This minor fracas hardly qualifies as an international incident, but anyone reading the Toronto papers, which reflected Canada’s increasing dismay with the war drums beating in Bush’s America, could be forgiven if he read a bit of geopolitical significance into this tempest in a teapot.
On the one hand, Toronto is a festival in thrall to Hollywood glitz. The studios, promoting their fall movies, produced plenty of star power for the locals to gape at. Susan Sarandon was on hand to boost “Moonlight Mile,” Adam Sandler appeared for the screening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s offbeat romantic comedy “Punch-Drunk Love” and, even though Sharon Stone wasn’t in any movies here, she popped up in the audience at the “work in progress” screening of “8 Mile,” Eminem’s charismatic acting debut.
But the real world kept asserting itself amid the glamour. September 11th occurred in the middle of the festival last year (all screenings were halted for a day and a half, and all subsequent parties canceled), and its presence still lingered in the air. This year the anthology film “11'09"01–September 11” was screened on the anniversary. The long, uneven movie was more a Rorschach test than a work of art–it consists of 11 films from filmmakers all over the world, each of whom was asked to make a film that ran exactly 11 minutes, 9 seconds and 1 frame long–and prompted wildly divergent reactions. Sean Penn directed the U.S. segment, a parable starring Ernest Borgnine as a lonely widower living in the shadow of the Twin Towers. No one seemed quite certain what its point was, but it was generally conceded one of the weakest. The strongest, for me, was from the director of “Amores Perros,” the Mexican Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, a scary, non-narrative recreation of the tragedy that ended with a salient question written in Arabic and English: “Does God’s light guide us or blind us?”
American foreign policy took strong hits in both the Egyptian and the English segments of the 9-11 anthology–the latter documented U.S. involvement in the assassination of Chilean President Salvador Allende, which eerily occurred on a Sept. 11–but America’s homegrown agent provocateur Michael Moore was just as scathing in his strong, funny, sometimes irritating “Bowling for Columbine.” An examination of our culture of guns, fear and consumerism, this nonfiction film contrasted the United States and Canada, where death by guns is almost unheard of.
Shocking for entirely different reasons was Larry Clark’s “Ken Park” (codirected by Ed Lachman), a fictional film about deracinated teenagers and their dysfunctional families that, in terms of sexual explicitness, makes his controversial first film, “Kids,” look like a Disney movie. You cannot go much farther than Clark goes. Speaking of Disney, this week it is releasing the English-language version of the most enchanting movie I saw in Toronto"–“Spirited Away.” The work of the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, it’s a transfixing tale of a 10-year-old girl struggling to escape from a nightmarish spirit world. It was the rare film that everyone agreed on: this was movie magic.
