Adolescence can be tough, and turning 14 has been a difficult transition for the Dublin Film Festival. The organisers faced into the event with a new programme director in Maretta Dillon, a new manager in Anne Burke, a move of dates to April, a shift in programming emphasis towards European cinema, and the biggest psychological barrier of all after 13 years at the Screen cinema, a new venue in Virgin.
The result was a relatively low-key event which lacked the excitement and atmosphere of the Cork and Galway festivals in recent years, and offered a programme which, while solid, sometimes bordered on the merely worthy. For whatever reason - the venue, the dates, the content, or all three - attendances were clearly down on many previous Dublin festivals. Maretta Dillon says that attendance figures were "comparable" with the 1998 festival and that she sees this year's event as a stabilising operation.
Certainly, there were problems this year. The coup in attracting world premieres of new Irish films for the opening and closing nights was undermined by the inexcusably late starts of both films. The cumbersome and pointless policy of numbered seating was a further irritant, which sensibly was phased on as the festival proceeded. As for the venue itself, Virgin proved a pleasant surprise to many who doubted the wisdom of re-locating there. The presentation was excellent, the availability of on-site coffee and bars was a bonus, and the box-office failure of so many recent cinema releases ensured that the festival audience would not be swamped by audiences for the six of the nine Virgin screens showing commercial fare. Nevertheless, the move from the Screen clearly deterred many regular festival-goers. To put this in perspective, take the case of Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, which disappeared rapidly from the multiplexes but continues to be a smash hit in the Screen.
The programme itself was short on the kind of high-profile movies which festivals such as Toronto and London select, and which Dublin did in the past, in order to attract a broader audience which, on joining, is tempted by the lesser-known movies on the schedule. For any number of reasons, the very many notable omissions on this year's Dublin programme included such well-regarded US productions as Robert Altman's Cookie's Fortune, Todd Haynes's Happiness, Doug Liman's Go, Carl Franklin's One True Thing, Harold Ramis's Analyze This, Audrey Wells's Guinevere, Robert Towne's Without Limits, Anthony Drazan's Hurlyburly, Tony Goldwyn's A Walk On The Moon and Wim Wenders's documentary, The Buena Vista Social Club.
Among the many notable European films missing from the Dublin programme were Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run, Catherine Breillat's Romance, Soren Kragh-Jacobsen's Dogma 95 film Mifune, Bertrand Tavernier's It Starts Today, Claude Chabrol's At The Heart Of A Lie, Lukas Moodysson's Fucking Amal, Manuel Gomez Pereira's Between Your Legs, Ingmar Bergman's In The Presence Of A Clown and Ben Hopkins's Simon Magus.
Given the later dates this year, one ought to have expected more movies from the Sundance festival in January and Berlin in February, but they yielded very few new films for the DFF - which was not represented at either festival. Toronto last September offered a wealth of programming possibilities for Dublin, but the DFF was not represented there because its board of directors, most of whom were conspicuous by their absence at last weeks' festival, dragged their heels for so long on appointing its new team.
All that said, there were many positive and laudable aspects to this year's DFF, not least of them the remarkable achievement of losing just one movie (the Taiwanese Jam) from over 150 feature films on the programme. The festival's other no-show was a crushing disappointment to the organisers, when the subject of the main retrospective, Bernardo Bertolucci, had to cancel his visit to Dublin for health reasons.
However, there was absolutely nothing which the DFF could do about that, and to its credit, it fielded an impressive line-up of visiting film-makers and actors who did turn up, including Olivier Assayas, whose retrospective programme was one of the most valuable elements of the event. And notwithstanding the reservations expressed earlier, there was a good deal to savour on the screen, particularly over the closing days of the festival. Woody Allen's Celebrity was the ideal choice for last Sunday morning - an often hilarious reflection on fame, publicity, pretentiousness and ego, for which the off-screen Allen assembles a fine, eclectic cast that most notably includes a wonderfully nervy Judy Davis, a foul-mouthed Leonardo DiCaprio, and a surprisingly comfortable Kenneth Branagh as the Woody surrogate. It left me with a broad beam on my face from start to finish.
From Spain, Fernando Treuba's The Girl Of Your Dreams was an exuberant, handsomely mounted serious comedy of the misadventures which befall a Spanish crew making a film in Nazi Germany. This lively brew of sex, politics and film-making is played to the hilt by Jorge Sanz, Rosa Maria Sarda and the radiant Penelope Cruz with Johnannes Silberschneider as the propaganda minister, Goebbels, who falls head over heels for her. Director Martin Duffy was back in his native Dublin to introduce his second feature (after The Boy From Mercury), The Bumblebee Flies Anyway, set and shot in the US. Elijah Wood is excellent as the only patient without a terminal illness in the clinic where this sensitive, involving and commendably unsentimental drama is set.
After working as lighting cameraman on Michael Collins and The Boxer, Chris Menges returns to directing with The Lost Son which opens Chandler-style as a private eye with a shady past is hired to find the son of a wealthy couple. Introduced as an opportunist, the detective (intensely played by Daniel Auteuil) finds that he still has the capacity for moral outrage and the will to act when he uncovers a truly sinister paedophile ring. Some scenes are skin-crawlingly disturbing in this energetic though somewhat over-plotted thriller. The worst film I saw in the festival was Mike Figgis's experimental and wildly self-indulgent The Loss of Sexual Innocence, which inter-cuts an all-too-protracted Garden of Eden sequence with snapshots from the life of an English film-maker played at different ages by Julian Sands and Jonathan Rhys Meyers.
The festival closed on Sunday night with the world premiere of Deborah Warner's film of the Elizabeth Bowen novel, The Last September, which was rushed from the labs and was subject to a press embargo because it had not completed its grading process.
The event's penultimate screening, the annual surprise film, which I had the pleasure of choosing, was Wes Anderson's Rushmore, a highly imaginative and deceptively light comedy that is wonderfully quirky. It was preceded by enticing trailers for Eyes Wide Shut and Star Wars Episode 1.
