Boston film fest projects shaky image
Every September, filmmakers, dealmakers, publicists, and journalists from around the world converge on Toronto for that city's annual film festival, a major civic and film-industry event. The New York Film Festival, held in October, is perhaps the most rigorously programmed festival on the planet: Movie lovers know that films chosen by director Richard Pena and his staff are a collective statement on the state of the art.
Our fair city holds a film festival in the fall, too. Oddly, it hardly seems to matter.
The Boston Film Festival, which ended Sunday, celebrated its 20th anniversary this year with a tribute to actress Annette Bening and a strong slate of movies, and yet it's hard to find anyone in the city's cultural community who was very excited about it. Outside that community, the festival barely even registers. Many of the town's movie critics and arts editors head to Toronto when mid-September rolls around: There are more movies, more people, more buzz there. The BFF has become a can-afford-to-skip event: a third-tier film festival for a first-tier movie town.
On the surface, this just doesn't make sense. The festival is covered in depth by the Globe, the Herald, and the Phoenix. Directors and stars show up with their latest work. Attendance is respectable; if an usher at the Loews Boston Common told me that only four or five people showed up for some screenings during the first weekend this year, the managers at both the Common and Copley Place theaters assure me festival films have been pulling in decent crowds for a weak movie season. Certainly the 2004 Film Excellence Award presentation to Bening on Sept. 13 was sold out, as any event featuring a personal appearance by a talented and beautiful star should be. (As a bonus, her new movie, "Being Julia," turned out to be a delight.)
And yet the Bening tribute also offered evidence of what keeps the Boston Film Festival a small-time affair. The actress herself was gracious to a fault, but the flickering film projection was an embarrassment, the question-and-answer session was awkwardly handled, and obsessive fans were allowed to approach the guest of honor.
I've been to enough festivals to know that projection quality is and should be a top priority -- at this year's Telluride festival, each movie seemed to leap off the screen. And I've never seen a fan sprint up to a star before she even left the podium and demand she sign a beach chair. That's what one overexcited fellow did to Bening; when I asked him about it later he responded, "I'm gonna sell it on
Other aspects of the BFF feel Podunk as well. The festival program is bland in the extreme, with a dull black-and-white cover and graceless film descriptions (from the write-up for "The Woodsman": "But Walter cannot escape his past. A convicted sex offender."). The festival website (www.bostonfilmfestival.org) is a marvel of minimalist counterintuition that doesn't put showtimes on the same page as the film descriptions or even offer a printable one-page schedule (for damning comparison, check out Toronto's site at www.e.bell.ca/filmfest or New York's at www.filmlinc.com/
nyff/nyff.htm). Adding to the BFF's low impact is the fact that it takes place in only two downtown multiplexes and has rarely in its history reached out to other Boston area theaters and institutions. The Coolidge Corner and the Brattle -- both shrines for the kind of smart Brookline and Cambridge cineastes you'd think the festival would want to attract -- have never been involved. Bo Smith, who heads the film program at the Museum of Fine Arts, says he extended an offer to rent the MFA auditorium to the festival this year and was turned down. "I was genuine in my offer," says Smith. "I'd like the festival to be a citywide festival."
There's a reason the Boston Film Festival stays close to the downtown Loews theaters: It started there. When the festival debuted in 1984, it was the brainchild of local film exhibition legend Alan Friedberg, who took over the old Sack Cinema chain from founder Ben Sack and built it up into the robust USA Cinemas. The festival started as a civic PR move -- a way to bring culture and cultured audiences back to a moribund downtown scene. Under programmer George Mansour, USA owned and operated the BFF even after Loews bought the chain in 1988 and relocated Friedberg to its New Jersey headquarters as chairman of the national circuit.
In 1993, Loews pulled out but continued to make its theaters available. Former Loews executives Mark Diamond and Susan Fraine took over the programming and management of the festival in addition to running a second festival in Palm Beach, Fla., where the married couple lives during the winter. The Palm Beach festival is now run by others; Diamond and Fraine devote their time solely to Boston these days.
So the BFF was born out of a distribution and marketing mind-set, and it reflects as much. The top titles in any given year tend to be boutique Hollywood Oscar-wannabes, such as "Being Julia," that happen to be playing Toronto and whose stars and director can tack on a visit to Boston while they're at the bigger festival. Programmer Diamond cherry-picks some Sundance hits -- this year, it's Shane Carruth's sci-fi-on-a-shoestring "Primer" and "The Woodsman," starring Kevin Bacon in a much-discussed turn as a pedophile -- and taps into a few high-profile art-house films just about to open theatrically (John Sayles's "Silver City" and Stephen Fry's "Bright Young Things"). He cuts a deal with an up-and-coming distributor: THINKFilm, based in New York and (surprise) Toronto, has six movies in the 2004 BFF. And he spotlights locally made films such as Maureen Foley's "American Wake."
And in the end, shouldn't it be about the movies? Of course, and the 2004 Boston Film Festival showed some very fine ones: among others, "Being Julia," Jane Weinstock's "Easy," Hungary's "Kontroll," documentaries such as "Born Into Brothels" and "Overnight." No one is denying that Diamond, Fraine, and their staff work hard and earnestly.
That said, what the BFF lacks is a distinct programming sensibility, which is a quality that's impossible to define yet unmistakable when you've got it. A well-curated film festival creates excitement and the feeling you're getting early access to the movies that matter. New York succeeds through dint of Pena's practiced eye. Toronto has it through sheer glitz and volume. Sundance, Cannes, Telluride, Seattle have established unique personalities. Without such a sensibility, you have a group of movies with no collective momentum, and that, year in and year out, is what the Boston Film Festival offers.
Anyway, a film festival is about more than its individual films: It's about a city's idea of itself. On that score the Boston Film Festival -- a stolid, unimaginative event too hidebound to venture outside its downtown base and connect with the communities that make up Greater Boston -- says things about Boston that are unflattering and more than a little truthful.
Ironically, there's a festival that does it better: The Independent Film Festival of Boston, two years old last spring and a surprisingly healthy toddler. Under program director Adam Roffman, the IFFB does have a specific sensibility -- it's still jelling, but it's there -- and by holding screenings at the Brattle, the Coolidge, and in Somerville, it's bringing the films to a core festival audience. If the IFBB can fold in the MFA, downtown venues such as the Wang, and even a multiplex or two, it may yet turn into the film festival this movie-mad town really deserves and has waited so long for.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
