Our 10-minute date with Keanu Reeves

I have still not recovered from my hot date with Keanu Reeves at the Hotel Le Germain last night.

Okay, hot date might be stretching it. But a full-on conversation with a celebrity at TIFF is a rarity – let alone a 10-minute one.

We were in the hotel’s slick dining room, Victor, at a party hosted by Joe Fresh Style and Maple Pictures for The Private Lives of Pippa Lee. The film, directed by Rebecca Miller (frilled out in black and white Topshop), concerns the emotional fall-out when Pippa Lee (Robin Wright Penn) moves to the ’burbs with her recently retired husband.

The film also features Blake Lively, who is captivating as a young Pippa, Julianne Moore, who does a surprisingly deft turn as a lesbian in rust-coloured knits, and Winona Ryder who is hilarious as an unstable other woman.

So what did Reeves and I discuss? Among other things, how he used to play hide-and-seek with my husband when both were boys growing up in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood.

“I used to live on Lowther Ave. across from a huge red brick house,” Reeves recalled.

That would be the current home of eccentric fine artist Vivian Reiss, who has turned the front yard into a tangle of corn stalks, rhubarb and Swiss chard.

We also talked about how gratifying it must be for Reeves to attend the festival as a star given that his first time was, as he put it, “as a civilian in 1984.”

I also chatted with Penn (who looked annoyingly hot in a liquid black sheath!) mostly about the challenges of the mother-daughter bond.

“Do we all suffer from the guilt of having said things we regret to our moms?” I asked her. “We do,” she smiled. “But you have to let it go.”

Check out our red carpet snaps from the premiere.

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