Sex Sells at This Year’s TIFF

Sex always sells—the edgier, the better. And this week, in the Great White North, two of Hollywood’s most fetching middle-aged matinee idols edged with abandon. The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) hosted North American premieres of Queer and Babygirl, horny psychodramas respectively starring Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman in bold-stroke performances full of nuance, humor, and startling vulnerability. What a nervy display of established thespians rawdogging their already impressive careers.

Craig’s bare-it-all-to-bare-it-all turn as the tortured gay expat in Luca Guadagnino’s magnificent midcentury meditation Queer is a remarkable feat of acting in a woozy dream of a film. Based on William S. Burroughs’ book, written in the early ’50s but not published until 1985, Queer unwinds like a raw-nerve confessional, painfully sensitive and tender to the touch—an anguish that Guadagnino molds into a stunning reverie of a tortured life.

His superior skill as a filmmaker enhances every aspect of Craig’s turn as William Lee, a restless man adrift in the gay bars of Mexico City who falls for former sailor boy Eugene Allerton (Dree Starkey).  But make no mistake: Craig commands every frame, effortlessly shifting tones from levity to pathos with the confidence and swagger of an artist in complete control of his craft. And talk about fearless: to see the steely former 007 with that icy blue stare become a sweaty-palmed middle-aged man desperate to sexually please his pin-up boy toy is a transformation both startling and deeply human. In one reputation-changing scene, Craig stuffs his mouth with cock like he’s Lucille Ball with chocolates.

Hetero ladies, don’t worry: Kidman delivers all your dark fantasies in Halina Reijn’s saucy self-immolation Babygirl. This messy kink cudgel of a psychodrama leans on hot-and-heavy moments of torrid abandon to redeem an otherwise fairly incredulous office-affair romance. But the wild master-servant dialogue and scalding chemistry between brittle CEO Romy (Kidman, fully committed) and her overconfident intern Samuel (brooding bohunk Harris Dickinson) are equal parts subversive and jaw-dropping.

You want Kidman on all fours eating sweets from Dickinson’s hand like a pliant puppy? How about her rubbing one out to laptop porn after yet another unsatisfying post-coital night with her husband? Reijn’s film excels as an unfiltered exploration of female desire, and the totally committed Kidman is there for every step of its hip-grinding escalation. Just ask the jury at this month’s Venice Film Festival: they awarded her Best Actress for her sultry, soul-baring turn.

The Venice International Film Festival, which wrapped during TIFF, lauded another Toronto highlight when it gave its top prize to The Room Next Door, Padro Almodóvar’s mournful, deeply moving study of a woman with terminal cancer (Tilda Swinton) and the back-in-her-life old friend (Julianne Moore) who midwifes her illegal wish for euthanasia. Moore’s conflicted character is a rich brew of inner turmoil, but it’s Swinton’s majestic portrayal of quiet dignity and Kübler-Rossian acceptance that makes this autumnal film a powerful work of agnostic communion unlike any other in the Spanish master’s storied works.

Who doesn’t want a life well-lived? Toronto made room for a slew of movies that examined those personal regrets, including The Last Showgirl, a glitzy elegy for long-in-the-tooth Las Vegas performers. Pamela Anderson stars as Shelley, the fiftysomething titular star of a tits-and-feathers revue on the Strip which is closing after more than 30 years.  And what does this showgirl have to show for it? A single life of fly-by-night suitors, an estranged daughter (Billie Lourd), a tough-as-nails cocktail waitress friend (scene-stealing Jamie Lee Curtis), an adrift ingenue dancer (Kiernan Shipka) who looks up to her as a maternal figure, and a gentle stage producer (Dave Bautista) whose kind manner belies a hesitance to let himself get any closer to her. It’s a minor-key study of gaudy lives that Sin City first nourished and then, inevitably, devoured. Some wags compared the film to Darren Aronofksy’s far more powerful sad-sack drama the Wrestler, except with girls—calling it the Breastler.

You want to see a brutal life, then just watch The Brutalist. Adrian Brody stars as uncompromising architect László Tóth in Brady Corbet’s utterly brilliant 215-minute fiction biopic, an epic study of a Hungarian holocaust survivor who makes his way to the United States to reconnect with his cousin and start his life anew. Professional integrity is the film’s lodestar—as it was for writer-director Corbet, who spent seven years realizing his commanding vision—and the result is staggering. He tells Tóth’s story with a narrative verve that creates a propulsive force, and films in a cinematic style, shot in 70mm VistaVision, that feels aptly vintage while also thrillingly modern. As a rhapsodic vision of how transactional principles inevitably lead to corroded values and devastated lives, The Brutalist stands as a persuasive treatise on unalloyed ideals—and a warning for all those who betray them.