the Toronto International Film Festival) for the thirtieth time this year and remains fond of its specificity. TIFF distinguishes itself these days for the massive local audience it still manages to draw to its theaters and for the marketplace atmosphere that dominates, stimulating an appetite for deals that might not happen elsewhere. The first point requires an addendum this year, for TIFF came close to alienating its long-loyal audience with new Uber-style “surge pricing” that sent popular film prices through the roof as if the festival were scalping its own tickets. The second point requires unpacking, too, since deal-making was down this fall, a symptom of marketplace anxiety. Folks worried that the film world was simultaneously producing a glut of product and collapsing, Film Quarterly, Vol. 70, Number 2, pp. 81–87, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. © 2016 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2016.70.2.81.
which, true or false, is the sort of thing that gives distributors and producers a case of the jitters. Nearly. Fox Searchlight made a surprise acquisition, Pablo Larrain’s Jackie, starring Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy in a film that was immediately anointed with Oscar buzz. If that plot line sounds familiar, it’s because Fox Searchlight picked up another film under similar conditions last January at Sundance; that film, Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation, subsequently ran into pre-release trouble in the form of seventeen-years-ago rape charges against the filmmaker: though acquitted, the details of his (and, it turned out, his co-writer’s) trial transcript damaged the release and jeopardized its impact. Searchlight used TIFF to hit the reset button on Birth—sold-out galas, standing ovations, a carefully controlled press conference—but then made the Jackie deal. Was Searchlight switching horses midstream, shifting its Oscar dollars from the historic treatment of a slave rebellion to an up-close look at JFK’s widow? This was festival rumormongering at its finest, but only time will tell. Because TIFF takes place in Canada, the kind of race conversation that would transpire south of the 49th parallel is displaced and reconfigured there, especially in the hopeful era of Justin Trudeau’s premiereship. At TIFF, the presence of its lauded Artistic Director Cameron Bailey similarly directs the conversation, since Bailey is black, very much in charge, and started his career as the curator of TIFF’s Planet Africa section, which may have been the first festival initiative to look at black diasporic cinema as an entity. Also, the sheer volume of films shown at TIFF (296 features and 101 shorts) mandates that anyone’s version of the festival is really a report on their own tastes, luck, and blunders. That said, there were a number of prominent films by black directors this year—including the two films that emerged for me as the most exciting and groundbreaking works there. What was noticeable in these two, in contrast to the other bigticket galas on the same subjects, was the scrappiness and rule-breaking of both films. The festival’s more mainstream movies—The Birth of a Nation, Loving (Jeff Nichols), A United Kingdom (Amma Asante)—played by the rules of big-screen entertainment. These mainstream race dramas—on slavery, F ILM QU A RTE RL Y
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Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight was the breakout hit of TIFF 2016.
miscegenation, apartheid—might be seen as #OscarSoWhite contenders, disrupting by virtue of casting and story but not style. The two films that I come to praise, by contrast— Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight and Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro—did no such thing. They might be seen instead as #BlackLivesMatter works, films that reject entirely the dominant narrative of movie-making in favor of a different kind of aura, one permeated by heart and heartbreak, by intense research and passionate speech, by intense feeling and passionate silence, by a different approach to making films. Moonlight by Jenkins was the breakout hit of the festival. Not a mainstream film in any way, it nonetheless required the scheduling of extra screening after extra screening as audiences and the press corps alike clamored to see what all the fuss was about. What was it? A quietly effervescent film about growing up black and queer and poor in the forgotten ghettos of Miami, based on—or, better yet, in cahoots with— the play by Tarell Alvin McCraney, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. Coming off a lovely but modest indie debut, Medicine for Melancholy (2008), Jenkins astonished everyone with the magnitude of his leap into thin air, and into brilliance. Jenkins grew up in Miami (like McCraney) and like his title character Chiron (aka Little), he survived the ravages of the crack epidemic that decimated both home and neighborhood. Moonlight is a tale told elliptically, like stones skipping across the surface of the water, with three distinct passages that track the emergence and crises of black masculinity in such circumstances: childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. What is shocking, but should not be, is that Jenkins avoids both homilies and action dramas; instead, he delivers a love song. With a lilting soundtrack of Atlanta-influenced music, the slippery slidey cinematography of James Laxton, 82
