Hackings, executions . . . excellent

It has been a gory opening to the second Dublin International Film Festival. But don't take that as a criticism, writes Donald Clarke.

'Look at your hands," Guillermo Arriaga, the writer of the searing drama 21 Grams, instructed the audience at the Savoy cinema in Dublin on Saturday morning. "Remember, one day those will be the hands of a corpse."

Arriaga's memento mori was one of the cheerier moments of the opening days of the second Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. Over five days this writer saw a tongue hacked off, several Chinese miners bludgeoned to death, a notorious serial killer executed twice in two films, Alec Baldwin kick an apparently pregnant woman in the abdomen and the whole world come slowly to an end as a result of climate change and a paucity of love.

None of this is to be taken as criticism. This was an excellent opening to a festival whose quality is living up to the high expectations triggered by last year's inaugural event. The public seemed to agree, and by Sunday evening more money had been taken and more tickets sold than the 2003 festival managed over its entire duration.

The Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, John O'Donoghue, kicked off proceedings on Thursday night by praising the efforts of Michael Dwyer, the festival's director - and this newspaper's film correspondent, of course. "But then again he's a fellow Kerryman. So what would you expect?" the minister quipped.

A packed Savoy was then treated to the première of Alan Gilsenan's often extraordinary, often baffling Timbuktu. Made as part of the Irish Film Board's low-budget initiative, the picture tells the story of a young woman, played by the Gilsenan regular Eva Birthistle, as she searches for her brother (Liam O Maonlaí), who has been kidnapped in north Africa. As often with this director, the images were beautifully composed and edited together with great subtlety to create an unsettling dreamscape.

But what did it all mean? One was reminded of so many experimental films of the late 1960s and early 1970s - Two-Lane Blacktop, Zabriskie Point, Easy Rider - in which the protagonists wander dusty wildernesses and find only themselves.

Many in the audience admired the sureness of Gilsenan's visual touch and his ingenuity in shooting a complex film in a distant location on such a small budget. Many others wished that the picture made a little more sense. Then again, perhaps it should have made a little less sense; if Paul Freaney's script had wandered into complete abstraction the plot's illogical turns would have been less troubling. And shouldn't Birthistle have been wearing a hat in that heat?

By coincidence, another film by an Irish director also featured life-changing adventures in the desert. David Caffrey's highly diverting Grand Theft Parsons tells the story of the aftermath of the death of the country rock legend Gram Parsons.

Seeking to honour a promise he made to the dead man, Phil Kaufman, Gram's road manager, steals the singer's body and heads into the Mojave Desert with the intention of lighting a funeral pyre among the Joshua trees. Featuring a surprisingly grounded performance by Johnny Knoxville of MTV's Jackass as Kaufman and a brilliantly funny one by Michael Shannon as the unwitting hippie whose help he enlists, the film is an easy, undemanding pleasure. After the screening Caffrey explained that the film-makers were indebted to Cameron Diaz for generously stumping up $2,000 (€1,500) for the hair extensions of Christina Applegate, another of the film's stars.

As shown by Caffrey's film, even the comedies at this year's festival involve death. Peter Bogdanovich's The Cat's Meow, which, more than two years after its completion, has only recently found a distributor, continued the trend. Telling the story of a notorious shooting aboard the yacht of the press magnate William Randolph Hearst in the 1920s, the film, whose fine cast includes Joanna Lumley, Kirsten Dunst and Jennifer Tilly, was entertaining enough, if a little dry and set-bound. But the festival pulled off a coup by persuading Eddie Izzard, who plays Charlie Chaplin, to appear after the screening for a characteristically dazzling display of verbal gymnastics.

He was asked one relatively untaxing question and immediately set off on an impromptu routine. "Bogdanovich came to see me talking all this surreal crap on stage and said you can play Chaplin," he said, astonished. The monologue then moved on to the way Chaplin's vocal patterns evolved through the years, the continuing sensitivities of US newspapers to portrayals of Hearst's life and Izzard's own "low sexual esteem". Eventually, I had to sneak out as I was late for a screening of Monster, the first of two films in the festival concerning the serial killer Aileen Wuornos, and found myself becoming part of the act. Sources tell me that Izzard plunged into the lobby, clutching his microphone, and begged those of us who had left to return.

