| LAUGHTER IN THE DARK : Annie Griffin's 'Festival' [5/10] |
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| Wednesday, 03 August 2005 | |
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Tragedy is if I cut my little finger. Comedy is if you fall into an open sewer and die. Mel Brooks Making her feature-film debut after rising to prominence with the fine Channel 4 sitcom The Book Group, writer-director Griffin certainly can't be accused of playing it safe. Her template seems to be no less than Robert Altman's peerless Nashville: a sprawling, multi-character portrait - written by Joan Tewkesbury - of a city devoted (albeit in Festival's case temporarily) to a particular branch of the performing arts. Griffin's emphasis is on stand-up comedy - with subplots featuring a couple of the other types of entertainment on offer in the Scots capital each August. But comedy is to Festival what country-and-western was to Nashville: in both instances the performers were responsible for writing their own (patchy) material. And just as Nashville attracted criticism from Danny Peary (in his Guide for the Film Fanatic) that it was unfair to present such "dull folk songs" as the best the C&W genre could offer, Festival gives a somewhat inaccurate version of what's supposedly the cream of stand-up. It doesn't help that Griffin, having secured the services of a genuinely outstanding comic actor in Richard Ayoade, then restricts him to two very brief (but movie-stealingly droll) appearances as a dopey member of the whisky-sponsored 'comedy awards' panel - clearly modelled on the Perrier Award which Ayoade himself won in 2001 as part of Garth Marengi's Netherhead. Much more screen time is allotted to Chris O'Dowd as boozy Irish stand-up veteran Tommy O'Dwyer, whose romantic pursuit of BBC Radio Scotland presenter Joan Gerard (Daniela Nardini) may or may not be prompted by the fact that she's serving on the award jury. Her fellow judges include comic Sean Sullivan (Stephen Mangan), who is as obnoxious in 'real life' as he is popular and successful with the public. Sean, his diary managed by put-upon recovering-alcoholic Petra (Raquel Cassidy), thinks nothing of abusing his fame for amorous ends: his Edinburgh conquests include rising-star Nicky Romanowski, an ersatz 'London Jewish Princess' whose limited stand-up skills are easily outweighed by her shapely figure and brash personality. Sean is also distracted by the very different figure of Faith Myers (Lyndsey Marshal, excellent) - a heartbreakingly earnest and un-worldly sort staging a one-woman show about Dorothy Wordsworth at a far-flung church hall. This is also the venue where the tormented Brother Mike (Clive Russell) is performing his one-person opus, on the subject of paedophilia within the Catholic church. Most of Griffin's (too-)numerous plot-strands are played for pretty broad laughs - including some refreshingly explicit moments of what used to be called "raunchiness". The tone becomes rather more reverent when the focus shifts to unhappily-married, post-natally depressed Micheline Menzies (Amelia Bullimore). Micheline ill-advisedly lets out her fancy city-centre flat to a trio of hippy-dippy Canadian thespians and takes up temporary lodging with her frosty mother-in-law. But she sneaks back into town to observe the Canadians and ends up falling in love with the ever-so-slightly camp Rick (Jonah Lotan) - the diametric opposite of her starchily unsympathetic barrister husband. Mr Menzies is presented by Griffin and her cinematographer Daniel Cohen in ways strikingly reminiscent of the broodingly besuited males painted by Scots artist Jack Vettriano. But while Vettriano's images are all about conveying powerfully concentrated, hyper-cinematic passion, Micheline's husband is (until an implausible final-reel outburst) a very cold fish indeed. This is typical of the way the American-born Griffin so often seems to miss a trick and/or the point - North American audiences will, for example, soon spot that the supposedly "Canadian" characters don't even make any attempt at 'Canuck' accents. Much more troubling is the caricatured presentation of the film's one representative of working-class Scotland: an inarticulate youth who is "picked up" by the bemused Canadians despite the fact they can't understand a word he's saying. It's a lazy, patronising joke - a very long way from the sharp observations which characterised the best of Griffin's Book Group writing. Griffin, of course, has to be selective, and even then seems to bite off rather more than she can chew. She concentrates almost entirely on comedy, which makes it all the more noticeable that Festival is only about two-thirds as funny as one senses it should be - although it's possible to argue that Festival, like Scorsese's The King of Comedy, isn't really itself a "comedy" at all. There are moments of distinct misery - including a musical montage late on which is only the latest example of lesser directors coming to grief when trying to emulate what Paul Thomas Anderson so magically pulled off in Magnolia. In Griffin's hands, however, this technique seems more about perpetuating the cliche of the clown who's always crying on the inside. The last US-born female writer to make a big impression in UK comedy was Fawlty Towers co-writer Connie Booth - who, along with John Cleese, worked famously hard on writing and re-writing the show's scripts until they were near-flawless models of economy. It's ludicrously unfair to compare Festival with Fawlty Towers, of course, but Griffin's script does nevertheless feel a draft or two short of its full potential. The laugh-rate is disappointingly sporadic throughout, with numerous repetitive sequences of street performers that feel more like padding than an attempt to convey the prevailing hectic ambience. And the film doesn't really do justice to the full 'Edinburgh experience': though entitled Festival, all the acts we see are actually from the Festival Fringe. There's no suggestion that the concurrent Television, Book or Film Festivals even exist at all - based on the experiences of this frequent visitor, the latter event would seem an especially rich source of material ripe for satirical skewering. Neil Young 3rd/7th August 2005 FESTIVAL : [5/10] : UK 2005 : Annie GRIFFIN : 107 mins seen at the Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 3rd August 2005 - public show |
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