What makes a good movie anyway?
A few loud boos cut through the cheers inside the Palais des Festivals when Jacques Audiard’s immigrant drama Dheepan won the Palme d’Or at last month’s Cannes Film Festival.
To TIFF artistic director Cameron Bailey, who is immersed in choosing selections for the next Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 10-20), the catcalls weren’t just the usual festival noise.
They added to his “existential crisis” — his words — over what constitutes a quality movie in the simultaneously connected and disconnected world of 2015.
It’s interesting that the crisis coincides with TIFF’s 40th birthday this year, the age traditionally denoting the start of mid-life angst.
The boos for Dheepan came from movie critics, who normally champion forthright directors like France’s Audiard. His 2009 prison thriller A Prophet was thought by many to have deserved that year’s Palme, which instead went to Michael Haneke’s historical parable The White Ribbon.
Bailey loved Dheepan, as did I, but many critics at Cannes did not, and for all manner of reasons.
This year’s Palme slate seemed to have more than the usual number of films attracting both brickbats and bouquets, among them Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario, Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth and Joachim Trier’s Louder Than Bombs.
“I don’t know if there’s much consensus over what is a great film any more,” Bailey muses in an interview, during a late lunch last week at a pub near his TIFF Bell Lightbox office. “At Cannes this year, I could not come up with a group of four to five people where everybody agreed that a movie was great or that it was terrible. I just don’t find that anymore, and that’s a little bit alarming. That worries me, actually.”
Earlier this year, Bailey watched with fascination as movie lovers of every stripe took passionate positions on films they wanted to win Best Picture at the Oscars: “There was Team Boyhood and Team Birdman, and there were also people who loved The Imitation Game or The Theory of Everything.”
They were going by what they thought about these movies, not what critics and other movie authorities told them to think.
“My sense is that there’s been a decline in the authority of critics,” says Bailey, who was once a film critic for Toronto’s NOW magazine.
“Not just critics by profession, but also by critical authority, experts that include film programmers and festival directors, telling you that this is good or this is not good and I know because I’m an expert . . .
“Restaurant reviews are the same things. People are all about Yelp and crowdsourced opinion, and it’s more democratic, I suppose. But it’s also more confusing, as well.”
This is a particular and immediate problem for Bailey, who along with a large TIFF programming team that includes Piers Handling, Michele Maheux, Steve Gravestock and Kerri Craddock, is tasked with selecting close to 300 features and dozens of shorts for September’s big bash.
Do any of them have the authority to say one film is better than another? Should they even try? “This is the kind of existential crisis I’m going through right now,” Bailey says, carefully enunciating a position he’s given a lot of thought to.
“If there’s such a wide range of opinion, and there’s never a consensus, then what are we doing? . . . It’s so hard to tell people what’s good. We can set the table and invite people to taste and make their own decisions. That’s really the best thing to do.”
In one sense, TIFF has a problem that many film festivals would love to have.
Despite being inundated with thousands of submissions from around the globe, the numbers rising every year, TIFF programmers have a solid track record for separating the wheat from the chaff. The festival has an international reputation for quality.
But it also has a dilemma with bigness.
Bailey’s table-setting analogy is apt for another reason: TIFF loads so much onto its groaning board of offerings, even the most ardent film fan couldn’t consume everything during the fest’s 11 days.
There’s the potential of even more this year as TIFF expands into television with its new Primetime program.
TIFF is trying to address the situation in part by introducing something it has long avoided: a competition along the lines of the Palme d’Or race at Cannes.
Designed to open up the festival to a wider audience and to spark broader debate, Bailey hopes it will go a long way to addressing his critical blues.
You might say he’s going for what psychotherapists call “talk therapy.”
Called Platform, the competition will feature 10-12 new films by internationally renowned filmmakers.
A jury of three, selected from the broader artistic community, will crown one of the films at festival’s end with a $25,000 prize and a trophy.
The plan is to screen Platform contenders simultaneously to the press and the public at the Elgin Theatre, a major festival venue. Everyone can then immediately join the discussion of which film should win the prize.
“We want one conversation, as much as possible,” Bailey says.
“We want the critics, we want the people buying and selling movies in the industry, we want the general audience to be there all together, to come out of it talking about that movie.”
Shifting the focus to Platform will have the added benefit of turning the spotlight towards the fest’s large slate of foreign-language films, which often get lost in the Hollywood shuffle.
Bailey also hopes it will reduce the din over the premiere status of films, which generated more heat than light at last year’s fest.
He was accused by some disgrun- tled industry players of beating up on smaller rival fests like Telluride in Colorado, by insisting that only world and North American premieres could screen during TIFF’s high-profile first four days.
The rule has been relaxed for 2015, with premieres demanded only for screenings at the Elgin, Roy Thomson and Princess of Wales theatres during the first four days.
The Platform competition films don’t have to all be premieres, Bailey says. This technically puts Dheepan in the running — and maybe attracting more boos — but there are many other possible contenders.
“We’re going to have a tough time coming up with that final 10 or 12 films,” Bailey says. “It’s a good problem to have!”
Indeed. If only all mid-life crises could be this easy. Oakville loves film: Toronto is Ontario’s top film town, but far from the only one. See for yourself June 26-28 at the Oakville Festivals of Film and Art, a three-day festival of 17 features, many more shorts and an accompanying art fair of music, performances and photography. Gala opener What We Did On Our Holiday stars Billy Connolly and Gone Girl’s Rosamund Pike. Festival host Rob Salem is a former Toronto Star movie critic, now a Humber College prof, playwright ( The Brain That Wouldn’t Die: The Musical) and pop-cult potentate. Details at offa.ca. phowell@thestar.ca