Brad Pitt in conference with the press

In the morning, CNN is filled with reporters in rain coats talking about the upcoming storm, but up here in Toronto there is only a cool drizzle. The real world feels very far away again. But it is not just the world of make believe up here, it's also a world of business. At the press conference for Burn After Reading, numerous security checks highlight the high price of celebrity, of the complicated cost the real world pays to have a land of make believe. Into a room filled with journalists whose real world demands they file stories and post photos walks Ethan and Joel Coen, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton and Brad Pitt, whose real world is the world of make believe. In the conference, there is a general love for the film and its makers, but the questions (and answers) continually highlight the difference in their worlds.

Many reporters asked about casting a serious actor (Brad Pitt) in a goofy role, to which Joel Coen answered, "We don't make the distinction between dramatic and comic acting that way. So if we put actors in comedies that are not normally associated with comedies, it is a comment on our belief in their ability to inhabit the character." Rather than seeing their stories from the outside in, that is from the point of the spectator, the filmmakers joked they make their films from inside out. As Ethan Coen joked about why Carter Burwell created an intentionally bombastic score--"since the characters thought they were in a spy movie, he thought the composer should be equally deluded." Indeed when asked about why the brothers love idiots, the Coens spoke about the tendency to form the point of view of storytellers--without someone so deluded that they continually make bad decisions, it's hard to have a drama (and even less so a comedy).

The Mark of an Angel

Delusion in (and as) film felt like the theme for the day. (But then how couldn't it, since isn't every film is a delusion of sorts?) In Michael Winterbottom's Genova, delusion takes the form of a ghost story that isn't. After a mom (Hope Davis) is killed in a car accident partially caused by her youngest daughter, her widowed husband (Colin Firth) takes his young, imaginative girl and his sexy teen (Wilma Holland) to Genova, where he's accepted a one-year teaching job, partially to get away from the scene of their old lives and the grief that it engenders. But soon enough the younger girl starts to see her mother in the crowded, narrow, creepy streets of old Genova. Is it ghost or psychological repression? And as it soon becomes obvious that the film is a sprightly nod to Nicolas Roeg's masterpiece Don't Look Now, I couldn't help wonder if this is a ghost story or simply the ghost of a film, one haunted by the emotions and spirit of another.

Blind Drunk?

Later the same theme of delusion carries Safy Nebbou's French thriller The Mark of an Angel, a strange mix of Lifetime and Patricia Highsmith that purports to be inspired by real events. Here a working mother (Catherine Frot) engaged in a custody battle with her husband spies a little girl when she picks up her son from a birthday party. She becomes convinced that the girl is her daughter who died in a hospital fire only days after its birth. Her obsession leads into crazier and crazier behavior as she stalks the family and the little girl, alerting everyone around her to her dangerously deranged state. Only, what if she's right? What if, it is not the film that is deluded, but us viewers for believing it had only one story to tell? Creepy fun to be had by all.

While other films, not worth repeating, hardly offered the crazy thrills of those two entries, there was still more lunacy to be had later in the night at the party for Fernando Meirelles' Blindess. What can you say about an event at which one must cross multiple barriers, climb several flights of stairs to end in a room filled with blind-folded statues, fog machines to obscure your view, and lots of people who look straight through you? Am I the ghost?