Ontario Gothic

In June of this year, the Ontario Science Centre, a Toronto landmark open to the public since 1969, was abruptly and unceremoniously shuttered. The government claimed the roof of the brutalist structure was in danger of imminent collapse and beyond repair, but architects and officials disagreed, strongly: necessary repairs to the roof would have clocked in at only a fraction of the estimated $478 million total cost, they argued, and the Science Centre could have remained open throughout. While wider repairs to the building would have taken years, they would have preserved a beloved institution in North York.

The government, under the hilariously corrupt Doug Ford administration, appeared more than anything to be motivated by its plans for a revitalized—in other words, significantly privatized—Ontario Place, another long-neglected public facility located along Toronto’s waterfront. That plan, currently under construction, will see a huge section of the once glorious public park, built on landfill and opened to great fanfare in 1971, turned over to European mega-spa corporation Therme on a ninety-five-year lease. As part of the deal, Ontario is obligated to spend hundreds of millions on a parking structure, and speculation has it that a proposal to move the Science Centre to a new location in Ontario Place was part of some sort of agreement to guarantee Therme an even steadier stream of visitors. When all is said and done, Ontarians will gain a spruced up stretch of the waterfront, primarily managed by a private corporation, and will lose one historic structure, a world-class interactive museum, acres of public park space, and a sense of itself as “a place to stand, a place to grow.”

I think about that phrase a lot. It’s from Ontario’s unofficial anthem—its cheesy “Ontari-ari-ari-o!” lyrics commissioned and penned for the province’s pavilion at the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal, celebrating Canada’s centenary—and I grew up with it playing on the TV and radio. At some point it fell out of fashion, though when Ford came into office as premier, he made “A Place to Grow” both our official slogan and the name for his initiative to further privatize our public goods for the “prosperity” of the province. The perversion of that idea, of Ontario as a place to stand (now for a fee) and a place to grow (with the right connections and business interests), pervades all aspects of life in our modern economy, in which the very concept of a “public” has disappeared in favor of a conglomeration of individual consumers. It has made life in Ontario a dispiriting affair to say the least.

Enter: the Toronto International Film Festival, or TIFF as it’s known. It’s one of the “big five” film festivals, alongside Cannes, Venice, Berlin, and Sundance, but unlike those prestigious focal points for the international film industry, Toronto has always been “the people’s festival.” Though not publicly owned, it’s a nonprofit bolstered by significant public support and maintains an ethos rooted in its founding as the Toronto Festival of Festivals in 1976. It has never been a hoity-toity gala, despite all the stars and swanky soirées; instead, it centers itself as a populist extravaganza, a chance for the people of Toronto, and whoever else makes the pilgrimage, to see leading and emerging lights of the film world present a diverse array of movies.

TIFF 2024 was perhaps the truest test of the founding proposition in several decades. Unlike the rest of the big five, which largely cater to press and industry types—and rich hobnobbers—Toronto has always been very open to the public, and the public has generally turned out in droves. The peak pandemic years challenged that, and then the SAG-AFTRA strike cast a grim shadow on an institution that was already known to be facing headwinds. Over the last year, amid the cancellations of several other cultural festivals around the city and a dire situation for our other big film festival, Hot Docs, TIFF lost Bell Canada as its main corporate sponsor. To make matters worse, Canadian Business reported in the spring about problems of all kinds within the organization, from a toxic environment, to an increasingly corporate mindset, to serious financial strain, a lot of it coming as a result of their albatross, the costly TIFF Lightbox, built fourteen years ago as a headquarters-slash-movie-theater and festival hub. But then the federal government announced funding of $23 million over three years to help offset the loss of Bell, and over the summer the country’s other major telecom monopolist, Rogers Communications, came on as a major presenting sponsor. Crisis averted, death delayed.

Despite this, problems persisted. That includes yet another year of increasingly outrageous ticket prices and another semi-disastrous ticket acquisition process, courtesy the universally adored Ticketmaster. It also includes initial announcements of the festival’s slate over the summer, with world premieres that did little to inspire confidence. When the Amy Adams vehicle Nightbitch—not great, but not nearly as bad as its title and concept and trailer made it seem—is your most compelling marquee title, that’s a problem. (All shade intended on the Anderson .Paak-directed K-POPS!, and the Elton John documentary codirected by the musician’s Canadian husband, and the Andrea Bocelli documentary, oh and the Bruce Springsteen documentary. I didn’t see any of them.)

