Topical documentaries and a fourth version of \u2018A Star is Born\u2019 stand out.<\/b>
\nThe Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which wraps up its 10-day run Sept. 16, showcases 342 films, including features and shorts. I saw a goodly 20 of them, sometimes four per day. I\u2019m not boasting. Some of my more intrepid colleagues saw five and six a day. And that includes midnight movies. Good luck with that.
This was the first Toronto festival of the #MeToo era, and its influence was everywhere. All official attendees were handed cards titled \u201cSafety & Respect at TIFF\u201d in which a \u201cfair and equitable\u201d code of conduct was laid out, with a phone number and website to confidentially report wrongdoing. The festival also announced it will make public the gender and race of all members of its selection committee, programmers, and consultants. It was reported that about 36 percent of the 342 movies in the festival were directed by women, up 3 percent from last year.
On Sept. 8, hundreds of women and men assembled downtown for the Share Her Journey Rally to protest the low representation of women filmmakers in the entertainment industry. It was noted that 4 percent of directors of the top films from 2007 through 2017 were female. A documentary about gender inequality in Hollywood called \u00ab\u00a0This Changes Everything\u00a0\u00bb was screened. In it, Natalie Portman says, \u201cI\u2019ve worked with two female directors on features, and one is myself.\u201d
Politically themed movies were also a fixture of the festival, many of them documentaries. Errol Morris\u2019s \u00ab\u00a0American Dharma\u00a0\u00bb focused, some complained too nonconfrontationally, on political consultant Steve Bannon; Werner Herzog\u2019s \u00ab\u00a0Meeting Gorbach\u00a0\u00bbev is a genial sit-down with the former Soviet president; \u00ab\u00a0Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes\u00a0\u00bb is a devastating look at the late Fox News chairman and chief executive officer, all the more so for being, well, fair and balanced. The jokey title of Michael Moore\u2019s \u00ab\u00a0Fahrenheit 11\/9\u00a0\u00bb refers to Nov. 9,2016, the day after Donald Trump was elected president \u2013 and the film is the usual Moore mashup of screed and scandal.
It\u2019s best when it deals with the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Mich., and other predominantly black cities, in which, in 2014, under the aegis of Michigan\u2019s Republican governor and Trump crony Rick Snyder, Flint\u2019s water supply was switched from the clean Lake Huron to the toxic Flint River, poisoning thousands of adults and children. But this outrage began under the Obama administration, and Moore flays him as well. (We see Barack Obama arriving in Flint and taking a drink of water as he tells a huge crowd that the water is now safe. A close-up of his glass reveals he barely took a sip).
But Moore has a penchant for undermining his own best intentions: When he shows us newsreels of Hitler speechifying and inserts Trump\u2019s verbiage, whose cause is he really serving? (Seeing Frederick Wiseman\u2019s fine documentary \u00ab\u00a0Monrovia, Indiana\u00a0\u00bb right after the Moore film was like a palate cleanser. Wiseman is the least coercive of directors).
I was also witness to a live \u201cpolitical\u201d event: At a post-screening party for the movie about astronaut \u00ab\u00a0Neil Armstrong, First Man,\u00a0\u00bb Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, an accomplished amateur boxer, was asked by an American journalist if he would please \u2013 please \u2013 step into the ring with Trump. Trudeau was quick to answer: \u201cI\u2019ve retired.\u201d
And what of \u201cFirst Man\u201d? I saw it on the outskirts of Toronto in a stadium-sized IMAX theater \u2013 the first ever built \u2013 and the experience was, if nothing else, immersive. Damien Chazelle\u2019s first movie since \u201cLa La Land\u201d stars Ryan Gosling (he\u2019s Canadian!) as Armstrong, and the movie is best when it\u2019s literally flying high. The ground-level domestic drama is less compelling, and Gosling seems so intent on playing down the heroics that at times he comes across as near-catatonic. But Armstrong\u2019s two sons were in attendance and endorsed the film. Said Mark Armstrong,\u201d I\u2019m here to tell you they got it right.\u201d \u2018Star is Born\u2019 impresses \u2013 for awhile
The other big hoo-ha at the festival was \u00ab\u00a0A Star is Born,\u00a0\u00bb the fourth filmed iteration of that classic chestnut about a male star hitting bottom as his lady love hits the heights. Bradley Cooper, who also debuts as a director, stars as a down-and-out rocker, and Lady Gaga is his singer paramour. Both are impressive, and the first hour or so, a high-style swirl of romance and performance, is more than that. It should not come as any surprise that Lady Gaga (real name: Stefani Germanotta) is a good actor: Singer-performers often are (Frank Sinatra, Bette Midler, Willie Nelson, etc.). But the relentless downward spiral of this old-style story, even in its new-style trappings, becomes wearying.
