Drenched in Movies--but Refreshed : Toronto festival shows 322 films in 10 days, screening works of conscience and consequence

Film festivals anywhere inevitably become like a term of time spent underwater, with films projected non-stop on the walls of one’s submarine. Dimly, there’s the knowledge of a real world out there, yet the only news that creates a stir is self-contained--the successes, scandals, buzzwords and jokes that a festival as huge as Toronto’s Festival of Festivals kicks up in the course of a 10-day run.

Last Sunday, as the festival closed, the film-faithful of Toronto were catching up with a highly mixed bag of movies--some so popular among festival-goers that extra screenings were added for the overflow. In all, 322 films, count ‘em 322, were screened during the official 10-day run.

There is John Woo’s “The Killer,” the most gleefully, roaringly violent movie that Hong Kong has yet been able to produce--and that is saying something--complete with a blood-dripping sequence in which the two blinded lovers crawl, like Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck in “Duel in the Sun,” toward, and then straight past one another, in some gory deadpan joke.

And there is its complete opposite, “A City of Sadness,” one of the festival’s prides, a new film from Taiwan’s brilliant Hou Hsiao-Hsien, which went straight from its showing here to the competition in Venice where, to the surprise of no one who’d seen it, it captured the first prize Golden Lion. A larger-scale departure for Hou, this is an intimately observed epic story of Taiwan’s past 40 years by a director whose framing alone marks him as a master.

Last Sunday was also a chance for all the “Roger and Me” fans to see or re-see their pet documentary, the saga of the death of Flint, Mich., when General Motors closed three plants and changed the one-industry town from one dedicated to building Blazers to one whose principal industry is manufacturing lint pickers. (If you think “Roger’s” rangers weren’t on top of that fact, handing out lint pickers at the press screenings, you underestimate an entirely savvy film support group.)

Not here to pick up his Labatt’s Award for the most popular film, by audience vote, was “Roger and Me’s” Michael Moore, reportedly continuing his saga of success by flying to Hollywood “for talks.” (That Labatt’s prize has been a bellwether in the past: Moore’s amiable documentary joins a list that has included “Chariots of Fire,” “The Big Chill” and “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.”) When entrenched studio officialdom discovers for itself that the Roger in question is the head of General Motors, Roger Smith, and that the film runs counter to everything big-business-linked enterprises hold dear, it will be interesting to see who is brought to a nervous breakdown first.

Also screened last Sunday was “Roadkill,” the thoroughly irreverent black-and-white movie whose top festival prize, the Toronto City Award of $25,000, comes like a whiff of smelling salts to this juried section. There were cries of outrage last year when, in the face of David Cronenberg’s spectacular “Dead Ringers,” the award went instead to a trifling piffle called “The Outside Chance of Maximillian Glick,” which has appropriately sunk from sight since. This year the festival took no chances in its jury selection. In addition to a Toronto city councillor and a film-savvy representative from Citytv, Canada’s Fourth Channel equivalent, it put three film makers on the jury: Cronenberg himself; Anna-Lena Wibom, current artistic director of the Swedish Film Institute and producer of both “Fanny and Alexander” and Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice”; and Brazilian director Tereza Trautman, whose “Best Wishes” was one of last year’s fond memories.

And the winner was . . . in its own words, a “rock ‘n’ road movie,” director Bruce McDonald’s cheeky and successful raspberry in the face of all that conservatism holds dear, successful right up to its black and murderous conclusion, which will certainly be a point of controversy in genteel Toronto. Its prize is an encouragement away from the usual staidness of this award, away from provincialism, from pale copies of already pallid U.S. movies--and that in itself is a step in the right direction for this festival.

Lest anyone worry that this year’s Canadian success at Cannes, Denys Arcand’s “Jesus of Montreal,” had been left out, it was first choice of the international critics here. By turns civilized, angry, savage and sorrowful, with a soaring ending peculiarly in tune with today’s technology, and never less than elegant, it’s a film we should be able to expect on our own doorsteps before too long.

Yet for at least this voter, the most powerful discovery was Jane Campion’s “Sweetie,” and for other voters too, since it came in second with the international press to Arcand’s film.

Reviled at Cannes, “Sweetie” was revealed here as the work of an extraordinary artist working in a dead-ordinary milieu, with (to paraphrase its notes) a hint of madness just outside the edges of her frame. Campion’s eye is superb, yet with all her care and precision, there is also enormous feeling; without the love that is present in equal proportion to her eye for the bizarre, “Sweetie” would be intolerable. As it is, it was one of the two films I would have seen twice or even three times, if such an indulgence were possible during festival madness.