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and the constant pang of a young man in search of affection, Moonlight etches the impact that one touch, one night, one electric connection can have across a lifetime. Kevin, his best and only friend, is the star in his firmament even if he doesn’t know it. Juan, his erstwhile drug-dealer mentor, and Teresa, Juan’s irresistible girlfriend (she’s played by Janelle Monáe after all), ensure his survival. But it is Kevin who can pierce the armor that Chiron uses to guard against the world he inhabits. Moonlight is that rare indelible film that changes how you see and hear and feel—not just onscreen, but in the whole damn world. Hold your breath. Raoul Peck is up to something entirely different but equally bold: the reinvention of the historical documentary. As someone who has been making films since the 1980s in both documentary and dramatic modes, he knows the terrain. Born in Port-au-Prince, raised in Brooklyn and the Congo (DRC), he lives today in Paris where he serves as president of La Fémis, the French state film school. His pair of films about the life and death of Patrice Lumumba, one documentary, one fiction—Lumumba: La mort du prophète (Lumumba, Death of a Prophet, 1990) and Lumumba (2000)—made his name indelible in the international film world and won over James Baldwin’s sister, who had loved those films and therefore granted him unprecedented access to the Baldwin estate’s archive. Unlike Jenkins, Peck has been at this game for many decades. He spent nearly ten years on this one. I Am Not Your Negro is anchored by Baldwin’s notes for an unfinished book, but it ranges far and wide to bring to life those ideas about race, politics, privilege, and life for a black person living in America during Baldwin’s lifetime (1924–1987). Peck has crafted a film that is dedicated to James Baldwin’s ideas, not a hagiography of his life. It is not a film about an expatriate in France, nor one about his literary struggles or published books. No, it is a forensic analysis of his ideas about race in the United States, interweaving news clips and interviews with key contemporary moments. Talking about how overused the civil rights footage has become, Peck described his decision to colorize that B+W material to make it live again; then, to match it, he turned the new Ferguson footage into B+W, rendering it instantly archival. Throughout, it is the voice of Baldwin or the voice of Samuel Jackson reading Baldwin’s words that is kept at the center. This is a new kind of intellectual documentary, one that will hopefully spawn a fresh lineage at a time when reenactment has threatened to sap the vitality from the form. Witnessing Baldwin’s 1968 appearance on the Dick Cavett talk show is alone worth the price of the ticket, not only for his brilliantly articulate persuasion but because the network
Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro boldly reinvents the historical documentary.
allows him nearly an entire show to present it to the audience. As for Peck, well, he gives him a whole movie—and the TIFF audience couldn’t have been any happier. Of course, an entire festival of films still beckoned. As it happens, by accident as much as anything else, I stumbled into a series of films tracing deception and faith. François Ozon broke with type, leaving humor and irony behind in favor of the sort of elegant, refined filmmaking that he’s until now preferred to put in the service of comedies and light thrillers. With Frantz he makes a surprisingly Renoiresque film set in the aftermath of World War I, tracing the story of a young French soldier who travels to a German town in search of the family of an equally young German soldier killed in the trenches. They think he was their son’s friend, as does the son’s fiancée who slowly falls for him; but in fact, spoiler alert, he was his murderer. Ozon moves with stately grace through the story’s inexorable machinery of deceit, hope, loss, deceit again. Its refusal of victimhood is as refreshing as its focus: not on the men but on the figure of the widow whose pursuit of love at all costs leads to unexpected heartbreak.
Deception rules, too, in Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s Karl Marx City, an entirely different investigation into German history, this time via a documentary researching the Stasi records for a very personal reason: to find out whether Epperlein’s own father had been an operative. She grew up in the eponymous town where a giant bust of Karl Marx presides over the landscape and returns to the former GDR to make this film and try to determine the truth, to uncover the layers of suspicion that had long clouded the family’s memories. Scenes of Epperlein strolling the empty streets with her giant microphone may be excessive, but they pointedly evoke the system of surveillance that once upon a time had engulfed everyone and every aspect of life. Actually, some of those shots also evoke a long-forgotten film, Helke Sander’s The All Around Reduced Personality— Redupers (Die Allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit—Redupers, 1977), made while the wall still stood and worth a revival now. Epperlein’s tours of the Stasi archive, meanwhile, reveal a monumental system dedicated to undoing the original systems of harm, this time in the interest of redress. By the film’s end, when she learns the surprising truth, she’s come F ILM QU A RTE RL Y
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Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s Karl Marx City.
