Felicia's Journey (15) Selected cinemas
The adventurous, Cairo-born, Canadian-raised film-maker, Atom Egoyan, follows one haunting literary adaptation (The Sweet Hereafter) with another, in his ninth feature film, Felicia's Journey, a thoughtful, intensely atmospheric work adapted by Egoyan himself from the 1994 novel by William Trevor.
Felicia's Journey features a remarkably expressive central performance from the young Irish actress, Elaine Cassidy - who is from Wicklow - as the eponymous Felicia, a naive 17-year-old from Co Cork who succumbs to the charms of her sweet-talking boyfriend, Johnny Lysaght (Peter McDonald from I Went Down) and realises she is pregnant after he leaves to work in England.
Rebuffed by her own widower father (Gerard McSorley) and by Johnny's cold, withdrawn mother (Brid Brennan), Felicia journeys to Birmingham in the hope of finding Johnny. Instead, she catches the attention of Joseph Ambrose Hilditch (Bob Hoskins), an ostensibly mild-mannered, middle-aged bachelor who is meticulous about his work as the catering supervisor at an industrial firm.
In his private life, however, Hilditch is just as fastidious at preying on vulnerable young women and murdering them.
Hilditch is utterly fixated by his late mother (played by Egoyan's actress wife, Arsinee Khanjian), a television chef who purportedly once rivalled Fanny Craddock for popularity, and he prepares each of his evening meals exactly to her recipes, watching videotapes of her programmes as he cooks. His other videos are furtively filmed tapes of his victims, the latest of which he labels Irish Eyes after first meeting Felicia.
Deftly and effectively employing a non-linear structure which cuts seamlessly between past and present as it outlines the personal histories of the two principal characters and draws them together, Egoyan's film creates and sustains an eerie, chilling mood of foreboding and fear as the wily predator circles the gullible Felicia and cunningly gains her trust. One of Egoyan's most compelling reflections on his recurring theme of marginalised characters, Felicia's Journey gains incalculably from the subtle portrayals he elicits from his two leading players. In his finest performance since Mona Lisa, Bob Hoskins is perfectly understated as he reveals the Jekyll and Hyde personality of Hilditch, and Elaine Cassidy is wonderfully natural as Felicia, belying the fact that this is only her second leading role in a feature film, after The Sun, The Moon and The Stars.
Michael Dwyer
American Pie (18) General release
The recurring theme of teenaged Americans attempting to lose their virginity is handled with a certain freshness and even some unexpected tenderness in the raunchy and often hilarious low-budget comedy, American Pie, which has proved one of the surprise big hits of the year in the US. It's easy to see why. Marking the cinema debuts of the 26-year-old screenwriter Adam Herz and the 29-year-old director Paul Weitz, this knowing comedy somehow balances the crude, provocative humour of There's Something About Mary with the sweet nature of a superior John Hughes teen movie such as Sixteen Candles. Emboldened by the huge commercial success of There's Something About Mary, which opened shortly before American Pie started shooting, Herz and Weitz pushed the envelope a good deal further than they might have dared otherwise.
This results in the gauche young Jim (played by a delightfully deadpan Jason Biggs) undergoing a succession of humiliations as he and his three best male friends set themselves a three-week target of losing their virginity by prom night. The movie opens as the hapless Jim is caught masturbating by his parents. Then, his father (Eugene Levy) - who cringe-inducingly attempts to discuss the facts of life with Jim - catches his son in the act of practising with a warm apple pie. And when an attractive Czech exchange student (Shannon Elizabeth) comes to Jim's room to study, the tables are turned and it is he who is ordered to strip and dance for her amusement.
In sharp contrast to such crass, mean-spirited antecedents as Porky's, the humour in American Pie is essentially good-natured and rooted in the innocence of the boys, who are depicted as awkward and vulnerable, while the girls are more self-aware, grownup and in control. There is a likeable, natural quality about the spirited young ensemble cast which also notably includes Chris Klein (from Election), Mena Suvari (American Beauty), Alyson Hannigan (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Natasha Lyonne (Slums of Beverly Hills).
Michael Dwyer
Runaway Bride (PG) General release
Nine years ago, Garry Marshall's light romantic comedy, Pretty Woman, made a star of Julia Roberts, revived the career of Richard Gere and presented prostitution as one of the world's most glamorous professions. It became such a major commercial success that the prospect of lightning striking twice has reunited Marshall with Roberts and Gere for another light romantic comedy in Runaway Bride, and Americans have turned out in their millions for it. Roberts plays Maggie Carpenter, a hardware store owner in an idealised small town in Maryland, and Gere is cast as Ike Graham, an opinion columnist on USA Today. When he hears from a bar-room drunk that Maggie has left her third fiance standing at the altar, he writes an article about her behaviour. Unfortunately, his piece contains 15 factual errors, which Maggie points out, and Ike is sacked by his editor, who just happens to be his ex-wife (Rita Wilson).
