With 250 new features on show, the 32nd Toronto I nternational Film Festival is an unrivalled cinematic feast. Michael Dwyer savours the first course
By 10 o'clock on Sunday morning, at a time when many Canadians were relaxing in bed or over breakfast, nine public screenings were already underway at the 32nd Toronto International Film Festival and mostly playing to packed houses. Simultaneously, 11 private screenings had started for the throngs of international media and film industry delegates at the festival.
Toronto is not a city known for conspicuous excess, but it's a different story at festival time. The programme is now at bursting point, with more than 250 feature films on show, many of them world premieres. Cannes, by contrast, screens about 20 films in competition every year, along with around 50 more in the sidebar sections, although there are hundreds showing in the Cannes market, most headed directly to DVD if they are lucky.
While the Cannes programme could be described as a degustation menu to sample world cinema, Toronto has become the Babette's Feast of international film festivals, and the temptation to gorge oneself is as irresistible to the paying public as it is to the media and the film industry. The result is glorious gluttony.
For the Toronto audience, there is the significant bonus of being addressed by hundreds of established and rising actors and directors at screenings.
Absurdly long stretch limos with darkened windows are fixtures outside the festival venues, delivering and collecting a passenger list that rivals Oscar night for star wattage.
Given the speed at which opinions travel in our information age, some of the media here tend to be prejudiced by a few negative or qualified reviews in the film trade press. A case in point is Lust, Caution, the new film from the supremely versatile Taiwanese director, Ang Lee.
Eavesdropping on comments in the audience before its Toronto press screening, it seemed that many reviewers were gagging to trash the movie on the basis of a few lukewarm trade-paper reports from the Venice festival. The abundant qualities of the film reaffirmed the importance of keeping an open mind.
Opening in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1942, Lust, Cautionintroduces its young protagonist, Wong (the beguiling Tang Wei), as she joins affluent women playing mah-jong, snacking on dim sum and gossiping while food queues and fuel shortages prevail outside their privileged milieu.
Extended flashbacks to 1938 tell the truth behind Wong's sophisticated veneer. As a shy young student, she joins the university drama group and features in a patriotic play. When war breaks out, she is given a real-life role, to seduce a Japanese collaborator, Mr Yee (Tony Leung) and set him up for assassination.
In one of the movie's rare moments of light relief, the virginal Wong undergoes a rudimentary course in intercourse with the only sexually experienced member of the group, who responds with premature ejaculation.
When she insinuates herself into Mr Yee's company, he expertly guides her through most of the Kama Sutra.
These vigorous sex scenes have ensured that Lust, Cautionwill be released in the US with a restrictive rating, but there is much more to this tense and contemplative, impeccably designed and photographed drama of betrayal, passion and conflicted allegiances.
Despite the sniffy early reviews for Lust, Caution, Ang Lee collected the Golden Lion for best film at the Venice festival last Saturday, having taken the same award two years ago for Brokeback Mountain. The Venice jury named Brad Pitt best actor for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, another of the most satisfying movies on show over Toronto's opening weekend.
In a thoughtful, authoritative performance, Pitt invests the much-filmed character of train robber and multiple murderer Jesse James with an acute awareness of his mythologised image and a deep sense of paranoia after he marks his 34th - and last - birthday in 1881.
The film features a revelatory performance from Casey Affleck as the fawning 19-year-old Robert Ford, who, despite being rebuffed by Jesse's older brother, Frank (Sam Shepard), is allowed to join the James gang. Ford is Jesse's number one fan, and anyone who has seen Misery could anticipate the consequences, even if they were not flagged in the title.
Running for close on three hours, this is a fascinating film, revisionist yet formed in the classical style of the genre, magnificently photographed by Roger Deakins, and directed with insight and at a perfectly measured pace by Andrew Dominik, the New Zealander whose earlier, Australian-set Chopperalso dealt with a real-life criminal in thrall to his notoriety.
THE BLURRED LINE between heroes and villains in our present-day 9/11 world runs through Rendition, which takes its title from the euphemism for the US practice of abducting suspected terrorists and sending them abroad for torture and interrogation. A suicide bombing in what is captioned as North Africa takes 19 lives. One of the victims is a CIA operative and the agency responds by subjecting an Egyptian-born chemical engineer (Omar Metwally), to the full rendition process on the flimsiest of evidence, even though he was in a very different area of Africa - Cape Town - at the time.
