THE VIEW FROM UP THERE.

Toronto international Film Festival

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

September 9-18, 1999

One of the highlights of the Toronto International Film Festival is the Perspective Canada program, which introduces new work by established and emerging Canadian talent and illuminates the achievements of Canada's film industry. This year's program, organized by Liz Czach and Helen DuToit, featured an impressive collection of nearly 60 features and shorts by well-known directors including Michel Brault, Atom Egoyan, Lea Pool and Patricia Rozema. These works collectively tackle subjects ranging from women's rights in nineteenth-century Great Britain to teen angst in contemporary Canada and just about everything in between.

What makes the Perspective program so interesting is that it reveals, in its spectrum of representations from across Canada, a great deal about both the culture and the industry that have produced the films. It is, of course, no secret that the products of Canada's entertainment industries have often been viewed, both at home and abroad, as inferior copies of those produced in the United States. This is due in no small part to the widespread practice of U.S.-based companies shooting grade-Z, no-budget claptrap in Canada to take advantage of lower production costs. The fact that many interesting Canadian films are often never identified or recognized as such, and thus are mistakenly classified as American, or at least not as Canadian, also plays a role in Canada's unappreciated status on the international market.

In recent years, filmmakers such as Egoyan, Rozema, Guy Maddin and Thom Fitzgerald have scored international success with films that duplicate the high production values of Hollywood movies yet exhibit a sensibility not often, if ever, encountered in American commercial film. These works examine the influence of external images on identity and, in so doing, point to the overpowering effect that U.S.-based imagery has on the Canadian imagination. It is especially interesting to note that three of the most fascinating films in this year's Perspective Canada program take what can only be seen as American themes and relocate them to specifically Canadian settings.

Jeremy Podeswa's The Five Senses (1999), which opened the series, tells the story of a group of people who profoundly influence each other's lives without realizing it. Each of the main characters suffers from some sort of sensory deprivation that prevents him or her from finding happiness: an ophthalmologist's impending deafness leads him to recognize the importance of sound in his life, for example; and a commercial cake baker obsessed with presentation realizes that she has not considered how her creations taste.

These lacks, losses and oversights open up narrative possibilities for the characters to learn about themselves and, in some cases, to find what they have been looking for. Some respond, others miss opportunities. These subplots unfold around the central story of the disappearance of a little girl in a city park. As the film shifts uneasily back and forth between actual locations and an artificial mediascape, Podeswa focuses his critical eye on how the "imagined community" created by the media in its coverage of the event veils the profound separation and alienation the characters feel. It also raises questions, however obliquely, about the influence of U.S. media culture on Canada by focusing on the transformation of the child's disappearance from a private occurrence to a full-blown media event, complete with round-the-clock live coverage. It is impossible not to be reminded of the frenzied media reportage that has become the mainstay of American television news coverage.

Like Podeswa's film, Jerry Ciccoritti's The Life Before This (1999) focuses on a group of characters brought together by tragic circumstances. Ciccoritti builds his existential study of a single night in the lives of seven people around another prevalent American theme: violence in the public sector. As the film opens, a stream of characters passes through the doors of a popular Toronto coffee shop. A high school teacher with quizzes to grade, a couple on a blind date, an exterminator deep in thought and a waitress/aspiring actress with a beehive hairdo and false eyelashes are all elements of a matrix of individuals whose actions and interactions form the foundation of Ciccoritti's study.

The relative calm of the coffee shop is suddenly torn apart as two dim-witted criminals, no doubt living out some Hollywood-inspired robbery fantasy, burst through the front doors and break into a shoot out with one another. As the last gunshots echo, the camera pulls back to survey the aftermath: bodies litter the floor and blood is spattered everywhere. All at once the image track runs backward and the viewer is taken back in time to the morning before the event. The film then follows the paths of each of its characters through his or her daily routine and toward what seems to be an impending and inevitable death, illustrating how even the most seemingly insignificant event can have far-reaching consequences. Like American Beauty (1999, by Sam Mendes) with its similar ambivalent outlook, The Life Before This is as intriguing as it is disturbing. It is a snapshot of life in North America in the 1990s. Ciccoritti's choice to focus on the vicissitudes of destiny rather than the spectacle of violence distingui shes the film from both the news events that it deconstructs and the Hollywood blockbusters that emulate them. Ciccoritti's film ends with the image of a metal saucer spinning on the floor of the coffee shop--an apt visual metaphor for its own form and content. The Life Before This presents its viewers with a small segment of an infinite continuum of possible variations in which each individual character's actions can alter the fates of those around him or her. It critiques the fatalism that informs both the way we view media spectacles and the way we view everyday life.

Far from the angst-ridden urban sprawls of Podeswa's and Ciccoritti's films is Exceptional Vista, the seemingly idyllic town of John Paizs's feature Top of the Food Chain (1999). Top of the Food Chain is Paizs's first feature in over 10 years (his last was the cult favorite Crime Wave [1986], shot in Winnipeg) and proved to be nothing short of a revelation at this year's festival. The film tells the story of an isolated Canadian town obsessed with television, fishing and sex (in that order) beset by invaders from another planet. The arrival of a dashingly handsome American scientist turns the town upside down and sets the stage for an inspired parody of 1950s American movies.

Top of the Food Chain looks and feels like a Cold War-era Hollywood science-fiction film, only this time the space invaders are stand-ins for the Americans instead of the Russians. It is no small coincidence that the evil aliens use television signals as their chosen method to invade and conquer the sleepy Canadian town, just as the U.S. media has done in countless border towns for years.

What makes Top of the Food Chain particularly fascinating is that it manages to avoid the broadly-drawn, "nudge-nudge" approach that characterizes parodies such as Tim Burton's Mars Attacks (1996) and, at the same time, to satirize the fever-pitch flag-waving mentality that informs such "serious" films as Robert Emmerich's Independence Day (1996). Top of the Food Chain takes Hollywood movies (and their rather idealistic representations of American popular culture) as the ground zero for its unique attack on cultural imperialism.

Paizs and his writers obviously love the material they satirize. The film's playful undercutting of morals and standards explodes traditional notions of gendered behavior and suggests, in a hilarious epilogue that has to be seen to be believed, that underneath the cardigans and crinoline it is the women of Exceptional Vista who possess the power and the know-how to run the show.

These three exceptional films, with their vastly different approaches, illustrate the scope and quality of the work that is being produced in Canada. The Toronto International Film Festival's Perspective Canada program makes these productions accessible to critics and industry representatives from across North America and around the world, and as such provides a valuable service to both the filmmakers whose work is exhibited and (at least potentially) to a public tired of formulaic Hollywood fare.

ROBERT L. CAGLE writes about film and popular culture. He has just completed work on a book about Canadian film tentatively titled You Can't Force a Country to Love You: Identity and Desire in Contemporary Canadian Cinema.