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Blind Shaft
57th International Film Festival
in Edinburgh
With its combination of high-flyers (this is the largest film festival in the UK) and up-and-comers (one of the highlights is the 48-hour film challenge in which participants are randomly assigned a genre and title, then asked to script, shoot, and edit within two days), the Edinburgh Film Festival has real energy and genuine appeal. Not to mention a debonair and gracious patron: Sean Connery. More than 100 films were screened, with special sections for music and advertising videos, animation, shorts, script-writing workshops, rare screenings of Miklos Janosco, a Henri-Georges Clouzot retrospective, and documentaries. But the wide variety didn't compensate for the middling selections, which favored sentiment over content; the overall effect was admirable rather than dazzling.
Much
was made of Scotland's own Ewan MacGregor, who stars in Young
Adam, directed and scripted by David Mackenzie, which opened
the festival. Adapted from Alexander Trocchi's 1950s beat novel, it's
the story of Joe, a young drifter who puts aside his writing ambitions
to work the barges in the canals around Glasgow, where an affair with
his captain's wife is only the latest of several bad decisions. Beat
novels rarely make good movies: transferred to the more blatant medium,
their adolescent and romantic premises often become downright corny.
Young Adam inadvertently illustrates this problem. Mackenzie's
leaden direction mistakes preciousness for grit, with the cinematography
so tastefully autumnal that barging looks less strenuous than coolly
stylish. MacGregor and Tilda Swinton attempt to breathe life into characters
not only unsympathetic but utterly uncompelling, but their heavy-lifting
sex scenes are uncomfortably self-conscious and thespian. With its earnest
tone and unengaging characters, Young Adam is fraught and freighted
and ultimately runs aground.
Jim
Sheridan's semi-autobiographical In
America chronicles an Irish family's stint in New York in the
1980s, the move an attempt to make a fresh start after a death in the
family. Sheridan presents a Sesame Street-ready ethnic neighborhood
where the drug dealers are softees and AIDS becomes a learning opportunity;
most unsettling is the censored skyline, with the World Trade Center
conspicuously absent from the often-observed NYC skyline. The Towers
were integral to New York at the time and their exclusion strikes a
false note. Odder still is that two-thirds of the way through, In
America for a time becomes a far more complicated and captivating
study in loss. Paddy Considine brings real anger to his part as the
Sheridan stand-in, credibly subduing and finally manifesting the grief
for a lost child that underlies this story. And the always watchable
and gratifyingly unpredictable Samantha Morton imbues the wife with
more moxie than modesty, effectively cutting some of the sweetness of
their two daughters, cloyingly played by Sarah and Emma Bolger. In
America reverts to its fairy-tale sensibility at the end, which
is too bad.
An
unpromising conceit — thirtyish Wilbur tries again and again to
kill himself — made for one of the better projects in the festival.
Admittedly, lachrymal aims lurk in Wilbur
(Wants to Kill Himself) but they're beautifully undercut by
Jamie Sives's performance in the title role: you really feel he wants
to kill himself and how tiresome this is for those around him, particularly
his brother, understatedly played by Adrian Rawlins. A Jules and
Jim triangle develops when Wilbur and Alice, his brother's new wife,
fall for each other. As Alice, Shirley Henderson evokes many of Audrey
Hepburn's qualities — wit, intelligence, and the improbable combination
of sexiness and decency. Dark humor keeps the bittersweet ending from
descending into mush, offering instead a bracing affirmation of life.
The art direction merits special mention, with perfect details of
Scottish interiors, such as the near-ubiquitous wooden-slat-clothes
dryers, the animal and plant cut-out "scraps" favored by generations
of Scots children, and especially the inviting chaos of the second-hand
bookshop the brothers run.
Clearly
Gregor Jordan wanted Ned
Kelly to evoke the insouciance and bravado of Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid and even Knocking on Heaven's Door,
positioning Heath Ledger's Kelly as a kind of rock star/ Robin Hood
for the pre-independence Australians. The sepia-tone cinematography
and rousing score hamhandedly remind us this is a Legend but the curiously
Peckinpah-style explosions and gore make it feel like yet another in
a series of movies-as-video-games. In the final scenes in which the
Kelly gang's furnacy armor bore a troubling resemblance to Monty Python's
Black Knight, and everyone looks so good and dies so excruciatingly
that the effect didn't so much invoke sympathy as skirt parody.
Edinburgh
was strong on debut features, among which The Hours of the Day
was especially striking. Using a circular structure, director Jaime
Rosales shows an apparently humdrum mother and her late-thirties son
breakfasting in their stolid middle-class apartment on the periphery
of a Spanish city, the camera-work nearly documentary in its matter-of-factness.
