After three years of celebrity drought, caused first by the pandemic and then the actors’ strike, the red carpet was awash with glamour this past week as Hollywood stars returned to the Toronto International Film Festival. Once again, mere civilians were able see movie stars in the flesh.
I’ve spent most of the past week in the dark, watching films, but I did duck into a Golden Globes party at the Four Seasons. While drifting through a ballroom of strangers, looking for a familiar face, Jennifer Lopez loomed into view as a nimbus of pale pink chiffon. I later read that her “semi-sheer tiered nude dress” was a more muted aftermath to the open-sided “revenge dress” of metallic sheaths that she’d worn to her TIFF premiere of Unstoppable. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that this apparition was a 55-year-old mother of twins who had weathered four marriages and just divorced to Ben Affleck.
Like I said, I was at the festival to see films. Especially ones that we may still be talking about at Oscar time. And a trend emerged. In one film after another, I found myself watching movie stars literally in the flesh, baring body and soul in raw performances of Olympian physicality.
Of course, film festivals like to cultivate a cinema of extremes, and we’ve come to expect young actors to be at its cutting edge. In Anora, Mikey Madison, 25, goes for broke as a Brooklyn lap-dancer who falls for the son of a Russian oligarch after a full course of home-schooled lessons in how to have sex. And We Live In Time’s Florence Pugh, 28, braves torrid love scenes with Andrew Garfield, undergoes an epic childbirth, vomits, shaves her head while being treated for ovarian cancer, and competes on the world stage as a celebrity chef.
But what was remarkable
At a certain age, movies stars are expected to slink from the spotlight and fade gracefully into dignified character roles, leaving the playing fields of love and sex to younger bodies. But this generation of older actors seem intent on defying Hollywood’s laws of gravity.
Twenty-five years after braving the kink of Eyes Wide Shut with Tom Cruise, Kidman ventures much further into the deep end of erotica in Babygirl. As Romy, the CEO of a robotics firm, in the opening scene we see her in throes of an orgasm with her husband (Antonio Banderas, 64), a faked climax as it turns out, because she then runs to her laptop to have a real one while watching porn. That’s quite the acting challenge – faking it then (presumably) faking it more convincingly. Whenever a movie star engages in a graphic sex scene, the voyeurism that we bring to a celebrity can be distracting. But in Babygirl there’s a real-life symmetry to the fictional premise. Kidman, like her character, is a woman with far more fame and power than the actor playing her blithely predatory intern (Harris Dickinson, 28). Which lends the fragility of her subjugation added resonance: her acting is not just an act.
But nothing could be more meta than Demi Moore’s astonishing performance in The Substance, as a faded celebrity in a body-horror satire about aging flesh. After being hailed and reviled as the most controversial film in Cannes, it came to TIFF larded with enough blood and guts to open the festival’s Midnight Madness program of genre cinema. Directed by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, it casts Moore as Elizabeth Sparkle, a washed-up Oscar-winning actress reduced to hosting a TV series of workout videos. Desperate for rejuvenation, she signs up for a mysterious black-market medical procedure involving weekly doses of a self-administered spinal tap that causes her to extrude a young and beautiful clone from her innards. As the clone (Margaret Qualley, 29) rises to stardom, Elisabeth is wracked by jealousy while her own body begins to rot.
This is sledgehammer satire, erupting in a revenge spectacle so deliriously disgusting that I began to worry about the film crew who had to clean up the blood and guts at the end of day. But what’s truly shocking about The Substance is the meta resonance of Moore’s casting –her audacity in exposing every angle her body in an unforgiving light, and the irony of her delivering the performance of her life as movie star who’s literally coming apart at the seams. Unlike her character, Moore has never received an Oscar nomination, and this is the kind of late-career big swing that would merit one. But as much as Hollywood loves to see itself mocked on screen, a horror film that holds up such a revolting vanity mirror to the industry may be even more daunting for the Academy than Anora’s brazen sex comedy.
Another star reinventing herself at TIFF was former Baywatch siren Pamela Anderson who, at 57, suddenly morphs into a serious dramatic actor with The Last Showgirl – a small American movie directed by Gia Coppola, granddaughter of Francis. As the lead, Anderson plays Shelley, a veteran dancer at a Las Vegas burlesque show that is abruptly ending its 30-year run. Co-starring with Jamie Lee Curtis, 65, as a perma-tanned cocktail waitress and Dave Bautista, 55, as a sad-sack stage manager, Anderson delivers a powerhouse performance that drew raves from audiences and critics at TIFF.