close to disappearing like Alice down the rabbit-hole, haunted by the past and its hall-of-mirrors reversal in the haunted present. Tough times always increase the public’s turn to fantasy. In the capable hands of João Pedro Rodrigues, there is no risk of toppling into current events, city dramas, or coded melodramas. Instead, his O Ornitólogo (The Ornithologist) transports the viewer into the Portuguese countryside where ornithologist Fernando (Paul Hamy) is out in his kayak cataloguing birds. After he capsizes, he begins to lose his way, his medicine, his map, and nearly his life. But he also loses his own moral compass. Encounters with a pair of nefarious Chinese women pilgrims with a hankering for castration, a deaf-mute goatherd who fancies a roll in the hay (until he doesn’t), a trio of Amazon gunslingers on horseback, and the goatherd’s twin brother all lead to life-and-death situations that are as allegorical as they are confounding. In the end, Fernando transforms into Anthony, Saint Anthony in fact, and ends up on a heavenly pilgrimage of his own. I couldn’t help but think of both Derek Jarman (halfway between Sebastiane [1976] and Caravaggio [1986]) and Pier Paolo Pasolini (in his Arabian Nights [1974] moment, perhaps) as Rodrigues queered the trials of sainthood, but with an emphasis on nature that makes The Ornithologist ultimately 84
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more a paean to paganism than any sort of saint’s progress. It caused a stir deservedly at Locarno, as at TIFF. An entirely different approach to erotic fantasy in the battle of good versus evil was unveiled by Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi), a retelling of the devilish novel Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, transposing her Victorian English setting to Korea during the Japanese occupation. More buoyant in some ways than the original novel, The Handmaiden has tremendous fun playing with questions of nationalisms, class, and sexualities as it follows Waters in the relentless deployment of trickery. Just as you think you have figured it out, you haven’t. There is a sadistic uncle, a trapped beauty, a fake count, and a pickpocket maid; some are Korean, some Japanese; and nobody can be trusted. Clues pile up faster than bodies, though the bodies have a way of misbehaving once the lady and the maid discover a new erotic world of their own. Chan-wook’s bird’s-eye views of naked female bodies tussling in bed may evoke the condemnation that greeted Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color (La vie d’Adèle—Chapitres 1 et 2) three years ago, but the contrast of the women’s lust to the perverse machinations of both male characters in search of “other” desires (power, money, unspeakable perversity) alters the context and the stakes considerably. A master’s hand is
everywhere apparent in Park Chan-wook’s direction, art design, and casting, and it makes for an eminently satisfying and delightfully noirish narrative puzzle. An entirely different sort of adaptation rules Pablo Larrain’s fiery Neruda, a meta-film that turns the story of Pablo Neruda in a key moment in his life in the forties into a character out of his own or someone else’s fiction. (Hint: the writer loved detective stories.) Gael García Bernal is cast as the obsessed detective tracking Neruda across the cities and countryside of Chile, all with their own period flourishes, and Neruda himself is an ever-fascinating largerthan-life character who regales audiences and delights in entertaining brothels. The detective, it transpires, truly dreams of being a writer. In the end, their fates may well be reversed but it is less clear than ever who is who, which is which, and who can be believed. Pirandelloesque in its devices and modes of deception, Neruda is ultimately a paean to storytelling that taps into the vanity driving the writer’s imagination and the envy fueling the detective’s quest. As beguiling as the past may be, especially onscreen, nothing speaks to the present like a political documentary that
Pablo Larrain’s Neruda is a metafilm.