Slowly, details accrete: Abel (Alex Brendemühl) dithers about his shop,
placates his girlfriend, caters to his mother, but completes nothing,
remaining infuriatingly passive. Until he apparently randomly corners
a fellow visitor to a public men's room and strangles him; the scene
is shot in a single-take and in real time, the victim's struggle uncomfortably
long. Rosales' film has a stealthy quality that makes it linger long
after viewing, the whole far more complex than its prosaic parts suggest.
With overtones of Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing and
with touches of early Roman Polanski and Chantal Akerman, The Hours
of the Day is detached and detailed, horrifying in its sheer normality.
Less
successful but also concerned with the banality of murder is For
She's a Jolly Good Fellow. In her first feature, Siegrid Alnoy also
brings Akerman to mind, occasionally conveying the true horrors of "la
vie normale." Sasha Andres plays Christine Blanc, a pitiless and awkward
misfit, willing to go to any length to fit in with her average officemates.
The self-conscious and over-tricky cinematography softens some of the
brutality, though the costuming, especially Christine's ox-blood-red
wardrobe, is particularly effective. Appropriately, Christine finds
her match at the mall, her favorite spot because it doesn't ask anything
of her and her eventual liberation through murder rings true. Unlike
The Hours of the Day, For She's a Jolly Good Fellow doesn't know
when to stop and the end feels wishful rather than fated.
Several
recent UK and Irish films fall into a shaggy-dog category — I
Went Down and Lawless Heart are examples, as is John Crowley's
first feature, Intermission.
Here lovers break up and set an entire community out of kilter. The
opening, in which Colin Farrell vies Tim Roth in Pulp Fiction
for sudden fury, sets in motion the various stories that ricochet off
one another, their social circle in a kind of Shakespearean disarray until the couple
reconcile. Yet again Shirley Henderson shines in a supporting role, her
amazing use of a washed-out pale blue hoodie managing to convey her rage
and pain after a humiliating break-up of her own. Though the script
works some jokes very hard (particularly the delights of brown sauce),
Intermission was appealing and fun to watch.
Four
men with little in common find themselves in a DWI rehabilitation group
in the lively and brisk One for the Road. First-time feature
director and writer Chris Cooke never condescends to his deeply flawed
characters. One for the Road is light on plot, essentially tracing
the odd friendship that develops among the four, culminating in a night
of excess at the Donald Trump-like home of the most successful. Art
direction deserves special attention, from the affirmations that festoon
the DWI therapy room to the fantastically tasteless mansion.
Similarly
energetic is Four Eyes.
Made on a fish & chips budget by writer/director Duncan Finnigan, Four
Eyes centers on Paul Hunt (Gordon Grant), seen first face-down in
a field while a couple argue over money. He's apparently been mugged,
though he lies so compulsively throughout the film it's hard to know
if he's ever straight. At his sales job, his boss has kitted out the
whole team with glasses, which he says an American survey proved makes
people think you're 15% smarter. Like the spiky UK television series
The Office, Four Eyes shows the caviling and beastliness that
define so much of cubicle life. In a grimly funny scene, Paul and his
pregnant girlfriend discuss the money they don't have while his live-in
father gathers his paltry treasures, aiming to fund the couple's new
place at the pawnshop, all of it sound-tracked by an unseen leaf blower.
Four Eyes loses focus a bit at the end, but Finnigan is definitely
a director to watch.
There
were also truly dismal films such as Mike Hodges' I'll
Sleep When I'm Dead, a a perfect example of how style and exposition
and moodiness add up to nothing. The film does have a great watery look,
as though the action — nearly all of it shot at night — were
taking place in the bottom of a tank. But a gangster trying to absolve
his past by becoming a woodsman needs a personality to match, and Clive
Owen as the unfortunately named Will Graham brought only the eponymous
cracker to mind. Wearing his hoodie like the Shroud of Turin, Graham
decides to avenge the suicide of his kid brother, a figure about whom
so little is revealed it's like being asked to care about an actor on
a billboard. The trite dialogue and music do nothing to help, and the
conclusion, in which Will calls up his barber and tailor to get himself
properly suited-up to retaliate against those who drove his brother
into the abyss looks more like a makeover than a rubout.
Even
the excellent Shirley Henderson couldn't salvage Alison Peebles' After Life,
a gooey family melodrama that relies on medical clichés as unwelcome
as the common cold: people with Down Syndrome are more sensitive than
humanity in general, cancer as the Great Unifier. Kevin McKidd plays
a driven journalist forced to return home when his mother, having fallen ill, is unable to care for his afflicted sister. After Life has
a soap opera rhythm and lines to match, emphasized by McKidd throwing
punches at doors and the like.
