Toronto Festival: The Civilized Alternative to Cannes

Here during the 14th running of the Festival of Festivals, the odds in favor of the dedicated moviegoer have been nothing less than startling. It’s enough to make one superstitious.

“In Country,” the gala festival opener directed by Toronto’s own Norman Jewison, was what Canadian festival programmers dream about: a warmly received, moving film headed for widespread exposure and made by a Canadian director.

So far, on a daily average since opening night, if you picked your way carefully, it’s been possible to see four exceptional movies out of four, or five out of five each day. Those odds seem pretty formidable, considering the range of nationalities in this best-of-the-best list: France, Australia, Taiwan, the United States, Italy, Poland and Canada; features and documentaries; the known, the unknown and the triumphantly discovered.

Already there’s been a sleeper, “Roger and Me,” a modest-looking documentary whose subject--the death of the one-industry town of Flint, Mich., after General Motors closed three plants and laid off 30,000 workers--is far-reaching and tragic, but with a touch so warm, so piercingly hilarious, that film maker Michael Moore is finding himself the object of hot pursuit from every small distribution company here.

It’s like the documentary version of the rush that “sex, lies, and videotape’s” Steven Soderbergh got at the U.S. Festival in Park City, Utah, and the genuinely modest Moore, a former political magazine editor whose persona is rather like that of a more political Garrison Keillor, seems understandably stunned. Not even his reception at the Telluride Festival the weekend before, where they had to tack on three additional screenings for the overflow crowds, quite prepared the first-time film maker for this.

“In Country,” which opens in Los Angeles on Friday, seemed to set the tone of profound audience reaction: Its closing moments at the black-marble Vietnam Veterans Memorial reduced the majority of the opening nighters to uncontrollable tears. Director Jewison likes to call it a healing film, and it may be just that. It’s the story of a spirited 17-year-old Kentucky girl who, in 1989, tries to understand something about her young father who died in Vietnam before she was born and about the war that killed him.

Centering on one splintered family and tenderly adapted from Bobbie Ann Mason’s semi-autobiographical novel, “In Country” is all the more interesting for its seeming randomness and loose-limbed structure. And although the strong presence and solid performance by Bruce Willis as the girl’s Vietnam War vet uncle will probably be the film’s commercial magnet, it’s British actress Emily Lloyd’s shadings and insights as the mercurial Sam that audiences are likely to come away talking about.

Heavy drama is not the only thing scoring with Toronto audiences. “The Icicle Thief,” a convulsively funny satire that manages to savage contemporary TV and Italian neo-realism with equal invention, is another of the early hits. Maurizio Nichetti, the author, director and star who plays both an earnest, mustachioed director and his own central character, is a real find, with a comic identity as ingratiating as any of Jacques Tati’s memorable bumblers.

What seems amazing to American eyes are these Toronto crowds. They’re eclectic, they’re faithful, they’re informed and they are undeniably dogged. With the word of mouth that came with “Roger and Me,” it wasn’t surprising that about 100 people were turned away from its evening screening in a small theater. What’s amazing is to see an equally patient line stretching around a block at 9:30 on a Saturday morning, and to learn that another hundred didn’t make it into “The Icicle Thief” at a remote 950-seat theater away from the center hub of screenings.

As one global veteran of Third World festivals commented wryly, “I never saw such lines, not even under socialism!”

Subject matter doesn’t daunt these crowds. Describe a film in the catalogue as a “quiet, gentle reflection on a strange physical and spiritual voyage through India,” and Alain Corneau’s masterly “Nocturne Indienne” starring “Betty Blue’s” leading actor Jean-Hugues Anglade fills up before noon on a Sunday morning. Explain that the witty and winning documentary “The Big Bang,” by long-absent director Jim Toback, gets its mixed bag of subjects (astronomer Fred Hess, basketball player Darryl Dawkins, violinist Eugene Fodor and more) into discussions of life, death, creation, orgasm, love and madness and you get a capacity audience at 9:30 on a humid Sunday morning. Amazing.

Toronto has been sneaking up on the position it holds today. It began like many hopeful festivals, a slightly insular and underfunded dream in the minds of two men, Dusty Cohl and William Marshall. It has emerged, particularly in the last five years, as a premiere flagship festival: the civilized alternative to Cannes’ hurly-burly, the place to catch up with the cream of that festival, with Berlin, Montreal and even the Telluride programming. Unpretentious and warm, its programmers and directors have forged it into a festival with an eye, a conscience, wit and, apparently, wherewithal.

As if to underline that, as the new week’s outpouring of films began, Ontario Premier David Peterson announced the merging of the 20-year-old Ontario Film Institute with the Festival of Festivals. What does Peterson’s flowery bureaucratese really mean? The first steps toward creation of a cinematheque, a consummation devoutly to be wished . . . in any civilized film community.