Literary adaptations abounded in Toronto this year, with movies drawn from George Orwell (Keep The Aspidistra Flying), Henry James (Washington Square and The Wings Of The Dove), Joseph Conrad (Swept From The Sea, based on the short story, Amy Foster) and Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway), and from more recent sources such as Pat Barker (Regeneration), Russell Banks (The Sweet Hereafter) and Gilbert Adair (Love And Death On Long Island).
Writer-director Richard Kwietniowski's impeccable screen treatment of Adair's eloquent and succinct, postmodern 1990 novel features John Hurt as the reclusive writer Giles de'Ath, a middleaged widower far removed from the modern world - until he goes to the cinema one afternoon. Locked out of home during a downpour, he impulsively decides to check out the latest E. M. Foster adaptation, a prospect that puzzles and intrigues him. Never having been in a multiplex before, he wanders into the wrong auditorium and happens upon Hotpants College II.
Initially aghast at what he sees, he finds himself becoming infatuated with the movie's teen heartthrob star, Ronnie Bostock, played by Jason Priestly from the TV series Beverly Hills 90210. Besotted by the young actor, De'Ath employs the new-fangled invention of video to check out his back catalogue and finds himself buying teen magazines such as Sugar in his quest for scraps of information on his idol. His obsession eventually takes him to Long Island, in the hope of ingratiating himself with Bostock.
Were the second half of this movie set on the west rather than the east coast of the US, it might well have been titled De'Ath In Venice Beach, so replete is it with clever pointed references to Thomas Mann's novella and Luchino Visconti's subsequent film. Skilfully adapted and directed by Richard Kwietniowski, Love And Death On Long Island is smart, sophisticated and seductive and features a sublime performance by John Hurt that stands among his finest work.
Fear of another death in Venice looms over Iain Softley's accomplished film of the 1902 Henry James novel, The Wings Of The Dove, which comes as a welcome antidote after the acute disappointment of Jane Campion's The Portrait Of A Lady earlier this year. Adeptly adapted by Hossein Amini (who scripted Jude), and moved forward by seven years to 1910, Softley's mature and sensitive film makes for an engrossing and melancholy meditation on passion, betrayal and exploitation.
In her strongest performance to date, Helena Bonham Carter plays the spirited Kate Croy who, taken under the wing of her steely, socially conscious aunt (Charlotte Rampling), is refused permission to see the lowly-paid socialist journalist Merton Densher (Linus Roache from Priest). Allison Elliott is touching as the secretly ailing American heiress who travels to Venice with the secret lovers.
Whereas Softley subtly taps into the contemporary resonances of James's novel, Marleen Gorris, the Dutch director of the Oscarwinning Antonia's Line, takes a decidedly more heavy-handed approach in her stiff, remote film of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. It is only partly rescued by Vanessa Redgrave's firm, intelligent portrayal of the eponymous character, a woman pondering life's regrets as she prepares for a dinner party in the summer of 1923. As adapted by Eileen Atkins, the English actor who featured in an acclaimed one-woman show as Woolf, the film is particularly cluttered in its early stages as it attempts to introduce its many characters and their youthful incarnations, and its parallel story of a seriously shellshocked young war veteran (Rupert Graves) is so tenuously connected that it becomes merely intrusive.
Sally Potter, who directed a far more satisfying Virginia Woolf adaptation in Orlando, teeters over into self-indulgence with The Tango Lesson, in which she unwisely gives herself the central role of an English film-maker named Sally. Frustrated by the problems of getting her new production financed, she takes tango lessons from an Argentinian dancer (Pablo Veron) until their relationship becomes more complicated. Shorn in half and retaining the tango footage so ably shot by Robby Muller, this might have passed as a dramatised TV documentary.
The redoubtable American independent film-maker John Sayles takes a bigger risk, and with qualified success, in Men With Guns (Hombres Armados), which employs Spanish dialogue, some Indian dialects and an unknown cast for an angry, didactic picture of injustice and oppression in an unspecified Latin American country. Contriving to take a city doctor (Federico Lippi) on a journey into mountainous country to meet his former medical students, it sets the politically unaware man on an eye-opening journey of discovery. For all its evident sincerity, Sayles's film would benefit if some of its more repetitive sequences were excised.
An even more radical departure is taken by the the Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou, with Keep Cool. Having made his mark with such striking period dramas as Raise The Red Lantern and Ju Dou, which proved controversial on their home ground, Zhang sets out to eschew such controversy with the allegorical but essentially apolitical Keep Cool, a comparatively slight but entertaining urban comedy set in present-day Beijing. It is in many respects as illuminating about the present as his earlier work was about China's past, offering a rare and fascinating picture of a vibrant city in which western influences collide with long-standing traditions.
Visual and audio reference points include Oasis, the Pet Shop Boys and Donna Karen, and the film's own brash visual style, shot entirely with often dizzying handheld camera, is much closer to that of the Hong Kong stylist, Wong Kar-wai, than to the precisely composed images of, say, Raise The Red Lantern. The slender storyline involves a hapless young bookseller brimming with desire for a liberated young woman and regularly distracted by a pedantic researcher.
The prolific Japanese director, actor, writer, performance artist and television personality Takeshi Kitano delivers his most thoughtful, tender and emotionally involving movie to date in Hana-Bi (Fireworks), which won him the Golden Lion for best film at the Venice festival this month. He also plays the leading role of Nishi, a morose former detective whose wife is diagnosed with a terminal illness and whose former police partner is paralysed in a shooting. Falling foul of the yakuza to whom he owes money, and drifting into crime, Nishi is forced to take stock in this moody and compelling movie which employs minimal dialogue and an unsettling stillness, punctuated by quite unexpected outbursts of stylised violence.
The audience award at Toronto went to first-time director Thom Fitzgerald for his visually and structurally imaginative picture of a dysfunctional family in The Hanging Garden, a Nova Scotia production with prominent Celtic overtones in its music and the actors' accents. Fitzgerald employs surrealism and magic realism as he follows a 25-year-old gay man on his return home after a 10-year absence for his sister's wedding. He is known as Sweet William - all the principal characters are named after flowers or plants - in this ambitious picture which cuts backwards and forwards in time and eventually makes several surprising revelations.
Of the 279 movies in Toronto this year, the only one of specific Irish interest was Jim McBride's The Informant, made in Dublin early last year for the US cable network Showtime. Set in Northern Ireland around the time of the supergrass trials of the mid-1980s, it is based on the novel Field Of Blood, by Gerald Seymour, author of the 1982 TV drama Harry's Game.
The promising young Irish actor Anthony Brophy plays Gingy McAnally, who has served five years in Long Kesh for possession of firearms and has moved to the Republic for a new life in an isolated caravan. He is called back into service by the Provos, who remind him that he has made an oath for life and who need his apparently unique skill in firing a rocket. Gingy blesses himself before firing the rocket and killing a judge.
What follows is a highly implausible relationship formed between Gingy and a young British army lieutenant (Cary Elwes), while McAnally is persuaded to turn informer by a gruff RUC inspector (an over-acting Timothy Dalton). Gingy incurs the contempt of his wife (Maria Lennon) and surly, foul-mouthed son (Ciaran Fitzgerald), and of the hardline Turf Lodge priest (Paul Hickey) who describes him as "a paid perjurer", not to mention the wrath of the Provos. The result is a ponderous and simplistic yarn devoid of insight, depth and dramatic tension.