Monster, directed by Patty Jenkins and starring an Oscar-nominated Charlize Theron, made an interesting comparison with Nick Broomfield's documentary Aileen: Life And Death Of A Serial Killer. Theron, who allowed herself to be battered about the head with the ugly stick to an impressive degree, creates a performance that is quite unsettling in its empathy. Indeed she acts Christina Ricci, playing Wuornos's lesbian lover, right off the screen, through the lobby and out to the bus stop.

But Broomfield's film, the second he has devoted to the sometime prostitute who killed seven men in the late 1980s, only serves to remind us what a dangerous and potentially dubious business dramatising such lives can be. Like Jenkins, Broomfield does not allow the magnitude of Wuornos's crimes to blind him to the abuse and suffering that made her what she was. But the emotions inspired by the sight of the ragged, vainglorious killer as she rants to the camera the day before her execution are much more complex than those raised by Jenkins's necessarily simplified script. The notion that any writer could plumb the depths of the anger revealed in her flared nostrils alone seems faintly absurd.

There was more misery in Li Yang's first-rate Chinese drama Mang Jing (Blind Shaft). About a pair of miners who operate a scam in which they kill a young colleague, blame it on an accident and accept compensation from the mine's owners, the picture is a quite terrifying investigation of the nihilism that can sometimes accompany extreme poverty and desperation.

It's All About Love, directed by Thomas Vinterberg of Festen fame, arguably took us somewhere even darker. Gravity has stopped functioning in parts of Uganda. People are dropping down dead on the streets of New York. It snows in summer. Meanwhile Sean Penn circles the world in an aircraft talking gibberish. Vinterberg's futuristic drama is icy, beautiful and sombre. It is also the maddest film I have seen by a major director since Jane Campion's In The Cut, and it may be even madder than that very mad film. No wonder that, like The Cat's Meow, it has taken two years to secure distribution.

Thank goodness for the celebratory Sophiatown. Pascale Lamche's documentary tells the story of a South African township where, until its demolition by the forces of apartheid in 1955, blacks and whites could come together to enjoy the country's great jazz musicians. The film, which was produced by the Irish company Little Bird, is indifferently shot but features deeply moving interviews and magnificent performances from the likes of Hugh Masekela, Abdullah Ibrahim and Dorothy Masuka. The soundtrack should be unbeatable.

Good cheer was also available from a slightly annoying Canadian comedy that should have been called My Big Fat Italian-Canadian Gay Wedding but was actually called Mambo Italiano and from the unexpectedly delightful Argentinian film Valentín, which was about a cute child who wanted to be an astronaut yet, amazingly, didn't make you want to vomit.

For this writer, however, the most enjoyable pictures of the first few days of the festival were all set in the US. I say set in because with 21 Grams Arriaga and his director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, both Mexicans, have managed to move north of the border without compromising any of the uniquely pessimistic vision that made their Amores Perros so special. Starring Naomi Watts, Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro, the film, which tells the story of the aftermath of a car accident through an apparently random but actually highly organised time scheme, is a moving meditation on the fragility of life.

Equally gripping but infinitely more optimistic was Thomas McCarthy's The Station Agent, a gorgeously languid story about a dwarf who inherits a railway station in rural New Jersey. When the genial McCarthy sat down for a chat with the audience on Monday evening he was still reeling from his film's victory in the best-original-screenplay category at the previous night's BAFTA awards.

But the most welcome surprise of the opening weekend came in the form of The Cooler, Wayne Kramer's acidic Las Vegas drama. Starring William H. Macy as a man so unlucky he is employed by a casino to break gamblers' winning streaks, the film employs coincidence to a degree that would make most script gurus foam with anger. It does, however, feature a gorgeous performance by Macy in a characteristic role and offers further evidence that we were all wrong about the once ridiculed Alec Baldwin.

Playing the manager of an old-school casino who refuses to adopt the voguish theme-park aesthetic, the former Mr Basinger, who has received an Oscar nomination for his role, manages to win sympathy despite his character's appalling brutality.

Kneecaps are broken. Women get punched half to death. Young lives are annihilated. And nobody needs to consult their hands to confirm their mortality.

Dublin International Film Festival continues until Sunday