Report from the 4th Athens International Film Festival

Here we are now / Entertain us

I'm putting this report in the Essays section, though it isn't really an essay - which is okay, because the Athens International Film Festival isn't really a festival either. Oh, they show films all right - around 50 this year, mostly American independents - but there's no jury, no awards, not even a selection committee. Instead, the Fest - which is organised by "Cinema" magazine - offers sneak previews of films slated to open commercially, a smattering of European premieres, and a whole bunch of stuff the "Cinema" people happen to have caught and liked at festivals elsewhere (which is actually indistinguishable from what the London and New York people do, so I guess it is a festival after all ; still, it got your attention).

I was feeling like a stranger in a strange land / You know, where people play games with the night?

This year's AIFF was my first, though in fact the 4th - a dangerous age for a film festival, its novelty value starting to wear off. For the organisers, it was the worst of times and the best of times : following a dodgy '97 the Fest unfolded in diminished form, its slate nearly halved from last year ; on the other hand, audiences were up 83% and a mobile-phone company offered sponsorship into the next millennium. Still, this being Greece, three things were inevitable. First, a relaxed approach to time-keeping (though some of the films did, remarkably, start on time). Second, a call for government funding. Third, an overwhelming faith in democracy - or perhaps mob-rule :

It's true there were no awards ; but, going into every screening, we unwashed masses each picked up a small paper rectangle with detachable halves - one black, one white ; and, as we filed out, we cast our vote - the film with the highest percentage of white votes guaranteed free advertising when (and, presumably, if) it goes into commercial release.

The clown / With his pants falling down

I won't keep you in suspense : the People's Choice, here as in Toronto, was Roberto Benigni's LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (64), with a whopping 97.5% of the audience declaring they'd enjoyed themselves. I was one of them, though I almost didn't go at all, temporarily laid low by a one-day stomach bug ; 'fact, by the time I arrived at the screening, having lurched and rattled across town in a crowded bus, I felt quite nauseous - which, based on what I'd heard, seemed like I was doing the film's work for it. A "Holocaust comedy", ran the Party line, putting across a borderline-offensive idea in slick, crowd-pleasing style.

In fact, the opposite is true : this is a lovely, heartrending premise - Benigni as the father trying to hide the horror of concentration camps from his little boy - handled, if anything, with an excess of diffidence. The film is never more than modestly effective, nor is Benigni the writer-director particularly inspired ; but he's always very neat, in a gracefully old-fashioned way rarely seen these days, and the film - with its artless images and clean, bright lighting - is always very likeable. How it managed to elicit such opprobrium (if in fact it did, which I'm starting to doubt ; I've read nothing but positive reviews) is beyond me - I can only imagine that some people are too caught up in ideological correctness to trust the evidence of their own eyes, or perhaps too determined to treat the Holocaust as a terrible abstraction, forgetting it actually happened to ordinary people who somehow had to deal with it : even if it meant joking about it.

When ze Fuhrer says we is the master race / We Heil, Heil right in ze Fuhrer's face

Ordinariness is at the heart of Benigni's film, the notion of pulling War down to the quotidian level of a children's game ; its touching conceit is that silly games and riddles can actually be Life-affirming (though not, it's made clear, when they blind us to others' suffering). We - i.e. some of us - might prefer the pumped-up, obsessively-detailed suffering of SCHINDLER'S LIST : as the reality of war becomes more remote, almost anachronistic, we want it turned into a circus ("The Madness Of War"), as exotic and basically safe as the Pirates Of The Caribbean. But Benigni's simple, low-tech vaudeville - crammed with ancient gags, from falling flower-pots to eggs in a hat unsuspectingly donned by a Solid Citizen - seems somehow more evocative, just as his ramshackle, two-barracks-and-a-stormtrooper depiction of the Holocaust seems more appropriate, and perhaps more honest, than Spielbergian hyper-reality. LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL isn't really much of a movie, but there's something very admirable about it.

And you'll allow, as I expect / That he was right to so object / And I am right / And you are right / And everything is quite correct

Other contenders weren't quite so admirable, offering "glib answers to tough questions" as someone says in PRIMARY COLORS (54), a super-faithful version of a well-(if perhaps over-)plotted book (the trailer makes a point of noting the "Screenplay by Elaine May", but she seems mainly to have condensed the source and added a couple of rabbi jokes). The result is lively and quite entertaining, with at least one hilarious scene as a wild boar analogy gets way out of hand ; but at no point does it really address the oft-repeated question underlying the whole enterprise, namely is immoral behaviour justifiable in a good cause? (Answer : kinda.) The few deviations from the novel are significant - not just downplaying the inter-racial sex as much as possible (quelle surprise), but also putting the accusations of student radicalism in the mouth of a new character, a viperish and unsympathetic girlfriend (who then, having made said accusations look bad, promptly disappears from the film) and arranging it so Presidential candidate Stanton / Clinton is empathising with the young clerk in the doughnut shop at the same time as his advisers are plotting strategy next door (the book has the two scenes taking place separately - and Stanton plotting away with the rest of them). That Jack / Bill often seems a supporting character in his own story is of course appropriate (and, if intended, quite perceptive), but it's a long way from that to this fairytale picture of a decent man who adores The People more than he likes playing politics - and the early, buffoonish scenes seem out of place, a transparent attempt to create "depth". This, in other words, is liberalism late-90s style, more or less resigned to lapses and imperfections and trying desperately to have its cake and eat it too : the ending sees our man proving he's a good sort by handing the incriminating evidence he's uncovered back to his opponent instead of making it public - but, if he's so virtuous, why didn't he just burn it? (Once the opponent realises his chequered past is coming back to haunt him, it's a fairly good bet he'll drop out - as indeed he does.) Not quite a whitewash perhaps, but certainly a dog's-dinner - and of limited interest to non-Americans, as the audience proved by giving it the lowest rating in the whole Festival, a dismal 41.5%.

Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow

What about themes, you ask? Never mind individual films, how's the zeitgeist looking? Well, vomit was as big as ever, confirming its position as the bodily function of choice for 90s film-makers, with retching scenes in movies as diverse as SLUMS OF NEW YORK, MISS MONDAY, FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS and the aforementioned COLORS ; and, stylistically speaking, chapter-headings made for a singularly twee recurring motif, most annoyingly in the otherwise splendid HANGING GARDEN (though nothing came close to the all-time champ for abject cutesiness in a chapter-heading, "Blues For A T-Shirt" from SINGLES six years ago).

I tried to make it work / You in a cocktail skirt, and me in a suit

More importantly, this was a Festival - as "Time" magazine put it, speaking of the year as a whole - when "gay films entered the mainstream". Same-sex relationships were everywhere, the general rule being that the more prominent the gay angle, the fluffier and more unthreatening was the movie. I missed BILLY'S HOLLYWOOD SCREEN KISS, but did manage to catch Brian Sloan's I THINK I DO (53). Advertised as harking back to 30s screwball comedy (yeah, right), this was actually the 1970 LOVERS AND OTHER STRANGERS with a gay twist and a hefty side-order of "Friends" - a blithe, sunny farce, set mostly around a wedding. Taking place in a world populated entirely by people who punctuate their sentences with "Duh" and "Hel-lo", and getting in rather adolescent digs at parents, Republicans and organised religion - not to mention references to both Carson McCullers and Jessica Rabbit - this still managed to have the (predominantly young and hetero) audience in stitches, sailing comfortably to a triumphant 95.3% : hell, even the inevitable chapter-headings ("Not A Christmas Face", "Happy Fucking Valentine's Day") got major laughs. Not from me, I should add, but I had a good time - you have to respect a film that can get away with dialogue like "I'm a walking emotional car wreck" / "Hey, that's an oxymoron!" ; and, when all else failed, there was always the splendid Alexis Arquette, able to invest a simple roll of the eyes with a longing both vulnerable and shamelessly dirty.

I hate people when they're / Not polite

Still, I THINK I DO was squarely in the Fluffy Gay Movie camp ; THE OPPOSITE OF SEX (66) bucked the trend slightly, though it too was a lot more mainstream than it liked to pretend - especially when its narrator popped up to chide the homophobes in the audience for groaning at the sight of two men kissing, apparently ignoring the fact that said kiss was discreetly obscured by the back of someone's head. But at least it went for Nasty rather than Nice - a teenage variation on THE BAD SEED, starring Christina Ricci as a nymphet hellion of political incorrectness, referring to near-saintly Martin Donovan as an "actual real-life homo" and reassuring us that "there's other people a lot nicer than me coming up. We call them losers." This was probably the Festival's funniest film, albeit in a terminally smart-ass way, throwing in gimmicky-but-fun effects at every turn - a sudden tangent into home-movie flashbacks, a five-hours-later interlude to "make us feel better" about someone getting killed (turns out he was dying anyway) and, above all, our heroine's interpolated comments, pouring scorn on "I was never the same after that summer"-type movies and generally wreaking havoc with the fourth wall ("What did you think, I'd be the dead one? I'm the fuckin' narrator guys, keep up!"). Puerile stuff, in a way - as you might expect from writer-director Don Roos, the man behind DIABOLIQUE and BOYS ON THE SIDE - but put across with tremendous style by La Ricci, who's found the knack of distilling the disaffected teen's permanent sneer and hipper-than-thou worldview into a kind of arched-eyebrow self-consciousness with a conspiratorial edge : it's you and her, you feel, against the world. Indeed, despite good work from Donovan and Lisa Kudrow as a sex-obsessed bluenose, the film's middle third - which is almost Ricci-less - drags terribly.

