The last day of a festival stay is always a time of reckoning. You may have seen a lot. But how much did you miss? Running alongside the slate of pictures you actually caught is another festival, a phantom festival, consisting of all the movies you might have seen, things you tried to get to and just couldn't manage, or things recommended by other people after you'd missed all the possible screenings.
My phantom festival this year includes Rowan Joffe's Brighton Rock (I'm curious to compare it with the strange, unsettling 1947 UK version, starring Richard Attenborough, though I fear, as my colleague Michelle Orange points out, that it will be just another botched Graham Greene adaptation) and John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole (which my other colleague, Stu Van Airsdale, painted as extremely intriguing -- plus, I'm a big Mitchell fan anyway). Once I start concentrating on the phantom festival, there's no stopping: I wish I'd seen the animated film Chico & Rita, which a trusted colleague adored; Fred Wiseman's Boxing Gym; and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cannes prizewinner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which, my love for the Thai filmmaker known as "Joe" notwithstanding, I know I'll be able to see soon in New York.
So let's leave the phantom festival behind -- it's only an exercise in frustration -- and concentrate on some of the movies I saw in my six-day Toronto blur and simply haven't yet had time to process. I was delighted to discover that Sally Hawkins, the UK actress who was so extraordinary in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, appeared in two movies at the festival: In a small role in Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go, and as the lead in Nigel Cole's Made in Dagenham, based on a true story about a group of women at a UK Ford plant who, in the late 1960s, went on strike in an effort to equalize their pay with their male counterparts. Both pictures were disappointing: Never Let Me Go (reviewed by my colleague Eric Hynes, elsewhere on these virtual pages) is a dreary, inane exercise in droopy-drawers romanticism; Made in Dagenham is a lively enough crowd-pleaser, but Cole (Calendar Girls) puts too much of a facile sheen on everything he touches. Still, Hawkins didn't disappoint me in either film: As a teacher who spills a very deep, dark secret to her wide-eyed, lumpy-sweater-wearing charges in Never Let Me Go, she's deeply believable and sympathetic, and unlike almost everyone else in this silly-dreary picture, she's a real character instead of a construct. (Carey Mulligan is terrific as well.)
And as Rita O'Grady in Made in Dagenham, Hawkins brings some lively dimension to what could be a stock character, the dutiful working wife and mother who at first reluctantly and then vigorously takes on a much larger leadership role. Hawkins, with her feathery, floating-on-a-cloud voice, is a sympathetic suffragette in a mini-skirt, a woman who's geared to step into the next century instead of being held back by the old one. At this point, I'd watch Hawkins in just about anything, though I hope that soon she'll get another movie worthy of her gifts.
I found myself completely charmed, and in the end quite moved, by Michael Winterbottom's The Trip, a freewheeling riff of a movie in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (who appeared together in Winterbottom's marvelously out-there 2005 Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story) play semi-fictional versions of themselves, two friends taking a food-junket trip through the Northlands. The Trip, technically, isn't a proper movie at all; it was shot as a BBC television series, and this feature-film version consists of the six episodes edited together. But even when downed in one sitting, this collection of sketches works: Brydon and Coogan needle and challenge one another, trying to one-up each other with their dueling impersonations of the likes of Michael Caine, Sean Connery and Woody Allen. And in the end, they get at some profound but subtle ideas about the nature of friendship and connection -- and miraculously, they don't even kill each other.
My final film at Toronto 2010 was Werner Herzog's 3-D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, in which everybody's favorite jolly German takes us on a journey through the Chauvet caves of France, the walls of which are decorated with charming, expressive, wholly alive animal drawings that are some 30,000 years old. The picture is so low-key and soothing that more than a few exhausted and overworked critics I know admit to drifting off, carried away on line-drawing dreams of ancient bison and stampeding, whinnying horses. (The movie's gloriously spare but rich score, by Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger, sure couldn't have hurt.)
But Cave of Forgotten Dreams captivated me, and though Herzog's use of 3-D technology sometimes threatens to cause a shaky-cam headache, when he and his crew are shooting in the caves, showing us these astonishing ancient works of art, the effect is dazzling. Herzog's technique shows us how these old-time artisans used the dimensional contours of the cave wall to add life and movement to their drawings. Calcite crystals embedded in those walls glitter like diamond sawdust; stalagmites'n'tites, looking like far-out coral branches or freeform home-made maple sugar candy, spring from the wall's floors and ceilings.
Herzog's running patter is alternately a form of wry stand-up comedy and a heartfelt commentary on how these drawings, made ages ago, connect us with a long and winding thread of humanity. He points out how a rhino is drawn with sketched-out multiple legs, to give the "illusion of movement, like frames in an animated film." And in the movie's weird little coda, he introduces us to a group of albino crocodiles -- they thrive in the radioactive glow of a nearby French nuclear power plant -- who, he muses, might someday make their way over to the Chauvet caves to blink their heavy-lidded eyes at these wondrous drawings. In a manner of speaking, between the Venice and Toronto film festivals, I've seen some pretty wondrous drawings myself these past few weeks. Now all that's left to say is, Arrivederci, Toronto.