Memo to producers and directors: festival audiences - the paying public, buyers and critics alike - are getting weary of being used as guinea pigs to test the limits of self-indulgence. Hardly a major festival goes by without a few movies suddenly taking on "work-in-progress" status after they have been screened, as directors realise that they ought to have been more ruthless in the editing suite.
This year Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke's Platform arrived in Toronto and overstayed its welcome to stretch to 192 minutes, only for the director to announce that he was cutting 45 minutes from it. Then, Tom Tykwer, the young German director who set pulses racing and adrenalin pumping at Toronto two years ago with Run Lola Run, presented his new feature, The Princess and the Warrior, but announced a few days later that he was trimming it by 20 minutes.
The Princess and the Warrior is much closer in mood and tone to Tom Tykwer's earlier, sombre Wintersleepers than to the frenetic Run Lola Run. Set in Tykwer's home town of Wuppertal, it features his Lola star, Franka Potente as Sissi, a shy, caring, nurse who works at a psychiatric clinic, and Benno Furmann as Bobo, an emotionally brittle young man who's dabbling in crime with his older brother.
Sissi meets Bobo under a truck when she is knocked down in an accident and he saves her life, only to disappear afterwards. The scene is set for Tykwer to pursue again his preoccupation with the themes of chance, fate and destiny, and to play out the drama with his distinctive visual dexterity. Never less than interesting, the movie relies rather too heavily on coincidence and is saddled with a needlessly protracted finale which ought to be a priority for pruning when Tykwer takes it back into the cutting room.
By contrast, the new Stephen Frears movie, Liam, could have benefited from some more screen time. Lasting a lean 91 minutes, there was little time to develop the rather abrupt transition of its key adult character (played by Ian Hart) from a happily married shipyard worker into an unemployed, black-shirted Fascist in 1930s Liverpool.
Evoking the milieux of Angela's Ashes and Distant Voices, Still Lives, the screenplay is inspired by the boyhood memories of its writer, Jimmy McGovern, and the drama is observed from the point of view of the seven-year-old Liam (winningly played by Anthony Borrows).
Set in a mostly Irish Catholic, working-class area, the film opens on a joyous New Year's Eve celebration before the Depression kicks in and the men find themselves out of work. Meanwhile, young Liam is more concerned with his imminent First Communion and the notions of sin drummed into his innocent little mind at school, from which the movie derives much of its engaging humour. In this intimate, meticulously detailed drama the sturdy cast notably includes Claire Hackett as Liam's loving, devout mother and a remarkable newcomer in Megan Burns as his sister.
The family at the centre of Claude Chabrol's latest, characteristically jaundiced dissection of bourgeois life, Merci Pour le Chocolat, comprises a virtuoso pianist, Andre (Jacques Dutronc), and a chocolate factory owner, Mika (Isabelle Huppert) - who re-marry at the film's outset - and his 18-year-old son Guillaume (Rodolphe Pauly) from an earlier marriage.
Their well-heeled contentment is upset when another 18-yearold, Jeanne (Anna Mougalis), a student pianist, discovers that she and Guillaume may have been accidentally switched at birth, and turns up at their Lausanne home. The consequences, involving a good deal of sly plotting, build to a fairly obvious denouement, but getting there, as is often the case with a Chabrol film, is most of the pleasure, and the cast, especially Huppert, plays it with panache.
Another French actor, Daniel Auteuil, is on commanding form, cast as the Marquis de Sade in Benoit Jacquot's Sade - a rehabilitating portrait which eschews sensationalism in its sober exposition of the man behind the notorious public image. Nor does the film shrink from the traits that made its libertine protagonist so notorious.
Set during the French Revolution, it observes the droll, worldweary, 54-year-old Sade during his confinements in a Saint-Lazare prison and a rural clinic, in his relationship with his lover (Marianne Dencourt), who is the mother of his child, and his interaction with a viscount's impressionable daughter (Islid De Besco) at the clinic. Sade will make for interesting comparison with Philip Kaufman's imminent Quills, which stars Geoffrey Rush as de Sade.
The protagonist of Baltasar Kormakur's dark-humoured and entertainingly unpredictable Icelandic comedy, 101 Reykjavik, is the lazy, reclusive Hylnur (Hilmir Snaer) who, at 30, still lives with his doting mother, treats his girlfriend as nothing more than a weekend sexual object, and draws the dole rather than bothering to work.
He gets a long-overdue wakeup call when Lola (Victoria Abril), the visiting Spanish woman with whom he has a brief fling, turns out to be his mother's lesbian lover in this surreal exercise which makes striking use of its wintry locations and features a score (co-written by Damon Albarn) which prominently draws on the Kinks classic, Lola.
Another growing-up-is-hard-to-do tale unfolds with wit and insight in Cesc Gay's Spanish movie, Krampack, in which two 16-year-old boys spend an eventful summer exploring their sexual urges. Nico (Jordi Vilches) comes to stay with Dani (Fernando Ramallo) at the Catalan beach resort home of Dani's parents who are on holiday. The film takes its title from their slang for mutual masturbation, which preoccupies them until they become more adventurous. However, the possessive Dani's feelings are directed at the resolutely heterosexual Nico, and the consequent complications are treated with wit, honesty and a keen sense of adolescent angst.
One of the most impressive US indies at Toronto, You Can Count On Me is an astutely scripted, character-driven drama of multiple tensions between a brother and sister who were orphaned in childhood. Sammy (Laura Linney) is divorced, devoted to her young son (Rory Culkin) and working at a bank in a sleepy Catskills town when her nomadic, irresponsible brother (Mark Ruffalo) returns home, short of money and out of work, as usual. No one is really quite what they seem on the surface in this appealing, perceptive film, which marks an auspicious film debut for its writer-director, Kenneth Lonergan and also features Matthew Broderick in utterly dislikeable mode as Sammy's petty, bureaucratic new branch manager.
GARY OLDMAN plays an altogether more loathsome character in The Contender, an old-fashioned, idealistic, political drama that's rooted in post-Lewinsky Washington. Joan Allen is perfectly cast as the assured, morally upright Democratic senator chosen by the US president - who's played as an affable but shrewd operator by Jeff Bridges - to replace his recently deceased vice-president.
With horn-rimmed glasses and a receding hairline, Oldman plays the wily, silver-tongued senator who chairs the hearings committee into the confirmation of Allen's appointment and, inevitably, muck is raked and accusations fly as powerful forces attempt to discredit her. Her verdict on Clinton's behaviour, incidentally, is "not guilty, but responsible".
Wearing its liberal heart openly on its sleeve, The Contender was written and directed by the former film critic, Rod Lurie, as an ideological protest against the invasion of privacy and as a stinging riposte to Kenneth Starr and his team. It is undermined by a number of implausible narrative developments and revelations, but its solid cast - including William Petersen, Philip Baker Hall, Sam Elliott, Saul Rubinek, and Christian Slater as an oily, ambitious young politician - ensures that audience interest never slackens.
Toronto Film Festival reports conclude tomorrow in Weekend
