The Edinburgh International Film Festival celebrated its last year before going solo in fine style, writes Michael Dwyer, Film Critic.
The 61st Edinburgh International Film Festival closed on Sunday with one of its most popular institutions - a full day given over to repeat screenings of some of its most popular presentations. And it marked the end of an era, as the event will no longer run simultaneously with all the other festivals - theatre, books, art, comedy, television - that inject the Scottish city with such vitality in the month of August.
The film festival will have the city to itself when it moves to the second half of June from next year. There will be much easier availability in hotels and restaurants, and none of the distractions the other festivals present. It certainly will be unusual to attend the film festival without being stopped on every block by exotically costumed performers touting their stage shows.
That may well be to the film festival's advantage, as it often tends to be overshadowed by so many counter-attractions. Whether it will affect the quality of the programme remains to be seen. The new dates will be just four weeks after Cannes, which should make it more difficult to secure films showing there. This year Edinburgh screened a quarter of the Cannes competition line-up - Death Proof, A Mighty Heart, Paranoid Park, Les Chansons d'Amourand The Man From London- all covered on these pages in Cannes reports.
Edinburgh already loses out on many films because the autumn festivals in Venice and Toronto demand, and get, their world premieres. This year Edinburgh lost a major new British film, Atonement, the Ian McEwan adaptation starring Glaswegian actor James McAvoy, because Venice had obtained the world premiere of the film for its opening last night. Such are the arcane rules of film festivals that Atonementhad a paid public preview at an Edinburgh cinema last Thursday night, but could not be shown in another festival before its Venice screening last night.
To nobody's surprise, Anton Corbijn's film Control, which had its world premiere at Cannes in May, was the big winner in the Edinburgh awards at the weekend, being voted as best British film and taking the acting prize for Sam Riley's electrifying portrayal of the late Joy Division singer Ian Curtis on and off the stage.
Among the other notable contenders was Jim Threapleton's compelling micro-budget Extraordinary Rendition. It is loosely based on the case of a Canadian citizen arrested in New York five years ago and imprisoned and tortured in Syria. The film features Omar Berdouni as an English academic of Moroccan descent who is drugged, taken to an unnamed location and subjected to torture and interrogation.
"You are a political insurgent dedicated to building a united nation of Islam," he is told by the warden (Andy Serkis), who relentlessly questions him. While overtly political, Threapleton's tough, unsettling film places equal weight on the personal dimension, effectively employing flashbacks to contrast the man's mistreatment with the simple pleasures of his life before detention and to delineate the trauma he experiences after his eventual release.
Another debut film from a British director, Roger Goldby's The Waiting Roomwas altogether more conventional in its ambitions and approach. It begins promisingly when two adults, George and Anna (Rupert Graves and Anne-Marie Duff), return from a park with two children and hurry upstairs for sex, while the children are watching TV. It soon transpires that they are neighbours and that George is married to another woman.
A brief encounter at a London railway station triggers mutual attraction between Anna and a caring retirement-home orderly (Ralf Little), whose own relationship is falling apart. Buoyed by engaging performances from Little and Duff, the film keeps them apart as long as possible, but the ending is never in doubt and is let down by pointless fantasy sequences.
IF THERE WASan award for most gratuitous screen nudity at Edinburgh (and there isn't), Little would have shaded it over Emmanuelle Béart, who undresses almost as frequently in André Téchiné's The Witnesses (Les Témoins).She plays a novelist in an open relationship with a vice-squad detective (Sami Bouajila), and as the film begins in the summer of 1984, she gives birth to their first child. Meanwhile, her doctor (Michel Blanc), a close friend, falls head over heels for a young man (Johan Libéreau) he meets cruising in a park by night.
Matters become a great deal more complicated as Téchiné addresses issues of commitment, fidelity, hypocrisy and obsession, before the spectre of Aids looms over one of the characters with consequences for all of them. The cast is exemplary in this classically formed and deeply involving moral drama.
Argentine filmmaker Lucía Puenzo was named best new director at Edinburgh for XXY, her challenging picture that dares to place a 15-year-old hermaphrodite at its centre. Expressively played by Inés Efron, Alex has reached puberty, but her parents continue to run away from the problem, even moving with Alex to Uruguay, before a series of events finally force them to confront it in this subtle yet unflinching film. One of the producers is the director's father, Luis Puenzo, who made the powerful 1985 political picture, The Official Version.
Stefan Ruzowitzky's Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters)is consistently absorbing as it relates the remarkable true story of Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), a master forger who survives the Nazi concentration camps when he and some other inmates are assigned to counterfeit millions of pounds to flood and destroy the British economy. The men are given special treatment - comfortable beds, better food - but faced with conflicts of principle as they aid the German war effort to save their own lives.
