A lovely Nowhere

Catch of the day: Colin Farrell (Circus) nets Alicja Bachleda (Ondine) in Neil Jordan's new film

La Dolce Vita

Launching our daily coverage of Dublin's film festival, DONALD CLARKEreviews Neil Jordan's new film, welcomes the screening of a Fellini classic and selects today's highlights

ONDINE***

Directed by Neil Jordan.

Starring Colin Farrell, Alicja Bachleda, Alison Barry, Tony Curran, Emil Hostina, Dervla Kirwan, Stephen Rea

NOT SINCE 1990'S The Miraclehas Neil Jordan attempted such a low-key, intimate picture as this seductive, if slightly unfocused drama. Ondine, which opened the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival last night, stars Colin Farrell as a Cork fisherman whose life skews towards the weird when he finds an exotically accented woman (Alicja Bachleda) curled up in his net.

Named Syracuse, though often referred to as Circus, the protagonist has been enduring a few crises of late. His daughter (Alison Barry) suffers from a serious kidney complaint. His estranged partner neglects the child while boozing with her Scottish boyfriend. Circus has recently gone on the wagon himself and treats the local priest (fancy seeing Stephen Rea in a Jordan picture!) as an unofficial Alcoholics Anonymous mentor. Initially, Ondine– as the washed-up stranger calls herself – seems to have a magical effect on the fisherman's life. Salmon leap into his net and, after much anguished waiting, a suitable kidney donor turns up for his daughter. Could Ondinebe one of those mythical seal-women known to the ancient Celts as selkies?

With its lilting, casually poetic dialogue, its fetishisation of West Cork's damp beauty spots and its interest in (essentially) maritime fairies, Ondinedoes look a little like the sort of film you'd expect an entranced foreigner to make. Indeed, Chris Doyle, the near-legendary Hong Kong-based cinematographer, brings a hazy, vague timbre to the images that turns the rugged environment into an unreal dreamland. The modern world – mobile phones, the internet – rarely turns up to shatter this apparently timeless idyll.

Jordan has, however, created some fleshy, wheezy characters to inhabit his lovely Nowhere. Though his Cork accent comes and goes, Farrell is charming, flawed and charismatic as the hero and Dervla Kirwan chews up the pool table as his troubled former lover.

It's just a shame that the central story is so slippery. We are never quite sure how seriously to take the notion that Ondinemight be a mythical being. At times – in its more surreal moments – the prospect seems eminently reasonable. At others, the very suggestion risks tipping the film into absurdity. Ultimately, the story pulls itself together and satisfactorily ties up all its neat ends, but Ondinefeels more like an agreeable five-finger exercise than a fully realised major opus.

A timely soak in celebrity Babylon

MOVIE FASHIONS come and go. A decade or so ago, Federico Fellini, once a holy figure of European art cinema, was in danger of being relegated to the second division. As the critical index of austere, glamour-phobic films from Iran (and other sweaty places) began to soar, the Italian film-maker was often dismissed as an entertaining but rather empty vulgarian. The imperishable Nino Rota, who scored so many of his films, also suffered a bit of a critical wobble.

This weekend, La Dolce Vita, one of Fellini's most famous films, celebrates its 50th anniversary with a screening at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. On Monday, Rota, who also scored such classics as The Godfatherand The Leopard, is honoured with a concert at the National Concert Hall. It now hardly seems possible that either man was ever edged out of the front rank.

La Dolce Vitais about a lot of things, but more than anything else it has to do with celebrity and the press's capacity to distort and manufacture news. (If you know one thing about the film, it's probably that the word "paparazzo" derives from the name of Walter Santesso's sleazy photographer.) Every decade since the film's release, hand-wringers have moaned about the trivial nature of the media and its intrusiveness into the peccadillos of the puzzlingly famous. But neither Beatlemania nor Osmondophilia nor Madonna-itis prepared us for the celebrity Babylon of the new millennium. La Dolce Vitanow looks like a key text for a wretched age.

The picture follows a week in the life of Marcello, a professional newsman, as he oils his way around a Rome featuring many gorgeous carapaces and the odd damp, fetid interior. He romances the gloriously sleek (but sad) Anouk Aimée. He is dragged out to investigate an apparent miracle in the outer penumbra of the city.

Most famously, he reports on the arrival of an American film star in the city. Later, this Sylvia – played with writhing sensuality by Anita Ekberg, above right – triggers the film’s most celebrated sequence by climbing fully clothed into the Trevi Fountain. Marcello, enchanted despite his cynicism, has obediently spent the previous moments trying to locate milk for a stray kitten she has taken up.

Now here's the thing. Think of a dozen similarly iconic sequences, those scenes you like to act out when you're drunk and abroad: Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman kissing goodbye at the end of Casablanca; Robert De Niro talking to himself in the mirror in Taxi Driver; Bela Lugosi greeting his guest at the start of Dracula. The characters may be crazy, they may be evil, but those in such resonant, era-defining scenes are rarely plain silly.

Countless tourists have since plunged into the Trevi Fountain and danced around the cascading water. They will have thought themselves seductive and magical. They will rarely have thought: "Look at me. I am the very embodiment of celebrity vacuity. I am beautiful, but I am stupid. One day I won't be beautiful, but I will always be stupid." The great gift of La Dolce Vitais its ability to puncture glamour while still revelling in it, yet the original film was partly appalled by all this gloss.

Any fool can offer an edge-free critique of celebrity culture. It is more difficult to combine disgust at the excesses of the pointlessly famous with a guilty delight in their voluptuousness. Or is it? That's what a million viewers do each day as they laugh at their own foolishness for lapping up The X Factor. Even the great Fellini didn't see that coming.

La Dolce Vitais at the Light House Cinema tomorrow at 2pm. La Dolce Vita: Nino Rota Film Music is at the National Concert Hall on Mon, Feb 22 at 8pm. See jdiff.com

Five to see today at the Festival

ENTER THE VOID

Gasper Noé, director of the terrifying Irreversible, annoyed as many fans as he delighted when this weird, psychedelic epic screened at Cannes. Anything sounding so weird must be seen.

Light House, 8pm

SALVADOR

A tribute to the late Michael Dwyer opens with Oliver Stone’s most focused film. James Woods and James Belushi play Americans observing their own country’s misdeeds in El Salvador.

Screen Cinema, 2pm

MOTHER

The latest film from Bong Joon-ho, creator of Korean masterpieces Memories of Murder and The Host, is a characteristically odd murder mystery.

Cineworld, 6.30pm

HIS AND HERS

Ken Wardrop’s fascinating documentary dealing with disparate women from the Irish midlands has already become the Irish film to see this year. Winner of a gong at the recent Sundance festival.

Screen Cinema, 6.40pm

THE SCOUTING BOOK FOR BOYS

Already highly praised, this slice of naturalism is from up-and-coming British director Tom Harper. Thomas Turgoose, of This is England, stars.

Screen Cinema, 8.40pm