For several caffeine-soaked weeks in June, America's largest and best-attended film festival presented a 25-day feast of all things cinematic. And what an event it was. This was the year in which former Brat-packer Ally Sheedy, whose career had been given up for dead, emerged from the shadows as a powerfully dramatic actress; little Christina Ricci of the Addams Family grew up with a vengeance in two of the best films of the festival, and actors Norman Reedus and Radha Mitchell impressed as potential stars in the making.
Ireland has always had a strong voice at the festival but this year it was particularly evident with Johnny Gogan's nostalgic punk rock saga, The Last Bus Home, Paddy Breathnach's road movie I Went Down, which was picked up for US distribution and opens in New York and LA this week, and Paul Quinn's marvellous directorial debut This Is My Father, which was the festival's closing night gala.
Uniting three of the brothers Quinn - actor Aidan (Legends Of The Fall), cinematographer Declan (Leaving Las Vagas) and writer/director Paul, this may be the best "American" movie ever set in Ireland. The brothers spent part of their youth growing up here and, although they now live in the US, their love for the old country is palpable in this story of a disillusioned Irish-American, Chicago schoolteacher (James Caan) who comes to Ireland to search for his roots and, more specifically, the mystery surrounding an old photograph he finds of his mother, Fiona, with a young man.
The film flashes back to 1939 as the mystery of Fiona and the young man she loved unfolds. Although the film boasts a beautiful performance by newcomer Moya Farrelly as the young Fiona and a superb supporting cast including John Cusack, Stephen Rea, Colm Meaney and Donal Donnelly, the heart and soul of the picture is Aidan Quinn's heartbreaking turn as Fiona's lover.
An honourable mention in the Irish category has to go to actor John (Missing) Shea's impressive directorial debut, Southie. Set in the same Irish-American working-class neighbourhood of South Boston that we saw in Good Will Hunting, the film stars former New Kid On The Block Donnie Wahlberg as a "southie" who returns to the neighbourhood after a three-year absence to find his family in ruins with mother (Anne Meara) having stress-related heart problems, sister (the always interesting Rose McGowan) on her way to becoming an alcoholic and his two brothers in debt to the Irish mafia. Shea directs with a nice lean style and Wahlbeg shows that he's every bit as good an actor as his brother, Boogie Nights's Mark.
The festival's main emphasis has always been on American independents and this year, with a special American Independent award, the indie spirit was particularly strong. Many of the films were well-made but uninspired. A number of the independents were set in the Seattle area, notably Meg Richman's Under Heaven, a modern version of Henry James's The Wings Of The Dove with Molly Parker, Aden Young and Joely Richardson filling in for Helena Bonham-Carter, Linus Roache and Alison Elliott, respectively. Although it makes evocative use of its Northwest setting and boasts good performances, particularly from Parker and Richardson, the movie just doesn't pack the punch of Iain Softley's version. Much more fun was Guy Ferland's delirious Hitchcock hommage/pastiche Delivered. A Strangers On A Train meets Clerks, this tale of a Seattle pizza delivery guy (David Strickland) who has his society-revenge fantasies enacted by psycho Ron Eldard is a real roller-coaster ride and boasts a great Bernard Herrmann-inspired score by British composer Nicholas Pike.
Gay characters, once nowhere to be found and now everywhere, were either the major focus or had strong supporting parts in almost every movie at the festival. Both of the movies marked in to open and close this year's Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (Outfest '98) were at Seattle - P.J. Castellaneta's Relax . . . It's Just Sex and Tommy O'Haver's Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss, respectively. Castellaneta, whose only previous work was the two-hander Together Alone, this time goes ensemble with a large bunch of LA thirtysomethings. The movie is a hit-and-miss affair but it does boast a very powerful gay-bashing scene in which oppressed suddenly turns on oppressor, and good work from Lori Petty and Cynda Williams as the designated lesbian couple.
