Nov. 17–30 at The Royal. All screenings free.
Since 2005, the European Union Film Festival has given Toronto audiences a chance to catch up with under-the-radar titles from across the pond; while a few of the 24 films on offer in this year’s program have previously been shown at TIFF (including Austrian director Karl Markovic’s acclaimed Breathing and the Irish chiller The Other Side of Sleep), the vast majority are local premieres.
Such curatorial care is evident with the-opening night selection, The Winner (Nov. 17, 8:30 p.m.), a Polish drama that continues the cinematic tradition of putting piano prodigies through the emotional wringer. In films from Shine to Tokyo Sonata, a character’s ability to tickle the ivories sits at odds with his ability to control the rest of his life. No sooner have we been introduced to Polish-American pianist Oliver (Pawel Szajda) than he’s storming off the stage at a sold-out recital in Wroclaw. Shunned by his peers and suddenly broke, he’s a brilliant artist in need of some fresh mojo. And it arrives right on schedule in the form of Frank (Janusz Gajos), a bookish older academic whose own talent is for picking winners at the horse track.
The Winner is a film of neat parallels: between the world of piano competitions and thoroughbred racing; between the discipline of classical music (embodied by Olivier) and the shaggier pleasures of rock ’n’ roll (Frank is really into Elvis); and between the two men themselves, whose predictably unlikely friendship drives the story. This isn’t exactly cutting-edge cinema, but there’s a clarity to writer-director Wieslaw Saniewski’s visual style and underlying metaphors that elevates The Winner above the majority of crowd-pleasing festival-circuit fare.
Exhibit A for that type of film would be Almanya—Welcome to Germany (Nov. 19, 8:45 p.m.), which is practically the dictionary definition of “inoffensive.” One would think that a film examining the fraught scenario of Turkish immigrants adapting to German society would aim for something more than light entertainment, but Yasemin Samdereli’s film is aimed squarely at the middle of the road. Almanya unfolds via parallel timelines concerning the same character, Huseyin (Vedat Erincin): In one he’s a newly arrived gastarbeiter (guest worker) trying to put down roots in a new country; in the other, he’s a prosperous patriarch mulling over a move back home.
There’s a potentially thorny idea here about strangers in a strange land, but Almanya is too streamlined to permit any really complicated emotions. Instead, there’s a sitcom-ish quality to the writing and the directing that makes it go down easy—a characteristic that some viewers may find hard to swallow.
