The trailer before screenings at the 26th Toronto International Film Festival was an attractive Magritte pastiche that followed a bowler-hatted man through a lush seaside garden as a strip of celluloid, floating above him, formed an infinite reel of film. It was an apt image with which to introduce the vast international programme of an event that offered 326 films, ranging from a one-minute short to La Commune (Paris, 1871), Peter Watkins's epic, which runs for five hours and 45 minutes.
Operating on 21 screens from early morning until very late at night, and adding a 1,900-seat venue for the two gala screenings each evening, the festival presented audiences with a succession of painfully difficult clashes.
Somebody estimated that anyone who spent the entire 10 days and nights of the festival watching movies, and without breaking for sleep or meals, could barely have seen even half of all that was on offer.
The genial mood of the event was shattered at the midway point with the news of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC, and the organisers responded by immediately cancelling all screenings for the day.
After much deliberation, the festival resumed the next day, stripped of such extraneous trappings as red-carpet photocalls, parties and press conferences. Despite the high quality of the movies on show, the general atmosphere, inevitably, would never be the same.
Toronto continues to rank as the premier North American film festival, and it has a significant advantage over the big European festivals - Cannes, Venice and Berlin - in that it is non-competitive: producers and directors are much more likely to enter films when they know they cannot be tagged as losers.
The principal award, announced last Sunday, is voted for by the audience, who turn out in huge numbers day and night, and this year's choice, which came as no surprise to anybody, was Jean-Pierre Jeunet's captivating AmΘlie, which arrives to enchant audiences here a fortnight from today.
AmΘlie led the formidable French presence at Toronto, which, in addition to the new films from Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Manoel de Oliveira and Michael Haneke, which had been launched at Cannes, featured notable new work from Catherine Breillat, Laurent Cantet and AndrΘ TΘchinΘ.
Breillat, who proved no slouch at courting controversy with her previous film, the sexually explicit Romance, again refuses to pull any punches with └ Ma Soeur! (Fat Girl), a candid picture of adolescent sexual urges.
It involves two sisters, the attractive and confident Elena (Roxane Mesquida), who is 15, and the dowdy, overweight 12-year-old Ana∩s (Ana∩s Reboux), during a summer holiday with their parents. The catalyst is a coolly seductive Italian law student (Libero de Rienzo), who charms his way into Elena's bed - in the first of two graphic sexual encounters - while Ana∩s tries to sleep in the same room.
Breillat's treatment of such delicate material is uncompromising, and even the ominous mood of the film's later stages cannot prepare audiences for the jolts she triggers.
Cantet, another writer-director, follows the arresting Ressources Humaines with another social-realist drama dealing with work and family, L'Emploi Du Temps (Time Out), in which a middle-aged financial consultant (AurΘlien Recoing) concocts an elaborate scheme to disguise the fact that he has lost his job.
Pretending to his wife (Karin Viard) and family that he has opted for a new post with the United Nations, over the border in Geneva, he engages in meticulous research to appear knowledgable on the subject, but whiles away his time by reading newspapers and sleeping in his car.
His mobile phone proves a useful prop for the deception, with which he persists to extreme degrees in this thoughtful, low-key drama. Later, asked why he didn't tell his wife, he replies: "It just seemed easier to keep going."
Loin (Far Away), the new film from TΘchinΘ, the richly accomplished director best known here for Les Roseaux Sauvages and Les Voleurs, adroitly handles a narrative agenda that encompasses human trafficking, black marketeering, racial prejudice and a passionate but problematic love affair.
The axis of these strands is Serge (StΘphane Rideau), a young truck driver who works between Algeciras, on the south coast of Spain, and Tangier, in Morocco, and is faced with a series of dilemmas in this intimate, well-observed and compelling drama, which also features actor-director Gaδl Morel, Art playwright Yasmina Reza and, as a bibulous American modelled on Paul Bowles, Jack Taylor.
TΘchinΘ seizes on the flexibility of digital video, employing it extremely effectively, and as a picture exploring the perils of illegal immigration, Loin is much stronger and more convincing than Bread And Roses, Ken Loach's disappointingly heavy-handed recent first US movie.
