For the 30th Toronto International Film Festival, The A.V. Club dispatched Noel Murray and Scott Tobias for a 10-day cinematic odyssey. Throughout the festival, they contributed regular dispatches to the A.V. Club blog (avclub.com/content/blog). Now that the dust has settled, they can look back on the memorable images and themes that surfaced at this year's festival, and how they reflect the current state of world cinema.
Noel Murray: I love the Toronto Film Festival about a dozen different ways, but primarily because after a week of watching almost nothing but significant movies, I really get a sense of the current state of cinema. During the fests, trends develop, themes recur, and certain actors pop up again and again. It's fair to say that each year's TIFF program documents what the global film community thinks is important, both aesthetically and in terms of the real world.
Let's start with aesthetics. This year's slate included super-slick action movies like the French thriller Banlieue 13, high-toned biopics like Capote, and deliberate, pensive art films like Hou Hsiao-hsien's Three Times. Then there were hodgepodge films like The Grönholm Method, which begins with a visually arresting split-screen sequence, then devolves into something plainer and more stagy, like the play it's based on. The Grönholm Method has a great premise, as a room full of corporate-executive candidates play psychological games to determine who's most fit for the job, but once it settles into the classical style of long-shot/medium-shot/close-up, the film gets harder and harder to watch. The script's just not built for cinema.
Which raises the first question: What makes a movie cinematic?
Scott Tobias: To answer broadly: What makes a movie cinematic is whatever sets it apart from television and theater. Is it necessary, for example, to "open up" a play for the screen? I'd argue "yes," though making a play cinematic doesn't necessarily mean making it less wordy, or otherwise compromising the text that made it great theater. Classic screen adaptations of plays like Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? and Glengarry Glen Ross don't necessarily hide their theatrical roots, but they're dynamically staged in a way that wouldn't be possible under the curtain. Contrast that with Proof, which premièred at this year's festival after being pulled from Oscar consideration last year. David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play has been left more or less intact, yet it's been adapted to the screen without a shred of imagination, so it falls curiously flat. The staging is so rudimentary that the film could have been one of those live Playhouse 90 TV shows that John Frankenheimer shot in the '50s.
When you talk about "cinematic," what really matters to me are images. With the rise of digital video and the still-looming specter of digital projection, images have become a negligible concern in some quarters, taking a back seat to budgetary concerns or misguided notions of indie realism. Yet at the same time, technology has advanced to such a degree that photography (with an assist from special effects) can produce such spectacular illusions that people take miracles for granted. Buyers and critics looking for the next Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon generally turned their noses up (or just plain bailed) on Duelist, the new film by Korean action maestro Lee Myung-se. But while the plot may be silly and convoluted, no film I saw at the festival was as visually dynamic. High style is a given in Asian action cinema, but Lee's blitzkrieg of effects (changing film speeds, stuttering freeze frames, and striking bursts of color) are close to avant-garde, and as good an approximation of graphic novel as the movie version of Frank Miller's Sin City.
So what images at the festival seared your retinas this year, Noel? I have a list, too, but I'll let you go first.
NM: I have a feeling we'll have one particular image atop both of our lists: a shocking scene at the climax of Michael Haneke's dread-filled bourgeois nightmare Caché. But we really shouldn't talk about that one.
So I'll cite the expressive tracking shots through the bloody tableaux of The President's Last Bang, a fact-based Korean thriller that contrasts opulent buildings with the stink people create within them. Also the flat shots of dolls being manufactured in Steven Soderbergh's awkward low-budget project Bubble; the superimposed faces of Forest Whitaker and Juliette Binoche, representing the inherent gender split of Christian faith in Abel Ferrara's misunderstood Mary; an unexpected car-and-scooter chase in the Dardenne brothers' L'Enfant; the brief glimpse of a serial killer playing "Where Is Thumbkin?" in Sympathy For Lady Vengeance, and the title objects in The Squid And The Whale.
I also think of two documentaries: the fairly straightforward stat-fest We Feed The World, which contains a harrowing scene at a chicken-processing plant, and the abstract John & Jane, which returns again and again to shots of Indian customer-service operators sleeping in hovels while they dream about fluorescent lights and dropped calls.
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