TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival, isn't quite like the others. For one thing, the public get to go too. Alongside an enormous programe of screenings for those with press or industry accreditation, there's an equally impressive schedule of screenings open to the public, the annual climax to the permanent presence TIFF now has in the city, year round, based in its grand, hi-tech headquarters, the TIFF Bell Lightbox, which opened in the middle of the Entertainment District two years ago.
All the red carpet premieres are public and they are thronged with incredibly excited and appreciative audiences who give a rapturous reception to the stars who turn up in person and standing ovations to all the successful movies. The stand-by mode is nothing less than thrilled. As a columnist in the Toronto paper, The Globe and Mail, put it: "Here is a huge city with next to no truly famous people, and then, in one Thursday night, they all seem to fall from the sky." That creates an amazing atmosphere, palpable even in such a megalopolis as Toronto has become.
Toronto, now in its 37th season, has good claim to be the most influential of all the film festivals, having overtaken Venice (the oldest, founded 1932), Cannes (founded 1946, invitation only), Berlin (founded 1951, also publicly attended on a large scale). It is the last major festival of the year in the run-in to the Academy Awards and as a result it has a reputation for kicking off the all-important Oscar-buzz.
Moreover, since there is no jury or rota of prizes for best actor, actress, director, etc, many producers and directors favour Toronto as a safe place to premiere their films. This year, it was Venice that premiered two of the most keenly anticipated films among film fans - Paul Thomas Anderson's film about a cult leader, The Master, and Terrence Malick's disappointing To The Wonder - but Toronto, screening 372 films in total, still managed no fewer than 146 world premieres, many of them mainstream Hollywood films, such as the crash-bang time-travel thriller, Looper, starring Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon Levitt, which opened proceedings.
TIFF offers only one major prize each year, "The People's Choice Award", voted for by the paying audiences dropping their ticket stubs into ballot boxes. As trailers before the public showings boast, this prize has transformed the fortunes of many movies in the past, ranging from American Beauty and The King's Speech, to Slumdog Millionaire which was headed straight to dvd before it won in 2008 and proceeded to sweep the Oscars. Last year's choice, however, Where Do We Go Now?, a feelgood comedy about women in a remote Lebanese village defusing religious conflict between the men, went nowhere.
This year's winner, Silver Linings Playbook, is much more mainstream: an acerbic romcom, directed by David O Russell whose previous film was the boxing movie The Fighter, both these movies sharing an interest in how damaged people can succeed through sheer tenacity, even in the most difficult families. Bradley Cooper gives a ferocious performance as bi-polar Pat, a former teacher, just out of the mental hospital to which he was sent by the courts, after beating up his wife's lover. Still obsessive and inappropriate in his behaviour, Pat believes he can win his wife back. Meanwhile, he's living with his overbearing, sports-mad, OCD father (Robert De Niro, much funnier than in Meet The Fokkers) and loud mother (Jacki Weaver).
Then Pat meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence, in her first adult role after Winter's Bone and The Hunger Games, a revelation, surely Oscar-worthy). Having recently lost her husband in a car accident, Tiffany's even madder than Pat, even more prone to saying just what she thinks without a filter. The scenes between this couple are wonderfully awkward, nervy and sparky. On being introduced to Tiffany and told not to ask about her late husband Tommy, Pat immediately ask: "How did Tommy die? What about your job?" For her part, Tiffany is soon telling him: "You can fuck me if you turn the lights off."
The film ultimately goes a bit soft, modulating into yet another variant of putting on a show: one of the recurrent plots. Pat and Tiffany train for a dance contest and the movie ends in tearful, feelgood mode. That's what audiences here evidently love - although perhaps not in quite such a sentimental form as in Dustin Hoffman's first film as director, Quartet (retired musicians put on a show to save their lovely residence) or Song for Marion (grumpy widower Terence Stamp agrees to sing in the choir his late wife loved).
Nonetheless, many of even the tougher films here seemed to end upbeat. The Place Beyond the Pines (Ryan Gosling as stunt-rider turned bank-robber) delivered reconciliation in the next generation. Vagabond tricksters Colin Firth and Emily Blunt finally faced up to their obligations in Arthur Newman. In The Impossible, Naomi Watts and Ewen McGregor suffered the full force of the tsunami but found each other again. In the real-life based film that was the runner-up for The People's Choice Award, Argo, wizard "ex-filtrator" Ben Affleck rescues the six people trapped in the Canadian ambassador's residence in Tehran after the Iranian Revolution - a truly extraordinary example of extracting a feelgood story out of a wider catastrophe.
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Perhaps that is one of TIFF's distinguishing characteristics as a festival: audiences like to feel good, to see happy endings? If so, that's consonant with the whole expansive and optimistic mood of Toronto itself, a place that compared to the great European cities barely has a past to contemplate or regret.
For myself, the films I liked best were Michael Winterbottom's Everyday, a slow-moving study of how a convict's wife and children cope with his absence, genuinely filmed over five long years in rural Norfolk; and Olivier Assayas's Something in the Air (Apres Mai, originally), about personal lives taking precedence over political engagement among student revolutionaries in 1968, a domestic continuation of the preoccupations of his biopic of the terrorist, Carlos.
But it is Silver Linings Playbook (a Weinstein film, yet again, scheduled for simultaneous release in the UK and US on November 21) that looks already to be headed for a full hand of Oscar nominations. If and when that happens, TIFF will have staked its claim to be the festival that matters most even more firmly.
