The 2005 London Film Festival (or Times BFI London Film Festival, as we are obliged to call it) kicked off on 19 October with the requisite range of World cinema that London-based cinephiles have come to expect of the world's biggest non-competitive festival. Since Sandra Hebron took assumed total responsibility as Artistic Director a couple of years ago it's probably fair to say that the median quality threshold has risen a touch; equally there seem to be fewer suprises (not all of them good) than under previous Director, Adrian Wootton.Surprises this year are ones of omission. New Line has chosen to open Cronenberg's Cannes smash, A History of Violence, two weeks before the festival kicks off. While studio and distributor might be deliberately distancing this potential crowd-pleaser from the director's copper-bottom arthouse credentials, it's a little more strange that Carols Reygadas' controversial Battle in Heaven is also absent from the line-up – yet Tartan is opening the film in the UK right in the middle of the festival's run. No place either for the highly regarded The Beat That My Heart Skipped, opening the day after the festival closes. Of course no single festival can encompass every possible option, but it seems odd that these two sure-fire festival hits were either not selected or not submitted. And what of Ang Lee's (a previous LFF opener with Ride with the Devil) Venice winner, Brokeback Mountain, also already shown in festivals at both Telluride and Toronto? Perhaps this is a decent bet for the Surprise Film (30 October), one area where Hebron has certainly raised the bar (recent years have seen UK premieres for School of Rock, Far From Heaven and Sideways).
Well, what is showing? What follows is a pocket sized survey gleaned from the official programme and clips real. You are unlikely to go far wrong with any of the five choices below. Choose these by all means, but please do enter the festival spirit and pick something else on a whim; a distressingly high proportion of the films screening will never get a UK theatrical release so it might be your only chance to catch a gem on the big screen.
1.The Constant Gardener
The opening Gala film has all the right respectable credentials – John le Carré source material, a British producer in Simon Channing-Williams (also behind 2004's LFF opener, Vera Drake), even Bill Nighy's in it, for goodness sake – but with a twist; it's the follow up to City of God from director Fernando Meirelles. Le Carré has actually been surprisingly well-served by screen adaptations and the unanimously positive US reception for this tale of a British civil servant's (Fiennes) investigation into his human rights activist wife's (Rachel Weisz) murder suggests that the LFF will open strongly.
2.Good Night, and Good Luck.
And, with any luck, close strongly as well. The final film to be shown is George Clooney's directorial follow-up to his fabulous Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and attests to his ambition to off-set lucrative cobblers such as Ocean's Twelve with more heartfelt material. Centring on the confrontation between influential 1950s newscaster Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joe McCarthy, Clooney's film highlights the role and responsibility of the news media at a time of national crisis. Why has this been made now, do you think? Hmmmm? Clooney has assembled a sensational cast, with the always (and I mean always) excellent David Strathairn as Murrow, supported by Robert Downey Jnr., Frank Langella and Gorgeous George himself. And Patricia Clarkson's in it, thus meeting the LFF's obligations under FIAFs 'Outlines for Selection' criteria: 'Any festival that does not select one film with Patricia Clarkson in it, no matter how rubbish (cf. The Station Agent) will invalidate its entire programme – no exceptions'.
3.The Proposition
Now, this looks weird. It's an Australian-set Western, written by Nick Cave, wherein outlaw Charlie Burns (Guy Pierce) is compelled to hunt down his psychotic elder brother by police Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), in exchange for the life of his younger sibling. It looks an inspired match between the timeless iconography and concerns of the genre with Cave's trademark Old Testament mythologizing. 'Ominous' doesn't do justice to the footage I saw. The screening is being sponsored by MTV, but try not to hold that against it.
4.Bee Season
After the success of the sublime Spellbound documentary, UK TV audiences have endured Celebrity Spelling Bee, where a semi-literate gaggle of – ahem – 'celebrities' struggled with words of more than one syllable – with hilarious consequences! While the celebrity count of Bee Season is actually sound – the cast includes Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche – the spelling bee competition itself is only the background to a family drama from Scott McGehee and David Siegel, directors of the bonkers Suture and the sombre The Deep End. The result is a rumination on family ties, with a little of the directors' trademark visual jiggery-pokery thrown into the mix, and probably their most accessible work to date.
5.Mirrormask / Hibernation
Ok, this is a bit of a trick insofar as it's numbers 5 and 6; but they are being shown together and Hibernation is a short – so it's sort of 5 and a half. Mirrormask is the feature of debut of comics pioneers Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman which would appear to be in the tradition of The Company of Wolves and Time Bandits, involving as it does children, circuses, dreams and fantasy worlds. But I really want to big-up Hibernation. The short clip shown received the biggest laugh at the Festival press launch and it was a prize winner at Edinburgh this year. I repeat the brochure blurb in full: "Two children in a tree house perform top secret experiments. But even science can't help them make sense of the loss of their best friend." What the blurb doesn't tell you is that the children are dressed in bear costumes and the experiments involve the sort of Heath Robinson equipment not seen since the heyday of Vision On. It's only 15 minutes long, but it may be the most inventive quarter of an hour of the whole festival.
...and one to avoid?
Deeply unfair though it is to judge a film's prospects by a short sequence of clips, wild horses won't drive me to Citizen Dog, Wisit Sasanatieng's Bangkok-set follow-up to Tears of the Black Tiger. It would appear to be the king of self-consciously 'wacky' romantic fantasy that would have me gagging on my popcorn. Think Chungking Express meets Amelié, then get the hell out of there.
