Toronto seems, on first consideration, one of the most unlikely places for a major film festival. The squeaky-clean, aggressively consumer-oriented metropolis doesn't have the exotic appeal of European fests such as Cannes and Venice, the dangerous excitement of Miami, the ultrasophistication of New York, the mountain air of Telluride, or even the distinctive culture of Montreal.
And yet, this past fall the Toronto Festival of Festivals—now in its thirteenth year—proved itself to be increasingly one of the foremost international film festivals. Undeniably, it is the festival with the best party atmosphere, the flesh-and-fantasy marketplace of Cannes notwithstanding. It manages to be both serious and fun: 288 films in ten theaters for ten days hardly allows much opportunity for boredom.
The whole city seems to participate. Long queues prevail at nearly every showing. People (and even press) are turned away at some showings. The local newspaper gossip columnists are practically exhausted from dropping names. The stores along Bloor, aka Chrome and Steel Street, get into the act and devise window displays for the occasion. What distinguishes the Festival of Festivals from many others is a sense of occasion.
But any film festival is only as stimulating, provocative, and sophisticated (in other words, as good) as its films. Toronto was not lacking in quality or in quantity, though perhaps the festival needs fewer movies and more theaters to show them in. Being in Toronto was like being a child in a candy shop, suffering the almost paralyzing anxiety of having to choose among temptations.
In the Candy Store
In addition to two special side programs—Contemporary World Cinema and New Visions, New Voices, the films of which had come from around the globe—there was a sizable retrospective of Russian films, most tantalizingly, films made as much as twenty years ago but hardly ever shown in their country of origin until the advent of glasnost. Also of considerable interest were "classics" from the late fifties and early sixties. For the film scholar, there was the Open Vault series: nine restored movies ranging from the silent Sodom und Gomorrah (1922), directed by Michael Curtiz, to the breathtakingly beautiful She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1948), the latest gem of color restoration from the UCLA archivists,
If that were not enough, there was the Perspective Canada series designed for the homegrown ticket buyer and interested outsider alike. Each year the festival spotlights an up-and-coming director. This year there were two of them—brothers—Finns Aki and Mika Kaurismaki, of whom more later. The year before last, it was Pedro Almodovar, whose Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, shown here, opened the latest New York Film Festival. Toronto, in fact, duplicates New York to a great degree: Twelve of its features showed up in New York, which showed only twenty-two.
Film festivals, whether they intend to or not (and they probably don't), develop certain themes. Toronto's (as was New York's) was women: films made by them and about them. Perhaps it is only reasonable to expect that, only twenty years or so after the embryonic stirrings of the feminist movement, the distaff side would be represented in world cinema to a far greater degree
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