Beautiful People (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
One of the most significant discoveries at Cannes this year, where it was voted best film in the official sidebar Un Certain Regard, the exuberant Beautiful People introduces a bright new talent in its Bosnian writer-director, Jasmin Dizdar, who has deftly assembled a multi-charactered, London-set narrative of disparate characters whose fates are interlinked. Although set in 1993, the movie bristles with an urgent topicality.
In an arresting, scene-setting opening, two men from same Bosnian village, a Serb and a Croat, recognise each other on a London bus and a vicious fight immediately breaks out. Another Bosnian refugee (Edin Dzandzanovic) is hospitalised after an accident and falls for a junior doctor (Charlotte Coleman), whose father is a Tory MP.
An overworked obstetrician (Nicholas Farrell) is having domestic problems, as is a BBC reporter (Gilbert Martin) who is about to leave for Bosnia. Three football hooligans mug a black youth for the airfare to Rotterdam, where England is playing its World Cup qualifier against Holland. And the obstetrician has to deal with a Bosnian refugee (Walentine McGaughey) who is pregnant after being raped by soldiers, and with her young fiance who wants the baby aborted.
Dizdar's tightly drawn, ingeniously structured and frenetically paced film dexterously draws and interconnects all these characters - and many others - with such skill and wit that he sustains the viewer's willing suspension of disbelief, even when some of the coincidences he devises would be resistible in a less absorbing context. The film is charged with a powerful humanity and honesty.
While it deals persuasively with themes drawn from English life (overworked hospital staff, Tory lifestyles, class divisions, soccer hooliganism), it is at its most effective and most chilling when a stoned young Londoner (Danny Nussbaum from TwentyFour Seven) unexpectedly finds himself detoured into the terror and chaos of the Srebrenica conflict.
Michael Dwyer
Drop Dead Gorgeous (15) General release
The phenomenal success of The Blair Witch Project is certain to further fuel the current vogue for mockumentaries (mock documentaries), and several more are due here in the months ahead. Opening today is Michael Patrick Jann's black comedy, Drop Dead Gorgeous, which purports to deal with a documentary crew as they follow the run-up to a high school beauty pageant in a hick Minnesota town.
The front-runners are daughters of women whose rivalry when they were contestants back in their teens still festers. Kirstie Alley plays the ostentatiously wealthy Gladys, who won that time and is grooming Becky (Denise Richards), her spoiled brat of a daughter, to repeat her success. Ellen Barkin plays the boozy, wasted Annette who lives in a trailer park with her virtuous, too-good-to-be-true daughter, Amber (Kirsten Dunst), who works part-time at the local morgue after school and is Becky's main rival.
The humour gets progessively bitchier in Jann's cynical comedy - which was scripted by Lona Williams, herself a former Minnesota beauty queen - as Gladys is prepared to stop at nothing in her ruthless schemes to eliminate her daughter's competition. The darker the humour turns the more entertaining the movie proves, especially when it comes to contest time and Gladys switches from one ghastly outfit to another and her daughter truly tastelessly performs Can't Take My Eyes Off You.
The generally unbearable Alley lets rip for once and goes way over the top, keeping perfectly in tune with her material, while Barkin is surprisingly underused and Allison Janney makes her mark as her sparky best friend. However, the movie is a good deal closer to the gross humour of There's Some- thing About Mary than to Michael Ritchie's altogether more sophisticated and incisive treatment of a small-town beauty contest in his 1975 movie, Smile.
Michael Dwyer
The General's Daughter (18) General release
In Simon West's whodunnit murder mystery, set on a US army base in the dank and swampy American South, John Travolta plays a military investigator called in to investigate the ritual murder of a bright young female officer who just happens to be the daughter of the army's most powerful general (James Cromwell). The fact that Cromwell is on the verge of embarking on a political career adds to the pressure on Travolta to conclude his investigation before the civil authorities are called in.
Travolta soon finds that things on the base are not as clean-cut and straightforward as its commanders would like him to believe. Evidence of drug-taking, sado-masochistic rituals, rape and corruption surfaces before you can say "How's your father?"
