An epic drama charting 37 years in the life of an Italian family stole theshow at Toronto, writes Michael Dwyer
So many movies, so little time - with a programme of 254 feature films and 85 shorts showing over 10 hectic days and nights, and screenings running from 8.30 a.m. until a few hours after midnight every night, the 28th Toronto International Film Festival offered up a rich, ultimately indigestible feast. It helped to have seen around 50 of the movies earlier in the year at Cannes and elsewhere, but the daily schedules still yielded one agonising clash after another. The only way to cope was to accept the impossibility of seeing everything that seemed attractive, and to repeat over and over again the mantra: "It's only a movie."
In that context, making the commitment to a six-and-a-half-hour Italian epic might seem a calculated risk, given that three feature films could be viewed over the same time period - but it would be very hard to find three features in any festival to match an epic as wholly enthralling as Marco Tullio Girodana's The Best of Youth (La Meglio Gioventu).
The outstanding film in this year's festival, this masterly drama follows an Italian family, the Caratis, from the summer of 1966 to the spring of 2003. The focus is on two brothers - Alessio Boni and Luigi lo Cascio in riveting performances - who, at the outset, are carefree students for whom life holds a wealth of opportunities.
The powerfully unfolding drama charts the highs and lows in their lives - the hopes, pleasures, fears, disappointments and complications - as they take on the responsibilities of adulthood.
Their experiences are set against decades of turbulent change - the flooding of Florence in 1966, the terrorist activity and industrial unrest of the 1970s, the exposure of appalling scandals in state mental institutions, Sicily's struggle against the Mafia, the equivocal attitude of Italian politicians to corruption, and several key World Cup games for the national team. The period detail is precisely achieved, and enhanced by rock music of the era, making unexpectedly potent use of Queen's Who Wants to Live Forever.
The film's triumph lies in the exemplary skill with which it deals with the intimate and personal while simultaneously addressing momentous themes of national identity, political upheaval and the inevitability of mortality.
The consequences are deeply emotional, dramatically startling at times, and even devastating, and invite favourable comparisons with the sweeping epic film-making of The Godfather, Heimat and Berlin Alexanderplatz.
The veteran Italian director, Marco Bellochio, whose career has spanned the entire period covered by The Best of Youth, deals specifically with one of the key events in that film's background in his own accomplished new movie, Good Morning, Night (Buongiorno, Notte). This chilling political drama thoughtfully confronts a convulsive event in recent Italian history - the 1978 kidnapping of the former prime minister, Aldo Moro.
The film is built around a handful of principal characters - Moro himself, and the four idealistic Red Brigade terrorists who held him captive for 55 days while his party, the Christian Democrats, and the Vatican refused to negotiate with his abductors. As the stalemate continues, the captors themselves become prisoners, forced by their actions to exist in an edgy state of permanent vigilance. Taking its title from an Emily Dickenson poem, this fascinating and thoughtful chamber piece features fine performances from Maya Sansa as the only woman among the terrorists, Luigi Lo Casto (from The Best of Youth) as their rigidly determined leader, and Roberto Herlitzka in a dignified portrayal of the doomed Moro.
A third notable Italian film at Toronto this year was Facing Window (La Finestre di Fronte), the fourth feature from the Rome-based, Turkish director, Ferzan Ozpetek. A prologue, set in wartime Rome in 1943, depicts a fight between two young men which ends in a stabbing, before the movie cuts to the present as a happily married young working-class couple, Giovanna and Filippo (Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Filippo Nigro), find an amnesiac elderly man and give him a temporary home as they try to establish his identity.
Touchingly played by Massimo Girotti, one of the most gifted actors of classic Italian neo-realist cinema, the enigmatic man transpires to have survived confinement in a Nazi concentration camp. Meanwhile, Giovanna is coping with her discontent with work in a poultry factory, and her growing interest in the good-looking young banker whose window faces on to her apartment.
While Ozpetek relies rather too heavily on chance and coincidence, his ostensibly opaque movie is resolved with clarity and finesse.
Coincidentally, Rosenstrasse, the new film from Margarethe von Trotta and her first for the cinema in nine years, operates a similar time-shifting structure between 1943 and the present, although its dramatic emphasis is on past events. Maria Schrader plays a Jewish New Yorker of German origin who learns for the first time how her mother survived the war as a child with the help of Lena, a kind young woman who shocked her pro-Nazi aristocratic family by marrying a Jewish violinist.
