Fraught bliss
The Toronto International Film Festival faces a new anniversary.

By Johnny Ray Huston

MAYBE I WAS delirious because I'd seen 29 films in seven days. Hitler, hard-ons, and Sept. 11, 2001, were impossible to avoid on-screen at the 27th Toronto International Film Festival, the premier North American event that unites stars and cine cultists in a quest for Oscar-large and indie-small endorsements. No single movie, as far as I could tell, combined that unholy trinity. But the resulting dominant motifs of sexual and political tension, of private and public explosions (and their aftermaths), befit a festival that might as well have been subtitled "One Year Later."

Because Toronto's uneasy marriage of spotlighted showbiz galas and mole-hole industry screenings commemorated an additional, newer anniversary this month, it was a foregone conclusion that, once the morning's moments of Dolby-free silence had passed, image junkies would observe Sept. 11 literally – by observing the attacks on the World Trade Center in film form. Stateside posttraumatic prescriptions, contained in celluloid adaptations of stage works (Reno: Rebel Without a Pause, The Guy), were overshadowed by the more contentious 11'09"01 – an internationally divided collection of 11 short films, each lasting 11 minutes, nine seconds, and one frame.

Arriving with an "anti-American" reputation, 11'09"01 played more like an anticlimactic Olympic event. Youssef Chahine's critique of United States foreign policy employed hokey ghost-soldier theatrics; only the U.S. contribution, by Sean Penn – stuck to the sweaty-pored ham of Ernest Borgnine's performance – was worse. The strongest polemic, unsurprisingly, was Ken Loach's letter from a London-based Chilean exile recalling the CIA-sponsored torture (involving dogs trained to rape women) and destruction connected to the overthrow of Salvador Allende's elected socialist government Sept. 11, 1973.

11'09"01's near miracle came from Mexico's Alejandro González Iñárritu, who remade numbing news footage into a self-critically spiritual work of art. A black screen – unpredictably invaded by split-second images of falling bodies – shifts almost invisibly to blinding white in González Iñárritu's piece, yet sight itself is secondary to a soundtrack of layered prayers that swells to suffocating proportions. The result is visceral, upsetting, and – by design – too thoughtful for CNN. (Part of a different program, local experimentalist Jay Rosenblatt's three-minute "Prayer" navigated similar ideas on a smaller scale.)

One crowning irony of the 27th Toronto fest was that even González Iñárritu's piece lacked the apocalyptic insight of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kairo. That film, which screened at the festival on Sept. 10 of last year, culminates in an indescribably lonely image of a plane crashing into a cityscape; a day later the horrific sorrow in Kurosawa's vision – antithetical in tone to Hollywood bomb-love – didn't seem psychic: it became philosophically uncanny. In comparison, 11'9"01's directors could only react to overt evidence of a world gone awry. A truer compass to the fraught pleasure-seeking atmosphere of this year's festival arrived in a package titled Blissfully Yours.

Following the acclaimed doc Mysterious Object at Noon with a fictional feature enlivened by doclike elements, Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul establishes himself as a truly unique directorial talent; edited to induce drifting thought and lensed to perceive new shades of green, Blissfully Yours is a metamovie – in this case, a movie about the movie-watching experience – like no other. Its simplicity is deceptive. Its innovation is playful (the credit sequence materializes at the midway point). On the surface, a ticket to Weerasethakul's show buys you an idyllic picnic-length trip into a Thai forest, where canyon panoramas and lush streams wait to be discovered. But the film's three characters (the fest's most memorable humans, each eccentric to the point of normality) find out that even in Eden, the pressures and prejudices of society are only a thought away.

Near the end of Blissfully Yours, the camera watches from directly above as one of the movie's two women languidly strokes her boyfriend's cock. The nature-film wonder of its transformation from soft to hard either occupies a space outside porn or expands porn's boundaries – depending on how you look at it. Catherine Breillat's Sex Is Comedy points a stiff penis in an entirely different direction. The hard-on in Breillat's metamovie is prosthetic, and it's attached to swoon-worthy Claire Denis regular Grégoire Colin, who uses it for sight-gag rather than gag-reflex purposes. Restaging the filming of the sex scene in Breillat's last movie, Fat Girl, (which was banned in Ontario after last year's TIFF), Sex Is Comedy ricochets from self-parody to sexual-politics tract, enjoying every spasm of agony as it struggles to achieve its own version of orgasm – coaxing authenticity out of fakeness.

The sensuality of Denis's own Vendredi soir, an uncharacteristically endearing homage to Nan Goldin, was comparatively unconcerned with phallus-ies. Not so Larry Clark, whose Ken Park, codirected with Ed Lachman, provided Toronto's sweetest surprise. Ken Park out-cocked all comers, serving up an autoerotic-asphyxiation money shot and a climactic three-way (two guys and a girl, though Clark still has yet to cross one great divide – that which separates two lusting male bodies from one another). But the real shock came from the movie's spells of tenderness. Another Day in Paradise and the deliberate crappiness of Teenage Caveman aside, the imitated but never duplicated blunt(ed) clarity of Clark's motion pictures has been semisabotaged by throwaway nihilism. Ken Park is different: the vulnerability of its cinematography and direction does Harmony Korine's smart-ass screenplay a major favor. Korine uncorks one great joke (involving the sound of televised women's tennis), but if he had made Ken Park, the suburban investigations would have remained stuck in a state of smirking, pseudo-all knowing Happiness.

The veneer of suburban cheer is punctured in the festival's one instant classic, Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven. Photographed by Lachman, 2002 Toronto's MVP, Far from Heaven couldn't be further from Ken Park stylistically, though both films contain moments that are breathtaking on visual terms alone. Haynes's immaculate script condenses elements of Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (and Fassbinder's Ali, Fear Eats the Soul) into a remake of Sirk's Ali-inspiring All That Heaven Allows, and Lachman unerringly revivifies the domestic blues and seasonal artifice of Sirk's Heaven, adding his own noir and autumnal details. Subversive Oscar bait opulently scored by Elmer Bernstein, Far from Heaven turns a dream home into a house of mirth, leaping from genuine ironic detachment to a melodramatic grace that's more truthful and tragic than the kind Sirk's era allowed. Measured against Haynes, the festival's other Sirk-influenced dandies came up wanting. Pedro Almodóvar's leisurely Talk to Her – a better title would be "Girlfriend in a Coma" – stresses the man in Bergman, while François Ozon's 8 Women is an amusing cuckoo-for-Cukor puff piece (MTV's Sorority Life cuts deeper) in which the subtext is as facile as the surface is complex.

There's really no graceful way of segueing to Hitler, who (as played by Noah Taylor) receives piano lessons from a tutor played by John Cusack in Menno Mayjes's Max. The documentary Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary also provided a bevy of banal personal trivia about the man history usually simplifies, but its chief insight stemmed from illustrating a collaborator's – in this case, titular typist Traudl Junge's – self-serving ignorance. Led by Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, Toronto's strong doc selection doubled as a field guide to America. MC5: A True Testimonial and the Funk Brothers tribute Standing in the Shadows of Motown supplied enthusiastically flawed Detroit journeys, one overly long, the other overly slick. In Cul-de-sac: A Suburban War Story, San Diego's hidden narrative of military-sponsored meth addiction comes full circle, as a man drives a tank down streets, destroying every outmoded machine that gets in the way.