As the summer ebbed, though, the slate began to fill out. A few genuinely exciting premieres were added, like Mike Leigh’s latest, Hard Truths—maybe the best film I saw at the festival, period—and the Tim Robinson-starring Friendship—I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard at a comedy’s opening gag. Moreover, the lineup grew to include many noteworthy films that had screened or would first be screening at other festivals, including David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, Sean Baker’s Anora, Mati Diop’s Dahomey, Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud, and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. In July, a friend in the know, who works for competing festival, had described TIFF’s then-upcoming slate as “rancid.” The final slate was quite the opposite. The Festival of Festivals ethos had returned. Perhaps a concession forced on the festival—friends in the festival world have told me TIFF’s move to streaming during the pandemic cost it a lot of prestige in Hollywood, which has turned its eyes instead to the glamorous canals of Venice—but a welcome change for me and many others I spoke with in attendance.

In the end, I didn’t see all the films I wanted to see, but I did see too many. Throwing in a few advanced screenings, and Midnight Madness programmer extraordinaire Peter Kuplowsky’s unofficial Midnight Dankness event on the eve of the festival, I took in fifty features and fourteen shorts. Spurred, I think, by TIFF’s existential crises, and the sense I had of my city’s evaporating culture—at the time, Toronto’s historic and wonderful Revue Cinema was also under threat from an egomaniacal landlord—I became voracious. Amid the bustle on Festival Street, the name given to the part of King Street near the Lightbox that’s pedestrianized for the first four days of every TIFF, I felt alive in Toronto for perhaps the first time since the restrictions of the pandemic. Nice, then, that my first movie the festival proper was The Shrouds, which is not only a funny, beguiling film about losing a partner to illness and death, but also a showcase for the city, name-checking local establishments and putting the CN Tower outside the lead character’s apartment window like it was the Eiffel Tower in some French movie.

Specificity of place in cinema always excites me. For three decades now, Jia Zhangke has devoted his filmmaking career—which encompasses documentary, fictional narrative, and hybrid films alike—to chronicling a changing, rapidly modernizing China. His new film, Caught by the Tides, which premiered at Cannes, serves as a marvelous elaboration of that project. Assembled out of the detritus of twenty-two years of his films, the outtakes and unused footage from the likes of Unknown Pleasures (2002) and Still Life (2006), it tells an epic story of a woman, played by Jia’s great muse Zhao Tao, searching throughout the country for the lover who left her behind to pursue a better future for them both. Their reunion some twenty years later—in a third act shot during the pandemic—finds the old couple fundamentally altered, disconnected, facing their memories of each other and a China they hardly recognize. Not so much a work of nostalgia, Jia has concocted an essayistic narrative of dislocation within one’s own country and heart, one that’s highly observant of China’s growth and corporatization since the 1990s. It’s a transformation I can hardly begin to comprehend—footage from Still Life of the community destroyed for the building of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River is almost beyond imagination—but, still, I identify with Jia’s vision of an altered world, one in which public space is trampled by the forward march of capitalist progress, leaving the possibility of a shared, collective life almost alien.

I don’t know much other than Toronto—or more accurately, the Greater Toronto Area, which includes the suburbs I lived in as a child—and when I consider my place in it, pangs of loneliness are unavoidable. The experience of a big city can be an isolating one, particularly as cultural centers shutter and everyone walks around with AirPods in-ear, phones in-hand, connected to “the world” but far apart from each other. So many glass and steel condominiums litter the city, making it ever more anonymous, leading me to long for the once dominant brutalist architecture of earlier eras—Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, by the way, is a triumph, though not exactly an ode to concrete. Toronto is not different from many other cities suffering the harms of late capitalism, though the thought has sometimes entered my mind to become a wanderer, like Zhao’s character does for a time in Caught by the Tides, searching the land for a new space to call home. Yet as soon as that thought arrives, it’s usually been met by fear, as if moving away would be some kind of death. My parents, immigrants themselves, have often spoken about struggles with a kind of placelessness, their home in Canada very entrenched yet somehow not quite firm.

Paul Schrader’s new film, literally titled Oh, Canada, is in part about that very problem. In the film, Canada functions as a kind of purgatory for its lead character, Leonard Fife, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker living in Montreal, played by Richard Gere in his first reunion with Schrader since American Gigolo. Now quite literally on his deathbed, Fife is sat down for an interview to be featured in a documentary about his life. This is his last testament, and one the documentary crew hopes will reveal something of how he became the cinematic pride of Canada. But in his haze of illness, Fife is instead more interested in recounting his younger days as an American gadabout and eventual draft-dodger.

