To Market, To Market

Although film festivals are now ubiquitous, the difficulties of programming are rarely addressed directly. Even the most seasoned festival-goers tend to get peevish about the selections of any particular festival. This goes from the smallest festivals to the biggest. At this year’s 22nd Toronto International Film Festival, it wasn’t uncommon to hear complaints about the crop of films; this complaint was also heard at this year’s 35th New York Film Festival. The complaints told one more about the complainant, because the festivals turned out to be exceptionally good in terms of the variety and quality of the films.

Of course, there were innumerable overlaps: most of the films in the New York Film Festival were also in the Toronto festival, though there was an amusing split: the New York Film Festival had Abbas Kiarostami’s The Taste of Cherry, which shared the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival with Shohei Imamura’s The Eel, which showed at the Toronto Film Festival. However, both festivals featured Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, which had won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. Since the spring, with the disappointment of the Cannes Film Festival on the occasion of its 50th Anniversary, there were international reports on the lack of excitement for this year’s films. But what most of these reports boiled down to was that there was no new Pulp Fiction. By the middle of the Toronto Film Festival, hope sprang eternal, and Paul Thomas Anderson was being talked about as the new Tarantino for his “epic” Boogie Nights, so that the appearance of the film at the New York Film Festival was greeted with wild anticipation.

What does this tell us about the critical climate now? Quality is no longer a criterion for critical judgment; rather, box office potential is a paramount consideration. The Japanese media phenomenon Takeshi “Beat” Kitano’s Hana-Bi had won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and that film was shown at both Toronto and New York; it received respectful reviews, but the idea of outrage over the violent content has long abated. Wong Kar-Wai finally received almost universal acclaim for his Happy Together (for which he received the Best Director prize at Cannes); the few hold-outs (including the various reviewers from The New York Times) capitulated because of the emotional directness of the movie’s gay-themed storyline. Though undeniably stylish, Happy Together just didn’t have the spontaneity and fevered inventiveness of Wong’s previous films, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels. But Happy Together was one of several films from Asia with gay subjects; others included Murmur of Youth, directed by Lin Cheng-sheng (from Taiwan) and East Palace, West Palace, directed by Zhang Yuan (from the People’s Republic of China). Happy Together, Hana-Bi, Boogie Nights, The Sweet Hereafter, The Taste of Cherry, The Eel, and Youssef Chahine’s Destiny (for which Chahine was presented with a special Career Achievement Award at Cannes): any of these films should have provided ample material for serious critical discussion. But what is serious critical discussion nowadays? On the one hand, we get consumer reports telling us which movies are hits; on the other hand, we get “discourse,” that admixture of academic theory and snob appeal.

It’s too late in the game to go into the specific allure of movies as an art: movies have become “the media,” and the amorphousness of the media makes critical distinction superfluous. The idea of critical standards always has created problems for the movies: when a movie overwhelms you, how can you then sit back and try to analyze what hit you? But too many critics take this attitude of power as a shortcut to critical response. The Taste of Cherry and The Eel are two examples: the former about a man seeking assistance for his suicide, the latter about a man who killed his wife and his readjustment to life after being released from prison, these movies were subtle and contemplative works, attempting to provide parables about people trying to find a...