And there she was / Like double cherry pie / Yup, there she was / Like disco superfly

(OPPOSITE OF SEX, by the way, pleased a respectable 77% of the audience - and Ricci, appearing in four different movies, rapidly became the AIFF's undisputed star. She got a round of applause just for walking on in I WOKE UP EARLY THE DAY I DIED (19), an otherwise tedious farrago with amusing bits and pieces and a cast-list to die for - except that most of them appear in cameos, leaving only Billy Zane (who also produced) acting "wacky" for long, painful stretches. Despite some diverting games with found footage and lively soundtrack electronica, this is vanity film-making at its most disposable. "Imagine people getting up at 5 in the morning to work on that!" one of my friends observed as we were filing out. "It's obscene!". The audience generally agreed, giving it a less-than-stellar 57.2% despite the low expectations of the midnight-movie slot.)

We are young / We run green / Keep our teeth / Nice and clean

One other trend I should mention : having a day of the week in your title - though the trend, strictly speaking, was more like having a day of the week in your title and making a piss-poor movie. There was the execrable MISS MONDAY (on which more later), and there were also Skip Woods' THURSDAY (32) and Adam Bernstein's SIX WAYS TO SUNDAY (40). Woods' was the more indefensible - sub-Tarantino nonsense that begins with a "Star Trek" reference and ends with a cameo by Mickey Rourke (looking like he's been pickled, as indeed he has). Lots of pocket nihilism and violence-played-for-laughs in between, stories about dicks getting bitten off, a phone in the shape of a cow ; a wannabe cult movie, in other words, losing a rather neat story (a former drug-dealer trying to start anew as a suburban architect) amid a welter of lurid detail. "Ever done drugs?" our hero's asked ; "No more than anyone who's ever been to college," he replies - a line aimed squarely at the dorms and drinking-parties that are obviously the film's target audience ; being over 25, I smiled wanly and moved on. Bernstein's film was better, a coming-of-age story cross-bred with a crime movie : avuncular Jewish gangsters, a hero who reads "Dog Enthusiast", Debbie Harry looking about a million years old (and singing "Sunday Girl" on the soundtrack), pleasing moments and amusing dialogue (Domineering Mother, brandishing a copy of 'An Introduction to Human Sexuality' : "Harold, have you been reading this filth?" ; Teenage Son : "No Ma, just looking at the pictures..."). Trouble is, it all adds up to exactly nothing - and (a clear sign of failure) our hero seems significantly less interesting at the end of the film than at the beginning. Random lines stick in the memory - "Which do you prefer, cashews or pecans?" ; "When it came to liquor, I was a desperate fiend" - plus a certain sense of place (small industrial town in the Midwest). Nice little film, but what's it about exactly? "A morality tale about the ties that bind...and kill!" says the tag-line helpfully. Well, that's all right then...

We sit here stranded / Though we're all doing our best to deny it

Fortunately for days-of-the-week fans, there was also SUNDAY (71), Jonathan Nossiter's Sundance prizewinner. Bit of a dodgy one, this, given that Nossiter himself - a noted Hellenist, currently making his next film in Greece - was a guest of honour at the Festival, and seeing as I met and even interviewed him ; what if the film was a dog? But it was probably the second-best in the whole Festival, wonderfully skilful stuff - just the opening quarter of an hour, blending dawn shots of New York with snippets of dialogue and found sounds (TV cartoons, Pat Buchanan railing) in the background, then sweeping up to the sky in a climactic flourish, would be enough to indicate a master at the helm. It's about fuzzy identities, transplanted people living in an "un-place", the way life blends indistinguishably with dreams and tall tales (did it really happen to you? asks the heroine, or was it just invention?) ; and it's fascinated by the look of things - candles in a church, lobsters in a water-tank, garish-looking doughnuts in a bakery window, a page of stenography, a face in a mirror. It's a film full of textures, daring us to pinpoint which if any can be called "real" - for, as someone says (with deliberate pretentiousness), "Doubt is the protoplasm of all true Art". David Suchet and Lisa Harrow (doing a more ravaged Julie Christie) are memorable as the rather sad middle-aged protagonists, and the film might've been among the year's finest - at least if it didn't peter out : the ending seems designed to suggest that its alienated duo finally find something "real" (viz. each other), but in fact it feels as fragmented as the rest of it. The result is impressive, elegant and allusive - but not particularly satisfying. Or, indeed, particularly popular, picking up a mere 68.5% white votes, marginally below SIX WAYS TO SUNDAY (69%) and a long way behind THURSDAY's 83 % ; cinematically, though, it left them both for dead.

I don't like your fashion business, mister / I don't like these drugs that keep you thin

Another prizewinner without a third act was HIGH ART (62), which I'm rather alarmed to find totally evaporating in my memory - especially since I spent most of it thinking what a solid, finely-crafted film it was. 85.5% of us gave it the thumbs-up, but I just about remember three excellent performances - Elizabeth McGovern lookalike Radha Mitchell as a sweet young thing, Ally Sheedy as the brilliant-but-reclusive photographer she falls for, and Patricia Clarkson as a washed-up German actress - plus a feel, rare in American indies, for the subtle difference between being decadent and just being wasted. Beyond that, nothing - especially if we're talking about the final third, which seemed to lose itself in slow, laboured duologues. I don't know, maybe I'd just been watching too many movies.

