TIFF opening night on Thursday highlighted just how big of a spectacle the festival has grown to over the last few years. King Street has been closed to traffic for the first 4 days of the fest and walking to join the line for my first screening I worked my way through crowds, noise and lots of corporate/branding "entertainment".
I must remind myself next year that maybe a late show on opening night is not the best selection if I don't want to start off the 10 days with a very late night and cut into the sleep bank right off the bat. The movie, which started closer to 10:30 than the planned 9:45, was Clouds of Sils Maria and was introduced by director Olivier Assayas and star Juliette Binoche (who apologized for the fact that she would not be back for the Q&A after the screening since she was jet lagged and it was going to be so freaking late - my words not hers).
Binoche plays Maria, an actress who got her big break playing Sigrid, the younger half of a lesbian couple with a disastrous end to the relationship. 20 years later, and after the sudden death of the playwright, Maria is asked to play the older half of the couple against a new up and coming ingenue (Chloe Grace Moretz) in the role that made her famous. Maria and her assistant Val (Kristen Stewart) head to the alps to spend some time rehearsing, deal with the loss of her friend and her own struggles with aging.
There were some interesting scenes, and Binoche was lovely but I didn't love the movie. There were a couple really disjointed moments and it was a tad long for my liking...B- I'd say. Assayas returned after the screening for a Q&A discussion and was lovely and charmingly french. He spoke about how he had written the movie for Juliette and dropped a tidbit about the fact that when casting the two young women at one point Kristen was looking at the ingenue role which he said we have made it into a different film. And then someone got up to ask a question and went down a long rambling road with no end in sight (people, please give some thought to keeping your questions concise and relevant!) and I slipped out the back door and home to bed.
Friday night's screening was Nightcrawler (aka the one where Jake Gyllenhaal lost a bunch of weight) and I ended up liking it much more than I expected to. Jake plays Lou Bloom, a clearly intelligent but socially awkward man who sort of falls into the world of freelance crime journalism in LA. A chance encounter on a highway, where he observes a seasoned pro (Bill Paxton) making quick work of selling grisly footage of a traffic accident victim arouses his curiosity and gives him the motivation to try it for himself. He is soon spending his nights listening to a police scanner and racing to crime scenes with his video camera in hand to capture footage worth selling.
Based on the trailer I was expecting a dark thriller, and while I'd say that it does fall into that broad description it was quite a bit more darkly comic than anything else. Jake's performance is terrific, as is Rene Russo as the news director who buys the footage and enters into a twisted symbiotic relationship with Lou as his daring (over the line) behaviour delivers shocking and ratings grabbing material for her struggling early morning news program.
Gilroy, Gyllenhaal and Russo all took to the stage after the film for a Q&A. Gilroy discussed his motivation for the story, his transition from writer to director and praised the performance and commitment of his leading man. I've had the opportunity to see Jake in these types of settings a few times now (a talkback after his off-broadway performance and a screening/discussion with Denis Villeneuve for Enemy) and he is consistently well-spoken, quick-witted and charming (he's well suited to his chosen profession :-)). I found his comments about the character and how he saw Lou really interesting and they've stuck with me, and raised my overall perception of the movie from a B+ to an A-.
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