Speaking at a press conference for the film, Lady Gaga, connecting to her own experience, said, \u201c I think that fame is very unnatural…. And the truth is, people think that we change, but it\u2019s not us that changes \u2013 it\u2019s everyone around us that changes.\u201d
A slew of major directors, as usual, was represented in Toronto, but I was not alone in thinking, as the days wore on, that a towering masterpiece was not in the offing. Lots of movies had terrific passages, but the best movie I\u2019ve seen here, front to back, is Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s semi-autobiographical \u00ab\u00a0Roma,\u00a0\u00bb shot entirely in black and white and set in the early 1970s in the middle-class Roma district of Mexico City. The film focuses not only on a well-to-do family but equally on the nanny (played by non-actress Yalitza Aparicio) who lives with them and cares for the children.
It\u2019s beautifully felt, but because the action is almost always filmed in medium shot, utilizing long, slow pans, I often felt oddly abstracted from the characters. Cuar\u00f3n has had an astonishingly versatile career \u2013 among other films, \u201cA Little Princess,\u201d \u201cY Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n,\u201d \u201cChildren of Men,\u201d \u201cHarry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,\u201d \u201cGravity\u201d \u2013 but clearly this is his most personal movie and one that at its best draws closely on the plangent, humane neo-realist tradition of the Italian director Vittorio De Sica in such films as \u201cThe Bicycle Thief\u201d and \u201cUmberto D.\u201d
\u201cI wanted to look into the past from the standpoint of the present,\u201d Cuar\u00f3n said in a post-screening interview. \u201cI wanted to come to terms with the women, the country that formed me.\u201d
Another semi-autobiographical black-and-white opus was \u00ab\u00a0Cold War,\u00a0\u00bb from the Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, whose \u201cIda\u201d won the Oscar for best foreign language film. It gets my vote here for best first half of a movie, but, in its depiction of a romance gone to pieces in the cold war 1950s, it unravels along with the relationship.
Mike Leigh was represented at the festival by \u00ab\u00a0Peterloo,\u00a0\u00bb a sprawling, uneven epic about the Peterloo massacre of Aug. 16,1819, in which 60,000 people demonstrating peacefully for electoral reform in Manchester, England, were brutally set upon by the king\u2019s forces. It takes a while to get going but, as is often true with Leigh\u2019s period films (\u201cTopsy-Turvy,\u201d \u201cMr. Turner\u201d), you feel as if you\u2019ve been airlifted into the past. It\u2019s not just the costumes and sets in this film that are in period. It\u2019s the faces.
\u00ab\u00a0If Beale Street Could Talk,\u00a0\u00bb Barry Jenkins\u2019s highly anticipated follow-up to \u201cMoonlight,\u201d extends that film\u2019s almost trancelike stylistics in this adaptation of James Baldwin\u2019s 1974 novel about a young black couple where the man has been falsely charged with rape. Jenkins is essentially a director of moods, and his films, as touching as they often are, have a tendency to drift off into the ozone. He etherealizes experience.
With all this heavy-duty seriousness on the screen, I welcomed the regular clamor of the ever-present fans in the street. Bar none, this city has the friendliest fans of any festival I\u2019ve ever attended.
Aside from some of the movies, of course, my favorite takeaway from Toronto came just before a gala screening of \u00ab\u00a0Outlaw King,\u00a0\u00bb a Scottish period piece, heavy on the mud and the chain mail, starring Chris Pine. Two young Asian girls, standing just behind the barricades, held up a sign that read \u201cPine Nuts.\u201d
They looked ecstatically happy.<\/p>\n

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