Toronto's grim diet proves a feast

Several fine films at the Toronto International Film Festival did not flinchfrom conjuring up a dismal prospect for young people around the world in the 21st century, writes Michael Dwyer

The failures and weaknesses of the established institutions - marriage, parenthood, government and religious orders - are presenting young people all over the world with dismal prospects in the 21st century, to judge from a range of international cinema screened in the vast and comprehensive programme of the 27th Toronto International Film Festival, which closed last Saturday night. Day after day brought new images of young people struggling to cope with dysfunctional families and deep-rooted alienation, and few of the films were tempered with optimism or cosy resolutions. Grim as this daily festival viewing diet may sound, it produced many fine films.

The enthralling second feature film written and directed by Rebecca Miller, Personal Velocity, arrived in Toronto trailing its well-merited Sundance Festival awards - best film for Miller and excellence in cinematography for Ellen Kuras. Adapted by Miller from her book of short stories, Personal Velocity is structured as a triptych to explore the dilemmas of three American women leaving the men in their lives for different reasons.

In the first story, Kyra Sedgwick gives the performance of her career to date as a tough, working-class woman who is not physically tough enough to withstand the shocking physical abuse doled out by her husband (David Warshofsky) in full view of their terrified children.

The second deals with a cookery book editor (a sparkling Parker Posey) who is noted for "her eye for the inessential" and is getting bored with marriage to a loving husband (Tim Guinee) as she feels "ambition drain out of her like pus from a lanced boil". The third stars Fairuza Balk as a pregnant young New Yorker who survives a near-death experience and goes on the road to re-evaluate her life. Along the way, she picks up a teenage hitchhiker (Lou Taylor Pucci) who has been horribly tortured by, it is implied, a family member.

The only drawback, if it is one, about Miller's fine film is that one becomes so drawn to the protagonists of the three stories that one wants each to continue much longer. All three are elegantly scripted and liberally peppered with sharp observational humour - even the jolting first story - and dexterously shot on digital video. Miller astutely employs the voice of a male narrator (John Ventimiglia from The Sopranos) to comment on these disparate stories of women's lives.

The movie début of Eminem, 8 Mile, is marked by the poetry of its street rap, which is delivered with the characteristic fluency and witty wordplay and ambiguity of its star's album tracks. This semi-autobiographical movie charts an eventful week in the life of Eminem's character, Jimmy "Rabbit" Smith , a Detroit factory worker who lives in a trailer with his self-absorbed, sexually active mother (Kim Basinger on terrific form) and dreams of winning a local rapping duel as a ticket to a recording career in New York. The title refers to the boundary between the city and its suburbs, the crossroads between deprivation and affluence.

The narrative is relatively slender and obvious, and certainly less substantial than the distinctly unsettling four-minute music video for Eminem's dramatically loaded hit single, Stan. Curtis Hanson, who made LA Confidential and Wonder Boys, directs 8 Mile with vigour and rhythm, drawing on the intensity evident in Eminem's performances in music video, and presenting a bleak view of dilapidated Detroit, with its lack of hope and opportunity for its young denizens. The film was shown in Toronto as a work in progress, without credits and some technical post- production polishing, and it was rapturously received by an audience high on anticipation.

Writer-director Dylan Kidd makes an auspicious feature film début with the sophisticated dark comedy, Roger Dodger, in which a 16-year-old Ohio schoolboy, Nick (bright newcomer Jesse Eisenberg), desperate to lose his virginity on a visit to Manhattan, has the misfortune to seek advice and assistance from his uncle, Roger (Campbell Scott), a loquacious advertising copywriter who prides himself on his successes with women. Chief among the abundant pleasures of this hilariously scripted movie is Scott's full-blown personification of smugness and arrogance as Roger's deeply cynical view of women finally rebounds on him.

Two resourceful young brothers try to make sense of the erratic behaviour of the adult world in Emanuele Crialese's boisterous but serious Italian comedy, Respiro, set in an ostensibly idyllic fishing village on the island of Lampedusa, off the coast of Sicily. There, the only disruptions to the boys' humdrum daily routine are provided by the erratic behaviour of their unconventional mother (Valeria Golino). Eliciting engaging naturalistic performances from a predominantly non- professional cast, Crialese embellishes the movie with a wealth of surprising and original surreal imagery, which includes using a hen to help get someone out of a coma, and placing a statue of the Virgin Mary on the sea-bed to help trace someone feared drowned.

