For over three caffeine-soaked weeks in May and June, America's largest and best-attended film festival presents a 25-day feast of all things cinematic. And this year, being the festival's silver anniversary, was extra special, from the opening film, Francis Weber's The Dinner Game, to the shaggadelic groovefest that was the closing night's Austin Powers: the spy who shagged me. More than other years, this year's festival concentrated on American independent film-making. Even so, a number of entries from other countries managed to make an impression. Ireland was represented by both John Lynch's Night Train and Stephen Bradley's Sweetie Barrett. From Belgium, Patrice Toye's Rosie delivered a haunting portrait of a troubled teenager (the superb Arkana Coppens) while in Mexico's Santitos director Alejandro Springall reinvented magic realism in his story of a mother (the glorious Dolores Heredia) searching for her missing daughter. Yugoslavia managed to bring us two very black comedies about the horrific situation in the Balkans: Emir Kusturica's Black Cat White Cat and Goran Paskaljevic's The Powder Keg, which, in some strange hommage to Bob Fosse, has just been re-titled Cabaret Balkan by its American distributor.
In the American independent series, there was the occasional disappointment - most notably Morgan J. Freeman's highly anticipated follow-up to his much-lauded debut, Hurricane Street, Desert Blue, which left its talented young cast (including Kate Hudson and Christina Ricci) stranded with no place to go. For the most part, though the series offered a stunning array of fresh talent. In Dead Dogs, Clay Eide combined the traditions of film noir and family drama in his hypnotic tale of two brothers whose attempt to rob a motel over the fourth of July weekend goes horribly wrong, while in Freak Talks about Sex, Paul Todisco beautifully captures the anomie of post-college existence as he follows two buddies (the marvellous Steve Zahn and Josh Hamilton) trying to get their lives in order in small-town New York. Gorgeously shot in black and white, Eric Mendelsohn's Judy Berlin managed to transform the familiar terrain of suburbia into a strange and evocative planet while getting exceptional performances from the ensemble cast, most notably Madeline Kahn and a superb Barbara Barrie.
In Robert Schmidt's uneven Saturn, Scott Caan's riveting performance as a troubled youth shows that he's every bit as talented as his father James, while in Don Most's The Last Best Sunday, Angela Bettis from Broadway's Arcadia makes a stunning debut as a repressed teenager who discovers the joy and pain of living when a young man (Douglas Spain) breaks into her house while her parents are away for the weekend. With both the sensuality and vulnerability of a young Jessica Lange, Bettis makes her character one of the most memorable to be seen in American cinema in quite some time.
And this year's David Lynch award has to go to . . . Michael Polish's Twin Falls Idaho, which boasts the very Lynchean concept of conjoined twins (played by the director and his brother in real life, Mark) and the woman (Michele Hicks) who loves them both. Equal parts Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, it also manages the Lynchean feat of being alternatively weird, hilarious and deeply moving.
While the "new queer cinema" continued to make its presence felt, there was nothing at this year's festival to match the power and depth of last year's High Art, Gods and Monsters or The Opposite of Sex. However, Yonfan's tragic Beauty, about the intersecting lives of three gay men in Hong Kong, more than lived up to its title, while Alex Dimitriades gives a star-making in-your-face performance as the self-destructive and sexually voracious gay Australian teenager in Ana Kokkinos's Head On. And there were two delightful lesbian comedies: Nisha Ganatra's Chutney Popcorn about a second-generation Indian lesiban in New York who takes on more than she bargained for when she decides to do her childless sister a favour, and Anne Wheeler's sweetly funny tale of a young woman's coming out of the closet in Vancouver, Better Than Chocolate.