McKidd
had another chance for scenery chewing in Richard Jobson's debut feature,
16 Years of Alcohol, a semi-autobiographical look at rock and
roll and getting sober. The opening voice-over, narrating a stylized
child's memory of his father's drinking and philandering, relied so
heavily on the word hope that I lost mine. Though Jobson tries for the
meanness and menace of Clockwork Orange, his Glasgow louts never
get beyond an unappealing petulance; unsavory oiks you'd cross the street
to get away from.
Similarly
disappointing was Christophe Blanc's A
Big Girl Like You, which makes the fatal error of taking a teenage
girl's desire to be "a real woman" at face value, dwelling on the highly overrated loss of innocence
theme. As played by Mercedes Cechetto, Sabine
has an undeniable brashness, but her adventures feel scripted rather
than natural and her sullen pout gets old very fast. A Big Girl Like
You works like the irksome video diary of a 16-year-old, whose great
adventures (a porn film, an older amant) have no consequences
other than to make her poutier than ever.
Pablo
Berger takes a much more entertaining look at porn in his first feature,
Torremolinos
73. Set in Franco's Spain, the film not only faithfully reproduces
the styles, personal and domestic, that marked the era, but hints at
the pan-Europe cooperation to come. Based on a true story, it's about
Alfred (Javier Camará), milquetoast encyclopedia salesman, and his wife,
Carmen (Candela Peña), who take part in a sex-guide project, Danish-funded
and for export only. Given a camera and told to document their sex life,
Alfredo discovers his inner Ingmar, imbuing these bedroom training films
with Bergmanesque angles and turning his wife into a Danish star. Berger
has a light touch with some amusing sight gags such as the fully armored
knight that serves as Alfredo's stand-in while his wife brushes up on
seduction and Alfredo's suggestion that he and his wife cure their childlessness
with adoption after spying Cine magazine's cover story on Born
Free. Wry and sympathetic, Torremolinos 73 evokes an entire
era without sugarcoating it, with plenty of real laughs along the way.
Another
unexpectedly funny film is Evenhand,
a first feature by Joseph Pierson. A local policeman and his new partner
patrol small-town Texas, forced to give away plush toys to children
who witness arrests as a public relations ploy. The film has a garish,
supermarket-at-night look and focuses on the petty sadism of the officers'
petty routine, such as when the small force lunches outside on the forlorn
lawn outside a crack house just to hassle the inhabitants. Several shots
show offenders in the background, wearing boards proclaiming I AM A
THIEF or I DWI like portable stockades. Evenhand would benefit
from a quicker ending, but the pace is solid and promises good things
from Pierson.
The
most striking up-and-comer is Li Yang, whose first feature Blind
Shaft provided some of the very best viewing at the festival.
This beautifully realized and chilling film has a folktale feel, emphasized
by the barren, mysterious landscapes and especially the velvety dark
of the mines (the one Li Yang filmed in collapsed two days after he
finished). Set among the itinerant coal miners of post-Mao China, which
one character describes as "having shortages of everything except people,"
it focuses on two men whose scheme for making money is to befriend a
third by telling him that if he poses as a cousin they'll break him
into the lucrative coal mining business. They're like stray, feral dogs
— in fact, one flap on the hat of the meaner of the two is always
up, a kind of canine alertness. They insure their patsy then kill him,
collecting the payout from owners only too happy to see them move on
elsewhere. They pick up what appears to be the perfect victim, except
one of the cons becomes genuinely fond of him. "We'll get him laid today
and kill him tomorrow," he suggests. Not only did the film engage narratively,
but it also managed to convey the desperation and toil of life in China
without being didactic. The mine scenes are so creepy and claustrophobic
that even the well-air-conditioned cinema seemed airless.
American
Splendor, written and directed by Shari Springer and Robert
Pulcini, closed the festival. The movies seem to have discovered curmudgeons
in the past few years and Harvey Pekar, played with abject spleen by
Paul Giamatti, fits the bill perfectly. The narrative of his rise to
fame; his oddball friends; finding his perfect mate in his wife Joyce
(Hope Davis); his bout with cancer; and ultimate semi-happy family life
with their adopted daughter has an inadvertent Horatio Alger quality
to it. Pekar's snide remarks feel like posturing. He definitely keys
into the often lackluster qualities of non-celebrity American life and it's
mildly interesting to see the actors side-by-side with the people they're
based on but not nearly startling enough. Like Michael Moore and his
obvious and hard-to-disagree-with commentaries, the writers/directors
of American Splendor offer remarks but no insights. An appropriate
end to a festival with too much whimper and not enough bang.
November 2003 | Issue
42
Copyright © 2003 by Megan Ratner
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