And the audience awards go to...Best film: Finder's Fee
Best director: Tim Blake Nelson for O
Best actor: John Cameron Mitchell for Hedwig And The Angry Inch
Best actress: Thora Birch for Ghost World
The 27th Seattle International Film Festival, the United States' largest, got off to a good start with The Anniversary Party, written and directed by Alun Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Many dismissed it as cinematic indulgence, but I found engaging the party thrown by a volatile bisexual writer (guess who) and his ageing neurotic wife (guess who), particularly its first hour, when the guests - played by Kevin Kline, Phoebe Cates, Gwyneth Paltrow, Parker Posey and a host of the directors' other real-life friends and colleagues - are at least trying to be on their best behaviour.
Alan Rudolph's Investigating Sex, at the closing-night gala, was middle-level Rudolph. Although not up there with his masterpieces Choose Me and The Moderns, this occasionally irritating yet often fascinating tale about a wealthy eccentric (Nick Nolte) who assembles a group of men to discuss sex academically during the closing days of the Roaring Twenties was a vast improvement on his last two offerings, Trixie and Breakfast Of Champions.
The festival offered more than 250 films from 25 countries. Ireland was represented by the uncle and niece Sheridans: Peter with Borstal Boy and Kirsten with Disco Pigs.
Within the event was a mini festival highlighting film from Thailand, whose movie culture remains one of world cinema's last uncharted realms. Most of what I saw was deeply rewarding.
There were two standouts: Nonzee Nimibutr's Nang-Nak, a haunting ghost story set in the jungles of 19th-century Thailand, whose shades of Bram Stoker's Dracula and Apocalypse Now made it a double dose of Francis Ford Coppola; and Tears Of The Black Tiger, an otherwise conventional Western that is presented within the framework of a 1950s Douglas Sirk melodrama and using a 1950s colour palette. The directing debut of Wisit Sartsanatieng, who wrote Nang-Nak, it was the most original offering at the festival.
China also impressed, with Li Gong giving a heartbreaking performance as the mother of a partially deaf child in Zhou Sun's Breaking The Silence; Taiwan offered Li-Kong Hsu and Chi Yin's operatic Fleeing By Night, the story of three friends in 1930s northern China whose paths diverge only to be reunited several years later.
Australia's two big offerings were Samantha Lang's The Monkey's Mask and Jonathan Teplitzky's Better Than Sex. Both starred the up-and-coming Australian actress Susie Porter, but neither was worthy of her talents: the former was a deathly boring film noir with a lesbian sub-plot, the latter a protracted one-night stand without the courage of its convictions.
The US offerings were a mixed bag. A big disappointment was the crowd-pleasing Hedwig And The Angry Inch. Based on the popular off-Broadway musical, John Cameron Mitchell's paean to 1970s glam rock tells the story of a German-born transsexual whose band performs in salad bars across the US, shadowing the stadium tour of Hedwig's former protΘgΘ, the depressed superstar Tommy Gnosis.
While some of Stephen Trask's songs are catchy in a faux-Tommy way, and Mitchell is appealing in the lead, the film lacks an emotional centre and becomes wearying after the first 30 minutes.
Another let-down was My First Mister, the feature-directing debut of the actress Christine Lahti, in which a teenage brat (played by Leelee Sobieski) falls in love with an older man (Albert Brooks) who happens to be dying of leukaemia. As in Lieberman In Love, her Oscar-winning short, Lahti leaves no manipulative stone unturned.
Equally distressing was Mar∅a Ripoll's Tortilla Soup, a remake of Ang Lee's 1994 film Eat Drink Man Woman that transferred the story to Hispanic Los Angeles. The food-preparing montages are sumptuous, but the rest of the film should have been left on the cutting-room floor.
Probably the festival's biggest disappointment was Lost And Delirious, the English-language debut of LΘa Pool, the acclaimed film maker from Quebec whose sublime Set Me Free was one of the best films of 2000.
Clearly not at home in a new language, Pool allows this boarding-school lesbian love story to degenerate into a never-ending series of unintended belly laughs.
But check out Susan Seidelman. After more than a decade and a half in something close to feature-film limbo, the director of Desperately Seeking Susan suddenly reappears with the delightful Gaudi Afternoon, a jazzy gender-identity romp set in Barcelona in which the marvellous Judy Davis and Marcia Gay Harden have the times of their lives.
Also great fun was Jeff Probst's ingenious Finder's Fee. Obviously inspired by David Mamet's 1987 film House of Games, this story of a lost lottery ticket keeps you guessing right to the final reel.
Beautifully acted and directed, Tim Blake Nelson's O is a contemporary update of Othello with Mekhi Phifer as Odin James, or O, a new player on the high-school basketball team who has quickly become "king of the courts", and Julia Stiles as the bright and beautiful Desi Brable.
Originally scheduled to open in the US in October 1999, the film was shelved when the Columbine High School shootings made the subject too hot to handle. Newly picked up by Lions Gate, it is due to be released here later in the year.
My two favourite films of the festival both dealt with strong and fascinating female characters.
Based on the serialised comic book by Daniel Clowes and directed by Terry Zwigoff, Ghost World features a pitch-perfect Thora Birch - the daughter in American Beauty - as a teenager who faces the uncertainty of life after high school.
Her scenes with Steve Buscemi as the older man who becomes her confidant are some of the best you are likely to see this year.
Equally stunning is Stockard Channing as a middle-aged corporate executive in The Business Of Strangers, Patrick Stettner's investigation of the difficulties women face in the male-dominated world of big business.
Smart, sexy, tense and lonely, Channing is a knockout in an Oscar-worth performance.