The US documentary Crazy Lovetells a tale that truly is stranger than fiction as director Dan Klores observes the relationship between an odd couple over almost 50 years. It begins in 1959 when ambulance-chasing attorney Burt Pugach meets a younger woman, Linda Riss. He becomes so obsessively possessive that he hires thugs to throw acid in her face when she gets engaged to another suitor. Even though she is disfigured and almost blinded, she astonishingly agrees to marry him. Pugach and Riss are the principal contributors to this engrossing documentary that exerts the fascination of watching a car crash.
Representing Ireland at Edinburgh were John Carney's Once- rejected by the festival last year, but invited this year by the new artistic director - and Paddy Breathnach's venture into the horror genre with Shrooms, which reunites him with Man About Dogscreenwriter Pearse Elliott. Jack Huston and Lindsey Haun head the cast in this tall tale of US college students on holiday in Ireland, where they take magic mushrooms in a remote wood.
They obviously haven't seen The Blair Witch Projector heard the song about what happens "if you go down to the woods today", and they have the misfortune of choosing an area near a disused orphanage where the children were cruelly mistreated. Breathnach's atmospheric picture is respectful of its genre, and while the students are unsympathetic creations, they are harmless and ill-prepared for their gory fates. Don Wycherley and Sean McGinley contribute amusingly ripe cameos as what one character calls "the indigenous people", a couple of grotesquely primitive Irish woodsmen.
The pick of the new US fiction films in Edinburgh was George Ratliff's commendably low-key contemporary horror movie Joshua, in which the eponymous character is an exceptionally bright nine-year-old student and piano prodigy (Jacob Kogan) whose behaviour turns sinister when his affluent parents (Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga) have their second child. Clearly as talented as the boy he plays, Kogan demonstrates formidable screen presence, heightening the tension, as Joshua plots one unpredictable scheme after another. It may well prove too hard to take for parents of young children.
EXPERIENCE HAS TAUGHTus that Ethan Hawke is a better actor than a novelist and a better novelist than a screenwriter-director, and his second outing as a director, The Hottest State, affirms that view.
It begins promisingly as it throws together a struggling actor (Mark Webber) and an aspirant singer (Catalina Sandino Moreno), but while Hawke elicits capable performances all round - the cast includes Laura Linney, Michelle Williams and Hawke himself as the actor's father - the film begins to creak under its self-indulgent contrivances.
Teen angst suffuses Rocket Science, the first narrative feature from Jeffrey Blitz, who made the much-lauded spelling-bee documentary Spellbound. This time the protagonists are participants in high-school debates where they crumble under the weight of expectations. They carry other burdens on their young shoulders, coping with dysfunctional families, and in the case of the main character (Reece Daniel Thompson), with a pronounced stammer. The result is yet another calculatedly quirky US independent production, but it's reliably inventive and appealingly played by its young cast.
Rocket Scienceseems relatively restrained when compared to Darren Ashton's exuberantly over-the-top mockumentary Razzle Dazzle: A Journey Into Dance. Imagine Little Miss Sunshinecrossed with Strictly Ballroom, and you begin to get the measure of this often uproariously funny film following the misadventures of ambitious pre-teen dancers, pushy parents and anxiously insecure teachers. English actor and comedian Ben Miller is admirably deadpan as the tutor who devises absurdly naive political themes for his young dancers, and Kerry Armstrong equally so as the stage mother from hell, who describes her daughter as "an Ikea of talent".
For sheer entertainment, the only movie to top it at Edinburgh was Disney's new animated feature Ratatouille, a Pixar production charting the experiences of a young rat who arrives in Paris from rural France and reveals outstanding culinary skills. Directed by Brad Bird, this inventive and irresistibly charming comedy features a fine voice, in which Peter O'Toole is outstanding as a snooty, sneering food critic, named Anton Ego.
Edinburgh winners
Michael Powell Award for Best New British Feature Film: Control(Anton Corbijn)
Best Performance in a British Feature Film:Sam Riley ( Control)
Audience Award: We Are Together(Paul Taylor)
Best Documentary: Billy the Kid(Jennifer Venditti)
New Director Award: Lucía Puenzo ( XXY)
Best British Short Film: The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island(James Griffiths)
Special mention: Dog Altogether(Paddy Considine)
European Film Academy Short Film 2007 - Prix UIP: Soft(Simon Ellis)
Short Scottish Documentary Award: Breadmakers(Yasmin Fedda)
McLaren Award for New British Animation: Over the Hill(Peter Baynton)
