A number of new American and European movies raised both eyebrows and hackles at the recent Toronto International Film Festival with their direct confrontation of such taboo subjects as paedophilia, incest, extreme violence and casual sex and drug-taking, . Eschewing allegorical subtleties, all the films are set in the present or very recent past, and are the work of film-makers aged in their thirties or late twenties.
All should be making their way to Irish screens in the months ahead, censorship permitting - and in many cases, that censorship may take the form of self-censorship by their distributors. Already one of these films, Todd Solondz's Happiness, has been dropped for US distribution by October Films, the specialist division of Universal Pictures, which felt it too hot to handle. Instead, an independent production company, Good Machine, has set up a distribution outlet to release Happiness in the US this month.
Voted in a poll of critics as the best of the 315 films in Toronto this year, Happiness is set among an extended family in New Jersey.
The parents of this dysfunctional dynasty, played by Ben Gazzara and Louise Lasser, are on the verge of breaking up after 40 years of marriage. One of their daughters (Jane Adams) is a lonely and naive idealist, unlucky in love and work. Another daughter is a successful author (Lara Flynn Boyle) who turns the tables on a sexually frustrated neighbour (Philip Seymour Hoffman) by returning his smutty phone calls. The third daughter (Cynthia Stevenson) projects an archetypal all-American homemaker image which disguises the fact that her marriage is sexless; later, her psychiatrist husband (Dylan Baker) is revealed as a paedophile who preys on his son's school-friends.
The inter-connected protagonists also include a promiscuous and violent Russian taxi driver (Jared Harris), and a despairing, overweight woman (Camryn Manheim) who exacts lethal revenge on a man who rapes her.
In a skilfully structured and executed, multi-charactered scenario writer-director Solondz strips bare the veneer of respectability, acceptability and cosiness with which these characters mask their secret lives. Made all the more unnerving by its spurts of very black humour, Happiness is a challenging and unsettling film, never more so than in its revelation of the psychiatrist as an unrepentant paedophile.
"What makes it tragic is that he's a great father who loves his son and family," Solondz commented in Toronto. "He's not a monster, but he struggles with the monster within and succumbs to it. Personally, I'm never depressed by something that's well done, even if the subject matter is emotionally difficult.
"I don't find my film that bleak, myself. There's a moral centre there. I give the audience enough credit that I don't need to say anything as obvious as `Rape is bad', to have a moral meaning."
Happiness contains two scenes featuring semen, which startled audiences when the film screened at Cannes in May. But audiences in Toronto were much less taken aback - perhaps because Happiness comes in the wake of the scatological US comedy, There's Something About Mary, which employs semen for its most outrageous, and most talked-about, visual gag. The latter film, the most profitable released at the American box-office this year, is now a big hit at Irish cinemas, where it is restricted to audiences over 15 years old. Cameron Diaz, star of There's Something About Mary, turned up on Toronto screens, joining Christian Slater, Jon Favreau and Jeremy Piven, in Very Bad Things, an ultra-black comedy which makes There's Something About Mary seem like something by Jane Austen. Peter Berg, the actor who plays Dr Billy Kronk in the TV series Chicago Hope, makes his directing debut with Very Bad Things, which deals with a stag party in Las Vegas during which a prostitute is accidentally killed. What follows involves the five male partygoers in a chain of guilt and aggression - and amazing cold-bloodedness - which few survive.
What is most audacious about Berg's movie is that the more serious its themes become, the wilder and blacker its humour turns. Echoing some of Todd Solondz's comments, Michael Schiffer describes Very Bad Things as "dazzling and insane, because when monsters emerge from characters we identify with real people, the kind of people we know and grew up with, we can't dismiss them or hold them at arm's length. By exposing them, Peter's film reveals the demons inside all of us."
A more thoughtful and responsible approach to that theme is taken by Bryan Singer, the gifted young director of The Usual Suspects in his riveting meditation on the individual's capacity for evil in Apt Pupil. Adapted from a novella by Stephen King, Singer's psychological horror movie features Brad Renfro as a bright, inquisitive high school student who takes his interest in the Holocaust to extremes when he recognises a Nazi war criminal (Ian McKellen) on a bus and confronts him, offering not to reveal his identity to the authorities in exchange for the details of the man's horrific past activities.
