Halfway through its week-long schedule, this year's Murphy's Cork Film Festival is rolling along with some confidence and professionalism. Many of the major presentations, such as John Sayles's thoughtful Limbo, JeanPierre Dardenne's Palme d'Orwinner Rosetta and Tom Tykwer's exuberant Run Lola Run, have already been covered in these pages in reports from the Cannes and Toronto film festivals, but they attracted enthusiastic audiences for their first Irish showings. It's a welcome sign of the times that the screening of Limbo on the opening night was accompanied by a Cork-made short film, Enda Walsh's very funny absurdist fantasy, Not a Bad Christmas. Only a few years ago, the screening of any local production was a major event - this year sees three full programmes encompassing 13 titles. Many of these are still quite rough and ready, but it's good to see the second city finally starting to assert its identity on screen.
But Cork's chief importance is as a showcase for the best in international cinema, ranging from the avant-garde to the commercial mainstream, and the programme, now running across four screens with the increasing involvement of the Gate multiplex, has the potential to reflect that range better than anywhere else in the country. Inevitably, there were misses as well as hits this week, but this writer experienced more of the latter.
Two films from opposite ends of Europe addressed strikingly similar themes of urban alienation, cultural identity and youthful anomie. Most impressive was Schpaaa, Erik Poppe's assured and stylish portrait of a gang of teenagers - most of them the children of Balkan or Asian immigrants - living a life of petty crime and casual violence on the streets of central Oslo. Poppe's film has apparently caused much controversy and angst in Norway, with considerable soul-searching in that country's media about the social dislocation, drug abuse and dead-end lives it depicts, but to a foreign eye, what's most striking is Poppe's eye for dramatic lighting and striking widescreen compositions, along with the energetic performances from its young cast. In fact, the self-conscious style at times threatens to overwhelm the obviously heartfelt social criticism, but there's no reason why every European film-maker should succumb to the current fashion for drawn-out miserabilism, and Schpaaa's mix of style and substance recalls another film which sparked debate in its own country, Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine.
Like Schpaaa, Constantinos Giannaris's From the Edge of the City focuses on a gang of young, second-generation immigrants in a European capital. In this case, the city is Athens and the characters are "Pontioi", Greek Russians whose parents left the former Soviet Union for their "homeland" after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Ten years on, their children are disillusioned outsiders, still regarded as "Russians" by the local population, and relegated to a lowly social status, with only the Albanian immigrants they despise below them. At least, that's what Giannaris would have us believe, although it's hard not to suspect that he's over-egging the cake somewhat. Centring on the travails of one such young man, Sasha (Stathis Papadopolous), From the Edge of the City expressly sets out to shock, but its rollcall of social dysfunction - from rent boys to pimping to heroin addiction - rises to a hysterical crescendo which it's difficult to take seriously - particularly since the film takes itself far too seriously. The preening machismo of the central character also helps to defuse whatever sympathy we might feel.
Both From the Edge of the City and Schpaaa go to some pains to emphasise their modernity, extensively featuring hip-hop and dance music on their soundtracks. In contrast, the BBC Scotland production, Donovan Quick, ignores such contemporary trappings. It's often been a valid criticism of British (and Irish) films that they avoid the modern world, even when they're supposedly addressing it, and the last year has seen a rash of bland, anachronistic Full Monty-lookalikes to reinforce the point, but David Blair's quirky, likeable film is too individual and unusual to be lumped in with the rest of that crop. As the title hints, this is a modern-day Quixotic tale, which pits the little man against the overweening forces of authority. Colin Firth plays the eponymous, mysterious hero who shows up as the new lodger on the doorstep of the Pannick family, led by alcoholic Lucy (Katy Murphy), and including her learning-disabled brother (David Brown, who is himself learning-disabled, giving a terrific performance). To the Pannicks' bemusement, they find themselves caught up in Firth's crusade against the ruthless corporation which runs the local public transport system, and Murphy's cynicism is challenged by his idealistic "madness".
Donovan Quick is the kind of film which, in the wrong hands, could have ended up as the most awful sort of sentimental mush, but the screenplay (by Donna Franceschild, who wrote the recent adaptation of Robert MacLiam Wilson's Eureka Street for the BBC) and direction are too intelligent for that. Blair was responsible for the under-rated TV drama, Vicious Circle, based, like The General, on the life of Dublin gangster Martin Cahill, and here he convincingly creates a cast of highly believable, sympathetic characters who you find yourself really rooting for.
Less successful was Where the Elephant Sits, obviously a labour of love from its writer/director/star, Mark Lowenthal, which uneasily attempts to blend hard-hitting realist drama with whimsical fantasy. Lowenthal plays a teacher at an American inner-city high school, where the odds seem hopelessly stacked against making any sort of difference to the lives of his pupils. The bleakness of the situation is alleviated by the arrival of a talking elephant called Faith, and we find ourselves lost in the land of very heavy-handed metaphor, from whence there is no return. A pity, because the young, non-professional actors who play the high school kids are very impressive.
With four separate screens in four different locations, it's difficult to cover all the bases at Cork, and I didn't see as much of the programmes at the Triskel as I would have liked, devoted as they are to more experimental work, short films and documentaries. One documentary I did catch told a story so remarkable that it's surprising no enterprising producer has tried to turn it into a drama. My Mom's a Gangster (the more evocative original French title is Que Personne ne Bouge!) recounts the tale of a wave of bank robberies which took place near Avignon in 1989 and 1990. It took the police some time to track down the perpetrators, whom they were surprised to find were all women, most of them mothers. Solveig Anspach's witty, revealing film talks to many of the key protagonists in this highly unusual crime drama, including the women themselves, the police and the magistrate who tried the case.
While the broad and varied programme this week offers audiences all kinds of fare which they would never otherwise get a chance to see, there's also a fair helping of more mainstream films, and there's little doubt that the Kino Cinema will be jammed tonight for the first Irish showing of the American low-budget sensation The Blair Witch Project, as it was on Tuesday for the big-budget comedy, Pushing Tin. The latter, set in the strange, ultra-pressurised world of New York air traffic controllers, who are responsible for the busiest chunk of airspace on the planet, and suffer accordingly from appallingly high rates of suicide, depression and marital breakdown, might seem like less than fertile ground for light entertainment.
But director Mike Newell makes a pretty good fist of what turns out to be an odd hybrid of a movie - part romantic comedy, part buddy story, and part study of mental breakdown, with John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton as the controllers whose dislike for each other turns to self-destructive hatred, and Cate Blanchett and Angelina Jolie as the wives who suffer the consequences of their feud. More about Pushing Tin in a few weeks' time, but in the context of a festival celebrating all kinds and all lengths of films, it was notable that it was the supposedly hard-nosed, commercial Hollywood product which, at over two hours, felt over-stretched and self-indulgent.
