The Toronto Film Festival this year was vast and hugely impressive. The usual auteurs and many new names were there, writes Michael Dwyer in his final report.
The statistics indicate the sheer scale of the 27th Toronto International Film Festival, which closed last Saturday night. From 3,024 submissions, 343 movies were selected for the vast, hugely impressive programme - 263 features and 80 shorts hailing from 50 different countries, with more than half of them in a language other than English, and ranging in length from Nikolaus Geyrhalter's four-hour Elsewhere, to Louise Bourque's one-minute Going Back Home.
With an average of 26 new features screening on each of the 10 days of the festival, it's physically impossible to see much more than a fifth of what's on show, and the scheduling clashes are painful. What to choose? The safest option is to bank on auteurs, who were out in force at Toronto again this year. The result, of course, is that some deliver, some don't.
Ireland's most prolific film-maker, Neil Jordan, returned to Toronto for the world premiere of his 13th feature, The Good Thief, a heist movie inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville's 1955 thriller, Bob le Flambeur. Like Christopher Nolan's recent Insomnia, Jordan's film reworks a respected original source with freshness, vitality and distinction. Like Jordan's Mona Lisa, its pivotal relationship draws together a world-weary older man down on his luck and the much younger prostitute he takes under his protective wing.
Played in a charismatic performance by Nick Nolte, Bob is a haggard, smoky-voiced American heroin addict and criminal living in a shady Nice underworld, populated mostly by expatriate opportunists portrayed by an eclectic cosmopolitan cast. When Bob gambles everything on a horse and loses, he is enticed into that classic genre staple, One Last Job - an audacious scheme to rob an upmarket Monte Carlo casino of its priceless paintings. To prepare himself, Bob goes cold turkey - which involves handcuffing himself to his bed - with the help of a young Russian prostitute played by Nutsa Kukhianidze.
What follows is deviously plotted, and shot through with witty, spiky, hard-boiled dialogue that's delivered with panache by the cast, notably including the fine Turkish-born French actor Tcheky Karyo as the dogged detective on the case; Serbian director Emir Kusturica as Vlad from Vladivostock, a security systems expert; Ralph Fiennes in a cameo as an unscrupulous art fencer; British actress Sarah Bridges as a transsexual bodybuilder; and American twin brothers Mark and Mike Polish (from Twin Falls Idaho) as security guards with thick Dublin accents.
Jordan's sprightly thriller effectively employs freeze frame, slow-motion and speeded-up footage within an atmospheric visual scheme lit by Chris Menges, and the soundtrack includes Bono in lounge music mood as he croons Sinatra's That's Life.
In The Heart of Me, Irish director Thaddeus O'Sullivan, charts the changing fortunes in a romantic triangle not dissimilar in outline to his enthralling first feature, December Bride. Set in London between 1934 and 1946, the new film features Paul Bettany as Rickie, a City businessman getting passionately involved with Dinah (Helena Bonham Carter), the sister of his wife, Madeleine (Olivia Williams). Their clothes reflect the personalities of the two women - the stiff-upper-lipped Madeleine in her sensible and elegant ensembles; Dinah, dressed in brash, primary colours - setting the tone for the inevitable greater conflict to follow in this low-key, well-acted and time-shifting chamber piece.
The fast-rising young Irish actor, Colin Farrell, comfortably moves centre-screen for Phone Booth, which reunites him with Tigerland director Joel Schumacher and is set almost entirely in and around a Manhattan phone booth. Farrell plays with panache Stu Shepard, a cocky, manipulative publicist who uses a pay phone to call the aspirant actress he is attempting to seduce, in case his wife might notice her number recurring on his cellphone bills. One day, the payphone rings and on the line is a threatening voice (Kiefer Sutherland) warning him he will be killed if he hangs up. The ensuing siege involves both women in his life, the police, helicopters and a barrage of TV crews, as Schumacher fashions a lean and pacy thriller within the setting's restrictive limitations.
After the major misstep that was Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haynes returns triumphantly to form with his fourth feature, Far From Heaven, which chronicles the collapse of an apparently perfect marriage in the hypocrisy-steeped 1950s. The film is conceived and executed in the lush visual style of that era's classic melodramas, directed with such distinction by Douglas Sirk, which penetrated deep beneath the surface of their glossy middle-class milieux.
On her second film for Haynes, Julianne Moore immerses herself in a subtle, emotionally complex performance in Far From Heaven, as an idealised homemaker, the immaculately groomed Cathy Whitaker, whose every day is a whirl of shopping expeditions, cocktail parties, charity events, and boundless devotion to her businessman husband (Dennis Quaid) - until she discovers that the real reason for her husband's late nights at the office is to have sexual dalliances with other men.
