Letters from Toronto

Pleasure, meet danger.

By B. Ruby Rich

WHEN AN EVENT is as huge – 350-plus films huge – as the Toronto International Film Festival, it becomes impossible to debate its programming quality. Who can see enough to judge? Instead, the burden is thrown back on the journalists to program personal editions of the festival and defend our choices in devious games of press corps one-upsmanship. "How's 'your' festival going?" we ask, and lie in defense of our own utter brilliance of selection. There are four basic methods for sorting through the overload: Spot a theme to track, find new talent to discover, reassess established auteurs, or pinpoint key sociopolitical issues. Most critics follow one approach, but I have such poor impulse control that I tend to jump frantically from one theme to another while trying to stay coherent (and awake).

Take the new talent. Media sources were in a lather over reports that Ivan Reitman's son Jason hit the jackpot with his debut, Thank You for Smoking, since Fox Searchlight and Paramount Classics slugged it out in Sundance-style, Weinstein-reminiscent, all-night negotiations, then both claimed they'd bought the rights; I discovered Australian filmmaker Sarah Watts instead. Her thrilling Look Both Ways mixes witty drama and savvy animation into a hybrid exploration of love, mortality, and family ties that sports a visual boldness and muscular pacing in stark contrast to the politesse of so many women filmmakers. Also thrilling was the world premiere of The Heart of the Game, Ward Serrill's complex documentary about a Seattle high school girls' basketball team. More than Hoop Dreams redux, it's as much a highly original dissection of what makes girls tick as it is a sports doc.

The sociopolitical focus was easy. I made a beeline for the two Palestinian films and wasn't disappointed. Hany Abu-Assad's new drama, Paradise Now, is a brilliantly executed look at the last days of two childhood friends tapped for the honor of a martyr mission. Abu-Assad based his script on lots of real-life details about suicide bombers, with the addition of a surprising sense of humor. My favorite scene is the covert taping of a martyr's-last-words videotape, replete with retakes and unacceptable improvisation. By contrast, Rashid Mashawari's Waiting (Attente) takes a lighthearted theme – a Palestinian film crew with European Union backing travels to Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon to audition Palestinian actors – and delivers a sucker-punch to the gut of any feeling viewer. Palestinians are invoked in The Smell Of Paradise too, a rough but eye-opening documentary that basically answers the question "Why do they hate us?" It's a road movie through Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Qatar, and the filmmaking team of Mariusz Pilis and Marcin Mamon gain unprecedented access to the ideologues behind the global attacks on imperial America. Calling PBS (if it has any nerve left)!

In terms of career evaluation, I made a rash decision to skip the big-reputation directors this year. I tracked the baby auteurs instead – like Jim McKay, whose fourth feature, Angel, continues his anticommercial focus on urban poverty and wasted lives. This time, alongside newcomers and nonprofessionals, he cast Rachel Griffiths (yup, Six Feet Under's Brenda) as a social worker trying to save young Angel. I am forced to steal ex-Examiner critic Wesley Morris's staircase wit: "It's the Dardenne brothers without subtitles."

That brings me to the theme of the year. Oh no, not sex again! Yup, sex. But this time around, it's the perils of sexuality in unforgiving times that got me thinking. Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee's much-anticipated saga of cowboy love, is every bit as good as the Venice jury (which gave it the Golden Lion) claimed. We all filed weeping out of the press screening, praising Ledger and Gyllenhaal between our tears. The points Lee makes about the toll taken on those whose love is outlawed, though, run differently through another pair of period films. Mary Harron's The Notorious Bettie Page makes sense of the 1950s pinup girl by seeing her innocent embrace of sexual play as decades ahead of its time, while Gretchen Mol's terrifically joyous performance helps explain why Bettie's image is so popular. Even Atom Egoyan's conventional (for him) period drama, Where The Truth Lies, about a sex-and-murder scandal involving a Martin-and-Lewis-esque comedy team, communicates the hideous moralism of the time. Pleasure and Danger was the title of a landmark anthology on sexuality two decades ago, but it seems its message is relevant again.

Given our government's attempt to wrench us all back to the '50s in foreign affairs, military adventures, and punitive domestic policies, it's no wonder that some of our finest filmmakers are rethinking the dangers of sexual exploration back in the eras when speaking and acting, as well as silence, equaled death. And it's no wonder that the Toronto festival turned out to be an excellent place, as usual, to reconsider dominant fantasies from the safe vantage point of a theater seat.