27th Toronto International Film Festival - Festival Wraps

TAKE ONE, Dec, 2002 by Kathleen Cummins

7:15 p.m. Wait in line for an hour, politely, for David Cronenberg's creepily austere Spider. Lynne Redgrave sits behind me at the screening and because it's a Cronenberg film I'm unnerved. A Beautiful Mind it is not. No heartfelt speeches, no expository dialogue about paranoid schizophrenia, no CIA agents! Quite simply, it's a masterpiece.

Tuesday, September 10

10:00 a.m. Ryan Feldman's Folk, Larry Peloso's Prom Fight: The Marc Hall Story and Jennifer Alleyn's Les Rossy make for an interesting lineup of short documentaries. Folk stands out because of Feldman's ability to move effortlessly between humour and pathos, featuring his two very reluctant parents as subjects.

11:00 a.m. I wait in line patiently for the premiere of Edouardo Ponti's Italian-Canadian co-production, Between Strangers, starring his still gorgeous screen-icon mom, Sophia Loren, as well as Canadian divas Wendy Crewson and Deborah Kara Unger. Blessed with fabulous bones and screen charisma, Loren brings true magic to this troubled film, but when she's not on screen, we realize it can't be saved. In the film Loren plays a martyr/mother who makes the ultimate sacrifice for her daughter's future, and in a way her presence in this film is also an act of motherly love.

Wednesday, September 11

11:00 a.m. Anticipate Alanis Obomsawin's Is the Crown at War with Us? Single handedly, Obomsawin has established the Native-rights documentary in this country. However, unlike the powerful Richard Cardinal: Cry from the Diary of a Metis Child or Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, this film seems rushed and excessively one-sided. Obomsawin's mission as a filmmaker is significant and necessary, but here I felt a complex issue about racial and class politics among struggling Native and non-Native fishermen was being simplified.

Thursday, September 72

9:00 a.m. When I arrive for more PC shorts, I notice on the press list I'm the only journalist in attendance. There are about 10 people in the audience. Richard Fung's deconstrudtive and humourous Islands plays with star close-ups, campy dialogue and a sweeping musical score, as he revisits his uncle's experience as an "ethnic" movie extra in a 1950s Hollywood epic war/romance starring Deborah Kerr. If only this film could have opened for The Four Feathers. Despite annoying sound projection problems, which induces some viewers to leave, Quebec filmmaker Catherine Martin's 50-minute documentary Ocean is a near spiritual experience. Gorgeously shot in 35 mm by Carlos Ferrand, without voice-over narration and very few interviews, the film is an elegant and pensive cinematic ode to the culture of train travel.

Friday, September 13

My last day Running out of coupons brings mixed emotions. On one level there is a great sigh of relief, and on another level there is a feeling of anxiety. I realize it's all those films I didn't get to see. However, of the films I did see, I was often the only press person or one of a few in attendance, and so I have to wonder about Ebert's rants about not getting into the "key movies." I bet he didn't have trouble getting into Planet Africa films. And so, maybe it isn't that the festival is too big, maybe it's just that some of the movies are. Everything and everyone else gets lost amid the stardust, just like Richard Fung's indistinguishable Chinese uncle as a Japanese extra in a Hollywood star vehicle. In the end, everybody wants to go to America.