Cannes Goes to Canada

Among the 455 hours of film unspooled in the 10-day bash known as the Toronto International Film Festival was a new Stephen Frears picture called Dirty Pretty Things. A smart film and an even cannier title, because it defines the lure of movies: that they show people doing dirty pretty things. And the lure of Toronto is that it’s a clean town with a pretty fine festival — the busiest and most influential in North America.

Last year, Toronto was not so festive. The suicide bombers of Sept. 11 severed the convocation in half: five days of illuminating fun, five days of mourning from which the movies provided only fitful distraction. So this year on Sept. 11, the festival presented two films that explicitly confronted the attacks and their aftermath: Jim Simpson’s The Guys, a conventionally heartrending meeting of a journalist and a New York City fire captain, and the much more ambitious and provocative 11’09″01: September 11.

The conceit is this: 11 directors from five continents each make a film, running 11 min. 9 sec. Some episodes find subtlety, humor, parable in the world’s reaction to the event. In Iran (a segment directed by Samira Makhmalbaf), a teacher desperately tries to explain the meaning of the attack to her uncomprehending village school kids. Sean Penn helmed the Manhattan segment in which an old man (Ernest Borgnine), grieving over his wife’s death, gets the blessing of sunlight in his dark apartment — because the World Trade Center towers no longer block the light.

Still, the dominant mood in 11’09″01 is finger pointing. Several of the pieces — set in Chile (Ken Loach), Israel (Amos Gitai), Bosnia (Danis Tanovic) — make a single hectoring, helpful point: our countries have suffered atrocities for years, decades, centuries; welcome to the club, America. Egypt’s Youssef Chahine argues that Islamic militants have the right to kill civilians in the U.S. and Israel because these are democracies, where the people choose their leaders and thus are responsible for policies that enslave the world. The film polarized Toronto audiences: at one screening, the anti-U.S. segments were booed; at another they were cheered.

All right, every movie is propaganda — for the director’s political, emotional or social program. Dirty Pretty Things, for example, could be called an expos of the inhuman conditions forced on an African doctor (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a Turkish woman (Amélie’s Audrey Tautou) and other immigrants working in a London hotel. The movie clicks, however, because Steven Knight’s script tucks sharply observed commentary into an appealing love story.

Phillip Noyce’s stylish The Quiet American, based on the 1954 Graham Greene novel, uncovers early U.S. chicanery in Vietnam. But it’s more impressive for Michael Caine’s perfectly graded performance as a tired Englishman whose political scruples — and sexual possessiveness — put him at odds with the blandly conniving Yank played by Brendan Fraser.

Even Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile, the widely heralded acting debut of hip-hopper Eminem, has a political agenda tucked inside its rappin’-Rocky plot. It says that the white underclass should be as free as the black to mouth racist, misogynist, gay-bashing jive. Eminem is as yet no actor; he recedes into sullenness, and his intimate scenes with the smart, tarty Brittany Murphy lack juice. But the guy has a face for movies. He’s Tobey Maguire with ‘tude.

When Toronto movies couldn’t find heroes, they searched for villains. Hitler, for instance: a documentary (Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary) and a fiction film (Max, about a Jewish art dealer who befriended young Adolf the aspiring painter) plumbed the cinema’s inexhaustible fascination with Mr. Bad. And when you can’t blame one person, blame the culture. Among the festival’s most praised films were two parables of hypocrisy set in the 1950s and ’60s: Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven and Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters.

Far from Heaven is inspired by those glossy ’50s romances produced by Ross Hunter and directed by Douglas Sirk. Haynes takes the alcoholic husband from Written on the Wind, the race mixing of Imitation of Life and the matron-in-love-with-her-gardener plot of All That Heaven Allows, then trumps them by making the gardener a black man and the alcoholic spouse gay. The film wears its chic, imitation-of-Sirk style like a mink stole at a country-club ball, and as the matron, Julianne Moore gives a tautly frazzled turn that is a lock for an Oscar nomination. The problem is that Haynes reduces most of his characters to stick figures bearing placards. The film is a high-camp cocktail — a martini with gin and hemlock — that’s shaken but not stirring.

The Magdalene Sisters came to town fresh from copping the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. It’s basically a women-in-prison movie, set in Dublin in the ’60s, when some girls were sent to convent reformatories, which, at least as shown here, were run by some very nasty nuns. They flog the girls, make ribald fun of their naked bodies, drive them to despair or madness. The young cast squeezes every righteous tear from the audience. But Magdalene would be a better film — at least, it might have been a good one — if it had shown the nuns, themselves the victims of a cruel, cloistered mind-set, as something more than horror-film sisters of Satan. (One literally carries a pitchfork.) Or is it to much to ask a committed filmmaker to offer sympathy for the devil?

Is it possible, for that matter, to provide a lucid, nuanced portrait of children in distress? Yes, says Christophe Ruggia’s Les Diables, about two abandoned kids — Joseph (Vincent Rottiers) and his autistic sister Chloé (Adèle Haenell) — searching for their home. Joseph is Chloé’s protector and, if he were only old enough to realize it, her lover, with all the devotion and myopia true love entails. Harrowing and delicate, this French film transcends case history to become a work of seamless art and broken heart.

And for a retreat into luminous, ageless film craft, queue now for Patrice Leconte’s L’homme du train, a bittersweet fable about a chatty old schoolteacher (Jean Rochefort) who invites a mysterious gunman (Johnny Hallyday) to stay in his decaying chateau. It’s rare to see a film so at ease with its diminutive size, so effortless in its charm and poignancy. Toronto had lots of celebs on display — There’s Dustin! There’s Denzel!! Sarandon and Sophia!!! But Rochefort, the wily veteran of 100 movies, and Hallyday, a rock star for 40 years, gave Toronto its most eloquent lesson in star quality.