Now I know how Joan of Arc felt / When the flames rose / To her Roman nose / And her hearing-aid started to melt

Which, come to think of it, is entirely likely. Festival-going, still a relatively new experience for me, is very much an Experience : you give your life to it - even as you know it's wrong, or at least inadvisable, to watch films this way, sitting through three or four a night till everything melts together. My friends and I soon developed signs of the dreaded Which Film Was It? Disease, in which the patient quite suddenly goes blank, bites his knuckles in thought and says something like "Which film was it where we saw a horse painted green?". The disease is highly contagious, spreading within seconds to everyone else in the group, and curable only by someone (even if it's just a passing waitress) saying something like "I know! LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL!". This doesn't necessarily have to be a "correct" answer, so long as it's delivered with enough authority to allow everyone to stop torturing themselves and move on.

But you couldn't tell it from the way they behave / They run around in underwear and they never shave

No doubt Athens, too, had something to do with it. The Greek capital is notoriously chaotic and impossibly spread-out, an American city with a Mediterranean sense of organisation : it's what I imagine Los Angeles might be like if you took away the freeways, left everything unpainted for about forty years and replaced all the palm-trees with bougainvillea. But it's also a party-town, with an ultra-low crime rate and a gregarious, all-in-this-together vibe. Eating alone for a few nights before my friends arrived I was invariably the only lone diner in the restaurant, and treated with a solicitude usually reserved for the bereaved - clearly, it was implied, something terrible must have happened to reduce me to this sad state (my pizza took up half the table, though I'd asked for the smallest size ; furrowing his brow as if broaching a delicate subject, the waiter explained that they didn't actually do pizzas for one person). Athenian taxi-drivers keep stopping for new passengers - as long as they're headed in roughly the same direction as the passengers they've already got - till their cabs are full, and at least one cabbie turned the ride into an impromptu variety show, asking for all our names and regaling us with jokes and riddles ("Theo my friend, you answer this one and I'll let you ride for free! Ready? Quickly now, how many legs does a horse have?" "Uh...four?" "Correct! And if it lifts up one of its legs, how many?" "Uh...three?" "Nope, still four! You lose, my good friend!"). I don't think I could live there, but it's fun.

I study nuclear science / I love my classes / I've got a crazy teacher, he wears dark glasses

The audience had fun too - especially the hardcore buffs who turned up to almost every screening (films were shown in three cinemas, starting in the early evening). We compared notes on the previous day's screenings, gossiped about who was there and who was missing. We smiled at the production companies with names like Axiom Films, Goatworks, Essential Films, No Bones Productions, House Of Pain Productions. We sat in the dark, building our own worlds, intermittently reminded of the real-life dramas going on in the big world outside. "I made a mistake," said the heroine in DEAD MAN'S CURVE (46), caught doing a Lewinsky on her boyfriend's best friend ; "People make mistakes, y'know?". "A mistake?" he thundered. "You had my roommate's dick in your mouth!". "Well, it's not like we had sex or anything," she retorted, to tumultuous cheers and applause. Someone get this girl to public office, pronto.

The film, by the way, was the directing debut of Dan Rosen, who wrote THE LAST SUPPER - and can't have been too thrilled to see DEAD MAN ON CAMPUS stealing his thunder with a very similar plot (based around the hook of college students getting automatic high grades if their room-mate commits suicide). The program notes unsurprisingly emphasised the SCREAM angle - a twisty plot, the bug-eyed hyperactive-psycho presence of Matthew Lillard, plus a bushel of pop-culture references (including a five-minute, thoroughly gratuitous parody of the entire Russian-roulette scene from THE DEER HUNTER). You might also call it yet another variation on LES DIABOLIQUES, with HEATHERS trimmings - and the smart, snappy dialogue distracts slightly from the nonsensical plot which, as usual in this kind of enterprise, cheats terribly for the sake of a few striking twists (what, for instance, is the point of the whole tape-recorder business?). It's a dumb movie in clever clothes, though you have to admit - and 75.5% of the audience agreed - that it's entertaining.

