NOW ranked by Variety as the most important film festival in the world after Cannes, the Toronto International Film Festival turned 21 this month and fielded a mammoth line-up of 243 feature films from all over the world in just 10 days, presenting even the most selective filmgoers with a daily dilemma of difficult programming clashes.
Although Toronto is a non-competitive festival in that it does not organise its own jury, it presents several awards on closing day - and when this year's awards were announced last Sunday, Australian films swept the board, taking everything except the Toronto City Award for best Canadian film. That went to a respectful and much-respected new film of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night by David Wellington, the director of I Love A Man In Uniform.
The People's Choice award, voted by the audiences who turned out in their thousands in torrential rain throughout the festival, went to the Australian movie, Shine, followed by the English Beautiful Thing (now on Irish release), with the Canadian Fire and the American Fly Away Home tying for third place.
Shine also took the Metro Media award, voted by the 600 accredited media covering the festival, with Lars von Trier's Breaking The Waves, already reviewed here from Cannes, in second place and Neil Jordan's Michael Collins in third. And another Australian movie, Life, won the FIPRESCI prize voted by a panel of international film critics.
Directed by Scott Hicks, Shine recalls another remarkable Antipodean biopic, Jane Campion's An Angel At My Table, in its factually-based portrait of a tormented artist who, like Janet Frame in Campion's film, is played at different ages by three different actors. The subject of Shine is David Helfgott, a brilliant concert pianist who is still alive and performs in the concert pieces on the soundtrack.
A series of flashbacks documenting his troubled life begins in Perth in the 195Os when Helfgott (played by Alex Rafalowicz) is a child prodigy driven relentlessly by his domineering father, Peter (Armin Mueller-Stahl), an impoverished but stubbornly self sufficient Polish Jew. For all the father's obsession with success for his son, he displays a fundamental jealousy when he prevents David from accepting a US scholarship offered by Isaac Stern.
When the teenage David (Noah Taylor) finally stands up to his possessive father and goes to study at the London College of Music, he is banished from the family home. The traumas of David's life finally cave in on him and after a virtuoso performance of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No 3, he has a complete breakdown.
Under the sensitive and imaginative direction of Scott Hicks, Shine unfolds as a fascinating, thoughtful and touching picture of how a young life and talent can be virtually destroyed by a misguided parent's bizarre expression of love, and how that character somehow manages to pull together some of the pieces of his life in his later years. The performance sequences, in particular, are brilliantly filmed in this notably well-acted film in which Geoffrey Rush is outstanding as the hyperactive older David.
Whatever it was that impressed the FIPRESCI jury with Life eluded me, for one. The first feature film directed by Lawrence Johnston, this worthy but curiously uninvolving adaptation of a stage play by John Brumpton features Brumpton himself as a violent convict who learns that he is HlV-positive and is moved to a segregated unit of a Sydney prison.
Much more impressive were the works of two other first-time Australian film-makers. "She looks all of 12 years old," remarked a colleague when the 24-year-old Emma-Kate Coghan came on stage to introduce her neatly structured and sharply observed Love And Other Catastrophes, a lively comedy of 24 hours in the complicated love lives of university students. Punctuated by on-screen quotations from, among others, Jane Austen, Alfred Hitchcock, Doris Day and the Bee Gees, Croghan's refreshing and very funny film is played with panache by an unfamiliar young cast.
Aden Young, one of Australia's most intense young actors, lightens up in first-time director Craig Rosenberg's briskly-paced and often hilarious romantic comedy, Hotel de Love, which had the Toronto audience cheering on its feet last weekend. Set for the most part in an outlandishly designed love-themed hotel, the movie oozes with that cheery quirkiness so characteristic of Australian comedy as it follows the fortunes of twin brothers (played by Aden Young and Simon Bossell) besotted since their teens with a young woman played by Saffron Burrows from Circle Of Friends.
The outstanding European films in Toronto included two Eastern European features from father-and-son teams examining the plight of, young Russians caught up in difficult relationships.
