fri 29/03/2024

theartsdesk in Cambridge: 30th Cambridge Film Festival | reviews, news & interviews

theartsdesk in Cambridge: 30th Cambridge Film Festival

theartsdesk in Cambridge: 30th Cambridge Film Festival

East Anglia's starriest, edgiest 10 days of film opens

Cambridge is in pre-term cocktail mood, almost. Its Film Festival slips in after Locarno and Venice, and as Toronto ends, and before Rome (increasingly important) and London (internationally a struggler) start. It tilts in the same direction as the aforementioned, with fully fledged art movies, provocative documentaries and work from a dozen language groups or so, though it's very small and many people might not know it exists.

This year, it nearly didn't exist at all. No corks popped as it opened, arriving at its 30th birthday - yes, 30 years of festival films in a city far more famous for something else - with a new Luc Besson on Thursday. The reason was, needless to say, money. A significant subsidiser, Screen East, a government-backed agency, folded recently amidst allegations of financial irregularities, with one employee being arrested. Cambridge lost out on a vital £18,000 at programming-finalisation stage, and so lots of things, to say nothing of parties, have gone.

This includes a magnificent sideline I lapped up, as a first-time visitor in 2009, on the Cam: being punted across night-time water and stopping four times to watch extracts from well-known flicks on riverbank screens (last year the genre was horror) while being served liberally with champagne. Very Cambridge - and sadly this year such luxury could only have been rolled out on the back of university largesse, but the festival's way too early for Michaelmas Fiss there is aplenty nonetheless in Besson's brand-new Les aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec), an ebullient cross between Indiana Jones - name any one - and (ditto) those overwrought Jeunet-Caro fantasies.

The IJ connection is made lamentably fast, with the eponymous heroine Adèle (Louise Bourgoin) tomb-raiding in Egypt about ten minutes in, which provokes that dullest of critical reactions: "It's derivative." The action is replete with stone buttons in walls located by said hieroglyphic-decoding heroine opening booby-trapped catacombs; ancient, flammable sludge; and Nosferatu-like villlain, Dieuleveult - a dentally challenged rival (Mathieu Amalric, quite unrecognisable: pictured with Bourgoin below) - who lines her up in front of a firing squad, from which she escapes with a little help from the sludge...
ADELEIt is, as this much suggests, a remarkably silly and, mostly, enjoyable adventure film. Based on that very Franco-Belgian entity, the bande dessinée - strip cartoon - this one from the 1970s (Adèle is a kind of belle époque Modesty Blaise), it gives Besson huge latitude to indulge in an array of absorbing special effects. A pterodactyl terrorises Paris, and it's a terribly well-realised pterodactyl: almost the best thing in the film. It's certainly better than the bungling cop - Poirot minus the brains, Suchet minus the talent - charged with solving the ridiculous case.

Adèle's twin sister has been killed in a freak tennis accident involving a hairpin (beautifully sequenced towards the film's end). Adèle's plan, having preserved her upright in bed, is to bring her back to life. Hence the trip to Egypt: an old prof in Paris has powers of resurrection, which a particular mummy can, when the prof has it in front of him, activate. Hence the pterodactyl, wrongly resurrected and an excuse for mayhem. That said, the best effect of all is when a group of animatronic mummies wake up in the Louvre...

Such malarkey wholly crowds in on a perfomance of ironic poise and considerable sensusousness by Bourgoin, who is much, much better than the pterodactyl and the mummies, and anyone or indeed anything else in the film. She produces a richly nuanced mix of Emmeline Pankhurst and Julia Roberts at her witty best, even a touch of Bardot. Whether outwitting Dieuleveult, flirting with the Président (in fact pleading for the daft old prof's life) or reading an admirer's letter in the bath, she's never less than delectable.

And yes, she does do nude, and yes, it's extremely, briefly tasteful. This is a great character actress straining to take a much more adult film by the scruff of its neck. Put Bourgoin in the hands of a director less determined to show off and more concerned with tight human drama, and there's no knowing what this 29-year-old mightn't achieve.

Nancy Trotter Landy is as gritty and feistily sexual as Bourgoin is feline and funny

Jury's out on the two unknowns in Brilliantlove, Liam Browne and Nancy Trotter Landy (pictured below), acting mainly in the buff, courageously, in a film from Newcastle by Ashley Horner. Than which you don't get much more different from a French pterodactyl farrago; and yet each shares an overlong fascination with things they - ie the directors - think they're doing terribly well.

BRILLIANT_LOVE_SizedIn Brilliantlove's case, it's nudity, shagging, wanking, pissing; all of which work quite well in the first hour's depiction of two young things, Manchester and Noon, loving each other almost, but not quite, towards pornographic tedium; then, the showing-off - and the sex is definitely daring - simply collapses into a writing void, as so often happens with a good idea that has no real story, or one that's audibly been bolted on to the sex bit.

Here, it's Manchester's leaving in a pub a wad of revealing photos of 'im and 'is girlfriend (Manchester snaps away while they're at it) picked up by a rich porn-agent, who sells them, and Manchester, on to a gallerist, who turns the images into "art". Manchester, implausibly, fails to tell Noon who - fairly, I'd contest - doesn't like seeing her vulnerable self splashed out across a public wall. Etc.

As I say, the story amounts to little, but the film has qualities: tender cinematography of England's North-East and a wonderful (post-post-Brit pop?) soundtrack; and Nancy Trotter Landy is, it turns out, as gritty and feistily sexual as Bourgoin is feline and funny in the Besson. Two top female performances to admire, then.

Hair-raising foreign horror, shorts, children's and contemporary German work all admirably serve the purpose of a festival

This surely says nothing about what lies ahead in Cambridge, with a week still left. The festival's director, Tony Jones, who's been in charge for 25 years, is grateful that it's going ahead at all, yet mindful of the fact that it traditionally ends in a deficit, and this year will probably be no different. He runs the Arts Picturehouse anyway, CFF's general HQ, and leads the festival without a salary, with a band of low-paid happy helpers, identifiable by their black T-shirts with yellow logo.

This low-key approach lends the 10 days an agreeably improvisatory feel: pizzazz is provided by an open-air event at the Fitzwilliam Museum and talks by Stephen Frears amongst others. There are also some hair-raising foreign horrors, plenty of shorts, children's and a short season of contemporary German work to come. All this admirably serves the purpose of a festival, above all screening edgy films which will struggle to get wide distribution; but my goodness, Mr Jones, you could ratchet up the glamour. Invite Louise Bourgoin, for example?

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