The London Film Festival 2006

Helen M Jerome reviews

The London Film Festival 2006

London Film Festival 2006…

Helen M Jerome witnesses some fresh and flourishing talents – homegrown and international – at the 50th London Film Festival.

Another year, another remarkable London Film Festival to make one take stock, think, laugh, weep, and even leap to the barricades. One big theme emerged – surveillance – and the fortnight was also notable for promising directorial debuts and strong female performances across all ages (Hoorah!)

Once again the festival was book-ended by big budget blockbusters with brains. Last year it was The Constant Gardener and Good Night and Good Luck. This year the opener was THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND, Kevin ‘Touching the Void’ McDonald’s first fiction feature, which is also notable for a towering performance by Forrest Whitaker as Idi Amin, with James McAvoy as the innocent abroad, a na•ve Scottish medical graduate taken under Amin’s wing and seduced by the high life and hedonism while poverty and violence escalate around the rest of Uganda – with two vivid incidents turning the stomach towards the end.

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The festival itself closed with BABEL, the amazing, continent-crossing epic that shows how one small incident can have repercussions from Morocco to Mexico to Japan, and brings out subtle, understated performances from the likes of Gael Garcia Bernal, Cate Blanchett and even Brad Pitt. With similar sensibilities to Crash and chockfull of Big Themes like alienation and fate, this again shows why director Inarritu is one of the fastest rising auteurs around.

In between came the Brit grit of indies like THIS IS ENGLAND, Shane Meadows bitter love letter to the eighties, and the casual rise of the National Front, post-Falklands War and amidst doc martens, big perms, pebble dash, ska music, buckaroo and Blockbusters on TV.

Then there was RED ROAD, one of the outstanding feature debuts of 2006, directed by Andrea Arnold. Set in contemporary Glasgow, this revenge thriller has swirling rubbish, feral dogs and brilliant performances set against the rise and power of CCTV, and resembles last year’s voyeurism hit, Hidden, and Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

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THE LIVES OF OTHERS is another debut – from Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck – that expands on the theme of surveillance. It takes the Stasi – secret police – in East Berlin in the mid-eighties as its murky subject, then explores the complex and mixed emotions of one of those doing the bugging.

What happens if he starts to like and even sympathise with the subjects he’s spying on? If he doesn’t tell the truth he might risk incarceration or worse, but surely it couldn’t hurt to look the other way and record a “lack of suspicious acts”? Beautifully and sensitively acted and directed, this is probably the pick of this year’s thrillers.

DARK BLUE, ALMOST BLACK is a gritty, yet effortlessly stylish Spanish comedy about responsibility, love in different forms and escape. Plus some inevitable surveillance, this being the unofficial festival theme.

Watching and controlling another’s fate is a theme that also runs through the smart comedy STRANGER THAN FICTION, in which Will Ferrell’s mundane life is accompanied by the constant voiceover of Emma Thompson, who, it turns out, is writing a novel with the unassuming Ferrell as her protagonist. But will he be able to confront and change his preordained destiny? And will the sympathetic supporting turns from Maggie Gyllenhaal and Dustin Hoffman help prevent Thompson from polishing off Ferrell on the page?

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FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION is Christopher Guest’s broad satire on Hollywood and the business of hype around Oscar-nomination time. A small film called Home for Purim gets sufficient heat to make its previously neglected stars get risible facelifts and makeovers, and appear on appalling daytime TV shows hosted by Fred Willard (with Mohawk haircut). Filled to bursting point with double entendres and outrageous observations on showbiz, this is for those who loved Guest’s Waiting for Guffman, and is Catherine O’Hara’s finest hour (and a half) as fading actress Madeline Hack.

From the other side of the world, but with similar sensibilities comes KABUL EXPRESS, a stunning-looking black comedy set in present day Afghanistan, with Tarantino-esque references to cricket and Bollywood – plus the constant presence of the Taliban.

THE KING AND THE CLOWN is a sprawling epic that also delves into unknown territory, set in a 16th Century Korea awash with conspiracies. Concentrating, as the title suggests, on the court ruler and his personal troupe of comic actors, it shows how hubris, revenge and paranoia are a fatal cocktail of royal characteristics found not only in Hamlet’s Denmark, but also in Seoul. Always colourful, sometimes romantic, frequently hilarious, and featuring great hats, this huge domestic hit could be the next Hero.

