CINEMA CENTRAL

ALL THINGS TIFF, FROM THE POLITICS OF PROGRAMMING TO THE CLAMOUR FOR GLAMOUR.

From Sept. 7th–17th, Toronto will be at the centre of the cinematic universe, but is that the result of artistic ambition or corporate sponsorship?

The 42nd edition of the Toronto International Film Festival will feel the want of Claire Denis.

The revered French filmmaker – one of the greatest living artists of the medium – has a new movie this year: Let the Sunshine In, a loose adaptation of the Roland Barthes book, A Lover’s Discourse. It stars Juliette Binoche, and premiered in May to acclaim at the Director’s Fortnight sidebar at Cannes. But TIFF won’t have it. TIFF won’t have Noah Baumbach’s Meyerowitz Stories, either, nor Philippe Garrel’s Lover for a Day – both conspicuous absences. It won’t have Before We Vanish, the latest film by longtime TIFF mainstay Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and it won’t have the latest features by Arnaud Desplechin (Ismael’s Ghosts), Serge Bozon (Madame Hyde) and Todd Haynes (Wonderstruck) – works by some of the most important directors of our time.

Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying will skip TIFF and premiere weeks later at the New York Film Festival. Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel will too. Of course nobody expects Toronto to screen everything – and some decisions are no doubt beyond the festival’s control. But however you look at it, this year, what TIFF lacks is more astonishing than what it has.

When TIFF announced in February that its 2017 lineup would be reduced by 20%, the industry received the news warmly and with enthusiasm: the prevailing complaint about the festival among regular attendees had for many years been its unwieldy scale, which was difficult to navigate for critics and audiences alike. Filmmakers – as well as the studios and distributors who represent them – meanwhile approved of the alleviation of competitive pressure. Movies have a tendency to disappear amid the TIFF deluge, as they vie in vain for hotly sought attention, and the promise of fewer films naturally means greater opportunity for notice by the public eye. “We’re challenged to balance providing a generous choice of movies with maintaining a strong curatorial focus,” Artistic Director Cameron Bailey said. “For 2017 we’re offering a refreshed, more tightly curated edition.”

Quality over quantity seems a sensible policy. Besides which, there are economic factors to consider – factors that, while the festival maintains its reductions were motivated by creative preference, obviously had an impact. A report presented to board members last month divulged some alarming statistics around festival attendance: nearly 3,000 fewer people patronized TIFF in 2016 than the year before, a sharp decline the Toronto Star describes as the first in recent memory, while yearround sales for new release and cinematheque screenings have plummeted in the same period by more than 27 per cent. These cuts to programming may not be austerity measures, exactly. But it’s apparent there are more compelling reasons for the festival to change.

What does the leaner, more diminutive TIFF look like? The numbers seem, at first glance, rather reassuring: a whopping 339 films will still screen at the festival – 255 features, 84 shorts – as compared to a total of 396 in 2016. The glut has been pruned; there’s nonetheless much offered. More than 40 features were pared away from the surfeit. For most they will hardly be missed. Only when one begins to scrutinize what remains does the problem with TIFF Lite reveal itself.

TIFF will have its much-publicized Special Presentations of movies set to be released theatrically across the country literally days after they premiere, like Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! and David Gordon Green’s Stronger. It will have big, glamorous Gala screenings of films without artistic merit whose only excuse for being programmed – one presumes – is that the famous people in them have agreed to show up and walk the red carpet, like the Bryan Cranston Intouchables remake The Upside.

TIFF will have programmes rife with mediocrity: Contemporary World Cinema remains forever the most reliable dumping ground for undistinguished middlebrow foreign-language pictures, while the award-bestowing Platform returns for a third year without any clear identity or point. Even a programme with an unmistakable character, like the beloved Midnight Madness, sags beneath a bit of anodyne dead weight. The presence of some films feel distinctly like favours to studios – a not uncommon courtesy extended by festivals everywhere to their more influential partners.

