This year's Cork Film Festival ran the gamut from a Hugh Grant crowd-pleaser to a daring take on narrative. Michael Dwyer reports
Three new Irish movies, set in Dublin, Cork and Limerick, took the prime slots in the commendably varied programme of the 48th Cork Film Festival. The event closed with the whimsical Dublin comedy Mystics, of which more shortly, having opened eight days earlier with the emotionally received Irish première of Aisling Walsh's powerful Song For A Raggy Boy, set and shot in Co Cork and now on general release.
The third home-produced feature, Cowboys & Angels, given a gala screening on the closing weekend, is an assured feature-film debut for David Gleeson, its writer and director, who traces his interest in film-making to his childhood in the Limerick village of Cappamore, where his father ran the local cinema.
Set in present-day Limerick city, Cowboys & Angels stars Michael Legge, who played the teenage Frank McCourt in Alan Parker's film of Angela's Ashes, but Gleeson's breezy comedy drama presents an entirely different view of the city to the rain-sodden misery of McCourt's early life - and to the Stab City image of Limerick as the alternative murder capital of Ireland.
There are some brief scenes of street scuffles, and a secondary plot dealing with drug dealers, but the emphasis of this warm, engaging movie is on the friendship that develops between two young men who agree to share an apartment for economic reasons.
Shane (Legge) is a shy with girls and already bored with his job as a civil servant with the Department of Agriculture. Vincent (Allan Leech) is a flamboyantly dressed, openly gay fashion student who dreams of moving to New York after graduation. He describes Shane as "nice but completely square", while Shane envies Vincent's confidence and determination to pursue an artistically fulfilling career.
Shane's journey of self-discovery is charted with wit and insight in Gleeson's sweet-natured, attractively photographed film, which neatly resolves the potentially awkward moral dilemmas it raises. There is an appealingly natural chemistry between the charming leads, Legge and Leech, along with a touching portrayal of a deeply disillusioned older civil servant by Frank Kelly.
Mystics, Cork's closing film, is altogether less adventurous and imaginative entertainment, resorting to a tired old shamrock-tinged concept of present-day Ireland. Two redoubtable veterans, David Kelly and Milo O'Shea, play a former music-hall duo pretending to be mediums in a scam to extract money from the bereaved by organising faked seances.
Given the number of Irish radio phone-in shows involving people described as fortune tellers, this is not as implausible a scenario as it might seem, but the movie's screenplay, by Wesley Burrowes, is disappointingly slender and obvious, devoid of the cutting edge he brought to Rat, the dark 1999 Dublin comedy.
The convoluted plot revolves around people's attempts to uncover the loot of a recently deceased gangster - among them his determined widow (a spirited Maria Doyle Kennedy), a ruthless rival gangster (Pat Kinevane) and a nosy Garda inspector (Liam Cunningham). The humour is mostly feeble and obvious, with a dreary running gag of the phoney mystics mangling language in malapropisms, and the best efforts of a more than capable cast are poorly served. The director is David Blair, a British film-maker best known for his work on the television series The Lakes and Anna Karenina.
Among the dozens of new features showing at Cork, the polar opposite to Mystics in terms of ambition and invention was the superb trilogy of films written and directed by the Belgian actor and film-maker Lucas Belvaux, set in present-day Grenoble. Eschewing the traditional mould of a trilogy as a series of consecutively linked stories, Belvaux daringly plays with narrative by concentrating on six principal characters and exploring their experiences from different perspectives and through different genres.
The three films may be viewed in any order but for optimum resonance ought to be seen in that in which they were shown at Cork. Cavale (On the Run) is tautly structured as a thriller in which Belvaux himself demonstrates striking screen presence in the leading role of Bruno Le Roux, an anarchist terrorist who, in his late 30s, escapes from prison after 15 years.
He returns to a changed world where his former associates have moved on to the responsibilities of adult life - work, marriage, family - but he adamantly refuses to accept this and remains intent on creating civil unrest and wreaking revenge on those he regards as "class enemies". The consequences make for lean, gripping and stylish cinema.
