Caffeine-soaked cinema in Seattle

The Seattle Film Festival - with 250 movies from 30 countries including more than 80 US indie features but only one offering from Ireland - was 'hella good', writes Padraig Browne

The 28th Seattle International Film Festival got off to a pretty good start with writer- director Burt Steers's début feature, Igby Goes Down. Starring Kieran Culkin as the eponymous scion of a wealthy family, this wickedly funny study in blue-blooded dysfunction is firmly planted in Wes (The Royal Tennenbaums) Anderson territory and all the better for it. Boasting a superb supporting cast, including Bill Pullman, Susan Sarandon, Ryan Phillippe, Jeff Goldblum, Amanda Peet, Jared Harris and Claire Danes, it was the perfect opening night feature.

The largest film festival in North America and taking place over three -and-a-half weeks in late May and early June, this year's event boasted more than 250 films from some 30 countries. Ireland's sole representative was Johnny Gogan's The Mapmaker, with Brian F. O'Byrne and Susan Lynch. It was screened to a somewhat mixed response at the festival's smallest venue on June 5th and was due to play a larger venue on June 7th, but it had to be pulled because the print was making its way back to Ireland for the Irish première.

Although the festival had its share of disappointments (Taiwanese director Hoe Hsiao-hsien's gorgeously shot Millennium Mambo, which heaped loads of style on a trite story was the perfect example), most of the screenings were rewarding and my time spent in America's most caffeine-soaked city was, to use a Seattle expression, hella good.

Probably the most delightful and charming film I saw was Italian director Gabriele Muccino's The Last Kiss. Following in the venerable tradition of those great Italian sex comedies exploring temptation and infidelity (think Divorce Italian Style), the film focuses on the premature midlife crises of four friends in their early 30s and particularly on Carlo (Stefano Accorsi), a successful 30-year-old who finally decides to marry his long-term live-in girlfriend, Giulia (Giovanna Mezzorgiorno), when he learns that they are expecting a child.

Boasting a superb ensemble cast, the movie's standout performance comes from veteran Stefania Sandrelli who, as Anna, Giulia's mother, finds herself at a crossroads as grandmotherhood approaches.

Chinese director Zhang Yang has followed his lovely movie, Shower, with Quitting, a much more austere and mannered piece about the breakdown and drug addiction of a famous Chinese actor amid the breakneck social transformations gripping Chinese society in the early 1990s. Meanwhile, Iranian director Babak Payami's reserved yet beautiful Secret Ballot explores the relationship between a female civil servant and a soldier who are assigned the task of collecting votes at a barren Iranian outpost on election day.

British director Sandra Goldbacher makes good on the promise of her début, The Governess, with her second outing, Me Without You. Tracing the downward spiral of a late 1970s schoolgirl friendship, the movie follows its two leads for over two decades, making great use of music and attention to period detail. American actress Michelle Williams (Dawson's Creek) is totally convincing as a British character, a feat made all the more remarkable by the fact that she is acting opposite British powerhouse Anna Friel.

Then there was the delightfully titled Men With Brooms, which has broken all domestic box-office records in its native Canada. A deadpan comedy about the venerable Scots-Canadian pastime of curling, a sport in which grown men slide a smoothed granite rock along the ice to come to rest on a circle while other grown men scamper alongside whisk-brooming the ice to make the rock go faster (or slower, or something). With Paul Gross doing Welles-ian duty as star, director, co-writer and co-music scorer, the film has more than a few laughs and its heart is in the right place.

Almost a third of the films showing at the festival were US independents, and even though there was no truly outstanding indie this year, a number are worth commenting on. Peter Care's début feature, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, is a standard coming-of-age story save for its animation sequences, in which the film's Catholic schoolboy protagonists, Kieran Culkin (again) and Emile Hirsh, imagine themselves as superheroes fighting the malevolent forces of darkness embodied by Jodie Foster's Catholic school nun. Care has a great way with actors, and Hirsh, in particular, is outstanding.

Director Gary Winick gives a nice Upper West-Side Manhattan feel to the pleasant if inconsequential Tadpole, in which newcomer Aaron Stanford makes a strong impression as a 15-year-old who falls in love with his stepmother, played by Sigourney Weaver. However, it is Bebe Neuwirth, as Weaver's cradle- snatching best friend, who steals the show.

Reaching the height of political incorrectness, writer Adam Larson Broder's and co-director Tony R. Abrams's Pumpkin treats us to a tale of prejudice, southern California style, in which sorority girl Christina Ricci falls in love with Pumpkin (Hank Harris), a mildly retarded boy she is mentoring for the "Challenged Games", and gradually becomes a social outcast. Although the film's constant shifting between earnestness and parody is occasionally irritating, the film packs a surprising emotional punch, and Ricci, who plays the whole thing straight, is marvellous.

Finally, my favourite indie was Nicole Holofcener's Lovely and Amazing, a finely observed comedy about four women: mother Brenda Blethyn and her daughters Catherine Keener, Emily Mortimer and Raven Goodwin. Although the men are mostly a sorry bunch of caricatures, the film succeeds in giving us an intimate family portrait and perfectly captures the bitter-sweet lessons that these women learn in keeping up with the hectic demands of their lives. Altogether delightful.