We're pretty / We're pretty vacant

Alas, festival-viewing brings its own rules and standards : you long for the new, the different, the original and imaginative - "mere" entertainment just won't do. I've no doubt, for instance, that I'd have enjoyed (or at least tolerated) both THE THIEF (48) and SLUMS OF BEVERLY HILLS (48) a lot more under different circumstances, say on video after a long day ; in the event I found them both tame and a little tiresome, albeit in different ways. THIEF is one of those "I was never the same after that summer" movies Christina Ricci scoffs at in THE OPPOSITE OF SEX, a Russian crowd-pleaser (96.6% approval rating!) that starts off merely familiar - a boarding-house full of "characters", a little boy pining for the father he never knew, vodka toasts and accordion music - then becomes increasingly inexpert and incoherent, repeating its effects and sketching things hurriedly, like a student running out of time in an exam : we barely get to see the mother's (apparent) descent into alcoholism, and the epilogue is weak, trying to cram a decade's worth of drama in a quarter-hour's screen time. I liked the (implicit) parallel between the Stalinist stepfather and Uncle Joe himself, both callous thieves hiding behind an authoritarian creed ; and of course the little boy is very cute. It has its moments, but FREEZE, DIE, COME TO LIFE it ain't ; nor - speaking of Russian masterpieces - does SLUMS OF BEVERLY HILLS deserve to kick off with the "Anna Karenina" quote about unhappy families each being unhappy in their own way. This is actually quite an engaging little comedy, only let down by director Tamara Jenkins' apparent belief that she's "telling it like it was", making something gritty and uncompromising. But a family's slightly dishevelled lifestyle (they - gasp! - move around a lot) doesn't quite make it dysfunctional, any more than talk of tits and dildoes makes this any more honest than the usual TV-family fakery. An R-rated sitcom, in other words, with a chirpy music score and rather perfunctory period trappings ; it ends, predictably, in cloying sweetness, though there's some enjoyable tomfoolery along the way. 89.9% of the audience liked it, which is no surprise ; I liked it too, come to that - it just doesn't bear too much thinking about.

When I was your age I was just like you / And just look at me now, I'm sure you do / But your grandfather was just as bad / And you should've heard him trash his Dad

Family dysfunction (another recurring theme - isn't it always?) was more honestly, and memorably, on view in three other films, one Canadian and two Antipodean. The Canadian was Thom Fitzgerald's THE HANGING GARDEN (61), which played rather like a...well, Canadian version of Tennessee Williams - a controlled floweriness, a clear-eyed view of family eccentrics, ghosts of the past haunting our gay hero (and literally "buried" in a final twist that was just a little too earnest to work, even in the winking way obviously intended). Speaking of floweriness, the notion of the family's kids named after assorted flora - though it obviously fits in with the central metaphor of a garden as the crucible of family conflicts - struck me as a little precious, like the impromptu waltz our hero dances with his grandmother and, of course, like those damn chapter headings ("A Lad's Love"? I mean, please). Nonetheless this was super-solid stuff, one of the few films on view here (or anywhere) that seemed genuinely to have looked at how families work, all the little quirks and recurring in-jokes holding them together ; characters are drawn with care, and the directorial flourishes (Virgin Mary icons shooting dirty looks, and so on) mostly wry and unobtrusive. I wish I could say exactly what it is that makes it excellent, but nothing really sticks out in my memory - it works as a whole, organically, without obvious highlights or money-shots ; which, I suppose, is what makes it excellent.

I said to the man, are you trying to tempt me / Because I come from the Land of Plenty?

The Down Under crowd were Rowan Woods' THE BOYS (61) from Australia, and Scott Reynolds' THE UGLY (53) from New Zealand - though, in fact, only the former took family strife as its primary theme. I was for a long time repelled - and remain unconvinced - by this self-consciously "raw" working-class tale, steeped in the pass-the-fucking-salt school of drama ; everyone onscreen (a mother, her three grown sons, the sons' girlfriends) seems caught up in an unrelenting brutalism, and the yeah-right factor is a lot higher than the film-makers (presumably) think : it's like a middle-class fantasy of "the poor" as Neanderthal and dehumanised. It took a while for me to notice that, though violence hangs constantly in the air, we don't actually see any ; and it wasn't till the remarkable ending that I realised the film's true intentions - to explain, or at least account for, the random nature of violence-as-release. Based on a play that (apparently) shocked Australia some years back - and set mostly in a couple of rooms - the film is elliptical and atmospheric, with a very effective piano score : even the opening credits are memorable, slowly racking ordinary objects (dripping water, kitchen fixtures) into focus then out again as the spare, emphatic music tolls in the background.

In fact, what was most noticeable about the Antipodean films was an emphasis on style, stemming presumably from the same impulse that makes Australian comedies so garishly over-cooked ; fortunately it can also make a low-budget horror flick unexpectedly interesting, as evidenced by Reynolds' film. "The Ugly" is a serial-killer - though, in one of the film's many puzzles, he's played by a conspicuously handsome actor ; since the character is sympathetic (driven to murder by a bad mother and childhood bullying), the point is perhaps that our thoughts about him are what's ugly - hence the rather strange ending where he apparently cuts the heroine's throat without touching her. She's presumably imagining it - which is no surprise in a film prone to mind-games and red herrings, full of clever transitions (child goes into a room, man comes out years later) and fluid storytelling ; like THE BOYS it likes to play with Time, and it also does things like cutting up the soundtrack, interspersing music with blank spacing. All of which probably makes it sound more exciting than it is ; in fact, though the main influence is probably Brian De Palma in his more mindfuck moments (remember the joke that climaxes DRESSED TO KILL?), Reynolds doesn't have the knack for visceral action that kept De Palma's movies terrifying : it's hard to enjoy the false alarms, because we're not taken in - i.e. scared - in the first place. Plus, for some reason, blood (of which there's plenty) comes out as black sludge here - no doubt a conscious decision, intended to reach beyond the splatter-movie audience, but not a successful one, once again losing the film its edge.

