ST: That's wishful thinking, but you're right about the ways in which it satisfies as both art and conventional entertainment: It may be "neatly arranged," but that stark simplicity is also its greatest strength, because it situates violence as an essential component of the American character, almost like a hereditary trait. Oscar voters will likely be turned off, but A History Of Violence functions so smoothly as a genre film that it's the only auteur piece in Toronto with a chance for mainstream success.
As for the "importance" of Toronto relative to other festivals, that's definitely the industry talking. Granted, having the full force of the North American press behind a Toronto première can give prestige projects some early momentum in the Oscar race, but as the place to unveil the best in world cinema, Cannes still reigns supreme. Even as North American festivals go, Sundance attracts far more heat from distributors. In the six years I've been attending the festival for The A.V. Club, usually just one or two world premières a year are truly revelatory: Brokeback Mountain from this year (though that technically played a bit earlier in Venice), Sideways in 2004, Far From Heaven and Friday Night in 2002, Time Out in 2001, and Memento in 2000. The other big winners—and there seem to be nearly a dozen every year—are holdovers from Cannes or other places.
But the beauty of Toronto is that it's all things to all people: With 300-plus films on the menu, even the most voracious moviegoer can catch only a small fraction of the schedule, so everyone's experience at the festival is different, sometimes dramatically so. This year, for example, I played a game of follow-that-auteur, sticking to new films by reliable or semi-reliable known quantities like Tsai Ming-liang, Cronenberg, Martin Scorsese, Terry Gilliam, the Dardenne brothers, Abel Ferrara, Park Chan-wook, Michael Haneke, and so on, while taking a chance on certain buzz items, such as Nicolas Winding Refn's gritty crime trilogy Pusher, Jason Reitman's riotous spin-zone satire Thank You For Smoking, and the mordant Romanian black comedy The Death Of Mister Lazarescu. If you apply other scheduling philosophies—like only seeing films that currently have no distributor, or ones that feature Europeans engaging in desultory sex—your experience is as unique as a precious little snowflake.
What's your philosophy, Noel? Also, juice boxes: For kids only, or essential festival replenishment?
NM: For a quick burst of vitamin-laden refreshment without dirtying a glass, you can't beat a juice box. You also can't beat a movie that's connected to the culture at large, made by people who understand that some century-old cinematic techniques—like montage and dolly shots—are still in use because they're useful. I particularly like movies that capture a moment in one person's life the way Noah Baumbach's The Squid And The Whale does. It's set in 1986 and covers the first few months of his parents' divorce, which took place around the time he was going through an awkward late adolescence. Baumbach doesn't shy away from the painful moments, but he also puts them in the context of a movie, with impossibly funny dialogue and moments of rare magic when a pop song and a lighting cue hit each other at just the right angles.
I appreciate filmmakers devoted to rigorous formalism and "Art" with a capital A, and I have a soft spot for big, predictable middlebrow crowd-pleasers, which have a formalism of their own. But after digging through piles of both at Toronto every year, what I'm really looking for are filmmakers who step outside those disciplines to express something true and personal and direct.
And for you? More silent five-minute shots of empty rooms?
ST: Always trying to provoke me, aren't you? As a critic, I don't like to draw too many lines in the sand. Films tend to set their own aesthetic agenda, whether that means a succession of dick jokes or austere master shots from a stationary camera, and I prefer to be open to whatever goals they lay out for themselves. People like yourself who complain about long takes in movies by directors like Tsai Ming-liang, Aleksandr Sokurov, or Hou Hsiao-hsien—all of whom contributed stellar new work to this year's festival—usually harp on the lack of information on the screen. The logic goes, "If we've seen all that we need to understand in a shot, then why must we continue to look at it?" Of course, no one would think twice about museum patrons staring at a painting for many minutes at a time, but most of the movies we see (certainly everything from Hollywood) have conditioned us over the years to have different expectations. Unlearn, man!
As a case in point, Tsai's bleak new musical-comedy The Wayward Cloud opens with exactly the paint-peeling shot you describe: A five-minute take of an empty parking deck, which is eventually filled by two strangers passing each other, one a young woman in a nurse's uniform carrying a watermelon. In the next shot, she's splayed out half-naked on a bed with the melon between her legs, ready for some unimaginably kinky violation from a fellow porn star. Long takes like these are not only key to Tsai's deadpan comic style, but also help enforce a feeling of melancholy that pervades his characters' lives. I'll concede that some directors are guilty of empty formalism, but it's often rewarding for the viewer to be situated within a shot for more than a few seconds and given some space to think or soak in the atmosphere.
As the Toronto Film Festival proved yet again this year, there are many different kinds of experiences for the adventurous. Or to put it in culinary terms familiar to all festivalgoers: Dining on hot dogs and cheap Asian noodles are fine when you're on the go, but if you don't settle down for a sit-down meal every once in a while, you're not getting a balanced diet.
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