At Toronto, Women Who Are Shockingly, Thrillingly Human

TORONTO — “Destroyer,” a down-and-dirty thriller starring a sensational Nicole Kidman, isn’t the kind of movie that tends to have a red-carpet moment at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s too brutal, too pulpy and deliberately ugly. All that made it ideal for the Toronto International Film Festival, a sprawling showcase for unapologetic genre fictions and pleasurably difficult art films. The event’s size gives it abundant variety, which in turn is a reminder that a festival movie doesn’t need to conform to some perceived idea of cinema. There are 342 titles in this year’s edition, which ends Sunday, and it’s just too big and aesthetically diverse to set a clear new-season agenda, as smaller, more selective festivals try to do.

Over the decades, Toronto has become essential partly because along with the Telluride and Venice festivals, it kicks off the fall season and that grinding monthslong marathon known as the Oscar race. Awards hysteria quickly set in after the premiere of “A Star Is Born,” the latest telling of one of Hollywood’s most enduring self-mythologies about stardom and sacrifice. Its director, Bradley Cooper, and Lady Gaga play musicians turned lovers hurtling toward radically different destinies. It opens in a few weeks, and I’ll have more to say about it then (it’s good). But soon after the movie had its first screenings, the usual cycle of acclaim and backlash was in motion. (Rinse, repeat.)

Largely driven by the Oscar Industrial Complex, this yay-nay cycle doesn’t do movies or audiences any good, most obviously because it puts a movie’s shifting or nonexistent awards odds above art, culture, history. It’s no wonder that festivalgoers are willing to pay more, sometimes much more, to see a movie that’s not yet been assaulted by bad hot takes or written off as disappointing long before it has opened in theaters or gone into VOD oblivion. At Toronto, festivalgoers (600,000 last year) can watch movies on the big screen, gawk at celebrities and sit in on Q&As with directors and performers; they can also have the pleasure of discovering movies themselves.

One of the most pleasant discoveries this year is the number of female-driven and female-centric stories from both female and male filmmakers. “Destroyer” was among the most unexpected, just because the premise — Kidman plays Erin Bell, a dissolute, alcoholic Los Angeles detective with a sordidly violent past — sounded preposterous, even faintly risible. But the movie works, in great part because director Karyn Kusama, best known for her indie breakout “Girlfight,” commits to the material’s malice and keeps sentimentalism in check as fiercely as her hardworking star. This is genuine pulp fiction, filled with blood and despair and bad, bad people.

It’s also a trip, and wholly, uncomfortably, immersive. Although “Destroyer” most overtly evokes Abel Ferrara’s 1992 epic bummer “Bad Lieutenant” (it nods at the earlier film with the sounds of a baseball game on a car radio), it is very much its own movie. As with several other festival selections, the story is that of a character’s catastrophic personal and professional fall, capped by hints of possible redemption. On first sight, Kidman looks close to unrecognizable, her face carefully mottled and leathered, and her eyes ringed in a red hue you could call Permanent Hangover. The performance is so great, though, that soon enough you’re watching it, not the makeover.

It’s very satisfying to see an actress like Kidman use everything in her artistic toolbox while also chancing the audience’s sympathy and love. Erin Bell isn’t likable or (that horrid word) relatable, whether snorting, boozing or blasting a gun; she is instead fully felt, human. The same is true of Natalie Portman’s pop diva, Celeste, in “Vox Lux,” another festival standout. Directed by the actor Brady Corbet, making an artistic leap forward with his latest, it opens with a grisly high school shooting that Celeste survives and that, queasily, turns her — after a memorial song she sings becomes an internet sensation — into a new god, which presumably explains its title, Latin for “voice” and “light.”

Narrated by Willem Dafoe and graced with a brilliant score by Scott Walker and some mood-perfect songs from Sia, “Vox Lux” circles around its ideas — about violence set loose on bodies and souls alike — rather than delivering a comfortably tidy message about the perils of celebrity. Celeste climbs and climbs and then stumbles, occasionally hilariously (Portman delivers one of the best-timed pratfalls I’ve seen in ages), which put her in somewhat crowded company at Toronto. Presumably, the other movies about rising and falling female stars aren’t some kind of metacommentary about the enraging struggles and abuse that women in the entertainment industry continue to face. Looking for the zeitgeist in a handful of movies is often foolish. Even so, it was hard not to connect movies as different as “A Star Is Born” and “Vox Lux” with some of what was happening outside the theater, including the unfolding news about the CBS executive Les Moonves (forced out by allegations that he had sexually harassed women) and in Toronto a Saturday rally for gender equality that was held in front of festival headquarters. Director Alex Ross Perry may not have intended to make a point about sexual politics with his latest, “Her Smell,” about a punk singer (a fantastic Elisabeth Moss), but even so-called self-destructive women get a lot of help on their way down.

The world inhabited by the title character of “Gloria Bell” is neither as glamorous nor as tawdry as those in some of the other female-driven selections. It is more intentionally ordinary, though the movie is anything but. Written and directed by Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio, the movie is a close remake of his own Spanish-language “Gloria” (2013), starring Paulina García as a divorcée. An equally wonderful Julianne Moore stars in this version, which takes place in Los Angeles. There, Gloria works, dotes on her family (Michael Cera and Caren Pistorius play her adult son and daughter) and searches for love, often while twirling in dark dance clubs.

One night, Gloria locks eyes with Arnold (John Turturro), a look that inaugurates an uneasy intimacy that is by turns erotic, comic and poignant. One of the pleasures of a movie like “Gloria Bell” is how it turns an average life into the stuff of immersive fiction. Nothing especially big happens. Gloria doesn’t turn rogue or criminal, like the women do in Steve McQueen’s “Widows,” an art-film exercise in exploitation cinema that’s never as good as its headliners (Viola Davis and Elizabeth Debicki most especially). Instead, Lelio starts from the assumption that there is plenty of story material in the act of falling in love, in having children, in just getting up in the morning.

The characters in the lovely, at times piercingly elegiac “If Beale Street Could Talk,” the latest from Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight”), need to fight to have even an ordinary, unmolested life. Based on the 1974 James Baldwin novel, it traces a young couple, Tish and Fonny — a wonderfully matched KiKi Layne and Stephan James — just as they are starting their life together. Before long, they are living la vie bohème in a grungy, underlit West Village basement apartment with a bathtub in the center. There, as Tish relates their story in voice-over, the two plan for the future as Fonny pursues his muse, turning blocks of wood into sculpture amid swirls of cigarette smoke.

In many bohemian stories, the struggle is often internal. Here, though, Tish and Fonny are also weighed down with the entire history of American racism, which affects their seemingly simplest, most quotidian moments, the kind that white characters often take for granted, like finding a place to live or grocery shopping. (There’s also a nod to El Faro, one of Baldwin’s favorite Village restaurants.) Jenkins does some beautiful work here; he’s particularly good at creating intimacy and empathy with close-ups that are, by turns, plaintive and challenging. He creates a world through his characters, one that is insistently personal and never less than political.