The 41st London Film Festival, which closed on Sunday night with Mike Figgis's One Night Stand, contained a number of notable movies already covered here from Cannes and Toronto, among them Boogie Nights, Funny Games, Keep Cool, The Wings Of The Dove, Love And Death On Long Island, The Hanging Garden and One Night Stand itself - which, incidentally, was originally set to open in Dublin today but has been postponed until January.
Of the movies new to me at London, much the most pleasurable was Pedro Almodovar's enthralling melodrama Live Flesh, very loosely based on the Ruth Rendell novel of the same title. It opens on a deserted Madrid in January 1970 as General Franco introduces oppressive legislation and as a boy is born in a bus taking his prostitute mother to hospital. It ends in the present with another birth on the streets of Madrid, now thronged with revellers, and with the baby being told that "we stopped being scared in Spain a long time ago".
Those childbirth sequences bookend Almodovar's precisely plotted picture of interlocked destinies involving five protagonists whose lives are changed irrevocably when a bullet is fired one evening. Sancho (Pepe Sancho) is a bitter, alcoholic policeman; Clara (Angela Molina) is his despairing wife, whom he beats regularly; David (Javier Bardem) is Sancho's young partner, who is having a secret affair with Clara; Elena (Franchesca Negri) is an Italian diplomat's daughter in whose apartment the crucial shot is fired; and Victor (Liberto Rabal) is the handsome young man who was born at the outset of the movie and lost his virginity during a brief liaison with Elena.
This entrancing, immensely satisfying film builds on the new maturity and subtlety displayed in Almodovar's previous film, The Flower Of My Secret, as it reveals its serpentine narrative of infidelity, jealousy, guilt, revenge, obsession and destiny.
It contains more than a few nods to the greatest of all Spanish directors, Luis Bunuel - and explicitly to his Criminal Life Of Archibaldo De La Cruz - and features a fine performance from a former Bunuel actress, Angela Molina, in what once would have been the Carmen Maura role. In an exemplary cast, Javier Bardem continues to demonstrate his range and versatility, while the young Liberto Rabal (grandson of the Cannes prize-winning actor, Francisco Rabal) lives up to Almodovar's promise that he inherits the crown left vacant by Antonio Banderas.
Cool Britannia, as the British film renaissance has been dubbed, was represented at London by 20 new movies of variable calibre, from the depths of Simon Moore's abysmal Up On The Roof, which played for a week in Dublin earlier this month, to Gilles MacKinnon's sensitive and moving film of Pat Barker's novel Regeneration, astutely adapted for the screen by Allan Scott, which is due here in January. Set in 1917, it opens on bleak images of the battlefield, a confusion of mud and blood where hapless soldiers are picked off like skittles.
The film is set principally in the Craiglockart military hospital in Scotland, where disturbed and disabled soldiers are brought for treatment before returning them to fight in a war in which many of them will be killed. Acutely aware of that moral dilemma is the psychiatrist, Dr William Rivers (Jonathan Pryce), who has the onerous responsibility of deciding when to recommend that soldiers are well enough to be sent back to the battlefield.
His patients include the disenchanted poet Siegfried Sassoon (James Wilby), who has thrown his military medals into a river; 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. In this thoughtful, deeply-felt film, Gilles MacKinnon elicits vivid, persuasive performances from all four actors.
The fast-rising young Irish actor Stuart Townsend, who made his film debut in MacKinnon's Trojan Eddie, delivers an intense and commanding performance which anchors the Welsh director, Marc Evans's movie of Eoin McNamee's novel Resurrection Man, adapted by McNamee himself. It is set, like Thaddeus O'Sullivan's recent Nothing Personal, in Belfast in 1975 as the Shankill Butchers carried out their atrocities. The most callous - and most psychotic - of the killers in Resurrection Man is Victor Kelly (played by Townsend), who, according to his doting mother (Brenda Fricker), "is in pain because of life". A simplistic, heavy-handed flashback suggests that James Cagney's deranged gangster in White Heat made an indelible impression on him in childhood. The movie seriously flounders in its central section when Townsend is off screen and the attention shifts to a hard-drinking, wife-beating journalist weakly played by James Nesbitt. John Hannah, Geraldine O'Rawe and Sean McGinley are also featured in this often gruesomely violent picture which was shot in Manchester, Warrington and Liverpool.
