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- guardian.co.uk, Sunday July 30 2000 02.31 BST
- The Observer, Sunday July 30 2000
Lizzie Francke, the director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, is taking no chances by book-ending the fifty-fourth event with proven successes from Cannes. The movie chosen for the opening on Sunday, 13 August at the ABC Lothian Road is Lars von Trier's dramatic musical, Dancer in the Dark, which won the Palme d'Or, brought Björk the best actress award and attracted widespread plaudits, though not from me.
The festival concludes on Sunday, 27 August with Wong Kar-Wai's enchanting In the Mood for Love, a romantic Hong Kong love story, for which handsome Tony Cheung was named Cannes's best actor and the cinematographer Christopher Doyle received the Grand Prix Technique.
In between these gala events are several hundred movies from 50-odd countries, ranging in time from Victor Sjöström's silent classic The Scarlet Letter, starring Lillian Gish (20 August) to newly minted movies by unknowns getting their premieres at Edinburgh. All are described in the festival programme as 'magical', 'superb', 'eccentric, surreal, liberated', 'this subtle masterpiece', 'a visual treat' and so on, the organisers having no truck with dour Caledonian modesty.
There are sections devoted to established directors and first-time offenders, the latter being unknown quantities, the former including two outstanding pictures from Cannes - Liv Ullmann's Faithless (21 August) from a script by Bergman, and Michael Haneke's first film outside Austria, Code Unknown (19, 20 August), starring Juliette Binoche.
Of particular interest are movies by two directors whose careers received a major boost from the favourable critical attention their early work attracted at Edinburgh. Terence Davies showed his semi-autobiographical trilogy at the 1983 festival in Edinburgh to great acclaim and is now back with his version of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (19, 24 August), set in New York, filmed in Scotland, and thought by many to have been unfairly rejected by Cannes.
The other director is Bernard Rudden whose impressive 50-minute The Hunger Artist, a transposition of Kafka's tale from Prague to Glasgow, was the major discovery of the 1995 festival. He's back this year with his first feature, Daybreak (22, 24, 26 August), set in the world of Edinburgh clubbers and low-lifes.
The festival began in 1947 and to honour Scotland's greatest cineaste, John Grierson, the man who coined the term 'documentary', it was initially devoted to non-fiction films. Documentaries have continued to be a major strand, and two of the 19 films in the 'Imagining Reality' section are by Scots. Kevin Macdonald, whose One Day in September won an Oscar last March, is represented by A Brief History of Errol Morris (14/15 August), a portrait of the American documentarist whose own work has often been seen in Edinburgh. Murray Grigor, a former festival director, has on show the enticing The Work of Angels? (25/26 August), a study of the Book of Kells. It was Grigor who suggested in the days before Edinburgh instituted awards that a special prize should be created - the Mouton d'Or - for the year's most tedious work, a film capable of stunning a sheep at 15 yards.
Another attractive aspect of Edinburgh is that the moviemakers come here not to give press conferences but to meet the audience and discuss their films with interested cinemagoers. Among this year's visitors are Liv Ullmann, Paul Verhoeven, Wong Kar-Wai and the composer Carter Burwell, who has written the scores of most Coen Brothers film, including O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which is being shown in the festival.
Nothing new on view, however, compares with the work of Marcel Ophuls, subject of this year's retrospective. Like the camera in his movies, Ophuls was constantly on the move between the early Thirties until his death in 1957 - from Germany to France to Italy to Switzerland to America and back to his adopted France.
Four of his pre-war movies, his four Hollywood pictures (The Exile, Letter From an Unknown Woman, Caught, The Reckless Moment), and his costume masterworks of the Fifties (La Ronde, Le Plaisir, Madame De, Lola Montes) are on show. That final French quartet are available on video but they demand to be seen on the big screen. Superlatives are justified for these exquisite films.
