With seven world premieres of Irish movies, an impressive guest list and a number of notable special events, the Ninth Galway Film Fleadh was one of the best to date and, not surprisingly, attracted substantially higher attendances than ever. The talking point of the entire event was one of those world premieres, Neil Jordan's greatly anticipated The Butcher Boy, which closed the fleadh on Sunday night. That show was the hottest ticket for any screening in Ireland for quite some time; inevitably, given that the capacity of the fleadh's principal venue, the Town Hall Theatre, is limited to around 400 seats, many had to be turned away on the night. Those who succeeded in getting a ticket for the screening were rewarded with a singular work of the imagination, as I reported on these pages last Monday. On Wednesday The Butcher Boy received a rave review in the leading Hollywood trade paper, Variety, by critic Emanuel Levy who attended the world premiere in Galway. He described it as "a brilliantly bold, hauntingly disturbing evocation of an intensely troubled and violent childhood". The film is, he wrote, "an ambitious epic that remains intimately focused, a brutally honest exploration of a troubled mind that is both horrific and darkly comic". He added that the movie is "an instant classic about coming of age" which "ranks among the best in its genre, including Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Fellini's Amarcord."
The premiere was even more of a coup given that the movie may not be released here until after it is screened at The Berlin Film Festival next February. A few hours before the Galway screening on Sunday, Neil Jordan was relaxed and informative as he participated in a public interview, chaired by myself. Over the course of a lively 100 minutes he discussed his work from his debut with Angel in 1982 up to The Butcher Boy and his plans for In Dreams, which he begins shooting in Massachusetts next month.
In Dreams is a psychological horror-thriller which will star Annette Bening, Aidan Quinn and Robert Downey Jr. "It's a Francie Brady type of movie, one he'd really like," says Jordan, referring to the unhinged young central character in The Butcher Boy. "It's going to be really scary. I think it's time for a really good horror film - something spectral, terrifying. It's time to frighten people out of their wits."
Among the attendance at the public interview in Galway was Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning director of the English Patient, who himself took to the stage last Saturday afternoon to present a very well-received four-hour master-class on film directing. Another fleadh visitor on Saturday was the veteran lighting cameraman, Jack Cardiff, who promoted his new book, Magic Hour, and attended the festival screening of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1946 classic, A Matter Of Life And Death, which Cardiff lit.
The world premieres at Galway this year included the opening film, Bogwoman, the first feature directed by producer and documentary-maker Tommy Collins. An opening caption informs the audience that the movie follows one woman's journey from the boglands of Donegal to the Bogside of Derry. Hence the title of the film, one which does it no favours.
The woman is Maureen (Rachael Dowling), a single mother who leaves her Donegal island home in 1958 and crosses the Border into Derry, where she marries Barry (Peter Mullan), a bookie and compulsive gambler. The growth of their family is wittily summarised in a sequence wherein Barry is presented with one baby after another. Meanwhile, her Catholic doctor refuses to give her advice on birth control.
Bogwoman is at its successful in depicting the relationships between Maureen and her husband, and the close friendship which she forms with two women, her resilient mother-in-law and a hardworking neighbour (Marie MacDermottroe and Noelle Brown). Writer-director Collins treats his hard-pressed principal characters with an infectious affection and lighting cameraman Peter Robertson bathes them in warm lighting. The film turns more sketchy in its second half as it charts the rise of the civil rights movement in Derry. Its dramatic potential is drained because it begins to rely all too heavily on distracting archival footage and explanatory voice-over provided by a newsreader. The unseen Bryan Dobson, who provides the latter's voice, seems to have more lines than anyone in the movie except Maureen herself. Another RTE reporter, Eamonn Lawlor, turns up as a pedantic schoolteacher in How To Cheat In The Leaving Certificate, a promising and inventive first feature from writer-director Graham Jones, who was 22 when he made it on a very low budget last year. The title is self-explanatory in the case of this black-and-white feature which follows the determined attempt of one Leaving cert student (Garret Baker), abetted by five accomplices, to steal the papers from their Athlone storehouse. Eamon Lawlor is one of many well-known Irish faces to make a cameo appearance in the movie - a device which could have been irritatingly distracting, but actually works here. The others include Eamon Morrissey, Mick Lally, Maureen Potter, Chris De Burgh, Joe Duffy, Mr Pussy (as an exam superintendent), and best of all, Mary McEvoy as an inept and blase career guidance teacher. There is a good deal of witty throwaway humour in this confident and deeply cynical picture.
It received third prize in the audience award for best first feature, with the US indie, The Closest Thing to Heaven in second and Frank Stapleton's The Fifth Province in first. The Galway audience, with so many film industry people present, responded warmly to Stapleton's film, not least for its in-jokes in which it sends up a silly, pretentious EU-funded screen-writing seminar held in the eponymous hotel. To be fair, The Fifth Province tries to do something different to the more conventional Irish narratives slagged off during that seminar, but its blend of fractured narrative, offbeat comedy and magic realism - and several explicit and ill-advised references to Hitchcock's Psycho - left me cold. The central character is a confused young man (played by Brian F. O'Byrne) who runs the run-down Innisfree guest house, has a crush on the Irish president (who's a black woman) and tells his psychiatrist that he has been afraid of getting pregnant. Pythonesque it ain't.
