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 edinburgh film festival roundup 2004
Who needs celebrities anyway? This year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival opted for arthouse credibility in place of red carpet pulling power. Neither Gael Garcia Bernal, for opening night film The Motorcycle Diaries, nor Beatrice Dalle, whose carnival of human misery, Process, was in the line-up, made an appearance. But in the absence of star glamour a ragtag bag of interesting work rose to the fore. My Summer Of Love and Primer My Summer Of Love, A Yorkshire tale of girl-on-girl teen love, set off serious shock waves winning The Michael Powell award for best British film. Director Paul Pavlikovsky makes good on the poetic promise of his previous feature, Last Resort, with this evocation of feral child energy and a potentially tragic culture clash. But it was the film’s leads, Natalie Press and Emily Blunt, who got everyone talking with their mix of beauty and grit. Sundance hits, Primer and The Machinist, showed that American independent film still has room to produce thrillingly edgy work. The first, described rather discouragingly as “an essay in auto-didacticism”, was made by first-time writer/director/DOP/editor/musician for a mere $7,000. Shane Carruth taught himself how to make films from scratch and his debut is nothing if not completely unique. Primer tells the story of two men who build a time machine in their garage, speaking as they would in the language of quantum physics. At first it’s a little like watching a film in Japanese without subtitles, but the plot is ingeniously twisty, making the hardcore science magical and compelling.  The Machinist and Anatomy of Hell Brad Anderson’s The Machinist, on the other hand, though as dark and polished as a slab of onyx, was memorable chiefly for a physical transformation that will go down in cinema history. Christian Bale lost 25kg to play Trevor, a man who hasn’t slept for a year and believes his life is being controlled by malevolent forces. With vertebrae that stick out like iron bolts and the face of an anorexic corpse, his screen presence aroused as much horror as the film’s taut story. Further perusals of the more far out fringes of human experience were legion. Catherine Breillat returned to the festival with her brilliant film essay on female sexuality and suppression, Anatomy Of Hell. The tritely wacky Calvaire on the other hand, summed up as a more extreme version of League Of Gentleman crossed with Deliverance, involved a male cabaret singer being tortured by an all-male community of inbreds and was strictly surrealism by numbers.  Calvaire and A Letter To True Not that the festival was short of the feel-good factor. Fashion photographer and experimental filmmaker Bruce Weber’s A Letter To True introduced his five golden retrievers to the world, along with a cat, some ponies, a husky and an elephant. But it’s his youngest pup, True, to whom he addresses his letters and meditations, on anything from the dogs’ childhood to the Vietnam War, cancer, AIDS and Liz Taylor. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, but it’s not just for animal lovers. So, Edinburgh 2004 may have skimped on boring old celebrity, but it was moviemaking itself that stole all the attention. Which is exactly as it should be.
Skye Sherwin
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related info
 useful linksprimermovie.com the machinist official site flach film: anatomy of hell
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see also
 motorcycle diaries interview motorcycle diaries tinseltown
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