A New York University graduate, he has been living for 20 years in the US, where he is married to an American woman (Reese Witherspoon), now pregnant with their second child. The globe-hopping narrative extends to encompass an idealistic CIA agent (Jake Gyllenhaal), who enrolled the day after 9/11 and suffers a crisis of conscience; a glacial CIA chief (Meryl Streep); an ambitious political aide (Peter Sarsgaard) to an ostensibly liberal US senator (Alan Arkin); the North African officer (Igor Naor) who sadistically tortures the alleged suspect; and that officer's daughter, who is involved with a radical young Islamic student.
Renditionproves to be a film of two halves, the first thoroughly intriguing as it sets up its disparate characters and moral complexities, the second unconvincing as it stumbles towards resolution. The most dramatically effective sequences involve the horrific torture of an evidently innocent victim. The director, Gavin Hood, made the Oscar-winning South African drama, Tsotsi, which was tighter, more clearly focused and more plausible.
Renditionwas more satisfying, however, than Redacted, Brian De Palma's low-budget experimental movie on the Iraq war. Dealing with a squad of US soldiers in Samarra, it juxtaposes the video diary of a soldier who wants to go to film school; a faux French documentary on the soldiers' activities; Arab website footage of insurgents planting explosives; and YouTube admissions made by the soldiers.
This unwieldy mishmash of self- conscious styles only dilutes the impact of the film's anger when it tackles the widely reported case of the soldiers raping and murdering a 14-year-old girl - a theme treated far more potently in De Palma's Vietnam war movie, Casualties of War.
Events in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942 trigger the drama of Canadian director Jeremy Podeswa's Fugitive Pieces, which opened Toronto on Thursday. Based on a novel by Anne Michaels, it is adeptly structured as it moves back and forward in time to reflect on the trauma of a seven-year-old boy, Jacob (Robbie Kay) who witnesses the murder of his parents and the abduction of his sister. He is saved by a Greek archaeologist (Rade Sherbedgia), who raises him and takes him to Toronto when he moves there as a university lecturer. Jacob (played as an adult by Stephen Dillane) remains haunted by his childhood experiences and his obsession with researching a book on the subject wrecks his first marriage in this touching, multi-layered movie.
In the new Neil Jordan film, The Brave One, the life of a New York public radio presenter, Erica Bain (Jodie Foster), is changed utterly when she and her doctor fiancé (Naveen Andrews) are brutally attacked by thugs in Central Park. She emerges from a coma after three weeks, initially afraid to go outdoors until she decides to buy a gun, gaining a renewed sense of empowerment when she takes to the streets as a vigilante.
This is Jordan's 15th film, and only the third (after We're No Angelsand Interview with the Vampire) on which he has a screenplay credit (the film was originally set to be directed by George Miller, with Nicole Kidman in the lead). It is clearly not one of Jordan's more personal projects, and while the opening sequences are arrestingly staged, and Erika's radio show effectively operates as a forum to debate vigilantism, the screenplay is bogged down by unlikely contrivances, crucially in the central relationship unconvincingly formed between Erika and a detective played by Terrence Howard, despite the committed performances of both actors.
FOUR YEARS AGO Jordan was a producer on Intermission, which marked the feature-film debuts of two Irish theatre talents, director John Crowley and playwright Mark O'Rowe. Boy A, the second screen collaboration between Crowley and O'Rowe, tackles difficult, sensitive material. It is based on Jonathan Trigell's 2004 novel, which clearly was inspired by the fate of the 10-year-old Liverpool schoolboys who murdered toddler Jamie Bulger in 1993.
The film changes the victim to a young girl and, in flashbacks, it depicts one of the boys, Eric, as weak, impressionable and bullied by older boys, while the other, Philip, is fuelled by mindless aggression. The other significant change is that Philip has died in prison and Eric is told that the boy took his own life.
The focus of the drama is on Eric when he is in his early 20s and released from prison. Eric (played by gifted newcomer Andrew Garfield) is given a new identity as Jack Burridge, relocated to Manchester and set up in accommodation and a job. The only person he can trust is his care worker, empathically played by Peter Mullan.
As he re-enters the outside world he left as a boy, Jack experiences socialising, drinking and sex for the first time, while remaining haunted by his past and the fear of discovery. The drama heightens when a tabloid newspaper publishes an artificially aged picture of Eric. A young man who resembles it is attacked by vigilantes in Nottingham, and Eric learns he is the target of a bounty posted on the internet.
Crowley treats the complex themes of his film with maturity, even-handedness and an unexpected tenderness while fuelling it with the sustained tension of a thriller. As it ends, it is impossible not to think about the Bulger killers out there in the world somewhere, hiding in plain sight.
Michael Dwyer continues his reports from Toronto in The Ticket on Friday
