The Cork Film Festival might have lost its title sponsor but it has lost none of its quality. It also attracted an impressive list of guests, including directors Alex Cox, Peter Mullan and Oscar-winner Jan Sverak, writes Michael Dwyer
Losing its title sponsor this year inevitably led to the Cork Film Festival having to introduce some cutbacks - or re-adjustments, as they are known in political parlance. However, there was no reduction in either quantity or quality when it came to assembling the event's comprehensive film programme, which delivered an attractive, wide-ranging selection of international cinema over eight lively days and nights.
It also fielded an impressive guest list which included the gifted veteran lighting cameraman, Jack Cardiff; the Oscar-winning Czech director of Kolya, Jan Sverak; Scottish director Peter Mullan and the principal cast of The Magdalene Sisters; Irish director Damien O'Donnell with his new film, Heartlands; Jim Sheridan, accepting the UIP Directors Award on behalf of his director daughter, Kirsten; the US documentarist, Tom Thurman, for the world première of his new film, John Ford Goes to War; and the anarchic English film-maker, Alex Cox, with whom I engaged in a lively, outspoken public interview at the festival last Saturday afternoon. They were joined by countless representatives from the event's vast programme of short films, Irish and international.
This year's festival, Cork's 47th, was book-ended by a pair of powerful, factually-based dramas confronting the cruel mistreatment of girls and young women at the hands of callous authorities - Peter Mullan's award-winning The Magdalene Sisters, set in 1960s Ireland, which was given a standing ovation on the opening night, and Philip Noyce's equally angry and socially concerned Rabbit-Proof Fence, a damning indictment of shameful episodes in Noyce's native Australia in the 1930s, when Aboriginal girls were forcibly taken from the arms of their families. It closed the festival on a high note on Sunday night.
The programme included many other fine films already covered here from other festivals, most notably: Aki Kaurismaki's The Man Without a Past, David Cronenberg's Spider, Mike Leigh's All Or Nothing, Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar, Francois Ozon's 8 Femmes and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Intacto.
Troubled young and youngish men dominated most of the films new to me at Cork. Heartlands, Damien O'Donnell's second feature film, is, like his début, East is East, marked by an infectious compassion for put-upon characters. The humour is more low-key and less boisterous in Heartlands, which charts an eventful week in the life of the mild-mannered Colin, an innocent whose good nature is easily exploited by, among others, his wife to whom he is devoted, and his darts buddy, a police officer who is having an affair with her.
When the illicit lovers take off for a darts tournament in Blackpool, the crestfallen Colin impulsively follows them on his moped. The film is shaped as a classic road movie as it takes its protagonist on an eye-opening journey of self-discovery, finding a meaning in his life for the first time, and finding himself.
His route is punctuated with entertaining diversions in his encounters with disparate characters, as he tries all the while to stop the pain breaking through his cheery mask. We suspect from an early stage that he's going to realise how much better off he would be without his selfish wife, but that never detracts from the unfolding pleasures of this endearing, serious comedy scripted by Paul Fraser, the writer of Shane Meadows' movies.
O'Donnell's treatment of this material is confident and aptly understated, precisely catching the right tone and pace as he seduces the viewer, and eliciting sharply etched performances all round. Featuring a key cameo by Colin's darts hero Eric Bristow, the strong cast notably includes Jim Carter as the adulterous policeman and Mark Addy as a self-absorbed bar-owner with the humour of a seaside postcard. The anchor of the movie's winning charm is the endearing portrayal of the hapless Colin by Michael Sheen, de-glamorised with excess weight and a shock of frizzy hair.
Breaking away from her image in Friends and commercials, and proving that there's much more to her as an actress, Jennifer Aniston goes through The Good Girl without washing her limp hair even once. She plays Justine, a 30-year-old Texas supermarket worker bored silly with her humdrum job and with her slobbish house-painter husband (John C. Reilly). Doe-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal plays her morose and intense new colleague, an aspiring writer who is 22 and has re-named himself Holden after the protagonist of his favourite novel, The Catcher in the Rye.
United in mutual disaffection with their lives, Justine and Holden are drawn together in a passionate affair, but the consequences are complicated in what is neatly described by its director, Miguel Artera, as "a comic ode to depression". The screenplay is by Mike White, who wrote Artera's similarly edgy and unpredictable Chuck & Buck, and White himself is suitably creepy as the geeky, voyeuristic security guard who tries to lure Justine to bible classes.
The eponymous character played by Jake Gyllenhaal in Donnie Darko is about one degree of separation away from his Holden in The Good Girl. Donnie is an angst-ridden teen, anti-social, on medication and in therapy, and unhappily living in Middlesex, a suburb of Los Angeles, in October 1988, in the run-up to Hallowe'en, the Bush-Dukakis election, and perhaps, the imminent end of the world.
Looking like a young Hugh Grant, Gyllenhaal gives his most assured and intriguing performance to date in a disarming picture which marks an auspicious feature film début for its 26-year-old writer-director, Richard Kelly, who infuses it with striking surreal imagery and eschews obvious plot turns all the way towards pulling off its tricky ending with aplomb.
His eclectic and impressive cast includes Drew Barrymore and Noah Wyle as liberal schoolteachers, Mary McDonnell as Donnie's perplexed mother, Katharine Ross as his psychiatrist, and Patrick Swayze as a secretly sleazy major figure in the lucrative business of inspirational self-help books and videos.
THE troubled teen at the core of L.I.E. - which takes one level of its ambiguous title from the Long Island Expressway, off which it is set - is the 15-year-old Howie (Paul Franklin Dano), an only child missing his mother, who died in a car accident on the expressway, and unavoidably overhearing the nightly grunts and groans of his wealthy father's sexual activity with different women.
One of his housebreaking ventures brings Howie to the attention of an Irish-American former marine (Brian Cox) with a predatory interest in boys.
First-time writer-director Michael Cuesta, who has worked since on Six Feet Under, draws a complex web in this thoughtful, unsettling drama devoid of prurience and superbly played by the accomplished Cox and remarkable newcomer Dano.
Alex Cox, who made his mark in the mid-1980s with Repo Man and Sid and Nancy, returns to his native Liverpool for Revengers Tragedy, based on the Jacobean play by Thomas Middleton, first performed by Shakespeare's acting company in 1607. Cox re-locates the drama to 2011 in a Liverpool seeping with corruption and decadence personified by the avaricious ruler, the Duke (Derek Jacobi with a powdered face and shocking-red lipstick).
The Duke becomes the prey of Vindici (Christopher Eccleston), a lone avenger who returns home to settle the score after the murder of his wife on their wedding day 10 years earlier. Cox astutely taps into the contemporary resonances of the play, retaining its original dialogue, which is delivered with exceptional passion by Eccleston, and peppering it with offbeat anachronisms. While the result is not as satisfying as such similar recent exercises as Richard Loncraine's Richard III and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, it marks a welcome return to form for Cox.
The outstanding new film for me at Cork this year was Les Cheminsde l'Oued (Under Another Sky), a simmering psychological drama of accumulating power written and directed with deceptive simplicity by the young French actor, Gael Morel. Its troubled protagonist is Samy (the expressive Nicolas Cazale), a young Frenchman who gets involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident and gets dispatched to his mother's village in Algeria.
A stranger in a strange land, and still riddled with guilt, Samy can barely speak a few words of the language, and there are tougher cultural clashes ahead in this perceptive picture of an ancient land still deeply scarred by history and war. Morel's film is haunting, fascinating and deeply involving, and it packs the dramatic tension of a thriller.
