Sailing into Cannes last weekend on a huge wave of hype and anticipation, the new Todd Haynes movie, Velvet Goldmine, sailed out with the jury's nebulously-named award for Best Artistic Contribution - but for many, the film was beginning to sink almost as soon as it started. Perhaps inspired by his visit to the Dublin Film Festival a few years ago, Haynes's film of Britain's glitter rock era in the 1970s begins in Dublin - in 1854, with the birth of Oscar Wilde. This contrived opening sequence jumps forward to the schoolboy Oscar being asked in class what he would like to do as an adult. "I want to be a pop idol," he replies.
Having gratingly established his perception of Oscar Wilde as the first pop idol - and the direct antecedent of glam rock singers in all their pomp, theatricality and campness - Haynes fast-forwards again, this time to the 1970s and the strutting, extrovert lifestyles and stage personae of two bisexual pop idols. One is the archly-named Curt Wilde, a mascara-eyed, torso-caressing exhibitionist who drops his leather trousers on stage to sing and dance naked before his adoring fans; he is played with characteristic passion and lack of inhibition by Ewan McGregor.
The other is the purportedly enigmatic Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) who is first observed performing flamboyantly on stage in a skin-tight glitter-suit, a cloak of feathers and bright blue spiky hair, inevitably recalling David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust persona. At the end of the song, Slade fakes his own death on stage.
Moving forward in time again to 1984, Haynes introduces Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), a journalist who left his native Manchester for New York where his stereotypically gruff editor assigns him a story on the 10th anniversary of Slade's faked death. This hackneyed device is made all the more tiresome by flashbacks to Stuart's upbringing by conservative, dull-as-dishwater parents and to his early sexual infatuation with Slade.
Coming in the wake of Boogie Nights and The Ice Storm, Velvet Goldmine offers rather more by way of nostalgia than insight into The Decade That Taste Forgot. And Haynes's specific focus on the so-called gender-bending of the period is left largely underdeveloped - and is most effectively handled when he lays off the narration and allow actions to speak louder than words, as in a homoerotic stage routine between the protagonists which evokes the theatrical stage duels of David Bowie and the late Mick Ronson.
To its credit, Velvet Goldmine aptly captures the fashion tragedies of the period in the outlandish costumes designed by Sandy Powell and the hair and make-up designs by Peter King. The soundtrack blends original recordings (by Cockney Rebel, T. Rex, Slade, Gary Glitter) with cover versions of Seventies material (performed by Thom Yorke, Pulp, Teenage Fanclub, Placebo) and new songs commissioned for the film.
Ewan McGregor and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers perform three songs each in the movie, with the latter sounding uncannily like Bryan Ferry on his cover of Steve Harley's Sebastian, and the two actors work earnestly to transcend the limitations of the screenplay. While the underused McGregor is off-screen for about half of the movie, it is the prolific and fast-rising 20-year-old Cork actor, Rhys-Meyers, who enlivens it with that radiant screen presence which defines star quality.
It was a very good year for Irish actors at Cannes, with his work in The General putting Brendan Gleeson firmly on the international map; Colm Meaney injecting a sinister menace into Claire Dolan, on which I wrote last Friday; and Donal McCann, one of the small few to shine in the stellar cast of Illuminata.
John Turturro's second film as actor, writer and director after Mac, Illuminata is set in turn-of-the-century New York among a struggling repertory theatre company. The title refers to a new play which their resident playwright (Turturro) has written specifically for an actress played by Turturro's off-screen wife, Katherine Borowitz.
Although the play is deemed not quite ready by the theatre's owners (Donal McCann and Beverly D'Angelo), Turturro dares to substitute it when an actor's illness causes a performance of Cavalleria Rusticana to be cancelled. When the play is savaged by a foppish but powerful critic (Christopher Walken), the company hopes for a reappraisal if the critic succeeds in seducing the (male) cast member he desires. Meanwhile, an acclaimed but ageing diva (Susan Sarandon) has her professional and personal eyes on Turturro.
In Cannes Turturro cited the influence of Georges Feydeau, Jean Renoir and Michael Powell on his film, but the result falls very far short of such aspirations. Based on a play by Brandon Cole and so resolutely stage-bound a film that it captions the beginning of each act, Illuminata has been adapted for the screen by Cole and Turturro in a slender and strained screenplay so trite as to border on the illogical, and it strands the cast with some awful dialogue.
While the German film industry loudly bemoaned being excluded from the Cannes competition for the fifth consecutive year, Italy was memorably represented by Roberto Benigni's La Vita E Bella, covered here last week, which took the runner-up prize, the Grand Prix du Jury, at Sunday night's awards ceremony, and by Nanni Moretti's Aprile, which should have - but did not - take any prizes.
A deceptively simple follow-up to his autobiographical Dear Diary, and considerably lighter in tone, the witty and thoroughly engaging Aprile features Moretti as himself over the course of three years beginning with the 1994 election of the media magnate, Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing party, which prompts Moretti to smoke a joint for the first time in his life.
When that government falls over a year later, Moretti defers plans to make a musical about a 1950s Trotskyite pastry chef - and instead sets out to make a documentary on the imminent elections. However, he is easily distracted from his mission, not least by the impending birth of his son. Replete with entertaining digressions and asides, Aprile sparkles with warmth, humour and striking imagery over the course of a jaunty 78 minutes which pass all too quickly.
The humour is altogether blacker in David Caffrey's sprightly film of Colin Bateman's Divorcing Jack, one of two Northern Ireland productions showing in the Cannes market and set in the near future. The time is 1999, in the run-up to the election of Northern Ireland's new prime minister, with Robert Lindsay as the suave front-runner, a former IRA bombing victim campaigning on a peace platform.
Its central character, Dan Starkey (David Thewlis) is an abrasive Belfast newspaper columnist whose drunken adulterous fling with a woman he meets in a park ends abruptly when he finds her dead in bed. Soon he has the RUC, IRA, UVF and the British army on his trail in this cynical and acerbic comedy which at times turns jaw-droppingly irreverent. Briskly paced and marked by some keen comic timing, it marks a notable feature debut for its young Irish director, David Caffrey, although it could benefit from some fine-tuning of its over-plotted final stages and the deletion of a superfluous montage of flashbacks.
Writer-director Colm Villa's first feature, Sunset Heights, is set in a future Derry where "the British pulled out years ago". In this still-divided city "that doesn't even know its own name", law and order is maintained by rival uniformed punishment squads. The English actor, Toby Stephens, impressively plays a young man who has managed to remain uninvolved - until his son is murdered during a wave of child killings in the city.
There are shades of The Wicker Man about the film's eerie verging on the supernatural, although the ghost-like re-appearances of a preacher (Jim Norton), who earlier has been forced to dig his own grave, unbalance an intriguing drama made with a sharp visual style.
The 51st Cannes Film Festival produced one of the more satisfying programmes of recent years and it closed on Sunday night with two events which illustrate the festival's ever-uneasy marriage of art and commerce. First there was the presentation of the major prize, the Palme d'Or, to Theo Angelopoulos for his classically composed, serious-minded meditation on life and death in Eternity And A Day - followed immediately afterwards by the European premiere of the mega-budget Hollywood blockbuster, Godzilla.
