The Dublin film festival won over audiences with a solid line-up and a steady stream of film-makers and actors, writes Hugh Linehan.
With a 60 per cent increase in admissions since 2003, the organisers of the second Jameson Dublin International Film Festival can be forgiven for patting themselves on the back now the curtain has closed on this year's event. They knew our capital city needed and deserved a proper, well-run, intelligently programmed festival, and this year's success appears to show that the event has bedded in very nicely in a relatively short time.
The right balance has been struck between the twin pitfalls of the wilfully obscure and the blindingly obvious.
With the exception of the Surprise Film (the enjoyably silly Starsky and Hutch) this year's festival stayed away from programming such candyfloss as last year's Colin Farrell vehicle The Recruit, and there was little or no Farrell-scale star wattage on view.
What there was instead, thankfully, was a steady stream of film-makers and actors to introduce their films and discuss them afterwards with the audience. The first few days saw 21 Grams writer Guillermo Arriaga Jordan, The Cat's Meow star Eddie Izzard and The Station Agent writer/director Tom McCarthy (fresh from winning his BAFTA) showing up for the screenings of those films.
They were followed by Blind Flight director John Furse, with his stars Ian Hart and Linus Roache, and many others.
Two British film-makers, Richard Jobson and Penny Woolcock were on hand to talk about their respective films, 16 Years of Alcohol and The Principles of Lust, and both were at pains to distance themselves from what they saw as the mainstream of British cinema.
Jobson's film, based upon his own, semi-autobiographical book and set in Edinburgh from the 1960s to the 1990s, is an unashamedly poetic study of male violence and alcohol abuse - subjects familiar from other Scottish films such as Trainspotting and Small Faces, but treated here in a more stylised, less naturalistic manner which, as Jobson acknowledged, owes much to the influence of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai, who at one point planned to direct the story.
Accompanied by his two female stars, Laura Fraser and Susan Lynch, Jobson, whose varied career includes singing with Scottish punk band The Skids and working as a film critic and TV presenter, engagingly explained the genesis of the film, his own cinematic influences and his problems with the British Film Council, which, he said, couldn't believe his working-class central character could possibly be so articulate.
Woolcock's The Principles of Lust looks to France rather than Hong Kong for its influences, most explicitly to the writer Georges Bataille, whose Story of the I provides the inspiration for her protagonists' explorations of sex, drugs and social transgression. And pretty explicit it is too. Filmed and performed with lots of energy and some visual flair, its portrait of a listless writer's (Paul Newman) struggle to choose between domestic solidity (represented by single mother Sienna Guillory and her young son) and the hedonistic excesses offered by charismatic risk-taker Marc Warren, the film, like Bataille's book, doesn't amount to very much in the end, but it's certainly not dull.
Nor is Basque Ball, the new documentary from Julio Medem, although it features up to 100 talking-head interviews about one of the most confusing and apparently intractable political conflicts in modern Europe.
The San Sebastian-born director was present for a public discussion with writer and former Irish Times arts editor, Paddy Woodworth, following the screening, the culmination of a retrospective of such Medem films as The Red Squirrel, Sex and Lucia and Lovers of the Arctic Circle. Basque Ball, described by Medem as "an invitation to discussion", presents a wide array of views on the Basque-Spanish conflict, from journalists, artists, politicians, academics, victims of ETA violence and former political prisoners, intercut with sequences from the director's own previous work. The resulting film manages to be both informational and moving, level-headed and passionate. For an Irish audience, the resonances and parallels with aspects of our own political situation are inescapable, although the differences are just as striking. Most striking of all, perhaps, is the fact that the Spanish government and the Instituto Cervantes refused to co-operate with or support this retrospective of one of its country's most respected film-makers because of Basque Ball, despite the film's explicit and absolute condemnation of terrorist violence.
Basque Ball was just one highlight in a strong documentary strand running through this year's festival, which included three of the main contenders for next weekend's Best Documentary Oscar. Capturing the Friedmans, Andrew Jarecki's weirdly compelling and thought-provoking study of a deeply dysfunctional American family, gained much of its power from its main source material, the video, audio and home movie footage amassed by the Friedman family in the years before their father's arrest in 1987 on multiple charges of child abuse. Even after Arnold Friedman's arrest, his three sons continued to record the disintegration of their family in self-lacerating detail. This footage is intercut with present-day interviews with the protagonists in Jarecki's extraordinary film, which raises far more questions than it answers.
