Posted by J. Robert Parks
The J Robert Toronto Blog World Tour continues. After debuting two years ago at Film Journey and moving to Flickerings, this year Darren Hughes has been kind enough to volunteer his web site for my musings. And since Darren is also blogging from Toronto, loyal readers will get two thoughts for the price of one.
The first two years of my Toronto experience, I flew out on Friday, which happened to be the second day of the festival. That worked out perfectly the first year, as there were only a few public screenings on Thursday night and none during the day. But last year, that schedule meant that I missed out on a number of films, including both public screenings of Jean-Luc Godard's latest movie. So I decided this year that I'd come out Thursday and do the fest whole hog. And then when I found out that my hotelmate, Charles Odell, was planning on coming Wednesday, I looked at my own schedule and realized that'd work for me, too.
So I ended up landing in Toronto around 10:30 Wednesday night. This was after five hours of teaching earlier in the day and some heavy-duty lugging of the luggage through the streets of Chicago. So when I arrived at my hotel at 11:30 pm, I was bushed. I got a bit of Canadian cash out of an ATM and promptly headed for bed.
One of the nice things about arriving Wednesday night (no matter how late) was that I had much of the day Thursday to relax. As some of you know, I found out at the end of July that I had to move out of my apartment by the end of August. So the last month of summer turned out to be an extraordinarily busy one. Given that I didn't want to come back from Toronto to a house full of boxes, my Labor Day weekend was consumed with unpacking along with getting ready for the first day of classes on Wednesday. All that to say, I needed a day to de-compress before the "pressure" of a festival kicked in.
Fortunately, after a brief spell of rain Thursday morning, the weather returned to its normal gorgeous 75 degrees and sunny (I think I've had a total of an hour of rain in my two years of Toronto festival going). I got my tickets, had fun looking over the schedule, and then wandered around the city, stopping occasionally to read the paper or re-examine my schedule. I didn't have much time that last week of August to really immerse myself in the Toronto programme book or the accompanying schedule, so it was fun to catch up a bit with that.
Had a nice Asian dinner with Darren, Girish (a net friend from Buffalo who's been coming to Toronto for many years), and Rob and Lorraine (friends from San Francisco). Afterwards, they all headed off to see the documentary Ballet Russes. I, on the other hand, went to stand in my first rush line. Of the 40 tickets I ordered, I got 39 of my first choices. The only shut-out was my Day 1 movie: Douches Froides. I might've skipped that and made it a full day of doing nothing, but it seemed silly not to see anything on Opening Night. More importantly, though, I've been asked by Time Out Chicago, a local alt-weekly, to cover 9-10 films here in Toronto that are also playing in Chicago's festival next month. That's a welcome gig, and I didn't want to blow it by not seeing one of the films. So, it was off to stand in the rush line.
Fortunately, the weather was beautiful and the company was, as always in Toronto lines, friendly. Girish had mentioned at dinner that he was impressed with my social skills in festival lines, and I laughed out loud. I'm not usually a social animal, but I do enjoy meeting people in Toronto for some reason. Had no trouble getting into the movie and even got a good seat.
Ok, enough of the warm-up. What about the movie(s)? Well, the fest didn't exactly get off to a bang. Douches Froides is about a high school senior named Mickael. His girlfriend Vanessa is a sexual animal, which doesn't bother Mickael at all, and he's also the captain of a traveling judo team. One day, a new kid named Clement joins the team, and the two young men hit it off. It's not long before they're sharing judo moves, jokes in the locker room, and Mickael's girlfriend. Woah! Actually, the film telegraphs the menage a trois well before it happens. In fact, I was surprised that Clement and Mickael didn't hook up as well, given the abundant (and glamorous-looking) male nudity in the film, but maybe that would've pushed the envelope too far. Still, the sex scenes are fairly explicit, which is a problem given that Douches Froides's natural audience is teenagers. The characters' hopes, dreams, and problems aren't exactly after-school-special material, but they don't have the depth you'd expect for a film targeted at adults. And when the inevitable fallout occurs, director Antony Cordier handles it with all the grace of a punch to the face. Literally.
That's too bad, since there are a number of things to like about the movie. The acting is solid across the board, Johan Libereau is charismatic in the lead role, and I particularly enjoyed how he relates to his parents. In fact, that family dynamic would've made a much more interesting film than what Douches Froides actually gives us. Instead, we're treated to a class dynamic in which one family is absurdly rich while the other can't pay its electric bill. And the film's penultimate scene involves the main character walking along a beach while a voiceover explains his thoughts. As my friend Garth put it, that's a tell-tale sign of a failure of filmmaking. Give it two 1/2 stars, out of five.
Coming back to the hotel, I happend to bump into Darren, Girish, and Rob. Turns out they didn't enjoy their movie much more than I enjoyed mine. They were hoping for an interesting documentary about the origins of ballet's most famous company; instead they got a lot of talking heads and charming but empty anecdotes. Both Girish and Darren likened it to something you'd see on A&E, which is not what any of us want when we come to Toronto'.
Fortunately, Day 2 kicks off with Alexander Sokoruv's The Sun. But more on that tomorrow.
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