West's track record is in big, slick, dumb entertainments like ConAir, and he brings some of that aesthetic to The General's Daughter - not a filter is left unused, a crane movement unexplored or an atmospheric guitar left untwanged on the soundtrack. But, for a while, there's much to enjoy, not least a gallery of grotesques which includes such high-quality character actors as James Woods and Timothy Hutton. Indeed, the presence of Cromwell adds to the expectation that we might be in store for a military version of LA Confidential, with Travolta in the Kevin Spacey role. And Travolta is good here, after a string of rather underwhelming performances verging on self-parody in the last couple of years. Accompanied by a more than feisty sidekick in Madeleine Stowe, he wisecracks his way through the investigation with a succession of surprisingly funny one-liners ("Why sheriff, I thought you'd be out with your nightstick, tending to the coloured folk," he drawls at one point to the Rod Steiger-ish local cop).
So far, so good, but The General's Daughter takes a disappointing nose-dive in its final act, when implausible sentimentality takes hold and bad pop psychology kicks in. The movie's more interesting sub-plots are jettisoned in favour of a banal denouement and unconvincing conclusion. At least, though, it doesn't follow the propaganda line of so many Hollywood military movies - it can only be a good sign when you see that the US Army refused, as here, to co-operate in any way with the film-makers.
Hugh Linehan
The Trench (15) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin; Capitol, Cork
From All Quiet on the Western Front to Regeneration, by way of Paths of Glory and La Grande Illusion, the first World War has provided the subject for some of the most powerful polemics in cinema. Most, if not all, have taken an elliptical approach to the horrors of trench warfare, perhaps because the sheer scale of the thing is beyond their means, but possibly also because representing the reality of the carnage might just be too alienating for an audience. The novelist and screenwriter William Boyd, making his directing debut with this ensemble drama, set on the eve of the Somme offensive in the summer of 1916, touches on many of the familiar tropes of the first World War drama - class inequalities, ineffective communication and incompetent commanders all figure. But his prime concern is to imagine the effect of war on a group of painfully young, working-class men in the hours before their inevitable deaths.
Shot entirely in an eight-foot-deep trench - one of the most forward British positions before the offensive - Boyd's film sets out to make a virtue of its claustrophobic setting, as the tensions within a squad of young soldiers begin to rise. One is picked off by a sniper, another killed by shellfire, but Boyd's film concentrates on the waiting, the increasing sense of fear and the sheer physical misery of the trench. In this he is well served by a lively young cast, led by Paul Nicholls, who plays the 17-year-old private through whose eyes most of the action is seen. Daniel Craig, as the slightly older sergeant, alternates impressively between paternalistic concern and hard-bitten weariness. It's hard, though, to escape the feeling that we've seen all this before, and Boyd's rather conventional use of camera and editing fails to find a visual language to match the horror and pity of his story.
Hugh Linehan
Instinct (15) General release
Is Anthony Hopkins becoming to the 1990s as Richard Harris was to the 1970s? Certainly, Hopkins has made a few choices in recent years which hardly seem based on the quality of scripts. One can only hope that he received a very large cheque for Instinct, since nobody else is likely to derive much pleasure from this turgid eco-melodrama.
Hopkins plays a respected primatologist who had disappeared in Rwanda while studying mountain gorillas. Discovered by a troop of park rangers, he had killed two of them before being captured, convicted of murder and incarcerated in a Rwandan jail. Returned to a prison for the criminally insane in the US, he comes under the study of ambitious young psychiatrist Cuba Gooding Jr, who is determined to find out what happened to him in the jungle. Gooding could have saved himself (and us) a lot of time by asking the nearest five-year-old child, who would have had no problem correctly predicting the outcome of this dreary, silly, bloated story, leadenly directed by Jon Turteltaub. Like Hopkins, the fine French cinematographer Philippe Rousselot adds an air of spurious quality which is not even skin deep.
Hugh Linehan
The 1968 animated Beatles film, Yellow Submarine, is also released in a digitally re-mastered version at the Ambassador Cinema, Dublin, this week, with a general certificate.
