In the end, loneliness becomes a festival reality

Films of isolation make impression as Toronto wraps

In "Treeless Mountain," (above) two Korean sisters staying with an aunt miss their mother. (The New York Times)

TORONTO - The last days of the Toronto International Film Festival, which ended on Saturday, can feel, if not like a ghost town (there's always a party somewhere), then like last call at a bar where everyone has managed to find someone to go home with. Everyone except you and the handfuls of stragglers who drift into press screenings. Even the four-alarm urgency to get into some public events calmed to one alarm, maybe two. What remaining press and industry people there are mysteriously stick to aisle seats like barnacles to a ship. In my case, all the better to make a clean getaway, which on one atrocious occasion (thank you, makers of "Deadgirl") was necessary.

To some extent, I'm describing the loneliness that settles in after the excitement leaves, how revelers mutate into fallen confetti. When I got here earlier in the week, I was doing some rubbernecking at the festival's hotel headquarters, where someone in a room just off the crowded lobby was playing a piano. The song was rather indifferently performed, but the sadness in it lingered. I went about my business thinking the pianist should take an antidepressant - and some lessons. It was Viggo Mortensen. But that's life here in fits and starts - even Viggo gets the blues.

Loneliness can be good for filmmakers. The strongest movies I saw here were marked by either emotional desolation or its physical counterpart. The two Korean sisters in "Treeless Mountain," a new film by So Yong Kim, an American realist, miss the mother who dropped them off with an aunt while she goes on a vague family rescue mission. The sisters - Jin (Hee Yeon Kim) is 6; Bin (Song Hee Kim) is about 5 - occupy their time with chores and play and enterprise (selling barbequed grasshoppers is apparently pretty lucrative). But they wait in uncertainty.

The feat of Kim's filmmaking is the way she's able to consider dislocation as both a matter of place and feeling. The girls don't know where they are and, half the time, neither do we. And yet for a movie built almost entirely out of tight close-ups, strategic editing, and stalking hand-held tracking shots, what you experience is not claustrophobia but its opposite. There's enough heart here to sense that the world - the one inside the movie theater - is expanding.

Kim is part of a wave of American independent directors who've embraced realism not as a resurrected trend but as an artistic prerogative. And with Hollywood conspicuous this year by its absence at the festival, realism, aptly and ironically enough, has overtaken the foreground. Realism has always prized transparency over what we've come to think of as plot.

Now, there's a political dimension as well. Realism as a deliberate attempt to take movies to parts of the world Hollywood goes only to fatten profit margins, to show us people (of color, in poverty) mainstream movies tend to ignore. This isn't to say you need to leave the country to pull this off. For some filmmakers, it's in their backyards. Of course, some backyards are more interesting than others.

In Barry Jenkins's "Medicine for Melancholy," the backyard is San Francisco, and the movie takes what might be the least believable morning after a one-night stand in the history of sex and turns it into a discourse on gentrification and racial assimilation. This is one of a handful of movies at the festival this year mashing up realism with something else. Here the something else is romantic comedy. And it doesn't work.

The movie treads happily under its influences - "She's Gotta Have It" with the sexual politics corrected (neutered, really); "Before Sunrise" with nothing all that interesting for its talkers to say. The male half of this blossoming relationship, played likeably enough by the comedian Wyatt Cenac, has better chemistry with the city than he does with Tracey Heggins, who plays the woman with whom he spent the night and is now sharing the day. Jenkins considers whether African-Americans living post-racially is the fallacy it sounds like it is and takes us into a community meeting about the demise of rent control and certain poor, black neighborhoods. But for some reason, he's devoted the bulk of his film to inadvertently demonstrating how boring it can be to watch two people sit around awkwardly and get to know each other while the city falls apart. His realism is out to lunch.

Matteo Garrone's "Gomorrah" is the realist gangsta saga. A grim snapshot of life in the concrete slums of the Campania region (Naples is the capital), the movie sneaks in and out of the Brutalist buildings where the residential spaces are barely distinguishable from the vacant, bombed-out ones. Based on Roberto Saviano's non-fiction account of Campania, "Gomorrah," which won the grand prize this year at Cannes, raises a curtain on a vast culture of collapse - a drug dealer for every junkie, kids poisoned with "Scarface" dreams, killing that erupts from nowhere.

We're so completely immersed that when, after one extermination, a character walks up a ramp and onto the street, I gasped. You mean that wasteland is this close to traffic and trees? We've been here before with "City of God," various South Central tragedies, and parts of "The Wire," but rarely with our faces pressed so close to the grime. Aside from the occasional Michael Bay picture, a work of fiction rarely leaves its audience with the sense that the filmmakers' lives are in danger too. But I watched this grandly grisly achievement in a new, irrational kind of terror: God, I hope the crew wore Kevlar.

Is there such a thing as Kevlar for the soul? The Charlie Kaufman stand-in Philip Seymour Hoffman plays in Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" could use some. The movie is far from a work of typical realism. Instead, it is - as you might expect from the writer of "Being John Malkovich," "Adaptation," and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" - a work of self-obsessed surrealism. Hoffman plays a miserable Schenectady playwright who tries to realize his magnum opus after his emasculating wife (Catherine Keener, who else?) takes their daughter and leaves for Germany.

He builds a life-size set of Manhattan in a warehouse. Characters are followed by the amateur actors playing them. It's part "8 1/2" - Hoffman's obsessions are all the women in his life, including Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Emily Watson, and Dianne Wiest. But it's also mostly Kaufman. The film manages to transcend his self-commentary and infinite cleverness. It achieves beautiful and bizarre pathos. The arbitrariness of life is reorganized into a steady tracking shot to the grave. It's not realism per se, but it is triumphantly, depressingly real.