PRESS CONFERENCE: Black Swan (dir. Darren Aronofsky)

‘Black Swan’ is the story of a prim Prima Ballerina (Natalie Portman) who is forced to expose her dark side in order to maintain her position as the face of the New York City Ballet. The film marks another development in Darren Aronofsky’s startling career: combining a unique take on the thriller genre with captivating, choreographic camerawork and excellent performances, this film is sure to cause a few ripples come award season. The following press conference was attended by Aronofsky, two of the film’s stars – Mila Kunis and Vincent Cassel – and producer Scott Franklin, and was chaired by Screen International’s Mike Goodridge.

INTERVIEW: Derek Cianfrance on Blue Valentine

One of the standout hits of Cannes and Sundance, ‘Blue Valentine’ is a gritty and infectious portrayal of a failed marriage. Director Derek Cianfrance has spent the past twelve years perfecting the film, stripping away the layers of sentiment to reveal a truly raw and original domestic drama. FAN THE FIRE met up with the director at the London Film Festival…

INTERVIEW: Matt Reeves and Kodi Smit-McPhee on Let Me In

When news that a US remake of Swedish horror hit ‘Let The Right One In’ was going ahead, many were anxious to see what Hollywood would do with the nuanced and genre-bending original. Most probably weren’t expecting ‘Cloverfield’ helmer Matt Reeves to take on the challenge, but his remake is respectful of the original while also ploughing new turf, and amping up the horror for a US audience. FAN THE FIRE met with the film’s director Matt Reeves and young star Kodi Smit-McPhee in advance of the film’s release…

REVIEW: It's Kind of a Funny Story (dir. Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck)

Cast: Zac Galafianakis, Keir Gilchrist, Emma Roberts

Ryan Fleck has one request of his audience before the first showing of ‘It’s Kind of a Funny Story’ – “Anyone that has seen ‘Half Nelson’ or ‘Sugar’, just wipe them out of your mind, because this is a totally different kind of film.” Those first two films from directing duo Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden were nuanced and infectious explorations of various elements of American society (drugs, class, education, and sport). Their latest film explores the world of pharmacology, psychology and mental hospitals, but this is no searing or nuanced drama… it is a teen comedy.

Craig is 16-yrs-old, and as such he is convinced that he is the least intelligent, least capable, and least attractive student at his uber-elite New York private school. He decides that the only way to deal with this problem is to throw himself off the Brooklyn Bridge; but when this plan fails to materialise, he settles for a visit to the psychiatric ward of a city hospital. Unfortunately the teen ward is closed for renovation, so Craig is entered into the adult ward for a minimum stay of five days. Craig’s initial panic is calmed by the presence of the cuddly, calming influence of ward veteran Bobby, and the bewitching beauty of Noelle, another troubled teen on the adult ward.

Queue a touching, whimsical coming-of-age tale that would have had John Hughes flicking through his notebooks to check no ideas had been stolen. The cast of larger-than-life extroverts help Craig to rebuild his self-confidence, and learn an enormous amount about what is really important in life, leading to the obligatory ‘getting the girl’ moment at the end. It is his friendship with Bobby – a chronic visitor to the ward who is in danger of losing visitation rights with his beloved daughter – that really helps Craig to come to terms with his childish problems.

The film is beautifully shot. There seems to be a conscious decision to shoot the ward scenes in a shallow depth of field so that every pore and crease of the characters faces are perfectly realised, while the backgrounds blur into a drained, messy palette of institutional beiges. It is as if the filmmakers are saying “forget the background and the ‘world’ of the film, just study the characters and fall in love with them”. This purposeful and affecting aesthetic is punctuated by wonderful animated sequences that seem to gel perfectly with the dazzling and eclectic score created bespoke by Broken Social Scene.

The costumes have been provided by Kurt&Bart, and it is when you start adding up all these friendly relationships and ‘fun’ elements to the making of this film that you realise a disappointing truth… Fleck and Boden have perhaps had a bit too much fun making this film, and have fallen short of their artistic responsibility to the filmmaking process. The film is attractive and entertaining and there are some touching moments, but it pales in comparison to their earlier films.