Directed by the Siberian-horn Sergei Bodrov the urgently topical and quietly powerful Prisoner Of The Mountains transposes a Tolstoy novella, Caucasian Captive to present-day Chechnya for a compelling anti-war drama. With a deceptive simplicity, it explores the relationship forged between two Russian soldiers - played by Oleg Menshikov, from Burnt By The Sun, and the director's son, Sergei Bodrov Jr - and the Chechen ambushers who capture them and hold them as hostages. Filmed in a mountainous settlement 300 kilometres away from the war zone, Bodrov's film is briefly hopeful as its builds inexorably to a tragic conclusion.
Set in Prague in the months before the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Jan Sverak's superb Kolya deals with the initially difficult relationship between a Czech and a Russian. The Czech played by the director's father, Zdenek, who also wrote the screenplay is a 55-year-old cellist and confirmed bachelor who has fallen out of favour with the Communists, and the Russian is the five-year-old boy, Kolya (Andrej Chalimon) for whom he finds himself responsible after an ill-advised marriage of convenience to the boy's mother. The result is irresistibly charming without ever turning mawkish.
The prolific Finnish director, Aki Kaurismaki, is at the peak of his form with the stylised realism of Drifting Clouds, which features Kati Outinen and Kari Vaananen as a married couple living on hire purchase and finding their lives turned upside down when they are made redundant within weeks of each other. They remain ever-hopeful as life deals them one hard blow after another and it seems like the eponymous clouds will never drift away in this sombre and affecting low-key, slice-of-life story sparked by Kaurisamaki's trademark offbeat humour.
Having confronted football hooliganism in Ultra and the assassination of magistrates in La Scorta, director Ricky Tognazzi continues to probe corruption in his native Italy in the gripping and violent Strangled Lives, an arresting picture of unscrupulous moneylenders and their desperate victims. The usurers are personified in a chilling performance by Luca Zinagretti as a financially and sexually avaricious operator whose extortionism and callousness knows no limits in this fast moving, no-holds-barred drama that bristles with anger.
The great Italian film-maker, novelist and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was found murdered in Rome in 1975, is the subject of a pretentious and fragmented picture in Aurelio Grimaldi's Nerolio, which takes its title from that of Pasolini's last, unfinished novel. Featuring an uncanny lookalike, Marco Cavicchilio, as Pasolini, the film is liberally interspersed with quotations from its subject's strong views on art, politics, socialism, the Church - and, inevitably, homosexuality.
Frank and provocative in its voyeuristic view of Pasolini's sexuality, Grimaldi's film clearly states in its climax that Pasolini died as a result of a misfired gay pickup - contradicting the conspiracy theories that have abounded, in Italy and were expressed so persuasively in Marco Tulli Giordana's Pasolini: An Italian Crime, shown at Toronto last year. THE French selection at Toronto this year included a pair of recent festival prize-winners. The involving new Claire Denis movie Nenette Et Boni won awards at Locarno last month for best film, actor (Gregoire Colin) and actress (Alice, Houri). Colin capably plays the 19-year-old, Boni, who refuses to speak to his father after" his mother dies, and Houri is diverting as his rebellious 15-year-old sister, Nenette.
Jacques Doillon's slow-moving Ponette is also set in the aftermath of a mother's death and it painstakingly observes the impact of this on her four-year-old daughter, expressively played by Victoire Thivisol. There was some consternation when the Venice jury named Thivisol best actress earlier this month, not least because of the huge demands the film made on such a young person.
Ireland was represented at Toronto by four films, three of which already have been covered on these pages Michael Collins, Some Mother's Son and Trojan Eddie. The fourth was Trish McAdam's disappointing Snakes And Ladders, which has its world premiere in Toronto. It's hard to care a whit for the romantic and professional problems of its central character, the sullen, irritable and self-centred 30-year-old Jean (Pom Boyd) who works as a street performer in Temple Bar with her best friend (Gina Moxley).
The older actors, such as Rosaleen Linehan and Maureen Toal, fare best in a cast that also features comedian Sean Hughes as Boyd's musician lover; proposing marriage to her in a lavatory, he declares, "Jean, I love you, I'm kneeling in piss for you". It has to be said that many in the Toronto audience warmed to this rambling piece but even McAdam and Moxley looked surprised when, on stage after the screening, one viewer asked them if there would he a sequel.