Determined to pursue the story on a freelance basis for a magazine, Ike travels to Maryland where Maggie is preparing for another walk up the aisle - and, probably, another race back down if she shies from commitment yet again. In the standard tradition of romantic comedy, the initial antagonism between Maggie and Ike gradually dilutes to the point where - well, let's just say you don't need to be a clairvoyant to predict the long-signalled ending.
One of the key problems with Runaway Bride is that that ending takes so long to arrive. At a few minutes short of two hours, this cynical and contrived yarn is tediously protracted for such flimsy material as the screenplay from the writers of Three Men and a Little Lady, Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott. Consequently, director Marshall relies all too heavily on Roberts's much-exposed killer smile and Gere's unusually laid-back performance, and on the rare flashes of screen chemistry conjured up by the two stars.
Michael Dwyer
The Buena Vista Social Club (Club) IFC, Dublin
The Last Days (Club, IFC), Dublin
Documentary films these days are almost exclusively the preserve of television, and even they are being superseded by cheaper factual programming like docu-soaps and fly-on-the-walls. With the exception of festival showings, it's extremely rare to have the opportunity to see documentaries in a cinema now, so to have two on (albeit limited) theatrical release in the same week is something worthy of note.
Despite huge differences in subject matter and tone, both Wim Wenders's The Buena Vista Social Club and James Moll's The Last Days explicitly set out to document memories of the past before they disappear and to celebrate the human instinct for survival and capacity for transcendence. That neither film quite succeeds doesn't detract from the deeply evocative stories of the people they portray, but it does underline one of the difficulties in evaluating documentary - separating the subject from the quality of its treatment.
Wenders's film arrives on a wave of pre-publicity, with reasonable hopes of a guaranteed audience among the many fans who have bought the CD of the same title. The Buena Vista Social Club, as nearly everyone knows by now, was the name given to the group of veteran Cuban musicians assembled by guitarist Ry Cooder in 1996 to record an album of music based on the Afro-Caribbean traditions of son and bolero. Some months after the record's successful release, Cooder persuaded Wenders, for whom he has composed film soundtracks, to make a documentary on the subject.
Wenders's previous ventures into non-fiction in Tokyo-Ga and Notebooks on Cities and Clothes, are closer to visual essay/poems than documentaries, and light years away from the self-effacing style of The Buena Vista Social Club, which follows its subjects from rehearsals in Havana, through concerts in Amsterdam, to a triumphant appearance at New York's Carnegie Hall.
It's impossible to quibble with the reverence accorded such figures as the 72-year-old bolero singer Ibrahim Ferrer, the 77-year-old pianist Ruben Gonzalez and over 90-year-old guitarist and singer Compay Segundo. These are marvellous characters and brilliant musicians, and Wenders captures some wonderful musical moments between them. His interviews, by contrast, are less revealing. We get little sense of the pre-revolutionary era in which they starred, of the Cuban traditions they draw on, or of what directions that music took after their heyday came to an end. Wenders and Cooder have reacted with understandable irritation to criticisms that their film ignores the current political and economic difficulties of Cuba: that is not the subject of this film, nor is there any reason why it should be. But, given that the core audience for The Buena Vista Social Club will consist of fans of the record, it might have been a good idea to provide a greater sense of context.
* * *
On the surface, The Last Days could hardly be a more different project. The first feature production from Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, James Moll's film follows five Hungarian survivors of the Holocaust as they return to the country of their birth and to the concentration camps in Poland and Germany where they almost died.
The story of Hungary's Jews, who lived in comparative safety for most of the second World War until their rapid annihilation in 1944 and 1945, seems to encapsulate the rancid madness of Nazism, and raises difficult questions about the attitude of the Allies, who by this stage knew what was happening, but chose not to bomb the camps or the railway lines leading to them. Moll's film touches on these questions, but its primary focus is on the five survivors, whose memories of the brutality and degradation they suffered, and the loss of their entire families, are almost unbearably heartbreaking.
The Shoah Foundation gathers the testimonies of survivors for archival purposes, and has already stored more than 50,000 interviews. The intention is to gather as many memories as possible before this generation disappears, and to use this material to bring the human reality of the Holocaust home to new generations - particularly in American high schools.
The disadvantages of that pedagogical purpose can be seen in the choice of subjects for The Last Days and in the conclusions it draws. The five people in the film, all of whom settled after the war in the US, have found different ways of making sense of what happened to them, and made successful lives for themselves - one is a congressman, another a teacher, another an artist. The film emphasises the resilience of the human spirit, the possibility of redemption, and the triumph of good over evil. One could hardly do anything but admire the dignity and humanity of these survivors, but the insistence on a uniformly positive ending seems far too soft and too easily heart-warming - just like a Spielberg film, in fact.
Hugh Linehan
The Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland has organised a short season of films with the IFC in Dublin to mark World Architecture Day. The season continues tomorrow with Ridley Scott's director's cut of Blade Runner and on Sunday with Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mepris
