Our top choices for TIFF 2010:
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Cinematical - A highbrow festival like Toronto doesn’t offer many opportunities to laugh, and I was grateful for this one. Easy Virtue, an adaptation of an early Noël Coward play, is a droll and witty delight, a superb showcase for its cast, and a return to fine form for The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert director Stephan Elliott, who last turned in the unsettling but incomprehensible Eye of the Beholder nearly 10 years ago. Where most TIFF films seemed to glower at me from the screen, this one winked and smiled.
Noël Coward may seem a strange choice for Elliott, whose films have favored the bizarre and the obscure. I don’t know what attracted the filmmaker to this project, but I’m glad that something did. The material may seem almost purely verbal, all clever turns of phrase and sardonic interjections (what Americans think of as “Britishness”), but Elliott is constantly concerned with how the movie looks and sounds. Fittingly, he manages to give it a curious, otherworldly feel. This is most pronounced in the opening sequence, which marries choppy black-and-white footage, odd angles, and a jazzy soundtrack to introduce us to the characters and transport us to a universe that is ever so slightly off-kilter. It’s a welcome recognition that these hyper-literate, impeccably constructed old comedies – Coward, Wilde, etc. – don’t take place in a world quite like ours.
The characters we meet in the haunting opening are Larita Huntington (Jessica Biel), America’s first female racecar driver, and John Whittaker (Ben Barnes), heir to the fortune of an aristocratic British family. John meets Larita on his world travels (apparently par for the course for young male British aristocrats) and up and marries her, to the horror of his ultra-traditional mother Veronica (Kristin Scott Thomas). The rest of the film is dedicated to the battle that ensues when John brings Larita to his family’s obscenely opulent castle to live, at least for a while, with mom and his two unmarried sisters (Kimberley Nixon and Katherine Parkinson). Veronica is having none of John and Larita’s plan to ditch the estate and move to London, and intends to scuttle it by any means necessary. Also there, albeit barely, is John’s bored father (Colin Firth), who spends most of his time taking sarcastic swipes at his uptight wife… [Full Story]