There are further complications when Cathy befriends an articulate, sensitive black gardener, Raymond (Dennis Haysbert), and her social circle is aghast to see them chatting at an art exhibition he appreciates more than any of them. A product of a conservative upbringing, Cathy is unwittingly patronising towards Robert and her black maid (Viola Davis), but she is an extreme liberal by comparison with her friends and neighbours in the affluent New England suburbia of 1957.
This superbly acted drama, which inescapably prompts comparisons with the supposedly more enlightened contemporary world, is formed as a lovingly detailed homage to Sirk's work - bookended by striking retro credits sequences, gorgeously lit by Ed Lachmann, and accompanied by a vintage dramatic score from Elmer Bernstein.
Prefaced by equally apt retro credits, Auto Focus, the factually based new Paul Schrader movie, opens seven years later, in the nascent Swinging 1960s, when Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear) graduates from radio talk show presenter to star as the Bilko-esque conniver of the wartime sitcom, Hogan's Heroes - and as he participates in the new sexual liberalism of the period with unbridled enthusiasm, preserving his exploits on the new-fangled video equipment provided by a sleazy Sony technical wizard (Willem Dafoe), who becomes his co-conspirator in swinging.
A married Catholic with three children, Crane remains blithely indifferent to the problems his sex addiction creates in his family life, and the damage it does to his image as a mainstream popular star. This makes him an ideal subject for dissection in the tradition of Schrader's trademark flawed and conflicted anti-heroes in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, American Gigolo and Mishima.
The sexually active protagonist of Jean-Pierre Limosin's whimsical French tale, Novo, is irresistible to women not just because he is so physically attractive, but also because his severely limited short-term memory makes sex feel new and fresh for him every single time.
He is played with puzzled innocence by Eduardo Noriega, the Spanish star of Open Your Eyes and The Devil's Backbone in this sexually frank, less intellectually rigorous spin on Memento.
The complicated sexual and artistic lives of the Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo, and her contemporaries are sketched in surprisingly obvious soap opera terms by Julie Taymor in the uneven biopic, Frida, which falls far short of Taymor's ambitious and imaginative work on the Broadway production of The Lion King and her radical Shakespearean screen adaptation, Titus.
Even though most of the Mexican characters behave with stereotypical fieriness and passion, this is a surprisingly inert production, not at all helped by the fact that it went through development hell (four writers share the final credit) and that Salma Hayek (one of its 13 credited producers) is patently not up to carrying the title role. The cast more notably includes Alfred Molina as Diego Rivera, Geoffrey Rush as Leon Trotsky, and Edward Norton as Nelson Rockefeller.
An even greater disappointment was The Four Feathers, the new film from Shekhar Kapur, after the far superior Bandit Queen and Elizabeth. Apart from orchestrating an epic desert battle sequence and capturing some atmospheric Moroccan locations, Kapur brings nothing special to his meandering treatment of the much-filmed AEW Mason's novel of a British soldier's perceived cowardice and later redemption in Sudan in 1884.
Presumably intent on attracting women viewers, the movie expends an unwarranted amount of screen time on the tiresome romantic triangle involving the outcast soldier (a rugged Heath Ledger), his prim former fiancée (a twee Kate Hudson) and his best friend (Wes Bentley in an un-ironic John Cleese caricature). After his dynamic exploration of English history in Elizabeth, it is dismaying that such a politically minded Indian film-maker as Kapur should relegate this story's more interesting themes, of militarism and imperialism, to mere glib asides.
Far more direct and forceful in tackling a country's colonialist past, Rabbit-Proof Fence is the first film in 12 years set and made in his native Australia by Philip Noyce - and a damning indictment of shameful episodes in that country's past, which still resonate today. In this true story set in 1931, three Aboriginal girls aged between eight and 14 are forcibly taken from the arms of their families, on the orders of the pompously named petty bureaucrat played by Kenneth Branagh, the chief protector of the Aboriginal population.
They are half-castes - "an unwanted third race" - fathered by white settlers who had moved on. The girls are sent 1,200 miles from home for re-education and grooming in domestic servitude. The movie follows the escape of the girls and their long, long walk home and the embarrassment caused to the authorities. Noyce's rightly angry drama is shot in expansive widescreen compositions by Christopher Doyle and accompanied by a strong percussion-driven Peter Gabriel score. Ending on a moving present-day postscript, the film received thunderous applause from its Toronto audience.