Considering that the Cannes experience consists mostly of critics and other assorted ornery types shambling into theaters, sitting in front of a screenful of flickering images for a few hours and then, like Flash Gordon’s Mole People, tumbling back out into daylight, news travels surprisingly fast.

Earlier today, a colleague and I had just stepped out of a midmorning screening of a rather steamy and interesting little thriller, Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, when a third colleague began thinking aloud about what he might see next. Earlier in the morning, some of our friends who are surprisingly adept at being in two places at once had seen a picture called The Selfish Giant, screening not in the main competition, but in the Quinzaine, or Directors’ Fortnight, section of the festival. Our colleague told us what he’d heard about the movie, and warned us that it was probably going to be upsetting; a Cannes programmer had told him he still feels a little melancholy every time he thinks about it.

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"It's hard not to be romantic about baseball," admits Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics played, in career-best form, by Brad Pitt in Bennett Millers' Moneyball. This line, from a screenplay by Stephen Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, happens in the home stretch of a film about the push-and-pull between traditional methods of baseball team building and player evaluation, and the experimental methods Beane put into practice beginning in 2002, after a heartbreaking pennant series loss to the Yankees--a team with a payroll four times the size of Oakland's.

Tired of being beaten and having his players poached by wealthy bigger-market franchises ("We're organ donors for the rich," he complains, with Pitt giving the middle-aged former player a touch of brass tacks anti-establishment swagger reminiscent of his Tyler Durden from Fight Club), Beane hires Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) to shake up the As with the aid of math. A fictional figure based on Paul Depodesta (Beane's assistant at the A's who graduated to the general manager post at the LA Dodgers, from which he was fired in 2005 by Frank McCourt after a Depodesta-rebuilt team finished the second worst season in LA history), Brand is a Yale graduate and disciple of Bill James, the former security guard, writer and current Red Sox employee who essentially invented the advanced analysis of baseball statistic known as sabermetics. 

The second narrative feature from writer/director Julia Loktev (Day Night Day Night played TIFF in 2006), The Loneliest Planet stars Gael Garcia Bernal and Hani Furstenberg as Alex and Nica, a newly-engaged couple who hire a guide (played by real-life guide Bidzina Gujabidze) to lead them on a backpacking trip in the mountains of Georgia. The title, an apparent play on the Lonely Planet travel guides designed for boho tourists like Loktev's couple, takes on more complicated connotations as the trio delve into rugged, desolate terrain, both literally and figuratively.

The movie opens with the most disarming image I've seen at the festival thus far.

Greta Gerwig in Damsels in Distress

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Tragic romance is a big TIFF theme this year. Soured love tied to death and/or suicide and/or beautifully-lit misery has popped up in eight of the nine films I've seen since I last blogged. At the festival midway point, I've seen so many movies hinged on mad/bad romance, rejection and infidelity, that they all threaten to blur into one massive, incredibly melancholic scare campaign. You have been warned: open your heart at your peril.

Some of these films (like Philippe Garrel's That Summer, or the long-awaited Whit Stillman romantic-musical-comedy Damsels in Distress) really deserve more careful consideration than I can give them whilst under the scheduling demands of a film festival. Others (like, say, Alexander Payne's The Descendants) don't. With that caveat, and the promise that I'll dig deeper into few of these movies when time allows, here's a notebook drop from my last 48 hours in Toronto.

Werner Herzog

Friday was Foreign-Born Documentary All-Stars Tackle Powerful Symbols of America day at TIFF. The scarily prolific Werner Herzog (whose first foray into 3D, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, premiered at this festival last year before its blockbuster theatrical run this summer) is back with another new feature, Into the Abyss, which considers the different fates of two young men accused of collaborating on a murder: one was sentenced to 40 years in prison, the other to die at age 28 via lethal injection. The press screening of that Texas-set story preceded Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, an attempt by British documentarian Nick Broomfield (whose work has long circled infamous American women, from Heidi Fleiss to serial killer Aileen Wuornos to Courtney Love) to "find out about the real Sarah from the people who know her best."

Jafar Panahi and Igi in This is Not a Film

TIFF 2011's opening night festivities were emblematic of the Festival's sometimes chaotic diversity. While a press screening of the highly-anticipated Moneyball and the world premiere of Davis Guggenheim's U2 doc From the Sky Down thrilled the red carpet media at other theaters, one of the larger screens at TIFF's flagship venue, the Bell Lightbox, hosted a free screening of This is Not a Film, the 75-minute video diary documenting a day in the life of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi.

