London bridges

Judging the best at the film fest

by Peter Keough

Hilary Swank in 'Boys Don't Cry'

As Samuel Johnson noted, anyone bored with London is bored with life, since the city contains everything life has to offer. That can be a distraction when you're hosting a film festival. How to compete not only with the riches of one of Europe's great cultural centers but with the new Millennium Dome (it looks like a vast Jell-O mold with fondue forks stuck in it) or the 400-foot-tall Millennial Ferris Wheel (it looks like a towering electric fan dwarfing the houses of Parliament across the Thames)?

Nonetheless, I was not bored by the 15 films by first- and second-time directors I and my fellow members of the International Critics Jury were asked to judge. A glimpse into the future of world filmmaking, they offer a view of life not nearly as sanguine as old Samuel's, or as kitschily optimistic as that of the designers whose millennial architecture blights the city's skyline. It's a world of shiftless youth devoid of dreams, dominated by a crapulous patriarchy, and menaced by male psychos with bad teeth.

A case in point is British wunderkind Shane Meadows's second film (his first, TwentyFourSeven, raised high expectations locally, though not in America), A Room for Romeo Brass. Set in working-class Nottingham, it starts out as an easy-going tale of two pre-teen pals, mixed-race Romeo and handicapped Gavin, who take up with a local oddball Morell (Paddy Considine in a tour de force performance) who has, yes, with bad teeth. Morell tries to set himself up with Romeo's sister and usurp the role of the clan's raffish, estranged father, revealing some kinked cables in the process. It's a subtle transformation and a wasted one as Meadows turns his most intriguing character into a scapegoat for family values.

A similar scenario prevails in first-time French director Hélène Angel's tellingly titled Skin of Man, Heart of Beast. Here the psycho with bad teeth is Coco, the brother of Francky, the raffish, estranged father of two charmless girls. Like Morell, Coco seems at first misunderstood, but by the film's sloppily Chabrolesque ending -- and despite having his teeth fixed -- he turns out to be just another homicidal maniac, and no more engaging than the film's other overwrought, lowlife characters. Angel's world seems just a step in class and credibility above the cartoon surreality of Harmony Korine's urban Dogpatch in julien donkey boy, a weirdly earnest self-indulgence distinguished by Werner Herzog's hypnotically bad performance as a freaky paterfamilias.

Absent or impotent dads prove more invidious than the despotic ones in the likes of American indie Rob Schmidt's debut feature, Saturn. It's an unlikely melodrama in which James Caan's telegenic son Scott plays a mechanic saddled with both a drug problem and a father afflicted by Alzheimer's disease. It's well-produced but pointless, and its Of Mice and Men dénouement doesn't help. More feeble dads dwell in Jan Hrebejk's Cosy Dens, in which the teenage son of an anti-Communist blowhard takes a shine to the nubile daughter of their ineffectual army-officer neighbor. This broadly comic melodrama set in the days before the Soviet invasion of 1968 evokes none of the charm of Jirí Menzel's Closely Watched Trains, which it vainly imitates.

More cogent are the anti-authoritarian moppets in Italian director Gabriele Muccino's But Forever in My Mind. Dismayed by the complacency of their parents, who have sold out their '60s radicalism for bourgeois comfort, a group of students take over their school in protest against nothing in particular. It's a far more charming and insightful look at young angst and idealism than, say, Scream -- as is Spanish director Santiago Lorenzo's My Silly Mother. Poor José has enough trouble with classmates pelting him with soccer balls when he craps his pants -- then his good-natured but witless mother gets hired as a local newscaster by cruelly cynical network executives. Innocence, however, triumphs, sort of, as does Lorenzo's quirky surreality, a mix of Buñuel and Almodóvar.

For the most part, though, innocence, youth, and love in these films face a bleak future, with the only recourse senseless violence or victimization. Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn shows the lingering influence of Quentin Tarantino in Bleeder, a dreary account of the ill effects of anomie and bad videos on dull-witted Copenhagen thugs. More stylish are the teenage lovers on a crime spree in hot new French director François Ozon's Criminal Lovers. Bonnie and Clyde by way of the Brothers Grimm, it's the tale of a pair of pretty thrill killers who end up in the cellar of a forest ogre.

A fairy tale of a different sort is Boys Don't Cry, the smashing debut film of American independent Kimberley Peirce and the winner of our jury's prize. Already a critical triumph in America, it's based on the real-life story of Brandon Teena (Hilary Swank in one of the year's great performances), a female-to-male cross-dresser who meets a grim fate at the hands of gap-toothed types in rural Nebraska, and it provides this festival's few glimmers of hope. Bored with the nothingness her life offers, Teena dares aspire to transcendence; even a curmudgeonly Londoner like Samuel Johnson might have approved.