Toronto round-up

Tom Charity grabs a first glimpse at this year's potential Oscar nominees.

Sep 21 2006

Christopher Guest's new movie, 'For Your Consideration', traces the way in which a single, possibly planted rumour on the 'worldwide interweb' sparks a wave of Oscar buzz around an unlikely low-budget melodrama, 'Home for Purim'. Before the hoopla runs its course, the entire cast of has-beens and hopefuls is swept up in the media hype – so what if the movie couldn't be more of a turkey if it grew tail-feathers?

Seasoned Toronto-goers know the phenomenon well: the festival is ideally placed to kick off the Oscar race, so Guest's paltry satire couldn't have found a more receptive audience. 'At this stage, anyone's a contender who wants to be,' admitted a fest programmer – though the critical derision afforded to such aspirants as Ridley Scott's bucolic 'A Good Year' and Steve Zaillian's turgid and old fashioned 'All the King's Men' may well have curtailed their respective marketing budgets.

Anyone looking for this year's Best Actor might start with 'Infamous', a virtually identical take on the writing of 'In Cold Blood' to last year's 'Capote'. Brit actor Toby Jones is excellent mincing in Philip Seymour Hoffman's footsteps, but the film itself is sadly doomed to inspire unfavourable comparisons. There is some thought that Forest Whitaker might get a nod for his impressive portrait of a scarily avuncular Idi Amin in Kevin Macdonald's 'The Last King of Scotland', but for better or worse it's James McAvoy's film: he plays the Scottish doctor who finds himself elevated to the position of Amin's personal physician. Derek Luke, meanwhile, is heart-rending in Philip Noyce's apartheid thriller 'Catch A Fire', written by Shawn Slovo, though both these rather gruelling dramas qualify as a tough sell.

My own award for Best Actor would have to go to Sacha Baron Cohen for 'Borat' – quite the ballsiest performance of the year in a movie which lived up to the legendary status of its Cannes sneak preview, even surviving the fiasco of a midnight screening which broke down 15 minutes into the show. The projector proved beyond repair and Borat himself ascended the stage to blame the Jews.

Then there's Todd Field's probing, sardonic 'Little Children', based on a novel by Tom Perrotta ('Election'), and starring Kate Winslet as a suburban mom in romantic revolt against her comfortable drudgery (Patrick Wilson is the Mr Mom who wows her). With its cod-Kubrick-ian vision of the human animal in thrall to sexual desire, this arguably reactionary picture transcended its familiar 'Desperate Housewives' scenario and looked to be the meatiest Hollywood movie on display.

Beyond the Oscar suck which seems to dominate the conversation here, Toronto offers North American audiences their first taste of this year's Cannes crop and considerable overlap with Venice. Jia Zhangke's Golden Lion winner 'Still Life' was a late addition and, like 'The World', it finds an extraordinarily resonant topographical metaphor – this time in the rubble of the crumbling landscape on the shores of the Three Gorges dam.

In fact the most adventurous filmmaking all seemed to come out of Asia, most notably Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 'Syndromes and A Century' and Tsai Ming-Liang's 'I Don't Want to Sleep Alone', both part of the Mozart anniversary series New Crowned Hope. Look out too for Hong Sangsoo's 'Woman on the Beach', a beautifully observed, very simple film about the fraught and frustrating dance between men and women.

Most memorable night? Has to be the world premiere of Guy Maddin's delirious silent, 'Brand on the Brain', complete with a live orchestra, a narrator, three lab-coated foley artists to supply the sound effects, and even (allegedly) a castrato for two song sequences. The flick itself is a typically cavalier slice of naked angst masquerading as camp, and has to be seen (and heard) to be believed. Surely this is the sort of night film festivals were invented for?

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