Toronto Film Festival

Courtesy Toronto International Film Festival

Mati Diop (left) and Alex Descas in "35 rhums."

Toronto Film Festival

The Venice Film Festival takes risks while Toronto promises gems like Claire Denis' "35 rhums," an intimate movie about the pleasures of home -- and knowing when to leave it.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Arts & Entertainment, Toronto Film Festival

Sept. 5, 2008 | TORONTO -- I generally arrive in Toronto on the first day of the festival, but I'm showing up a day late this year after making an unexpected and pleasurable detour: I was asked to sit on a panel at the Venice Film Festival, to coincide with a retrospective called "These Phantoms: Italian Cinema Rediscovered (1946-1975)," a series of about 30 rarely seen Italian films by the likes of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Rossi, Dino Risi and Lina Wertmuller. (Wertmuller herself was on the panel, decked out in her trademark stark white eyeglasses.) Because I was in Venice for only a portion of the festival, I knew I wouldn't be able to cover it in a thorough and proper fashion. But I spent long enough on the Lido, the seven-and-a-half-mile finger of sand between the Laguna Veneta and the Adriatic Sea, where the festival is held, to get a sense of how intimate and relatively relaxed it is; it seems purposely designed to discourage the mad rushing around that so many of the big film festivals demand. It is, after all, a festival by the sea -- although I doubt most of the critics and journalists attending even look much at the water.

I arrived in Venice too late to catch the opening film, the Coen brothers' "Burn After Reading," which means I also missed the pandemonium caused by the presence on the island of both Brad Pitt and George Clooney. The most glittery movie-star action on the Lido takes place not in the two theaters where the movies are screened for us press and industry schmoes, but in the imposing and tastefully glamorous Hotel des Bains, the beaux-arts beauty used by Thomas Mann as the setting for "Death in Venice." This symbol of Old World decadence is hidden from the street by a long, fat, nicely manicured hedge -- well, it's mostly nicely manicured, except for a sparse, concave hollow in one spot where onlookers would gather each night to peek onto the hotel grounds in the hopes of getting a glimpse of Brad, George or whomever. I don't know if anyone is ever successful in this endeavor: Whenever I peeped over the hedge, all I saw were anonymous waiter types in stiff suits, or a cluster of young women dressed in nondescript black evening dresses -- all the Old World decadence you can buy at the Prada store.

I much preferred plain old people-watching on the Lido's broad, shady sidewalks, which stretch parallel to the island's hidden beach front: At dusk, tubby elderly gents would come out to walk their even tubbier dogs; parents and their kids would scatter over the sidewalk, making it nearly impossible to pass -- the sort of thing that would be infinitely annoying in New York, but that you make allowances for, because who has a right to be grumpy in Venice?

But if you're looking for grumblers, even in Venice, you don't have to look far. The festival is packed with critics and journalists, largely from Italy and other countries in Europe (there were relatively few Americans), and the word on this year's festival, streaming first from the lips of these writers and then onto the pages of their newspapers and blogs, was that most of the movies were, to use the relatively polite adjective, lousy. I tried to use my time in Venice to get some sense of the films in competition, and from what I saw, I'd probably agree: Pictures like Amir Naderi's "Vegas: Based on a True Story" (a small American indie about a family who destroy their backyard, and their life, looking for buried heist money) and Werner Schroeter's "Nuit de chien" (a self-serious futuristic parable in which the stalwart French actress Bulle Ogier is relegated to playing a lesbian nightclub owner in a cheap tuxedo) are most likely not coming to a theater near you, and you should be grateful. But there is an upside to a festival that offers such a weird mix of pictures. Venice, this year at least, is a festival that takes chances with its programming rather than packing it with crowd pleasers: The Clooney/Pitt juggernaut aside, you don't program a Turkish film whose title translates to "Milk" if you're trying to pack 'em in.

I didn't happen to catch that one myself (its Turkish title is "Sut," and its director's name is Semih Kaplanoglu), but it's one of numerous Venice selections that will also screen over the next week in Toronto. And even though I missed the first day of the festival here, I did manage to catch up in advance (a phrase that perhaps makes sense only when you're trying to hit four or five films a day) on a few things that will be making waves from Toronto. (As Steven Wright might say, the next best thing to being in two places at once is being in two places consecutively.) I already know that one of those pictures, Claire Denis' "35 rhums," will end up being one of my favorites, of either festival.

Next page: Making waves in Toronto

Browse showtimes and buy tickets

Enter ZIP or city and state:

Powered by

Visit the Movie Page for more reviews, plus critics' picks and more.