Brucie's thoughts, pretty streamers / Guess this world needs its dreamers / May they never wake up...

THE UGLY was a so-so horror movie, but a stylish calling-card for a first-time writer-director (whose follow-up, HEAVEN, played this year's Toronto Fest) ; unfortunately, style was undervalued at this AIFF. Reynolds did okay with 83%, but THE BOYS got a dreadful 47.5% - and, judging by the audience's decidedly muted response, I suspect I'm very much in the minority in declaring Michael Winterbottom's I WANT YOU (71) far and away the Festival's best offering. I've never liked Winterbottom much in the past, mostly because I find he has a monotonous way with narrative, finding a tone and sticking with it. He does the same here but it hardly matters, for the film (clocking in at a scant 87 minutes) is a gorgeous exercise in style, transforming an English seaside town into something haunting and otherworldly. Once again, mood isn't quite varied or developed - but here the mood is everything, Slawomir Idziak's images finding a million hues for yearning melancholy : it's wonderfully rich, a film to get lost in. And what's it about exactly, this odd tale of paroled killers, Bosnian refugees, violent passions and a mute boy who records the world? Longing, mostly - for love, or the past, or mother, or country - and the opposing impulses of seeking to forget and understand ; and there's also Alessandro Nivola, unrecognisable from his FACE / OFF gig (had to check the IMDb to see if he's actually English or American), plus an extraordinary sequence of violent, delirious lovemaking to the strains of Elvis Costello and the classic title-song. Admittedly it's a very abstract movie (the attempt at resolution is, inevitably, unsatisfying), and possibly one to be seen at a festival, where the plots of films become secondary to their density and dazzle, their ability to stand out. My friends, I should add, weren't quite as taken with it. "Just looking at the skin-tones is an education in itself!" I remonstrated. "Get the fuck outta here!" they chorused. But - well, it's true...

Got killed by ten million pounds of sludge / From New York and New Jersey

Pretty much everyone, on the other hand - 75% of the audience, including all the film-buff types I talked to - liked SLAM (42), another Sundance prizewinner and a good illustration of the difference between style and energy : plenty of the latter here, while reducing the former to bits of slo-mo and flashy, often inappropriate camera moves. A typical moment in this striking, utterly hollow movie has a prisoner in a creative-writing program starting to talk about his life before jail - and the camera zooming in on him pointlessly, as if to prevent us from being bored. This is more than dishonesty : it's a kind of disrespect.

Am I being unfair? How can I laud I WANT YOU for its overwhelming visuals while (ahem) slamming director Marc Levin for much the same thing? But it's a question of context - not theme per se, but how a film chooses to present itself. Even if there were real visual imagination in SLAM (which there isn't), it would still make a poor fit with the film's unrelenting didacticism. Everyone seems to get a speech here - on the plight of the inner cities, the future of the black race, the importance of "being yourself" ; yet even its energy is never the energy of ordinary people struggling to survive - it's the energy of gifted film-makers crafting cool effects, and "intense" performers hammering their way to a tour de force. To be blunt, I didn't believe a second of it - and nothing's more annoying than being lectured by people who don't know what they're talking about ; SLAM has the feel of bad performance-art, or an actors' workshop where "self-expression" comes before skill and control. Though I should add that I spent most of the poetry scenes (including the climactic "slam" of the title) giggling quietly into my cupped palm, unable to resist the idiocies being spouted - or should I say, like Owen Gleiberman in "EW", the "wrenching mind cascades of beauty and torment"? I wish I could remember some of the mind cascades in question, but they went by too fast - which, I suspect, is probably the key to their success, as it is with the film as a whole : pure energy, no need to think about the fakery and banality on view. Fans of freestyle poetry are directed instead to the similar but incomparably greater "preaching" scenes in THE APOSTLE - a film where the actor genuinely seems to lose himself in what he's saying, even as the possibility remains that what he's saying is nonsense. This, on the other hand, is a film where the Acting quite overwhelms what's being said - even as what's being said is held up reverently for our awed approbation.

Arrest this man / He talks in maths, he buzzes like a fridge

It was a relief to go from the overheated hard-sell of SLAM to its polar opposite, the understated languor of Nanni Moretti's APRILE (55) - in which, as in 1994's CARO DIARIO (but more loosely), he plays semi-straight man to Life's (and Italy's) absurdist madness. I've never really warmed to Moretti's rather snobbish, self-centred personality, or his affectedly goofy brand of observation - all of which, of course, is central to APRILE - and, even as personal documentaries go, something like SIX O'CLOCK NEWS strikes me as a lot more perceptive (and less self-indulgent). Still - like 88.3% of the audience - I enjoyed APRILE, finding notable pleasures and occasional grace-notes amid the padding. The baby's birth, seen through increasingly frantic phone calls ; joining the Left's victory parade to shout out the baby's weight ; reading out unread letters at Speaker's Corner ; amassing the day's papers ; holding his remaining years in the form of alarmingly short measuring-tape ; all are highlights. Terribly slight, but - against the odds - quite beguiling.

