PREDICTING the response of cinema audiences is such an imperfect science that, as screen writer William Goldman concluded, nobody knows anything. The result is that nine of out of every 10 movies fail to make a profit, and no movie star is invincible and no formula sure fire. Within the very specific terms of the Dublin Film Festival, that science seemed to be more exact and generally conformed to a pattern, but curve balls have bounced through the festival box office since booking opened last month, and the organisers have been surprised time after time.
Ticket sales are ahead of last year's figures, the festival's programmer, Martin Mahon, said at the weekend, but they have not been following any predictable pattern. Attendances for the afternoon screenings are higher than ever, he notes, with remarkably high turn outs for the documentary, The Celluloid Closet, dealing with the depiction of gays and lesbians throughout the first 100 years of cinema; the German sex comedy, The Most Desired Man; and the Chinese drama, In the Heat of the Sun, which Time magazine named best film of 1995.
However, a number of much more high profile productions have struggled to find an audience in the festival's largest venue, Savoy 1. Disregarding the festival's opening and closing nights, which are largely invitational, only two Savoy presentations - Get Shorty and next Thursday's Surprise Film - sold out in advance, although a third, From Dusk Till Dawn, may sell out before it screens tomorrow night.
Meanwhile, such attractive Savoy presentations as Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite, Sean Penn's The Crossing Guard, Richard Loncraine's Richard III and Robert Lepage's Le Confessional all under achieved at the festival box office. "There were a lot less sell outs at an early stage," says Martin Mahon, "and the bookings were spread out over more films than ever before, which suggests that people were taking more time to think about it and to read the programme.
Those who passed on Sunday morning's screening of Richard III - shown with the added bonus of John Boorman's delightful Two Brides Bathing - missed out on one of the major events of the festival, a vigorous and rousing Shakespearean adaptation which made for dynamic and stimulating cinema. Pared down and opened out with admirable skill, this Richard III is transposed to an imaginary Britain of the 1930s by Ian McKellen, who plays the title role and who adapted the text with Richard Loncraine, the film's director. The body count escalates as the cunning, scheming and manipulative Richard and his blackshirted fascist cronies destroy his enemies on the pathway to power.
The play bursts into life in this precisely delineated new context, and Richard delivers the "winter of our discontent" soliloquy from a ballroom stage and declares: "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse" from a besieged tank. The art direction and costume design are terrific in this bold and vibrant production which is accompanied by a rich Trevor Jones score. McKellen is magnificent in the central role, surrounded by a superb cast which includes Annette Bening as Queen Elizabeth, Kristin Scott Thomas as Lady Anne, Maggie Smith as the Duchess of York, Nigel Hawthorne as the condemned Clarence, and Adrian Dunbar as the cold blooded lackey, James Tyrell.
Much more intimate in scale Losing Chase marks a confident directing debut for actor Kevin Bacon who allows his very capable principal players ample space for their performances to breathe and blossom. The film features Helen Mirren in a vivid, beautifully judged performance as Chase Phillips, a woman whose inability to conform to the social demands of life on Martha's Vineyard leads to her having a nervous breakdown. When her husband (Beau Bridges) hires Elizabeth Cole (Kyra Sedgwick) as a household help for the summer, Chase is rude and hostile towards her until a close bond forms between them. Shot on attractive locations, this is a leisurely paced but involving character study powered by its cast and Bacon's sensitive direction.
Another woman recovering from a nervous breakdown is the central character in Jon Amiel's thriller, Copycat. She is a criminal psychologist (Sigourney Weaver) who specialises in the psyche of serial killers. "I'm their damn pinup girl," she says. "They all know me." A year after surviving a murder attempt by a serial killer (Harry Connick Jr), she remains traumatised, popping pills, lowering down brandy and suffering from agoraphobia which prevents her from leaving her high security San Francisco home.
When homicide detectives played by Holly Hunter and Dermot Mulroney are investigating a series of apparently connected murders, they enlist her help and it is she who detects that the murderer is a copycat who replicates the crimes of notorious serial killers. Any movie on this theme will be hard pressed to match the recent achievements of The Silence of the Lambs and Seven, and while Copycat is neither as complex nor as eerie, it remains engrossing, well plotted and a worthwhile commentary on the fascination with and the pursuit of fame by serial killers.
There's another killer on the loose in the Danish horror movie, Final Hour, which was billed as being "full of twists and surprises that will make your hair stand on end". On the contrary, it proved to be an utterly inept exercise in which all the characters behave even more irrationally than most of those who usually populate this genre.
The most popular indigenous production for many years in its native Germany, Der Bewegte Wiann (The Most Desired Man), was savaged by the British media when it opened in London recently, as if the notion of a German comedy were an impossible contradiction in terms. Both the German and British responses have been rather extreme in relation to what is essentially an amusing farce which could and should have been pushed to further limits. The storyline deals with the snowballing confusions which ensue when a handsome promiscuous waiter (Til Schweiger), thrown out by his girlfriend, moves in temporarily with a gay man.
Certainly, the Canadian actor and director, Bruce LaBruce, would have taken such a scenario to wild extremes. A regular in the festival late night programme - with No Skin Off My Ass in 1994 and Super 8V last year - LaBruce came to Dublin last week with his new movie, Hustler White, and the film's co director, Rick Castro. With explicit references to Sunset Boulevard and Andy Warhol's Flesh, the film features Tony Ward as an accident prone Hollywood hustler and Bruce LaBruce himself as a mysterious man on his trail. The production values are of a much, higher standard than in LaBruce's previous films, the humour is more outrageous and the sex scenes included some activity that I, in my innocence, had never ever imagined.
