In the midst of Edinburgh's culturally saturated August, the 52nd Edinburgh Film Festival - the longest running in the world but without a major sponsor for the second year - high-kicked in with a fun, if flawed, opener: Velvet Goldmine. A major turnout included the no-longer-local lad, Ewan McGregor (the best thing about the film) in a decidedly un-glam kilt and sweater for the opening gala, while director Todd Haynes lined up for one of the festival's most popular innovations, Scene By Scene - public interviews with interactive film clips.
The festival's director, Lizzie Francke, began her second year with what appeared to be a personal, week-long shrine to Velvet Goldmine, which looks at the glam rock era through a Wildean/ Wellesian prism but is actually a puffball movie with a great soundtrack. Two other Scene By Scenes on the film with producer Christine Vachon and costume designer, Sandy Powell, took place, but as Goldmine was generally poorly received here, they only emphasised the feeling it may now be in danger of over-hype.
It is a testament to the intense, maverick spirit of the previous - and Irish - director, Marc Cousins, that the programme structure over a fortnight of film remains untouched, but the festival had a depleted guest list compared to the major names and retros that Cousins enticed to Scotland. The one retrospective was a posthumous consideration of the realist director, Alan Clarke, who gave TV film acting debuts to Gary Oldman, Ray Winstone and Tim Roth in his often banned films (Scum, etc), which focused on British youth and society at their most violent. Clarke died in 1990, but Roth and Winstone were on stage for a Scene By Scene session on their beloved mentor, "Clarkey".
Robert Redford's The Horse Whisperer was screened without a guest in sight, although the golden pensioner did appear later in a live satellite link from his Utah ranch, for a public interview. But the essential ingredient is having a star there in the gleaming flesh and a stroll-on by Redford, rather than a televised presidential address, would have made all the difference to this year's event. It was left to an extraordinary stream of debut features, blackly comic dramas and - following Goldmine - a strong strand of gay-themed films, to provide the thrill of discovery.
Edinburgh has established itself as the crucible of new British film and David Yates's debut feature, The Tichborne Claimant, burst like sunlight through the clouds of a somewhat uneventful first week. The absolute delight of the fortnight, The Tichborne Claimant revives the ghost of Ealing, where it was partly shot, with a perfectly pitched and paced costume comedy of fraud and the class system.
Based on a true story of a butcher who returned to England from Australia in 1876, claiming to be the long-lost aristocrat and heir to a fortune, Roger Titchbourne, the film was privately financed by the Irish actor, Tom McCabe (wealthy by means of his Swiftcall telephone company) who also appears among a wonderfully appointed ensemble cast. Veterans John Gielgud, Charles Gray and James Villiers relish their roles and Robert Pugh (best remembered as the incestuous father in Priest) is exuberantly rebellious as the Claimant, balanced by the noble stoicism of the distinguished South African actor, John Kani, as his trusty manservant, Bogle. The Irish actress, Rachel Dowling, shines as the Claimant's long-suffering wife and Yates directs with a panache that captures all the deft, dark wit of Ealing while dragging costume drama out of the aspic.
A Kind Hearts And Coronets for the 1990s which left the other costumed epics on show - debuts from Sandra Goldbacher with The Governess, a weak Victorian tale of forbidden love on Skye starring Minnie Driver, and Des McAnuff's star-studded but ineffectual Cousin Bette, starring Jessica Lange - standing with their corsets undone.
At the opposite end of the cinematic experience, another first-time director, Frenchman Gasper Noe, unleashed the shock of the festival with Seul Contre Tous (Alone Against All), a remorseless, visceral journey into the mind of a man (Philippe Nahon) whom the world has abandoned to his own terrifying logic. The cacophonous narration and inner-city decay has its template in Taxi Driver, and the appalling conclusion - preceded by screen-filling warning signs - is reached when the unnamed character abuses, then kills his own daughter before turning the gun on himself. A pulverising outpouring of loneliness and hate, this is the France of Le Pen writ large, with Noe's direction moving into areas explored by Michael Hancke's shattering Funny Games.
