The LFF Blog: Day Seven

David Jenkins offers highlights from the past week at the LFF and gives his tips for a film-packed second weekend

If not quite the home straight, we’re certainly on the final bend of another rip-roaring London Film Festival. While the members of the Time Out film section are certainly feeling the pinch of late nights and early mornings, it's all for a damn good cause. Personal highlights so far have included an evening screening of Roy Andersson’s ‘You, The Living’ which, though it didn’t quite fit its LFF brochure billing as the festival’s funniest film (that award goes to ‘Lions for Lambs’), the first half-hour was undeniably hilarious before it quickly tailed off into stock Scando gloom (much like his previous film, ‘Songs From the Second Floor’). Still, I was humming the Louisiana jazz soundtrack all the way home.

Another one to look out for is Nicholas Philibert’s stunning ‘Return to Normandy’, the director’s belated follow-up to 2002’s charmer, ‘Etre et Avoir’. By turns heartfelt, rousing and hugely detailed, it sees the director return to a rural village in northern France where he once worked as an assistant on René Allio’s 1975 feature, ‘Moi, Pierre Rivière…’ to reconvene with the members of the local community with whom he met on the set. Undeniably a more challenging work than his previous film, it nevertheless touches on deep themes of the subtle relationship between character and actor, and how cinema can touch the lives of ordinary humans in weird and wonderful ways.

Last night was the gala screening of Sean Penn’s ‘Into the Wild’ who, along with star Emile Hirsch, was in town to promote the film and spread an air of gruffness over zone one. No longer tempted into tossing half-empty Kool-Aid bottles into the face of annoying journalists, it’s clear that Penn’s eighties wild-child phase is clearly in the past, and this film reflects the director’s new-found maturity and liberal conscience. The film is likely to divide audiences, mainly due to a central character who is eminently dislikeable, but many have been charmed by the film’s poetic vision of crumbling American ideals and its message of potential ecological disaster.

If you haven’t managed to catch anything at the festival yet, don’t fret: there’s an entire weekend of films to sink your teeth into. Tonight, BFI Southbank is hosting a screening of ‘forgotten masterpiece of black cinema’, Charles Burnett’s ‘Killer of Sheep’, a lyrical tale of life in LA’s Watts ghetto. Bobcats (that’s Bob Dylan aficionados) should be out in numbers for the gala screening of Todd Haynes’ ‘I’m Not There’, a sideways trawl through the life of the illusive and enigmatic Minnesotan rock deity. NFT3 is also giving itself up to house a weekend’s worth of experimental film, which you can read about in more detail here. If you want our advice on a gamble, you’d do a lot worse than heading along to see Ulrich Seidl’s miserablist epic, ‘Import/Export’ at the Odeon West End on Saturday or Daniele Luchetti’s massively enjoyable ‘My Brother is an Only Child’ on Sunday at the same location. Join us on Monday for more festival gossip from the weekend.

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