by MARK SLUTSKY

The second half of the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival—at least what I can remember of it—comes back to me as a period of furious decadence, a days-long haze of Christal champagne, designer drugs, outrageous, scandalous parties and deeply fulfilling celebrity sex.

Just kidding. I woke up every day at 7 o’clock and watched movies all day, with brief interludes when I’d eat a hot dog, until I fell asleep at 11 p.m. It’s a living!

Hands down, my favourite film of the fest is also probably the most difficult to describe. Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century (Sang sattawat) is part absurdist comedy, part love story and part pure, imagistic abstraction. It’s really impossible to describe what this film is actually about, save for the first half concerns a rural doctor and her patients, until the movie re-starts in urban Bangkok at a modern medical facility, where some of the first half’s scenes are repeated. Sounds exciting, huh? Actually, it’s amazing—hilarious, gorgeous and hypnotic, here’s hoping it’s released in Canada sometime soon.

Just as elliptical but far less fun to watch was Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth, an extremely slow two-and-a-half hour series of dramatic tableaux set in a Portuguese slum. Much to the consternation of most of the critics at the screening, due to some mix-up, the last half-hour of the film was shown with French subtitles, making it a poor return on the time they’d invested in this difficult film.

The exact opposite of Colossal Youth (although a lot of movies could be described that way), Christopher Smith’s Severance, billed as “The Office meets Deliverance” is a very funny British slasher comedy about a corporate retreat to Eastern Europe gone very, very wrong. Other points of reference would be Shaun of the Dead and Hostel. A surprisingly smart horror movie and a real crowd-pleaser.

Another international thriller, weirdly enough, is the new film by Hal Hartley, Fay Grim. A sequel to 1997’s Henry Fool, the movie stars Parker Posey as the titular character, who crosses the world to find hubby Henry, with a bevy of intelligence agents (including Jeff Goldblum) on her tail. It’s as bad as it sounds.

Also worth mentioning are a couple of unconventional Italian docs that showed at TIFF. Primo Levi’s Journey, from director Davide Ferrario, follows the late author’s wanderings through Eastern Europe after he was liberated from Auschwitz—the impressionistic film is far from your standard Holocaust doc. Vincenzo Marra’s The Session is Open purports to be about the Italian justice system, focusing on the minute details of the trial of an alleged Naples gangster (and climaxing with a bizarre right-wing rant from the presiding judge over lunch).

At the gala screening of his new Dutch-language film Black Book, director Paul Verhoeven remarked that, after Hollow Man, he felt he need to return to filmmaking in the Netherlands to perhaps “save [his] soul.” The film starts innocuously enough as a WWII resistance drama, though it quickly descends into total Verhoeven perversity. A couple of very dumb plot twists marred my enjoyment of the film, but there’s great stuff here, notably ingenue Carice van Houten as a disguised Jew who bleaches her pubic hair to infiltrate the German occupation and ends up in love with a Gestapo officer (I said it was perverse!)

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