Toronto round-up

Jessica Winter sees the Canadian Film Festival turn into a bidding war.

Sep 20 2005

The vibe among the press corps at the Toronto International Film Festival this year was ever so slightly underwhelmed, which might seem like the height of ingratitude given the 250-plus features on view.

This most congenial of major festivals even had its own quasi-bidding war, with Fox Searchlight and Paramount Classics both claiming to have bought distribution rights to the Big Tobacco satire 'Thank You for Smoking' (Fox carried the day, for a cool $7 million).

The flat feeling among the scribblers probably had much to do with the low batting average among the name directors with premieres, including Laurent Cantet's wan 'Vers le Sud' ('Heading South', with Charlotte Rampling on queen-bitch autopilot as a sex tourist in '70s Haiti) and Neil Jordan's desultory 'Breakfast on Pluto' (starring Cillian Murphy as a transgender Candide).

Takeshi Kitano's glib greatest-hits comp 'Takeshis' amounted to Beat giggling into his own reflection while shooting everyone in sight, and Danis Tanovic made a puzzling foray into baroque French melodrama with 'L'Enfer' ('Hell'), which sifts through the wreckage of a primal family catastrophe.

Speaking of hell, John Hillcoat's convincingly infernal 'The Proposition', scripted by murder balladeer Nick Cave, won a fan base for its vicious Western classicism. Though the net effect is akin to 'The Outback Chainsaw Massacre', the movie demands esteem for its uncompromising vision of Victorian Australia as a scorched-earth nesting ground for insects and sociopaths.

Just as unpretty, Terry Gilliam's exhausting 'Tideland' drops a modern Alice in a trash-palace Wonderland, where her ornate fantasy world helps her escape the mounting squalor and horror of her waking life; sadly, this isn’t the comeback that Gilliam's fans have so eagerly awaited.

Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe memorably recorded Gilliam's filmmaking travails in 'Lost in La Mancha', and here unveiled their first fiction feature, the mostly serious mockumentary 'Brothers of the Head', adapted from the Brian Aldiss novel about conjoined siblings in rural Norfolk turned sex-symbol rock stars.

Painfully attuned to the with-or-without-you claustrophobia of profound intimacy, the film is borne aloft by its firestarting soundtrack – an exhilarating, note-perfect melding of mod, glam and punk – and the insolent beauty and astonishing stage magnetism of Luke and Harry Treadaway as the tragic glimmer twins.

'Brothers of the Head' provided an alternative to the seasonal onslaught of biopics (ranging from the accomplished 'Capote' to the endearing Johnny Cash cheese-fest 'Walk the Line').

So did Guy Maddin's 16-minute 'My Dad is 100 Years Old', a centenary tribute to Roberto Rossellini written by his daughter, Isabella, who also plays all the roles – including David O Selznick, Federico Fellini, and a flying Charlie Chaplin – and provides the voice of her father, who's depicted as a large talking belly.

Shot in storm-cloud black-and-white, 'My Dad…' is at once sweet, cerebral, funny and mournful – for both Dad and cinema itself.

Another biographical film of sorts, Michael Winterbottom's hilarious career peak 'A Cock and Bull Story' tackles Laurence Sterne's famously unadaptable 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman'.

Winterbottom turns a novel about writing a novel into, naturally, a movie about making a movie, while stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon offer a joint masterclass in droll banter amid the meta-narrative acrobatics.

High-intensity filmgoing always produces odd recurrences, and Toronto attendees were treated to versions of 'My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean' by both Coogan and Shirley Henderson in 'A Cock and Bull Story' and by Zooey Deschanel in 'Winter Passing', though surely the indelible musical moment in Adam Rapp's serviceable family-dysfunction drama was Will Ferrell's riveting dive-bar rendition of The Eagles' 'I Can't Tell You Why'.

An enchanting interlude of Philippe Garrel's 'Les Amants Réguliers' ('Regular Lovers') likewise deploys a potentially Proustian pop artefact in a group-dance scene scored to The Kinks' 'This Time Tomorrow'. Garrel's leisurely, bittersweet revisitation of May '68 and its discontents is itself something of a pensive answer-song to Bertolucci's silly sexfest 'The Dreamers'.

The unofficial theme song of Toronto '05 was indisputably 'Linda Linda' by '80s Japanese punk band the Blue Hearts; you could overhear people humming the title tune for days after the press screening of Nobuhiro Yamashita's rousing and loveable 'Linda Linda Linda', wherein an all-girl cover band charge down the bumpy road to their high-school talent contest fronted by the lanky, huge-eyed Son (Bae Doona), a Korean exchange student whose uninhibited cool-dork charisma could give the Treadaway twins pause.

Ambling amiably toward a finale as legitimately feelgood as 'School of Rock''s, 'Linda Linda Linda' also makes the best use of a diabolically catchy hit since Wong Kar-wai put 'California Dreamin' on a loop for 'Chungking Express'.

One of Son's bandmates dreams that the Ramones come to see them play; the Latino skateboard enthusiasts of Larry Clark's 'Wassup Rockers' also receive a punk seal of approval when they stumble onto a ritzy pool party and a scenester coos, 'They're like the Mexican Ramones!'

Clark's tight-knit ensemble of South Central teens rollick through Beverly Hills in pursuit of horny girls and the choicest urban skating arenas, falling foul of the police, territorial rich kids, and an armed and dangerous Clint Eastwood look-alike.

'Wassup Rockers' captures all the tenderness and cock-eyed humour of Clark's sorely unappreciated 'Ken Park', but it's mostly wiped clean of the director's usual shock tactics and sundry bodily fluids.

The movie's goofball humanism is crystallised when one of the kids grabs a racist cop's sandwich and issues a grave threat: 'Let us go or I'm gonna eat your lunch.'

For a list of Toronto award-winners, click here.

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