While the core of a strong film festival is the quality of the movies it shows, it is essential that the event extend its brief beyond just showing movies to bringing in the stars and directors of at least some of the films on view. In that respect, Murphys 43rd Cork Film Festival delivered handsomely over the course of a highly successful eight-day event. The guest list over the first four days included directors Whit Stillman, David Caffrey, Joe O'Byrne and John Lynch, writer Colin Bateman and actor Jason Isaacs. They were followed on Friday by actor Liam Cunningham, producer Ed Guiney and director Stephen Bradley, all representing the touching and surreal Sweety Barrett.
Saturday brought the Bedrooms And Hallways team of actor Simon Callow, director Rose Troche and producers Ceci Dempsey and Dorothy Berwin, and the star of the week, Jonathan Rhys Meyers on a flying visit from the Rome set of Titus Andronicus to his home town where he featured in two festival films, Velvet Goldmine and The Governess.
On Sunday afternoon, Simon Callow was in wonderfully articulate, informative and witty form during his public interview, which I had the pleasure of conducting, as he talked frankly and perceptively about acting and directing. And at the closing ceremony on Sunday night, Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle, who were working on Angela's Ashes in Cork all week, took to the Opera House stage to present the festival awards. Their director, Alan Parker, turned up later to be surrounded by enthusiastic film fans.
The festival director, Mick Hannigan, said the week had exceeded even his wildest dreams. "We wanted a big event and we certainly got it," he said. "The box-office is up slightly on last year's record-breaking £54,000, so naturally I am delighted. We had so many visitors this year that we can be certain of our status as a truly international festival."
Cork certainly got the package just right this year. In addition to lining up so many notable guests, the festival fielded a solid selection of new international features, documentaries and shorts which drew packed houses at all three venues, creating a genuinely festive atmosphere.
All of the scheduled features turned up and programme changes were minimal. The educational programme, UnReel, was a major success. And a welcome innovation was the free-sheet, Daily News, a lively mix of news, humour, and photographs edited by Peter Johnston and Alan Murphy. To their credit, the final edition was hot off the presses at 11 p.m. on Sunday, complete with details and pictures of the awards ceremony which had taken place just over two hours earlier.
The international features programme included a number of newly released movies reviewed here last Friday or today, along with some others - I Want You, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, My Name Is Joe and Out Of Sight - which will be covered here when they open over the next four weeks. The festival's closing weekend was marked by a number of features by first or second-time directors which are unlikely to arrive here until next year.
The most audacious of these was Sitcom, the first feature from the young writer-director, Francois Ozon, who won the short film prize at the French Film Festival in Dublin two years ago with the exuberant Un Robe d'Ete.
Ozon's confident and provocative Sitcom deals with an apparently contented suburban French family of four whose bourgeois lifestyle is turned upside down after the father brings home a rat as a pet. The consequences involve incest, homosexuality, bisexuality, and group sex orgies which are left unseen but hilariously suggested. Ozon loses his grip on the frenetic material in the final stages, but getting to that point is all of the fun in this calculatedly outrageous comedy with resonant echoes of Almodovar, Bunuel and John Waters.
Questions of sexual identity, personal honesty and commitment are raised and explored with perspicacity and humour in the American director Rose Troche's London-set romantic comedy, Bedrooms And Hallways, her second feature after Go Fish. Working from a keenly acutely observed original screenplay by Robert Farrar, Troche deftly juggles an assortment of mostly sexually confused characters in Bedrooms And Hallways.
Kevin McKidd amiably plays the pivotal character, Leo, a sensitive love-lorn sort who is persuaded by his heterosexual colleague (Christopher Fulford) to join a New Age men's group lorded over by a pretentious older man (a delightfully deadpan Simon Callow). Leo falls for one of the men, an ostensibly straight Irishman (James Purefoy with a dodgy Irish accent) who's soon inviting him for "real Guinness" and offering him poteen. Meanwhile, Leo's flatmate (Tom Hollander, looking like a camper version of Robbie Williams) is having an affair with a sexually voracious estate agent (Hugo Weaving).
In the French-Canadian film, Un 32 Aout Sur Terre (August 32nd On Earth), a young model (Pascale Bussieres from When Night Is Falling) survives a near-fatal accident which forces her to re-examine her priorities in life. Quitting her job, she decides it's time she had a baby, and she invites her closest male friend (Alexis Martin) to be the father.
Impulsively, they select a desert outside Salt Lake City as the place to procreate.
The film marks the feature debut of Denis Veilleneuve, a 30year-old Quebecois director whose experience has been in advertising and music video, and whose influences clearly include Antonioni and Godard. While he exhibits a firm sense of visual style, Villeneuve ultimately squanders the movie's promising premise in a meandering second half.
Writer-director Sandra Goldbacher achieves many striking wide-screen visual compositions in The Governess, aptly enough for a film which has photography as one of its concerns. Unfortunately, its principal theme is the slow-burning affair which develops in the 1840s between a young Sephardic Jew (Minnie Driver) who poses as a Gentile to get work as a governess when her father dies, and her employer, an older man (Tom Wilkinson) experimenting with photography.
This pot-boiler boils all too slowly and obviously, and as Wilkinson's sexually frustrated teenage son, Jonathan Rhys Meyers does as well as anyone could hope with a role which mainly requires him to pout and take off his clothes.