Noe's vicious but towering drama revealed the much-anticipated Acid House Trilogy as the facile bag of drug-fuelled tricks it is, and Seul Contre Tous was rightly given a Special Mention in the festival's Channel 4 Director's Award. This was given to Todd Haynes for Velvet Goldmine, his fourth feature, a decision which raised eyebrows since the award was judged by Lizzie Francke and Velvet Goldmine backers, Channel 4, and usually goes to first or second-time directors. The audience award was also a surprise, going to Simon Shore's teenage gay movie, Get Real, which is colourful and upbeat about its gay schoolboy hero on the path to true love with the head boy, but highly manipulative and insultingly speechy in a finale akin to Grange Hill.
Much better was Rose Troche's follow-up to Go Fish, a gay romantic comedy that inverts many preconceptions with a welcome light-hearted touch and features fine performances from Kevin McKidd as the bisexual hero, Tom Hollander in high camp mode and the brilliant Simon Callow as the over-sensitive (and heterosexual) leader of a new man encounter group. On a more serious sexual note, High Art, directed by Lisa Cholodenko, explores lesbian first love in a lusciously stylish New York art world, with a fine comeback performance from ex-brat packer, Ally Sheedy, as the older woman.
Out of a Hollywood grab-bag of gala screenings, the presidential satire, Primary Colours brought only the fleeting appearance of Emma Thompson - but the star drought was alleviated by the best of the Scene By Scenes with Terry Gilliam. His latest folly, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, did not improve its critical profile since the derision it received in Cannes, but the nicest, craziest visionary we have was fascinating and funny as he told a packed audience about his intentions when approaching the film, working with Johnny Depp. One of these days he will make a masterpiece, but this is not it.
Among the US indies screened was elder rebel John Sayles's Latin American epic, Men With Guns, a noble, mythic tale of redemption in Spanish, and Hal Hartley's most mischievous and enjoyable movie, The Book Of Life, with Jesus (Hal Hartley stalwart, Martin Donovan) arriving at JFK in a sharp suit with a sexy secretary in the stick-thin shape of P.J. Harvey. Millennium fever grips New York as the constantly irritated devil (Thomas Ryan) prowls the bars on the last day of the century. A short, irreverent but never mocking delight, this is Hartley's celestial High Noon for the millennium.
In the often overlooked Mirrorball strand for new music videos and documentaries, Iara Lee's Modulations was a starburst of movement and sound, a fabulous, all-embracing documentary on the evolution of electro-pop that captures the times and sounds like no other. Modulations premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh along with a number of Edinburgh hits, including Orphans, Peter Mullan's pitchblack Glaswegian comedy of grieving, which was an audience favourite, as in Galway. Actor-director Mullan still waits for a distributor for his directorial debut, but in many ways, this was Mullan's Edinburgh, acting in a too-short film and sneaking into a sell-out Surprise Film screening, which had all of the anticipatory thrills missing from much of the galas, before the screen revealed Mullan's Cannes award-winning performance in Ken Loach's My Name Is Joe. Granted a standing ovation from a tearful audience, Mullan accepted the adulation with an easy Scottish shrug and told us "the pubs'll be closing soon".
But ultimately Edinburgh belonged to John Maybury, the triumphant double-award-winner, for his debut feature, Love Is The Devil. At the closing gala, he accepted the new Pathe British Performance Award on behalf of Derek Jacobi and Daniel Craig, both on raw, dangerous form as the tragic lovers in Maybury's fierce cinematic portrait of Francis Bacon and George Dryer. Much to his bemusement, he returned to the stage to accept the festival's main prize, the Michael Powell Award for Best New British Feature. The star of the poorly attended ceremony, indicative of this year's lack of names with Stephen Frears and Ewan Mc Gregor's mother handing out the prizes, he sent the crowd into hysterics by declaring his pride at the award, as he had always meant Love Is The Devil to be "a Powell and Pressburger Carry On Film".
A sample of Maybury's witty flair and ambitious attack would not go amiss in securing the sponsors and the stars to ensure next year's century's-end festival is the event it should, and can, be.