Part of the problem is the central character, and the fact that we are following the wrong guy around this hospital. Keir Gilchrist is faultless as the young lead, but the character just isn’t interesting enough to carry a feature film. Bobby is a kind, hopeless man who wants desperately to find a normal life with his beloved daughter; he is the true emotional heart of this story, but we are so busy following an angst-ridden teenager through the hallways that we only ever see snippets of this fascinating, troubled, and achingly pathetic man. This is even more of a waste because Galafianakis is extraordinary in the role. His comedic capabilities are beyond doubt, but his quiet power as an actor comes across in this film, and you just want to reach through the screen and hug him.

In the end, the title of the film contains an irony that may be lost on the filmmakers: this is kind of a funny story… no more, no less.

REVIEW: For 80 Days (dir. Jon Garaño & José Mari Goenaga)

Cast: Itziar Aizpuru, Mariasun Pagoaga, José Ramón Argoitia

One might easily assume that a film about septuagenarian lesbian adulteresses is trying a bit too hard to shock; but Garano and Goenaga have in fact created a moving and subtle exploration into the timelessness of passion. Axun is a sullen and trampled wife who lives with her growling, childless patriarch Juan Mari. When her estranged daughter’s bastard ex-husband, Mikel, winds up in a coma after a car accident, Axun uses this barely feasible excuse to escape her cold, agrarian farm house. Axun finds little respite in the hospital, however, as she is immediately confronted by Maite – a ballsy lesbian who is throwing a birthday party for her comatose brother who shares a room with Mikel. After a few frosty encounters, Axun and Maite realise that they were best friends (and almost slightly more) as children. Maite has moved on, travelling the world, composing music, and liberating herself from her rural shackles; but it may be too late for Axun to do the same.

This beautiful and nuanced film is a stunning example of the criminally under-exposed world of Basque cinema. The film studies its subjects with patience and respect, but there is a ferocity and anger simmering beneath the surface. The film is kind and measured, but somehow always seems on the verge of erupting into madness and rage. The central performances, as a pairing, are equalled at this festival only by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in ‘Blue Valentine’. Itziar Aizpuru and Mariasun Pagoaga bring a charming vivacity and innocence to the potentially bizarre subject matter.

REVIEW: Poetry (dir. Lee Changdong)

Cast: Yun Junghee, David Lee, Kim Hira, An Haesong, Kim Yongbaek

Mija is a quiet and thoughtful old woman who seems out of place in Seoul’s ferocious urban modernity. She has been forgotten about by her family, her community, and her country; and seems resigned to living out her days caring for her sulking and selfish grandson. That is until she decides to take up an evening class in poetry, and thus slowly begins to view the world around her with new eyes, and to see the beauty and pain that abounds in the city and the natural world. When her grandson and his friends are accused of raping a girl, who subsequently committed suicide, Mija is forced to join the other boys’ fathers in an attempt to cover up the crime before word spreads.

Yun Junghee’s performance is unmissable. She is confused and vacant, but there is a quiet power and resolution to her actions. She is forgetful and often hopeless; but some of her poetic insights are disarmingly thoughtful, and when she is backed into a corner by the manipulative gang of fathers, she is not scared to fight back.

‘Poetry’ is a slow-building and patient film, and its exploration of Mija as a character is fascinating. The hazy palette of colours is strangely alluring and, well, poetic, and it ensnares the viewer in a mystified dream world. However, there can be no possible justification for the filmmaker’s appalling and irresponsible approach to the difficult subject matter. On a literal level, this is a story about the cover up of a horrific crime; reading between the lines, this is a story about Korea’s emerging middle classes abusing their power and influence to stifle the injustice suffered by the rural working classes. And yet Changdong refuses to say anything about it at all; whether this is incompetence of malaise is beyond my comprehension, but it is an issue that prevents this film being truly worthy of commendation.

REVIEW: Home For Christmas (dir. Bent Hamer)

Cast: Trond Fausa Aurvåg, Fridtjof Såheim, Nina Andresen Borud, Reidar Sørensen, Ingunn Beate Øyen

A desperate, cuckolded man dresses up as Santa Claus, beats his wife’s lover over the head with a shovel, and sneaks into his family home to give his children presents and spend time with his wife. A Serbian man holds up a doctor with a blade – it seems he is looking for drugs, but really he is desperate to find someone to deliver his wife’s baby. A homeless man attempts to break into a woman’s car, only to discover that she was his first childhood sweetheart. She allows him to shower and shave, before feeding him and sending him home to his family with a Christmas tree.

