It goes without saying that the program for the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the most significant annual gatherings of its type, contains a vast, diverse lineup. Still, there’s a detectable formula to its design. Situated on the eve of the fall movie season, TIFF serves as a launch pad for Hollywood studios to showcase their coming attractions, and for those same studios’ specialty divisions to reveal the “indie” titles intended to find audiences on a comparatively smaller scale. Last year, for example, Warner Bros. premiered Michael Clayton, its foremost Academy Awards contender, while Fox Searchlight flaunted Juno. Now, Warner Bros. has unveiled the British crime comedy RocknRolla, while Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist arrives courtesy of Sony Pictures. There’s also Joel and Ethan Coen’s Burn After Reading, Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna, Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno and Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, all of which have guaranteed distribution and sizable audiences. For this bunch, the festival is hardly more than the first step in an eternal cycle of marketing schemes.

That said, TIFF is also the place where some films come to die — or, rather, to live the only life they’ve got. Like many festivals, the entries situated way beyond mainstream sensibilities often receive their greatest showcases here before teetering off to oblivion. The opening night slot at TIFF, generally a Canadian film, typically suffers that fate: Last year’s disjointed Holocaust drama Fugitive Pieces virtually evaporated after its fleeting spot in the limelight; this year, the World War I romance Passchendaele seems destined follow. But there’s a greater region of obscurity where certain films barely even register with most attendees. These are often found in the outer tiers of the festival, such as the Discovery and Wavelengths sections, where the festival can become the exclusive venue for uniquely eccentric artistry that fails to interest the general public. It’s not a limbo, but a rarefied glance at the bolder, less accessible experiments with the art form. In the current festival, I can single out the befuddling, audaciously minimalistic drama Liverpool, an Argentinian film virtually devoid of plot. Director Lisandro Alonso has an international cult following from his earlier features, including Freedom and Los Muertos, but the excruciatingly intimate detail in Liverpool of a single character wandering around Ushuaia, a town near the isolated port where ships travel to Antarctica, will only interest daring viewers with particular enthusiasm for this seriously patient approach.

That said, the countless long takes in Liverpool where the quiet, lonely protagonist (Juan Fernandez) stomps across massive, snowy landscapes or dines at vacant eateries throughout a very long journey to visit his ailing mother hold far more appeal than pretty much anything in RocknRolla. The latest from the United Kingdom’s champion of sleek outlaws, Guy Ritchie (Snatch), the film contains a needlessly overstuffed plot about corrupt real estate brokers in the seediest regions of London. It glides on autopilot with the usual roundup of Richie-isms, including trite slo-mo sequences of smoothly dressed business folk walking around as rock music blows out the soundtrack, and hyperstylized, dime store Tarantino dialogue that sounds like it was written after a rough night at the pub (”It’s not about the drugs, the money, the hospital trips…rockers never die”). Despite intense performances by Gerard Butler and Tom Wilkinson, RocknRolla doesn’t offer much beyond the plastic shine of Ritchie’s music video direction. Story-wise, it’s equal parts Glengarry Glenn Ross and Ocean’s Eleven, but that’s not a compliment. In general, Ritchie’s script suffers from a confusion of tones, unable to choose between crude humor and faux suavity.

Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist is neither of those things, which means it’s a welcome antidote. Although technically just another studio movie making the obligatory festival rounds before its theatrical release in October, it has roots in the independent film community, being the sophomore effort of director Peter Sollett, whose debut feature, Raising Victor Vargas, became a major indie success story just a few years ago. It’s the sort of movie that proves a young, ambitious filmmaker doesn’t have to compromise his creative integrity once faced with commercial pressures; instead, he grooves with them at his own pace. Although occasionally uneven and not an essential TIFF movie like some of the lower profile works, it’s still a testament to the perseverance of independent expression.

Sollett has an eye for Manhattan’s Lower East Side youth culture, as Vargas initially proved, and he does it again with Nick and Norah. An adorable hipster fairy tale about the two eponymous disaffected teenagers (Michael Cera and Kat Dennings) wandering around the city with a wild bunch of drunken pals, it’s one of the most sincere mainstream romantic comedies I’ve seen in a long time. The would-be lovers meet while still uncertain about their previous romantic excursions, but a mutual attraction blossoms out of the revelation that they share the same outsider anxieties. Drifting from one gritty New York venue to another, Nick and Nora wholeheartedly supports that sentiment — it’s cheesy, but honestly so. The characters continually express themselves with ironic glee, yet the conclusion is agreeably mushy. All hail the best date movie for this generation’s East Village elite.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Eric, Toronto Film Festival 2008, Academy Awards 2008, Festivals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.