After a long and contentious build-up, the Edinburgh International Film Festival was undoubtedly keen to open with a crowd-pleaser that would get the audience on its side. Which The Guard did, more or less.
Any film giving Brendan Gleeson free rein to police the mean streets of Connemara and indulge his fine line in withering put-downs is going to be a droll spectacle, and director/writer John Michael McDonagh just about manages to keep the spectre of Craggy Island at bay.
The wistfulness that creeps in around the edges of the black comedy stops anything unexpected from happening, and the tone lands in a pre-fabricated spot between Hot Fuzz and Minder, but in return you get to witness Gleeson relaxing into the part of pill-popping acid-dropping Olympic-swimming Garda Sergeant Gerry Boyle like a man reclining into a big baggy sofa.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyA5wYGFbnk
Even more isolated than the good citizens of Connemara are the residents of the besieged apartment block in Nicolas Goldbart’s Phase 7, who are marooned indoors by a largely unseen low-budget apocalypse sweeping Argentina and, apparently, the world. John Carpenter is the correct touchstone for this sort of thing, which Goldbart demonstrates by borrowing a pulse from Prince of Darkness and a theme from Escape From New York for his film’s score.
Faced with a virus which apparently just makes people ramble on for a bit before flaking out, the neighbours first band together to keep the lights on, but end up descending into self-preservation and survivalist mayhem. There’s a thread of low-fi social commentary and a vague suggestion that it’s all part of the new world order decreed by George HW Bush, but Goldblart seems a bit half-hearted with the satire.
The violent set-pieces are more sure-footed, including one in near-total darkness that allows the elderly resident played by Federico Luppi to loom menacingly out of the gloom. Since Luppi is still in full possession of the aristocratic vampire air he cultivated in Cronos, that’s some serious looming.
The single best performance at the festival so far came from someone at the opposite end of their lifespan. Tomboy is, by any stretch, one of the great films made by adults for adults about children, and exquisitely written and directed by Celine Sciamma. It treads delicately around the story of 10-year-old Laure, already a tomboy and moderately androgynous, who introduces herself to some new playmates as a boy named Mikael more or less on the spur of the moment and plays the conceit through from there.
The film’s tone is perfect, not just tasteful but utterly unpatronising, even when Laure makes a Play-Doh penis to fill out her swimming trunks. Long stretches of screen time in which kids of both sexes are shirtless captures their innocence in a way that manages to be both intimate and objective at the same time, largely because Zoe Heran as Laure is captivating, a triumph of casting.
Sciamma even generates a moment of pure visual poetry after Laure has been reluctantly forced into a girlie blue dress, when the camera pans up into the trees and retreats into nature, before returning to find the dress sloughed like an old skin and left hanging on a branch.
There’s a much more self-destructive breed of misfit at the heart of Bobby Fischer Against the World, Liz Garbus’ documentary about the eccentric chess master’s rise and catastrophic fall. An all-conquering chess juggernaut from the time he could sit on a chair high enough to see the board, Fischer was eventually manoeuvred by no less a puppet-master than Henry Kissinger into serving as a poster-boy for Western democracy, and paid a very high price for his singular and uncontrollable talent.
Garbus rounds up terrific film of Fischer as a crop-topped 1950s teenager realising the extent of his own gifts and scores it with the theme from Shaft, but even back then Fischer looks like he would rather be in the dentist’s chair. The saddest sight of all is the footage of Fischer’s mother Regina, a gentle and committed soul driven by her own left-leaning convictions, who allowed her son to make his own way in the world and could no more have corralled his demons than she could have defused a timebomb.
Scientists and their convictions didn’t do much good for the chimpanzee known as Nim Chimpsky, whose troubled life as the focus of a project to teach sign language to a primate is told in James Marsh’s documentary Project Nim. Marsh’s instincts for incorporating dramatic reconstructions into archive footage makes this doc feel much more manipulative than Garbus’s, and in this case Marsh’s subject isn’t around to play a part, as Phillipe Petit was in Man on Wire.
Plenty of other characters are available though, including Bob Ingersoll, the primate studies student who took one look at Nim and set about rescuing the chimp from hell. But the film is equally interested in pondering just how much trouble scientists can have in agreeing how to get from A to B, especially once the slippery principles of animal experimentation are involved.
The most fascinating and confounding presence is the project’s instigator Herb Terrace, who eventually comes to the same conclusion that a compassionate viewer might have predicted from day one and realises that he has been barking up the wrong tree. Marsh leaves the viewer to unpick Terrace’s noticeable tendency to end up in bed with his female students, well aware that the film could just as easily have been called Dr T And The Women.
For more information on this year’s EIFF head to edfilmfest.org.uk
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2011 – Round Up: Part I (text) by Tim Hayes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