These are just a few of the surreal and touching vignettes that weave their way through this bewitching, snowy tapestry. A magical time that has been lost to advertising jingles and last minute shopping sprees in most of the Western world, is here treated with a uniquely Skandinavian frosty admiration. Christmas, in this film, is a time of haunting beauty; where desperation and hope meet in equal measure.

The film is based on a series of short stories by Levi Henriksen, and this has allowed Hamer a great deal of freedom to experiment with different tones and styles of filmmaking without worrying too much about consistency or unity. In this barren and timeless landscape, the various stories could be happening hundreds of miles apart or right next door to each other, it doesn’t really matter. The tone shifts constantly from melodrama to thriller to fairytale to romance; and the film benefits from the energy and freedom resulting from this lack of collusion.

That is not to suggest that Hamer has been given an easy ride. The film is only 85 minutes long, and his ability to fill those minutes with so many individual storylines that never become muddled or clichéd is nothing short of masterful. By the end of the film every strand has reached a fulfilling conclusion; and they all work to create a simple, glowing synergy as the Serbian couple, holding their newborn baby stare up at the Aurora Borealis playing out above them.

While the entire world of the film is nestled deep in snow, there are no flurries during the film. This is a world of stillness and calm, where the only warmth and movement comes from the people that live there. Whether the vignette concerns a bitter spinster, a depressed cuckold, or a lovelorn teen; the whole film is imbued with a tender-hearted hopefulness that makes this a must see film, especially during the festive season!

REVIEW: Cold Weather (dir. Aaron Katz)

Cast: Cris Lankenau, Trieste Kelly Dunn, Raúl Castillo, Robyn Rikoon,

Aaron Katz’ latest lo-fi slacker movie proves that using inexpensive equipment and cheap locations doesn’t mean you have to make a mumblecore film about angst-ridden teens. Admittedly, the hero (Doug) is a college dropout, intentionally falling short of his potential, who has moved in with his sister back in his hometown of Portland, Oregon. He seems content to spend his days drinking beer and reading Arthur Conan Doyle stories; but his patient sister Gail persuades him to take a night-shift job at an Ice Factory. He meets a suitably ‘real’ friend in Raul, a fellow employee at the factory who seems content with this life of DJing in local bars and earning money shifting ice. When Doug’s ex-girlfriend, Rachel, arrives in town, the scene seems set for a traditional slacker movie about ‘growing up’. But when Rachel disappears from her motel room, Doug, Gail and Raul find themselves embroiled in a sinister mystery that even Sherlock Holmes would have struggled to uncover.

The ‘slack’-er film of the first half hour becomes a taut and suspenseful crime thriller – complete with briefcases full of money, seedy underworlds, dingy motels and screeching SUVs with blacked-out windows. The film perfectly blends film noir conventions (‘femmes fatale’, shadowy figures, etc) with some hysterical insights into the life of a bored ‘twenty-something’ living with his sister in Oregon. I am not usually one for film comparisons, but think ‘Garden State’ meets ‘The Big Sleep’.

The four actors are perfect in their roles. None of them are stand out, award-worthy performances, but they perfectly capture the tight-lipped fun at the heart of the story. In one scene, Doug and Raul try to book a room at Rachel’s motel in order to do some more snooping around – they seem completely unaware of the social taboos surrounding two young men taking a motel room for a few hours, and the scene is all the more hysterical for it. The production design leaves something to be desired, but where the film ditches expensive lighting set-ups, it pastes over the shortfall with charm and wit by the barrel load.

REVIEW: The Parking Lot Movie (dir. Meghan Eckman)

Some documentaries are valuable as essays on important social, political, and historical events and figures; the value of others lies in their ability to uncover charming glitches in our depressingly predictable modern society. The Parking Lot Movie examines some of the most important thinkers and strategists based on the battlefields of the Corner Parking Lot in Charlottesville, Virginia, during the war of attrition against the drunken frat boys and spoilt little rich girls that try to escape without paying in their gas-guzzling SUVs. This might not seem like a universally important war, but to the criminally over-educated and idealistic parking lot attendants, it is of terrifying existential importance.

