La Presse at the 47th TIFF | Steven recounts the birth of Spielberg

(Toronto) Towards the end of The Fabelmans, semi-autobiographical film by Steven Spielberg, there is a scene where one of his high school bullies makes him swear not to say anything about what just happened between them. “I swear…unless one day I make a movie out of it!” “, replies, sardonically, the young Sammy Fabelman, alter ego of Spielberg.

This absolutely charming initiatory story, a family chronicle coupled with an ode to the cinema, is full of this type of wink and mise en abyme. Presented as a world premiere this weekend, The Fabelmans was announced — with good reason — as the “event” of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). And not only because Spielberg had never presented a film there before.

The greatest of popular filmmakers, Steven Spielberg is a brilliant chameleon who transforms according to the stories he tells. This time, it’s his own story (or almost) that he stages. That of his budding passion for cinema, within an eccentric family, from his early childhood in New Jersey to the end of his adolescence in northern California, via Arizona, which saw growing in the 1950s and 1960s.

The young Gabriel LaBelle, an actor from Vancouver, perfectly plays Sam, this ingenious, shy and worried boy, passionate about cinema, who makes films in 8 mm with the help of his sisters or his fellow scouts. Steven Spielberg was 13 when he won an award in Arizona for a 40-minute medium-length film, Escape to Nowhereabout the Second World War.

Spielberg’s portrait of his family is full of tenderness. His father (Paul Dano) was a brilliant computer engineer, who encouraged his son in the hobby of filmmaking, but hoped for him a career in a more “hands-on” field. His mother (Michelle Williams), a trained pianist, gave up her artistic career to raise her children.

“You and I are junkies of art”, says his great-uncle (Judd Hirsch), a former lion tamer of the Barnum circus, who predicts a life torn between the cinema and his family.

We recognize in them what Spielberg has become, the genius artist passionate about the mechanisms of cinema and directing, to the point of imagining himself filming the announcement of his parents’ separation to his sisters, in order to to exploit its full dramatic potential…

“I thought it would be easier [de faire ce film], admitted Steven Spielberg at a press conference on Sunday. I know the story and the characters so well. I found it intimidating to recreate this tale, even though it is semi-autobiographical. »

His parents died recently, his mother in 2017 at age 97, and his father in 2020 at age 103, which is undoubtedly not unrelated to the fact that his most personal film is emerging today. The pandemic has also been a source of motivation, he says.

“I saw the death toll and wondered how far it would go. If I wanted to tell this story, this initiatory tale of a boy who has very special parents, it was time to do it”, says the filmmaker of jaws and of Schindler’s Listwho will soon be 76 years old.

“It was difficult at times. The emotional charge was great. I heaved a sigh of relief at the end, thinking to myself, “That’s a book I won’t need to write!” »

The Fabelmans starts off in a naive and childish tone, à la Hugo of Scorsese, which made me fear the worst. But the screenplay – co-written by Spielberg with his long-time collaborator Tony Kushner – becomes more and more dense and interesting, by dint of exploring the gray areas. Beneath the joy of living of the fabulous Fabelmans (as Orson Welles would have said) hide secrets and wounds.

This moving film, filled with tenderness and nostalgia, humor and melancholy, is both a lesson in cinema and a demonstration of the intrinsic truths and lies of cinema.

“Movies are dreams you never forget,” Sam’s mother said, before he saw his first feature film, The Greatest Show on Earth by Cecil B. DeMille (“which traumatized me for years”, explains Steven Spielberg). For better and for worse.

“When I realized AND., I had in mind to make a film about my parents’ divorce. But there is an extraterrestrial who has come between us and who has deflected the story! “says Spielberg, about his most famous film, which closed the Cannes Film Festival 40 years ago. ANDthe first film that I myself saw at the cinema — and which I saw again in theaters a few weeks ago — also had its nods to old Hollywood cinema, in particular to The Quiet Man by John Ford.

In The FabelmansSam, who decides to leave university and make films, meets very briefly, in a delightful scene, the filmmaker of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (played by none other than David Lynch).

“I will not say what is authentic and what is a reconstruction of my memories in the film, said Steven Spielberg at a press conference. But what John Ford says in the movie is text what he said to me back then, from the first sentence to the last! »

The Fabelmans is due to hit theaters in November.

They were waiting for Harry

At 6:45 a.m. Sunday morning, when the streets of downtown Toronto were deserted, I passed outside the Princess of Wales Theater two dozen fans (mostly female fans) of Harry Styles… scheduled for the red carpet 12 hours later. “I arrived at 6 a.m., but there are several who have spent the night here! », told me a young woman, accompanied by a friend. I tried not to show my deep incomprehension in my eyes.

“The reason why, in my opinion, this story is so distressing is that it is about lost time. And I think the time wasted is the saddest thing,” said Harry Styles a few hours later during the film’s press conference. My Policeman. Indeed, Harry…

Less than a week ago, the singer and actor found himself at the heart of an improbable psychodrama around this improbable question: did he or not spit on his colleague Chris Pine during the Venetian premiere of the film controversial by Olivia Wilde, Don’t Worry Darling ? On Sunday, I didn’t take any risks: I sat several rows from the stage…

Harry Styles was notably at TIFF to receive, along with the entire cast of My Policeman, the Tribute Award for Performance. Michael Grandage’s film, in which Styles plays a gay policeman in love with a museum curator who would rather marry than risk prison — homosexuality being a crime, especially in England in the 1950s — is a classic drama, without surprise and without glamor, which will not go down in history.

I can’t say I was as won over as the TIFF executives by Styles’ (dull and nondescript) performance in this apparent TV movie, ironically shot partly in Venice. He has a nice Pepsodent smile, beautiful eyes, so much the better, buttocks that know each other (and that we can see well on the screen), but is his game fair? The jury is still outas they say on Bay Street.