With the exception of Wavelengths – far and away the festival’s strongest programme, and the only one whose seal of approval is a dependable testament to a film’s quality – the TIFF slate is as much a picture of compromise between merit and politics as it’s ever been. A more tightly curated TIFF Lite is decidedly not.

At TIFF instalments past I have sat stupefied through vacuous mid-budget dramatic comedies and undercooked actor passion-projects that studios would ultimately bury. In awe I’ve watched Australian coming-of-age stories that looked and felt like commercials for laundry detergent, and have skulked out of starstudded train wrecks demoralized about the state of contemporary American film. None of these movies had any business being part of a serious film festival – and indeed they never would have been were film festivals, even serious ones, programmed strictly on the basis of quality. Of course merit is a factor in all programming decisions, but programming is also unavoidably political: privileged parties demand special treatment, distributors and studios and filmmakers of high standing must be appeased, and consequently many unworthy films are extended invitations.

Year after year TIFF proudly fêtes masterpieces by some of the world’s most eminent artists. It also, as a matter of tradition, screens a lot of expensive and well-connected crap. They could easily trim such movies if they wanted to reduce their lineup of its least deserving surplus. But they will not.

Now it may seem self-evident that TIFF’s predilection for a certain kind of unremarkable studio movie is induced by mere avarice – moviegoers do gravitate, after all, to fashionable celebrities and the mainstream-inclined films in which they tend to star. But what this assumption takes for granted is that TIFF is an ordinary moviegoing experience: that people think of titles premiering at the festival the same way they think about what’s on the multiplex marquee. That simply isn’t true.

TIFF – especially of late – has a distinctly rarefied air. It’s a niche activity, comparable not to any old soda-andpopcorn blockbuster matinee but to more esoteric pursuits. It’s like an evening of theatre or a night at the ballet. It’s costly, festive and decidedly highbrow. People don’t so much pay to see any one specific film: they “go to TIFF” in the same way one might go to the opera. Does it matter much to the flyby-night opera patron whether it happens to be Carmen or La Boheme? It’s a special occasion. The content matters less than the nature of the event.

This attitude is reflected in the audiences one finds at TIFF’s most lavish features. No matter how obscure the filmmaker, no matter how difficult the technique, no matter how arduous or demanding the work, people will turn up – and turn up in enormous numbers. I’ve seen packed houses for Pedro Costa and Hong Sang-soo where I’d wager less than 10 per cent of those present had any idea what they were about to see. I’ve attended sold-out screenings of six-hour experimental features. I’ve witnessed 500 people enjoy a Q&A with Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass.

In a sense, this is the best thing about TIFF. It exposes people with set ideas about film to a kind of film that doesn’t play anywhere else in this country. The weirder or more abstract the movie, in my experience, the more satisfied the moviegoer – the weirdness perhaps confirming that this was no mere movie but was in fact an encounter with genuine Art.

Probably the middlebrow star vehicle and mainstream gala spectacular persist as TIFF fixtures for a more dispiriting reason: optics. It looks good to have A-list celebrities descending upon the city for a weekend, cavorting with trustees or men responsible for signing road-closure permits. And I suppose the executives at Bell and Visa who avail themselves of sponsorship privileges in festival-adjacent hotel bars all week are pleased to see George Clooney or whichever big name a handful of Special Presentation slots were able to secure. Red carpets make a good impression, undoubtedly, and I imagine reassure the hands that sign the cheques that their small fortunes in annual donations have been put to good use.

These are the needs and obligations that prevent TIFF from pruning its lineup where pruning is actually warranted. These are the realities that lay bare in what ways TIFF lacks.

You can’t very well dazzle corporate sponsors with an appearance by Serge Bozon or Philippe Garrel. So in this respect the lousy Daniel Craig movie will always matter to the ongoing operation of the festival – while the new Claire Denis movie, however superlative, now and always does not.