What better solace, away from the wretched South Westerly autumnal winds, the dank November rains and decapitated days of natural illumination, than the velvety red cosiness afforded by the cinema.
Here in the gilded Georgian surrounds of Bath, its 19th Film Festival unfurls. At the same time as its more precocious, more vociferous younger cousin the Encounters Festival crackles and hisses just down the A4 in Bristol, the Bath Film Festival continues to stride down its own path unabated and unperturbed.
Bath, bizarrely you may think, has something of a serious film pedigree. This year the Christmas lights will be turned on by one Nicholas Cage (true story) who is something of a local land baron round these parts. Similarly this quietly but efficiently run festival enjoys the patronage of locally based luminaries Peter Gabriel and Ken Loach (whose stake in a local football team has enjoyed much attention recently thanks to his dalliance with Eric Cantona) as well as also being able to name producer Stephen Woolley, filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski, and, crucially for this year’s programme, Martin Scorsese’s editor of choice Thelma Schoonmaker, as key members of the festival Patron committee. The Honorary President of the Festival is Sir Christopher Frayling, the popular culture historian and writer and a serious expert on the spaghetti western.
Another film historian Professor Ian Christie recently noted that there are now over 1000 film festivals world wide, making it a complex and logistically mired process to carve an original programme of distinct personality and theme whilst grappling with release platforms and the muscle of the larger, bigger-name festivals who wield more clout in securing the crowd-pulling previews and exclusives.
It seems sensible, then, that the Bath Film Festival programme concentrates on what will draw the best local audience and not being too concerned if some of the films shown have already hit DVD release stage in their respective life cycles. The BFF aims not really to recreate the general festival model of an intensified global city in microcosm, or a space for feverish transaction, instead it calmly carries on trying to ‘open the eyes and minds to the overlooked,’ films which might have passed Bath by in the past year and recent months.
A Serious Man
There are, however, a few totemic previews. The Coens’ critic-tickling piece of Yiddish absurdum A Serious Man gets a run-out, as does the mighty critic-swatting A Prophet by the even mightier Jacques Audiard and Steven Soderbergh’s weirdly underrated whistle-blowing black comedy The Informant!. There are also more platforms for Jordan Scott’s first major feature release after her now compulsory stint in advertising – Cracks, as well as Newsnight Review prime cuts in the shape of Steven Poliakoff’s Glorious 39 and Michael Keaton’s subtle The Merry Gentleman.
Those, though, are films which will continue to enjoy rich coverage elsewhere. One of the joys of the smaller festival is that they can extend the life support system of films which may have been drowned in the gush of release schedules. To this end it was warming to see such films as the intricate and light of touch Mid-August Lunch by Gianni Di Gregorio take another shot in the arm just as it is the deceptively sophisticated Helen by Bath debutants Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor which plays carefully with boundaries of physicality and identity marked by clever uses of colour.
Timecrimes
It was heartening, too, to see a re-appearance of the Spanish Möbius-strip curio of Timecrimes which seems to take the ante offered by another overlooked chronologically manipulative film – Shane Carruth’s Primer – and up it somewhat. Another hot toddy of a film which provided a welcome tonic to the bite of the cold air outside was the chromatically precise Rumba by the Franco- Canadian pairing of Fiona Gordon and Dominique Abel. Of pure, mildly anarchic spirit it did not disguise its wafted allusions and debts to Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (it uses body gags and onomatopoeic sounds in much the same way) and I saw it compared in some festival notes, too, to Kaurismäkian melancholic comedy, which I first thought misleading until I remembered the perennial popularity of tango in Finland. That’s right, tango.
Movement, grace, dance and the body provided the festival with perhaps its most energising subject matter this year, the documentary strand marrying with the Dancing Screen strand in the shape of two dance-docs – Alastair Siddons’ sketching of the B-Boy phenomenon Turn it Loose, and Sophie Fiennes portrait of the free-wheeling Belgian choreographer Alain Platel and his zealous take on Monteverdi – VSPRS. It was with these two films that the general middle-browing of the BFF was gently jabbed. Perhaps for the 20th festival next year, there will be more outlandish selections.
The Red Shoes
The theme of dance in cinema waltzed gracefully along to the BFF’s highpoint for many which was a screening of the magnificently restored Powell and Pressburger film The Red Shoes, with the late and lamented Michael Powell’s wife Thelma Schoonmaker available for a Q&A. Bolshy, witty and not short of a good tale or two from her times spent with Powell and Scorsese, Schoonmaker’s enthusiasm for the restoration project and heart-felt pride of her connection with the film’s creators filled the room and maybe the odd eye too.
Rising up from the below street level belly of the Little Theatre Cinema back into the rasping wet wind at the festival’s close, we even succumbed to a little jig ourselves on the way back to the car. Singing in the rain, we splashed through the puddles all lit up in neon by the bright Bath lights soon to be in the care of Saint Nic.
