With a strong, well-balanced mix of major features, documentaries and shorts, this year's Murphy's Cork Film Festival gives the happy impression of a festival sure of its identity, connected with its audience and solid in its organisation.
Probably the best time to appreciate this is mid-week, before the always frenetic closing weekend, and a good time to catch two world premieres of two very different Irish features (just part of a hefty Irish programme this year).
The writer-director Joe O'Byrne's feature debut, Pete's Meteor, recalls Into The West, both in its combination of urban realism with magical fantasy, and in its central theme of a child's need to come to terms with the death of a parent. Set in inner city Dublin, O'Byrne's film centres on 12-year-old Mickey Devine (an excellent performance from young Ian Costello), who, with his young brother and sister, lives with his grandmother (Brenda Fricker) in a part of the city ravaged by drug abuse.
The children's parents have both died of AIDS contracted through heroin use, and the family receives financial support from Pete (Mike Myers), a former dealer who blames himself for those deaths. When a meteorite crashes into the Devine's back garden, it sets in train a sequence of events which forces the tensions of these relationships to the surface.
With Alfred Molina and Dervla Kirwan as an absent-minded scientist and his taxi-driving girlfriend, and John Kavanagh as the paternalistic local garda, Pete's Meteor is well endowed with acting talent, and it's beautifully photographed by Paul Sarossy, but the tone veers uneasily between naturalism and poeticism, especially when Myers (a long way here from Wayne's World) is let loose on some rather purple patches of dialogue. Although more ambitious and less whimsical than Into The West, the film's pacing is unsure at times, at its best when focusing on Costello's performance. But O'Byrne engineers some magical and affecting moments along the way.
Also shot around the docklands of Dublin, Vicious Circle tells a more prosaic story, one which must be familiar to most of us by now, whether from the media or from John Boorman's The General. This is the second of three films based on the life and death of Martin Cahill (the third, Ordinary Decent Criminal, is currently shooting on the streets of Dublin), and director David Blair adopts a grittier, less stylised approach to the story in this BBC-produced, made-for-television drama. Most of the same elements are in place - the jewellery heist, the theft of the Beit paintings, the conflict with the IRA and so on - right down to the torture scene where Cahill nails an accomplice to the floor.
Whatever else, the flurry of films on this subject will provide fertile ground for textual comparisons in film studies courses for years to come. But Blair's version has its own distinct merits, particularly in Ken Stott's portrayal of Cahill (less sympathetic than Brendan Gleeson's interpretation in The General) and Andrew Connolly's strong performance as his main (fictionalised) adversary in the police force. John Kavanagh turns up again, this time as the IRA leader incensed by Cahill's refusal to share the spoils of his crimes.
The pared-down, TV-drama style of Vicious Circle makes for a taut and often gripping thriller, and Blair, shooting on long lenses in mostly docklands locations, manages to convey a real sense of the grimy, noisy clutter of Dublin. One of the fascinating aspects of the multiple "General" films is the different portrayals of the capital city, and in this respect, Vicious Circle's Dublin is more recognisable than that of The General. One wonders, though, at the bizarre coincidence of these three almost simultaneous productions.
Not so bizarre as Dutch directors Menno and Paul De Nooijer's Exit, a self-consciously surreal satire on art and commerce which tells the story of a young graphic designer's nightmarish experiences when commissioned to make a video for a famous American rock star. The De Nooijers' most obvious influences are Peter Greenaway and Paul Verhoeven; unfortunately they combine the dramatic tension of the former with the subtlety of the latter, and their film's appalling pretentiousness is not improved by its schoolboy humour.
Far better to surrender to the charms of a veteran and master film-maker. Alain Resnais's hugely enjoyable On Connait La Chanson is a perceptive and cleverly written comedy set among a loosely connected group of Parisians. It may not have anything new to say, but what does that matter? Resnais ingeniously plunders the endless archive of dodgy French pop songs to punctuate his story, underscoring his characters' romantic predicaments by having them lip-synch along to a succession of songs which range from the banal to the bathetic, with hilarious and often touching results.
Micheal Dwyer will conduct a public interview with the actor Simon Callow at the Shandon Court hotel in cork on Saturday at 1 p.m.
