If Friday’s theme was “girls behaving badly,” Saturday’s was most certainly “adoption.”

I began with Mother and Child (7/8), the latest from writer-director Rodrigo García (Nine Lives, Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her) and easily his most accomplished film to date. García always crafts multiple-character stories involving women, and this time around he explores the nature of motherhood through the eyes of three troubled characters: Karen (Annette Bening), a physical therapist struggling with a lifetime of regret over having given her baby girl up for adoption 37 years ago; Lucy (Kerry Washington), a young wife desperate to adopt a baby, who’s growing frustrated by jumping through the hoops of the process; and Elizabeth (Naomi Watts), a career-driven attorney whose professional success masks a personal life that’s kind of in a shambles. Peppering his stellar leading ladies with a strong supporting cast that includes Jimmy Smits, Samuel L. Jackson and David Morse, García delicately interweaves the lives of these women and creates a rich tapestry of love, loss, sadness and joy.

Those same themes ran through my final TIFF 2009 film, The Waiting City (7/8), an introspective and somewhat quiet meditation on love and relationships under pressure. The story follows a young Australian couple (Radha Mitchell and Joel Edgerton) in Kolkata, India, where they hope to bring home the young girl they’ve adopted. But red tape and delays arise, forcing the culture-shocked pair to settle into their hotel and adjust to life in a foreign city amid increasing tension and doubts about their lives together. Both Mitchell (who’s always great) and Edgerton turn in some wonderfully nuanced performances that anchor the film, and their work is supported nicely by Samrat Chakrabarti as Krishna, a hotel staffer who becomes their de-facto guide through this new world.

And that, folks, is that as far as TIFF 2009 goes. Overall, I would say my decision to cut down my film-going made for a much less manic nine days... and, though I’m still tired at fest’s end, I’m far less bitter and exhausted than I have been in years previous.

If you’re curious about which films won which awards, click here.

Otherwise, that’s a wrap until 2010.

TIFF 2009

Sometimes, when I select my TIFF films, I try to create some kind of theme, whether it be for the overall collection of screenings or just the movies I see on a given day. On Friday, I selected two films dealing with groups of teenaged girls – one set at a hoity-toity boarding school in the UK, the other set in the gang-riddled streets of South Central Los Angeles.

First up was Cracks (5/8), a drama that I’d really been looking forward to seeing but one that left me feeling rather frustrated with its storytelling and choices. Directed by Jordan Scott (daughter of Ridley) and positively dripping with homoerotic subtext, the story centers on Miss G (Eva Green), an exotic and alluring housemother to a group of enamored boarding-school students in the 1930s. In their eyes, she’s a daring goddess... but when a young Spanish aristocrat (Maria Valverde) arrives and indirectly upsets the balance of power among the young women, things get very weird. For the first 45 minutes or so of the film, I loved it and thought “this is a full-pie film!,” but when it became painfully obvious that the filmmakers were going to pull out the tired old “unbalanced lesbian predator” card, I deflated in my seat. Arguments can be made that the behavior of the film’s characters has little to do with sexuality and more to do with power, and that’s fine and I can buy that... but based on the conversations I overheard as the audience left the theater, I’m not sure that’s what people took away from what they saw. It’s a gorgeously shot film with some terrific performances, but its final third kind of undermines those things, in my opinion.

Juxtaposing the idyllic setting of Cracks was Down For Life (6/8), a gritty – both in terms of subject matter and storytelling – drama about a teenaged girl named Rascal (Jessica Romero, in a terrific debut), who wants out of the gang life she’s lived for years. Filled with plenty of hard-hitting story points and turning an unflinching eye on the brutal violence that permeates every corner of Rascal’s life, the film spends a day in her world as she struggles with her future. It was interesting to experience the movie in a packed theater, alongside folks who clearly didn’t know what they were getting when they picked this screening – gasps and audible shock sprung up from time to time.

But perhaps the most surprising thing happened before the screening even began, when one of the producers stood onstage to welcome us, and informed us that the lead actress (Romero) – a complete unknown, who’d been a ward of the state when she was cast and for whom special provisions had to be made for the shooting and promotion of the project – was now incarcerated in a juvenile detention center as a result of some bungled red tape and her trip to TIFF. It was a strangely sobering way to kick off a decidedly sobering screening.

TIFF 2009

Only one film on the docket yesterday – the documentary Cleanflix (7/8), which examines Utah-based companies that “sanitize” Hollywood films by editing out sex, nudity, profanity and violence. Co-directors Andrew James and Joshua Ligairi profile a number of shop owners, who explain their businesses and the demand for the services they offer... especially given their location in the Mormon-centric state, where watching R-rated films is prohibited by religion. As the film unspools, though, it becomes as much a look at how quickly money can corrupt as it is about artistic integrity vs. censorship.

And, even more interestingly enough, the owners of these companies actually make some valid points – most notably: there is a big market for “clean” versions of Hollywood films, but Hollywood isn’t providing them to the consumers. Studios edit films for use on airplanes or television or foreign markets, but those same edited films are not available for rent or purchase by Americans. Why? There’s some great discourse on the subject, and a number of notable directors – including Steven Soderbergh, Neil LaBute, Michael Apted and Michael Mann – contribute to the film.

There was a fantastic and super-long post-film Q&A with the directors, a couple of their subjects and a number of crew, and I was totally impressed with the intelligent questions posed by my fellow audience members.

Speaking of Q&A sessions, I’d also like to reiterate something I’ve cited in TIFF diaries and assorted film fest coverage I’ve done in the past: all moderators are not created equal, and TIFF seems to have the broadest spectrum in terms of quality. Some are really awful (they shall remain nameless but I quietly groan whenever they take the stage) and some, like Sarafina DeFelice, are awesome. She’s new, but is becoming the Myrocia Watamaniuk of TIFF 2009 for me.

TIFF 2009