Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.At the Toronto International Film Festival, last year’s Hollywood actors’ strike has started to seem like a distant memory. Fans throng King Street, which hosts several festival theatres, craning to see stars en route to screenings and enjoying the fellow feeling in the autumn air. If actors are absent this year, it is often because they are elsewhere, shooting something new — good news for future movie-goers.The 49th edition of the festival is another busy showcase of 278 films. All hope to attract some love — from audiences, of course, but also from the troupe of buyers, critics and other industry professionals surfing the densely scheduled line-up.The awards race looks more open at this point than in past years, though some previously launched titles cruise into Toronto with heads of steam from Cannes (Anora) or Venice (Maria, The Brutalist). A few angled for a bounce before an imminent release, such as We Live in Time, a love story starring Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh, or Saturday Night, which chronicles the run-up to the first broadcast of US TV sketch show Saturday Night Live.The opening movie was Nutcrackers, a well-received family comedy starring Ben Stiller, but for many intrepid festival fans, the unofficial kick-off was Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths. The director’s first modern-set movie in more than a decade is a bracing character study of a middle-aged woman seemingly aggrieved by whomever and whatever she encounters. Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who appeared in Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, plays Pansy as a font of criticism yet evidently in pain herself; her plumber husband and adult son, who lives with them, react with exhausted silences.Rather than wallow with Pansy, Leigh contrasts her with her agreeable sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), a hairdresser who laughs away with two cheerful daughters, both ably employed. This is Leigh’s first film entirely focused on Black characters, though he leaves the role of race somewhat ambiguous, energised as ever by the specific curiosities of personality. To a certain extent, Leigh suggests that temperament and mental health are the luck of the genetic draw: the sisters share some traumatic memories of their deceased mother, but it is Pansy who is caught in a depressive spiral.Conclave drops us into a very different maelstrom: the Vatican’s selection of a successor to its newly deceased Pope. In an elegant adaptation of Robert Harris’s best-seller, Ralph Fiennes plays the judicious Cardinal Lawrence, tasked with stewarding the election, and unofficially with vetting candidates and negotiating obstacles as they emerge (which they most certainly do). Edward Berger, director of Oscar-winner All Quiet on the Western Front, offers a front-row seat for the gamesmanship of pure politics. The ambitions of papal candidates might be openly declared, or unctuously denied, but in any case come with elaborate strategies for courting favour among the many cardinals sequestered for the voting procedure.Accompanying Fiennes are a well-cast crew of cardinals, including Stanley Tucci as Lawrence’s sophisticated but plain-speaking ally, John Lithgow as a pompous self-promoter, and Sergio Castellitto as a rabble-rousing conservative, plus Isabella Rossellini as a formidable nun. The genuinely unpredictable drama unfolds amid the monumental architecture and ethereal murals of the Vatican, and Berger likes to make us privy to arcane details of the conclave, such as the way ballots are handled. But despite the venerable trappings, the power plays might remind some viewers of an office during treacherous moments of transition.The Toronto line-up always has a healthy share of truth-based tales, though Eden sounds more outlandish than fiction. Set in the 1930s on an island in the Galápagos, it’s a story of survival in which the biggest threat, beyond the wild dogs and insects and meagre fresh water, is people. An ex-doctor (Jude Law), who is attempting to write a new philosophy, and his partner (Vanessa Kirby) live off the land, having repudiated their native Germany. But their solitude is spoiled first by a middle-class couple (Sydney Sweeney and Daniel Brühl) seeking a new life, and then by a sketchy baroness (Ana de Armas) with boy-toy assistants and impossible plans for a hacienda hotel.Hollywood veteran Ron Howard rambunctiously directs this social experiment on a beach as a pulpy thriller with back-stabbing and food-stealing galore. The folly of the Germans’ endeavour constantly teeters on the brink of the ridiculous, and any new hopes for democracy in a world beset by fascism soon evaporate, aggravated by the baroness’s scheming and the doctor’s cold intransigence. Law and de Armas have fun with the overheated script, though the most surprising moment might be the end text stating that the woman played by Sweeney lived on the island into her nineties.Two more young stars, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Jacob Elordi, excel in the beautifully realised 1950s romance On Swift Horses, from director Daniel Minahan. Muriel (Edgar-Jones) is married to Lee (Will Poulter), whose brother, Julius (Elordi), is a heart-throb, introduced shirtless and sprawled on a car bonnet. But then he leaves for Las Vegas and falls in love with a man who works with him at a casino. A potential love triangle gives way to a wonderfully matter-of-fact portrayal of forbidden connections; Muriel in turn finds herself revived sexually by a svelte woman from whom she and her husband happen to buy olives.The bungalow-and-diner locales, and rapturous cinematography and costume design, promise familiar postwar suburban melodrama. But Minahan and his cast don’t reduce Muriel’s or Julius’s affairs to a vehicle for prestige tragedy or steamy entertainment. Their experiences feel as if they might reflect any one of countless lives and loves constrained by social conformity and bias at the time. While glamour could dazzle on screens and red carpets at the festival, the handsome stars and tony production values of On Swift Horses are put in the service of something that at times can feel even rarer — ordinary emotional truths.To September 15, tiff.net