O'Haver's debut, on the other hand, is a simple and sometimes charming tale of obsession with our hero Billy (Sean P. Hayes) swooning after an unattainable West Hollywood hunk played by Brad Pitt-lookalike Brad Rowe.
On the lesbian scene, there was Lisa Cholodenko's uneven but acutely observed High Art which depicts the developing relationship and eventual love affair between Syd (Australian actress Radha Mitchell, last seen in Love and Other Catastrophes), an ambitious but naive art magazine assistant, and Lucy (Ally Sheedy) a charismatic, semi-legendary photographer living in obscurity. Cholodenko directs in a hypnotic, trippy style, but it is Sheedy's mesmerising performance of weary tenderness that makes this movie essential viewing.
Mitchell also cropped up in noted video director Jon Reiss debut Cleopatra's Second Hus- band, a chilling tale of what might happen if the meek really did inherit the earth. If Mitchell appeared in two movies, actor Norman Reedus (who looks like a more butch version of Leonardo De Caprio) came from total obscurity to appear in three - as a crazy mobster caring for his equally crazy mother (Deborah Harry) in Adam Bernstein's Six Ways To Sunday; as the ambivalent traveller who hooks up with Alan Rickman and Polly Walker in Adam Coleman Howard's sinister Dark Harbor and, best of the bunch, as an aimless teenager passing away a lazy summer in William Roth's Floating.
Christina Ricci was the undisputed star of this year's festival. In Don Roos's cleverly written if somewhat blandly directed The Opposite Of Sex she plays Dedee, a poisonous piece of southern white trash, who causes havoc when she decides to visit her gay half-brother Bill (Martin Donovan) and his lover (Ivan Sergei). Among the films many pleasures is a great performance from Lisa Kudrow who plays Bill's best friend and the only person who understands the mayhem Dedee is capable of causing.
Ricci is even better as the surly teenager who Vincent Gallo kidnaps to pose as his wife in Gallo's astonishing directorial debut Buffalo 66. Gallo has always been an edgy actor and he carries this nervy, Cassavetes style into his directing. The scenes where Gallo takes Ricci to meet his parents (Anjelica Huston and Ben Gazzara) and she, unexpectedly, brings more conviction to her role than he to his, are among the best you are likely to see all year.
Three other American movies at the festival were exceptional: in Bill Condon's Gods And Monsters Ian McKellen gives a towering, Oscar-worthy performance as James Whale, the gay director of Frankenstein who died mysteriously in 1957 in his California pool. In Scott Ziehl's striking debut, Broken Vessels, Todd Field and Jason London (one of the fabulous London twins) are amazing as two Los Angeles paramedics with an eerie attraction to self-destruction.
With The Last Days Of Disco, the middle (and linking) chapter in Whit Stillman's trilogy of romantic comedies which began with Metropolitan (1990) and jumped chronologically to Barcelona (1994), the director delivers his best film yet, as he introduces us to two recent college graduates (Chloe Savigny and the brilliant Kate Beckinsale) who escape at night from their jobs in a publishing house to a Studio 54-type dance club during disco's last days in the early 1980s. Stillman's writing is as witty and clever as ever, his direction has improved immeasurably and he draws superb performances not only from Sevigny and Beckinsale but also from the men in their lives.
Finally, my favourite at the festival turned out not to be American but a British movie: Sandra Goldbacher's gorgeous directorial debut The Governess. Set in the immediate pre-Victorian era of 1830s England, Goldbacher's film chronicles the fascinating story of a Sephardic Jew (Minnie Driver, in her best performance to date) who, after the death of her father leaves his family in debt, poses as a gentile and goes to work as a governess for the Cavendish family on the Isle of Skye. There, she becomes involved in the photographic experiments that Mr Cavendish (Tom Wilkinson) is carrying on behind closed doors and joins him in his work. Beautifully shot by Ashley Rowe, the film manages to blend the richness of the Sephardic Jewish culture, the stark beauty of Skye and the fascinating science of early photography into a lush, sensuous masterpiece. Just the kind of jewel you discover at a great film festival.
