After a busy week of lunching, gossiping and even attending the occasional movie, Donald Clarke applies his critical thinking to the second half of the Dublin International Film Festival
Having twice heard distinguished distributors telling off film writers during public events at this year's Jameson's Dublin International Film Festival, which ended on Sunday, I approached the task of summing up that event with a certain caution.
On Saturday evening Hamish McAlpine, the brash, colourful chairman of Tartan Films, one of Britain's leading art-house specialists, explained that the average "film reviewer" - he feels that few deserve to be called critics - forms his or her opinion while lunching with the other similarly unqualified members of a tight, self-regarding cabal.
McAlpine will therefore probably find it of only passing interest that I greatly enjoyed Andrew and Jeremy Get Married, a documentary distributed by Tartan and directed by the company's co-founder Don Boyd. Following an apparently ill-matched, but actually rather happy gay couple as they prepare for a civil union, this charming film manages the impressive task of making the viewer feel as if he is being introduced to two new friends.
Earlier in the week Brendan McCaul, the respected general manager of Buena Vista Ireland, Disney's distribution wing, remarked that Irish critics, having once been notably forgiving of domestic films, had now perhaps swung a little too far in the opposite direction.
This cabal of lunching wolverines was offered more flesh last week in the form of a varied selection of new Irish films, all of which showed promise, even if none really jumped off the screen and into your lap.
One could hardly imagine more contrasting - or complementary - views of Dublin than those offered by Ciaran O'Connor's Capital Letters and Fintan Connolly's Trouble With Sex. O'Connor admitted that his film, whose numerous night-time sequences look as if they were shot through mosquito netting, still requires some technical tinkering, and it does indeed feel more like a sketch for a movie than a finished work. Telling the story of an immigrant who is forced to work as a prostitute, Capital Letters - "torn from the headlines" as we used to say - is worth watching for a decent performance by Karl Shiels and a genuinely electric, though virtually wordless, one by Ruth Negga.
Featuring gloriously chocolaty photography by the always-terrific Owen McPolin, Trouble With Sex presents the capital city as a glass space-station populated by sleek achievers who keep their supernaturally crisp underwear on while rutting in various semi-public places. After being dumped by a boyfriend oikish enough to own golf clubs, a well-dressed lawyer (Renée Weldon) takes up with an enigmatic, purse-mouthed barman played by Aidan Gillen. Connolly, whose 2000 movie Flick demonstrated considerable flair, creates an impressively dreamy atmosphere, but the film is so relentlessly stylish it sets your teeth on edge somewhat.
Mickybo and Me, the début feature of Terry Loane, son of a Methodist minister from North Belfast, returns us to a time when all Irish films featured muddy-faced children confused by the harsh realities of the adult world.
Based on a popular play by Owen McCafferty, Loane's nostalgic comedy focuses on two young friends, one of whom is a Protestant, and one - you're way ahead of me - a Catholic. Inspired by a screening of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the pals set forth into a world whose boxy motor-cars and chunky, drab knitwear seem a little out-of-date for 1970.
Featuring good performances from young John Joe McNeill and Niall Wright, Mickybo and Me breaks no new ground, but may, on its upcoming commercial release, appeal to that sizeable portion of the audience which enjoys a cosy evening out with no garottings.
There was more talented juvenile acting (where do these kids all come from?) in Gary McKendry's elegant, technically dazzling short, Everything in This Country Must. When proposing the project, McKendry, a commercials director who financed the film out of his own pocket, bravely announced to writer Colum McCann, the author of the source story, that he intended to secure an Oscar nomination. Amazingly, this did not prove to be hubris. McKendry's picture, in which a Catholic farmer and his daughter reluctantly receive the help of the British army while attempting to rescue a stranded horse, is indeed up for a statuette next week.
Our other Oscar nominee is Belfast-born writer-director Terry George, a frequent collaborator of Jim Sheridan, whose compelling Hotel Rwanda received a triumphant screening - women on either side of me wept like geysers - on Thursday night. George, a passionate man with a forceful line in righteous rhetoric, was on hand to receive the plaudits for this story of a Hutu hotel manager (Don Cheadle, another Oscar hopeful), who rescued more than 1,000 Tutsis from the homicidal militias in 1990s Rwanda. The film has its flaws (let us just mention that Nick Nolte's supporting performance does not show that actor to his best advantage and leave it at that), but it should prove a powerful force for challenging audiences' complacencies about continuing tragedies in Africa.
Sadly, I could not find time to take in all the short films by younger Irish directors that were screened over the week. But mention should be made of Andrew Legge's ingenious silent-film parody, The Unusual Inventions of Henry Cavendish, Brian Durnin's dark children's adventure, Tilly and the Teeth, and James Cotter's amusing zombie comedy, Strangers in The Night.
Out there in the rest of the universe, mischief was afoot. A representative from the American anti-globalisation pranksters The Yes Men turned up to talk about the eponymous film detailing their exploits and, rather tragically for a group that works to alleviate the United States' perceived ignorance about the world, seemed to believe that the Screen on D'Olier Street was in the United Kingdom. The audience, to this point amenable, muttered angrily.
After the showing of Scared Sacred, Velcrow Ripper's documentary concerning various post-millennial outlooks on catastrophe, a member of the public reportedly introduced himself thus: "I am the reincarnation of a lion that is a direct descendant of King David and Jesus of Israel." About which no more needs to be said.
Despite the festival being situated at four corners of central Dublin, such stories do seem to travel from venue to venue and help foster a busy, gossipy atmosphere. Although crowds are not as tightly pressed together as they are at other Irish film jamborees, punters do tend to build up a fellow feeling with their colleagues in the trenches.
Thomas Riedelsheimer's Touch the Sound, an intoxicating documentary concerning the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, offered soothing release from all that rushing around. Structured around several challenging, experimental improvisations between Glennie - who, understandably, seems a bit prickly about constantly being asked about her deafness - and the great avant-garde guitarist Fred Frith, Touch the Sound is considerably less middle-brow and comfy than it sounds.
Further easy-going relief came with Danny Boyle's Millions. In this adaptation of Frank Cottrell Boyce's acclaimed children's novel about two young brothers who discover a large sum of money by a railway track, Boyle, whose recent 28 Days Later showed a new willingness to be messy, returns to the busy, fussy style he perfected for Trainspotting and Shallow Grave. Sadly, the film is as deficient in charm as it is rich in good looks.
As in the old Dublin Film Festival (any similarity to which is entirely coincidental), the week's great unifying event remains, for those who can get tickets, the surprise film. After tantalising trailers for such flicks as Kingdom of Heaven, Batman Begins and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, festival director Michael Dwyer allowed the curtains to pull back on John Maybury's bleak, puzzling thriller The Jacket.
Featuring a characteristically gaunt Adrien Brody and a surprisingly earthy Keira Knightley, the picture tells the story of an inmate in a mental asylum who, during drug-induced psychotic incidents, appears to be transported into his own future.
Strange as the film is, it is no more odd than its director. Maybury, best known for the Francis Bacon biopic Love is the Devil and the video for Sinead O'Connor's Nothing Compares 2 U, asked the audience what the writing meant on the back of Aer Lingus's seats, and then went on to explain that his film was really about Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
With scarlet lining spilling out of his pockets, Maybury, who has the louche manners of a man at home to a thin cheroot, could have stepped back behind the drapes and happily joined the cast of the closing film, Wes Anderson's agreeably barmy The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