The hairy, charming men that run the lot are all anthropology, sociology, or philosophy students (or in some cases ex-professors!) from the University of Virginia. One of them even makes the point that such intelligent and thoughtful people should not be allowed to do such a monotonous and thoughtless job… it leads to dangerous levels of existential angst. They fill their time writing poetry on the walls of the cabin, and editing newspaper cartoons to provide whimsical anecdotes on the world of a parking lot attendant (for example, “imagine if Rosa Parks had owned a car!”). When they move on, they become academics or successful musicians, and leave some other hopeful and naïve American vagabond to take over their hours.

They all have one thing in common… an abject hatred for the rich kids, yummie mummies, and aloof republican patriarchs that argue over cents and dimes while taking up two spaces with their over-priced mastodons-on-wheels. When one quiet and unassuming philosophy major comes up against a ditzy-blonde who recognises him from high school, she sniggers and says “I hope you’re happy with your life.” He replies, “Yes, I am happy. I love my life. You are driving your daddy’s car and arguing over a 40c charge, so who has come further?” These are the real people living on the periphery of Generation X, and I am happy to say they are even more robust, considerate, and fulfilled than Douglas Copeland could have imagined.

REVIEW: Carancho (dir. Pablo Trapero)

Cast: Ricardo Darín, Martina Gusman, Carlos Weber

Luján is an overworked, dope-addict emergency medic who seems to spend her every waking hour chasing down traffic accidents in Buenos Aires. Such accidents in the Argentinean capital occur with horrific regularity; and while this tragic failure of the system tears families apart, it is also good news for the ‘vulture’ lawyers who take the insurance companies to the cleaners and hide the profits from the victims’ families. Luján meets just such a lawyer at the scene of a crash that he just happens to have witnessed. Sosa has created a name for himself at his fleapit law company for literally chasing ambulances around the city, and occasionally even paying homeless people to jump in front of vehicles; but as soon as he sets eyes on Luján he seems eager to bury this embarrassing lifestyle and prove himself to this enchanting melancholy beauty.

Unfortunately – as ‘Carlito’s Way’ taught us – escaping from a criminal underworld is no easy task. The acting head of the law firm, realising he has been double-crossed, attacks Luján at work; and in return, Sosa slowly and methodically beats him to death. There is no turning back for Sosa and Luján, who are forced to take unspeakable measures to escape from this sordid world.

Pablo Trapero’s stunning and violent film possesses that uniquely South American ability to combine searing social commentary with energetic and powerful filmmaking. As with so many great crime stories, this is a story that takes place at night, when the middle-classes are asleep and the criminals and emergency medics emerge to do battle once more. Buenos Aires appears as some crumbling, nightmare world, where flashes and eruptions punctuate the brooding darkness. Through this nightmare world, our heroes fight, back to back, with only their passion for one another helping them through. It is a romantic and visceral noir story that is unparalleled at the festival.

REVIEW: Howl (dir. Robert Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman)

Cast: James Franco, Jon Hamm, Jeff Daniels, Mary-Louise Parker

It is hard to work out what demographic ‘Howl’ has been made for. Fans of Alan Ginsberg will gawp at the obvious treatment of the court case that surrounded the publication of ‘Howl’ in 1957; they will react with lukewarm shrugs of indifference to the ‘far-too-literal’ translation of the poem into a tawdry animated sequences, and they will wonder why the hell the actor from Spiderman has been paid to mimic Ginsberg in a series of faux-interviews. People who aren’t fans of Alan Ginsberg… wont go and see the film.

Epstein and Friedman’s film seems eager to break the boundaries of the ‘biopic’ genre by splicing together the aforementioned elements to create a portrait of Ginsberg and his most famous work; but the devil is in the detail, and the unnecessary use of black-and-white film and the constant shots of tape-recorders during interviews suggest that the filmmakers have not stemmed the flow of clichés as successfully as they might have hoped.