Stuart Townsend turns up again, though less prominently, in the Brazilian-born writer-director Carine Adler's auspicious first feature film, Under The Skin, which follows the sexually-charged exploits and fantasies of the grief-stricken 19-year-old Iris (Samantha Morton) after the death of her mother (Rita Tushingham). The unpredictable course of the film, which echoes the personality of Iris, is heightened by the unsettling hand-held camerawork of Barry Ackroyd.
The remarkable Samantha Morton, who also features in Mary McGuckian's imminent This Is The Sea and plays Sophia in the current BBC series of Tom Jones, charges the movie with a riveting portrayal of the volatile Iris, with Claire Rushbrook as her older, married sister and Townsend as a young Irishman who becomes sexually involved with Iris. Carine Adler will be in Dublin in a fortnight to discuss Under The Skin at the Women in Film and Television Festival at the IFC.
The other exciting new British film-making talent to emerge at London was the 25-year-old Nottingham writer-director, Shane Meadows, with Twenty-Four-Seven, which takes its title from one character's line describing the tedium of daily life - 24 hours a day, seven days a week - for him and his unemployed mates. Their lives are transformed when a paunchy, middle-aged man (Bob Hoskins, rarely better) renovates a disused boxing club and encourages them to get into the ring. This assured, succinctly scripted and sharply observed film is shot in striking black-and-white and introduces several fine young actors, especially drama student Danny Nussbaum a true find in the central role.
On an altogether lighter note, Gary Sinyor's amusingly titled Stiff Upper Lips sets out to lampoon the profusion of British heritage movies. The Merchant-Ivory movies are the main target in this elaborate parody of A Room With A View fused with a skit on David Lean's A Passage To India, with reference to Chariots Of Fire, Gandhi and Death In Venice along the way. Some very funny visual gags cannot sustain this often merely silly exercise which relies all too heavily on its own strained narrative and defeats the best efforts of a hard-working cast that includes Prunella Scales, Samuel West, Georgina Cates and Peter Ustinov.
The London festival included some of the most interesting movies screened at the commendably wide-ranging recent Dublin French Film Festival, chiefly Bruno Dumont's low-key, naturalistic first feature, La Vie De Jesus, which dispassionately views a group of bored, disaffected young people in a dull provincial town in northern France - a place so devoid of life that the shops never seem to open and most of the population seems to stay indoors all the time. Employing non-professional actors and giving them minimal dialogue, Dumont acutely catches the emptiness in the lives of these characters - and offers none of the hope engendered by Twenty-Four-Seven - and their potential to release that frustration in violence. He also includes a few graphic sex scenes, reportedly performed by body doubles.
Writer-director Graham Guit's debut movie, Le Ciel Est A Nous (Shooting Stars) is a diverting, ironic exercise which wears its Tarantino influences on its sleeve - in its disjointed chronology, brash production design and eclectic score (which sadistically includes the Cardigans' grating Lovefool three times). Playing a minor con man who gets in too deep for his own safety, the engaging and prolific Melvil Poupaud heads a solid cast that includes Romane Bohringer, Jean-Philippe Ecoffey and Elodie Bouchez.
Much the weakest of the new French movies I saw was Bat Out Of Hell, which fell very far short of Guardian critic Jonathan Romney's description of it as "the best French thriller in years". This picture of dishonour among thieves, directed by Xavier Durringer, is set in the aftermath of an armed robbery and is pointlessly over-plotted and over-extended.
