Sex, sex & sex

Reeling at the 25th Toronto Film Festival

by Gerald Peary

Kelly McGillis and Susie Porter in 'The Monkey Mask'

The 25th Toronto International Film Festival included, as it should, a celebratory showing of the movie that started it all, Jean-Charles Tachella's lovely French comedy Cousin cousine, which was the opening-night entry back in 1976. I attended the retrospective screening earlier this month and was invigorated by the inventive lovemaking: an erotic body-painting scene and, something I've never seen on screen, one naked lover showing her feelings for her equally unclothed partner by cutting his toenails.

I'm surprised that the mildly raunchy Cousin cousine played intact at Toronto in 1976, a short time after the Ontario Film Review Board -- a notoriously puritanical, ill-humored, interfering government body -- had ordered Deep Throat to be seized and impounded by the Toronto police. Even through much of the 1980s, the festival, annoyed and frustrated, had to run its touchy-feely films by this activist board, which specialized in censoring and scissoring and keeping explicitness out of the province.

Although the board is still around, "Our guidelines focus on issues of violence," chairman Bob Warren told the Toronto Star -- meaning that Toronto 2000 was one sexy place to see movies. The Cousin cousine revival was complemented by a nostalgic large-screen showing of Deep Throat itself. The Linda Lovelace starrer was introduced by Toronto director Bruce (Highway 61, Twitch City) McDonald, who heralded it as "a groundbreaking film."

Catherine Breillat, who conceived the hardcore 1999 feature Romance, arrived from France to show her first film (from 1975), A Really Young Lady, which had been shelved by censors. A belated North American premiere! Unfortunately, it proved one dull, inept movie about a young girl (a comatose Charlotte Alexandra) coming to terms with her fantasy life, which included riding a bicycle bare-ass under her skirt. "Stuck in the '70s," a twentysomething criticized it.

Elsewhere, the ever-randy Marquis (Daniel Auteuil) got into some flagellation and finger fucking in Sade, Benoît Jacquot's mostly absorbing intellectual costumer. And for those who wonder what happened to Kelly McGillis (of Top Gun, Witness, and The Accused): she surfaced as a femme fatale university professor in Australian Samantha Lang's The Monkey's Mask, in which, bare-chested, she partakes of a hot, hot sexual encounter with Susie Porter's Jodie Foster-like lesbian detective.

Then there was the gorgeous Italian movie star Asia Argento with her autobiographical Scarlet Angel, in which she has wet-dream sex and runs around nude while moaning about a lost rock-musician lover. Speaking at her screening, Argento promised that her next work will be "a real porn film: a riot of fun, lots of pussies and cock, and no more crying."

But Toronto's big sex movie by a mile was France's genuinely scandalous Baise-moi, which a friend of mine called "Thelma and Louise on crack." This shot-on-DV tale of two chicks on the run having hardcore sex when not being serial killers was written and directed by two young women, Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, with their own tarnished pasts (the first was an occasional prostitute, the latter a French porn star). With its porno bloodbath and adult-movie performers, it provoked a box-office-destroying X rating from the French government.

I was told that Baise-moi had been championed by three critics on the selection committee of the New York Film Festival, though in the end it was rejected by those at the top. I would have voted for the film also, with its make-you-horny sex scenes and riveting Jeanne Moreau-like performance by Raffaela Anderson. It mounts an anarchist assault against good taste and proper sexual politics -- Luis Buñuel would have adored it.

And what shone at Toronto outside the wonderful world of sex? Canadian Guy Maddin's The Heart of the World, a dazzling short film with Eisenstein constructivist montages and Lang silent-movie epic scenes, shot on a sound stage in Maddin's home town of Winnipeg. A masterpiece. Two key Samuel Beckett dramas, Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days, effectively, faithfully brought to the screen by (respectively) Atom Egoyan and Patricia Rozema. And the first North American showing of Jafar Panahi's The Circle, which days earlier had won six major prizes at the Venice Film Festival. No movie has depicted the systematic oppression of Iranian women the way this brave feature from the filmmaker of The White Balloon does. Panahi moves from woman to woman -- political prisoners on the lam, prostitutes, those seeking abortion; his harsh circle is completed with his female ensemble back behind bars.

"It took three difficult years to make this film," he explained at Toronto. "I don't want to think of the hardships but to enjoy my newborn's birth. The film has been shown to some new members of parliament, but they didn't give permission to screen it. I hope it will be shown in Iran."