By Johnny Ray Huston

WHEN HOLLYWOOD TAKES to the streets, only the vacuously famous are invited. Or so it seemed midway through the Toronto International Film Festival as Vanity Fair commandeered one of the city's busiest intersections for an evening party. Elitism for one and all to see: a go-go boy guarded the soiree's invisible door while celebrity interviewee Kim Cattrall mouthed New Age pseudo-profundities in her best missionary-worker voice from an elevated digital screen. The sidewalks below grew so congested with gawkers that one of Bloor Street's largest ground-level billboards – an angry- and android-looking J.Lo clutching a Louis Vuitton handbag – briefly disappeared from view. Among the hordes, a lone man with a message held a placard above his head. "American?" it read. "You can defeat George Bush. Register here to vote Democrat."

That sign was one of the friendlier messages directed toward the United States at this year's festival, an event containing some angry responses to Stars and Stripes warmongering. Vanity Fair's party was populated by celebrities who act as if only one country makes films, but even they couldn't have been unaware of Lars von Trier's Dogville – after all, Nicole Kidman stars in it. Spreading nine chapters and a prologue over three hours, von Trier's latest finds him rearranging Brechtian codes (the set consists of lines mapped on a studio floor) as he charts the demise of an American town. When the climactic violence arrives – long after John Hurt's narration has switched from cuddly folksiness to blunt sarcasm – it brings detached satisfaction: some dogs need to be put down.

"I'll hoe as I darn well please," declares Lauren Bacall, just one of Dogville's voices of Americana, adding, "When it comes to hoeing, who is better, you or me?" In The Saddest Music in the World, the United States' representative ho (played by Kids in the Hall alum Mark McKinney) is a smarmy motherfucker for whom slavery's just showbiz. Guy Maddin's latest mad vision pits countries against each other – Siam versus Mexico; Serbia versus Scotland – in a quest for the title description, attained through Iron Chef-style tuneful battles held in Winnipeg, "the world capital of sorrow in the Great Depression." As a legless beer heiress, Isabella Rossellini oversees the festivities; gifted with a pair of alcohol-filled glass gams, she dances with joy.

Still best suited to short forms, Maddin's manic energy grows exhausting, but his take on silent-film language is superior to that of Neil Young – who makes his directorial debut under the name Bernard Shakey – in Greendale. Though Young's songs effectively paint a picture of a country addicted to vindictively watching itself ("It ain't an honor to be on TV / And it ain't a duty either," a Young-like grandpa complains), his visual approach traps Greendale citizens in a state somewhere between perpetual lip-synching and mime. A more elegant, wordlessly eloquent take on American tragedy can be found in Gus Van Sant's Cannes award-winner Elephant, the erratic director's best work to date. A candy-colored cousin of Frederick Wiseman's High School drama-doc mix, Elephant utilizes improv dialogue that sometimes rings false, but Harris Savides's tender TV-formatted cinematography – crisscrossed tracking shots that float just behind the shoulders of the characters as they navigate a Portland, Ore., public school's cold corridors – was the strongest single element at the festival: over and over, Savides comes as close as one can to entering a silent person's mind.

While Vanity Fair was celebrating itself, the most eventful screening of a U.S. film took place only a block or so away at the Uptown, after Jim Jarmusch and others scrambled to find seats. Vilified at Cannes, where Roger Ebert – apparently blessed with the ability to travel back in time – declared it the worst film to ever play that festival, Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny was affectionately received in Toronto. Gallo trimmed a half hour from his onanistic ode to the charms of the highway strip, but the result is still comically self-indulgent – and self-aware about it. (Faced with an army of U.S. films that do everything but think for the viewer, "self-indulgent" is one pejorative that immediately sparks my interest.)

Following a serial seducer as he Gordon Lightfoots from one coast to the other, The Brown Bunny is unexpectedly delicate; a trip into memory riddled with casually intimate pit stops, it's hardly uncritical of the protagonist's epically fragile ego. When the notorious Chloë Sevigny blow-job scene began, a camera flash immediately went off in the theater, prompting the festival's loudest burst of laughter. Gallo freestyled some one-liners during the post-film question-and-answer session, asserting that Ebert earned his wrath for heckling the movie and breaking out into an impromptu rendition of "Singin' in the Rain" at its first public screening. He claims to have made The Brown Bunny for $40,000, another detail that suggests he was punished in Cannes for rejecting the filmmaking practices of both major-league studios and minor-league indies.

Since The Brown Bunny was cradled with open arms, something else had to take its place on the chopping block, and the similarities between the film that did, Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms, and Gallo's are worth commenting on. Prompting a high volume of press walkouts and a hearty round of public boos (a far more rare occurrence in Canada than in France), Dumont's movie, like Gallo's, takes a searching, Antonioni-esque approach to the American road, in this case, uncharted paths through the California desert. Dumont is no stranger to controversy: his previous effort, L'humanité, collected three major awards at the 1999 Cannes fest, including a Best Actor win by the film's mentally challenged lead. Detachedly observing an American location scout and his French-speaking Russian girlfriend as they fuck and fight against language barriers, Twentynine Palms is deliberately unfriendly and at times – primal orgasmic screams, a swimming pool scene that splashes in the direction of Paul Verhoeven – roughly ludicrous. But Dumont's vision confounds simple positive or negative responses; few filmmakers are so palpably attuned to the physical frustrations of being in the world.

Shot in Cinemascope, Twentynine Palms portrays the American male lead as an abuser; the camera frequently shadows him as he creeps up behind his emotionally volatile mate. The fact that the female role is played by Katia Golubeva, the apocalyptic muse of Leos Carax's critically reviled Pola X, is one clue that Dumont isn't out to win audience sympathy – and that this is a story with an unhappy ending. The desert has eyes in Twentynine Palms, and the movie's final, brutal deliverance is horror stripped of the genre's familiar commercial elements. The real-life residents of Twentynine Palms are already angry about Dumont's film, and it's hard not to view his first U.S.-set feature – which follows two hypernaturalist dramas based in his northern France hometown – as an act of vengeance against a certain nearby film industry. Not that its maker will agree. After one screening an audience member asked Dumont if he was "on the wrong track" in suggesting that the film was a metaphor for current U.S.-European relations. "You're on your own track," the director answered through an interpreter.