Panahi has been under house arrest in his apartment in Tehran since May 2010, after spending nearly three months in Evin Prison. The internationally celebrated director (a neorealist who works often with non-actors and real locations, his most recent film was 2007's Offiside) spent nearly three months in prison last year, and is currently appealing a sentence of six years in prison and a 20 year ban from filmmaking on charges of "assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country's national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic." (Panahi's wife has said her husband, an outspoken supporter of the opposition movement who was initially arrested near a gathering at the grave of slain protester Neda Agha-Soltan, had been working on a film that "had nothing to do with the regime.")

This is Not a Film, billed in the end credits as "an effort by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb," is a dispatch from Panahi's life behind closed doors--it stemmed from Mirtahmasb's desire to go "behind the scenes of Iranian filmmakers not making films"--and as such it's implicitly about the regime that put him there. That regime is well aware of the film, which was infamously smuggled out of Iran for its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on a flash drive hidden in a cake. Originally scheduled to appear in Toronto with the movie, on Monday Mirtahmasb was stopped at Tehran Airport, where his passport and luggage were confiscated, and he barred from leaving the country. That very recent turn of events gives chilling irony to one moment in Film, in which Mirtahmasb, filmed by Panahi on his iPhone, says with a laugh, "Take a shot of me in case I'm arrested."

Jordan Gelber and Mia Farrow in Dark Horse

"We're Jews, and Jews we shall always be."


So a main character warns of the us-vs-them difference that would define the first half of the 20th century, in A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg's period piece triangulating the Oedipal relationship between Sigmund Freud, (Viggo Mortenson), Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), and the latter's young patient-turned-mistress Sabine (Kiera Knightley). That film screened last week at the Venice Film Festival but has not premiered yet in Toronto, and while embargo prevents me from publishing a full review at this moment, I bring it up because the line could double as an unspoken thesis of another film on the Venice/Toronto circuit, Todd Solondz's Dark Horse.

It seems notable that it's Cronenberg's unsubtle but terrifically entertaining film--a comedy of sexual and psychological confusion which fractures into a sincerely sad romance shrouded in heavy-handed foreshadowing--that exploits the audience's knowledge of the fate of Jews at the hands of Aryans for the purpose of narrative weight, while Solondz's strange, almost flippantly psychographic Dark Horse rises to the Jungian challenge of dismantling the Jewish collective unconscious.

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The Toronto Film Festival kicks off tomorrow, offering the usual mix of Oscar bait, new films from foreign and experimental masters, and basically every conceivable thing in between. With the caveat that the lineup, hundreds of films strong, could not possibly be tackled in full by one lone lady critic, here's a sampling of what I'm most excited to see over my eight days in the north.

CANNES, FRANCE. The 64th Cannes Film Festival provided an exceptionally rich and varied slate and the jury--headed by Robert De Niro--proved both gracious and judicious in dividing their prizes among eight films.

As expected, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life won the Palme d'Or, which was accepted on behalf of the reclusive director by his producer Bill Poland. The award seemed a forgone conclusion, thanks to the bizarre press conference performance that resulted in Melancholia's director Lars Von Trier being banned from the festival. Another powerful contender, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's challenging police procedural Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, was likely shown too late in the festival to wrest the Palme from The Tree, although it's a tribute to the movie's partisans that it split the second place Grand Prix with the Dardenne brothers' The Kid With a Bike. The third place Prix du Jury went to Polisse, a melodramatic portrait of the Paris Child Protection Unit. Resplendent in a revealing red toga and bondage high heels, the director Maïwenn gave the award ceremony's liveliest performance--the exaggerated sighs with which she gave thanks for her prize were as hilariously bogus as the movie itself.

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Film festival coverage tends towards hyperbole. If you're at home experiencing something like Cannes through blogs, you'll likely get the sense that there are masterpieces and travesties and nothing in between. In fact, the middle is huge--it's just hard to find space and time to talk about it within the on-to-the-next festival culture. What follows are brief notes on three Cannes films that fall squarely in central percentile of what I was able to see.

The Artist
As a formal stunt, this (mostly) silent film love letter to the last days of the silent film era "works," in that it adapts some basic tenets of pre-talkie visual storytelling to suit a modern gaze. But since there's little here other than form--director Michel Hazanavicius has nothing to say about the massive transition at the dawn of sound other than that it happened--that process of adaptation feels like a cheat. If you're making a silent film just to make a silent film, why employ a performance style that mimics not silent film acting nor naturalistic behavior, but the mid-century mugging of musicals like Singin' in the Rain (The Artist's most obvious influence)? Why filter silent style through multiple layers of remove?