London Film Festival Day 3 - THE OTHER MAN

THE OTHER MAN is a profoundly disappointing, frustrating attempt at a thriller powered by sexual jealousy. But instead of the emotional tension and mind games of Richard Eyre's previous directorial effort, NOTES ON A SCANDAL, we get a meandering plot, weak motivation and a denouement that is hard to swallow.

The key flaw is the poor quality of the script - penned by Eyre, based on a story by Bernhard Schlink. For the first hour the story stumbles around, often doubling back on itself, making a meal out of plot devices that should be worked through very quickly. Liam Neeson plays a decent but dull man called Peter who discovers that his wife Lisa (Laura Linney has been schtupping a schmoozy Spaniard called Ralph (Antonio Banderas). Rather than confront Ralph, Peter plays chess with him - a clunking great metaphor that the visually unimaginative Eyre makes nothing of. The wife, Lisa, remains enigmatic, and the daughter (Romola Garai) is basically redundant. The movie fails to drum up any tension (sexual or intellectual - dear god - how long does it take to realise that the password is "Lake Como"?)

And then, as the finish line nears, the writers clearly thought it was time to spice things up a bit so they dream up, well, not so much a plot twist, as a diversion into a dead end. This diversion allows Banderas to ham it up a bit and takes us into a final scene that jars completely the character motivation we have been shown in previous scenes.

THE OTHER MAN played Toronto and London 2008. It opens in the US on December 3rd.

London Film Festival Day 3 - DEAN SPANLEY

DEAN SPANLEY is a beautifully acted and cleverly written costume drama about coming to terms with grief and re-establishing familial relations. Peter O'Toole plays an Edwardian stick-in-the-mud who refuses to mourn his elder son's death in the Boer War. The subsequent death of his wife, which his younger son (Jeremy Northam) partly blames him for, reduces their relationship to one of cynical mocking on the part of Fisk Senior and deferential routine on the part of Fisk Junior.

This stagnant relationship is transformed when Fisk Junior cultivates a friendship with an eccentric clergyman called Dean Spanley (Sam Neil). The Dean apparently believes in reincarnation and, when plied with a rare Hungarian digestif, will unconsciously drift into his past life. The skill of DEAN SPANLEY is that its subject matter is patently absurd and yet the poker straight performance of Sam Neil in the title role and the reactions from Northam and O'Toole completely sell it to us. However the fact that the film takes so long to patiently create a credible platform for the final revelation makes the first hour of this film desperately slow moving, and does rather call into question whether the final emotional pay-off was worth the wait.

DEAN SPANLEY played Toronto and London 2008.

London Film Festival Day 3 - THREE BLIND MICE

THREE BLIND MICE is an intriguing wholly independent feature from writer-director-actor Matthew Newton. It follows three young Australian Navy officers on a night in Sydney before they ship out, presumably to Iraq. The movie starts off as a film much like Jon Favreau's brilliant SWINGERS with a very naturalistic shooting style and three guys speaking frankly and authentically about getting laid on their final night at home. Matthew Newton plays the smart-talking, funny guy, Harry, who orders two hookers in his friend Sam's name. Ewen Leslie's Sam is a bullied, quiet type who just wants to make his grandfather proud. Finally, there's the apparently sensible Dean (Toby Schmitz) - the calming influence, who has to meet up with his fiancee and her parents for dinner.

The movie keeps it's freewheeling style for the first half of the story and is genuinely very funny, if frustatingly meandering. Things aren't helped when Sam picks up a waitress called Emma (Gracie Otto) who must surely be one of the most irritating characters in Aussie film. However, just as I was starting to lose patience with the movie, it took a left turn into gravity and pleasantly wrong-footed me. In the final scenes, Newton still combines the previous crazy comedy with a more serious discussion of when and whether soldiers should disobey orders and take moral responsibility for their actions. I'm not sure if the combination works, but it made for interesting viewing and I'll definitely be searching out the next Matthew Newton flick.

THREE BLIND MICE played London, Toronto and Sydney 2008.

