Audiences at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival saw plenty to take their minds off the riots raging outside, writes Donald Clarke
When bombarded by a fusillade of movies from Irish film-makers as sustained as that launched by the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival (DIFF) last week, one inevitably seeks to trace the connecting tissue between the material. What is all this celluloid telling us about where we are today? Of course, no single clear message was discernible, but there was something a little like a trend on display.
Take John Riley and John Ketchum's rambunctious, micro-budget comedy, What Means Motley. The film is produced and written by Barry Mulligan, an advertising executive and sometime consular official who, while working in Bucharest in 1999, issued visas to 41 Romanians, allegedly members of a choir on their way to a festival in Sligo. Mulligan, clearly at home with self- deprecation, allows What Means Motley, in which he also plays the lead, to tell how every one of the supposed singers vanished upon arrival in Ireland.
On the same evening that the persuasive Mulligan was in the Irish Film Institute explaining how, some time after the events depicted, he came across a genuine Romanian choir and, despite the earlier embarrassment, still managed to secure them passage to Sligo, Eoin Moore's amiable ensemble comedy, No Sweat, was playing at Cineworld on Parnell Street. The film is a state-of-the-nation piece - the nation in question being, oddly, Germany. Moore, a Dubliner whose Pigs Will Fly was a highlight of the 2003 festival, has long been resident in Germany and seems to have integrated himself comfortably into that country. The film uses a failing health spa as a metaphor for the financially troubled unified state.
Earlier in the week, Irish directors Paddy Jolley and Reynold Reynolds's fine Sugar, a strikingly unsettling avant-garde nightmare featuring sour flavours of David Lynch's Eraserhead and Roman Polanski's Repulsion, left the audience feeling soiled and in need of a breath mint. Following the trials of a woman trapped in a seedy apartment in some American city, Sugar, the latest in a line of experimental pieces from Jolley and Reynolds, has backing from the Irish Film Board and is produced by Zanzibar Films, a respected domestic production company, but in location and atmosphere it remains stubbornly American (though, as you may have gathered, not at home with Hollywood values).
What are we learning here? It seems as if experiences of emigration and immigration, an ancient blight and a recent boon, have helped persuade Irish film-makers to open themselves up to the world. Multicultural themes and influences abounded in the films making up the domestic programme.
An inattentive viewer may, however, have looked at Norah McGettigan's elegant A Song for Rebecca and concluded that here we had an inward-looking film of the old school. And, yes, the plot - a young woman returns to Donegal to mourn her best friend - recalls those films from 30 years ago in which Irish film-makers attempted to use bits of Ingmar Bergman to help fashion a new national cinema. But it transpires that McGettigan, possessor of a formidable talent for graceful composition, is a graduate of the prestigious Lodz Film School in Poland and that the 45-minute picture is a Polish co-production. The melting pot bubbles on.
THE MOST PECULIAR and extreme example of cross-cultural intermingling among the Irish films was surely found in Anthony Byrne's head-spinningly odd Short Order, which opens commercially on Friday. Filmed in Dublin and Hamburg, the film, which pastiches such French classics as Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa Vie, takes place in an idealised version of Paris, featuring poster-paint awnings and cobblestones peppered with magic puddles. Its impressive cast includes Jack Dee, John Hurt and Vanessa Redgrave. It draws faintly disgusting analogies between exotic foods and sex organs. It features medium-scale dance numbers. In short, it is so wildly ambitious that it inevitably ends up overreaching itself. Still, something this peculiar deserves to be seen.
Other Irish features screening at the festival included Mark Hammond's Johnny Was, a gangster thriller set in Brixton but filmed in Belfast.
The excellent Laurence Kinlan, who plays a wounded republican, was at the premiere. Sadly, Vinnie Jones, Roger Daltry, Lennox Lewis, Samantha Mumba and Patrick Bergin, all of whom lend their disparate talents to the piece, were elsewhere. The least said about the film the soonest mended.
There were some impressive domestic shorts scattered about the programme. Thomas Cosgrove's sumptuous Rógairí, a recent winner at the Kerry Film Festival, drenches Fiona O'Shaughnessy in blood while working through its gothic horror tale. Jamie Hannigan and Maeve Clancy's The Boy with the Ever-Open Jaw uses beautifully simple animation - one thinks of woodcuts while watching it - to tell an elegant little fable. Margaret Corkery's Killing the Afternoon, which scoots about an Irish beach, remains stubbornly in the non-narrative tradition but has an engaging shape and exhibits skilfully controlled rhythms.
