O Toronto!

From the 24th annual film fest

I have raved on so often about the Toronto International Film Festival that this time I'll designate another to rave for me, the Hollywood Reporter's Patrick McGavin: "The festival's power and . . . status [come from] its unique ability to satisfy its rabid local audience without compromising the needs of the film professionals -- sales agents, buyers, exhibitors, producers, and journalists -- who religiously attend." Everybody's happy, starting with Torontonians.

A great civil-minded festival not only makes its city movie-crazy but, over the years, educates and elevates local taste. During Toronto's 24th fest, September 9 through 18, that was my profound thought while attending French director Claire Denis's latest contemplation of exclusive male culture, Le beau travail, which is set at a mythical post of the French Foreign Legion. I was duly impressed by how the large public audience stayed with, and enthusiastically applauded, this deeply subtle, almost narrative-less work. Was its appreciation of such a demanding movie an accident? The hottest ticket in town (I couldn't beg or steal one) was for Rosetta, a dark, bitter tale of an unemployed young Belgian woman that had been an unpopular Palme d'Or winner at Cannes in May.

There were probably a hundred lean little films at Toronto, for those whose tastes are esoteric and pessimistic (me, me!). For documentary fans there was former Harvard student Nonny de la Pena's The Jaundiced Eye, an unnerving it-could-happen-to-anyone story of two probably innocent men sentenced to 35 years in prison because a little boy testified they sexually abused him, plus Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., the askew saga of an electric-chair-repairman-turned-Holocaust-denier that many critics are calling the most significant film from Cambridge's Errol Morris since The Thin Blue Line.

And for those whose likes are a tad mainstream? Toronto provided North American premieres of well-mounted, feel-good, feel-cultured arthouse movies prior to their releases. (These are the films that eventually turn up here at the Kendall Square.)

Finally, there was a smattering of big-budget Hollywood studio films that have an artsy or literary hook. This year, Toronto got American Beauty, Mumford, The Cider House Rules, and Breakfast of Champions. The stars came along too. They gave interviews. Bigger than life, they partied.

The Toronto papers bubbled with stories of thespian misbehavior: Snow Falling on Cedars' Ethan Hawke almost crashing into a pedestrian with his skateboard; East-West's Catherine Deneuve lighting up a cigarette in her moviehouse seat; Ride with the Devil's Jewel storming out on photographers; Onegin's Ralph Fiennes (or was it, the Globe and Mail pondered, a Schindler look-alike?) emerging guiltily from a table-dancing strip club.

Star power reached absurd levels with a PR release I received one morning announcing that Breakfast of Champions' Bruce Willis would be hosting a private party that evening at Toronto's Planet Hollywood. We journalists were cordially invited to "cover arrivals." We could stand on the sidewalk and take notes and photographs as Willis and pals exited their stretch limousines!

I was MIA. I also wasn't there for a late-night bash celebrating the Canadian S&M documentary Tops and Bottoms. The shaky film was punishment enough with its chilly, boorish doms and its endless interview with a faux Foucault. I went to bed that night sans the free spanking promised to party comers.

And speaking of tedious sex talk: France's A Pornographic Affair has each of its male-female protagonists speaking into a camera about an afternoon together in which they performed a kinky act of sex. We never see them do it, and the kinky sex act is neither named nor described. "What it is is unimportant," this movie preaches. Oh? I predict a hit in puritan America for this tease of a picture, for those who persuade themselves that sex is in the brain and not in the body!

A Pornographic Affair, so coy and antiseptic, made me feel dirty. I cleansed myself right afterward with a sex-and-gore Bonnie and Clyde variant, François Ozon's Criminal Lovers. This French movie is indefensible trash, but I unapologetically enjoyed it.

"Why would you want to see a lesbian cheerleader movie?" a critic friend of mine straight-faced. He meant Jamie Babbitt's But I'm a Cheerleader. This amiable, broadly directed new comedy, in the Revenge of the Nerds mode, shows what happens when a cheerleader with "unhealthy" tendencies (Natasha Lyonne) gets sent to a gay-and-lesbian deprogramming camp led by hysteric Cathy Moriarty. What happens? Homosexuals stay homo and the self-righteous right is defeated. The Toronto audience applauded happily when Natasha ran off at the end with her baby-dyke girlfriend, Graham (Clea DuVall).

Filmmaker Babbitt, ex of Columbia, NYU, and feminist shorts, complained about the MPAA's double standard for gay and "girl on girl" sex scenes. To escape an NC-17, she reluctantly excised the lesbo line "Oh, eat Graham out!" Said Babbitt, "I fixed everything the MPAA told me to do. It's an `R' now, which I know is retarded!"