Rock stars, hunger strikers and telephone operators - Cork's 50th Film Festival had a diverse programme, writes Michael Dwyer.
After eight busy days and nights of screenings and discussions, formal and informal, the curtain came down on this year's Cork Film Festival, which celebrated its 50th anniversary with a range of special events.
Festival director Mick Hannigan, who marked his 20th year at the helm, and his team, can be well pleased with the event's diverse content and smooth organisation, and with the attendances registered over its course. Even the risk of playing two drive-in movies paid off, as the rain mercifully stayed away for a few nights and the capacity in-car audience at the Munster Showgrounds did not have to watch the movies, Some Like It Hot and Raging Bull, through wipers.
Preceded this year by a symposium on the short film form championed by the festival since its inception, the programme featured a lively mix of international cinema - features, shorts and documentaries - that spanned the history of cinema from the pioneering 19th-century films of Georges Melies to recent movies such as Walk the Line, featuring remarkable performances from Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon as Johnny Cash and June Carter, to Andre Techine's under-rated wartime drama Strayed (Les Egares), to Billy O'Brien's atmospheric Irish rural horror movie, Isolation.
Those films and some others already have been covered on these pages in reports from Toronto and Cannes. Of the material new to me at Cork, the outstanding film came from the gifted French writer-director, Jacques Audiard, who follows A Self-Made Hero and Read With Lips with another arresting drama in The Beat That My Heart Skipped (De Battre Mon Coeur S'est Arrete).
Unusually, given that the general trend is toward US remakes of French productions, Audiard's film is a French reworking of an American original - James Toback's first and best film as a director, Fingers (1978) - and the second remake this year from Paris-based Why Not Productions, which made the new version of Assault On Precinct 13. Even more unusually, Audiard's film builds on the qualities of its source material, transposing its setting from New York to Paris and harnessing its themes and narrative elements into a dynamic and gripping present-day morality tale.
Romain Duris wholly immerses himself in the role of the protagonist originally played by Harvey Keitel. The film acutely charts the conflicts in his character, Thomas, an unscrupulous and vicious enforcer hired by his slumlord father to evict immigrants, and dabbling with equally amoral colleagues of his own in shady property dealings.
There is another side to Thomas, who has inherited the musical ability of his late mother, a concert pianist, and a chance encounter with her agent prompts Thomas to revisit ambitions he had put aside 10 years earlier, when he was 18. His new routine alternates between administering violent beatings to squatters and taking piano lessons from a serenely patient Chinese immigrant, a Beijing Conservatory graduate who speaks barely un petit peu of French.
Duris is hypnotically edgy - and unexpectedly touching - playing Thomas as a young man coiled up with nervous energy and frustration and forced toward a turning point in life when his parallel paths collide. Building to a powerful conclusion, Audiard's vigorous and immensely stylish film is an object lesson in remaking a quality film, ultimately transcending the achievements of an original that still stands out in its own right.
The subject of a retrospective programme at Cork this year, Stephen Woolley was given a special award at the festival in recognition of his contribution to Irish film, as the producer of most of Neil Jordan's films and of other Irish productions from The Last September to Intermission. Woolley was wearing a second hat at Cork, introducing his first film as a director, Stoned, which charts the short life of Rolling Stones founder and guitarist Brian Jones, who drowned in his swimming pool, and in suspicious circumstances, in 1969 when he was 27.
In marked contrast to the majority of biopics on dead rock stars, Woolley refuses to airbrush the less palatable aspects of his subject's history, unflinchingly depicting Jones as manipulative, self-obsessed and essentially unsympathetic. The core of the film is the odd- couple relationship formed between Jones (Leo Gregory) and handyman Frank Thorogood (Paddy Considine), who come from similar working-class backgrounds but are now worlds apart. Woolley adeptly employs a time-shifting structure to draw an impressionistic picture of Jones, reflecting on the changes pop stardom brought to his life and his weakness in dealing with the consequences. The period detail is as precise as one should expect from a film-maker who has visited the 1960s as a producer for Scandal, Absolute Beginners, and Backbeat, dealing with "fifth Beatle" Stuart Sutcliffe.
The Italian production, The Silence of the Skylark (Il Silenzio dell'allodola), is the antithesis of Stoned, given the reverence with which it views its subject, H-Block hunger striker Bobby Sands, who was 27, the same age as Brian Jones when he died, in 1981. Several scenes of Sands wearing just a white towel invite comparisons with Jesus in a loincloth, and just in case we miss that reference, the movie's prologue hammers it home.
