Atr one point in When Brendan Met Trudy, the exuberant Irish romantic comedy written by Roddy Doyle and directed by Kieron J. Walsh, Doyle takes a well-aimed dig at the self-congratulatory nature of modern Ireland. RTE newscaster Anne Cassin is perfectly deadpan as she reels off the headlines on a spoof TV news bulletin: the Irish economy continues to boom, an Irish pop group tops the UK charts, and a United Nations man relates how much he loves Ireland.
To which one could now add, less facetiously: Irish Productions Make Impact At Top World Film Festival.
The Toronto International Film Festival usually screens a few new Irish movies every year, and past highlights have included the world premieres of The Field and Dancing at Lughnasa, a screening of The Crying Game which triggered a North American reaction that led all the way to the Oscars, and the gleefully received screening of The Snapper which went on to take the festival's annual People's Choice audience award.
Last week Toronto presented the world premieres of two new Irish comedies, When Brendan Met Trudy and The Most Fertile Man in Ireland, along with the largest showcase to date of the ambitious Beckett Film Project, the RTE/Channel 4 series of films based on all 19 of Samuel Beckett's stage plays, produced by Michael Colgan and Alan Moloney. Three of the films have yet to be shot, including Waiting For Godot, and nine were shown in a special programme at Toronto.
First to be screened were four of the shorter films, gathered together in one programme beginning with David Mamet's effectively austere production of Catastrophe with Harold Pinter as the authoritarian director, Rebecca Pidgeon as the assistant he bosses around, and the late John Gielgud, in his moving final performance, as the stoic protagonist who is treated with all the courtesy and humanity accorded a shop dummy.
Next comes Rough For Theatre I, directed by Kieron J. Walsh with more than a nod to Laurel and Hardy as he follows the melancholy interaction between two dishevelled old men, one blind (David Kelly), the other disabled (Milo O'Shea) on a rundown street in Dublin. The film is shot in gleaming black-and-white by Donal Gilligan.
The mood darkens progessively in Richard Eyre's touching film of Rockaby, which features a single actor, Penelope Wilton, in a riveting performance of accumulating poignancy, as an elderly woman whose rhythmicrocking in her chair matches the rhythm of her dialogue as she reflects on the "close of a long day", at the close of a long life.
This tempo shifts abruptly as this programme concludes with Anthony Minghella's Play, which employs rapid-fire editing and machine-gun delivery of the lines as it cuts between three characters - played by Alan Rickman, Juliet Stevenson and Kristin Scott Thomas - all neck-deep in different urns as they pour forth on the themes of love, lust and infidelity. A fifth film was missing from this programme of shorter films when I saw it - Damien O'Donnell's What Where, which had been delayed in transit from the Venice festival.
The first of the longer filmed plays to be screened at Toronto was Endgame, directed with deceptive simplicity by Conor McPherson, who described it in his introduction as "the template for so many 20th-century plays". It is set in a sombrely lit bunker, bare but for two dustbins, a stepladder and the armchair where sits the demanding Hamm (Michael Gambon on sublime form), ordering about the limping Clov (David Thewlis) and embarking on a stream of consciousness driven by reminiscences of the past and fears for the future. Jean Anderson and Charles Simon play the dustbin inhabitants with verve.
Among the most striking features about seeing eight Beckett adaptations over the course of five days were not just the felicitous adherence of the directors to every word and pause in Beckett's texts and stage directions, but also the diversity of visual styles adopted by the film-makers as they approached bringing these works to the screen without any of their regular freedoms to throw out or re-write pages of script.
There was something startling about the early images of Happy Days and their dazzling brightness, because Canadian director Patricia Rozema opted to take it out of the studio and film it entirely by the side of a volcano in Tenerife - an apt and potently atmospheric location for a play in which the central character, Winnie, is up to her waist - and later up to her neck - in sand. Rosaleen Linehan delivers a virtuoso and impassioned performance, vividly catching Winnie's humour and desperation as she tries to delude herself that this will be one more happy day.
It was refreshing to see again Neil Jordan's Not I (in which the monologue is spoken by the mouth of Julianne Moore), and this time uncluttered by the torrent of French sub-titles which, of necessity, preceded it at Cannes. Jordan's short film was shown ahead of the triumph of the Beckett Film Project to date - Atom Egoyan's hypnotic film of Krapp's Last Tape, featuring a magnificent, deeply immersed performance from John Hurt as a world-weary man riddled with regret and self-loathing as he spends his 69th birthday playing back a tape of his thoughts from 30 years earlier, when he sounded so much younger and chirpier and life seemed to offer so many opportunities and possibilities. Many of the audience, like Krapp, will shed tears before it ends.
It is worth noting that, at a festival crammed with high-profile counter-attractions in every time-slot, the attendance was so high at the Beckett films - more than 800 viewers at some of the screenings, and each film was shown three times. It is very likely that these films will find a new, wide, cinema-going audience for Beckett and cultivate interest in his work.
Meanwhile, there was not an empty seat at the 920-seater Uptown 1 auditorium for the world premiere of When Brendan Met Trudy, Roddy Doyle's regularly hilarious tale in which Brendan (played with terrific panache by Peter McDonald), an uptight schoolteacher, choir member and movie buff, is knocked head-over-heels and loosened up beyond recognition when he falls for the boisterous, plain-speaking Trudy (a wonderfully spirited Flora Montgomery), who tells him she's a Montessori teacher but is, in fact, a burglar.
Peppered with sharp movie references all the way from its opening pastiche of Sunset Boulevard, the consistently engaging and colourful When Brendan Met Trudy zips along at an unflagging pace under Walsh's keen direction - and with splendid comic timing from a fine cast which also notably includes Pauline McLynn, Marie Mullen, Don Wycherley and, especially, Barry Cassin as Brendan's headmaster, who exhorts him to choose life and listen to Iggy Pop.
When Brendan Met Trudy utterly overshadowed the festival's other new Irish comedy, Dudi Appleton's The Most Fertile Man in Ireland, which never lived up to the promise of the premise in its title - that a shy, awkward 24-year-old Belfast man (likeably played by Kris Marshall) finally loses his virginity, discovers he has an unusually high sperm count and goes into business with a colleague (Bronagh Gallagher) to artificially inseminate women all over Northern Ireland.
There are some good visual gags, such as a street mural in which cameos of Padraig Pearse and Gloria Hunniford face each other, and some lively repartee, but the yarn gets bogged down in a mostly pedestrian and blandly formulaic screenplay by Jim Keeble.
Matters are not helped by the movie's gratingly obvious attempts at political humour and a shrill, over-the-top performance from James Nesbitt as a once-feared paramilitary known as Mad Dog Billy Wilson. Following its world premiere in Toronto, the movie made its Irish debut last night, as the opening presentation of the Belfast Film festival.