The British Film Office set up shop in Park City for the first time in 1997, ferrying out directors and actors.Amid American tales of Russian roulette played by New York gangsters in Montana, or a young Indian’s quest to retrieve his estranged father’s body in Smoke Signals, are sprinkled films like Twentyfour Seven, a stark story from Thatcher’s Britain starring Bob Hoskins.The Land Girls, a story of women farm workers in World War II, and directed by David Leland (Personal Services, Wish You Were Here) had its world premiere, and was well received. The Sea Change, a joint British-Spanish production, came looking for distribution deals.For the hundreds of journalists who now converge on Park City, along with agents and Hollywood buyers, the game is to spot the film with “Buzz”. One candidate for this elusive quality: The Misadventures of Margaret, directed by former BBC documentary maker Brian Skeet, and starring Parker Posey, the actress known as the “Queen of the Indies”, who has made a virtual career out of festival films.Park City’s altitude is said to do strange things for people’s judgement: several films bought in bidding wars last year later lost hefty sums at the box office. There are also hits and misses in the selection panel’s choice of British talent.
Brassed Off was chosen to open the festival last year but the favourite film with audiences was The Full Monty.Scottish actress Andrea Hart won a special jury award for the title role in Miss Monday. Shot in London, though by an American director, the film is full of British grubbiness: bulimia and blotchy skin, and a nasal peeping tom in James Hicks, as a frustrated screenwriter whose search for a real female character leads him to stalking, burglary and hiding in closets.Miss Money, like other festival films, got one screening in Salt Lake City itself. As Hart makes panting love to her dressing-table mirror, watched by Hicks one couldn’t help wondering what the Mormon matrons in the audience would make of it all. Or, for that matter, Middle America.Sliding Doors is a cross-cultural tale in itself. “What is Bradford?” was the pointed question levelled by an American film executive at an early script. “I’m on first names with several people from Bradford,” the character played by Glaswegian John Hannah jokingly warns his co-star, Gwyneth Paltrow, as he picks her up in a bar. The joke was lost in translation, and it was expunged from the final version of the film, along with references to 15 to 1 (replaced by Jeopardy) and Countdown (now Baywatch).Howitt, struggling to find “a million quid” to make the film, originally took his script to Hannah, who had made his name with the funeral oration for a dead lover in Four Weddings.
After one financing deal fell through, Hannah mentioned the script to veteran American director Sydney Pollack. It took one call from Pollack to raise a $10 million budget, paradoxically from Britain’s Intermedia.Sliding Doors cleverly interweaves two parallel plots that begin as Paltrow’s character runs for a tube train. It is an impressive first outing as director for Howitt, with Pollack finishing the final cut. For all the minor concessions to the Americans, it keeps its British accent.
The fondest phrase of Hannah’s character is the old Monty Python line: “Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition”.. Resurrection Man is about violence – its irrationality and its glamour. The picture is set in 1975 Belfast, and though the fashions and the music are grimly familiar, the city is not. In keeping with the stylised tone of the novel by Eoin McNamee, who also wrote the screenplay, this is Belfast re-imagined in the style of a penny dreadful. An eerie mist rolls through the streets in daylight, enveloping street corner preachers and gossipy mums with creaky prams; at night, the city comes alive with sordid eruptions of colour.
A banana yellow Ford Escort caught under glaring street lights and the jet of blood from a punctured artery carry the same garish shock. Marc Evans isn’t the first director to make Belfast feel like a bad acid trip, or to conjure images which suggest he got a cut-price deal on coloured filters – Neil Jordan’s debut feature, Angel, has already left a neon imprint on the memory. Neither is he the first film-maker to remove the immediate political significance from a Northern Irish story, since that objective was realised by Alan Clarke’s Elephant, where an itinerary of killings were systematically stripped of all context. What Evans does do that is unusually daring is portray brutality itself as a character rather than an impulse, transforming the figure of the thuggish wide boy Victor Kelly, played by Stuart Townsend, into something like a physical embodiment of violence.
Victor idolises James Cagney, and gains his own kind of infamy when he becomes the protege of a local gangster who recognises in him the amorality of the born psychopath. As his reputation is bolstered by the random murders that he commits, selecting innocent men from the streets and carving them up with Stanley knives, Victor succumbs to all the usual vices: sex, drugs and a snazzy black Capri.If you are going to choose an actor to convey the sexual allure of a violent lifestyle, then it had better be someone who an audience could believe they might suspend their principles for. Stuart Townsend is an actor of remarkable control and confidence.
