No trend was more evident or attracted more comment on the international film festival circuit over the past 12 months than the candour with which so many American and European film-makers confronted the taboo themes of paedophilia, incest and extreme violence. And none of those films raised eyebrows and hackles more than a modestly budgeted US independent production, Happiness, a provocative and riveting drama written and directed by Todd Solondz.
The film proved to be such a hot potato that it was dropped by October Films - the specialist division of the Hollywood studio, Universal Pictures - which had acquired the distribution rights to it.
"This is very sensitive material," Solondz noted with an air of understatement when we met in Toronto. "October lost the battle. They wanted very much to release the film, but given the contract they have with Universal, they had no choice in the matter. "Universal felt it wasn't appropriate to their image to release a film like this. It wasn't due to any particular shot or scene. It was all of the film.
"From what I've heard, Seagram, who own Universal, were trying to pass some things through Congress and they just didn't need this kind of problem. So they gave the movie back to us."
Solondz, who is in his 30s, made his breakthrough three years ago with the promising though over-praised Welcome to the Doll- house, which received the prestigious Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Set and shot in his native New Jersey, it featured the remarkable young Heather Matarazzo as a plain, unfortunately named schoolgirl, Dawn Weiner, as she struggles through a painful and often cruel adolescence.
Meeting Todd Solondz immediately triggers off memories of Matarazzo in his film where she wore oversized spectacles with heavy black rims. Solondz's spectacles dominate not just his face but the slight frame that supports it. He walks as if he's gliding along the floor, and when he sits he seems to slide into his seat.
The publicity notes for Happiness suggest that it's his second film, glossing over the fact that he made another feature before Welcome to the Dollhouse.
Not a lot of people know that, and even fewer saw that first film of his, Fear, Anxiety and Depression, in which Solondz himself played the central role of a nerdy playwright who at one point actually sends a fan letter to Samuel Beckett, expressing his admiration - and hope that they will collaborate someday. Cringe-inducing embarrassment is a recurring feature in Solondz's movies, and not just for the characters he creates but for the audience which is drawn into their lives and fates. There are more than a few such moments to get audiences wriggling uncomfortably in their seats during Happiness.
The title is very deliberately ironic in the case of Happiness, which is set among an extended family in New Jersey. The parents of this dysfunctional dynasty, played by Ben Gazzara and Louise Lasser, are on the verge of breaking up after 40 years of marriage.
One of their daughters (Jane Adams) is a lonely and naive idealist, unlucky in love and work. Another daughter is a successful author (Lara Flynn Boyle) who turns the tables on a sexually frustrated neighbour (Philip Seymour Hoffman) by returning his smutty phone calls.
The third daughter (Cynthia Stevenson) projects an archetypal all-American homemaker image which disguises the fact that her marriage is sexless. Later, in the movie's most unsettling strand, her psychiatrist husband (Dylan Baker) is revealed as a paedophile preying on his son's school-friends.
The inter-connected protagonists also include a promiscuous and physically abusive Russian taxi driver (Jared Harris), and a despairing overweight woman (Camryn Manheim) who exacts lethal revenge on a man who rapes her.
In a complex, multi-charactered scenario as skilfully structured and executed as Short Cuts, writer-director Solondz strips bare the veneer of respectability, acceptability and cosiness with which these characters mask their secret lives. Made all the more unsettling by its spurts of very black humour, Happiness is a challenging and disturbing film, never more so than in its revelation of the psychiatrist as an unrepentant paedophile.
"What makes it tragic is that he's a great father who loves his son and family," Solondz says. "He's not a monster, but he struggles with the monster within and succumbs to it. "Personally, I'm never depressed by something that's well done, even if the subject matter is emotionally difficult. I don't find my film that bleak myself. There's a moral centre there. "I give the audience enough credit that I don't need to say anything as obvious as `Rape is bad' to have a moral meaning."
Clearly, this is not a movie for everybody. "It's just not," he says. "It's very, very difficult and very tricky, and it demands a certain open-mindedness, a certain willingness on the part of the audience to make a kind of leap, to come halfway to the movie - in the same way that all these characters are trying to connect with each other. I'm asking that of the audience, that they not look at the characters as freaks.