Seeped in sinister atmosphere, the film follows the boy's obsession as he buys the man a Nazi uniform as a Christmas present and orders him to wear it; reluctantly agreeing, the man soon reverts to character, reawakening the past he has suppressed so fastidiously. The sting in the tale is how this taps into the boy's own potential for evil. And the power of the film is heightened by its remarkable central performances, with young Renfro matching the veteran McKellen all the way.
The American suburbia depicted by Happiness, Very Bad Things and Apt Pupil seems like another planet compared with the wholesomeness of suburban life cherished in the US sitcoms of the late 1950s and early 1960s, such as The Donna Reed Show and Father Knows Best. But even those idyllic settings are not immune to the questioning of contemporary cinema, as screenwriter Gary Ross exhibits in his directing debut, Pleasantville, which takes its name from the title of a fictional 1950s TV series in which everyone's as sweet as Mom's apple pie.
The flies in this particular ointment are David and Jennifer (Tobey Maguire and Renee Witherspoon), a pair of present-day American teenagers catapulted into the past (don't ask how) and into the roles of Bud and Mary Sue, the squeaky-clean siblings of Pleasantville, a place where the temperature is always 72 degrees, day and night, and all the adults sleep apart in twin beds.
For a while, everything happens according to the old world order: after a day's work Dad (William H. Macy) coos, "Honey, I'm home," and the impeccably dressed and coiffed Mom (Joan Allen) proffers a Martini before serving him dinner. But Jennifer/ Mary Sue bucks the system when she introduces Skip, the high school sports star, to sex, triggering a chain-reaction which throws the community into turmoil, with the forces of conservatism taking on those tending towards individuality - the latter are identifiable because they are now in colour within this literally black-and-white world. Combining the paranoia of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with the post-modern wit of The Truman Show, the ambitious and very clever Pleasantville is mildly subversive without resorting to heavy-handedness, played with deadpan panache by a fine cast, and assembled with excellent colour effects.
From Denmark, Festen (The Celebration) begins with an ostensibly happy extended family gathered for the 60th birthday of the patriarch, Helge (Henning Moritzen). The atmosphere suddenly sours and the scene is set for a long day's journey into night when, standing up to make a toast, one of Helge's sons, Christian (Ulrich Thomsen) seizes the opportunity to expose the sexual abuse inflicted by the father on him and his twin sister when they were young children.
Helge initially refutes the claims, as does his wife whose complicity and hypocrisy Christian also targets. The consequences make for coruscating drama, made all the edgier by the use of jerky, hand-held camerawork and Camcorder footage which re-defines the term home movie. Under the clear and confident direction of 28-year-old Thomas Vinterberg, this gripping movie builds to a stunning conclusion.
Even the palpable anger of The Celebration pales beside the fury in Seul Contre Tous (I Stand Alone), the first feature from 35-year-old writer-director Gaspar Noe and a sequel to his 1991 extended short film, Carne, a Cannes prize-winner. As in the first film, Seul Contre Tous centres on a butcher (Philippe Nahan) whose traumatic past is recounted in an extended rapid-fire prologue before the new film picks up his story.
Now unemployed and wholly dependent on his heavily pregnant lover, the butcher is a deeply frustrated and disturbed man. Avowedly racist, misogynistic and homophobic, he is brutally violent towards his wife and lusts after his mute teenage daughter. Like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and the Michael Douglas character in Falling Down, he suffers from an aching sense of failure and he feels entirely dislocated from society. Bemoaning that he has nothing to show for 35 years of work, he believes his country to be nothing but "ruins and unemployment". As his rage gathers momentum, he is a human time-bomb. Noe's ferociously caustic picture even carries on-screen warnings alerting the audience to, and counting down to, the horrors it's about to depict. Those warnings are fully justified in the case of this utterly uncompromised, brutal and harrowing picture of a delusional, demented man cracking up. Some who did not heed the warnings and, understandably, could take no more, didn't just walk out, they ran from the cinema.