Gosling, Pitt and Clooney, as well as U2’s Bono and the Edge, dutifully showed up on their red carpets, gamely waving to the scores of assembled fans and stopping for pictures and autographs. But the Toronto International Film Festival — or TIFF, as it’s affectionately called by its loyal attendees — derives its allure not from glitz and glamour but from an abiding commitment to balance. At its best, TIFF exemplifies the kind of healthy filmmaking ecosystem that allows for movies big and little, commercial and artistic, entertaining and edifying.
What’s more, with some of the festival’s smallest independent productions having been acquired by studios in recent days, audiences can be assured that, even as multibillion-dollar spectacles and comic-book franchises threaten to gobble up the smaller fry, a diverse, harmonious cinematic habitat still has a chance of surviving.
So, at this year’s TIFF, audiences could rousingly applaud the funny, touching mainstream comedy “The Descendants” — the festival’s first bona fide home run, featuring a by-turns hilarious and heartbreaking performance by Clooney — then a few days later see “Shame,” Steve McQueen’s stark, disquietingly graphic portrait of a man grappling with sex addiction.
“Shame” stars Michael Fassbender, who appeared in McQueen’s feature debut, “Hunger.” As in that film, Fassbender’s body is put through punishing rituals of self-abasement. It’s an uncompromising performance that earned the actor an award at the Venice Film Festival and gave the movie an NC-17 rating. Fox Searchlight Pictures acquired “Shame” this week, clearly on the strength of both of those talking points. (As the unofficial start of awards season, TIFF also launched Pitt, Clooney and Fassbender as early front-runners for Oscar nominations.)
Although “Shame” was picked up with relative alacrity, observers noted that sales were slow in Toronto this year, although Sundance Selects snagged Werner Herzog’s new documentary, “Into the Abyss,” CBS Films got “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” (starring Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt), IFC Films bought Lynne Shelton’s comedy “Your Sister’s Sister,” and Oscilloscope acquired “Wuthering Heights,” Andrea Arnold’s revisionist take on the Emily Bronte classic.
The film fanatics
But even though the market heated up somewhat, the heart and soul of TIFF beat on the streets of downtown Toronto, where thousands of cinetourists make their annual pilgrimage, seeing up to four or even five movies a day, emerging only to cadge a hurried meal before plunging again into the dark. This is a world blithely oblivious to wheeling and dealing that occur in such elegant precincts as the Fairmont Royal York or InterContinental hotels, where the swells congregated this year. Instead, festival-goers — who could be heard coining the term “TIFF-ing” for their cine-obsessed pastime — shuttle from queue to queue, comparing notes with their fellow enthusiasts over well-thumbed programs, circling and crossing out titles with the ruthlessness of seasoned racetrack sharpies.
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