The 63rd Edinburgh International Film Festival – as the organisers (understandably) never tire of pointing out, the world’s longest-running event of its type – has barely been finished for a month and already a handful of its most high-profile titles can be found in art-houses.
The 40th anniversary of the lunar landings dictated the mid-July release date for Moon, which edged out some stiff competition for the prestigious Michael Powell Award – given to EIFF’s best new British film. I reviewed it very favourably in these pages, but I’m not sure whether I would have voted for it myself, had I been giving the honour of serving on the jury alongside Janet Street-Porter, Frank Langella and company. The bookies’ favourite – in the unlikely event of Ladbroke and Coral having been induced to offer odds on the competition – would almost certainly have been Andrea Arnold’s Ken Loachian slice of council estate life,
Fish Tank. This is a quantum leap beyond Arnold’s inexplicably overrated 2006 debut, Red Road, and features, from youthful newcomers Katie Jarvis and Rebecca Griffiths, two of the year’s most impressive performances.
Other Edinburgh notables which are already on the release-schedule are the tense, full-blooded American/Mexican co-production Sin Nombre, a powerfully assured debut from writer-director Cary Joji Fukunaga (August 14); Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq war thriller The Hurt Locker – a flawed film built around a stupendous characterisation from star in the making Jeremy Renner (August 28); EIFF opener Away We Go (September 18), which represents a sudden come-down for director Sam Mendes after his masterpiece Revolutionary Road; and the rock-the-house, wildly inventive Canadian horror comedy Pontypool (October 16), which is very nearly a one-man show from veteran character actor Stephen McHattie.
But while Sin Nombre, Fish Tank and Pontypool are eminently deserving of space on cinema screens and on to-see lists, many of the highlights from EIFF 2009 are, for various reasons, yet to obtain distribution in this country. And near the top of that list is the underdog contender to which I award my hypothetical Powell vote: Crying With Laughter, Justin Molotnikov’s cracking psychological thriller cum black comedy.
Taking its title from (or perhaps simply sharing it with) Bob Monkhouse’s autobiography, this is the disarming story of an obnoxious Edinburgh stand-up comic on the verge of something resembling the big time. But fate places several large hurdles in the path of our coke-snorting, severely dysfunctional anti-hero, Joey Frisk (Stephen McCole) – most notably a long-lost former school friend with murderously grudgeful intent.
With so many British films let down by melodramatic, contrived screenplays – no shortage of examples were on view, unfortunately, at EIFF this year – how splendid to encounter a writer-director who has the wit and the chutzpah to turn such “deficiencies” into advantages. Structured around Joey’s latest swaggeringly exaggerated stand-up routine, Crying With Laughter is a full-
blooded, take-no-prisoners affair that entertainingly captures this branch of showbiz’s intoxicating, edgy volatility.
And McCole – a television star north of the border, thanks to sitcom High Times (which is also extremely popular in Bolivia, by all accounts) – is terrific as Frisk. Gradually revealing the layers of fragility and pain beneath his burly, scruffily bearded facade, he has something of the young Brian Cox about him. And he’s so convincing on stage as Frisk it’s no surprise to learn that he’s planning several shows at the Fringe in character. Catch him – and the film – if and when you can.
Also keep an eye out for Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s Easier With Practice – one of the sharper, more intelligent and sensitive examples of the much-derided American “indie” scene, in which a 20-something author (Brian Geraghty, outstanding and barely recognisable from his cocky grunt in The Hurt Locker) embarks on a phone-sex relationship with an elusive and enigmatic female.
Similarly awkward in social situations is the eponymous heroine of Sebastian Silva’s The Maid (La nana) from Chile – Catalina Saavedra’s Raquel, who’s been devoted to the same middle-class family for over 20 years, putting her own emotional needs on hold and storing up mental problems as a consequence. Both films nimbly combine serious cultural and psychological analysis with disarmingly deadpan humour, transcending the technical limitations of digital video by giving their lead actors ample time and space.
Truth be told, this didn’t feel like a vintage Edinburgh – although it was great to see Roger Corman in person, introducing some of the titles in a dozen-movie retrospective and being interviewed on stage by horror aficionado Kim Newman. For all the merits of Fish Tank, Moon and Crying With Laughter, for example, there was nothing in competition to match the last two Powell winners, 2007’s Control and 2008’s Somers Town. Shane Meadows, responsible for the latter, was back in town to world-premiere his lo-fi faux-documentary Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee, a relatively minor work from a major British talent that’s primarily a showcase for the improvisational skills of his old mucker Paddy Considine. It may pop up at a cinema near you, but will more likely find its audience through more high-tech “platforms.”
If there was a hidden gem lurking in the large programme of this 12-day film jamboree – an unheralded masterpiece such as With a Girl of Black Soil, Jeon Soo-Il’s Korean heartbreaker from last year – for this visitor, it remained undiscovered by the festival’s end. The closest was, by some measure, Sylvie Verheyde’s French coming-of-ager Stella: a kind of cine-autobiography from the first-time writer-director, in which she revisits, via a very light fictionalisation, her own childhood in the Paris of 1976-1977. Stella (Leora Barbara) isn’t particularly bright or precocious, nor does she have an especially vivid inner life. Her outer life provides stimulation enough, as she lives with her parents in the rough and ready bar they manage, where she’s on pally terms with the barfly customers.
Among the latter is the late Guillaume Depardieu, in one of the bewildering stack of performances he somehow squeezed into the final months of his short life. Depardieu junior is the closest Stella can boast to a “star” name and it is to be hoped that his presence will attract the attention of an enterprising distributor. Verheyde’s movie, a pitch-perfect evocation of a time and a place, with outstanding work from young Barbara (and a lovely scene-stealing cameo from Laetitia Guerard as her holiday pal Genevieve), is an unassuming, bewitching delight and it would be a real pity if it were restricted solely to the festival circuit. I caught it on my last day in Edinburgh – and to say that it pretty much made the trip worthwhile would only be a slight, Joey Frisk-style exaggeration.
Neil Young
