THE ACCBank 12th Dublin Film Festival opened on Tuesday night with a solid political thriller, A Further Gesture, scripted by Ronan Bennett - who wrote the remarkable TV film, Love Lies Bleeding - and directed by Robert Dornhelm. It is based on an idea by Stephen Rea, who also stars in the film as a Provo who escapes from the Maze and heads for New York. Working as a dishwasher, he is befriended by Guatemalan activists who share his sense of displacement in the US. When he learns of their plans to assassinate a man who has killed and tortured many of their countrymen, the film evokes the movie tradition of ex-convicts going in for one last job as he offers his expertise in these matters.
The most dramatically effective sequence in the movie is the opening - the protracted and impressively staged break-out from the Maze. The pace slackens for a while when the movie moves to the US, and some of these scenes could usefully be trimmed and tightened before the film goes on release later this year. Rea, who is in virtually every scene, commands the attention in his acute picture of a lonely and alienated but determined man.
Rosanna Pastor, from Land And Freedom, plays the Guatemalan woman with whom he forms a tender relationship, and a good cast also includes Alfred Molina, Brendan Gleeson, Sean McGinley and the talented young Spanish actor Jorge Sanz.
AMONG the many new Irish movies being launched at the festival, arguably the most enterprising is Owen McPolin's first feature film, Drinking Crude, which had its premiere in the Screen last night. Achieved on a very low budget by McPolin, a 27-year-old writer-director from Tralee, this episodic road movie features Andrew Scott as a naive young Irishman who fails his exams and runs away to London.
There he endures a series of misfortunes - he gets evicted and then is robbed - and is crying in desperation when a chance encounter with a gregarious Scot (James Quarton) lends him back to Ireland and a job repairing tanks in oil refineries. The film also deals with domestic violence as the two friends tackle the brutish husband of a young woman (Eva Birthistle) they meet on their travels.
Although it needed a stronger narrative charge, this essentially good-humoured and good-natured movie is consistently appealing and its principal characters are well etched by the leading actors, especially Andrew Scott, who made such a promising debut in Korea two years ago and has impressed Abbey Theatre audiences in several productions since then.
Drinking Crude marks a confident directing debut for Owen McPolin, who makes maximum use of the movie's disparate locations, and it features notably good lighting and editing, and a vigorous score by Bill Corkey.
THE Spirit Of America season, the festival's annual showcase for US independent pictures, opened on a low note on Wednesday night with The Last Days Of Frankie The Fly in the presence of its director, Peter Markle, whose credits include Hot Dog. The Movie, Youngblood and Bat 21. The best thing about this soporific effort is the central performance of the redoubtable Dennis Hopper. He plays the eponymous Frankie, a minor criminal nicknamed The Fly because he can do no harm to anyone.
Michael Madsen is aptly repellent as the sadistic mobster whose wrath Frankie incurs when he attempts to free a porn movie actress (Daryl Hannah) from his grasp and her own heroin addiction. The violence is abrupt in this predictable revenge fantasy, which also features Kiefer Sutherland as an NYU film graduate working as a porn director.
VISITING film-makers due at the festival in the days are John O'Hagan, director of Wonderland; Andrew Kotting, who made Gallivant; Mark Joffe, director of Cosi; and Greg Mottola, director of The Daytrippers. Oscar-winning Irish actress Brenda Fricker will attend the screening of Swann in which she co-stars with Miranda Richardson. And, of course, Pat O'Connor will participate in a public interview at the IFC on Thursday morning and will attend the world premiere of his new movie, Inventing The Abbotts, later that night.
UNFORTUNATELY, some of the most attractive films the DFF programme will not be available to the festival, after all, for various reasons. Nick Gomez's Illtown will be replaced at 4.10 p.m. today by the controversial Italian film, Pianese Nunzio, Fourteen In May, originally scheduled to be shown on Wednesday last. Tomorrow's sold-out screening of L'Appartement will be replaced by another French film, Will It Snow For Christmas? Sandrine Veysser's picture of a rural family struggling to get by in the face of an overbearing father. It was described by the Toronto Film Festival programme as one of the most impressive debuts in recent memory.
Sunday's late-night screening of The Uncle From Brooklyn has fallen through and there will be a second screening of Moebius in its place. The scheduled screening of A Chef In Love on Tuesday next at 4.15 pm. will be replaced by the new Danish film, The Eighteenth, which arrives here trailing very good notices from the recent Berlin Film Festival. The film, takes place over the course of 12 hours on the day in May, 1993 when the Danes voted in the referendum on joining the EU, and the day ended in violence with the police opening fire on demonstrators.
Next Wednesday's 4.10 p.m. screening of Childhood's End has been cancelled and will be replaced by one of this year's Oscar nominees for best foreign language film, The Other Side Of Sunday. A Norwegian production directed by Berit Nesheim, it is set in 1959 and features Marie Theisen as a girl going through the turmoil of adolescence.
A programme addition in the Screen cinema next Thursday at 8.30 p.m. is Mother, the new serious comedy written, directed by and starring Albert Brooks. The movie features Debbie Reynolds in her first major screen role for decades and the cast also includes Rob Morrow.
ON the Ambassador stage before the screening of A Further Gesture on Tuesday night, Stephen Rea told the audience that last, week he saw Neil Jordan's The Butcher Boy, in which he has a leading role, and that it's a wonderful movie. This has led to great speculation that it will be the festival's Surprise Film next Thursday in the Savoy. However, the Jordan film is still in the late stages of post-production and will not be ready for public exhibition for quite some time. So Thursday's audience can expect to be surprised by something else.
IN between checking out festival movies, Brenda Gannon, administrator of the Federation of Irish Film Societies (FIFS)is planning another movie marathon - the annual National Viewing Sessions of FIFS. This year's event will be held at the Tower Hotel and Garter Lane Arts Centre in Waterford over the weekend of April 4th to 6th.
The event provides film society organisers from all over the country with an opportunity to view selected movies available for, their next seasons, and 18 feature films will be screened for delegates. The weekend programme is; also open to anyone interested in setting up a film society in their area. For further information, contact FIFS on (01) 679-4420.
IN a very busy week for film activity, this evening sees the launch of Ardmore Extras
Agency, which will represent and provide extras to the film and television industry. The agency is a joint venture between Ardmore Studios and Irish Entertainment Database, the Irish company which developed the first-ever computerised video database of film extras.
Each extra on the new agency's books will be individually filmed at Ardmore Studios and will then be accessed via computer desk-top by the industry professionals responsible for casting film, television and commercials in Ireland.