If you saw much of UCLA’s recent invaluable retrospective of Australian film and video, Campion’s short films, and her deadpan, dead-on eye, will be familiar. Now we will only have to wait for “Sweetie” to make its way west, and undoubtedly to ignite more controversy.

Continuing Toronto’s spotlight series, which has in previous years brought Pedro Almodovar and the wild Kaurismaki brothers to wide audience appreciation, this year’s spotlighted film maker, Poland’s Krzysztof Kieslowski, seemed like a one-man renaissance. Audiences flocked to his “Decalogue,” 10 films updating the 10 Commandments, all in roughly an hour-length except for his “Short Film About Killing,” and “Short Film About Love,” astringent, powerful, utterly definitive features.

If one country could be said to be making a cinematic comeback, blessedly that country would seem to be France--and high time, too, after straining decades of good will with recent efforts such as “The Big Blue.” Look for “Force Majeure,” Pierre Jolivet’s completely enthralling “intellectual thriller” about conscience and the drug trade. Jolivet manages to bring a morality play up close and personal: to save the life of a casual buddy, imprisoned already for two years in an Asian prison for possession of hashish, would you get on that plane for Southeast Asia, split the sentence (since one-third of the minuscule amount of hash he was caught with belongs to you) and save him from execution? Really?

The only miserable news about “Force Majeure” is that it has been bought by Touchstone Pictures, with an eye for an American version. Whoever it was who said “the only reason to remake a film is if it wasn’t done properly in the first place” should be first in line for Jolivet’s perfect version.

Next would be “Nocturne Indien” Alain Corneau’s hypnotic story in which we watch the atmosphere of India take possession of even the most seemingly resistant traveler, in this case Jean-Hugues Anglade (“Betty Blue’s” appreciative lover). Like most of the French films here, this one is a romance-drenched; in this case, the romantic object is a mysterious, elusive country, slowly and sinuously revealed.

Then there is Jean-Jacques Beineix’s “Roselyne et les Lions, “ a tale of love in a (literal) lion’s cage, which has a cinema addict’s madness all its own, and the whip-cracking Isabelle Pasco as the lion-obsessed beauty. Although technically the festival was generally fair to good, its second-largest theater, the Uptown, could be counted on for consistently ruinous projection and sound--so bad that Beineix’s producer registered a public protest after the first screening of “Roselyne.” Surely this festival deserves a large, modern screening complex comparable to its programming.

Bertrand Blier, who has led moviegoers down some pretty strange paths in the past (“Get Out Your Handkerchiefs,” “Beau Pere”), has an almost gentle entry with “Too Beautiful for You,” the story of a successful businessman (Gerard Depardieu) married to a perfect beauty (Carole Bouquet), who finds himself wildly drawn to a perfectly ordinary woman (the perfectly wonderful Josiane Balasko). A film about the irresistible attraction of appreciation, it’s not without the expected Blier touch to keep things a little off-balance, yet it’s a film as lush and all-stops-out romantic as the Schubert that it comes enveloped in.

And finally there was the film sublime, Bertrand Tavernier’s “Life and Nothing But,” set in immediately post-World War I France, in which Philippe Noiret gives his 100th and most magnificent performance, as a nearly mad and certainly obsessed major in charge of identifying as many of the war dead as possible. Crossing his path are two women, “A Sunday in the Country’s” elegant Sabine Azema, as an aristocrat searching for any sign of her long-lost husband, and a young schoolteacher, seeking her fiance. In Tavernier’s hands, the cool blues and grays of this misty landscape, the vast almost Expressionist interior settings become background for a story of profound significance and beauty, and, quite suddenly, the stuff of the most impassioned romance.

In a year in which the films , overall, were the stars, there were still individual performances to cherish, beginning, naturally with Noiret’s (and not incidentally, Azema’s) in “Life and Nothing But.” Also, Daniel Day Lewis’ work under director Jim Sheridan in “My Left Foot,” in bringing Christy Brown, the feisty Irish painter, writer and prisoner of cerebral palsy, to vigorous, unsparing life, can hardly go unnoticed.

And neither can Matt Dillon’s extraordinary work as the leader of a motley band of ‘70s pill-freaks in Gus Van Sant’s “Drugstore Cowboy.” Incandescent with drugs, suspicious, superstitious, expansive and paranoid by turns, Dillon’s performance is a lovely, lovely job.

What is the final fall-out from an orgy of film-going like this?

Hope. Euphoria. Most of all, perspective. Renewed proof that there are dozens of vital cinemas in the world and literally hundreds of film makers, making films of conscience and consequence. Can’t remind oneself of that enough, sometimes, in some places.