Franco is perfectly capable of mimicking Ginsberg, but this is not acting. Philip Seymour Hoffman was acting when he portrayed Truman Capote, DeNiro was acting when he portrayed LaMotta, because in these instances the actors had to take the essence of a person (everything from facial tics to childhood fears) and absorb them in order to portray that person in a dramatic situation. In ‘Howl’, Franco just has to sit on a sofa and mimic Ginsberg’s hand movements and elongated syllables.

The courtroom sequences serve the dual purpose of showcasing ‘the hot guy from Mad Men’ (which might bring the producers a few dollars closer to breaking even) and providing a pretentious and didactic platform for the filmmakers to broadcast their views on censorship… these weighty monologues on a culture of fear and censorship remind us of a shocking fact that I’m sure we would all have forgotten were it not for this film… our governments might be trying to control what we know!!! Shock horror.

REVIEW: Leap Year (dir. Michael Rowe)

Cast: Monica Del Carmen, Gustavo Sanchez Parra, Marco Zapata

These days, when a film is set in one room, this becomes the central focus for any critical discussion – Saw, Reservoir Dogs, Fermat’s Room, etc. But Michael Rowe’s stunning ‘Leap Year’ occupies its humble space so naturally that you almost never notice you haven’t left Laura’s stifling Mexico City apartment. We meet Laura on the first day of a leap year February, and our attention is naturally drawn to the 29th day. Rowe is in no rush to get there, however, and the film depicts Laura’s painful, monotonous life of canned food, vacant stares, and sordid, violent sex with virtual strangers.

When she meets Arturo, a man with a dark appetite for sado-masochistic roleplay, she seems to have found the perfect partner in crime. In one of the most disturbing pieces of filmmaking I have ever scene, Laura masturbates Arturo while explaining how she wants him to cut her open and strangle her and come inside her while the last breath rattles out of her body. Arturo, scared by his attraction to the idea, reluctantly agrees to return the following day (the 29th February) and live out the scenario. But will he materialise?

The premise of the film could have attracted an Eli Roth or some other exploitative non-entity; but in Michael Rowe’s hands it is a haunting and believable tale of desperation and lost hope. It is a film where almost nothing happens, but every moment is imbued with an agonising yet cathartic hopelessness. Del Carmen and Sanchez Parra are perfectly suited to the material – understated throughout, but capable of gutteral emotions that punch right out at the viewer’s solar plexus.

REVIEW: The First Grader (dir. Justin Chadwick)

Cast: Naomie Harris, Oliver Litondo

Arguably the most disappointing film of the festival, this cliché-ridden film offers absolutely nothing of merit, and can only have been included in the festival at the behest of the UK Film Council, who co-produced the film (which may explain its dismaying lack of quality). There is no criticising the source material – the true story of an 84-yr-old Kenyan, Maruge, who decided to take advantage of a government initiative to introduce free primary schooling to claim the education he always craved. Maruge is a member of the Mau-Mau tribe who fought the English occupation of their land. On receiving a letter from the liberated government thanking him for his loyalty to his country, Maruge decides he wants to be able to read it for himself. The beleaguered and uncaring school system, personified by the hotheaded Mr. Kibruto, makes things difficult for Maruge, but with the help of head teacher Jane, he manages to overcome discrimination and hostility and by the end of the film… he can read his letter.

The film does everything by the book – from the ‘beautiful’ sweeping desert landscapes and ‘luscious’ hues to the ‘powerful’ score and the ‘weeping’ performances – but it is all so predictable it makes Clint Eastwood look like Salvador Dali. The story is incredibly thin, and rather than working hard to find an interesting depth to the subject matter, the filmmakers opt for the cheap and easy alternative of bolting on a ‘political thriller’ element which sees gangs of marauding parents attacking the school while Jane receives threatening anonymous phone calls.

A ‘true story’ feature film has more in common with a painting of its subject than a photograph… such a film is necessarily defined by the temperament and artistic vision of its creators. Perhaps a few parents actually threw stones at the school building, perhaps Jane received a phone call; but that doesn’t represent the emotional heart of Maruge’s journey and the filmmakers’ decision to force this story through the ‘thriller’ mould is disappointing to say the least.

