Toronto 2004

CANADIAN FEATURES AT THE TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2004 Again I looked for interesting Canadian productions at Toronto's International Film Festival 2004. This year, sad to relate, I found only few that warranted even faint praise. At the top of my list was the Festival's gala opener, Being Julia, produced by Robert Lantos - his second venture with Hungarian director István Szabó and like the first, Sunshine, Being Julia is set outside Canada. It's an adaptation of an almost forgotten Somerset Maugham novel, the story of Julia Lambert, an ageing but not yet fading diva of the London stage in the 1930s. I found Being Julia absorbing, amusing and with an extraordinary sense of location and period. Clean, directed by France's Olivier Assayas, is a Canadian film in the sense that the character of Albrecht as played by Nick Nolte typifies the kind of Canadian who would support peacekeeping,...