Cinema with currency

Filmmakers take on the economy and corporate culture at the Toronto International Film Festival.

George Clooney and Vera Farmiga, the stars of Up in the Air, at the Toronto International Film Festival.

True to form, the Toronto International Film Festival presented films over the past week ranging from brazenly commercial to experimental. True to these difficult times, no major deals were announced, yet discoveries were there to be found all the same. In City of Life and Death, the new discovery is the Chinese filmmaker Lu Chuan, who has taken on a huge subject, the Japanese siege and conquest of the Chinese city of Nanking in 1937. Some 300,000 Chinese died in that campaign and it would point to the horrors of the war to come.

Lu Chuan's epic is in black and white, evoking classic war films and the newsreel of the time. His cast of Chinese superstars, led by Liu Ye and Fan Wei, play characters who display courage in the face of near-certain death. Yet his perspective is new - and controversial - in its narration of part of the film from the point of view of a Japanese officer, which the director said would have not survived censorship 20 years ago. At the film's opening in China in the spring, protests reflected the intensity of feeling about events that are 70 years in the past.

Jason Reitman, meanwhile, has seized on the most topical of themes, the collapsing economy and its human toll, in Up in the Air. While Michael Moore, who was also in Toronto, took the public on a first-person tour of victims of the crisis in Capitalism: A Love Story, Reitman tells his story of economic gloom in a proven Hollywood formula, the romantic comedy. The hero of his story, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), is a "career transition consultant", a specialist in corporate firings who is downsized, although not fired. At first the worst part of the corporate terminator's new status is curtailing his million-mile flying schedule, which had enabled Ryan to live comfortably without much human attachment. His new status also involves training a younger female downsizer who is destined to replace him.

Up in the Air being a comedy, Ryan's attempts at love with another frequent flyer, played by Vera Farmiga, go awry. So does Clooney's blithe composure, which had been reflected in generic hotel interiors and aerial views of American cities from Omaha to Des Moines, seen from 35,000 feet. The only thing that might keep this film from connecting with the American public that still has cash for a movie will be an upturn in the economy.

Another wry look at corporate culture that was drawn from the heartland and seems destined to reach it on the screen was The Informant!, by the veteran director Steven Soderbergh). Here Soderbergh tells the story of Mark Whitacre, a rising young chemist and executive at the agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, who embezzled huge sums of money in the 1990s while his firm was engaged in price-fixing, which led to massive fines and prison terms for the company's management. The script is inspired by a book on the scandal by Kurt Eichenwald, a reporter who covered the story for The New York Times.

Rather than point an accusatory finger, Soderbergh, like Reitman, has taken a light approach. The bouncy, carefree musical score is by the Hollywood composer Marvin Hamlisch, not a man whose melodies are associated with anything solemn. And the story of the corporate inside job is told like a fable of trouble in paradise. Played by a boyish Matt Damon, Whitacre seems more naive than criminal, even when all his embezzled millions are added up. Whitacre is now out of prison and, according to the film, running a new business.

Both The Informant! and Up in the Air are Hollywood projects with Hollywood stars and studio budgets. City of Life and Death, although budgeted modesty for its scale at $10 million (Dh36.7m), also comes from a new distributor backed by a venerable media institution, the National Geographic Society in Washington. None of these films entered the festival under the radar. The marketplace's volatility is a reason distributors were taking few chances in Toronto, and promoting upcoming titles to the fullest. The television host Oprah Winfrey was in town, singing the praises of Push, the motivational story (which premiered at Sundance and is now being launched in US cinemas) of a young African-American woman who triumphs over the twin misfortunes of illiteracy and an abusive mother. The New Zealand director Jane Campion journeyed to Canada to promote Bright Star, her new film about the loves and death of the poet John Keats, as did the French filmmaker Jacques Audiard, who won this year's Palme d'Or at Cannes for his prison saga, A Prophet.

TIFF itself is preparing for the long haul. The festival announced that it has raised most of the funds - a total of some $196 million (Dh720m) - for its new headquarters in a tower it is building in downtown Toronto. The new structure, designed by the Toronto architect Bruce Kuwabara, points to TIFF's roots. It is rising on land owned by the family of Reitman. Could a real estate comedy be next for the young director?