With a choice of 256 feature films over 10 days, more than half of them world or North American premieres, the 24th Toronto International Film Festival, which closed last Saturday night, offered such range and diversity that one critic calculated it would be possible for seven different people to attend four films daily and still see entirely different sets of films.
Wherever one looked, there was no escaping the recurring theme of alienation in the festival's remarkably comprehensive programme. It was the dominating theme in a number of Toronto presentations already covered here from Cannes - Rosetta, L'humanite, Ratcatcher, Wonderland, Felicia's Journey (which opened in Toronto this year) and The War Zone (reviewed below) - and in many of the international productions launched at Toronto.
The most deeply involving of those movies was Boys Don't Cry, which marks a highly assured feature film debut for the young American director, Kimberly Pierce. Her film is inspired by the true story of Teena Marie Brandon, a 20-year-old working-class woman from Lincoln, Nebraska, whose experiences were documented in the recent documentary, The Brandon Teena Story.
This dramatisation of that story is set in 1993 as Teena struggles to come to terms with the fact that she feels more like a boy than a girl and dreams of raising the money for a sex change. Although she doesn't see herself as a lesbian, her sexual attraction is towards women.
Reversing her name to Brandon Teena, she cuts her hair short, straps her breasts down and stuffs a dildo and a sock into her underpants. Travelling to the dead-end, redneck town of Falls City, the new-look Brandon falls in with a heavy-drinking group and recklessly courts danger to establish the new persona. The risks run higher when Brandon falls in love with one of them, the factory worker, Lana, and begins to pursue a sexual relationship.
The consequences are catastrophic, as documented in this complex, fascinating and chilling film of fear, prejudice and acceptance which builds to a shocking climax that lingers so indelibly in the mind that I, for one, could not contemplate seeing another film for the rest of the day. This bold, firmly unsentimental drama gains in conviction and strength from an impeccable cast that features superb performances from Chloe Sevigny as Lana and the extraordinary Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena. The central character of the gritty Swedish movie, Show Me Love, is the shy, lonely 15-year-old Agnes (Alexandra Dahlstrom), who despairs with her family's move to the small town of Amal, a place so boring that everything is out of fashion by the time it arrives there. Her disenchantment with the town is quoted in the film's original title, Fucking Amal, which has been changed to the utterly innocuous Show Me Love here and in North America.
Agnes has much more on her mind as she copes with the dawning realisation of her lesbian urges and the crush she develops for the high school rebel, Elin (Rebecca Liljeberg), who briefly and publicly kisses her for a dare. However, as in the recent Get Real, it is the more outgoing of the two would-be lovers who is the more nervous about facing up to her sexuality. From this premise, first-time writer-director Lukas Moodysson constructs an incisive and revealing picture of teenage angst and the awkwardness of first love, which builds to a protracted but brilliantly judged coming out sequence. And his film is permeated by a freshness and honesty that's all too rarely found in the US teen movies which glut our cinemas.
Alienation is treated on a grand scale by Regis Wargnier, the French director of the Oscar-winning Indochine, in his fiercely antiCommunist drama, Est-Ouest (East-West). It opens in the summer of 1946 as Russian emigrants return home, attracted by Stalin's offer of an amnesty, a Soviet passport and the opportunity to participate in the post-war reconstruction of the Soviet Union. But their hopes and euphoria are abruptly dashed as soon as they arrive in Odessa. The focus of the film is on Alexei (Oleg Menchikov from Burnt By the Sun), a Russian doctor who returns from Paris with his French wife, Marie (Sandrine Bonnaire) and their young son, only to find themselves despatched to Kiev to work in a factory's infirmary and forced to live under cramped conditions and without privacy in a communal apartment.
Marie desperately wants the family to go back to Paris, but with her passport ripped up by the KGB, there is no way out. As she and her husband begin to drift apart, she befriends a young neighbour (Serguei Bodrov Jr from Prisoner of the Mountains), whose swimming prowess offers a possible ticket to the European championships and to freedom. And a celebrated French actress (Catherine Deneuve in a cameo), who is on tour, sympathises with Marie's plight. Est-Ouest depicts an atmosphere of heightened paranoia, suspicion and betrayal, and an environment where most people drink themselves silly to deal with their daily grind. Against this daunting background, Wargnier fashions an engrossing picture of oppression, frustration and dogged hope, and it grows in emotional involvement through the expressive performances of Bonnaire and Bodrov Jr, in particular, and heightens its epic sweep through Patrick Doyle's thunderous score. It is all the more disappointing, then, that the movie unravels precariously in its later stages, as it jumps through time with such a rushed air that it appears to have been roughly truncated as an afterthought.
Back in the US, the Irish actor, Aidan Gillen (from Some Mother's Son and Queer as Folk) takes the lead in Mark Hanlon's indie production, Buddy Boy, a study in urban alienation which in several respects recalls Roman Polanski's far superior The Tenant. Gillen's character, Francis, is a shy, stammering and guilt-ridden Catholic who lives with his foul-mouthed, alcoholic mother (Susan Tyrell at her blowsiest).
Francis is first seen masturbating at a table covered in pornography and in the next shot is confessing his sins in church. His view of the world is almost entirely voyeuristic - through his interest in the photographs he processes for a living and in the attractive young neighbour whom he observes through a spyhole. In another nod to The Tenant, the neighbour is played by Polanski's actress wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, recently featured in Place Vendome. From surreptitiously watching her apartment he uneasily finds himself invited there after he saves her from a mugger.
As the movie wends its surreal way, writer-director Hanlon blurs the divisions between reality and fantasy to the point where one wonders just how delusional Francis is and how much of what we see is merely imagined by him. It is a tribute to Aidan Gillen, who is proving to be one of Ireland's most adventurous and interesting actors, that his immersion in his role sparks the movie to life so that it flags and sustains interest when his director loses the plot. The plotline of the wretched Brazilian movie, Orfeu, is signalled very early on when the eponymous Orfeu, a successful samba composer who lives in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, meets and is smitten by a coy newcomer who happens to be named Euridice. Meanwhile, Orfeu's boyhood friend is now a powerful drug dealer who has taken it upon himself and his gang to police the neighbourhood and punish or kill miscreants.
The transposition of the familiar Greek myth to Brazil was achieved with style and exuberance by Marcel Camus in his Oscar-winning 1959 Black Orpheus. Only the colourful Carnival backdrop enlivens this redundant and irritating new version by veteran director Carlos Diegues, who allows his players to give some of the most wooden and stilted performances I have ever seen on a screen.
More from Toronto tomorrow in Weekend tomorrow
