"See the world without leaving Beijing," runs the motto of a wondrously kitschy amusement park in Jia Zhang-ke's The World, one of the scant auteur highlights of the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival. Centering on a chirpy showgirl who performs cheesy musical revues in regional costume—whether she's in a sari or a kimono, the dances all look the same—The World never fails to register the miserable irony of its setting, which only reminds visitors that they're not going anywhere. Who needs to travel when every destination is just a tram ride away, from a one-third-scale replica of the Eiffel Tower to a miniature Leaning Tower Of Pisa to an outdated Manhattan skyline? ("The Twin Towers fell on 9/11, but we still have ours!") And, hey, take a picture: It'll last longer.
Similarly, Toronto festivalgoers can see the world every year without leaving a sedentary position. Like a lazy person's travelogue, this year's films provided a cheap vacation by loping through the rolling hills of California wine country (Sideways) and the lush jungles of Thailand (Tropical Malady) and Argentina (Los Muertos). One package tour (L'Intrus) visited the French-Swiss border, a Korean industrial city, and the clear-blue Tahiti coastline. Yet the camera lens has a way of distorting the world, or at least telling uncomfortable truths about it. Such images dominated the festival, turning most films into frank exercises in anti-escapism. Contemporary auteurs seemed to be engaged in a contest over who could conjure the nastiest behavior, the most desultory (and usually unsimulated) sexual encounters, and the ugliest, most assaultive filmmaking technique.
To that end, Swedish director Lukas Moodysson's A Hole In My Heart emerged the winner by a decisive margin. The once-reliable, sweet-natured humanist behind 1999's Show Me Love and 2000's Together took an abrupt turn two years ago with Lilya 4-Ever, an uncompromisingly bleak portrait of a Russian teen forced into a prostitution ring. But A Hole In My Heart plunges deeper into the muck. An unsightly mixture of Darren Aronofsky's Requiem For A Dream, a Rainer Werner Fassbinder chamber drama, and MTV's Jackass, the film critiques celebrity culture and reality television via X-treme amateur stunts. In a ratty one-bedroom apartment, two cretins with a video camera recruit a young blonde for an improvised porn shoot, but as the evening wears on, the degradation gets worse, leading to a food fight gone perverse and a terrifying fantasy encounter with a baseball bat. Meanwhile, Moodysson continues his abiding concern for neglected youth by spending time with the chief pornographer's disturbed son, whose face resembles a plant wilted from lack of sunlight. On the few occasions that the film lets the sun shine in, it only makes the scenario seem more sickly and debased.
Not to be outdone, feminist provocateur Catherine Breillat returned to the festival with Anatomy Of Hell, a severe regression after her last three films (Fat Girl, Sex Is Comedy, and especially Brief Crossing) got closer to marrying her sexual politics to something resembling human behavior. Taken from Breillat's 2001 novel Pornocratie, about a woman (Amira Casar) who pays a misogynist homosexual (Romance's Rocco Siffredi) to analyze her body, Anatomy Of Hell centers on dialogue that sounds like a thesis paper read aloud over Masters & Johnson footage. Lines about how her spread legs resemble a frog's or how the anus never lies are paired with appropriately icky imagery, including a garden tool slipped into the slumbering belle and the ol' tampon-in-a-teacup bit made horrifyingly literal. After it's over, Breillat's radical ideas about predatory and destructive male instincts are overwhelmed by more frivolous thoughts, such as "Boy, that woman can sleep through anything."
With so much miserablist sex on the brain, all eyes turned toward Eros—an omnibus trilogy of shorts by Wong Kar-wai, Steven Soderbergh, and Michelangelo Antonioni—but it's unlikely that many were left flush with desire. With Wong spinning his wheels in the overly precious tale of a courtesan's tailor and Antonioni ineptly parading topless Italian babes to no apparent end, it was up to Soderbergh's snappy middle segment to save the day. Perhaps knowing he wasn't going to out-art the likes of Wong and Antonioni, Soderbergh paired the verbal wits of Alan Arkin and Robert Downey Jr. in a psychiatrist's office for a hilarious dialogue that revolves around desire, but remains pointedly anti-sexy.
The only evidence that sex could be fun at all came from Michael Winterbottom's Nine Songs, an explicit hourlong suite intercutting scenes from a kinky affair with live performances from the likes of Super Furry Animals, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and Franz Ferdinand. Had the prolific Winterbottom slowed down and conceptualized the film more rigorously, it might have worked: The bedroom acrobatics possess a relaxed, unpracticed intimacy that's authentic and lively, with the well-chosen songs serving as both a nice relief and a punctuation mark. As the B-side to Nine Songs, François Ozon's 5X2: Cinq Foix Deux follows a similar relationship arc backward in time, from the end of a marriage to the beginning of a courtship, with pointed stops in between. Ozon's potent critique of hetero romance—which is dictated by rules neither partner can comply with—uses a reverse structure that feels like he started with a collapsed house, then burrowed down to the termites that were eating away at its foundation.
