Our first Saturday at TIFF was rainy. We only had one movie, our second of the festival, at 9:30 in the morning – Palo Alto, directed by Gia Coppola – her directorial debut. I thought she must be Sofia Coppola’s little sister – but instead, Sofia is Gia’s aunt. Gia is the daughter of Sofia’s older brother, Gian Carlo, who would be 50 this year except he died at age 22, in 1986, about six months before Gia was born.
The film is based on a set of short stories by James Franco. He’s in the movie along with lots of movie stars’ kids and relations and cameos by older, more famous relatives. The two main characters, April and Teddy, are Julia Robert’s niece and Val Kilmer’s son, respectively. Talia Shire (Francis Ford’s sister) played a high school guidance counselor. Val Kilmer plays an extremely inappropriate step dad.
I read an interview of Franco, and he said Teddy is the kid most like him. To me he was the kid most like John – who pretty much goes along with the other kids’ outrageous ideas, lets them pour booze down his throat till he pukes, and takes forever to work up the courage to tell the girl he really likes that he really likes her. But at least has enough sense to get out of the car before the real daredevil kid enters the freeway going the wrong direction. Which is how the film ends – Teddy walking home texting with April, Fred driving on the freeway going the wrong way. With the cars all miraculously separating and getting out of his way – but my heart was still pounding for at least half an hour afterward.
It was raining hard enough that we subway-ed & streetcar-ed everywhere. We came back to our airbnb condo, and I worked. It didn’t seem like such a bad way to spend a rainy afternoon.
We had a 5:30 reservation for Scaramouche, the perhaps-best-restaurant in Toronto, that we blundered upon, by using Open Table, during our 2008 trip here (in the dark ages, when Open Table was brand new), and then didn’t find when we were here in 2012. It felt a little awkward being seated – we were the only people in the place – but it quickly filled. And the food was just as good as I remembered – they’re really good with vegetables. They brought us an amuse-bouche, a dab of cod brandade on a tiny potato chip, with fried leek circles and micro greens and lemon marmalade – that is, lots of flavors, but it all hung together – and I don’t even like cod. We split a summer vegetable salad that was a mosaic of corn, gold and red beets, green and yellow beans, artichoke, fennel, cherry tomatoes in several colors, baby patty pans, a few leaves of little lettuces, and a few squirts of a basil mayonnaise. Mark had the salmon – it came grilled with smashed potatoes and a pea puree. I had the scallops – three absolutely giant scallops, with ham croquettes – little potato-y, cheese-y balls, and a chile sauce, and a black garlic sauce, and ribbons of squash. Again, it all went together amazingly well. My only regret was watching another couple a few tables away from us – they skipped the starters, went direct to entrees, and had room for dessert. We didn’t.
We walked back to our apartment – south so feeling like down hill, and actually really down hill a lot of the way. We got coffee at a Starbucks, and stopped by the Ryerson Theater, thinking we might be able to rush for the F Word – but the rush line was huge. So we sat on a rock in the front yard of one of the dorms across the street, and drank our drinks, and watched the hordes craning for a glimpse of Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe, as Mark kept correcting me). And we were collapsed on our airbnb condo’s couch by 9:30.