The film is no masterpiece, but playing a topless trouper who sacrificed motherhood for her “art,” Anderson is utterly credible and generates depths of pathos that mirror her own struggle to be taken seriously as a sex symbol whose talent and intelligence were eclipsed by her fame as a prime time “showgirl.” In a Q & A after screening, the Canadian actress – who now lives far from limelight in her childhood home in Ladysmith, B.C. – marvelled at this late twist to her career. “I thought it was over a long time ago,” she said. “I never thought I’d get to do a great film. But if you wait around long enough, dreams do come true.” That’s a fairy tale Hollywood can get behind. And if Oscar’s roulette wheel spins her way, an Oscar nod for Pamela Anderson isn’t out of the question. What makes her so appealing is that the role fits her like a second skin: because there’s no disconnect between her persona and her character, she seems wholly authentic.
For Daniel Craig, 56, to tackle the role of a gay junkie after 15 years of serving as a global icon of straight machismo is a far bigger stretch. The only things that James Bond and his character in Queer have in common is that they are both international men of mystery who wear dapper suits and have an appetite for hard liquor and blunt seduction. But the sex is gay and the liquor is tequila, knocked back in shots – save for a brief scene of him sipping martinis with a lover, which may be a winking homage to 007. Also, Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino directs Queer with the high-style sensuality that he brought to Call Me By Your Name and Challengers. Bathed in golden light, the Mexican streets and exotic bars would make Bond feel right at home. The film creates in its own synthetic universe, riddled with anachronistic needle drops from the likes of New Order and Prince (who also serves as an erotic troubadour for Kidman’s erotic delirum in Babygirl).
But within all those shiny trappings, this British actor embodies the outlaw desires of Queer’s decadent Yankee tourist with raw nerve and breathtaking commitment. At the heart of the film are the gay sex scenes, which are more explicit, passionate and prolonged than anything ever acted by a straight movie star. They aren’t X-rated. Other penises do appear onscreen, but not Craig’s. However, he makes up for that modesty with all-you-can-eat bouts of French kissing, as if determined to set some sort of cinematic record for oral gymnastics. He certainly works hard to convince us that his voracious lust for men is genuine. But there’s no getting around the fact that Craig’s charisma and physique are more Bond than Burroughs. And because of his sheer star power, it’s hard to suspend disbelief when we’re conscious of watching the heroics of a famous actor busting sexual boundaries with the fierce determination of someone attempting a challenging stunt. That said, he delivers a beautifully detailed performance that trembles between vulnerability and wit, and its ground-breaking significance may well earn him his first Oscar nomination – which I thought he deserved for his Bond swan song in No Time To Die (2021).
Another eminent British alumnus of the Bond franchise, Ralph Fiennes, takes on his own Herculean challenge at 61 with his role as Ulysses in The Return. Directed by another Italian, Umberto Pasolini, it dramatizes the final chapter of Homer’s Odyssey, and reunites Fiennes with Juliette Binoche, his co-star in The English Patient. We first see him lying prone and naked in the surf of an Aegean cove, washed up on shores of Ulysses’ island home of Ithaca. Resuscitated by the locals, as he steps into the sunlight bearded and bedraggled – displaying full frontal nudity – there’s a weird frisson, as if the movie has dropped us into another dimension. On a mission to reclaim his throne and his wife Penelope (Binoche) from the corrupt gang of suitors, his Ulysses disguises himself as a beggar, until finally revealing himself in the climactic bloodbath. But the ultimate reveal is the actor’s body. When he strips away his rags, leaving only a loin cloth, and the camera pans down his glistening frame, it’s a jaw-dropping moment – jeez, Ralph Fiennes is ripped!
Though The Return’s sword-and-sandal spectacle of half-naked men plays like an awkward throwback to 50s cinema, Fiennes is mesmerizing at every turn. The scene of him stringing Ulysses’ almighty bow is a minute master-class in acting. This, however, isn’t the TIFF movie that will take him to the Academy Awards.
That would be Conclave, an exquisitely crafted film from German director Berger, who won an Oscar for All Quiet on the Western Front. Adapted from Robert Harris’ pulp novel about a cloak-and-dagger papal succession, Berger elevates the source material while drawing a career-best performance from Fiennes. The film emerged from TIFF as the most surefire Best Picture candidate and Fiennes, whose Oscar is overdue, is well-poised to win.
Sometimes a red robe can be more alluring than a loin cloth.
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