Toronto Film Festivals

Editor’s Note: Doc Soup is a monthly documentary screening programme run by the good folks at Hot Docs. It gives audiences in Toronto (and now Calgary and Vancouver!) their regular doc fix each year from the fall through to the spring, leading up to the Hot Docs festival itself.

A Table In Heaven (2007, Director: Andrew Rossi): Sirio Maccioni first opened Le Cirque in New York in 1974, after years and years of working his way up from busboy to waiter to maître d’hôtel. His star rose through the 70s and 80s and the restaurant attracted the rich and famous, including Henry Kissinger, Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan. But as the film begins in 2004, the place has grown a bit stale, and the crowd of old regulars (and the emphasis is clearly on “old”) are dying off and no new customers are replacing them. Sirio decides to close and reopen in a new location. With his three sons Marco, Mario and Mauro, he sets out to plot the future of the family business. A new restaurant will be a fresh start, with a new location, a new chef, a new menu, and a new attitude. At least that’s what the younger generation wants. Sirio is from the old school, though, and is not willing to give up his micromanaging ways. Andrew Rossi’s camera was there to capture it all: Sirio’s charming tale of an uneducated Tuscan immigrant made good, his years of building relationships with New York City’s most rich and famous denizens, the gradual fading of his reputation, and then his family’s often fractious effort to get their groove back. Though it seems at times like a particularly rancorous episode of the Food Network’s Opening Soon, there are greater forces at work in the Maccioni story. Sirio complains bitterly of getting old, and refuses to retire. And yet the restaurant culture has changed and passed him by. His sons recognize this and want desperately to attract a younger clientele, but Sirio’s loyalty is to the people who helped him make it, and it hurts his new venture. Resistance to change is really about the fear of oblivion (through death and forgetting) and Sirio’s struggle is one that all of us can understand.

Luckily, the story doesn’t end when the film does, and it appears that the new Le Cirque is finally adapting to the new environment. Instead of singling out celebrities and treating everyone else as second-class citizens, the new culture prefers that everyone have the same experience, and from all accounts, they’re trying. The menu has been freshened as well, despite Sirio’s objections. A bad review from the New York Times, along with the footage of the opening, made it painfully obvious that the restaurant needs more than nostalgia and a charismatic owner to appeal to the new generation of diners.

Rossi has captured more than a restaurant or a family story. He’s given us a glimpse of a man on the run from his own mortality, a man who’s cultivated “friendships” among the most visible and powerful only to realize that it won’t save him in the end. It’s heartbreaking and a little bit terrifying. For me, the most satisfying moments are not in the restaurant at all, but around the table when Sirio’s longsuffering wife Egidiana serves up a simple meal of pasta to the whole family. It’s a shame that the man has so little time for that sort of meal.

Here is the Q&A with director Andrew Rossi from after the screening. Hot Docs/Doc Soup programmer Sean Farnel moderates and asks the first few questions himself:

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Duration: 13:46

Official site for the film

7/10 (7/10)

Tagged as: Doc Soup, Documentaries, Toronto Film Festivals

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Nightclubbing (Directors: Emily Armstrong and Pat Ivers, USA, 1975–1980): After seeing Wasted Orient (review), I’d planned to leave the NFB Cinema to see Kurt Cobain: About A Son, but when I found out what the next screening was, I immediately changed my plans. Directors Emily Armstrong and Pat Ivers have documented more than 100 bands from the New York punk and No Wave scenes from 1975–1980. They videotaped shows for broadcast on a cable access programme called Nightclubbing and the film is a rough assemblage of 25 performances from that archive. They’re working on a documentary which will incorporate present-day interviews with many musicians from the scene, and we got to see a short excerpt from that after their Q&A. Since they’ve been touring this particular collection of clips since at least 2000, I hope we’ll see a DVD release before the end of the decade.

I’ll start by stating the obvious. The video and audio quality of these clips is horrendous. Many were captured on primitive equipment and were never meant to be preserved. That being said, it’s mesmerizing to witness some of these early performances, most of which were filmed at either the late, lamented CBGB’s or at the Danceteria. Here are just a few highlights:

a three-piece Talking Heads performing “Psycho Killer” in December 1975, well before the song was recorded.
a 1980 clip of Pylon, whom I’d never heard of before. Conservatively-dressed singer Vanessa Ellison’s performance builds from a near-whisper to a sort of twitchy crescendo. Fascinating.
a 1979 clip of the Bad Brains covering Wire’s “12XU”.
Iggy Pop singing “New Values” in 1979. Unfortunately, the vocals are buried, but Iggy does some of his trademark stage moves.
The Dead Boys performing with Divine at a benefit for their drummer, who had been stabbed in a knife fight and who had no medical insurance.
a very early Blondie performance of the Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale” from 1975.
there really was quite a bit of saxophone in many of these bands, for better or worse. This brought home the joke behind L.A. hardcore band Fear’s song “New York’s Alright If You Like Saxophones”.
a 1980 spoken-word performance by Max Blagg about the evils of heroin, which had ravaged the scene by this time.

Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s book Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral History of Punk has been one of my favourite books for a long time now, and seeing these clips really added another dimension to that whole fascinating story.

The only drawback to my viewing experience was that I was sitting next to two old rockers who talked loudly thoughout both the film and the Q&A afterward. So, for me it was just like being at a real rock show in that sense.

The directors conducted a very informal Q&A afterward, and you can just tell they have a million stories they want to share. I hope the finished form of this film can pack even a few of them in.

A review of a screening from 2000.

8/10 (8/10)