WHAT A BASH!
A downsized TIFF unveils first batch of fest gems,
Toronto may have slipped behind Berlin as the city with the world’s largest film festival, but TIFF still plans to show a lot of quality cinema in September.
The 2017 Toronto International Film Festival will be a 20 per cent slimmer affair — it will fittingly screen Alexander Payne’s social satire Downsizing — yet there are many Oscar hopefuls and other hot tickets among the first batch of features announced Tuesday for the 42nd edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, Sept. 7 to 17.
“Berlin ran 260 features this year, so we’re going to run 240, and we ran 300 last year . . . but in terms of audience, I think we’re probably still the largest-attended film festival in the world,” said Piers Han- dling, TIFF’s director and CEO.
The 47 titles unveiled at TIFF Bell Lightbox by Handling and TIFF artistic director Cameron Bailey, most of them world or North American premieres, are for Galas and Special Presentations, the festival’s two main programs.
That’s down from the 60 to 70 titles Handling and Bailey usually reveal at their first summer news conference, but they felt they had to respond to industry and press concerns that the festival was getting harder to attend and navigate.
TIFF decided this year to drop two outlying venues and to go in for what Bailey called a “tighter, more focused” slate of films.
That still leaves room for a lot of gems — “There is some very cool stuff here,” Bailey said — which TIFF is announcing now and in the weeks to come. The current batch of titles includes some obvious Oscar bait and some of the most buzzedabout films at the Cannes and Sundance festivals:
Downsizing (Alexander Payne): Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig and Laura Dern star in the sci-fi satire of a man who literally shrinks himself in the hope of enjoying a cheaper and nicer lifestyle.
Suburbicon (George Clooney): Matt Damon also leads this home invasion comedy/mystery by his buddy Clooney, whose co-writers include Joel and Ethan Coen. Julianne Moore and Oscar Isaac co-star.
Battle of the Sexes (Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris): Emma Stone and Steve Carell star in the dramatic replay of the globally broadcast 1973 tennis tussle between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.
Darkest Hour (Joe Wright): Gary Oldman is Winston Churchill and Kristin Scott Thomas is Clementine Churchill in a period drama titled for a famous Churchill speech near the start of the Second World War.
Art-museum satire The Square (Ruben Ostlund) and AIDS memoir BPM (Beats Per Minute) (Robin Campillo): The respective Palme d’Or and Grand Prix winners at the most recent Cannes Film Festival.
Call Me by Your Name ( Luca Guadagnino): The romantic gay coming-of-ager starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet ( Interstellar), which electrified Sundance last January. Also on tap for TIFF 2017 are two of that fest’s other hits, Mudbound (Dee Rees) and Novitiate (Maggie Betts).
Stronger (David Gordon Green): Jake Gyllenhaal plays a survivor of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, with a performance reputed to be his ticket to his first Best Actor nomination.
Victoria and Abdul (Stephen Frears): The British helmer returns with his Philomena star Judi Dench, who again plays Queen Victoria, a role that won her a Best Actress nomination for Mrs. Brown. Dench plays opposite Bollywood star Ali Fazal in the story of an unusual friendship.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh): Big title, bigger Oscar buzz for this offbeat dramedy about a mother taking the law into her own hands to find her daughter’s killer. Frances McDormand leads; her co-stars include Woody Harrelson, Peter Dinklage, Sam Rockwell and Abbie Cornish.
The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro): Could this filmed-in-Toronto romantic drama be another Beauty and the Beast? Sounds like it, with Maudie’s Sally Hawkins courting Best Actress attention for her role as a lonely laboratory janitor who falls for a grotesque merman (Doug Jones) during America’s Cold War era. (And speaking of monster matches, Jennifer Lawrence has some weird invited guests in mother!, Darren Aronofsky’s Montreal-filmed, TIFF-bound horror film.)
Two Canadian films are among the 47 features TIFF announced Tuesday: the documentary Long Time Running by Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, chronicling the final tour of beloved Canuck rock band the Tragically Hip; and the animated drama The Breadwinner by Nora Twomey, the story of an Afghan girl who disguises herself as a boy to help provide for her family.
The Breadwinner is produced by actress/director Angelina Jolie, whose new film First They Killed My Father is also coming to TIFF. Jolie directs this biographical account by Cambodian author and activist Loung Ung about the horror of life under the rule of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime.
Besides Jolie and Clooney, three other actors-turned-directors are bringing fresh films to TIFF: Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, a comedy starring Saoirse Ronan ( Brooklyn), which will open Special Presenta- tions; Andy Serkis’s romantic drama Breathe, starring Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy; and Mélanie Laurent’s Plonger, a romance starring Gilles Lellouche and Maria Valverde.
This year’s gala TIFF closing film will be C’est la Vie!, a wedding-disaster comedy directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, who previously made the international oddcouple hit The Intouchables. It stars Canada’s Suzanne Clément ( Mommy) and Lellouche.
An opening-night gala feature hasn’t yet been named, but Bailey said it should be announced by the middle of August.