REVIEW: Infiltration (dir. Dover Kosashvili)

Cast: Guy Adler, Oz Zehavi, Michael Aloni

On the back of ‘Waltz with Bashir’ and last year’s extraordinary ‘Lebanon’, it is unusual to find an Israeli film documenting the country’s military character with an Altman-esque sense of playfulness. This is M*A*S*H for Israelis, the main difference being that while Altman’s band of brothers were delinquents and rebels, Kosashvili’s characters are just plain incompetent.

The film follows a rag-tag bunch of ill-fitting military conscripts at a military boot camp. The enlisted men are Ashkenazi Jews, new immigrants from North Africa and Europe, Holocaust survivors, as well as both secular and religious individuals. Set over a decade from the late ‘50s to the outbreak of the 1967 war, the film depicts a series of vignettes that represent the various disparate cultural attitudes that were piled together in the creation of the Israeli state.

There is plenty to commend this original and energetic insight into the Israeli military machine. The light-hearted approach is refreshing, and many of the anecdotes and characters are moving and amusing in equal measure. But Kosashvili lacks Altman’s mastery of tone, and when the film deals with the darker side of its subject matter, there is a sense that the director is punching above his weight.

REVIEW: Tabloid (dir. Errol Morris)

The legendary Errol Morris arrives at the London Film Festival with the wonderfully fun and trashy ‘Tabloid’. In 1977 Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming, was arrested in Devon for the kidnapping, rape, and false imprisonment of a slovenly, overweight Mormon missionary, Kirk Anderson. To this day, McKinney claims that they were lovers, and that she had flown to England to help her beau escape from the powerful grasp of the Church of the Latter Day Saints. The ensuing court case was something of a farce, as the stunning and voluptuous McKinney received thousands of fan letters from men begging her to kidnap and rape them. McKinney eventually escaped back to the USA, where she lived in obscurity for many years… until she became the first woman to have her pet dog cloned by a Korean doctor! McKinney found herself pasted across the front page of the world’s tabloids once again, as baffled editors joined the dots and realised that their favourite pin-up girl had once again handed them a gift of a story.

This is not so much a documentary about tabloids as a tabloid documentary. Headlines stamp themselves across the screen to highlight painfully obvious ‘hit’ words such as SCANDAL, LOVE, SEX, etc. At one point this has humorous consequences when our loopy heroine struggles to describe the wooden cabinet in her hotel room with a lock on it… MINIBAR appears silently on the screen, stamping out her tiny human voice with its typographic rigour. In an age where celebrity has become a bloated and meaningless concept, McKinney is a hysterical breath of fresh air – she might be completely insane, but no one can doubt that her motives were sincere, and that she committed these acts out of passion rather than a calculated attempt to reach the front page of the Daily Mirror.

The tabloid investigators and journalists are not vilified for their part in the story. They conducted themselves with all the greedy, immoral, selfishness we have come to associate with this valueless industry; yet somehow we forgive them because they seem as bewildered as everyone else. They are caught up in the whirlwind of McKinney’s story, and it is difficult to blame them without secretly feeling like a hypocritic.

This is not a moralistic film in any sense – Morris is far too intelligent a filmmaker to bother ascribing blame or innocence in this debauched scenario. Joy is not portrayed as a mad woman or a martyr, but she is clearly a bit of both. And as our image of her skips between innocent martyr, malicious spinster, passionate romantic, meek victim, etc. we come to recognise the essential shortcoming of ‘tabloid’ reporting… there are no simple answers in real life, and things only appear black and white when they appear below a red banner.

REVIEW: Archipelago (dir. Joanna Hogg)

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Kate Fahy, Lydia Leonard, Amy Lloyd, Christopher Baker

Following on from her critically acclaimed debut, ‘Unrelated’, Joanna Hogg’s second feature has all the latent, simmering power and bland, maritime settings of a John Cheever short story. Simpering matriarch Patricia (a prim and traditional woman who has been sculpted around her own name) has dragged her twenty-something son (the directionless Edward) and daughter (the sly and cutting Cynthia) to their lonely, abandoned family retreat in the Isles of Scilly. The father is noticeably absent from the trip, and so the odd family is completed by a meek cook, Rose, and Patricia’s painting teacher.

