Toronto Sexes Up for '03 Fest

TORONTO--As trouble-prone cities goes, this place has had more than its fair share over the past year, from SARS to the blackout. But now, Toronto is hoping for more glittery times ahead, thanks in part to the opening of its annual film festival, which unspools Thursday and runs through the 14th.

"We've been through some pretty major crises over the last little while," festival director Piers Handling says. But, "we went through 9/11 in the middle of our [2001] festival. I think we'll roll with the punches."

Indeed, having established itself as one of the world's premier launching pads for new films, Toronto has no intention of rolling over. This year, the festival's 28th, organizers will present 336 films from 55 countries, including 252 features, most of them world or North American premieres, and many considered potential Oscar players.

This year's start lineup includes performances from Denzel Washington, Nicole Kidman, Nicolas Cage, Neve Campbell, Sean Penn, Meg Ryan, Gary Sinise, Anthony Hopkins, Emmanuelle Béart, Toni Collette, Chloë Sevigny, Colm Meaney, Dylan McDermott, Mario and Melvin van Peebles, Woody Harrelson, Kate Beckinsale, Katie Holmes, Sarah Polley, Tim Robbins, Colin Firth and Benicio Del Toro.

Ridley Scott will be honored with a special screening of his director's cut of his classic sci-fi monster mash Alien. He will also show off his new comic caper Matchstick Men, starring Cage.

Omar Sharif, fresh from his conviction for head-butting a police officer at a casino near Paris, will also attend. Sharif has been making the fesitval-circuit rounds hyping his new film, Monsieur Ibrahim et les Fleurs du Coran (Mr. Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran), and was last spotted on the Lido, picking up a lifetime achievement award from the folks at the Venice Film Festival.

Toronto, which also boasts two annual book festivals, has put the spotlight on adaptations this year, with a serious roster of book-to-flick features. The authors whose works have gotten the star treatment include: Canadian Carol Shields' The Republic of Love, Barbara Gowdy's Fallen Angels, Philip Roth's The Human Stain, along with works by Evelyn Waugh, Kazuo Ishiguro and Mordecai Richler.

Sofia Coppola will launch her latest, the critically lauded Lost in Translation, starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson as two Americans in Japan. (Johansson, whose credits include The Horse Whisperer, The Man Who Wasn't There and Ghost World, will also appear in another Toronto entry, the costume drama Girl with a Pearl Earring opposite Colin Firth.)

But the film gathering the most prefest buzz is Good Bye, Dragon Inn by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang. Tsai's previous film, What Time Is There?, was featured at the 2001 Toronto fest and won a prize at Cannes the same year.

The festival's longest film is the nearly six-and-a-half-hour epic The Best of Youth, a family drama by Italy's Marco Tullio Giordana. But don't let the running time scare you, says Handling of the film. "Everyone who sees this film is blown away by it."

Other high-profile pics in circulation this year: the Denzel Washington thriller Out of Time; the Hugh Grant-Emma Thompson-led romance Love Actually; Neil Young's concept concert film Greendale; the rock 'n' roll farce The School of Rock starring Jack Black; Robert Altman's latest ensemble piece, The Company, a ballet drama starring onetime dancer Neve Campbell; the gritty drama 21 Grams, with Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro; Veronica Guerin, Cate Blanchett's biopic about the sad life of Irish reporter; Shattered Glass, Hayden Christensen's biopic about the sad plagiarism case of shamed American reporter Stephen Glass; and Oscar winner Adrien Brody in the ventriloquism (yes, we said ventriloquism) drama Dummy.

If a film festival loaded with star power isn't sexy enough, Toronto's programmers have ensured this year's cinematic crop will explode with bare flesh and steamy passions in such films as Jane Campion's In the Cut, an erotic detective story; Vruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms, an erotic thriller; Anne Fontaine's Nathalie" about a wife who hires a prostitute to find out if her husband is cheating; and Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny, which caused a scandal at Cannes where it was excoriated by Roger Ebert and other critics for its excesses.

"Sex is making a major comeback and it's remarkable how graphic it is," says Handling. It marks "a return to this notion of pushing extremes, of exploring extreme behavior, which even the major directors are getting into. I think it could well be a post-9/11 phenomenon."