TIFF 2011: The Lady, Machine Gun Preacher, Trishna, The Deep Blue Sea

Certain directors simply belong at film festivals and two Brits in particular were no-brainers for TIFF: one was Terence Davies, who brought his Terence Rattigan adaptation The Deep Blue Sea, and the other was Michael Winterbottom, director of the Thomas Hardy-inspired, India-set Trishna. More on these two later. But there were two other directors whose work you would think would also sit well within an international film festival forum. The first was America's Marc Forster, who arrived with Machine Gun Preacher, a biopic of born-again relief worker Sam Childers; the second was France's Luc Besson, who came with The Lady, a biopic of Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi (played by Michelle Yeoh).

I'll start with The Lady and work up to the best of these four. The Lady I really didn't like much at all, most due to its insanely long running time (145 minutes) and a script that didn't merit such indulgence. All the reviews of Besson's film were crushing, mostly pointing out that the film lacked any sense of tension even though the last 20 years of Suu's life have been incredibly dramatic. The filmmakers may wish to turn this around, in which case you may see The Lady being marketed as a love story. But the truth is, it doesn't work either way. It begins in the late 90s with Suu's husband, Michael Aris (David Thewlis), being given less than five years to live by his doctor, and in flashback he recalls the fateful day in the late 80s when his wife received a phonecall telling her of her mother's illness. Though never an exile, Suu (as her friends call her throughout the film) has nevertheless spent much of her adult life outside Burma, and her return there is an eye-opener: a brutal government is in control, the people are rioting, and the military are cracking down on civil liberties.

Suu doesn't think of going into politics straight away, instead she is invited to by local scholars on account of her heritage: her father was Aung San, was a popular leader assassinated by political rivals in 1947. She decides to go through with it, Aris supports her decision, and together they help found the National League Of Democracy. This, however, is not popular with the ruling party, who, fearing her martyrdom, decide not to kill her but to marginalise her, and as a result, Suu spends the next 11 years under house arrest. As you can imagine, there's nothing very exciting about house arrest, mostly because the film is so damn literal. With a better script, The Lady could have been about all sorts of things: destiny, responsibility, family… As it is, it's a ponderous mish-mash, with average performances and scenes that qualify as epic only because there's a lot of people in them.

Machine Gun Preacher (pictured) was a more successful but still slightly conflicted biopic, this one telling the story of how the vicious, heroin-addicted, American biker criminal Sam Childers found God and became a hero in war-torn Sudan. Gerard Butler stars as Childers, who, at the beginning of the movie, is coming out of prison and returning to his trailer park home. His wife Lynn (Michelle Monaghan) has discovered religion and quit her job as a stripper; this infuriates Childers, who goes out on the lash, drinking and scoring heroin. For a time, Childers continues on this wayward path, robbing a crackhouse and brutally stabbing a Native American hitchhiker who pulls a knife on his best friend (Michael Shannon). But while washing the blood from his clothes, however, Childers gets a newsflash from above and accompanies Lynn to church, where he is baptised.

Childers gives up crime, takes up construction and starts wearing short-sleeve shirts instead of biker leathers. In church one day, he is alerted to the plight of orphans in Sudan by a visiting pastor, and so he decides to visit the area as part of a relief mission. But what he sees there haunts him. Young orphans are everywhere, and none are safe from the rebel leaders who burn their villages, kill their parents and force their siblings into armed slavery. So Childers becomes a righteous avenger, building an orphanage for the kids and declaring open war on the rebels… and if you think Machine Gun Preacher sounds like it might sending out a bit of a mixed message, you'd be right. Forster's film suffers a strange tonal schizophrenia: on the one hand, it is a moving, sensitive film about the plight of children in war-torn Sudan. And on the other, it is a violent, all-guns-blazing, Boy's Own action movie. Forster handles the former better than the latter, and Butler captures the raging contradictions in Childers, but though I ended up admiring his charity, I can't honestly say I'd ever like to meet this man.

Also shot in exotic places and examining, on one level, the gulf between rich and poor in Third World countries was Michael Winterbottom's Trishna, a loose reimagining of Thomas Hardy's Tess Of The D'Urbevilles. On the flight over to Toronto I'd watched The Trip, with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, and had been reminded of what a national treasure Winterbottom is. Trishna will not be one of those crossover movies, and will doubtless divide critics with its alarming ending, but for most of its two-hour running time Winterbottom's film is an enthralling allegory for a certain kind of male-female relationship. Riz Ahmed stars as Jay, the rich son of a hotelier who is on holiday in Rajasthan with his friends. By chance, he meets Trishna (Freida Pinto), the beautiful daughter of a crippled rickshaw driver and sole breadwinner for her poor family. To please everybody, but mostly himself, Jay offers Trishna a job at one of his father's hotels, where he aims to seduce her.