In a festival of extreme visions, American independent films were no less radical in concept and execution, but the best were distinguished by their uncommon ingenuity and focus. With echoes of the Dardenne brothers' Palme D'Or-winning Rosetta, Lodge Kerrigan's accomplished third feature, Keane, refines the first-person schizophrenia of his 1994 debut Clean, Shaven with startling precision. Tracking an unhinged loner (the terrific Damian Lewis) as he searches obsessively and fruitlessly for his long-ago-abducted daughter, Kerrigan's camera rarely leaves his face for a second. The effect is deeply uncomfortable, yet exhilarating and poignant, because behind his raw, naked volatility exists a loss so profound that he's doomed to relive it at every moment.
Where Kerrigan once seemed like the odd man out at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, this year's star graduate, writer-director-actor Shane Carruth, looks similarly destined for an idiosyncratic career. An achievement at any cost, Carruth's $7,000 Primer (which won the festival's Grand Prize) represents independent moviemaking at its most resourceful and idea-driven. Centering on two young Texans who build a space/time-continuum-defying machine in their garage, Primer isn't afraid to overwhelm viewers with technical details and logical conundrums. The last 30 minutes are impossible to decipher on first viewing, which makes sense, given a situation where the ramifications are as infinitely terrifying as the apocalypse. When a movie bends far enough to include a line like "Are you hungry? I haven't eaten since later this afternoon," it's best just to yield willingly to its pretzel logic.
Over the past several years, the festival has been dominated by emerging Asian masters such as Tsai Ming-liang (What Time Is It There?), Kim Ki-duk (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… And Spring), Jia Zhang-ke (Platform), and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Blissfully Yours), and 2004 was no different. After announcing himself with lurid psychosexual dramas such as 2000's The Isle and 2002's Bad Guy, Kim took a sharp turn with last year's delicate Buddhist fable Spring, Summer, and he applies the same serene aesthetic to 3-Iron, which reveals a total command of his effects. The whimsical story of a ghostly young man who squats in homes he knows to be vacant—a well-behaved intruder, he leaves the owners with clean laundry and mended appliances—the film melds the human and spirit world so seamlessly that the distinction between the two ultimately doesn't matter.
For those unschooled in Thai mythology, the second half of Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady will seem "foreign" in the strictest sense of the word, as an overwhelmingly sensual love story transitions abruptly into the obscure tale of a shaman who inhabits the body of a tiger. While it's hard to make the connection between the film's halves, Weerasethakul extends his fusion of narrative and experimental techniques into ever more daring and challenging terrain, but with such a lyrical touch that the effect is more seductive than alienating. And thank goodness it has homoerotic overtones; otherwise, it probably wouldn't have found a U.S. distributor.
For a shot of pure cinema, however, nothing at Toronto 2004 beat Chan-wook Park's deliriously vicious Old Boy, a highly charged mega-revenge story shot through with eye-catching color composition, sadistic violence, and a twist so cold-blooded, it's hard not to laugh out loud. Drunk on style for style's sake, Park's gory thriller about a former prisoner's relentless pursuit of his captor caused some to criticize Quentin Tarantino's Cannes jury for awarding the Grand Jury Prize to such a frivolous item. But if there's a healthy development out of Cannes 2004, which awarded its top prize to Fahrenheit 9/11, it's that all films and all genres are created equal, and sometimes strictly sensual experiences can exceed their more high-minded, "important" peers.
The same people who turn up their noses at Old Boy may also snort at a comedy as unassuming as Alexander Payne's wonderful Sideways, but his big, generous sense of humor shouldn't be mistaken for a lack of artistry. Like Jack Nicholson in Payne's last film, About Schmidt, Paul Giamatti trails an aura of failure as he heads into a midlife crisis with a rejected novel, a remarried ex-wife, and a prevailing bitterness that makes him less and less sociable. His road trip through California with mismatched college buddy Thomas Haden Church opens up a second chance at love, but his defeatism proves difficult to overcome. Expanding on his schlumpy American Splendor misanthrope, Giamatti has a way of drawing more sympathy as he tries to deflect it, and Payne rewards him with a moving payoff that's thoroughly earned. Next to the other offerings at Toronto, Sideways may seem soft and hopelessly minor, but, like Giamatti's character, it has the heart of a true sophisticate.