"Regeneration" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin Set five years on from the sinking of the Titanic, Gilles MacKinnon's sensitive and moving film of Pat Barker's novel, Regeneration, opens with bleak images of a battlefield during the first World War, a confusion of mud and blood littered with dead and dying soldiers. The focus of this sobering picture of man's inhumanity to man extends to what men inflict on the men within their own ranks as they employ primitive "therapy" to make them fit again for active service, to return them to the fray where so many of them will face certain death.
Pat Barker's first novel, Union Street, was reworked beyond recognition by Hollywood and fashioned into a glib star vehicle for Robert De Niro and Jane Fonda in Stanley And Iris. Fortunately, no such infelicity has befallen Regeneration, the first in Barker's war trilogy, which has been responsibly adapted for the screen by director MacKinnon's fellow Scot, Allan Scott. It forms an intense and harrowing reflection on the insanity of war and the mutilation and destruction of so many young lives.
The film is set principally in the Craiglockhart military hospital in Scotland, where disturbed and disabled soldiers are brought for treatment before returning them to the Western Front - and to probable death. Acutely aware of that profound moral dilemma is the pioneering psychiatrist, Dr William Rivers (played by Jonathan Pryce) who has the onerous responsibility of deciding when to recommend that soldiers are well enough to be sent back to the front line.
His patients include the disenchanted poet Siegfried Sassoon (James Wilby), who has thrown his military medals into a river and written an outspoken and illegal anti-war pamphlet; another poet, Wilfred Owen (Stewart Bunce) who is encouraged to write about the war by Sassoon; and the only key fictional character, the cynical working-class officer, Billy Prior (Jonny Lee Miller) who arrives at the hospital mute and asthmatic. Prior, no longer bisexual as suggested in the novel, describes battle as "like sex - exciting and ridiculous", and it is startling to see so many young men eager for a return to active service, clearly believing what Wilfred Owen calls "the old lie" - dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, that it is sweet and honourable to die for one's country. In this thoughtful, deeply felt film, Gilles MacKinnon elicits vivid, persuasive performances from all four actors, especially Jonathan Pryce in his complex and authoritative portrayal of Rivers, and the gifted young Jonny Lee Miller, who was the droll Sick Boy in Trainspotting, as Billy Prior. The drama is accompanied by a beautiful, brooding score by Atom Egoyan's regular composer, Mychael Danna.
"Lucie Aubrac" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin Another war and another factually-based story provide the scenario for Claude Berri's picture of one woman's dogged determination to save her husband from death at the hands of the Gestapo. Lucie Aubrac is set in Lyon in 1943, during the German Occupation. The screenplay by Berri and Arlette Langmann is based on the memoir, Outwitting The Gestapo, written by the pseudonymous Lucie Aubrac - and, we are told, the film was made with the approval of Aubrac herself.
Carole Bouquet, who replaced Juliette Binoche two weeks after Berri started shooting the movie, plays Lucie, a Lyon schoolteacher whose Jewish husband, Raymond (Daniel Auteuil) is active in the underground movement, the Maquis. The film opens dramatically as Raymond and his colleagues blow up a German munitions train, before director Berri reins in the pacing of the picture, opting for a low-key, sombre approach which ultimately proves curiously uninvolving.
Clearly, this is a sincere, earnest film which effectively dramatises a shameful period of persecution and betrayal, and its painstaking period detail is captured in the meticulously composed widescreen images of cinematographer Vincenzo Marano. However, the film is all too controlled and conventional to come close to achieving the narrative drive and emotional power which propelled Berri's finest films, the Pagnol companion pieces: Jean De Florette and Manon Des Sources.
"The Tango Lesson" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin In the early 1970s, before she got involved in film-making, the English writer and director, Sally Potter, trained as a professional dancer and choreographer in London and went on to form her own dance company. She fused her two compelling artistic interests when she became a film director by making a number of short dance films.
Now, a quarter of a century later, Potter brings her preoccupation with film and dance to an extreme fusion in her third feature film, The Tango Lesson. Potter casts herself in the central role of an English film-maker named Sally. Frustrated by the problems of getting her new production financed, she takes tango lessons from an Argentinian dancer (Pablo Veron) until their relationship becomes more complicated.
After her vibrant and imaginative screen treatment of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Potter teeters over into navel-gazing self-indulgence with The Tango Lesson. Having met her several times, I was surprised that Potter suppresses so much of her own wit and personality in her central performance, as if she were somehow atoning for the narcissistic act of giving herself the leading role.
The scenes detailing her frustrations as a film-maker are arch and tediously predictable - coping with crass Hollywood executives unwilling to comprehend or finance her artistic vision. The only colour sequences in The Tango Lesson are of the film-within-the-film, a series of imagined scenes from her planned project, Rage, a meditation on modelling and murder. On the evidence of the risibly pretentious footage we are shown, it's hard to imagine anyone backing it, in Hollywood or anywhere else.
Then again, it's even more difficult to understand how Potter persuaded anyone to back the futile exercise that is The Tango Lesson itself, a flimsy concoction that slowly crumbles apart until it collapses in the kind of phoney resolution most likely to imposed by crass Hollywood executives.
