| SHE'S TAKEN CONTROL : Edinburgh 2007 overview, for 'Tribune' magazine |
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| Tuesday, 28 August 2007 | |
 Anyone seeking a practical definition of the term "baptism of fire" should have been in Edinburgh last month, when Hannah McGill made her debut as artistic director of the city's International Film Festival. EIFF has been running, in one guise or another, since 1947 - making it the film festival with the longest unbroken history in the world, a couple of months longer than Venice (Cannes didn't become a regular event until 1951) - and McGill is its 16th director. But surely none of them had to cope with a denunciation so public, so vitriolic and so discombobulatingly rapid as Kaleem Aftab's article which appeared in The Independent only four days into the festival. Aftab reckoned it "the most dismal" of Edinburgh's numerous August cultural jamborees, having "lost its edge years ago." The 2007 lineup came under fire: "a lot of the film choices seem rather generic... bizarre programming choices... lacklustre... bland..." And on (and on) it went. Aftab's piece was, perhaps inevitably, a major talking-point among festival-goers - public, press and industry alike, not to mention the organisers themselves - for several days after it appeared. But the general consensus among the people I spoke to was that, while Aftab's piece made some salient points, on the whole McGill was entitled to feel aggrieved by the ferocity of his onslaught. From my perspective (and I've been attending EIFF since 1997, when I realised it provided a chance to catch David Lynch's Lost Highway a month or so before its regular release), 2007's renewal lived up to my expectations. I managed to see 34 films altogether (27 new titles and seven from the archives), just over a fifth of the 123 features in the entire programme. Of these, two were exceptional movies which would grace any festival, anywhere in the world: Anton Corbijn's shattering Ian Curtis biopic Control, which opens in the UK on October 5th, and which quite rightly obtained both the festival's Michael Powell Award (restricted to British films) and also the prize for best single performance. The latter went to Sam Riley, a newcomer whose incarnation of Curtis (including during hyper-intense on-stage renditions of Joy Division hits like "Transmission" and "She's Lost Control") goes far beyond pitch-perfect impersonation - it's eerie, disturbing and heartbreaking, and I'm struggling to come up with any other performance, in any other film, which matches it from the present decade.  I saw Control right at the start of the festival - adroit scheduling that, as word-of-mouth (it was estimated that there were perhaps four critics in the city who didn't think it a near-masterpiece) meant that the picture became the must-see of the whole event. And I certainly wasn't expecting any other of the later selections to match up. But it's one of the joys of the film-festival experience that, when the lights go down in a crowded cinema, you never know quite what's going to hit you. A case in point is Blind Mountain, only the second film from 48-year-old LI Yang and the (confusingly-named) follow-up to his mining-industry expose Blind Shaft, which UK-premiered at Edinburgh 2003 to much critical acclaim - although my own reaction was rather more mixed. Blind Mountain, however, is very much the real deal and confirms LI among the very front rank of current Chinese film-makers. It's the tersely economic story of a college-educated young woman (terrific performance from LU Huang) who travels to a remote rural area for what she thinks is going to be a job working for a medicinal-herb company - only to wake up and be told that she's been 'purchased' by a farming family as a wife for their good-for-nothing, fortyish son. What unfolds is on one level an almost unbearably tense thriller as our resourceful heroine plans her escape - on another a savage indictment of contemporary Chinese society, showing how the "one-child" policy has had the inadvertent effect of many female babies being gotten rid of leading to a drastic shortage of potential brides for the resulting male-heavy population. On the back of its Edinburgh success Blind Shaft managed to obtain commercial circulation in British cinemas, and it will surely be a matter of "when" rather than "if" for Blind Mountain to do the same. Then again, with the vagaries and deficiencies of the British distribution system, you never know: witness how long it's taken for Berlin-based Christian Petzold, one of the decade's most consistently acclaimed European writer-directors, to get one of his movies onto the British arthouse circuit. I don't know what the German for "better late than never" is (besser spät als nie, according to Google), but it certainly applies to Yella, which comes out here on September 21st.  A cool, existential thriller set in the faceless world of modern corporate finance, it's the story of a poised young woman from the former East travels to Hanover to take up an accountancy job - only to find she can't escape the echoes of her past. A return to form for Petzold after a couple of slightly sub-par efforts, Yella features much of the director's trademark combination of unease and suspense - before eventually revealing itself as belonging to a venerable sub-genre of cinema and literature which can often leaves audiences frustrated, although it would be grossly unfair to specify the sub-genre here. Suffice it to say that, in Petzold's hands, the format becomes an instrument to probe not only the complex psychology of an individual, but also take the spiritual temperature of post-reunification Germany.Control, Blind Mountain and Yella were, then the stand-outs among the newer pictures - though mention must also be made of smart American teen-documentary Billy the Kid; Flemish envelope-pusher Ex Drummer; Michael Winterbottom's docu-style drama A Mighty Heart (about the kidnap and murder of journalist Daniel Pearl); US indie romance In Search of a Midnight Kiss (another major word-of-mouth success); veteran Czech director Jiri Menzel's return to the limelight with I Served the King of England (which kinda-sorta reminded me of Black Book, except with more laughs) and John Waters' hilarious one-man-show This Filthy World. But the festival's various dips into the archives yielded several juicy fruits: the retrospective for screenwriter Anita Loos (though no match for EIFF 2006's terrific double-whammy of Mitchell Leisen and 1970s Americana) allowed audiences to savour the likes of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), The Women (1939) and San Francisco (1936) on the big screen, not to mention a piano-accompanied double-bill from 1916 including His Picture in the Papers - an eye-popping showcase for the feline acrobatics of silent-screen legend Douglas Fairbanks. And it was marvellous to finally atch Gus Van Sant's 1985 debut Mala Noche (a black-and-white, 16mm-shot tale of passion and poetry in Portland, Oregon), programmed in conjunction with his latest, Paranoid Park - the latter much-heralded skateboarding/existentialist drama which I unfortunately had to miss due to one of those last-minute scheduling switcheroos to which all film festivals, new are old, are inevitably prone. Neil Young written for the next issue of TRIBUNE magazine  click here for Jigsaw Lounge's Edinburgh 2007 index page |
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