The range of the impressive programme for the Murphy's 42nd Cork Film festival was exemplified by the choice available in the event's three screening venues on Monday night. All 1,000 seats in the Cork Opera House were sold out for the most expensive production on the programme, John Woo's exhilarating balletic action movie, Face/Off, starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage and going on release here early next month.
Over in Washington Street the festival's newest venue, the Kino, was offering Tommy Collins's lowbudget feature film directing debut, Bogwoman, set during the build-up to the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland and already reviewed here from Galway Film Fleadh. A short walk away at the Triskel Arts Centre on Tobin Street was a double bill of no-budget films by young Cork directors - Cathal Condon's feature-length Intercession, made for £100 and shot in 13 days on a hi-8 camera, and Jon Patrick's Discretion, shot in a single night on a domestic hi-8 at the cost of £37.
The festival opened on a warm note on Sunday night with a crowd pleaser, Shall We Dance?, which has been a major hit in its native Japan and one of the arthouse hits of the year in the US. Although it has its longueurs, there remains much to enjoy in this gentle and charming movie elegantly directed by Masayuki Suo.
Its focus is Shohei, a conservative businessmen ostensibly happy with his wife and daughter, their newly-acquired home with its own garden, and his job. But he is tired, stressed out and feels there's something lacking in his life. Commuting home every evening, he is drawn by the sight of a melancholy young woman, Mae, looking out the window of a ballroom dancing studio, and he eventually plucks up the courage to enrol there.
In this humorous and touching story, Shohei's tentative first steps build to a new confidence on the dance floor and in life, and so changed is his behaviour that his wife hires a private detective to follow him. Although tagged as a Japanese Strictly Ballroom, this "heel-good movie", as one US review described it, is altogether more reserved than that Australian movie, a contrast reflecting the different cultures which produced the two movies.
Shohei is played in a subtle, credible performance by the versatile Koji Yakusho, who more recently starred in the intense Japanese drama, Unagi (The Well), which shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes in May. In her film debut as Mae, ballet dancer Tamiyo Takenaka grows in the role of a reclusive woman who once sparkled on the floor at a ballroom dancing championship in Blackpool. In an off-screen happy ending, Tanekana married her Shall We Dance? director after they finished shooting.
There is no hope of a happy ending to writer-director Neil Labute's adventurous and abrasive contemporary drama, In The Company Of Men, an American independent production which took a prize at Sundance this year. Its title hardly could be more apt for this provocative picture of two white male corporate executives who, in their late twenties, are bitterly frustrated at being passed over for promotion in these days of affirmative action and at being dropped by the women in their lives.
The more aggressive of the two, the good-looking, hard-nosed Chad (Aaron Eckhart) proposes to the more outwardly insecure Howard (Matt Molloy) a sinister scheme to take "therapeutic" revenge on women in general by subjecting one woman to humiliation. On an out-of-town company trip for six weeks, Chad chooses a vulnerable victim in Christine (Stacey Edwards), a deaf secretary, and the plan is that each man will have an affair with her and then cruelly drop her at the end of the six weeks.
Labute's riveting, slow-burning drama is unflinching in its head-on approach to delicate subject matter and it is bound to be heatedly debated when it opens here in the spring. Reminiscent of David Mamet's work in its themes and sharp dialogue - specifically Glengarry Glen Ross and Oleanna - the film extends its scope further in a scene where Chad reveals his racism and, it is suggested, repressed homosexuality, when ordering a junior black executive to drop his trousers. Charged by the power of its three superb central performances, In The Company Of Men builds to an electrifying and shocking climax.
Another acute US indie on male-female relationships, Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy, shown yesterday afternoon in Cork, deals with one New Jersey comic-book artist (Ben Afleck) who falls in love with another (Joey Lauren Adams) - before he realises that she is a lesbian. The biggest arthouse success of the year in the US, Chasing Amy is unusually frank in its dialogue, regularly defies expectations and manages to ring true consistently. I look forward to returning to it when it opens next month. Suffice for now to note that it marks as significant a leap for Kevin Smith after Clerks and Mallrats as Before Sunrise was for Richard Linklater after Slacker and Dazed And Confused. Linklater's new film, subUrbia, shown in Cork on Monday, opens in Dublin today and is reviewed in the Cinema column.
Michael Dwyer reports on the closing weekend of the Cork Film Festival on next Friday's Vision page.
