Dan Slevin previews three of the 17 titles in a festival that showcases a wide range of films recently produced in the UK and Eire.
Photo: British and Irish Film Festival
We have regional film festivals for Italy, France and Scandinavia – why not an event to support the plucky underdogs from Britain and Ireland.
Actually, Ireland genuinely is a plucky underdog, but many of the British films in this year’s British and Irish Film Festival in the past would have solid cinema releases here. Now they are toes being dipped hesitantly in the water. If audiences come to these screenings, maybe there’ll be a justification for a full release later on?
There are some big names featured in this year’s festival: Sir Michael Caine, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Dame Helen Mirren, Sir Ian McKellen, the not-yet-Sir Liam Neeson and the wouldn’t-accept-a-knighthood-if-they-offered-him-one director Ken Loach.
But as is my tendency, I asked the organisers to help me preview some of the smaller titles, the ones that wouldn’t normally justify a headline. They were as good as their word.
Róise and Frank
Photo: British and Irish Film Festival
The first is a little cracker from Eire, a rare film that’s entirely in Irish (with English subtitles). Róise (Bríd Ní Neachtain) is a widow, grieving the sudden loss of her husband who was not just loved by her, he was a local hurling star and well-known to the whole district.
Her son Alan (Cillian O'Gairbhi) is the local doctor and he, too, is grieving but in less obvious ways.
When a friendly dog starts following Róise on her occasional walks to the corner shop, and then invites himself in to sit on her husband’s favourite chair, she starts to wonder whether there might be something a little bit special about this animal. He loves hurling (an interesting sport unique to Ireland), her husband’s favourite foods and he seems to know his way around the house.
Is it possible that this dog is the reincarnation of her husband? She chooses to believe so and names it Frank to be sure.
Róise and Frank is a great family film – although some youngsters might not want to read subtitles for 90 minutes the movie is perfect for them. It treads lightly across its subject matter, never succumbing to sentimentality or overcooking the humour. It’s grounded and truthful and about good people dealing with grief, that constant companion.
Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War
Photo: British and Irish Film Festival
I’d never heard of the English artist Eric Ravilious before I watched this documentary and it’s fair to say that the film exists because that’s true for a great many people.
Ravilious was a designer, watercolourist, landscape painter and woodcut printer who found his ultimate calling as a war artist during World War II. The film is founded on a huge amount of letters between Ravilious and his wife Tirzah (a gifted artist in her own right but one destined to play a supporting role to her husband). The letters are voiced expertly by Freddie Fox and Tamsin Greig and there are also appearances from the writer Alan Bennett (a fan of Ravilious since his school days) and the artist Grayson Perry who explains what it was about Ravilious that made him one of England’s greats.
His pre-war landscapes and interiors are so incredibly English, but never nostalgic or twee. They’re not chocolate-box representations of idealised England. There’s a hint of an edge to them.
Photo: British and Irish Film Festival
But it’s when he’s called up to document the war that things get really interesting. He seems to have taken to it with a remarkable enthusiasm – more than I would be able to muster if I was trying to sketch on a destroyer or submarine while German warships are doing their best to sink you.
Incidentally, one of the wartime paintings featured in the film is in the Te Papa collection here in Aotearoa.
His wartime fate was the biggest contributor to his relative obscurity but we can be grateful that his family rediscovered a huge cache of his pre-war work and all those letters so his reputation could be made once again.
The Trouble with Jessica
Photo: British and Irish Film Festival
The least successful of my three samples from this year’s festival is a black comedy about some upper middle class people forced to do something monstrous in order to protect their wobbly status.
Alan Tudyk plays Tom, an idealistic architect whose latest project has gone off the rails and has forced the quick sale off the house he shares with his wife Sarah (Shirley Henderson). Trying to put a brave face on things, Tom and Sarah have old university friends Richard (Rufus Sewell) and Beth (Olivia Williams) over for dinner.
But Richard and Beth bring an uninvited guest, another old college chum Jessica (Indira Varma). She’s a writer who has used her rather wayward life as fodder for a successful career and after almost derailing the evening with some caustic commentary she utterly sends it off the rails by hanging herself in Tom and Sarah’s back garden.
Now, suicide is always a tricky topic to deal with, especially in a comedy-of-manners like this but one of the problems the film has is that it never really interrogates Jessica’s motives. She’s just an inciting incident that forces some nice and normal people into criminal (despicable) behaviour to cover the whole thing up.
Everyone in the cast is brilliant – they’re doing wonderful work with this unpromising material – and some of the incidents are amusing until you realise how awful everybody is and how complicit you are for laughing.
The British and Irish Film Festival opens today in 24 cinemas in 15 towns across the country. Full details can be found at the festival website.
