It’s a heady atmosphere — an exclusive party for the British film Snowcake finds Steve Coogan and Alan Rickman both holding court in a rosewood-lined drawing room. We’re in Edinburgh’s coolest member’s bar (possible Edinburgh’s only member’s bar), The Hallion. The celeb wattage is so dazzling that apparently Brian De Palma turned up at the bash and nobody noticed. All this — and J.K. Rowling - and it’s only the second night of the film festival.
Edinburgh had started as it clearly meant to go on, with an opening-night party for The Flying Scotsman that blew spots off previous years’ events. A new location offered an expansive open-air courtyard and an unusually balmy evening had revellers thronging outdoors. The film’s star, Johnny Lee Miller, was conspicuous by his absence, but other cast members made the effort. A kilted Brian Cox munched on the burgers scorched on braziers manned by ruddy, slightly flustered catering staff. Elsewhere a radiant Laura Fraser was mobbed by fans at every turn.
And while the festival always has a few casualties by its end (single malt at 3am has a kick like a mule and people are inevitably going to get damaged), this festival had walking wounded right at the very beginning in the bruised and battered form of the director and film buff Richard Jobson. Recently returned from Hong Kong, where he has been prepping his latest picture, Jobson had a painful eye infection that he was hiding behind shades and a broken wrist sustained after asking the fight choreographer Woo-ping Yuen to show him a few moves.
Goodness knows what kind of state he’ll be in by the weekend, when the likes of Kevin Smith and Charlize Theron are scheduled to have arrived and the serious partying will have started.
But this festival is about more than carousing — there are movies to be seen. Two particularly strong British pictures are generating an early buzz. Although it’s difficult to second-guess the decisions of the jury for the Michael Powell Award, my vote for best of British this year goes to London to Brighton, an outstanding, hard-hitting drama that spans a day in the life of a browbeaten hooker, her pimp, a runaway child and the man who wants to kill them all.
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Written and directed by the first-time feature film-maker Paul Andrew Williams, this is a supremely confident piece of storytelling. The performances, particularly that of the excellent Lorraine Stanley, are blisteringly raw; the story is taut, economical and utterly compelling. You’ll leave the cinema feeling as if you’ve been in a street brawl, but you certainly won’t forget it.
My tip for the break-out commercial success of the British films being shown in Edinburgh this year is Life & Lyrics, a bold, energetic urban tale starring the rapper turned actor Ashley Walters, formerly of So Solid Crew.
Star-crossed lovers from rival hip-hop crews find themselves competing on opposite sides of an explosive open mike competition. Meanwhile Jamaican gangsters are looking to recoup a debt and one young rapper is hoping to contact the mother who gave him up for adoption.
Everything about this slick, highly enjoyable picture screams quality, from the camera-hogging performances to the assured writing and confident ear for language.
But most of all this is Walters’s film. The man formerly known as Asher D starts the movie as the promising young talent from Bullet Boy, but by the time the credits roll he’s a fully fledged star.
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There are few places better than the Edinburgh Film Festival for audiences wishing to take the pulse of the British Film industry. For better or worse, the health of our film industry is laid bare for all to see. This year’s festival brings familiarly mixed messages. While London to Brighton and Life & Lyrics are both extremely encouraging, and there are several intriguing oddities on show, there are a few minor disappointments as well.
The organisers have every right to be pleased with the reception for The Flying Scotsman, a solid crowd-pleaser about the Scottish cyclist and sometime world record holder Graeme Obree. The warm response to the film is a double triumph for the festival as the organisers also managed to avert a potentially embarrassing protest at the premiere by crew members and extras who remain unpaid after the production company Mel Films Limited went into liquidation.
This unfortunate situation, while a bit of a depressing indictment of the state of production in the UK, will, it is hoped, be remedied once the film is sold to a distributor.
What is more disappointing is the fact that so much of this too-familiar Brit Grit, with its triumph against the odds storylines and whiff of whimsy, is still getting made. Granted, a darker dimension to the story — the spectre of depression — gives Johnny Lee Miller something to get his teeth into: his Obree is a whip-thin man with thighs like steel cable and haunted eyes who rides to escape his own personal demons.
Ultimately, however, it’s a fairly conventional piece of filmmaking that pushes all the right buttons. Despite its passion for two wheels, the picture has a pedestrian feel.