"The whole point is that for all the repugnant and repellent aspects of some of their behaviour, we may not like or sympathise with these people. But we have to acknowledge a certain kind of humanity, that there's a heart and mind to them. "That's not to say the film doesn't have a moral centre. It does. I just don't like to underestimate the intelligence of my audience, and they don't need to be told what is bad."
When I note how very few film-makers have tackled paedolphilia, even though the subject is all over the media, the quiet-spoken Solondz turns passionate. "There are so many articles about this subject in the papers all the time, and every day on TV, on the talk shows. Everything is public. "Everyone is writing their tell-all sexual abuse stories, or talking about them on television - Oprah, Roseanne, LaToya Jackson, and so many others.
"You have to ask yourself if this really is a healing process or if there's some kind of exploitation going on. These talk shows appear to be very moralistic, saying `Isn't this horrible?' - yet at the same time there's a titillation, freak-show factor at work. My film is not moralistic. It doesn't preach or tell people what to think."
In its treatment of paedolphilia, Happiness raises other disturbing issues, chiefly the casting of children and the huge responsibilities which that entails. "I take your point," Solondz says. "That was the most daunting challenge of the whole production, to find the kids who would be right for these roles - and the parents who would come with them - the whole package. Because you can't go into something like this without the support of the parents.
"The parents were always there every day with their kids. The kids did read the whole script and they discussed it with their parents. I never felt it incumbent upon me, or appropriate for me to explain any of the issues to them. "I still don't know what the boy who played Rufus, the psychiatrist's son, understood or what he didn't understand. But I didn't want to tamper with any of that because part of the whole point is that his character is in the process of trying to figure out and understand what's going on.
"My job, as I saw it, was to make him feel comfortable, to feel a sense of trust. I know that many people will say how can parents allow their child to do something like this. "All I can say is that I'm very admiring and supportive of these particular parents and the way they dealt with their child. I'm much more offended by parents who encourage or foist their children on television commercials selling detergent or whatever. "I think that cheapens the meaning of childhood. I think that's the obscenity. It removes the child's dignity."
Todd Solondz believes that there is a more acutely felt sense of alienation in America than in anywhere else in the world. And that for all the American declarations of family and family values, that there's a real lack of a sense of family in the US.
"In America they talk about family being important, but I think that's because they're so despairing of the nature of family in America. I don't know anyone who can say they come from a close family. "You get so many families where a sister lives in Los Angeles, say, while her brother's in Boston, and their parents, if they are not divorced, are in Arizona. And yet they call themselves a close family. You have to question the nature of that closeness.
"The wonderful thing that comes from this is the freedom from constraint and tradition whereby you can reinvent or recreate yourself. "Yet at the same time there's a kind of fallout where you are more vulnerable to feeling disconnected and isolated. Because we don't have that foundation of family which get in other parts of the world."
Even if he had the budget, which he didn't, Solondz says that he would not have cast movie stars in Happiness because he wanted all the characters to seem like regular people, the kind you see or meet in the supermarket, and he chose generally unfamiliar actors drawn from theatre and the US independent sector.
He cites Dylan Baker, an award-winning stage actor who has worked mostly in supporting roles in film and television, whom he cast in the demanding role of Bill Maplewood, mild-mannered family man, psychiatrist - and child molester.
"Dylan was brave to take this on," Solondz says. "He made Bill so real. He brings true genius to a character who's very disturbing and unsympathetic, and yet he manages to make him somehow sympathetic. "And that was the tough nut to crack - for all his vileness, there was a soul there that, as distasteful as it might be, one felt something for.
"Because I knew I was dealing with extreme forms of behaviour I didn't want it to emphasise the way I would cast or design the movie. The whole modus operandi was about restraint. "Given that the script was so far out there, I wanted to pull back. You go into this house, the Maplewood home, and you feel it's comfortable. It's not tacky, it's not kitsch, it's not a joke. It's very regular."