Preview of the 2010 Hamilton International Film Festival

After last year’s debacle over venues the International Film Festival returns to Hamilton in 2010.  Lido theatre is the perfect setting to feast upon a smorgasbord of local and overseas cinema: 80 odd features and sundry shorts spread over 18 mouth watering days, kicking off on August 12th and concluding on the 29th.

Recommendations?  Like Frank Sinatra’s regrets, I have a few.  For me personally the retrospective screenings bring the most pleasure.  The opportunity to see genuine classics in optimum conditions, resplendent in restored or otherwise spruced up prints, does not arise often.

This year the two revival sessions couldn’t be more different from one another. Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s “The Red Shoes” is the medium’s preeminent ballet film, a devastatingly beautiful mediation on love and art featuring the gorgeously red-headed Moira Shearer as a ballerina caught between husband and dancing vocation. “Once Upon a Time in the West” is the ultimate spaghetti western, the culmination of Sergio Leone’s baroque embroidery of the genre, operatic in score, scope and ambition yet suffused with a delicate black humour.  Henry Fonda’s baby blue eyes need to be seen on as wide a screen as possible.

Also something of chronological throw back is “The Illusionist”.  An animated feature by the maker of “The Triplets of Belleville”, it’s based on an unproduced screenplay by the late, great French comedian Jacques Tati.  Judging by stills and word-mouth-reputation it does for the Edinburgh of the 1950s what “Triplets” did for 1930s Paris, celebrating the lost art of music hall entertainment at the dawn of the rock n’ roll and television age.

Of more contemporary interest will be the opening night feature, New Zealand’s own “Predicament”.  Three generations of kiwi artistic icons are combined: Ronald Hugh Morrison, the bard of small town boozing, provides the source novel; Tim Finn, Split Enz godfather, proves that all those years spent with Greta Scacchi taught him something about acting, and Jemaine Clement, a wings-clipped Conchord, takes a leading role.  In the best traditions of Morrison some complementary vino will be passed around beforehand at the premiere screening so get there early and drink the place dry.

The film with the best critical reputation at the Festival is arguably “A Prophet”, which topped “Sight and Sound”’s 2009 survey of 60 international scribes.  A French/Italian co-production, it’s a gangster epic set largely inside a prison, tracing the development of a criminal’s career within institutional walls.

Speaking of incarceration, Roman Polanski put the finishing touches on “The Ghost Writer” whilst sweating it out in a Swiss jail.  Both thriller and political satire, the film has been seen as as much an oblique commentary on the nasty little Pole’s own problems with the legal system as it is about Tony Blair’s.  Ewan McGregor plays the title character, a drunken hack employed to write the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister who’s accused of war crimes.

Other noted auteurs having their work showcased are the Iranian Abbas Kiarostami with “Certified Copy”, for which Juliette Binoche, playing a journalist romanced by renowned author, won the Best Actress award at Cannes; Frenchman Oliver Assayas with “Carlos” a three part, five hour examination of the life and times of the Venezuelan terrorist known as ‘The Jackal’, and American independent feminist director Nicole Holofcener, with “Please Give”, another of her witty comedies of manners about unhappy bourgeois women.

Fans of film noir should be excited by the latest from that English jack of all cinematic trades Michael Winterbottom.  With “The Killer Inside Me” Winterbottom takes on Jim Thompson’s classic hard boiled novel, playing up the sex and the violence and showing scant respect for the cutesy reputation of starlets like Jessica Alba or Kate Hudson.

Amongst the documentaries creating a buzz are “Babies”, an account of the first year of life of four infants; “Love, Lust & Lies”, Australian Gillian Armstrong’s latest instalment in her answer to the “7 Up” series, and “The Most Dangerous Man in America”, a portrayal of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the ‘Pentagon Papers’ to the world, influencing the course of the Vietnam war.

Guaranteed to find a hipster audience is “Exit Through the Gift Shop” a documentary in someways about the media-shy, political graffiti artist who goes under the name Banksy.  Begun as a film about the artist, the project was eventually taken over by Banksy himself, who turns the tables on his director.

The best comedic bet of the Festival will be “Four Lions”.  Taking on the 21st century’s prime ideological conflict in the same manner as Kubrick’s “Dr Strangelove” addressed the Cold War, co-writer/director Chris Martin satirises both Islamic terrorism and the west’s not always co-ordinated response.  His anti-heroes are four moronic jihadists looking to do Osama’s bidding in England’s industrial north.