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| C'est la vie starring Suzanne Clément (centre) closes TIFF '17. Courtesy of TIFF |
Losing weight is rarely a bad thing. A diet looks to be
boding well for the Toronto International Film Festival after reducing its belly by 20%. With today’s announcement
of the first wave of programming, TIFF’s earliest slate of Galas and Special
Presentations seems to have resisted the sugary cravings and empty calories. There’s
a healthy mix of stars, indies and world cinema, and the effort to spotlight women
directors (about 30% so far) and multiculturalism is appreciated given that
this portion of the line-up draws heaviest from the Hollywood side of things,
which still has a ways to go. Those numbers will improve with the forthcoming announcements
of documentaries, indies, and international titles. TIFF’s eating its veggies
even if most members of the press have little more than black coffee and free
booze come September.
This gap isn’t the first time that TIFF has unveiled its initial
wave of titles without the hot ticket, since 2014’s festival randomly announced
The Judge (remember that film?) as
the opener about a week after it was announced as a Gala. My guess is that TIFF’s
lack of an opener isn’t an easier choice and that a homegrown favourite was set
for the spot but had to step back. (Further speculation would be indecent on my
part.) There is a notable bit of Can Con in the Closing Night Gala with Mommy star Suzanne Clément headlining C’est la vie! by Olivier Nakache and
Eric Toledano, directing duo behind the hit Les
intouchables and festival favourite Samba.
TIFF adds Opening and Closing Night films to the Special
Presentations this year with Greta Gerwig’s first solo feature as a director, Lady Bird, opening and Sheikh Jackson, Amr Salama’s story of a
young imam and Michael Jackson fan, closing the programme. This move also shows
that the festival team is listening and assessing the structure/style of its
line-up, and owning the sense that TIFF is really more like a half dozen
simultaneous festivals, rather than one big gong show that kicks off at Roy
Thomson Hall. The move takes pressure off the opening night Gala, which always
puts a film under extra scrutiny, and risks being eclipsed by a showy title,
like when Michael Moore’s wild and timely Where to Invade Next all but stole the opening night of 2015 away from Jean-Marc
Vallée’s solid Demolition.
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| I, Tonya Courtesy of TIFF |
The titles set for TIFF are a promising bunch whether or not
one judges success by a world premiere to Oscar nomination ratio. The hotter
tickets at the festival include I, Tonya
starring Margot Robbie as notorious figure skate/assailant Tonya Harding,
Boston Marathon drama Stronger starring
Jake Gyllenhaal and Toronto’s own Tatiana Maslany, and the Idris Elba/Kate
Winslet survival drama The Mountain
Between Us. Survival is one of the running themes of the festival,
apparently, as noted by TIFF CEO Piers Handling at the press conference. This
sense is reflected in the festival’s lone doc and Canadian Gala so far, Long Time Running, which chronicles the
farewell tour of The Tragically Hip following Gord Downie’s diagnosis with
terminal brain cancer. That Gala is bound to be one of the sentimental
highlights of the festival regardless of whether Downie walks the carpet in
person or in spirit.
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| Darkest Hour Courtesy of TIFF |
On the Oscar front, two promising star vehicles come in Joe
Wright’s Darkest Hour featuring Gary “Is
this his Oscar year?” Oldman as Winston Churchill and Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool starring Annette “Is this her
Oscar year?” Bening as Oscar-winning actress Gloria Grahame. Other contenders
that will presumably eye Toronto as a launch pad for bigger campaigns include
Fox Searchlight’s duo of Battle of the Sexes
starring Emma Stone and Steve Carell as tennis stars Billie Jean King and Bobby
Riggs, and Guillermo Del Toro’s Toronto-shot The Shape of Water, which looks to make Sally Hawkins a double
threat for Best Actress after last year’s festival gem Maudie.
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| First They Killed My Father Courtesy of TIFF |
Other awards hopefuls that have me really excited include
Darren Aronofsky’s mother! with Jennifer
Lawrence, Luca Guadagnino’s Sundance hit Call
Me By Your Name, and Maggie Betts’s Novitiate,
which jumped to my must-see list a few weeks ago when I read a description of
it as “Whiplash but with Melissa Leo
in the JK Simmons part as a nun.” Titles popping up that seem very promising
regardless of their awards potential include Angelina Jolie’s Cambodian film First They Killed My Father and Richard
Eyre (Notes on a Scandal) taking on Ian
McEwan’s The Children Act, which
stars Emma Thompson as a family judge weighing in on a child’s right to refuse
treatment on religious grounds. And finding a very TIFFy blend of stars and
world cinema pedigree is Kings from Mustang director Deniz Gamze Ergüven
with Halle Berry and Daniel Craig in a drama about the LA riots. (How many
boxes does that title check?)
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| Mary Shelley Courtesy of Search Engine Films |
On the international front, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun unveils his
drama A Season in France after
attending TIFF last year with the devastating documentary Hissein Habré, a Chadian Tragedy, while Cannes Palme d’or winner The Square and Grand Prize winner 120 Beats Per Minute both make their
North American premieres at Toronto. Among the most intriguing surprises of the
announcement, finally, is Mary Shelley,
a biopic of the Frankenstein author
with Elle Fanning in the title role, directed by Wadjda’s Haifaa Al Mansour.
TIFF drops its documentary titles next week and the big
Canadian announcement comes August 9. All this dieting gives an appetite for
poutine!
Get the full list of titles at TIFF.net.
