The Iraq war, testy teenagers take Toronto

TORONTO - The US dollar here is suddenly weak. But the filmmaking corralled at the 32d Toronto International Film Festival is in much better shape. This sprawling cinematic fortnight, which kicked off last Thursday here, manages to persuasively blend multiplex-bound features with homeless gems in urgent need of distribution. Meanwhile, Oscar contenders play alongside great new work from some of the art form's iconoclasts and idiosyncratic visionaries. Once in a rare while, as with the Coen brother's latest film (more on that in a minute), those two poles converge.

The festival this year could be summed up by any number of mini-themes. One is the rise of the fiercely perceptive and sarcastic teenager as seen in movies like Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody's very funny pregnancy comedy, "Juno," and Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's handsome expressionist bildungsroman, "Persepolis." An obvious and virtually unavoidable thread at this festival in recent years is the human reach of the Iraq war. American movies this year are particularly wrapped up in it - from Paul Haggis's "In the Valley of Elah" to Gavin Hood's banal position-paper thriller "Rendition" to Brian De Palma's on-the-ground docudrama, "Redacted."

These movies and about half a dozen more are on their way to theaters near you. One that isn't happens to be the most striking and complex. Nina Davenport's "Operation Filmmaker" starts off as a kind of farce of do-gooder liberal guilt, in which the actor Liev Schreiber caught an MTV profile of Muthana Mohmed, a middle-class Iraqi film student whose film school was bombed. Schreiber, about to begin production on his adaptation of "Everything Is Illuminated," was moved enough to put the kid on the Prague-based crew.

Almost immediately, however, it's apparent that Mohmed isn't simply grateful to have been rescued from Baghdad (although he is grateful enough to sincerely praise George W. Bush) and assigned menial production-assistant duties (making copies and preparing snacks for the talent are beneath him). He wants to do some filmmaking. But he bungles his one big task and may have expected his war-torn back story to win him plum assignments on the set and possibly more money from the film's producers. His penury is the tip of a larger moral iceberg that turns more fascinatingly complicated once the production moves on and he remains in Prague. Davenport stays behind to film him, and he, in turn, begins to expect her to help secure visas and help him stay afloat financially, which she does.

Mohmed may or may not understand the ethics of documentary filmmaking (or their low profit margins), but he doesn't care, either. His life is her subject, and a large part of him expects to be compensated for that. What ensues is a tense, mutually borderline-abusive relationship picture. Davenport sharpens the film's focus from social-political farce to the kind of incriminating self-portrait that transcends pure guilty liberal narcissism and encapsulates the entire situation between America and Iraq: Since she chose to invade his life, his problems are almost inextricably hers. Pulling out becomes virtually impossible.

It is possible to avoid the war at this festival - well, this war, anyway. Cristian Nemescu's excellent epic comedy "California Dreamin' (Endless)" is a completely committed farce set in a sleepy Romanian town in 1999 during the Bosnia bombing campaign. Clinton was president, and America still enthralled Eastern Europe - so the film is very much a period piece. The central conflict involves a detained train of urgently needed NATO communications equipment, the station manager eager to make a power play with the American soldiers transporting it, and the hapless mayor desperate to turn the holdup into a PR victory for his downtrodden burgh. The film has an ample Altmanesque comedic panorama that sends up it characters' haplessness without costing them their humanness. It's a reverse "Borat," in that sense. Until his sudden death at 27 last year, Nemescu was another light in Romanian's rapid rise to cinematic brilliance. But the movie is a sterling testament to what would have been.

Hou Hsiao-hsien is a far more established master whose new film is an encounter with the lightness of being, literal and otherwise. "The Flight of the Red Balloon" doesn't have the deceptive depths of recent triumphs like "Café Lumière" and "Three Times" but it does extend both the Taiwanese director's interest in professional actors and his bemusing case of wanderlust. This time he's in Paris with an exuberantly scattered Juliette Binoche as a puppeteer and single mom to a little boy who along with his babysitter is followed by the titular floating toy. Hou's movie is a tribute to Albert Lamorisse's "The Red Balloon" from 1956 and, in part, to his own film "The Puppetmaster." And gradually "Flight" is revealed to be about the puppetry of filmmaking and parenting. It's a deft, small marvel that should further endear Hou to cinephiles and win over their more patient kids.

If Hou Hsiao-hsien is taking a break from outright masterpieces, Joel and Ethan Coen have resumed making them. Their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel "No Country for Old Men" manages to be true to their own gruesome comic sensibilities while honoring and amplifying the generational wisdom in McCarthy's prose. Imagine the Coens's "Blood Simple" and "Fargo" stretched to John Ford's western panoramas. The film consists of a hunt across Texas for a case containing $2 million - Josh Brolin has found it; Javier Bardem, as a psycho for the ages, wants it. The year is 1980, and the investigating sheriff, played with extra-wise seasoning by Tommy Lee Jones, unhappily reckons with the changing face of brutality in this country. At some point Jones's shadow evokes the bygone western gunslinger's stance. It's an illusion, both grand and, for the Coens, soulfully tragic. Blood for them is not so simple anymore.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ movienation.com.