Lingering in film festival-land during the final days is much like being the last guest at a party after the beautiful people have left, your host has passed out in the backyard and you’re sifting through the ashtrays for smokeable butts, bleary-eyed, waiting for dawn. The press office closes down, the hotel lobbies are being shampooed, the limo drivers start vacation. It seems so desolate now, who’d have guessed only days before I was sharing an elevator with Ben Kingsley—who really is built like a ninja, as it turns out. 

 

Yet it was on the very last day of the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival—at which I saw exactly 33 movies—that I finally caught Darren Aranofsky’s The Wrestler, which  enjoyed the coup of winning the Golden Lion at Venice, the very same festival where Aranofsky’s The Fountain was famously booed two years previous. The Wrestler was something of a disappointment though: the narrative, about a spandex-clad lord of the ring reaching a very lonesome middle age, was formulaic, the dialogue flat, the visual style shockingly anonymous. But Mickey Rourke, with his leathery flesh and damaged beauty, was indeed wonderful, and the real reason to see the movie anyway is the milieu under investigation, which yields tremendous riches of human strangeness. And yes, wrestling, it seems, is indeed fixed.

 

What wasn’t fixed was any pre-set notions of what would be the highlights of TIFF ’08. There weren’t as many new films from high-profile filmmakers, and of those that did arrive, some were less than startling, like the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading or Richard Linklater’s Me & Orson Welles, which was pleasantly corny, while others, like Steven Soderbergh’s four-hour Che, proved difficult for many. I saw Che in two parts, and was at once dazzled and mesmerized, entranced by the obsessive attention to detail. But I noted a quieter, wearier, and smaller audience for the second screening, perhaps because while “Part One,” covering the Cuban revolution, functions as an instruction manual for fighting a successful armed uprising, “Part Two,” covering Che Guevara (Benicio Del Toro, superb) in Bolivia, does it all over again but ends in failure and death. But this is visionary filmmaking. Exhausting? Absolutely—but exhilarating, too, in its intensity of focus. Soderbergh’s a rare artist who makes you truly believe in the continued possibilities of movies.

 

The turbulence and atrocities of Latin America informed several other TIFF selections, notably Pablo Larrian’s Tony Manero, which follows a 52-year-old Chilean weathering the terror of the Pinochet regime by endeavouring to become the protagonist from Saturday Night Fever. That he wants to be a fictional character is revealing: like something out of a Roberto Bolaño novel, Larrian’s antihero seems to have taken the violence around him as tacit consent to release his own repressed aberrant tendencies, all moral logic eroding under the weight of his absurd fantasy life. It might synopsize like a movie about dreams trumping dictatorship, but this is not the case: Tony Manero is deeply sinister stuff, concerning a very dark passage of recent history.

 

Josué Méndez’s Dioses, meanwhile, chronicles an upper-class Peruvian family’s decline into incest, boredom and self-loathing, and announces a real talent to watch: Méndez arguably falls short in seeing his narrative through, but his compelling, subtly dynamic camerawork allows us to closely observe the characters during moments of inner anxiety. Gerardo Naranjo’s Voy a explotar is an altogether wilder tale of familial disintegration, class rot and teen rebellion, a very fun homage to Godard about a girl who meets a guy she says is both “invented and real,” a son of a Guanajuato congressman who harbours homicidal fantasies. Pablo Agüero’s Salamandra finds a mother and son travelling deep into Patagonia to live off the grid with hippies—John Cale among them! Like Méndez, Agüero doesn’t push his characters as far as he might have, but his careful evocation of this particular subculture and empathy for his characters make for a very worthwhile debut.

 

But enough with the Americas—on to Europe! I don’t think I saw anything more elegantly realized than Claire Denis’s 35 Rhums, which follows the delicate negotiations between a father (dashing Denis regular Alex Descas) and his adult daughter, cohabitants in a Paris apartment block. There are two sequences—one set in a trainyard, the other in a bar—built mainly around music and movement, that are sensuous, poetic, pleasingly aligned to the rhythms of everyday life and among the loveliest things I saw this TIFF. Yet much of the film is relatively straightforward, examining the trails of the working underclass and the knotty entanglements of urban life, something evident in both the film’s web of acquaintances and its metaphoric use of the public transit system. There’s also a scene involving a horse that, while so very brief, speaks volumes about the image-power of Denis’s singular cinema.

 

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys, like last year’s The Man From London, offers something pretty unusual: a modern noir delivered in a highly meditative style. It kind of reminded me of The Reckless Moment, but more overtly bleak and, you know, brooding. Spanish director Albert Serra’s Birdsong follows the three wisemen on their way to greet Jesus, a film comprised mostly of landscapes being traversed which won’t do it for many but does possess a certain velvety, chiaroscuro beauty and bone-dry humour. Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky is a nearly sublime character study, with the relentlessly cheerful Poppy (Sally Hawkins, terrific) encountering numerous fellow Londoners who challenge her to consider the hidden consequences of her flamboyant optimism. Mabrouk El Mechri’s majorly meta JCVD blurs the real and fictional Jean-Claude Van Damme as he’s held hostage in a Belgian bank heist, suffers tax problems and a child custody suit. He delivers this fucking crazy, half-coherent monologue that recalls Brando’s in Last Tango in Paris. I don’t think Mechri can cash all of the cheques he writes in this thing—It’s a comedy! It’s an action movie! It’s a Charlie Kaufman movie!—but it’s pretty fun.

 

Finally, a quick tour of Asia. Wong Kar-Wai’s Ashes of Time Redux is essentially an aesthetic tweaking of his 1994 arty martial arts movie, but is probably more noteworthy simply because most people haven’t seen it in any form. I can’t say it’s my favourite Wong—the first part’s rather too talky and expository—but it’s use of colour is unspeakably beautiful; the fight scenes, mostly captured in very tight shots, are weirdly thrilling, and the final pay-off, where the many tangled narrative threads reunite, is surprisingly moving. 

 

Meanwhile, two of Japan’s finest paid homage in their very different ways to that master of family dramas Yazujiro Ozu. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking is a beautiful, tender, at times cruelly resonant story of a family who’ve never gotten past the death of their favourite son, while Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata was simply the best surprise of the year, the acclaimed horror director’s latest being a very funny comedy about the individual members of a stressed-out family breaking apart to undertake their separate fugues.