TIFF 2006 Day 1
BORAT CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR
MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN
Imagine a packed 1237-seat cinema, full of excited twenty and thirtysomethings (uh, plus a few of us from other age brackets), at midnight on a Thursday, when the story runs through the crowd that the star of the uber-buzzy film we have come to see, BORAT CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN, has just arrived outside the theatre
on a donkey. Now this crowd was electric with anticipation already, but the voltage in the joint turned up to 11 when British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as the frantically naïve Kazakhstani cultural ambassador/cum television correspondent Borat headed down the aisle and up to the stage to be introduced to us. One manic introduction with UN and Canadian flags later, and the crowd was settled in for the funniest film we’ve not seen the end of. For 20 minutes we laughed (sorry, but how else to put it?) our asses off, and then… wham, the film broke. Or that’s what we figured. While we natives got restless, festival techies scrambled to find out what exactly was wrong, and soon enough they were begging for our patience while they sorted it out. With the lights back on and conversations starting up, Cohen, I mean Borat, stands up at his seat at the back of the auditorium and puts a fun spin on this turn of events, and lobs several jokes before running out the back. Next we spotted George Stroumboulopoulos across the aisle chatting with Ben Mulroney, and then a few rows to our left, local ‘mentalist’ Mysterion jumped up and had started mind-reading and doing spoon-bending tricks. If that wasn’t all surreal enough, Michael Moore, yes Michael Moore was soon spotted through the window of the projectionist’s booth digging into the machine and trying to sort out the trouble. I am not making this up. It is far too late for me to be making this up. Moore leaves the booth and wades into the nosebleed section, while a cheer erupts as he passes through the balcony crowd. Soon he’s advancing to the stage with director of the film Larry Charles in tow. The two of them start entertaining the crowd, fielding questions and making jokes for ten or fifteen minutes when Midnight Madness programmer Colin Geddes returns to the stage and brings Borat back again. Geddes has a prepared list of questions for Borat, and Borat is ready for every one of them with terribly silly and deliciously politically incorrect answers. We were practically hyperventilating with laughs again. At about 1:30am we learn from Colin that they cannot get a replacement part for the projector, and that we’ll have top head home, regretfully none the wiser about the end of the movie. It will be rescheduled tomorrow night at the Elgin at midnight for anyone that wants to see it. Run to a festival box office to get a ticket. Who knows how tomorrow nights screening will go. Never in the 17 years that I have been going to the festival has a screening gone quite like this. The projector has never before died so spectacularly, and the only on-stage antics that ever came close to this was at a screening of the YES MEN documentary a couple of years ago when one of the film’s stars was stripped naked on the stage. Even minus the nudity tonight’s semi-screening was the craziest event I have ever been in the audience for. Unbelievable. Unreal. Surreal. But all true, and the best time I’ve ever had at the movies without actually seeing a whole movie. Now I did see two complete films earlier, back when you could still call it ‘this evening’.
At about 10 minutes after 6 tonight at the same Ryerson Theatre, a very proper and smartly tuxedoed Piers Handling, CEO and Director of TIFF, strode on to the stage and welcomed us all to the festival, and to the screening of this year’s winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY. Directed by Ken Loach and starring Cillian Murphy (that’s pronounced Killian - didn’t know that before tonight), WIND dramatizes the events surrounding the formation of the I.R.A. in 1920s occupied Ireland. If my head wasn’t screaming for some sleep right now, I’d get more detailed about it, but suffice it to say that WIND is a good film, beautifully shot, naturally acted, with a very interesting story, but I never got emotionally dragged in to it despite the intensely heated troubles between the Irish and the British military. History buffs will find WIND worthwhile, and it does have distribution lined up, but I cannot imagine huge audiences for this one.
Once WIND had ended and Cillian Murphy had fielded several questions, I had to bolt from one group of friends to join another in line a couple of blocks south at the Elgin for DAS LEBEN DER ANDEREN, or THE LIVES OF OTHERS, which turned out to be a remarkable film, set between 1984 and 1992 in East German Berlin. LIVES concerns an agent of the GDR Secret Police, the Stasi, and his mission to spy on a playwright and his actress girlfriend. With beautifully nuanced performances by the three lead cast members Martina Gedeck, Ulrich Mühe, and Sebastian Koch, and a superb script and direction by feature-film first-timer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarc, LIVES has been a huge hit in Germany and has very good potential on the art-house circuit here. This flick has “Best Foreign Film” Oscar nomination written all over it, and the sustained standing ovation it received here makes me think - even this early in the festival - that it has a good chance of winning.