Oh Toronto, it’s been too long. I was last here for the film festival in 2007, and compared to then, this year’s TIFF seems a little slower, a little less crowded. Just one more thing to file under “In This Economy.” Not that I’m complaining–for the 35th annual TIFF, the festival has added an eleventh day, as well as opened a permanent base for year-round programming known as the TIFF Bell Lightbox. It’s like SIFF Cinema on steroids, with five screens and an inaugural program featuring what they consider to be the 100 essential films of all time (debate away!).

But let’s focus on the here and now, and what I have seen in my time at the Toronto International Film Festival since arriving late Tuesday afternoon. From the airport to the hotel and directly to the theater, in order to catch a film that was one of the main goals for this festival: Xavier Dolan’s sophomore release, Heartbeats (Les Amours imaginaires). Since his first film I Killed My Mother (which showed at SIFF this year), the twenty-one-year-old auteur wunderkind has screened his second film at Cannes, is already working on his third (Laurence Anyways), and has an idea for his fourth feature (his first in English, taking place in New York). To which I say: Kiddo, slow down, you’ve got plenty of time.

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As with his debut, Dolan wrote, directed, acted, soundtracked, and even had a hand in the gorgeous costumes in Heartbeats, but while he definitely has an eye and an ear for cinema, there really is no there there. The film is ostensibly about a love triangle between Marie (Monia Chokri), Francis (Dolan), and Nicolas (Niels Schneider, who looks like no one so much as Michelangelo’s David). Marie and Francis vie for Nicolas’ affection, accompanied by so much slo-mo and music that even Wes Anderson would cry uncle. Dolan brings much beauty to the film, and while I implicitly trust him as a director and genuinely look forward to what he does next, I just hope that with age comes maturation in the medium. 

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Wednesday morning brought The Debt, which has Oscar written all over it: a late December release date, a high-wattage cast (Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson), and a Very Important Topic (Holocaust-related, natch), but I give it a resounding “meh.” In 1965, three Moussad agents track down a Nazi in East Berlin to bring him to trial for war crimes, and thirty years later, the three spies reunite in Tel Aviv with the publication of a book on their part in history. For a film that takes place over two storylines, there’s way too little back and forth between the plots–and for the record, there is no way that Sam Worthington grows up to be Ciaran Hinds. The political thriller occasionally lapses into graphic brutality, which is perhaps not that surprising given the topic at hand, and the moral dilemmas presented are just plain mundane. Overall, it just doesn’t ring true.

And then there was The Last Circus (Balada triste de trompeta), fresh off its controversial wins for Best Director and Screenplay at Venice. Is Quentin Tarantino biased in giving this film that award? Yes, of course, it’s exactly the kind of hyper-violent pop culture-heavy foreign film he would love. But when you make Quentin the head of a film festival jury, you must expect such things. From director Alex de la Iglesia, the film is an allegory for post-Civil War Spain wrapped in a sideshow love triangle, in which two circus clowns (one funny, one sad) savagely compete for the affections of an aerialista. The editing is sharp, and the film has its brutally funny moments, but the climax is too long (that’s what she said), and I’m not exactly sure that “fuck both the fascists and the loyalists” is the most cogent reading of history.

I got into Cave of Forgotten Dreams by the skin of my teeth, but it was obviously well worth it due to the nature of the film: a Werner Herzog 3D documentary–about the prehistoric art found in the Chauvet Cave, of course. Herzog and a very small film crew entered the closed-off cave to capture the 30,000-year-old art and the cave’s natural beauty in glorious 3D, as well as getting the opinions of the scientists, archaeologists, and art historians who work there. Werner provides dry-witted narration, and asks the sorts of deadpan questions you would expect, like as to whether this art allows us to hear the heartbeat of cavemen or of our modern selves. But Herzog also allows the art to speak for itself, and the simple, slow-moving scenes of the painted cave walls are surprisingly moving and infused with timeless soul and truly awesome 3D texture. Let it wash over you, and ponder what it means to be human.