On my last day at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, I attended a cinematic revival in the form of Mona Fastvold’s “The Testament of Ann Lee.” A rousing portrait of the titular 18th-century religious leader, the founder of the Christian sect known as the Shakers, the film is a balm. At times, the festival felt similarly revitalizing. The French critic André Bazin once likened festival-going to “an amazing albeit hard-working retreat, with cinema as its unifying spiritual focus.” Among other things, events like Toronto are reminders that despite the industry’s gloom and doom, what matters is what is on the screen.
Or, as I’ve said before and will keep on preaching: The movies are not the business, though you wouldn’t necessarily know that from much of what passes as entertainment journalism. The adage that “if it bleeds, it leads” also applies to that media sphere, which tends to focus on and even thrive on bummer news, whether the topic is the threat of A.I., the future of exhibition or the failure of yet another unimaginative studio release. I get it. Good news just isn’t sexy. The problem is, when you keep hearing that the sky is falling, it can be hard not to believe it, even when critics are extolling the art or just a good time, and researchers find that adolescents still like going to movies (really).
The kids and the olds also like festivals, to judge from both the crowds swarming theaters and the long lines outside the Criterion Mobile Closet, which for a few days was parked near the Lightbox, the event’s headquarters. That people are willing to spend hours waiting to snag rush tickets or to browse the Criterion Closet speaks to the draw of selective events like Toronto. Almost anyone with the means can eventually see the latest Marvel movie, but only a happy few (thousand) can catch an early look at a festival offering like “No Other Choice,” from Park Chan-wook (“Oldboy”). One colleague waited 90 minutes to see Park’s movie, a tonally wild, often funny, timely yet bleakly evergreen tale of social class, desperation and murder.
Despite all the blood on the screen and all their behind-the-scenes intrigue, festivals are in the good-news business, or that’s the hope. They advance not only the industry’s interests but also national ones. The Canadian government’s official website, for instance, boasts that the event brings in more than 700,000 people (not everyone is seeing movies, mind you) and more than $100 million. In turn, regional and federal government grants provide money to the festival’s umbrella organization, TIFF. (It’s the circle of life.) Last year, the Canadian government announced that it would invest millions more in a “global content marketplace” where work can be bought and sold. It’s set to begin next year.
By then, I hope that the kinks that continue to plague attendees — a substandard ticketing system, a bafflingly terrible schedule that offered a deluge of choices or not enough — can be rectified. And while one of the sustaining attractions of this festival is that it has always included a bounty of work, a commitment to abundance does have pitfalls. It takes a lot of movies to fill up 11 days of screenings that start early in the morning and end after midnight. As a result, lazy personality-driven documentaries like Billy Corben’s “Canceled: The Paula Deen Story,” about the disgraced food celebrity, end up being presented along with “Cover-Up,” Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s smart, rigorous doc about the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh (a former staffer of The New York Times and The New Yorker).
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