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FRESH AIR may well be this year’s sleeper hit, much like Whisky two years earlier. A quiet, unassuming and gently affecting student graduation film from Hungary’s Agnes Kocsis, it pits mother against daughter in everything they do, except for the TV drama they watch together in silence in their Budapest apartment. Winning performances from Juli Nyako as mother Viola – who wears red and cleans toilets – and debutante Izabella Hegyi as daughter Angela – who wears green and wants to be a fashion designer – make this a rare gem.

ESMA’S SECRET explores the consequences of war through another working class mother-daughter relationship, this time in Bosnia. Hugely affecting performances from the female leads as they confront their violent past make this another must-see European film.

THE SINGER (Quand j’étais chanteur) is Gerard Depardieu’s movie. He sings, he seduces the camera, he effortlessly plays the part of a washed-up club singer – a grand fromage, if you will – placed amidst mirror balls. He’s seen it all, but how will he cope when his voice is threatened? Worse still, what should he do when he falls for a woman half his age, played by rising star, Cecile de France, a sort of Emmanuelle Beart with Mia Farrow haircut. A welcome meditation on love, mortality and music with a hopeful, but ambivalent ending.

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CLIMATES is a Turkish novelistic look at the end of a relationship – played out by real-life husband and wife Nuri Bilge and Ebru Ceylan – with Nuri also directing and portraying his character brutally and unsympathetically. But will she come back to him?

ROMANZO CRIMINALE is about a real gang who ruled Italy from the seventies through to the early nineties with drugs, violence and occasional terrorism. Cleverly intercutting the drama with real news footage, it’s overlaid with an evocative soundtrack including Sweet, KC & The Sunshine Band, Pretenders and Creedence Clearwater Revival. You can see the writing on the wall for many of the gang, who learn “you can’t erase the past,” and those who can’t get enough of the Sopranos and Goodfellas will quite rightly lap this up.

CATCH A FIRE is the true story of the politicisation of an ordinary black working man in South Africa. Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke) is getting by under apartheid – until the final straws of persecution and torture grind him down. From the same director who made Rabbit Proof Fence and Patriot Games – Phillip Noyce – it again boasts an entirely credible villain, Tim Robbins, though it sometimes sacrifices its heartfelt social issues to the thriller genre.

FALLING is one of an impressive batch of new Austrian films, this one directed by Barbara Albert and reuniting five schoolfriends, now in their thirties, for the funeral of a favourite teacher. With strong female leads and evocative music, it’s a sombre variation on the Big Chill/Secaucus Seven reunion genre.

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OUR DAILY BREAD is a deeply affecting documentary on food production, by another Austrian, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, and is all the more powerful through having no commentary or interviews. This is pure, lyrical and occasionally mesmerising filmmaking about the clinical business of death and efficient harvesting for our consumption. And it actually made me cry.

BLACK GOLD is brothers Marc and Nick Francis’s telling documentary on the coffee industry – jumping around from Ethiopia to New York to Trieste to Seattle to London in search of the truth. Just who is cleaning up while the coffee farmers’ cut gets smaller and many of their children are “moderately malnourished”? blackgoldmovie.com is the place to find out more.

THE GROUND TRUTH is the American documentary that dares to ask “What are we doing here?” through Iraq veterans who have returned damaged by bullets and bombs, and psychologically. Messed up, injured, brutalised and dehumanised, some even commit suicide rather than be haunted by what they’ve seen and done, or sent back for a second tour. Again, this needs to be seen by more than the NFT2 audience (including an attentive Mike Leigh) and further details are on thegroundtruth.net

On a lighter note, the middle-aged teenyboppers sitting behind me gasped each time they saw an image of their hero in SCOTT WALKER: 30th CENTURY MAN. Stephen Kijak’s portrait of the reclusive yet influential all-American boy, who is name-checked by everyone from Bowie to Radiohead, delightfully reveals that Scott himself was influenced by Margaret Rutherford. Bless.

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So, another festival, another crop of superlative movies. But, I hear you cry, which films and talents can be recommended without reservation. Well, since you ask…

Next Big Thing (Directors):

• Andrea Arnold (Red Road)
• Agnes Kocsis (Fresh Air)
• Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others)

Next Big Thing (Stars):

• Izabella Hegyi (Fresh Air)
• Cecile De France (The Singer) (right)
• Derek Luke (Catch A Fire)

Documentaries to change the way you eat, drink and think:

• Our Daily Bread
• Black Gold
• The Ground Truth

Without reservation, rush to see:

• The Lives of Others
• Red Road
• Stranger Than Fiction
• Babel
• The Last King of Scotland
• Romanzo Criminale
• The King And The Clown
• Fresh Air

Check out the official London Film Festival website at: LFF.org.uk

Review copyright © Helen M Jerome 2006.