This involves Sands telling a fable of a lark, a symbol of freedom, cruelly encaged until its prayers were answered and it died. The sadistic perpetrator of that act was Herod, he tells us. The film introduces Sands as an innocent young writer and poet whose writings were deemed subversive propaganda, leading to his imprisonment and humiliation at the hands of drooling, sadistic guards until he and fellow prisoners went on hunger strike to achieve political status.
Anyone who regarded Some Mother's Son and H3 as politically unbalanced treatments of the same subject matter will be astonished at the simplistic and naïve nature of The Silence of the Skylark, which reduces the political context mostly to montages of newspaper stories (The Irish Times is one of several sources thanked and credited) and archival television footage.
Writer-director David Ballerini appears more preoccupied with layering heavenly choirs and chanting as a soundtrack to the suffering endured by Sands. In an unexpectedly topical outburst following a recent remark by Fr Alec Reid, Sands shouts at the prison director (who has shoulder-length grey hair and a goatee) and his black-shirted guards that they are "war criminals" and "dirty Nazis".
Shot in an abandoned factory in Turin, the film features a hysterically over- emoted performance as Sands from Czech actor Ivan Franek, who is dubbed by an Italian actor and never seems to lose any weight as the hunger strike continues.
Australian director Robert Connolly wears his social conscience on his sleeve for the less heavy-handed but muddled modern drama that is Three Dollars, relying on his capable leading actors, David Wenham and Frances O'Connor, to carry the picture through its narrative lapses. They play a married couple doing their best to get by and faced with a financial crisis when the man's moral principles lose him his job as a government chemical engineer. There are some sweet flashbacks to their earlier years, when they are drawn to each other as Joy Division fans, but the movie is undermined by its fussily structured progress and by supposedly quirky elements that register as merely irrelevant diversions.
The marital relationship explored in Susan Kaplan's US documentary, Three of Hearts: A Postmodern Family, is, as its title suggests, unconventional. Filmed over eight years and augmented by earlier home-movie footage, it traces a triangular relationship to its roots in a gay love affair between Sam Cagnina, the son of a Mafia hitman, and Steven Margolin, a younger college student.
Keen to explore their bisexual urges, they set about bringing a woman into their lives, and after their first attempt misfires when the woman falls for Sam but not Steven, they find an apparently perfect partner in Canadian aspirant actress Samantha Singh. At Sam's high school reunion, he proudly introduces them as "my husband and my wife" to some of his former girlfriends.
The lovers work together at what Americans call a "wellness centre" in New York, and both men are thrilled when Samantha becomes pregnant, and the movie probably would have been interesting enough had the triangular relationship continued so happily. It doesn't, and the viewer feels like a voyeur as it begins to unravel, although it is clear that none of the trio is quite as forthcoming - to each other or the camera - as they were when everything looked so rosy.
Caroline Martel's Quebecois- produced documentary, The Phantom of the Operator, traces the history of the telephone operator from the earliest stages of the communications age, incorporating a wealth of neatly integrated corporate, scientific and (patronising) training films.
"I am the ghost of invisible women workers without whom the 20th century would never be the same," declares the mellifluous narrator (Pascale Montpetit), who speaks on behalf of all those women personifying "a voice with a smile" - and later notes, "I was the first agent of globalisation" - in this entertaining and absorbing movie that flies by in 66 minutes. It was one of the highlights in a lively festival that opened with presentations of archival footage and stills tracing its own history over 50 eventful years.
50th Cork Film Festival Awards
Jameson Award for Best Irish Short Film: Killing The Afternoon (directed by Margaret Corkery). Special mention: The Unusual Inventions of Henry Cavendish (Andrew Legge)
Claire Lynch Award for Best First Short by an Irish Director: Hitch (Mik Duffy).
Best International Short Film: Museum Piece (Hotel Diaries 2), (John Smith, England/ Germany). Special mentions: Heydar: An Afghan in Tehran (Babak Jalali, Iran/England) and Autobiographical Scene No 6882 (Ruben Östlund, Sweden).
Youth Jury Award for Best International Short: With All My Might (A Bras Le Corps), (Katell Quilléveré, France).
Irish Examiner "Made in Cork" Award: Mullet (Ed Godsell). Special mention: Killing The Afternoon (Margaret Corkery).
Gradam Gael Linn for Best Short in the Irish language: An Teanga Runda (Brian Durnin).
Audience Award for Best Irish Short: An Teanga Runda (Brian Durnin).
Audience Award for Best International Short: Ryan (Chris Landreth, Canada).
OutLook Award for Best Lesbian/Gay Film: Nights In Love (Hakon Liu, Sweden).
