TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL: FINE FETTLE FOR CANADA

If Cannes is, still, the Queen of Festivals, then the Toronto Film Festival may have emerged, with the programming of this 11th year, as the feisty princess.

It is an enormously popular, heavily attended public festival that has given its North American audiences an arresting cross section of the world’s films.

Solidly programmed, shot through with exceptional films and given the requisite sprinkling of Hollywood visitors, Toronto may not have been 10 days that shook the film world, but 10 days that most certainly reaffirmed its possibilities.

And, with the unprecedented double win by Denys Arcand’s “Decline of the American Empire,” it may also have given an enormous shot in the arm to Canadian film makers. Arcand’s droll, sophisticated thrust-and-parry of love and infidelity among eight French-Canadian academics won both the public’s vote and the vote of an international jury, which carries a $15,000 award. (In the past, the public award has been carried away by big-gun foreign films: “Chariots of Fire,” “The Big Chill,” “Places in the Heart.”)

Two more Canadian films were also singled out for the jury’s honorable mention: “Sitting in Limbo” (“for its freshness and vitality”), a largely improvised comedy-drama about black teen-agers in uptight, white Montreal, with sassy, insightful, heart-rending performances by Pat Dillon and Fabian Gibbs as the two young lovers, and actress Martha Henry’s tour de force in Leon Marr’s “Dancing in the Dark.”

“Winds of Change,” the festival’s searching look at Latin American cinema, with many of its towering figures present--Argentina’s Fernando Birri, Miguel Littin of Chile, Cuba’s Tomas Alea, among many others--was its cultural blockbuster, well attended, although somewhat slighted in the three Toronto newspapers’ tips for each day’s viewing.

The program as a whole, two years in assembling and begun under former festival director Wayne Clarkson, deserves the monographs and thorough discussions it will undoubtedly get, but the pity is that, once disassembled, it will probably not be seen again--not even in New York or Los Angeles, which might seem ideal targets for such a magnificent body of Latin cinema.

Every festival has a “buzz” film, one you can hear about in the movie lines and in the press rooms. This one was “Hombre Mirando al Sudeste,” a haunting evocative 1986 work by Eliseo Subiela, little known outside Argentina, which came out of the Latin American program to win the International Critics’ Award. The story of a highly intelligent, mysterious young man who claims to come from another planet and his effect on the doctor who treats him, “Hombre” shared with half a dozen of the festival’s best films, the tendency to provoke and resonate for hours afterward.

Those others are:

Bertrand Tavernier’s sublime “Round Midnight,” a film about music and the restorative qualities of friendship. Dexter Gordon’s gravely luminous performance as a American jazz musician in Paris in the late 1950s stood as a rebuke to the Venice Festival jury that decided not to award him best actor this week, on the peculiar grounds that the musician was “not acting, he was playing himself.” (This was in the face of Gordon’s 20-minute standing ovation in Venice.) To the press here, the usually composed Tavernier still seemed stung by the injustice, calling the jury’s decision “not only untrue that Gordon only played himself, but unfair and containing a racist element, saying ‘Those black people, they have music in their blood; it’s not like the whites, who make an intelligent effort of creation.’ ”

“Blue Velvet,” David Lynch’s hotly provocative dark romance, which opened in Los Angeles last week and will probably not subside as a topic of conversation before Christmas.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice,” another film making the festival rounds, an oddly hopeful, exquisite metaphysical conundrum.

“Betty Blue,” the third film from Jean-Jacques Beineix, set to open commercially soon: a dark, dazzling, accomplished story of love and loss.

“Down by Law,” a second black-and-white, poker-faced comedy of character by Jim Jarmusch (“Stranger Than Paradise”).

“Sid and Nancy,” Alex Cox’s surprisingly romantic treatment of the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious and his whiny impulsive beloved, Nancy Spungen.

“My Dear Little Village,” by Czech master Jiri Menzel, which already won second prize at Montreal, is warm, accessible, magnificently acted, with a spirit somewhere between Tati and Laurel and Hardy.

(One does not mention Toronto’s festival in Montreal, nor, to a lesser degree, Montreal in Toronto, but it seems only reasonable to report that in addition to the Menzel, the Lynch, the Tarkovsky and the Beineix had appeared earlier at Montreal--although in French or with French subtitles only.)

For Toronto’s international discoveries, the first would have to be “Nanou,” a glowing, intelligent account of the tempestuous love affair between an young English student and a French political activist in a small town in the Lorraine, all the more surprising since it is a first film by director-writer Conny Templemen. Its sense of discovery extends to a perfect cast, exquisite newcomer Imogen Stubbs as Nanou, the volatile Jean-Phillipe Ecoffey as her lover and Daniel Day Lewis (!) as her first love.

“Tampopo,” by Juzo Itami (director of “The Funeral”), although a little overextended, is a rollicking Japanese comedy that plays with those two great appetites, food and sex, to the advantage of both.

“Super Citizen,” by Wan Jen, an electrifying film from Taiwan, about street life in Taipei and a unlikely friendship between a young street hustler and a boy who has come from the country to find his runaway sister.

“Malcolm,” one of the few films to deserve the word zany , a sparkling, inventive bubbly bit of sedition by young Australian director Nadia Tass.

“Frida,” Paul Leduc’s challenging, evocative portrait of Frida Kahlo, surreal artist and companion to husband Diego Rivera and to Leon Trotsky.

Unhappily, there were more fine and relevant films than space to write about them. Finally, the overselling of tickets, an annoyance during the first few days, became a genuine problem in the latter half of the festival. It is clear that festival management will have to find larger theaters or more of them before Toronto’s 12th.