Everything said and done in Page Eight, David Hare’s first directorial feature for many years, betrays its origins in the mind of a playwright and its destiny as a BBC broadcast, but its strongest mood is simply nostalgia.
The sight of great British character actors pacing the corridors of MI5 and talking about the state of The Circus can’t help but conjure up the spirit of George Smiley circa 1979. Smiley never had access to the tailoring worn by elegant but harried intelligence analyst Johnny Worricker (Bill Nighy), but their shared disdain for the modern ways of the spooks looks about the same.
The plot pulls in Anglo-American political tensions over extraordinary rendition and murder in the West Bank, although in a firmly low-key fashion; the nearest thing to an action sequence is when Nighy cracks open a second brandy.
Page Eight’s heart lies with the smooth delivery and impeccable posture of Nighy as Worricker, a very civil servant in a line of work where the old ways aren’t coming back, but the goals Hare seems to be aiming for are so open that the film never feels very cinematic.
Perfect Sense is hard to envisage working in any other medium but cinema, and there will be no shortage of people unconvinced that it works even there. David Mackenzie’s stylised and poetic apocalypse depicts the human race as being pretty much done for, and is a film to be experienced rather than described.
But let’s try: it takes the dry, alienated mood that marks Mackenzie’s best films and grafts it onto a screenplay by Danish writer Kim Fupz Aakeson, with funding and apparently some gene-splicing from Zentropa, home of Lars von Trier.
The results are remarkable, jagging back and forth between moments of overblown drama and painfully intimate affection. Its allegories, allusions and symbolism are juggled with such conviction that the distinctions between them stop mattering after a while. No explanation is forthcoming in the film about why human beings start losing their five senses in sequence, or for the outbursts of emotion and violence that signal the changes, so the viewer is left adrift without a lifebelt.
Ewan McGregor and Eva Green are caught up in the meltdown, a pairing that on paper looks like a bad match, but McGregor is liberated by Mackenzie’s daring, bouncing off Green’s unearthly beauty and bottomless pupils. It’s the director’s best film in years, a brave and terrible fable about a world whose creator seems to have grown tired of it.
Tanja Liedtke’s creator clearly smiled on her, gifting the German-born Australian dancer with the talent and temperament to do remarkable work in modern dance. And he presumably took an interest in the garbage truck that wiped her out in the middle of the night at age 29, just before she was due to take up the reins at the Sydney Dance Company.
Bryan Mason and Sophie Hyde’s documentary, Life in Movement, was in production when she died. Intended as a record of her path to the top of her profession, it suddenly turned into an epitaph and then went further still, as a portrait of a tight-knit group of creatives who suddenly lose their prime-mover.
The film makes it very plain how much of Liedtke’s angular, confrontational dancing was a direct reflection of her own temperament and history, effectively decoding modern ballet before your eyes and marking it as one of the best documentaries on the subject ever.
Skilfully edited from endless miles of home video and rehearsal footage, it opens up Liedtke’s personality for inspection, leaving you free to gape in wonder at the creative urge inside. Faced with her unbearable absence, her team opts to carry on without her, which takes its own toll and says plenty about the dilemma of a choice which has no correct decision.
More bad choices arose in Albatross, with funnier results. Frustrated author Jonathan Fischer (Sebastian Koch), with his one best-selling book weighing on him like an anchor and marooned in isolation with a horrid wife (Julia Ormond, so you can hardly blame him for the mistake), manages to get into a sexual relationship with 17-year-old Emelia (Jessica Brown-Findlay). Shenanigans ensue.
Although a couple of scenes are a bit familiar, especially a spot of Oxford-toff-baiting that can be seen approaching for miles, Albatross is blessed with a script by Tamzin Rafn that doesn’t feel particularly British about its sex-comedy, and motors along. The casting helps, since both Koch and Ormond have more screen presence than a Britcom strictly needs, and director Niall MacCormick keeps things non-judgemental.
And the casting really helps in the case of Brown-Findlay, who walks off with the film. MacCormick and Albatross’s producer Adrian Sturges already have some shared history with Andrea Riseborough, so their eye for young British actors of prodigious talent is already proven.
Findlay is cut from similar cloth, venturing into territory where other performers before her have come badly unstuck, and is guaranteed to linger in the memory of many viewers.
Among its other carefully tooled manoeuvres, Albatross provides legitimate reasons for Emelia to look great with no make-up, give a spotty youth a quick flash and to dress as Slave Leia, which is pretty much the trifecta.
Strong characters of the real-life variety cropped up night after night at The Troubadour Club, the West Hollywood venue that James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and numerous others gravitated towards in the years around 1970. Morgan Neville’s documentary Troubadours sets about unpicking the reasons why the separate trees of folk music and rhythm & blues should come together there, and why such a fertile spring of singer-songwriters should emerge.
The consensus is that it was a timely reaction to the state of rock and roll and what was happening on the east coast at the time, but the real reason chimes out loud and clear every time Carole King appears and unleashes some of the most joyous sounds a human being has ever made.
Neville catches the moment it goes sour, when Lester Bangs puts the boot in via an essay called ‘James Taylor Marked For Death’ and the optimism drains away. A justifiably offended Danny Kortchmar, King’s guitarist, says more in hope than expectation that, “No one remembers Lester Bangs any more, but they’ll always remember the music.” Vast numbers of people actually remember both, but certainly not in the same way.
For more information on this this year’s EIFF head to edfilmfest.org.uk
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2011 – Round Up: Part II (text) by Tim Hayes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
