As Sean Connery and Michael Caine swapped jokes at the end of Edinburgh's 51st Film Festival - the most impersonated stars on earth together for the closing gala screening of a magnificent, newly-restored 70 mm print of The Man Who Would Be King, 23 years on from their collaboration on John Huston's classic - it was clear that the festival's new director, Lizzie Francke, had at least stepped on to the colourful, zesty, magic carpet woven by her predecessor, Marc Cousins, without slipping.
Belfast-born Cousins's flair and audacious programming resurrected the festival two years ago and his sudden decision to depart last year remains a shock to Edinburgh's system.
Francke, wisely, avoided any radical departures from last year's shape and form, with the Rosebud section emphasising new, cutting edge work, the big galas and the innovative Scene By Scene talks with film-makers, mainly conducted by Cousins himself, still in place.
Francke, though, has increased the documentary section and told me that she regards the festival as "a thesis"; "looking forward" by opening with the low-budget French feature, Ma Vie En Rose and "looking back" with the closing The Man Who Would Be King. Well, I'm not sure about approaching a film festival as an academic exercise - and it was either brave or mad to open with a small French film when the superb Mrs Brown, starring another world-famous Scot, Billy Connolly (with Judi Dench) was there to remind us what great acting is available.
But they were held for the middle weekend - and only then did the festival move into party mode, sparked by Connolly's shout of "Where's the cartoons?", shushed by Judi Dench, as Mrs Brown suddenly leapt on screen after the introductions. So, a week before, the opener was Alain Berliner's Ma Vie En Rose, starring the delightful Jean-Phillippe Ecoffey as the seven-year-old son of bland parents in their bland Parisian suburb who yearns to be a girl and begins dressing in his sister's clothes and disappearing into his own private candy-kitsch world ruled by Pam, a French Barbie-doll.
His father is appalled; and gradually his search for another gender affects all of their lives and almost destroys them. Berliner has a light comedic touch and an eye for colour and the small horrors of suburbia that strays into Tim Burton territory.
Although it received a muted response from the Edinburgh audience, Berliner's film heralded a dramatic theme which ran throughout the two festival weeks from the full-throttle, if overwrought, brutality of Gary Oldman's directorial debut, Nil By Mouth - which won the festival's Director's Award - to the one masterpiece on show, Ang Lee's delicate, mesmeric The Ice Storm, this was the year of the fractured family. Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter traces the effects of communal tragedy on a number of families but, typically of Egoyan, is so detached it fails to touch the heart.
Under The Skin, British director Carine Adler's debut feature, is also about grief and loss, with Samantha Morton starring as a girl who seeks solace after her mother's death in increasingly extreme sexual encounters. Morton is excellent, vulnerable and vicious all at once, and the film went on to win the Michael Powell Award for Best New British feature, but it does not always convince and I began to wonder if there is now too much of a British bias in Edinburgh's prizes.
The familial context continued with the bright, funny James Gang by the blossoming Brit director, Mike Barker, who has created something akin to Cathy Come Home meets Raising Arizona. A road movie starring the consistently striking Helen McRory in another fierce, funny performance as the Scottish mother of four who goes on the run with her loser ex-husband, played by John Hannah, to London, and embarks on a series of robberies with scene stealing kids in tow. Only a contrived ending lets it down.
Even beside Michael Haneke's shattering but important Funny Games, a drama about victims which shreds the nerves and preconceptions about violence, the most controversial film of the festival was Sick, an American documentary from Kirby Dick which challenges, then involves you in the painful, funny, extreme life and death of Bob Flanagan, self-proclaimed "supermasochist".
Flanagan was born with cystic fibrosis, yet was the longest living survivor of the disease, living into his forties and gaining a kind of escape by a freely-expressed masochistic existence and wicket humour. It culminates with him driving a nail through his penis. Not easy watching - but by the time of his death you see this is someone who has been reaching for life and raging against an incurable disease by taking command of his own body.
A strong final week featured the arrival of I Went Down with director Paddy Breathnach, writer Conor McPherson, lead actors Brendan Gleeson and Peter MacDonald among a host of producers in for an uproarious premiere, although the shifting moods of this cutting, hell-bound Irish road movie seemed to catch the Edinburgh audience unawares. Similar in its low-budget inventiveness, hard-edged humour and tone changes was Harry Sinclair's wonderful Topless Woman Talk About Their Lives, a New Zealand feature which was easily the highlight of an unusually weak antipodean selection. Fabulous performances and furious, fast-cutting momentum made this one of the films of the festival, with an outstanding lead in the ever-growing shape of Danielle Cormack as Liz, a sexually active girl who forgets to have an abortion and doesn't much care for the father. Literally filmed during Cormack's pregnancy, the film is hilarious, sexy and touching with a surprise bitter-sweet ending.
In comparison, John Byrne's Slab Boys now seems archaic and fails on many counts. Byrne is one of Scotland's great renaissance men in his writing and painting, but somehow cannot transfer this to film. And there is an old-fashioned feel to Brian Gilbert's Wilde, a pedestrian account of Oscar's life, saved by Stephen Fry in a commanding central performance. Another disappointment was Antonia Bird's Face, staring Robert Carlyle - who also stars in the joyous The Full Monty which won this year's Audience Award - as an East London armed robber with a political past who conducts a major heist that goes wrong. Bird was discovered at the festival and is a double award winner with Safe and Priest; but Face is an uneasy mix of heist movie and political comment, although the cast are brilliantly edgy and ugly and there are sequences to savour.
We had to wait to the closing weekend for the film of the festival; The Ice Storm, starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver, directed by the most unassuming and charming guest of the entire event, Ang Lee. There is now no doubt that the Taiwanese director is becoming one of the cinema's masters, following Sense And Sensibility with this exquisite, elemental American drama of a family in the America of 1973. Nixon is lying on TV, the clothes are awful and the children of the Sixties revolution cannot communicate with their own children. It is one of the great portraits of an era, and says everything about the loneliness and disintegration of the family with gentle humour and without raising a single voice. It begs for Oscars and demands an audience blunted by a formulaic Hollywood to reach their emotions again.