Loach is comfortably back on home ground with his latest film, The Navigators, which attracted a good deal of international distributor interest at Toronto, but which will go directly this year to Channel 4 in Britain, where it was made. The focus of Loach's characteristically socially concerned film is the breakdown of the British railway system, which he attributes to its privatisation. This theme is dramatised through the story, set in 1995, of decent, hard-working South Yorkshire railwaymen baffled by the management jargon, anti-union policies and misguided decisions of the bungling new bureaucracy.
Engagingly acted - and sometimes improvised - by a mostly unfamiliar cast, the film is shot with the humanity and good humour we have come to expect from Loach. The clearly focused screenplay is the work of Rob Dawber, a railwayman who died in February of mesothelioma, a cancer contracted from working in his job with asbestos.
The most satisfying new US pictures included a couple of taut thrillers, Antoine Fuqua's Training Day and David Mamet's Heist. Mamet's fourth film in as many years is a classically structured caper movie that again pursues his preoccupation with dishonour among thieves.
While the film is stamped with Mamet's trademark sharp, spiky dialogue - Danny DeVito, as a fence, gets the best lines, such as "Everyone needs money. That's why they call it money" - its two big set pieces are almost silent, robberies orchestrated with precisely rehearsed teamwork.
Gene Hackman plays the veteran thief setting up his retirement fund with the genre staple, one last job, and the cast also includes Delroy Lindo, Sam Rockwell and Mamet regulars Rebecca Pidgeon and Ricky Jay.
Even better is Training Day, in which Fuqua jettisons the clichΘs of his background in music videos and commercials to deliver a gritty, intense thriller set over a tumultuous day in Los Angeles.
This stylish, relentlessly paced film benefits enormously from the imaginative casting of Denzel Washington, switching from saintly roles to play a corrupt and unscrupulous LAPD detective with swaggering arrogance and undisguised relish, and Ethan Hawke, taking a break from the more angst-ridden, cerebral fare in which he specialises to play a rookie detective who gets an eye-bulging introduction to his new partner's modus operandi.
They are joined in a solid cast by Scott Glenn, Tom Berenger and, from the music business, Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg and a pink-taloned Macy Gray. The tight screenplay by David Ayer, who wrote The Fast And The Furious, is unflinching in confronting the corruption rife in the Los Angeles Police Department.
Hawke also featured at Toronto in two new films from Richard Linklater, the consistently unpredictable Texan director. One is Tape. Adapted from a play (by Stephen Belber), shot on digital and taking place on a single set with just three characters, it may not sound worth a trip to the cinema. Yet it exerts a fascination early on and sustains it to the end, as it brings together two former high-school friends, 10 years on, for a reunion that gradually turns sourer as unresolved matters resurface.
One of them (Hawke) is a drug dealer who's as grungy as his motel room, where the movie is set; the other is now a film-maker (Robert Sean Leonard). Later we meet the third character, a woman from their past played by Uma Thurman, as Linklater turns up the heat, shooting their encounter like a tennis match, the camera bouncing between their cutting repartee.
Altogether more ambitious, Linklater's Waking Life is a ground-breaking experiment. Shot and edited as live action, the footage was then "painted", frame by frame via a computer, to create the effect of an impressionist painting breathing with life. It follows Wiley Wiggins (from Linklater's Dazed And Confused) through a dislocated series of encounters and observations in a world that may be dream or reality.
The characters along the way - among them Hawke and Julie Delpy in a reprise of their roles in Linklater's finest film, the blissfully romantic Before Sunrise - spout torrents of philosophical musings on everything from alienation and existentialism to evolution, freedom and morality, as well as the recurring theme of dreaming and reality. Some of their loquacious interjections are laboriously self-indulgent, and probably intentionally so (or maybe not).
There is no doubt about the film's visual allure, however - or that it's going to be one of the trendiest pictures in years when it opens in the Republic, in December.
Michael Dwyer continues his Toronto reports tomorrow, in Weekend
