Northern Exposure

Trevor Johnston reports from a vintage Edinburgh film fectival.

Aug 29 2006

Given that it marked both the event's sixtieth anniversary and the last of Artistic Director Shane Danielsen's five years at the helm, we expected good things from the 2006 Edinburgh International Film Festival – and we weren't disappointed. With excellent films left, right and centre, and distinguished guests forming an orderly queue, the whole shebang was, frankly, a genuine tonic for anyone battered by another grim season of Hollywood blockbusters. Danielsen contends that we're living in a golden age of filmmaking, and there's some truth to that, it's just that you have to immerse yourself in a film festival like Edinburgh (or indeed London) to fully appreciate it.

Edinburgh used to be 'The Little Festival That Could', always fighting the good fight on relatively modest resources, but frequently losing out on key titles to heavyweights like Venice or its rival south of the border (where the LFF is understandably favoured by UK distributors as a pre-release platform). These days, though, canny programming favours the interesting and unexpected over the high-profile and predictable – even if the absence of Andrea Arnold's Glasgow-shot Cannes contender 'Red Road' was startling indeed – and the famous conviviality of the Festival City only adds to the attraction. Having recognised its limitations, the EIFF has settled into its own groove.

Highlights? Well, for a festival which always aims to surprise, 'London to Brighton' was a genuine out-of-nowhere first feature in the British section, an abrasive urban thriller about a prostitute and a young runaway escaping the grasp of a ruthless pimp and his shady underworld connections. It was taut as cheesewire, almost as tough, but never forgot its fundamental compassion for these unlovely characters. Paul Andrew Williams's film shone like a beacon among the homegrown productions on show, though both the 'Lost in La Mancha' duo Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's conjoined twins mock-rock-doc 'Brothers of The Head' and Andrew Piddington's extended reconstruction 'The Killing of John Lennon' deserved nods for enterprise if not ultimately achievement.

Elsewhere, three of the strongest films in the festival hadn't yet been picked up by British distributors. Wang Chao's 'Luxury Car', wherein a country teacher arrives in the big city unaware that his daughter's hostess work at a glitzy night-spot virtually amounts to prostitution, is both a clear-eyed picture of the new China and an exquisite Ozu-like story of fate-shaped resignation.

Utterly different in its Chabrol-styled restraint, 'Summer '04' from German director Stefan Krohmer mounts a cool, delicious study of the ripple effect on a holidaying bourgeois family when the teenage son's sexually precocious 12-year-old, girlfriend stirs up his fortysomething mother's air of domestic contentment.

'Jindabyne' meanwhile, sees Ray Lawrence improving on the excellent 'Lantana' with a complex ensemble piece which turns an eventful fishing trip into a thought-provoking meditation on the continuing shadow of Australia's colonial past. Strong stuff.

To begin with, Douglas Mackinnon's 'The Flying Scotsman' with Jonny Lee Miller as cussed, unconventional cycling world-record-beater Graham Obree made a low-key opening film (sports flicks and depression just don't seem to mix), but by the middle weekend it was increasingly difficult to dispel the notion that Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's 'Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait' was going to be the most striking film of the whole 13 days. You’ve probably heard about the set-up by now, with 17 cameras following the bald-pated midfield magician for the whole of a Spanish league match, but it's hard in print to describe the experience of actually watching it: mesmeric, enveloping, a multi-faceted portrait that goes way beyond mere football to pose the tantalising conundrum that it's our very unknowability which makes us human. Immediate yet somehow haunting, it's one of the year's essential cinema experiences.

Still, for all the worthwhile new titles on display, there was a strong temptation to spend significant amounts of time with the retrospective selection 'Other Voices from the New American Cinema'. Danielsen has always maintained that film history is simply too rich and multifarious to get restrictively canonical about it, so this was an opportunity to look beyond Scorsese, Coppola et al to pick up on the unjustly neglected and the plain overlooked from the same '70s period. Thus we moved from the bittersweet New York romance of Anthony Harvey's 'They Might Be Giants' to the existential torpor of Monte Hellman's 'Two-Lane Blacktop', from the touchingly skewed idealism of James William Guercio's 'Electra Glide In Blue' to the ideological provocation of Ivan Dixon's 'The Spook Who Sat By The Door' – a major studio release of 1973 allegedly removed from cinemas by the FBI because it shows armed black revolutionaries mounting a nationwide uprising!

It was double-take time too in many of the interview sessions, which this year were especially impressive and fulsomely enjoyable. There was Brian De Palma asking Arthur Penn in the audience which Broadway cinema opened 'Bonnie and Clyde', and Penn in turn describing the epiphany by which he came up with the film's epochal final sequence. There was Steven Soderbergh taking time out from the Hollywood shoot for 'Ocean's 13' to admit that he laughed his way through 'Scary Movie 4', Charlize Theron knocking back a second whisky on stage, and John Hurt revealing that David Lynch would have made 'The Straight Story' with him in the lead had Richard Farnsworth's cancer not gone into remission.

The outgoing director will never be accused of under-confidence, and his full-on manner hasn't been to everyone's taste, but his articulate and wide-ranging enthusiasm has made him a great frontman, and his belief in what he's doing has suffused through the whole event. It's going to be a hard act to follow.

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