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Another picture aimed squarely at the apparently lucrative market for lovable British eccentrics is Driving Lessons, a semi-autobiographical tale from the writer/director Jeremy Brock. The Harry Potter alumnus Rupert Grint does a nice line in inarticulate adolescent angst as a gauche teenager who escapes his oppressively uptight mother by going to work for an ageing alcoholic actress (Julie Walters, having an indecent amount of fun with the role of the obscenity-spouting old lush). A chaotic, booz-sodden trip to the Edinburgh Festival is part of his job description.
It’s watchable but unremarkable, and rather marred by the Big Embarrassing Flamboyant Ending that seems to be a prerequisite of a certain kind of British cinema at the moment. Richard Curtis has a lot to answer for.
More interesting is Andrew Piddington’s The Killing Of John Lennon, a handsomely photographed meditation on the flip side of fandom. The descent from inept prank caller to delusional assassin is told through the eyes of Lennon’s killer Mark David Chapman, his obsessions and interior monologue laid bare.
Carrying the picture pretty much single-handedly is Jonas Ball as Chapman. He finds little in his character to invoke our sympathy but he commands our attention absolutely. The style is heady, often claustrophobic, and very effective at suggesting the inside of Chapman’s short-circuiting mind.
But Piddington lets himself get bogged down in detail, resulting in an over-long picture that continues past its logical end: the shooting.
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The music industry also factors in Brothers of the Head, an engagingly offbeat mockumentary from Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (the team behind Lost in La Mancha, the real documentary about Terry Gilliam’s failed attempt to make his Don Quixote film).
Adapted from a Brian Aldiss story by Tony Grisoni, who wrote the screenplay for another Gilliam film, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and is the subject of a Script Factory event tomorrow night, the film tells of the rise and fall of the Bang Bang, a fictional 1970s band fronted by a pair of conjoined twins — and yes, we do get to see the join.
The cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle utilises a variety of different film stocks to create everything from fake Super 8 footage of the band in rehearsal to polished film footage supposedly culled from an aborted feature film project (Ken Russell makes a cameo appearance as the thwarted director).
The twins are played by the charismatic newcomers Harry and Luke Treadaway, twins in real life, who bring an anguished urgency to the live performances and a confrontational sexual presence. The Yoko Ono in this story is a rock journalist who tries to come between the brothers — difficult to do, considering that they share a liver.
But the most destructive love affair of all is with the drugs and alcohol that slightly numb the pain of this unusually close fraternal relationship. Ultimately, one of the film’s major achievements is that what we’re watching is not a freak show but a human tragedy, the themes of which — addiction, self-destruction and the bitter cost of fame — are universal.
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The Script Factory event with Tony Grisoni is at Cineworld, Fountain Park, Edinburgh, tomorrow (7.15pm)
THE BEST OF THE REST FROM THE FEST
JINDABYNE
Directed by Ray Lawrence, this is an emotionally adult, ethically complex tale based on a story by Raymond Carver and has outstanding performances from Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne.
AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
This documentary about Al Gore and his crusade to raise awareness about global warming should be required viewing for just about everyone. Inspirational, persuasive and disarming, Gore, a likable guide to the imminent destruction of the planet, will be visiting the festival in the final weekend.
SUMMER ‘04
A provocative and sometimes profoundly uncomfortable tale of sexual rivalry between a 40-year-old mother and the aggressively precocious 12-year-old girlfriend of her son.
REEL LIFE: BRIAN DE PALMA
After films such as Scarface, Carlito’s Way, The Untouchables and the forthcoming Black Dahlia, De Palma’s talk on the legacy of new American cinema should stand out as a highlight.
ZIDANE: A 21st-CENTURY PORTRAIT
The idea of Douglas Gordon and Phillippe Parreno’s film is simple and hypnotic: 17 cameras are trained on the footballer Zinedine Zidane, stalking his every move for the duration of a football match. Occasionally dull, sometimes frustrating but ultimately mesmerising, this is a must-see.
REEL LIFE: KEVIN SMITH
Smith’s 1994 debut Clerks — made for less than $30,000 — has become the benchmark of indie film-making, and his Reel Life talk promises hilarity, profanity, and lots of wry observations on the lunacy of Tinseltown.