Another dysfunctional American family (albeit not as dysfunctional as the Friedmans) figures in My Architect, Nathaniel Kahn's highly personal journey of discovery about his late father, Louis Kahn. Kahn senior was one of the most significant American architects of the mid-20th century, noted for the muscular, monumental style of his buildings. He also led a complicated and secretive personal life, fathering children by three different women. Nathaniel travelled through America and Asia in an effort to unpick the enigma of his life, meeting up along the way with some of the grand old men of international architecture, including Philip Johnson and I.M. Pei. At the end, however, his father remains elusive.
Less enigmatic is Robert McNamara, US secretary of defence for much of the Vietnam war and subject of the latest documentary from Errol Morris, The Fog of War. Structured as "11 Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara", it functions as an autobiographical essay by the 85-year-old on the consequences of his experiences and actions, from his time with Strategic Air Command during the second World War, when the techniques of carpetbombing and firestorms against civilian populations were being developed, to his theories about what would have happened had Kennedy lived, to the sheer, brutal, inexorable realities of war and mass destruction. Given its almost soliloquising form, The Fog of War may be seen by some as an act of self-aggrandisement by its subject, but it's a fascinating eyewitness account of 20th-century history all the same.
Twentieth-century history figures also in Good Morning Night, Marco Bellocchio's dramatisation of the kidnapping of Italian politician Aldo Moro by the Red Brigade in 1978. Reminiscent in some ways of Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst (but a lot better), Bellocchio's humane but unsentimental film charts the increasing tension among the kidnappers as it becomes clear that their middle-class notions of proletarian revolution are not going to happen.
Even more desperate circumstances are recreated in Rosenstrasse, Margarethe von Trotta's film about a rare moment of public dissent in Nazi Germany, when "Aryan" women protested outside a Berlin police station at the arrest of their Jewish husbands. While the central story is well told, there's always a certain uneasiness about using these historical events as the basis for what is essentially a melodrama, an uneasiness reinforced by the film's unconvincing flashforwards to the present day.
A notable feature of many of these screenings was the way in which they managed to attract quite different audiences. At least half of the audience at the Basque Ball screening seemed to be Spanish or Spanish-speaking; for My Architect the cinema was heavily populated by people wearing the self-consciously geometric spectacles beloved of that profession. This writer spotted a fair few fellow-journalists at Shattered Glass, the highly entertaining film about how New Republic journalist Stephen Glass made up his articles for that magazine.
In an ever larger and more diverse city, an international film festival becomes a place where various sub-communities can come together. The only potential downside is that the festival, now spread out as it is across all four city-centre cinemas, can lack a sense of a physical presence in the city, but this may just be unavoidable.
On Sunday, the festival ended as it had begun, with the world première of a low-budget Irish film. In The Halo Effect, Lance Daly's portrait of nocturnal goings-on in a seedy Dublin chipper, Stephen Rea is Fatso, the implausibly-named proprietor, beset by gambling debts and loan sharks. Circling around him are a couple of generations of Ireland's best character actors, John Kavanagh, Gerard McSorley, Brendan Cauldwell, Laurence Kinlan, Kerry Condon and Simon Delany among them, but they are hardly stretched by Daly's screenplay, which comes across as an Irvine Welsh story hastily rewritten by Brendan O'Carroll.
Part of the problem lies in the over-proliferation of storylines, which reduces most of the characters to cardboard cut-outs, but the sitcom humour and over-signposted plot twists don't help. One wonders why Daly chose to take the more difficult and expensive route of shooting The Halo Effect on 35 mm film, rather than using the digital technology with which most low-budget features are now shot.
The film's cinematography and design could charitably be described as prosaic, and are certainly less striking than last year's digitally-shot and equally low-budget Dead Bodies and Goldfish Memory. The Irish Film Board's low-budget initiative, of which this is a part, is one of the more promising developments in recent years here, and has already produced some worthwhile work, but The Halo Effect is a disappointment. However, many in the audience in a packed Savoy Cinema appeared to find it hilarious.
Much more fun, for this writer at least, was to be had at Zatoichi, the latest, sui generis offering from the inimitable Takeshi Kitano. Based on a character familiar to generations of Japanese viewers from decades of TV series and feature films, it stars Kitano as an apparently harmless, blind, travelling masseur who's actually a supreme swordsman and martial artist. Featuring everything from syncopated farm labourers to Three Stooges-style slapstick, along with the sort of deliriously sanguinary swordplay which Quentin Tarantino can only dream of, the film culminates in an utterly berserk, Riverdance-goes-East dance routine, with the entire cast - samurais, geishas, peasants and gangsters - tapdancing like Busby Berkeley hoofers as if their lives depended upon it. Now that's what I call entertainment.
