Sunday's opening ceremony at the 46th Murphy's Cork Film Festival was a double celebration: of film and of Cork. The capacity attendance at the Opera House cheered when Charlie Hennessy, the festival's chairman, saluted Cork's well-earned selection as European City of Culture for 2005, which had been announced just two days earlier.
They made even more noise when Mick Hannigan, the festival's director, noted the serendipity of the City of Culture year coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Cork Film Festival, which was set up with foresight and determination by the late Dermot Breen in the mid 1950s, when there were very few film festivals in the world.
The joint celebration of Cork and film continued with the screening of two locally produced shorts, the admirably concise Against The Wall, produced by Helen Guerin and directed by Chris Hurley, both prime movers at Cork Film Centre, and No Homework, a striking vignette made in shimmering black and white by Anthony Ruby (and produced by Hannigan).
Top of the bill was a powerful feature film in which Cork accents predominated, the Irish premiere of Disco Pigs, based on the acclaimed Enda Walsh play that originated as a two-hander from Corcadorca Theatre Company, in Cork, and featuring a powerhouse performance from Cillian Murphy, a Cork man, in the leading role.
The only disappointment was that Murphy was unavoidably detained in London, where he's making 28 Days Later, the new film from Danny Boyle, the Trainspotting director. Instead, Murphy received the applause from Cork over a mobile phone on the Opera House stage. Disco Pigs, which was reviewed in The Ticket yesterday, goes on general release tomorrow.
Another new Irish feature, Last Days In Dublin, written and directed by Lance Daly, had its world premiere at the Kino on Tuesday night. This quirky low-budget exercise follows the misfortunes of a hapless young Dublin slacker, nicknamed Monster and played by Grattan Smith, as he endures a succession of humiliations and physical abuse while ineptly trying to pursue his dream of leaving the Republic and seeing the world.
He encounters a series of disparate, generally inhospitable characters played in cameos by, among others, John Kavanagh, as his wastrel father; Laurence Kinlan, as a syringe-wielding mugger; David Norris, as a tetchy landlord; and Nell McCafferty, as a foul-mouthed moneylender. Overambitiously described in the festival brochure as a Ulysses for the new millennium, Daly's film rambles unduly, but it's hard to resist its underlying sense of humour, especially the more surreal and silly it turns.
Selected for Cork's midweek gala slot last night, The Deep End is a sleekly mounted psychological melodrama in which a terrific central performance by Tilda Swinton helps paper over some jarringly irrational turns in the narrative. This is the second film written and directed by the team of Scott McGehee and David Siegel, and their screenplay is based on the The Blank Wall, the Elisabeth Sanxay Holding novel first filmed by Max Ophⁿls in 1949, as The Reckless Moment.
Set against idyllic present-day locations around Lake Tahoe, on the California-Nevada border, the new version features Swinton as a woman depicted as devoted to her three children and father-in-law while her husband, who is a captain in the US Navy, is far away on duty.
The intensity of her protective nature is revealed when she sets out to cover up the death of a sleazy Reno operator (Raymond Barry) who has been having a sexual relationship with her 17-year-old son (Jonathan Tucker). Goran Visnjic, the charismatic Croatian actor from ER, plays the stranger who further complicates her scheme in this stylish morality tale.
The eponymous protagonist in Lovely Rita, an Austrian feature that borrows its title from a Beatles song, is an unruly and introverted outsider who is indifferent to her classmates, rude to her teachers and locked in as punishment by her parents. Her difficult sexual awakening involves a schoolboy, who is too young for her, and a bus driver, who is too old.
This impressive first feature, written and directed by 28-year-old Jessica Hausner, is an acutely observed coming-of-age picture that rings true with a refreshing honesty - and a humorous disrespect for Rita's middle-class background. Over the course of a lean 80 minutes, which culminate uncompromisingly, Hausner also elicits vivid performances from an entirely amateur cast - led by the remarkable Barbara Osika as Rita - and bolsters the film's authenticity through her dexterous use of digital video.
The festival continues until Sunday night, with a packed programme that includes an even more corrosive picture of adolescent sexual impulses, in Catherine Breillat's graphic └ Ma Soeur (Fat Girl, tonight); the European premiere of Fred Schepisi's fine film of Graham Swift's novel Last Orders (also tonight); Alejandro Amenβbar's subtle, deeply involving and spine-tinglingly spooky The Others (tomorrow), which will be attended by Fionnula Flanagan, who stars in it with Nicole Kidman; and the closing film, Dark Blue World, directed by Jan Sverβk, the Czech film-maker behind the Oscar-winning Kolya.
More details from 021-4278518, or see www.corkfilmfest.org