APRILE is only 78 minutes long, but was foolishly scheduled in a two-hour slot, so that everyone rushing to it from the cinema next door (including myself) missed the first 5 minutes - an infuriating mix-up, especially since it was one of the very few non-English-language films on offer (which, as I found out the day I left, was because another festival kicked off in Athens a week later, this one devoted exclusively to European films and featuring the likes of BLACK CAT WHITE CAT, ETERNITY AND A DAY, SITCOM, SEUL CONTRE TOUS...aaah, don't get me started). Fortunately the scheduling was otherwise excellent, making for just a couple of intractable dilemmas. Like for instance, should I go see Woody Allen trying to convince us he's a nice guy, or John Waters trying to convince us that he's not?

He hung his wild years on a nail that he drove through his wife's forehead...

As it happens, I saw both - because WILD MAN BLUES (55) opened commercially while I was still in Athens. This is Woody (allegedly) au naturel, doing his beloved New Orleans jazz on a tour of Europe : he worries about homicidal gondoliers in Venice, talks platitudes in Paris ("It doesn't have the excitement of New York ; on the other hand, it's more beautiful"), complains about the hotel showers in Madrid. He's mischievous with a society crowd, obsequious with audiences, becomingly modest about his musical ability - and self-obsessed from beginning to end. Many would doubtless change the title to "Vile Man Blues", but we don't meet many (or indeed any) Woody-haters here : instead, opinions range from respectful to ecstatic ("You are-a so happy to be so intelligent!" gushes an Italian matron), which, with the relative lack of revealing detail, pushes the result towards hagiography, a long way from the furious comic angst of Allen's own DECONSTRUCTING HARRY. It's unclear why the film visits Allen's parents in New York after the tour is over (maybe director Barbara Kopple realised she needed some counterpoint to the European trip) but, though the scene is funny, it also feels thoroughly self-serving : "Look!" you can sense Woody whining. "All those European sophisticates love me, and my own parents don't even appreciate me!". WILD MAN BLUES (what's with the title, anyway?) is fascinating but borderline-creepy ; John Waters' PECKER (30), on the other hand, is borderline-embarrassing - with or without the obvious pun. You can see what he's trying to do - swim against the tide as always, not with his trademark bad taste (which is now mainstream) but with "the end of irony", an aggressively benign love-letter to low-tech unpretentiousness. But the film needed a lot more care in order to work, better jokes and a crisper rhythm ; as it is, it's hopelessly lame throughout - though it got a spectacularly high 94.1% approval rating, almost on a par with Woody's 97.2%. Then again, I couldn't help noticing a teenager turn to his pal as we were filing out, give a thumbs-up and say "John Waters, eh!" - so I can only assume some members of the audience had already made up their minds from the opening credits.

Where rocking-horse people / Eat marshmallow pies

One scheduling conflict proved impossible to reconcile : a gleaming print of Jean Eustache's 1973 THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE, which I've never seen. I opted, with a heavy heart, for FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (55) instead, and didn't regret it - the film was perhaps the festival's bravest and most ambitious - though Terry Gilliam's adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's druggy classic is unlikely to be remembered much 25 years from now (except perhaps as a noble failure, on a par with Joseph Strick's ULYSSES). It's actually more a subversion than an adaptation, upending the book from a fun wallow in the chemical lifestyle into what amounts to an anti-drug tract, concentrating on the sad pointlessness of a life that turns adherents into "permanent cripples" : it doesn't have the mad rush of an Oliver Stone movie (a fair approximation of a drug-fuelled high) but an arrhythmic bittiness, the garbled headache of a bad trip. The movie's Thompson promises "a gross physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country", but the result is a stylised, outlandish downer of a movie that's all about the negation of possibility. That it's unsatisfying and occasionally irritating seems inevitable and (presumably) deliberate ; that, with its Spiro Agnew jokes and Margaret Mead references, it probably means a lot more to ageing hippies seems fair comment ; that Johnny Depp's performance is both fearlessly brave and a monstrous caricature seems incontestable ; that Thompson himself allegedly likes the film seems to suggest he's even further gone than anybody knew. Hard to enjoy, which seems to be the point - though a respectable 71% of the audience disagreed with me.

