Let’s match the Palme d’Or with a Golden Nelson
Some form of competition would, I think, lend the festival a narrative and create that vital elixir of all film festivals, ‘buzz’. Trophies concentrate the mind, and London could mark out its taste with a major, headline award, supporting the kind of film the good members of Bafta wouldn’t touch. (Even the new Reykjavik festival hands out, I’ve just discovered, a Golden Puffin to the best film.) A Golden Nelson or a Golden Pigeon would make London a festival worth winning on the global circuit.If I had a favourite this year, it was probably The Savages, a bitterly funny, beautifully performed comic drama with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as a brother and sister having to put their ailing father into a nursing home. Written and directed by Tamara Jenkins (10 years after her Slums of Beverly Hills debut), it’s an edgy, neurotic film about various forms of care - for ourselves, our families, parents, plants and pets - and one with a dread fear of ageing.The American film that most delighted audiences was Juno, a smart-mouthed indie comedy about a 16-year-old high school girl (the impressive Ellen Page) giving her unwanted pregnancy up for adoption to yuppie couple Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner. Working with a sharp, poisonously sarcastic script from Diabolo Cody, director Jason Reitman has orchestrated a moody teenager of a movie, a sort of Knocked Up meets Heathers, and it could be a suprisingly big hit.For sheer breezy fun, I was swept along by Don Cheadle and Chiwetel Ejiofor in Talk to Me, a terrific (and true) tale of a Washington DC prison DJ who became a cult figure with his audience when let loose on the city’s black radio station in the late 1960s. Directed by Kasi Lemmons, it mixes politics and social history with a genuine affection for its subject, and provides a platform for Cheadle’s outrageous afros, large shirt collars and funky dialogue while the soul music soundtrack is superbly chosen.While American, Romanian and French film appeared in good health this festival, it pained me to witness a real timidity among home-grown product. The only British film of any great imagination was Garth Jennings’s lovely Son of Rambow, a story of two schoolboys in Eighties England trying to make a home movie to send into the BBC’s Screen Test programme. Charmingly funny, there are flights of doodly animation and lo-fi comedy as well as touching moments of young friendship - and it’s the first British film I’ve ever seen to feature that extraordinary childhood event: the French exchange.Although well received by an invited audience, I’m afraid Brick Lane was rather disappointing, all muslin and Muslims, with feeble stabs at capturing the character of the titular street and even milder attempts to explain radicalisation, sex, love and even motherhood.Among the documentaries that grabbed my attention was the remarkable Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go by Kim Longinotto, about a school for troublesome children who kick, spit and swear until controlled by the amazing everyday heroics of the teaching staff. It’s a very British version of the French hit, Etre et avoir, shot with clarity and human kindness.Just like a womanBob Dylan only gave the go-ahead for Todd Haynes’s biopic I’m Not There when he heard he was to be played by Cate Blanchett. At the festival Todd told me: ‘Dylan’s never said yes to a dramatic film about him or his music but my plan to use Cate got his attention. I don’t know if he was flattered or just amused - I think he just wanted someone to be playful and light. All we know, through his manager, Jeff Rosen, is that he admires Cate as an actress.’ Blanchett also needed careful persuasion: ‘She told me she always took the men’s parts in her high school plays,’ explained the director of Far From Heaven . ‘But I’d always detected a masculinity in her - Cate’s tall, with these immaculate cheekbones, strong neck and a beautiful, real nose that hasn’t been tampered with, so I always knew you could do extraordinary things with her in drag.’
Audiences might be surprised at the absence of Dylan’s famous cue-card sequence, but Todd tells me it’s out there somewhere. ‘That sequence to “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was shot as a trailer for Don’t Look Back , the Pennebaker film, but it became so famous that they put in the movie. So I shot it for the same promotional purposes, with all the different characters who play Dylan in their own backdrops, but I don’t know what will happen to it now.’ Band on the runLFF crowd-pleaser The Band’s Visit was also the opening film of the UK Jewish Film Festival last week, where its subtle themes of reconciliation were warmly welcomed. The comedy, about an Egyptian police band stranded in a tiny Israeli desert settlement, won eight Israeli Academy awards but has now been denied entry to the Foreign Language Oscar race because half its dialogue is in English, the only language the Arab and Hebrew-speaking characters have in common. It’s a shame, because the film would have appealed to the Oscar academy and stood a great chance. Instead, Israel is putting forward Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort, billed as the country’s first war movie. You can see the two films go head-to-head in the UKJFF’s eclectic programme.
