Toronto, Day 3: Italians, Danes, and the English

Some quick hits and then I have to rest up.

"Genova" is yet another Michael Winterbottom film featuring yet another stylistic turnabout -- the director who gave us "24 Hour Party People," "9 Songs," "Tristram Shandy," "In This World," "A Mighty Heart," and "The Road to Guantanamo" now delivers an emotionally loaded domestic suspense story about an American family fraying at the seams in Genoa. After mom Hope Davis dies in a car crash in the opening scene, surviving daughters Willa Holland and Perla Haney-Jardine relocate to the Italian city with dad (Colin Firth, above, with Holland)) and try to put the pieces of their lives back together. Easier said than done: the guilt-ridden younger daughter is seeing ghosts, her sister is discovering sex with cute Italian boys, and Firth is fending off the advances of lonelyhearts colleague Catherine Keener. On top of this is a tone of dread that never fully settles; after shaking us up with that opening scene, Winterbottom keeps us waiting for the other shoe to drop. There's a definite "Don't Look Now" vibe to the movie -- I kept waiting for the dwarf in the raincoat to pop out of an alley with a knife -- but the monsters in "Genova" are all in the head. It's an interesting, not entirely pleasant experience (and as the father of two daughters roughly the same age as the girls here, some of this was truly difficult for me to watch), but Winterbottom never figures out how to bring the movie to a proper and organic close. He's more interested in the journey than the destination. Good for him, but unfortunately in this case, only in theory.

"The Duchess" is about the 18th century Duchess of Devonshire Georgiana Spencer, who suffered the same massive public popularity and private marital discord as her descendent Lady Diana Spencer: Both women had cold fish husbands with big titles and a mistress, lived with a national preoccupation with male heirs, possessed a natural and influential sense of style, and had a yearning to do good works. "Duchess" works that parallel as best it can without ever leaving its perfectly reproduced period topiary behind. Keira Knightley plays Georgiana as a smart, vibrant woman ground down by her society's inability to think outside the gender box -- it's a very good performance -- and Ralph Fiennes gathers brutishness about himself as the Duke. It's gorgeous to look at, well-done all around, and I enjoyed it without ever piercing its exquisite veneer. For all the historical underpinnings, the movie feels like a high-40s Hollywood women's pic in corsets -- not a bad thing but also not, I think, what this movie was shooting for.

"Flame and Citron" is another of those WWII resistance dramas they do so well in Europe, this one a true story about a pair of Danish anti-Nazi assassins whose nicknames make up the title. The red-haired Thure Lindhardt (above, right) plays gunman Flame while Danish superstar Mads Mikkelsen (the uber-villain in "Casino Royale") plays his tormented friend and co-conspirator Citron. Rather than a triumphal tragedy of anti-Fascist martyrs, director Ole Christian Madsen daringly takes a psychological approach, showing how life lived underground eventually removes all moral and rational reference points. The film begins in mist and ends with its characters lost in a fog of other people's motives, and, if anything, it's too sprawling. Plot developments are repeated, revelations and incriminations go back and forth and back again, and the dreaded movie drift kicks in. Just because "Flame" is about entropy doesn't mean it has to play entropically. (Ironically, Flame and Citron are Danish state heroes today.)