Trying to taste the difference 'tween a lemon and lime / Pain and pleasure, and the truth will softly chime

What then have we learned from this AIFF? Not a lot, admittedly. Can the Festival program shed any light on what people want from indies - or, at least, what they're perceived to want? Kind of. Most of the films were screened only one time ; but a few - those where demand was deemed to be highest - were screened twice. THURSDAY was among this group. So was SIX WAYS TO SUNDAY. So was MONTANA (29), a stale, seemingly endless crime movie, full of shoot-outs and super-cool gangsters (sample scene : Stanley Tucci, counting a pile of money, hears a noise, gets up, calmly wastes an approaching thug, then goes back to counting). Then again, so was THE ALARMIST (54), a fun if (obviously) rather pointless shaggy-dog story, "made" by its stars - Tucci again in his man-on-the-make persona, biting big meaty chunks out of every line ("I like to stay current with all the evil twists of Man's inhumanity to Man"), and David Arquette as a shy, awkward young salesman, stammering and mincing like a Grady Sutton for the 90s. Crisp direction, a narrative that goes dark just at the right moment, and a joke at the county morgue that's incredibly cruel and shamefully hilarious. 85% liked it (MONTANA had 67.5%) ; but what did they like, exactly? What makes a successful indie?

I'm Miss World / Somebody kill me

Anyone presuming to answer that question, prepare for defeat. For there was also MISS MONDAY (11), which was shown twice at the AIFF. Which had an astonishing 91.2% approval rating. Which won a prize at Sundance, Andrea Hart nabbing an unprecedented best-actress award (from, inevitably, the same jury that gave SLAM its Grand Prize). Which was, quite simply, a monstrosity, so mind-bogglingly inept I thought for a while it was deliberately aping film-school amateurishness - not unreasonably, seeing as its hero is a young film-school type looking for a "corporate bitch" to provide inspiration for the script he's writing. He finds a likely candidate and follows her home : turns out that, beneath her hard careerist veneer, she's an emotional wreck, lonely and bulimic - all of which Hart delineates in excruciating detail, going through all the various stages of degradation. It has a certain fascination, if only because it's so extended, but only as a brave piece of acting : it offers no insight into bulimia, using it for a cheap buzz, and emotionally it takes place in a vacuum. The references to Katharine Hepburn - in this morass of sleaze, ineptitude and know-nothing superficiality - are the final insult.

The silicon chip inside her head / Has switched to Overload

Yet it's worth staying a little longer on MISS MONDAY, if only to gape at it and wonder, How could this have happened? How could a film like this have been taken seriously? How could our early-warning system have failed so spectacularly? It's not just a bad movie - it seems to have been made by people who'd never actually seen a movie before. Two examples, out of countless others. #1: our hero asks a friend for advice on how to find "Miss Monday". "What are you looking for?" asks the friend. Hero describes her. "You know how many women in the financial district fit that description?" laughs the friend. An-n-nd cut, surely - to a montage perhaps, or at least a medium-shot of our hero standing on the pavement in the financial district, looking around. But instead the scene limps on, through two more wholly unnecessary lines (Hero : "Heaps." Friend : "Well, there you go then."). #2: Heroine sees Hero, remembers where she's seen him before - when they bumped into each other on the street. A couple of frames will do for a flashback ; but we get the whole bumping in slow motion - look, here she is ; and here he is ; and they're coming closer - killing the moment dead. Without even the grace to cut back to her face over the moment of impact.

One foot in the door / The other one in the gutter

Details, you say - but it's more than that. Here's a film that doesn't even know basic film grammar - and nobody cares. It gets financed, made, edited, shown at festivals, picks up awards. Why? Because it features a "provocative" plotline? Because it shows (even if it doesn't explain or understand) human suffering in delicious detail? Are we so desperate? Are we so jaded?

Ronny saves his noomies on a window in his room / A marble to be seen, dysentery-green / While Kenny and his buddies have a game out in the back: / Let's Make The Water Turn Black

What's up with indies? In a sly bit of inadvertent irony, both exhilarating and vaguely depressing, the biggest crowd of the entire Fest turned up on the very last night - for THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY (62), the absolute antithesis of festival fare. Lines stretched around the block. The box-office closed long before the film was due to start. People who'd been saving seats for friends refused to give them up. Angry scenes ensued. The Festival organisers were called in. About fifty people watched the entire movie on their feet, standing at the back (couldn't they have waited a couple of weeks?). The film itself was almost an anti-climax, though a good 80% of the audience enjoyed themselves - and why shouldn't they? This is a mostly deserved box-office smash, a thoroughly feelgood romantic comedy - with a gratifying number of running jokes ready to click into place in the final few minutes - studded with gratuitous but surprisingly funny bad-taste gags. Also of course padded out with a lot of leisurely, vaguely pleasant exposition and scenes (like the murderous hitch-hiker) that don't quite work - but always with a raucous high-point just around the corner. A sad-sack sensibility and some nice touches, including references to CAT BALLOU and another bad-taste love story, HAROLD AND MAUDE. Slick, but affably so - and, if not quite the most appropriate climax for the AIFF, certainly the most upbeat.

Fuck the Yanks / And drink their wives / The moon is clear / The sky is bright / I'm happy as the horses shite

And what about me? Well, I was feeling pretty upbeat too. The films were admittedly a mixed bag - statistics hounds will be thrilled to learn that my average rating for the Fest comes to 49.80 - but there were enough gems to make it all worthwhile. Besides, there's more to a festival than just the films - even a not-quite festival like the AIFF : it's an experience, something to remember. I know that now. And I plan to be back.