Toronto 2009

People who love something, don't always know how to run something. The folks who run the Toronto Film Festivalreally love film, and they genuinely want to share a passion with as many of the rest of us as possible. They just haven't figured out how. Every year they try some new delivery system, but still their hallmark is monumental inefficiency.

Today I joined a queue of about 150 people who were there to pick up tickets, which they had already ordered and paid for. It took an hour and a half. And there are thousands of people who come to the festival. In previous years, they have had 15, 20, 25 staff managing this operation. Today -- 3.

Ruthless inefficiency.

The volunteers are the heart of the festival, and the muscle too. But not, unfortunately, the brain. This is not their fault at all. They have a specific assignment, which is all they know. Tonight, one volunteer was confused about which line was ticket holders and which was the rush line. Further on, another volunteer in charge of hurting two lines of ticket holders had a spotty command of English, not to mention an her puzzlement at the French title of one of her charges. Evening goals. She knew the number of the cinema where each line was headed, but who picks a film on which box it is in?

Enough rant. I am in Toronto with 300+ films to choose from, like everyone around me in line, in cinema one, on the sidewalk. We love films about as much as the Festival folks to, and we all patiently revel.


L'ENFER D'HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT directed by Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea

Off to a mild start. This is a great idea for a documentary. Serge Bromberg is a film preservationist who convinced the widow of the classic French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (Diabolique, The Wages of Fear ) to let him use never-released footage from the 1964 film Inferno, which Clouzot had had to abandon.

It is like some other reconstructions of lost films, and the footage, featuring Romy Schneider at the height of her charm and stardom, is striking, hypnotic, unsettling. The interviews with surviving crew members, including assistant director Costa-Gavras, recount the excessive, Hollywood-funded production structure -- 3 entirely separate camera crews, including Claude Renoir on one underused unit -- the extensive visual and audio effects experiments, the endless retakes, the apparently undetermined structure of the script. While Clouzot ran further and further behind with retakes that would take William Wyler's breath away, the crews balked, Schneider yelled and a month into the shoot, the leading man walked. Then, just to seal the film's fate, Clouzot had a heart attack in the mid-take. Talk about bad karma.

There is a fascinating story to tell here, but Bromberg doesn't know how to tell it. A preservationist's mission is to save everything because it all has value; a documentarian's mission is to pair the voluminous material into a cogent, informative film. This time, the preservationist won out. While the inherently interesting, it is way too long, and way too repetitive. This is the kind of film DVRs and fast-forward were made for.

I rate it fair - a C+.