In an extraordinary exchange with one member of the crew, a woman in her mid-twenties, he explains that by the time he was her age, he’d lived a whole life, gotten married, had a child, and how it all ended for him soon after. To Fife, his life in Montreal’s art scene was ultimately just an escape from a previous, more meaningful life, the abandonment of his home and the people who really knew him. He speaks of it like a death. In his retelling, his memories blend into one another, and anecdotes seem to repeat and contradict. In flashbacks, the America of his memory is gold-hued, and the people are beautiful, and all the mistakes he made and people he hurt are cast in that light. As a young man, he’s alternately played by a surprisingly credible Jacob Elordi and sometimes by Gere himself, as if his older self were intruding on the past, perhaps trying to right old wrongs in his mind, or maybe just allowing himself the fantasy of living again in days gone by.

Based on the novel Forgone by Russell Banks, the film nevertheless comes across as among the most personally revealing of Schrader’s late career. Themes of old age, death, and memory make that intention obvious, as does Gere’s casting, but it’s more than that. The film is a quiet, moving meditation on what it is to have lived a life, or more than one life. It is a reckoning with place, and with dislocation, and with the lies we tell ourselves and others. After finding success north of the border, Fife refuses acknowledgement of his child from his previous life, a betrayal of family and of self. Feted at film festivals and in the press, he chose to live the majority of his years in a world of his own construction that only begins to crumble there at the end.

A film so elegiac, and so content in its smallness, was always going to produce the slightly confused, muted response I heard from the audience as they walked out of the massive Princess of Wales theater. Perhaps they’ll be reminded of it sometime in the future, as they contemplate their own lives; more likely they’ll retain only the vaguest recollections of having seen it at all, paling in comparison to the surprise toast of the festival, the People’s Choice winner, The Life of Chuck. I saw Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King adaptation immediately after Oh, Canada, and was somewhat shocked to be sitting through another story about loss, memory, and regret. I was moved greatly by the film—a cancer diagnosis last year has made me a real mark for stories like this, I admit—which I believe its early detractors have viewed a little too reductively as simplistic, life-affirming pablum. Still, I cannot help shaking my head at the difference in public reception between a film like Oh, Canada, with its irresolvable exploration of a specific life, and The Life of Chuck, which in its favor does feature the return of Mia Sara to the screen and a few great dance sequences, sandwiched by maudlin universalism. It’s not not pablum.

I saw both Oh, Canada and The Life of Chuck on my final day of festival going. By that point, in its second weekend, TIFF had mostly emptied of press and industry, leaving just a few stragglers and some, like myself, who actually live in the city. While screenings were still selling out, the energy was a lot lower (though the ticket prices were still far too high), more akin to the humdrum of day-to-day life in Toronto. Fitting, then, that the last film of my TIFF 2024 was Your Tomorrow, a direct cinema documentary—clearly inspired by the work of the legendary Frederick Wiseman, whose incredible 1972 doc Essene played the festival in a new 4K restoration—about the last year of Ontario Place before its dilapidated remains were fenced off for the construction of Therme’s privatized playground. It’s not a very good documentary. Turns out Wiseman’s style is not easily mimicked. Your Tomorrow is too scattershot in its not-so-subtle advocacy, and too consumed with a few genuine oddballs and eccentrics who regularly frequented the park in its final days. Maybe the weirdo professor who invented the hydraulophone and still wears a Google Glass-like device of his own creation wasn’t the best mascot for Ontario Place as a vital public space. Protests to protect the park populated predominantly by gray-haired white people in one of the world’s most diverse cities leave a bad taste as well.

Perhaps a testament to some sly effectiveness, the film’s footage of a park run down by societal neglect juxtaposed with archival footage of the once-vibrant symbol of Toronto and Ontario’s great future, left me in a state of melancholy. Feeling dislocated, I stepped out onto Richmond Street, up John Street, through Grange Park behind the Art Gallery of Ontario, past another unsightly condo building under construction, on my lonely walk home; not unlike Zhao in Caught by the Tides, walking around the vast, emptied spaces of a technologically advanced, pandemic-era Datong, the city she left and finally returned to. Her home, irrevocably altered. Her self, too. Yet there she remains all the same.

Even in my mid-thirties, running from theater to theater like a madman, I recognize kinship with a fictional, middle-aged woman in China. TIFF this year was successful, though the organization’s ambitions still appear geared toward corporate-style revenue, including plans to launch an official sales market during the festival in 2026. When TIFF’s upcoming month of cinematheque programming went on sale, securing tickets was again a nightmare, and great classics have again been shoved into the Lightbox’s smallest screening rooms, ceding the larger auditoriums to new releases that often screen for just a handful of people. I still nabbed tickets, of course. The wonders of the film festival—so easy to get lost in, existing in the city, but in a space almost outside of time—eventually give way once more to the reality of a Toronto I strain to recognize but cannot bring myself to leave.