Forget Venice, Berlin, Sundance, and even Cannes. Toronto reigns supreme on the international film festival calendar as the ultimate feast for anyone seriously interested in savouring the very best in world cinema over the course of 10 intensive and pleasurably exhausting days from early morning shows to midnight movies, writes Michael Dwyer.
Whereas the focus of those other major festivals is driven by the two dozen or so movies in the official competition and all eyes are on the prizes, Toronto is a non-competitive event where the most coveted award is that voted by the public, who turn out in their thousands around the clock every day.
Consequently, Toronto is open season with more than 250 feature films on the programme, 109 of them world premieres this year, along with the award-winners from other key festivals. For the dedicated film lover, Toronto is a mind-bending maze to navigate, given that there is just so much to see. With so many movies inevitably clashing on the daily schedules, the only philosophical response is to accept the impossibility of seeing most of them and to keep repeating the mantra that it's only a movie.
That cannot be said of Breakfast on Pluto, another potent blending of Patrick McCabe's wonderfully weird and fertile imagination and Neil Jordan's rich cinematic flair after their fruitful collaboration on The Butcher Boy.
At the heart of the new film is a quite extraordinary performance from the versatile and adventurous Cillian Murphy as one of life's pure innocents, Patrick Braden, who's plunged into a whirlwind of events that are, by turn, uproariously funny and dramatically jolting.
The unplanned offspring of a priest (Liam Neeson) and his housekeeper (Eva Birthistle), Patrick grows up during the 1960s in the fictional Irish border town of Tyreleen, where, to the exasperation of his stepmother (Ruth McCabe), he exhibits far more interest in wearing dresses and make-up than in football. In his teens and adopting the name of Kitten, he sets off on a quest for his birth mother, and first finds a romantic protector in Billy Rock (Gavin Friday), leader of a glitter band, The Mohawks.
In a movie packed with resonantly employed period singles - Breakfast on Pluto takes its title from a 1969 hit by busker Don Partridge - the musical highlight is the surreal duet between Kitten (in Indian squaw costume) and Billy Rock on the Nancy Sinatra-Lee Hazelwood torch song, Sand.
Moving to London, the naïve Kitten's encounters include a hard-drinking Irish emigrant (Brendan Gleeson) who gets him a job in a Wombles of Wimbledon theme park; a sinister kerb-crawler (singer Bryan Ferry); a morose magician (Stephen Rea) who saws Kitten in half on stage; and an aggressive detective (Ian Hart), who suspects him of triggering an IRA pub bombing.
In the tradition of Candide, Kitten is an eternal optimist whose good nature is rewarded in the unexpectedly beautiful and moving resolution of a film that artfully weds preoccupations familiar from Jordan's earlier work - terrorism, cross-dressing, inter-racial relationships, lost parents, musicians, and fairytales - in an intoxicating fusion that amply justifies the willing suspension of disbelief.
The large cast - which notably features Ruth Negga and Laurence Kinlan as Kitten's friends from childhood - is admirable from Murphy's marvellous immersion in the "svelte gamine" that is Kitten, to Tom Hickey's spot-on delivery of his single line as a bothered bishop.
Another remarkable feat of the imagination is achieved in Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, an enchanting stop-motion animated musical set in a vaguely Victorian era when plans for an arranged marriage are thrown into utter disarray by an intervention from the after-life. Johnny Depp provides the voice of Victor Von Dort, the son of nouveau-riche fish tycoons (Paul Whitehouse and Tracey Ullmann), with Emily Watson as Victoria Everglot, the daughter of unbearably snooty old-money aristocrats (Albert Finney and Joanna Lumley).
Nervously practising his complicated wedding vows, Victor unwittingly becomes betrothed to the Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham Carter) who rises Carrie-style from the grave, setting in motion a snowballing sequence of hilarious complications in the here and the hereafter. Life after death is much more fun than what precedes it, according to this delightfully inventive and witty entertainment.
The drolly acerbic epigrams coined and delivered by Truman Capote provide some rare light relief in Bennett Miller's deeply involving first feature, Capote, featuring the gifted Philip Seymour Hoffman in a meticulous performance that seems ensured to earn him a long overdue Oscar nomination.
He nails the fey, affected voice of Capote and the author's narcissism and flamboyance with subtle precision in this fascinating film that, despite its title, is not strictly a biopic but proves just as, and arguably even more revealing. It begins in 1959 when Capote reads a report on a rural Kansas robbery that resulted in the cold-blooded murder of a family of four, and he impulsively decides to delve into the story as his next feature for the New Yorker.