London Film Festival Day 2 - FRANKLYN

FRANKLYN is the debut feature from British writer-director Gerald McMorrow. It's a movie about the delayed impact of emotional trauma on three people living in contemporary London - a suicidal video artist (Eva Green); a jilted lover (Sam Riley) and an Iraqi war vet. The first half of the movie shows the three characters failing to cling to reality and plays their fantasy worlds as reality, not least in a gothic "Meanwhile City" where a Ministry sanctions a multitude of religious cults and a masked vigilante rails against who knows what.

The scenes in the real world have a certain satisfaction insofar as they are well-acted by a strong cast and pack an emotional punch. But I feel that McMorrow has failed to tie together the real and fantasy strands of his film. Despite the portentious voiceover from Ryan Philippe's vigilante, we are given precious little information. At first, I thought this was being the movie was baiting the audience and would reveal a richness of interlocking later on. Actually, when we figure out what's happening, which isn't hard to do, it's all a bit thin and bathetic.

So, I have to say that FRANKLYN was a rather disappointing and unsatisfying experience - setting up a complex interlocking world but failing to deliver. On the positive side, I loved the way McMorrow placed and moved his camera and I definitely liked the GORMENGHAST meets BEETLEJUICE fantasy world production design. But, in the final analysis, the lack of narrative coherence (and the similarity of the vigilante outfit to Rorschach) let the movie down.

FRANKLYN played London 2008 and opens in the UK on January 30th 2009.

London Film Festival Day 2 - LOVE LIVE LONG

LOVE LIVE LONG is the latest film by the pioneering British director Mike Figgis. It had a bizarre genesis as a vanity project of the Gumball 3000 - an annual event involving a bunch of flash tossers driving high-spec cars very fast on public roads because - hey - road safety is for peasants. Anyways, the Gumball spivs gave Figgis £100k and said he could make a movie about anything so long as it featured Gumball. Much like Shane Meadows' recent SOMERS TOWN, Figgis' LOVE LIVE LONG happily takes the money, makes a provocative movie and, if anything, subverts the corporate brand.

The film is essentially an improvised two-hander set in Istanbul. Sophie Winkelman (Big Suze in PEEP SHOW) plays an emotionally scarred young woman who gets off on being sexually degraded by a casually cruel flash git Gumball driver, played by Daniel Lapaine. The movie shows their first encounter in an Istanbul market, their involvement during the rally, and hints at the disaster that is to follow.

I loved the tension and raw emotion of the scenes in Istanbul and the denoument. The only mis-step was, in my view, the insertion of a very funny but jarring scene just prior to the finale.

LOVE LIVE LONG played London 2008.

London Film Festival Day 2 - LA BELLE PERSONNE

LA BELLE PERSONNE is French auteur Christophe Honoré's loose adaptation of Madame de la Fayette's La Princesse de Clèves. In Honoré's version, the tale of unrequited and unconsummated love takes place in a dreary Parisian high school populated with over-sexed pupils and staff. In uncharacteristically slippery style, Honoré completely side-steps the moral difficulty with teacher-pupil relationships. Indeed, his film has a curious democracy to it - pretty much everyone - young, old, gay, straight - is emotionally wrecked by love.

Léa Seydoux plays the enigmatic Junie who transfers into school and begins a relationship with earnest Otto (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) even though she doesn't really love him. Thereafter she falls for the dishy Italian teacher, Nemours. (Louis Garrel in an unusually low-key performance - and all the better for that). Nemours clears the decks for a relationship with Junie but is curiously resistant to pursuing her. And Junie in turn is sceptical about Nemours' capacity to remain interested once the relationship is consummated - hence an emotional stand-off.

The story is economically told and nicely photographed, and doesn't feel like a TV film that somehow stumbled into a cineplex. However, I have to say that despite all the constant blubbing, I found it to be a rather slight film. I think this is because Honoré has a tendency to compose his films like a series of over-wrought French pop videos. He indulged this fully in LES CHANSONS D'AMOUR but even here, he sometimes seems more interested in the moody close-up than emotional truth. Indeed, it was with great dismay that I found Honoré slipping back into his lip-synching addiction in the most dramatic scene of the film, reducing it to pop video banality.

LA BELLE PERSONNE is a TV movie. It opened last month in France and Germany and played London 2008.