Memories of the 11th Galway Film Fleadh flash together in a whirlwind of snapshots from a succession of busy, stimulating and immensely enjoyable days and nights: Damien O'Donnell bringing a dozen of his cast and crew on stage to a euphoric reception after his film, East is East. Michael Winterbottom, fresh off a plane, engaging in an animated discussion on the making of his beguiling new film, Wonderland. Donal McCann articulately sharing his own memories of a brilliant career in Bob Quinn's enthralling documentary, It Must Be Done Right, much of it filmed at last year's fleadh. Gabriel Byrne, relaxing over a seafood lunch in the idyllic setting of Moran's On the Weir after giving a two-hour acting masterclass that morning and an illuminating introduction to a late-night screening of The Usual Suspects the night before - and about to face into an extended public interview two days later.
All the many first-time filmmakers from Ireland and abroad enthusiastically congregating long into the night at the festival club at Galway Rowing Club. The avid audiences which braved the sweltering heat of the Town Hall Theatre every day and night. And memories of all those movies which made up the fleadh's eclectic and thoroughly satisfying programme.
Memories are at the core of one of the most adventurous productions shown over the fleadh's closing weekend, Nichola Bruce's I Could Read the Sky, imaginatively adapted by from the innovative photographic novel by Timothy O'Grady and Steve Pyke. These are the memories of an elderly man looking back on a life which began quite promisingly in the west of Ireland and gradually went into decline as he emigrated to England and made his hard-earned money as a workhouse on building projects across the country. The title, I Could Read the Sky, is taken from his recitation of the things he could do - and his list of the things he couldn't do concludes with the words, "Stop remembering." The nameless man comments, "Without the past I would have fallen; I thought I had a future, too." After a past bound up in a cycle of work, drink and sleep, the future to which he has been relegated is an unfulfilled and lonely one in his unkempt Kentish Town bedsit.
Regrets he has more than a few, but there isn't a trace of self-pity about him as the years come tumbling back again - the memories of childhood, family, friends, work, drink, more drink, the sadness at the death of his mother, and the thrill of the day he first saw the woman who became his wife - in a film which firmly eschews sentimentality in its melancholy overview. Nor is it without humour, as when the man recalls how he and his fellow emigrants regularly used assumed names at work. "You could be on a site those days," he says, "and half the men could be calling themselves Michael Collins for the crack."
Rather than construct the flashbacks in cinema's traditional linear way of things, the film captures them like all our memories recur - scattershot, incomplete, at random - and images of the man's past flood out in torrents, the memories blending into each other as images superimposed upon each other. The visual style of the film recalls, for example, Derek Jarman's memory exercises in The Last of England and The Garden.
There is an hallucinatory aspect to the movie's layering of images and sound which may prove disorientating to mainstream audiences, but demanding as it might appear from the outset, the film soon takes on a hypnotic quality, due immeasurably to the haunting presence of the writer and poet, Dermot Healy, who was an inspired choice to play the pivotal character and whose lined features and heartfelt delivery are powerfully expressive. His achievement is all the more remarkable given that he performed all his scenes in isolation from the other actors who are all playing people from his past - and who notably include Brendan Coyle, Francis Burke, Stephen Rea and Maria Doyle Kennedy. The movie's accumulative impact is heightened by the striking cinematography of Seamus McGarvey and Owen McPolin, and Catherine Creed's seamless editing.
The harsh emigrant life of Dermot Healy's character in I Could Read the Sky makes for sharp contrast with the experiences of two young Irishmen in present-day America in Sunburn, one of five films at Galway - two of which were covered here last Friday - dealing with the Irish immigrants to the US in the 1990s.
Directed and co-written by Nelson Hume, an American on his feature debut, Sunburn follows the escapades of two young Dubliners in Montauk, Long Island. Davin McDerby (Cillian Murphy) has escaped there to avoid marrying the young woman pregnant by him after a fleeting relationship, while Robert Fisk (Barry Ward) is there on a student work programme. Where Darby is brash, irresponsible and charming, Robert is gauche, shy and unconfident. Surprisingly, perhaps, it is Robert who becomes romantically attached, when he is taken on as a handyman by an older woman (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) about to be divorced, while Darby's interest in a fellow emigrant (Paloma Beeza) is undermined by his rash behaviour. Along the way there are a few glaring narrative contrivances which only serve to distract from the lively pacing and appealing performances in Sunburn, but the day is carried by the understated Barry Ward (from Family and Lipservice) and the refreshing, wonderfully natural Cillian Murphy (from the stage play, Disco Pigs), an actor adored by the camera.
There are more misadventures involving Irishmen abroad in The Craic, which opens in Northern Ireland in 1988 as two Provos squabble over whose balaclava is the one with the red stitching. The screenplay for this slender but often very amusing comedy is by Jimeoin McKeown who also stars with Alan McKee as hapless characters who flee to Sydney after an incident with a vain and violent Provo in a chip shop. The consequences most humorously involve Jimeoin participating in a tacky TV dating show a la Blind Date, and the movie has already proved a major success with Australian audiences.
Another chancer takes refuge in Australia - this time a New Yorker played by Johnathan Schaech - in Welcome to Woop Woop, based on Douglas Kennedy's novel, The Dead Heart and treated with characteristic flamboyance by Stephan Elliott, who directed Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Schaech's character finds himself seduced, drugged and married, and unable to escape the remote area of Woop Woop ruled over by his domineering father-in-law (veteran Rod Taylor at his most deadpan) and populated by eccentrics. After the deceptive lightness of Priscilla, this is fairly heavy-handed stuff which sags in the centre, although it bursts back into life for an exuberant resolution.
The pick of the new American movies at Galway was Doug Liman's Go, set in Los Angeles and Las Vegas over a Christmas Eve packed with incident as the fates of a dozen characters are interconnected with admirable precision - and revealed in a time-shifting structure like Pulp Fiction, re-playing events from different perspectives, each revealing more elements of this tangled tale of sex, drugs, duplicity and secret affairs.
Director Doug Liman doubles as lighting cameraman on this heady, exhilarating and stylish movie which marks a major leap from his previous film, Swingers, and Sarah Polley is outstanding in a spirited cast that includes Scott Wolf, Jay Mohr, Katie Holmes, Desmond Askew, Breckin Meyer, Taye Diggs, William Fichtner and from Ally McBeal, Jane Krakowski. Go, of which much more when it opens in the autumn, powers along with the kind of sustained rush of energy it takes to get through the hectic days and nights of Galway Film Fleadh.