Le Roux figures peripherally in the second film, Un Couple Épatant (An Amazing Couple), which, in marked contrast, is shaped as a romantic comedy of errors in which the deceptiveness of appearances causes chaos in the lives of a hypochondriac, stressed-out businessman (François Morel), his Neapolitan teacher wife (Ornella Muti) and their circle. One well-intentioned phoney excuse triggers snowballing confusion and paranoia in this nimbly directed, highly entertaining farce, the lightest in the trilogy.
The third film, Après La Vie (After Life), is formed as a marital melodrama and features the outstanding performance of the trilogy in Dominique Blanc's raw portrayal of a desperate morphine-addicted teacher whose detective husband (Gilbert Melki) is morally compromised when he relies on a local drug dealer to feed her habit.
In Belvaux's bold, ingenious and fascinating cinematic exercise, all three films take place at the same time, sometimes containing overlapping scenes that take on different tones in their alternative contexts - a scene played for laughs in one becomes the stuff of drama in another, for example - and there is the consistent pleasure of their precisely devised structures as each episode illuminates the personalities and motivations of their disparate characters with accumulating detail.
On his first film as director, Richard Curtis also displays a laudable level of ambition in the smart romantic comedy Love Actually, which interweaves the complications and desires of more than two dozen principal characters over the five weeks leading up to Christmas in London. Already established as Britain's most successful screenwriter with his work on Four Weddings And A Funeral and Notting Hill, Curtis has fashioned an irresistibly entertaining comedy that is very likely to match or surpass both those films in popular appeal.
There are more than a few nods to his earlier screenplays in the new film, which features a wedding and a funeral in the first half-hour - the Bay City Rollers providing a significantly less profound source for a quotation for a funeral than W. H. Auden. Once again, Hugh Grant is the star, this time as the bachelor British prime minister who falls for his tea lady (Martine McCutcheon). And, once again, the film is steeped in popular culture, most prominently in the old Troggs song Love Is All Around, first used in Four Weddings and now hilariously reworked as Christmas Is All Around by a faded rocker (Bill Nighy) intent on beating Blue to the Christmas number-one slot. (Life will imitate art here, I bet.)
True romantics will lap up this artful blend of comedy and pathos as the multiple characters are neatly established and their fates juggled and resolved.
The exemplary ensemble cast most notably includes Liam Neeson as a grieving widower; Emma Thompson as the prime minister's sister, who fears her husband (Alan Rickman) is cheating on her; Laura Linney as a lonely American torn between lust for an office worker and responsibility for her disturbed brother; and Andrew Lincoln, from the TV series This Life and Teachers, as a man secretly besotted with his best friend's wife.
Shown before the closing film at Cork on Sunday night, Thirteen is another impressive directing debut, this time for the production designer Catherine Hardwicke, who earned the best-directoraward at Sundance this year for her work on it. This gritty US indie drama features two terrific young actresses, Nikki Reed and Evan Rachel Wood, as 13-year-old Los Angeles schoolgirls Evie and Tracy, whose friendship and obsession with peer pressure result in a spiral of shoplifting, body-piercing, self-mutilation, drugs and sex as the insecure Tracy falls under the spell of the precocious Evie.
Refreshingly avoiding the clichés of US youth movies, Thirteen is based on a partly autobiographical screenplay that Reed wrote when she was 13, on which she collaborated with Hardwicke for the film. The strong adult cast includes Holly Hunter in a riveting portrayal of Tracy's mother, a recovering alcoholic; Jeremy Sisto (from Six Feet Under) as the mother's lover; and Deborah Kara Unger as Evie's irresponsible guardian. This is tough, uncompromising drama that parents, in particular, will find deeply unsettling.
My personal highlight was conducting the public interview last Saturday with John Hurt, who received the festival's new lifetime-achievement award. One of world cinema's most versatile actors, with more than 100 film and television roles to his credit, Hurt was on sparkling form, informative and entertaining as he reflected on his remarkable career, even though he had been filming until very late the night before in London, playing Alan Clark in a BBC series based on the late Tory MP's infamous diaries, and was due back on set before dawn on Sunday.
