TIFF DAY ONE

It’s cool in the shade here and it feels like the whole city is under construction—but then, it always feels like that.

I sign my name, as I do every year, under Beverly Thomson from Canada AM. And, as every year, I’ve beaten her to the press office. Blackberry is a major sponsor now and they’ve got a table set up in the lobby with some poor girl trying to pawn off phones on the exact crowd that already has them.

I need some things—batteries, lunch, coffee, a media card reader(?)—and I gather them along Yonge Street where you can’t tell on any given day if the biggest film festival in North America is opening today.

At the Varsity, an 8-screen multiplex atop the Manulife Centre at Bloor and Yonge where I will spend most of the next eight days, things feel familiar. The same nice lady checks my badge, the press screening board is in the same place across from the concession stand, the volunteers have the same eager willingness to please that will be beaten out of them by Monday.

On my way to the loo I pass a bank of pay phones; next to them is a leather bar stool chair covered in a white sheath. A sign is taped to it: “Cameron.” Does fest poobah Cameron Bailey have his own resting place in every theatre, I wonder?

My first movie of the festival is Bright Star, Jane Campion’s reimagining of the romance between John Keats (Ben Whishaw, if Gael Garcia Bernal fronted Phoenix) and Fanny Browne (Abbie Cornish, AKA That Girl Who Broke Up Reese and Ryan). I am not a fan of the historical epic, but Campion—too gifted to work so infrequently—is a masterful composer of image, and she gets the movie outside of the sick beds and drawing rooms as often as she can. Her frames of purple wildflowers, grasses taller than a child and Keats climbing, then lying atop a tree elicit gasps from the audience.

Which then turn to groans.

Because the film is set in olden times tymes, Bright Star is more of a traditional heaving-bodice film than your typical Campion bodice-ripper. Much depends on looks, words, tiny gestures—subtext. But you know there’s something coming, requited-love-wise.

And when it does this afternoon, that moment, over 100 minutes coming in all its artfully constructed glory, is:

Out of focus
Inaudible
Upside down

People start clapping to get the projectionist’s attention. A woman in the back row stands up, pounds on the booth and yells “Wake up!” Realizing the claps sound like applause—a delightfully common occurrence here—people start clapping off-beat. A few oddly hilarious minutes later, the film is stopped. A poor management type has to eat it for the festival as people grumble past. She insists it will be rescheduled, but the odds of even half this room coming back for the last 15 minutes of a two-hour movie, no matter how beautiful it looks, are not great.

The whole time, the infra-red guys—the dudes who stand at the front the entire movie scanning the crowd for PIRATES—never drop their infra-red doohickeys.

PS: Dear John Patrick Shanley, that is how you do Meaningful Wind.

This article appears in Sep 10-16, 2009.