Like Hardy's novel, and Roman Polanski's film version, this is a sometimes frustrating story of a passive woman who seems to let her life wash over her. In another director's hands, this could have been catastrophic, but Trishna is one of Winterbottom's most cinematic movies yet, making terrific use of the Indian landscape as his heroine travels from Rajasthan to Mumbai and back again. Regular collaborator Marcel Zyskind's cinematography could not be better and it finds the perfect median between fiction and documentary. Especially good are the scenes in Mumbai, where Trishna dreams of being a Bollywood dancer; the film set she visits, though invented by Winterbottom, seems thoroughly authentic. And as well as India, the camera clearly loves Pinto too, and so she overshadows Ahmed, in a somewhat thankless role. It won't be everyone's cup of tea, but Trishna raises some interesting points, just as Hardy did, about equality, economic freedom and injustice.

The last one I'll come to is also a literary adaptation. Terence Davies' Deep Blue Sea is the director's take on Terence Rattigan's 1952 play of the same name. Unlike Winterbottom's film, this is not the story of a passive heroine – by contrast, his leading lady, Hester (Rachel Weisz), is a definite go-getter who has left her older, wealthy husband (Simon Russell Beale) for a dashing young fighter pilot (Tom Hiddleston). It begins with Hester trying to commit suicide in a dowdy boarding house, her life flashing before her eyes in a woozy, fragmented delirium. Her deathwish, however, is foiled by the landlady, and Hester is forced to face up to the situation she has created for herself.

Deep Blue Sea hasn't been terribly well received (at the time writing this it was rated an unfair one out of ten on the Imdb), but that's possibly because of its often challenging style. The opening salvo, which lasts a full nine or ten minutes, is an impressionistic overture, heavily scored with classical music (Samuel Barber's Concerto For Violin And Orchestra), and once the story beds in, it becomes clear that Davies has done away with much of Rattigan's original story. He has, however, kept the main bones of it, and, though the film contains many of Davies's signature tropes – singsongs, long takes, peeling wallpaper – this isn't such a rigourous auteur experience as you might imagine. The chief reason for this is a luminous turn by Rachel Weisz, who really ought to be looking at a Bafta nomination for her work here. But I was more surprised by Hiddleston, who, at first sight, seems to have the least interesting role of the three. However, he definitely won me over; he has the hardest job of the main players, and by the end of this sad and affecting film, his character is as empathetic as the others.

That pretty much brings my coverage of Toronto to an end. In passing, I liked the documentary Paul Williams: Still Alive, but wished it said more about the musician/movie star than simply what it's like to be around him. I wasn't too gone on Eduardo Sanchez's Lovely Molly, a new horror from one half of the Blair Witch duo that, though atmospheric, became less coherent throughout its 99 minutes. And The Loneliest Planet I didn't get at all, an opaque travelogue starring Gael Garcia Bernal as half of a couple on a hiking holiday in Eastern Europe. It was a tie between that and Killer Elite as my least favourite movie here. Though it starts promisingly, with Robert De Niro, lots of gunfire, and an assassination attempt gone wrong, this needlessly complex Jason Statham vehicle degenerated into shouty, shooty spectacle in which a mercenary is hired by an Arab sheikh to bump off the SAS men who killed his sons. Enter Clive Owen as the former SAS man who rumbles the plot, and you have a clumsy action-drama hybrid that isn't good enough to be great or bad enough to be brilliant. It's somewhere in the middle, a sort of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for Zoo readers.

There were so many others I wanted to see but just couldn't find the time to, like Lynn Shelton's Your Sister's Sister, Bennett Miller's Moneyball, Rodrigo Garcia's Albert Nobbs and Werner Herzog's Into The Abyss. I also wished I'd been at the now-legendary screening of Francis Ford Coppola's derided Twixt, which is alleged to have prompted 300 walkouts (from the public screening!). But it's a testament to TIFF's programming that there is always something good showing somewhere. This is an excellent festival where films and filmmakers are accessible to the public and life is never ever dull. I can't wait for next year.