As I write this, I'm in the middle of my third day at the film fest, though compared to previous years - this is my 25th festival, by the way, a milestone to be dealt with in an upcoming Metro feature - it feels equally as tense but nowhere near as hectic. Reasons to follow in a later post ...

Up until Thursday, the rest of the Metro writers and I were mostly occupied with screenings - the dozens and dozens of preview screenings set up for local journalists to get a head start on their festival duties, and incidentally to clear them out of the regular festival screenings as much as possible when the hordes of out-of-town journalists finally arrive. Very few of the really anticipated films were screening in the run-up to the fest, leaving mornings and afternoons crammed with screenings of arty foreign and independent films whose reels had already arrived in town, thanks either to eager, businesslike producers or local press reps.

And a lot of Canadian films. It's been a few years now since the festival tore down the wall that kept local product in the ghetto known as Perspectives Canada - a program title that evoked a grade school textbook loaded with Susanna Moodie excerpts and Bliss Carman poems, and which conveniently allowed festival-goers to ignore a whole section of the program book when planning their screening schedule.

By mixing Canadian films in with the other stuff, they were likely presuming that filmgoers would make their choices according to the program synopses - if you have a taste for gritty, low-budget dramas about dysfunctional rural families, failing farms and incest, why should you care whether it's set in Yorkshire, Moldova or Nova Scotia? That, I can only presume, was the thinking. At this point, I certainly can't give much credence to the notion that it was because Canadian film had, finally, matured into something truly worthwhile.

It's a dirty secret that Canadian film critics swallow hard and set their face in a stoic grimace when called upon to review local product. Obviously I have no scientific basis for this; there's no poll or movement or manifesto articulating it, but based on years of experience, observation and anecdotal evidence, it's an almost inescapable conclusion. Just as unhappy is the fact that, weary of sounding negative and (occasionally) unwilling to piss too close to where we eat, many critics are sparing when it comes time to write their reviews, with the result that the industry - in the absence of anything like healthy box office returns for their work - might be deluding itself that it's aesthetically healthier than it really is, and that a mass artistic breakthrough is just around the corner.

The late John Harkness of NOW magazine was one of the few truly outspoken voices on this subject, and his passing late last year deprived us of the one voice that might be relied upon to apportion scorn where it was truly deserving - a fact that I think might have been cause for unspoken relief in some quarters of our cultural industries. I found myself missing John, for not the first time, as I left screenings of films like Passchendaele and Control Alt Delete on the eve of the festival, two products of the Canadian film business, from very different extremes of the budgetary scale, on offer at this year's fest. John would probably have given the latter a miss - though he would have gleefully thrown in a shot in some other context - but he would have taken on the former with undisguised glee.

As it turns out, if you read between the lines of the vast majority of reviews of Canadian films at TIFF this year, you can discern a pale, or even occasionally bruise-blue shadow of the impatience and disappointment that I was hearing much more openly in the last couple of weeks, and in the last year or two. My peers in the critic business here have found it harder and harder to be discrete with their unhappiness with what passes for our national cinema, at least with each other, and especially with what they regard as their grim duty to trudge into yet another screening and produce one more in a long line of lukewarm appraisals of films that can't seem to deliver, even when they've set their artistic sights so low.

Quizzed on this dilemma, the critics I've spoken to sound resigned, mostly, and almost inevitably make sure they make an exception for Quebecois cinema, which exists in another world - its own small but vital solitude - and which we get brief glimpses of at the festival every year. Produced for a small but eager audience in the province and, occasionally, in France, Quebecois films succeed where English-Canadian films so often fail, both commercially and artistically. I remember sitting through Jean-Marc Vallee's C.R.A.Z.Y. three years ago, smarting at its ambition and audacity, knowing that I'd never seen anything like it from English Canada, and probably never would.

Almost inevitably, Canadian critics will shrug and mutter about "cultural insecurity" and regionalism among a host of potential reasons for our failures, and ritualistically talk about Hollywood as either some malign influence that either makes even our best efforts seem half-formed or as a yardstick that we shouldn't even try to measure ourself against, preferring to suggest Britain or Europe as better models for our local industry. When they name their own favorite films, however, they'll inevitably mention American films, both big-budget and independent; this is how it should be - they're our closest neighbour, our virtual linguistic twin, and a cultural doppelganger even if they usually act as if they barely know we're here.

Finally, they'll shrug and talk about the cultural bureaucracy that funds film in this country - the arts councils and provincial and federal funding entities that seem to make their decisions on what will get made based on filmmakers' resumes - ensuring that the same people who've made the same dismal pictures will keep producing - or vague criterion full of words like inclusion, alienation, hegemony, diversity and marginal, none of which have ever been known to galvanize weekend ticket-buyers or, based on the evidence so far, encourage a nation to overcome its wise and longstanding aversion.

That, they say, will have to change, but no one has any idea how that's going to happen. Few imagine that any kind of radical restructuring - the abolition of the bureaucracy or that dread phrase "private funding" - is either possible or even desirable. And so we critics, in our small way, ensure that the system will perpetuate itself, and that we'll be the authors of our own critical misery when their products are trotted in front of an either resentful or indifferent audience, almost as an afterthought.  

            
            


            

                

                    
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