Returning to the multicultural theme, mention should be made of Pauline McLynn's excellent performance in Gypo. Jan Dunn's film, a rare British entry in the austere Danish genre of Dogma film-making, sees the Irish actor befriending Czech refugees in Margate. McLynn, whose considerable talents as a serious actor deserve more frequent exploration, movingly conveys her character's desperate compulsion to bear responsibility for other people's problems.
THERE ARE CURRENTLY no prizes at the festival, but if a clapometer had been installed to help choose an audience award from the international selection, then Mark Dornford-May's U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, a magnificent restaging of Carmen in a South African township, would have walked away with the gong. Pauline Malefane, the film's star, was not quite carried aloft by the adoring crowd on Saturday afternoon, but her handlers, aware that another film was due to screen in Cineworld, had enormous difficulty prising her away from delighted well-wishers. It was an altogether more agreeable sort of hysteria than that simultaneously fermenting a few hundred yards away on a burning O'Connell Street.
That sort of interaction between film-makers and audience is one of the reasons festivals exist. This year's DIFF, whose attendance figures grew steadily throughout the 10 days, featured a busy calendar of special events and celebrity appearances.
Ralph Fiennes, speaking in a comprehensive public interview after a screening of James Ivory's picturesque The White Countess, the last film produced by the recently deceased Ismail Merchant, was characteristically erudite about the art of acting.
Earlier, Simon Perry, the recently appointed chief executive of the Irish Film Board, while in conversation with festival director Michael Dwyer (who is also this newspaper's film correspondent), reminisced about producing such significant features as Michael Radford's 1984. Happily, no deranged young film-makers, desperate for funding, waved burning torches at Perry. It's happened before, you know.
Handily for those of us in search of connecting tissue, U-Carmen eKhayelitsha was only one of several important films with African associations. Michael Caton-Jones's Shooting Dogs, a tale of the Rwandan genocides, was disturbingly powerful, even if it said little that had not already been expressed forcefully in last year's Hotel Rwanda. Gavin Hood's first-rate Tsotsi, an adaptation of Athol Fugard's novel concerning the moral dilemmas of a Johannesburg criminal after happening upon a baby, features a touching lead performance from the fabulously named Presley Chweneyagae and deserves to win the Best Foreign Film Oscar for which it has been nominated.
Robert Towne's Ask the Dust, in which Colin Farrell's struggling novelist falls for Salma Hayek's waitress while dallying among Edward Hopper interiors, is as much concerned with the character of Los Angeles as was the director's faultless script for Chinatown. Ask the Dust was, however, shot in South Africa. Based on John Fante's revered novel, it wears its literary origins heavily, but it remains a sardonic, elegantly performed piece of work.
BUT, FOR THIS writer, the best film in the festival was John Hillcoat's The Proposition. This exhaustingly bleak meditation on the myth of civilisation - an anti-Western in the style of 1970s pictures such as High Plains Drifter - is based on a script by Nick Cave and is rich in the sort of Old Testament flourishes with which that apocalyptically minded Australian musician litters his songs. Guy Pearce plays a bushranger in pursuit of his borderline-deranged brother. John Hurt, appearing in his fourth film of the festival, turns up as a bounty hunter with a great line in anti-Irish rhetoric.
"I must apologise for the character of John Hurt inciting these riots today," Hillcoat said, as the veteran actor made his way before the screen.
On Sunday the audience was reminded of those disturbances as it pottered warily past broken windows towards the Savoy Cinema on O'Connell Street for the surprise film, a favourite event at the festival. Michael Dwyer had dis- appointed Hurt's fans at The Proposition screening by revealing that the actor did not appear in this penultimate presentation. We were therefore aware that the upcoming comic-book adaptation, V for Vendetta, till then a heavily napped favourite, would not be unspooled.
As it happened, we were treated to a screening of The Squid and the Whale. Directed by Noah Baumbach, a disciple of Wes Anderson and the writer of that director's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, which closed last year's festival, the film manages the not insignificant feat of making us care about a disintegrating family of New York intellectuals while mercilessly satirising their pretensions. Superbly funny and more than a little sad, The Squid and the Whale is surely the best surprise film to be screened since the festival's reconstitution in 2003.
By an unusual coincidence, both Baumbach's picture and the closing film, Rebecca Miller's The Ballad of Jack and Rose, are set in 1986. Following the screening of the latter film, which focuses on a father and daughter attempting to sustain counter-cultural ideals on a remote island, a bearded Daniel Day-Lewis, Jack and Rose's star and Miller's husband, pottered forward to shyly congratulate Dwyer on a successful festival.
"I have had a lot of happy memories in this cinema," he said, glancing around the Savoy. "And Michael has just given me another one."
It's just as well the mob refrained from burning it to the ground the previous day then.
