SHIRTLESS IN SEATTLE

FOR over three caffeine soaked weeks in May and June, America's largest and best attended film festival presented a 25 day sampling of the best of world cinema with over 250 shorts and features from 43 countries. Although the main emphasis is usually on American in dependent films, this year's festival had a particularly strong international flavour.

Ireland's only entry was Sue Clayton's eclectic and unpredictable, but ultimately captivating The Disappearance of Fin bar, which transports us from the grim suburbs of Dublin to a magical Lapland as Danny (Luke Griffin in a charming central performance) searches for his lost friend Finbar Flynn (gorgeous camera object Jonathan RhysMyers). A meditation on the meaning of home and the power of wanderlust, the film contains some priceless moments, not least of which is the making of a video to raise funds to find the missing Finbar which boasts a growling lead vocal that would put Leonard Cohen to shame (and has the making of a cult hit single).

This year's tribute was to the French director Bertrand Tavernier, who presented his new film Captain Conan. Set in the Balkans during the first World War, it was long and tedious and compared unfavourably with the very similar but infinitely superior 1990 movie Life And Nothing But, which was also screened. Luckily France had a host of more interesting offerings up its sleeve, ranging from Cedric Klapisch's adorable When The Cats Away to Diane Bertrand's startling directorial debut A Saturday On Earth in which a random twist, of fate brings a long separated sister and brother back together for a brief, portentous encounter.

Gabriel Aghion's Pedale Douce (What a Drag!) a somewhat irritating French version of La Cage Aux Folles/The Bird Cage, was saved by a luminous performance by Fanny Ardant, while the fabulous Maggie Cheung, segued beautifully from Olivier Assay's marvelous Irma Vep to her native city for Peter Chan's romantic comedy about the mainland Chinese emigre experience in Hong Kong, Comrades, Almost a Love Story.

One of the festival's major crowd pleasers was Japan's Masayuki Suo's Shall We Dance. Basically a more subdued version of Strictly Ballroom in which a hard working middle aged businessman discovers the joys of ballroom dancing, the film has already been snapped up for distribution by Miramax and should be a serious contender for next year's Oscars. Personally, I found one of the other Japanese films, Sogo Ichi's beautiful monochromatic tale about a serial killer of female bus conductors, Labyrinth Of Dreams, much more perverse and rewarding.

Other gems included Holland's idiosyncratic Alex (The Northerners) van Warmerdam's twisted variation on La Ronde, The Dress in which a certain item of clothing causes a daisy chain of seductions across the Dutch landscape, Helke Misselwitz's unrelentingly bleak vision of, post reunification Germany, Little Angel, and Montxo Armendariz's Secrets Of The Heart.

Local opinion was severely, divided with regards to Tsai Mingliang's latest opus, The River. Tsai who uses the longest takes this side of Angelopolous, needs a lot of getting used to but found that once I got into the rhythm of his almost silent examination of an hilariously dysfunctional Taiwanese family, I was hooked. Meanwhile. Australia brought Peter Duncan's very uneven satirical comedy Children of The Revolution which, thankfully, boasted another brilliant performance from Judy Davis as a woman whose relentless pursuit of her Communist ideals very nearly changes the course of history; Clara Law's lovely autobiographical film about an ageing Hong Kong couple who move to Australia to live with their assimilated daughter, Floating Away and, one of the very best films of the festival, David Caesar's darkly hilarious Tarantino influenced Idiot Box with great in your face performances by Ben Mendelsohn and Jeremy Sims as two suburban slackers whose lives revolve around watching TV, drinking beer and keeping their much loathed appointments at the unemployment office, who decide that the one job they're qualified for is robbing a bank. Mendelsohn and Sims are names to watch.

From Canada came John (Zero Patience) Greyson's Jarmanesque Lillies. Set in a Quebec prison in 1952, most of the story is a flash back to 1912 where two a lovers are destroyed by jealousy and an uptight society. The story is enacted by the inmates of the prison, so all of the actors are male, many of them in drag. Shifting smoothly between realty and performance, the film's fluid pace and occasionally super performances are captivating, even if the film doesn't quite reach the Genet peaks to which it aspires.

Also from Canada was Deepa Mehta's Fire about two beautiful Indian wives who fall in love partly because of their shared repression. Boasting luminous, performances by the great Shabana Azmi as the older wife and newcomer Nandita Das as the younger, it was one of Seattle's major finds.

However, the festival's most enjoyable film came from England in the form of Peter Cattaneo's The Full Monty in which a delightful Robert Carlyle and a bunch of his mates who have been laid off from the Yorkshire steel mills supplement, their dole income by performing as strippers and outdo the Chippendales by going all the way ("the full monty"). Blessed with fine performances and a great put on the show spirit, it was a delight from beginning to end.

The American independent film continues to be the festival's bread and butter and, of the 42 non documentary features presented, five - all of which are directorial feature debuts - were exceptional. Bart Freundlich's vividly moving The Myth of Fingerprints brings together a superb ensemble cast including Julianne Moore, Noah Wylie (doing very nicely outside of ER) and one of this year's major discoveries, Hope Davis (The Daytrippers) for a Thanksgiving homecoming they all have reason to regret. Setch Zvi Rosenfeld's Brother's Kiss, tells the story of two brothers (Nick Chinlund and Michael Raynor), one who grows up to be a cop, the other a junkie.

The story may sound familiar but Rosenfeld's assured direction and great performances by his leading actors (as well as a heartbreaking Cathy Moriarty as their mother) makes this one of the best films of the year, so tar. Jonathan Nossiter's fascinating Sunday about two of life's losers in New York manages to blend Pinteresque ambiguity and touches of Bergman and Hitchcock with beautifully shaded performances by Lisa Harrow as an out of work actress and David Suchet as a middleaged man who may or may not be a once famous film director.

Douglas Spain is the magnetic centre of Miguel Arieta's superb Star Maps about a young man who comes to Hollywood to become an actor but is persuaded by his pimp father to do some bustling under the cover of selling maps to the stars' homes.

Finally, the best film of the festival was writer director Neil LaBute's remarkable debut In The Company Of Men in which two male executives (Aaron Eckart and Matt Malloy) vent their rage against women by both dating a shy deaf office worker (Stacey Edwards), building up her self esteem and then dumping her. The film packs an enormous punch and boasts a stunning a star is born performance by Eckart as the more handsome and cockier of the two slimeballs. Strong stuff. The film sparked much discussion which continued at various coffee houses well into the early hours of the morning. That's Seattle.