As the uncomfortable family go through the motions of a happy holiday – picnics on the cliffs, visits to old restaurants, etc – they slowly unfurl the lingering resentment and personal disappointment they all feel towards one another. Edward has decided to validate his existence by saving Africa, one helpless orphan at a time; Cynthia directs her scathing and surgical wit against her frater and mater in the hope that it will prevent her from turning it against herself, and really accepting how sad and empty she is; and Patricia is so desperate to play happy families that she seems constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

The film revolves around the extraordinary improvisations and spontaneity of the actors, all rehearsed and coerced wonderfully by the unquestionable talent of Joanna Hogg. The performances are natural and quiet, refreshing and understated. The finest example of this comes when the family head for an empty restaurant. Cynthia tries to keep everybody happy by enthusiastically suggesting which table they should take and what order they should sit in. Patricia’s muttering silence causes the group to move numerous times before finally settling down. When the food arrives Cynthia’s bird is apparently undercooked and she demands that her meal be returned, but she is humiliated by her mother’s decision to keep the same dish – “Mum and Ed are allergic to complaining”. All this tension is sliced open by a moment of comedic genius when, after a few minutes of awkward silence, Patricia remarks, “It’s actually quite good.”

There are other examples of Hogg’s confidence as a filmmaker, and willingness to juggle humour and tension until the two bleed into one another, and the viewer doesn’t know whether to worry for these poor souls or laugh at them. At one point, after a heated argument between the nuclear family, we cut to Rose cleaning an array of menacing blades in the kitchen. If there was any chance of the visual metaphor being overlooked, Rose suddenly emerges with an even bigger knife. We are in the palm of Hogg’s hand, and she is tickling us.

The cinematography is often flat and unattractive, but the filmmakers do well with the use of available light and evidently inexpensive production design to evoke the tonal qualities of the story. Sometimes the interior of the cottage feels warm and lively, at other times cold and vacuous; and the bland uninviting weather and harshness of the terrain are often beautifully rendered.

Joanna Hogg has saved the British Film Industry from another embarrassing LFF, and shamed the UKFC who have once again failed to notice and support a sparkling homegrown talent.

REVIEW: The Arbor (dir. Clio Barnard)

Cast: Manjinder Virk, Neil Dudgeon, Monica Dolan

Undoubtedly the most over-hyped and over-celebrated films of the festival; one can only assume that it was our desperation to laud a British filmmaker that allowed this hollow, meandering husk of a film to garner such critical praise. The admittedly pioneering approach to documentary filmmaking takes as its subject the equally over-hyped alcoholic playwright and ‘Paul Abbot-precursor’ Andrea Dunbar. The film takes real interview recordings with Dunbar’s children and brings them to life using lip-synching technology and a number of specially trained actors. The film also cuts in scenes from Dunbar’s first play (from which the film takes its name) that are filmed on the street where Dunbar lived as a child.

This could have been a superb one-hour TV documentary – and would have been deserving of praise in that form – but the pointless attempt to string it out into a cinematic feature have forced the filmmakers to search for subject matter that just isn’t there. All the expensive equipment and talented cameramen in the world cannot mask the fact that Andrew Dunbar is not interesting enough to be the subject of a feature film; and eventually the filmmakers reluctantly bow to this inevitability and turn to her troubled daughter, Lorraine, instead. Unfortunately, Lorraine is just a self-obsessed crackhead who hates her mum and accidentally killed her own child. They are a dime-a-dozen in the Western world, and the decision to take advantage of her predicament is cheap and constitutes exploitative and insincere filmmaking of the highest order.

The only possible justification for this segway is the idea that the film constitutes the play Dunbar would have written if she were still alive today. In Robin Soans’ play ‘A State Affair’ (2000) – in which he revisits Dunbar’s life and surroundings – there is a monologue of Lorraine explaining that if ‘Rita, Sue, and Bob Too’ (Dunbar’s most famous play) had been written in 2000, it would have been about smackheads instead of drunks. Perhaps Barnard is suggesting that, with the continuing collapse of our nation, in 2010 Dunbar would have written about women who are addicted to crack cocaine and get imprisoned by abusive partners and accidentally kill their own infant children with methadone overdoses.