The eponymous young priest at the centre of Carlos Carrera's Mexican drama, The Crime of Father Amaro is a handsome, recently ordained young man who is sent to the small parish of Los Reyes as an assistant to the ageing Father Benito. It transpires that the older priest is sleeping with his housekeeper and accepting money from the region's drug dealer to help construct a new clinic. It is only a matter of time before the more principled Father Amaro is following his example, kissing in the pews and stripping off his white collar - and everything else - to have sex with the housekeeper's religiously devout 16-year-old daughter (Ana Claudio Talancon).

Based on an 1875 Portuguese novel, Carrera's film is saddled with some superfluous expository baggage in the first half before it begins to exert a commanding dramatic hold. Gael Garcia Bernal, the bright young star of Amores Perros and Y Tu Mama Tambien, succinctly captures the unfolding complexities in the character of Father Amaro and his oddly à la carte Catholicism. The film has been a huge box-office success in Mexico, where it has been condemned vociferously by the Catholic Church.

After the infectious comedy of his satire on 1970s hippie communes in the recent arthouse hit, Together, Swedish writer-director Lukas Moodysson jettisons all humour in Lilya 4- Ever, set in a grim, rundown town in present-day Russia. The 16-year-old Lilya (the expressive Oksana Atkinshina) is looking forward to escaping its pervading gloom to a new life in the US with her mother and her new partner, until the mother reneges on her promise, leaving Lilya to fend for herself and to drift into prostitution. She was always an unwanted child, she is told, in this chillingly harsh portrait of a girl whose resilience is undermined by her own genuine good nature and gullibility.

Just as bleak and even more wrenching is Christophe Ruggia's gritty French drama, Les Diables, an unflinching picture of two pre-teen siblings who, after being abandoned at birth on the streets of Marseilles, have spent their miserable lives escaping from one institution after another and dreaming of a family life in a home of their own. Chloe (Adele Maenel) is volatile, self-destructive and doesn't speak, while her brother, Joseph (the extraordinary Vincenz Rottiers), is fiercely protective of her in this viscerally charged study of helplessness and hopelessness.

From Germany, Väter (I'm the Father) charts the breakdown of a marriage between a couple struggling under the weight of professional pressures, and the impact on their six-year-old son who is caught in the middle. Working from an incisive screenplay by Ladybird Ladybird writer Rona Munro, director Dani Levy precisely catches the simmering tension in the relationship between a close couple undermined by their capacity for obstinacy and unreasonable behaviour.

SET IN what was East Berlin over three years beginning in 1986, Winfried Bonengel's Fuehrer Ex is based on the formative experiences of a former neo-Nazi ringleader, Ingo Hasselbach, who wrote the screenplay with Bonengel. The protagonist, Heiko (Christian Blumel), is a bored, nihilistic dreamer whose promiscuous mother, a journalist with the state news agency, is more concerned with the parade of one-night stands through their apartment. Attempting to escape across the Berlin Wall with a friend, Heiko is caught, jailed and raped in a prison that is depicted as a breeding ground for neo-Nazism. The film fails crucially in its later stages to render plausible the easy-going Heiko's abrupt transition to racism-spouting activist.

Of all the many films I saw at Toronto this year, the shortest and most moving was La Dernière Lettre (The Last Letter), which features a single character, a victim of Nazism in the Ukraine in 1941. She is a Russian- Jewish doctor held behind barbed wire in the ghetto set up by the German army. Profoundly aware that her death is imminent, she is writing one last letter to her beloved son.

She knows that there will not be the time or the opportunity to receive a reply, but writing the letter will make dying easier for her. She is angry, but remains defiantly proud. Her letter describes her disgust at the anti-Semitic attitudes of her former neighbours and their taunting of the Jews being marched to the ghetto, and it celebrates her stoic determination to carry on with life as a friend and carer to her fellow prisoners, even though all their lives are ominously close to ending cruelly.

Based on Soviet writer Vassili Grossman's novel, Love and Fate, this is the first fiction film directed by Frederick Wiseman, a pioneer of cinéma vérité and one of world cinema's most accomplished documentary-makers. Shot in black-and-white on a single stage, the film dexterously employs subtle lighting and shadows as it captures a magnificent performance by Catherine Samie, a doyenne of the Comédie Française, who invests her role with remarkable strength and dignity.

This classically simple and spellbinding film is vastly superior to Roman Polanski's convoluted and pedestrian Holocaust drama, The Pianist, which undeservedly received the Palme d'Or for best film at Cannes this year.

• Michael Dwyer concludes his Toronto reports, including a look at new films by Neil Jordan, Thaddeus O'Sullivan, Todd Haynes, Paul Schrader and Philip Noyce, in this Saturday's Weekend section.