Toronto Film Festival Days Nine and Ten: Encounters at the end of Toronto

Not only am I back from Toronto; I've already moved on. Yesterday I checked out Facets' awesome symposium on the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, whose Man from London played the fest. Tarr was supposed to attend himself, but he had to cancel at the last minute because of a family emergency. Even so, the panelists—my colleagues Scott Foundas and Jonathan Rosenbaum, themselves bleary from Toronto, and academic luminary David Bordwell—were remarkably engaging and insightful all the same.

Anyway. Seems that no matter how carefully you plan your festival, you always end up with a few regrets, so if you'll indulge me for a moment, I'd like to mention the films I wish I hadn't missed.

My first impulse decision of the fest led me to swap Jacques Rivette's The Duchess of Langeais for Lee Chang-dong's buzz magnet Secret Sunshine. Not really a bad decision (Secret Sunshine is terrific, and unlike Duchess, which will see theaters next year, it doesn't have a distributor). But everyone loves the Rivette, and given my past admiration for the filmmaker, I'm kicking myself for having passed on it.

My other regret, admittedly less reasonable, is that I didn't have time for Lav Diaz's nine-hour Death in the Land of Encantos (also screened as an installation at Toronto's Spin Gallery), which I'd been told was a complete break with anything I'd seen before. The hour or so that I did catch was singular: an epic, poetic portrait of the Filipino village of Padang after a typhoon—Tarr-like in its penchant for observing figures wandering to and from the horizon, but lent a jumpy visual quality by Diaz's gorgeous use of digital video. It's strange to say, but I could easily see myself being hypnotized for the remaining eight hours.

Carp, carp. The bottom line is, I saw a lot of damn fine films over the past week, many of which—Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon, a Parisian companion piece to his 2003 Tokyo story Café Lumière; Carlos Reygadas's beautiful and austere Silent Light, set in a Mexican Mennonite community; Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, a continuation of (but also a break with) the style he explored in Elephant and Last Days—I haven't even mentioned yet.

Oddly, many any of my favorite films came to the festival with distributors, which I'm inclined to take as a positive development for the state of film culture. Filling in the void left by Wellspring, the unstoppable IFC alone owned the Rivette, the Hou, the Van Sant and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (a.k.a. "the Romanian abortion movie"). Before the fest was over, it had also picked up Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, the director's funniest movie since Cowards Bend the Knee. Kudos are also due to the Weinstein Company, I guess, for buying George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead. Here's hoping it gets a speedy release.

Insofar as Toronto turns critics into consumer advocates, it's worth running down the best titles that risk languishing in obscurity. Will someone please buy Ira Sachs's Married Life, a superb dark comedy set in 1949 about a husband (Chris Cooper) who attempts to murder his wife (Patricia Clarkson)? More topical now than ever, Jia Zhangke's Useless is a startling and original documentary about various segments of the Chinese garment industry. And what about Werner Herzog's Antarctica doc Encounters at the End of the World, which features the famously detached director pondering inexplicable behavior of penguins?

That's the kind of film for which I'll be waddling north next year.