But one that managed neatly to avert at least one popular operatic disaster. This must be the first production in which we actually see Tosca’s fall from the battlements of the Castel Sant’ Angelo. And she isn’t about to bounce back.To 27 Oct (Booking: 071-632 8300). If you typed in a URL, please make sure you have typed it correctly.
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}. More and more festivals are competing for a diminishing pot of top-notch new films, and critics at Venice this year complained of the meagre pickings in the official selection. But Toronto is bullish: it has even renamed itself the Toronto International Film Festival.
For the past 18 years, it was known officially as the Festival of Festivals, a seemingly pretentious but ultimately honest description of its nature: programmers went to Berlin and Cannes and came back with the goods Toronto in 1994 is all grown up, hence the name change. World premieres are numerous and the festival has netted some interesting new products. Michael Tolkin’s The New Age telegraphs enough despair to have optimists opting for suicide. The film peels the paint off the trend’s buzzwords to reveal a bankrupt theology.
In Tolkin’s words, ‘it’s a story about two people spiritually unprepared for crisis’. The plight of its monied protagonists (Peter Weller and Judy Davis, who has made despair something of a speciality) can be scaled down to fit most professional tax brackets.
Along comes Louis Malle’s Chekhov update, Vanya on 42nd Street, to remind us that, for all the talk of post-modern ennui, despair has long been a going concern. Adapted by David Mamet from a literal translation, filmed in the auditorium of a decrepit vaudeville theatre (the stage was too dangerous), its actors dressed in street clothes, it’s a quality production that never quite justifies its methodology.A Man of No Importance stars Albert Finney as a bus conductor in Dublin during the early Sixties. A Wilde aficionado – indeed, a Wilde surrogate – he mounts an amateur production of Salome and so incurs the outrage of his former leading man (Michael Gambon). The teasing out of the conductor’s homosexuality plays like a bittersweet Ealing comedy.Another American distributor’s nightmare is Chris Menges’s Second Best. It’s first-rate and William Hurt is a marvel in it but it’s hopelessly low-key.