unfolds during election season. Fernando León de Aranoa’s Política, manual de instrucciones (Politics, Instruction Manual) charts the rise of Spain’s Podemos party in the year leading up to last winter’s election where they came from nowhere to seize nearly seventy seats in Parliament. The new political party that started on a dare ends up being taken very, very seriously. Yes, there are a tad too many scenes of people sitting in meetings fretting or arguing; yet the stakes are so high and the strategies so unprecedented that fascination carries the day. But there is one statement that bears repeating above all else. The Podemos political analyst surveys the news and renders her judgment: election campaigns used to be about platforms and goals, but now they seem to be about reporting polls and asking what every candidate thinks about the accuracy of the polls, questions which shape a self-fulfilling prophecy of polls getting not only to predict the winners but actually to create them. Another documentary provided similarly useful reminders. Matt Tyrnauer’s Citizen Jane: Battle for the City traced the political career of the revered Jane Jacobs, dutiful architectural critic turned crusading anti-freeway activist who managed to defeat urban “planner” Robert Moses at his own game. In this centennial of her birth, Jane Jacobs looms large as a Joan of Arc battling the forces of “urban renewal” to save the life of the city. This was a world premiere worth celebrating in public, so I traveled to the Annex neighborhood movie house which, saved by the Hot Docs festival a few years ago, is now a year-round home for documentary cinema. It was packed, the opening cheers deafening, the popcorn plentiful. After saving Greenwich Village, Jacobs had moved to Toronto for her retirement, only to be pressed into service again to stop (successfully) its planned Spadina freeway. If you reside in a livable city today, thank Jane Jacobs. And lest you forget, writing after the mostly failed bombings in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood in September,
Fernando León de Aranoa’s Política, manual de instrucciones (left) and Matt Tyrnauer’s Citizen Jane: Battle for the City (right).
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Deepak Rauniyar’s White Sun was funded by Nepal, Holland, Qatar, and the United States.
New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik posted in his “New York’s Sane Response to Terror” that the bomber’s swift capture and New York’s urban calm should remind everyone of Jane Jacobs’s principle that “there are many advantages in having eyes on the street.” The documentary didn’t quite do her justice, spending too much time and effort on Robert Moses himself (he must predictably show up more often in the archive) and on global glosses on super-urbanization. There was a reference to an earlier five-hour cut and, yes, I wish I’d seen that one. In the age of tech gentrification and the forced suburbanization of so many cities, Citizen Jane could have gone much further to empower its audience. Interestingly, Brazilian director Kieber Mendonça Filho tried to do just that in the melodramatic Aquarius through the figure of Clara (Sonia Braga), a family matriarch engaged in pitched battle with a developer who wants to tear down the beach-side Rio building where she is the sole remaining tenant. There was tremendous support for the film by those who had admired Filho’s earlier Neighboring Sounds (2013); having missed it, I found myself instead perplexed by their enthusiasm. Don’t get me wrong: it’s always a pleasure to watch Braga onscreen. But with Filho’s heroine and villains 86
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drawn in such broad strokes, and with Braga’s sex appeal and celebrity used to rather peculiar effect, Aquarius played like a stacked deck, replete with cartoonish officials, bickering children, and even a golden-hearted male prostitute. For this viewer, that added up to a heavy-handed misfire despite its engaging premise and always-charismatic star. Though film festivals are often a poor site for thematic exploration, as themes seldom surface clearly in their goldpanning culture, former Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television director Helga Stephenson pointed me to a noticeable emphasis on father-daughter relations this year. It was a dynamic played for laughs as well as tears and seen in films large and small. Prominent in German director Maren Ade’s runaway hit Toni Erdmann—wait for the next FQ for more on that—where the corporate consultant daughter is plagued by a ’68-era dad determined to derail her toxic capitalism, it popped up elsewhere, too. Deepak Rauniyar’s quiet drama White Sun (Seto Surya), a Nepalese civil war family drama produced with funding from Nepal, Holland, Qatar, and the United States (Danny Glover’s Louverture Films), turned on a father-daughter mystery and a daughter–father-in-law burden. And even
renowned Rumanian director Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation (Bacalaureat) turned on a father’s obsession with his daughter’s exam scores as a way to get her out of the country, away from a system of corruption and, not so incidentally, from her new boyfriend. In the end, the Toronto International Film Festival did what it always does best: turn out the city for a celebration
of cinema. With a new festival zone surrounding its shiny Bell Lightbox center, replete with music, crowds, and redcarpet vantage points, TIFF began to look like a megaCannes. Don’t be deceived. The reason it is still a great festival is precisely because filmmakers adore the genuine and generous audience responses that Toronto has always delivered. May that never change.
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