THE 40th London Film Festival, which closed on Sunday night, was dedicated to the memory of two of its stalwarts who died this year - the indefatigable, far seeing cineaste, John Gillet, who was 71, and the wonderfully witty and shrewdly observant commentator, journalist and writer, Oscar Moore, who was 36.
This was the 10th and last festival under the direction of Sheila Whitaker, who moved the focus of the event away from the National Film Theatre on the South Bank to the heart of Leicester Square and achieved a surge in attendances - from 60,000 to 100,000 - which was by no means limited to the more high profile films on show.
Whitaker made it clear that she was unhappy to be leaving the festival at this successful point in its progress. "For me, it is very sad, but the decision is not mine," she states at the beginning of her introduction to the mammoth 186 page programme brochure. Her problems were compounded by the late withdrawal of Jane Campion's The Portrait Of A Lady as the opening film - The First Wives' Club, even with Goldie Hawn present, was hardly a strong substitute.
There was better news with the ongoing development success of the festival's exciting programme of master classes and public interviews, with subjects which this year included Gena Rowlands, Harry Belafonte, Steve Buscemi, Robert Altman, Bob Rafelson, Takeshi Kitano, Terry Gilliam, cinematographer Christopher Doyle - and, most topically, David Cronenberg in conversation with J.G. Ballard.
Cronenberg's film of Ballard's Crash was the succe's de scandale of the 40th London Film Festival, and its single festival screening the hottest ticket in town. Whether or not Crash will ever be seen again in a London cinema depends on the decision due from the British Board of Film Classification before the end of next week.
As ever, many of the most interesting movies showing at London had been covered on these pages in festival reports from Cannes, Toronto and elsewhere. Of the films new to me in London, the most winning was Mark Joffe's Cosi, the latest in an ever extending line of agreeably offbeat contemporary Australian stories with a musical backdrop. Heading a cast of redoubtable Australian actors, Ben Mendelsohn plays an aimless young man who lands a job at a Sydney asylum where he is hired to direct some of the patients in a variety show.
This occupational therapy exercise builds a head of steam as he is persuaded by one patient to stage Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte and he ignores the warning that "these people are damaged - they can't do an opera". What follows is a series of mishaps, rivalries, squabbles and discoveries as the night of the performance nears, and Joffe's resolutely unsentimental film shifts tones seamlessly between the touching and the humorous. One of the patients, Toni Collette from Muriel's Wedding and Emma, reveals her talents as a singer in the opera rehearsals and when performing Crowded House's Don't Dream It's Over over the closing credits.
Colin Friels, who plays one of the asylum staff in Cosi also plays an ex convict whose burgeoning relationship with a young woman (Jacqueline McKenzie from Angel Baby) is misunderstood by police who believe he is kidnapping her in Nadia Tass's factually based and over extended Mr Reliable, set in 1968. The siege which follows, with its attendant media and public circuses, would be incredible if it were not based on fact.
The slew of US independents at London included She's The One, the new movie from the Irish American actor, writer and director Edward Burns. It is not dissimilar, in mood and outline to his previous film, The Brothers McMullen, although he clearly had access to a bigger budget. Burns and McGlone again play Long Island brothers undergoing romantic complications, with Burns again taking the more likeable role for himself, and the women in their lives are played by Jennifer Aniston from Friends, Cameron Diaz from the Mask and Maxine Bahns from the first Burns film. The result is light and breezy with some good one liners, although there is an overwhelming feeling of deju vu.
FOLLOWING Burns's victory with The Brothers McMullen at Sundance in l995, this year's Sundance prize winner was Todd Solondz's interesting but overrated Welcome To The Dollhouse, which is carried much of the way by the remarkable 11 year old, Heather Matarazzo. Wearing geeky glasses and even worse clothes, she plays the unhappy and unfortunate Dawn Weiner, who gets a hard time from her fellow students and is virtually ignored by parents who dote on her overcute young sister. The movie yields more than a few sharp observations on the cruelty of youngsters to each other and on the solitary dilemma of Dawn.
Alan Taylor's Palookaville is, like Solondz's movie, set in New Jersey. Inspired by three ltalo Calvino stories, it deals with three male friends whose basic slacker ineptitude undermines their attempts at crime. All three characters are firmly established through the performances of Vincent Gallo, Adam Trese and William Forsythe in this diverting and good natured tale.
Very much the pick of the new European movies in London was the directing debut of screenwriter Agustin Dias Yanes with Nobody Will Speak Of Us When We're Dead in which Victoria Abril, the Joan Crawford of the 1990s, plays yet another long suffering woman although Crawford never suffered as physically as Abril does here. She plays an alcoholic prostitute working in Mexico City, where she survives a bloodbath involving mobsers and corrupt cops; taking a ledger detailing money laundering scams with her she returns to Madrid, where her bull fighter husband lies in a coma and the most philosophical of the gangsters is on her trail. Abril is riveting in this tense and often shockingly violent drama.
Arguably the most misguided movie at London was La Passione, which marks the cinema debut of Chris Rea as writer, producer and composer. A whimsical account of a young boy obsessed with car racing in the early 1960s and of his adventures in adult life, it is structured like some bizarre hybrid of Terence Davies's films about childhood and Ken Russell's loonier composer biopics, all laced with the trappings of a low grade TV variety show. It just might find an audience drawn to its high camp extremes, especially when Shirley Bassey bursts on screen to perform Yes, I Own a Ferrari and the title song.
However, the festival turkey just had to be Terence Ryan's risible The Brylcreem Boys, which jettisons any remotely interesting potential in its scenario of British, Canadian and German soldiers held in the same prisoner of war camp in neutral Ireland in the early 1940s. Gombeen men abound among the Irish characters, of whom Gabriel Byrne is the camp's commander, while the prisoners are tired archetypes played by Bill Campbell, William McNamara, Angus MacFayden and John Gordon Sinclair.
Riverdance star Jean Butler makes her acting debut in the movie - as the Oirish lass tentatively involved with a Canadian prisoner (Campbell) and a German (MacFayden) - and she choreographs the dance sequences in which the movie briefly comes to life. As a POW escape movie, The Brylcreem Boys is far removed from the thrills of The Great Escape and it might more aptly have been titled The Bridge On The River Dance.
