High-profile film festivals are natural magnets for controversial movies, and few recent productions have been devised with such candour and determined provocation as the French picture, Baise-Moi (Rape Me). It was already notorious before it arrived at Toronto this year, having been withdrawn from Paris cinemas after three days on release during the summer and given an Xrating which restricted its exhibition to sexshops.
Its roots are in a 1994 novel written by Virginie Despentes, who had worked in prostitution and peep shows and written pornography. The novel was written in four weeks, or as Despentes puts it, "vomited in a spirit of hate". She describes its principal characters as "Thelma and Louise's wicked younger sisters", and she co-directed the movie of Baise-Moi with Coralie Trinh Thi, a soulmate who, she says, shared her "vision of a feminist battle, an avant-garde battle, as well as a certain fondness of provocative".
Provocation is laid on with the heaviest of hands in Baise-Moi, in which a chance encounter brings together two young women, Nadine and Nanu, whose mutual taste for extreme violence is revealed when they go on a homicidal rampage. Their supposedly legitimate targets include a man whose crime is to be wear a suit and a well-dressed woman who has the audacity to use an ATM machine in their presence; they shoot her dead after obtaining her pin number. Between revelling in acts of extreme violence, the nihilistic Nadine and Nanu engage in casual sex which is filmed with all the cinema verite of hardcore pornography; to cast the two leading roles, the co-directors recruited two performers from the porn industry, Raffalea Anderson and Karen Bach. "These scenes had to be real," Despentes says. "Time to return their complete bodies to women, of which they have always been deprived. To reclaim women's rights over their true sexuality, to seize it back from the male gaze."
However, the feminist agenda Despentes purports to espouse in Baise-Moi is exposed as even more bogus than the film's flimsy socialist pretensions. The bottom line of Baise-Moi is exploitation, and brutally killing off male partners after depicting graphic sexual encounters cannot disguise this fact. The treatment of violence is equally dubious in this nasty, shallow and utterly amoral exercise which does not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Thelma and Louise.
The theme of a woman's capacity to commit murder when circumstances become overwhelming is explored with vastly deeper maturity and acuity - and with infinitely greater cinematic flair - in the new Kathryn Bigelow film, The Weight of Water, which had its world premiere in Toronto. Based on the best-selling novel by Anita Shreve, the film features Catherine McCormack as a magazine photographer working on a feature which explores the mysterious killing of two Norwegian immigrant women on a bleak island off the coast of New Hampshire in 1873.
Bigelow's film employs a complex, time-shifting structure as it gradually reveals the background to the 19th-century murders and their harsh, puritanical milieu, and contrasts this with the opulence and directness of the parallel contemporary story, while noting their mirror images of jealousy and illicit sexual longing. In the present-day story, the photographer and her husband, a self-absorbed, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet (Sean Penn) are joined on his brother's yacht by the brother's new lover (Elizabeth Hurley) for a journey which, like the memorably edgy boat trip in Polanski's Knife in the Water, is laced with sexual tension.
Some all-too-obvious shots of Hurley seductively sucking ice cubes and massaging her body with them are among the few missteps in Bigelow's demanding but firmly intriguing drama which is played out against distinctive visual schemes - strikingly photographed by Adrian Biddle - for its individual narratives. The strong international cast also notably includes Vanessa Shaw, Katrin Cartlidge, Josh Lucas, Ulrich Thomsen and Anders W. Berthelsen, with sterling contributions from the Irish actor, Ciaran Hinds, and the gifted young Canadian, Sarah Polley.
Style takes precedence over substance in two essentially more conventional movies of duplicity and murder, Brother and Sexy Beast. The first US film starring, written and directed by the Japanese film-maker, Takeshi Kitano, Brother features Kitano himself in a familiar portrait of a dour, laconic yazuka driven by codes of loyalty and vengeance, but this time relocated from Tokyo to Los Angeles, where his younger half-brother is a minor drug-dealer. In a minimalist narrative, with most of the sparse dialogue in Japanese, the body count escalates at an alarming rate as the brothers take on more powerful criminals, and the violence is as ritualistically stylised as we have come to expect from Kitano.
The latest in a long line of recent British gangster movies, and one of the more satisfying, the misleadingly named Sexy Beast, another world premiere at Toronto, is populated by amoral characters. However, a few of them have vowed to go straight, among them a London criminal, Gal Dove (Ray Winstone) and his wife he adores, a former porn model (Amanda Redman), who have put London and their pasts behind them and settled down to an idyllic life in a clifftop villa on the Costa del Sol.
THEIR lazy days of sunbathing, drinking and dining out are shattered by the arrival of Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), a psychopathic gangster intent on luring Dove back to London for that old movie stand-by, one last job. Director Jonathan Glazer's background in commercials is evident throughout this sleek production in which Kingsley is comfortably cast against type as the volatile, foul-mouthed Logan, and the protracted cutting between parallel crimes set in Spain and in London is firmly effective.
The young US director, Darren Aronofsky, may well have set a record for the number of cuts in a feature film - about 2,000 compared to an average of 600 or 700 - in Requiem For a Dreamer, his bold second feature after the inventive but over-praised Pi. Aptly described by him as hiphop montage - and incorporating digital effects, rapid-fire editing, speeded-up footage and split-screen - this technique creepily heightens the horrors of drug addiction and the self-destructiveness and helplessness of its victims.
Based on the novel by Hubert Selby Jr, who wrote Last Exit to Brooklyn, and adaptedby Aronofsky in collaboration with Selby, Requiem For a Dream is set in Coney Island where Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), a lonely widow, spends most of her days glued to TV game shows and blithely unaware that her aimless son, Harry (Jared Leto) and his best friend, Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) are engaged in drug-dealing.
The utopian dreams the self-deluded Harry shares with his new girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly), and with Tyrone, unravel horrifically as they become hooked on the drugs they are peddling. Meanwhile, the unfortunate Sara, told she has won a spot on her favourite game show, embarks on a severe diet which leads to her becoming dangerously addicted to pills and losing her last grasp on reality.
Following the characters over three seasons from summer into winter, Aronofsky's unflinchingly harrowing drama charts their inexorable decline and their hallucinatory worlds with a startling explicitness which entirely eschews phoney feel-good resolutions. The principal performances are riveting, in particular those of Leto and, in an astonishing comeback which could well earn her a second Oscar, Burstyn. Requiem For a Dream is one of the toughest, most unsettling films of recent years, but also one of the most powerful and touching.