Working from Gerald Clarke's definitive biography of Capote, actor Dan Futterman (the son in The Birdcage) shapes a cool, dispassionate and acutely observant screenplay of what follows as Capote grows close to one of the two convicted killers (Clifton Collins Jr in a riveting performance), and what started as a magazine story takes five years and grows into his innovative non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood. Catherine Keener is aptly understated as Capote's close friend, Harper Lee, whose book, To Kill a Mockingbird, is published and filmed before Capote's quest reaches its chilling resolution.
The new Stephen Frears film, Mrs Henderson Presents, depicts its protagonist as a woman who could match Capote any time when it comes to elegantly barbed wit, and she is played with such panache by the incomparable Judi Dench that another Oscar nomination is sure to come her way in the spring. Inspired by true events, we are told in an opening caption, the movie begins in 1937 as wealthy septuagenarian Laura Henderson is initially bereft and soon bored by widowhood.
To amuse herself, she buys and reopens a disused Soho theatre, the Windmill, and with the help of a wily manager (Bob Hoskins) comes up with a ruse to avoid the rigid censorships, by staging tableaux vivants featuring naked women, which is acceptable to the Lord Chamberlain (Christopher Guest) as long as the undraped performers do not move a muscle. Thoroughly entertaining through its first half, the movie founders when it has to turn serious.
Gabrielle, the new film directed by Patrice Chereau, one of the Renaissance Men of French culture over the past 30 years, takes an avowedly serious - and thoroughly discursive - approach to marital malaises in early 20th century Paris. Based on Joseph Conrad's short story The Return, it charts the disintegration of a loveless marriage between a smug businessman (Pascal Greggory) and the wife (Isabelle Huppert) he takes all too readily for granted. The two leads, both on fine form, carry this loquaciously introspective melodrama that pointlessly employs screaming captions and abrupt shifts between colour and monochrome.
Steve Martin offers more subdued and arguably more pointed reflections on the hurtful nature of personal relationships in Shopgirl, which he adapted from his novella of the same name and is directed by Anand Tucker.
It features Martin at his most self-deprecating as a predatory, wealthy middle-aged man who casually exploits the vulnerability of a lonely, much younger woman (Claire Danes), who sells gloves at a Los Angeles outlet of Saks Fifth Avenue and is as socially awkward as her name, Mirabelle Buttersfield. Fortunately for her, she has a second suitor in the carefree aspirant designer engagingly played by Jason Schwartzman. Danes is achingly tender and sympathetic in this appealing serious comedy that leaves a bittersweet aftertaste.
Shane Black, the screenwriter of the Lethal Weapon franchise, turns director and takes a unremittingly cynical view of the vacuity and phoniness of Los Angeles life in his caustic satire on the city's primary industry, the film business, in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. This irresistibly entertaining modern spin on film noir is gamely played by Robert Downey Jr, as an inept petty thief mistaken for a Method actor and up for a movie role, and Val Kilmer as an openly gay detective who warns him that he's being used, that the studio is threatening to cast him as a ruse to get their ideal choice, Colin Farrell, to knock a few million off his exorbitant salary to play the same role.
Meanwhile, Ireland is further represented at Toronto this year by Perry Ogden's thought-provoking Traveller film, Pavee Lackeen, which screens on Thursday and was covered here from Galway Film Fleadh, and by writer-director Billy O'Brien's unsettling first feature, Isolation, which was shown in Toronto's "Midnight Madness" strand on Sunday night.
Madness is right, given that the all-too-real shadow of mad cow disease hangs over and heightens the credibility of this dark tale set on a remote Irish farm. Respecting genre form, it wastes no time in setting up several ominous incidents. When a cow experiences great difficulty in calving, a vet (Essie Davis) is alarmed when her hand is ripped while inside the animal. Following a ritual unfamiliar to urban dwellers - the farmer (John Lynch) swings the calf around his head to get it to breathe - it transpires that the calf, too, was pregnant.
The narrative involves just three other characters - a couple of runaway lovers (Ruth Negga and Sean Harris) and a sinister scientist (Marcel Iures) - and reveals the consequences of tampering with nature. Although its most graphic imagery is not easy to stomach, Isolation is relatively restrained for its genre, and all the more effective for that as O'Brien, employing an effectively layered sound design, establishes and sustains a climate of fear. The movie closes with tongue firmly in cheek on a country song, "I'm Going to Make You Love Me Till the Cows Come Home."
Michael Dwyer continues his reports from Toronto in The Ticket on Friday