The film is named after the Berlin street where hundreds of women gathered to protest against the deportation of their Jewish husbands, and von Trotta acutely catches their anxiety and determination as the Nazis refuse to relent. Her slow-burning drama treats their plight compassionately without ever resorting to sentimentality, and it affirms her position as one of international cinema's most persuasive chroniclers of women's lives and friendships. As ever, she elicits strong performances from a well-chosen cast, in which Katja Riemann and Doris Schade memorably play the young and older Lena.
German cinema's recent preoccupation with aspects of the country's unification in 1989 - treated so inventively in the recent Good Bye, Lenin! - continues with Lagos-born writer-director Branwen Okapko's Valley of the Innocent. It's an intriguingly revealed story of a mixed race Frankfurt police officer (Nisma Cherrat) returning to Dresden, where she was raised in an orphanage, to investigate her parentage.
Set in present-day Berlin, Soren Voigt's Identity Kills is shaped as a conscious homage to the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in its improvised picture of a hard-working 24-year-old woman downtrodden by her selfish boyfriend and devising a series of ruses to make a new life for herself. The digital camera-work is cold and ugly, presumably deliberately, but the plotting is consistently unpredictable, and Brigitte Hobmeier is aptly vulnerable and resourceful as the unlikely heroine.
The pick of the new French films at Toronto was Errance, writer-director Damien Odoul's assured sophomore feature after his very promising debut with the recently released Le Souffle. Errance details the changing fortunes in the brittle relationship between a young couple, the practical, level-headed Lou (Laetitia Casta) and the feckless, irresponsible Jacques (Benoit Magimel), a compulsive liar who's forever promising to change but remained rooted in a fantasy world.
The movie opens in rural France in 1968, with the painfully difficult birth of their first child, an event that Lou hopes will force Jacques to face reality. Four years later, they have moved to an apparently idyllic home on the Cote d'Azur, but Jacques has drifted deeper into drinking, infidelity, gambling and crime. Odoul's tough, uncompromising drama has the authenticity and simmering power of a socially concerned picture by Ken Loach, and it is charged by vividly credible performances from Casta and the versatile Magimel, who won the best actor award at Cannes two years ago for Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher.
David Thewlis, named best actor at Cannes in 1993 for Naked, makes his feature film directing debut with Cheeky, an unbearably tiresome serious comedy in which he plays a grieving widower who travels to London totake part in a tacky TV game show for which his wife had entered him just before her death in a fire. Suffused with heavy-handed whimsy and crude British humour, Cheeky is one of those movies with just a single redeeming feature - that it eventually comes to an end.
An altogether more impressive directing debut, 16 Years of Alcohol marks the latest venture for the multi-talented Scotsman, Richard Jobson, who first made his mark as lead singer with punk band The Skids and then as a movie critic and TV presenter. on the defunct Sky series, Movietalk and Face to Face. Along the way, he wrote the semi-autobiographical novel, 16 Years of Alcohol, which he has now turned into a gritty, poetic movie.
Loosely based on the formative experiences of Jobson and his late brother growing up in Edinburgh, this is an honest and compelling story of possible hope and redemption in an environment scarred by violence and drinking. Kevin McKidd is terrific as the complex central character, and there are engaging performances from Laura Fraser and Susan Lynch as the young women who hold out the prospects of alternative lifestyles in this strikingly textured movie.
The Toronto festival closed last Saturday night with the work of another first-time writer-director, the quintessentially quirkily Australian serious comedy, Danny Deckchair, made by Jeff Balsmeyer, a Sydney-based American, and starring Welsh actor Rhys Ifans in the title role.
Danny Morgan is an accident-prone building site worker, dominated and put down by his ambitious real estate agent girlfriend (Justine Clarke). When her work schedule dictates that they cancel their annual holiday, he tinkers with attaching helium balloons to his deckchair and is propelled through the skies until fireworks deflate his craft and he lands hundreds of miles away in the garden of a lonely traffic cop (Miranda Otto) in the idealised small town of Clarence.
Naming that town after the angel in It's a Wonderful Life is the most explicit of this engaging movie's nods to director Frank Capra and his most popular themes, as Danny, dismissed as "one of the little people", finds a new meaning in life for himself while changing the lives of those around him. The often irritating Ifans is on fine form here, credibly charting Danny's transformation in a warm, feel-good movie that sent the festival audience back home with broad smiles on our faces.