Something to watch tonight: Special British and Irish Film Festival edition

For the last few years I have pre­viewed fest­ivals (large and small) for the RNZ web­site. I’d either select three or four titles from the pro­gramme, or have them selec­ted for me by the organ­isers, and see what con­clu­sions I could draw.

RNZ has decided they don’t want those any­more so I’ll see if I can make them work in the news­let­ter format. Apologies for those sub­scribers who are not in Aotearoa New Zealand. Hopefully these short reviews will be use­ful to you, one way or anoth­er, soon­er or later.

The British and Irish Film Festival has grown in a short peri­od to become one of the cru­cial events in the cal­en­dar. Distributors use it to promo big titles that will get a prop­er cinema release later in the year. Some titles are being tested to see what the audi­ence response will be. And for some, this will be their only big screen outing.

Films in the first cat­egory seem fairly obvi­ous and the fest­iv­al has secured more of those than ever before. Conclave looks like it’s going to be an awards con­tender at the busi­ness end of the sea­son. Somehow I have man­aged to become a big fan of pap­al intrigue – Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope and McCarten/Meirelles’ The Two Popes spring to mind – so this looks right up my alley.

I signed an NDA so I can’t tell you that I’ve already seen We Live in Time or that I thought it was mar­vel­lous. New films by Andrea Arnold (Bird) and Mike Leigh (Hard Truths) are standouts and very, very fresh, as is Alice Lowe’s com­edy Timestalker.

The titles I get to pre­view are usu­ally among the less-heralded, though, and that’s the way I like it.

The Problem with People (Cottam, 2023)

This is an Irish crowd-pleaser with two well-known faces up front (Colm Meaney and Paul Reiser, who also co-wrote the screenplay).

Knowingly inspired by Yankee fish-out-of-water films like Local Hero, it sees New York prop­erty developer Barry (Reiser) invited by his cous­in Ciáran (Meaney) to vis­it the old coun­try and try and bridge the multi-generational divide that has kept the American and Irish sides of the fam­ily apart.

An easy­going allegory about how stub­born­ness and mis­un­der­stand­ings can breed fresh dis­cord, even while you’re try­ing to heal the old ones, the pleas­ure here is mainly in watch­ing these vet­er­ans in action and in see­ing how this sort of fiddle-dee-dee Irishness is being updated for the mod­ern world. Same sex mar­riages and all that, to be sure.

Lies We Tell (Mulcahy, 2022)

I was less enam­oured by this goth­ic hor­ror – inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu’s nov­el Uncle Silas – in which a rich orphan is ter­ror­ised by the people who have been assigned to her guardianship.

It’s partly the stil­ted and self-conscious Victorian-style dia­logue and partly the per­form­ance incon­sist­en­cies from scene to scene, but I nev­er felt like this one let me in – or par­tic­u­larly wanted to.

Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger (Hinton, 2024)

If you’ve ever been lucky enough to watch A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies – the great director’s epic con­tri­bu­tion to the same ‘cen­tury of cinema’ series that brought us Sam Neill’s Cinema of Unease – you’ll already know how much pleas­ure and insight you can get from Scorsese talk­ing about film.

In Made in England, he turns his atten­tion to a dif­fer­ent kind of ‘per­son­al jour­ney’, his unex­pec­ted rela­tion­ship with the dir­ect­or Michael Powell and his appre­ci­ation for the ambi­tious and exper­i­ment­al movies Powell made with cre­at­ive part­ner Emeric Pressburger in the 40s and 50s.

Lavishly illus­trated, Scorsese’s his­tory shows us what British cinema might have become if post-war cyn­icism, pro­duc­tion aus­ter­ity and kit­chen sink drama hadn’t taken hold. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes are glor­i­ous but Scorsese also intro­duced me to two less well-known Powell/Pressburger films, A Canterbury Tale and I Know Where I’m Going! Both were con­sid­er­ably less col­our­ful (visu­ally) but just as emo­tion­ally vivid, per­haps even more so.

I love that Scorsese isn’t afraid to laud tech­nic­al achieve­ment as well as artist­ic vis­ion – Technicolor and VistaVision get spe­cif­ic shout-outs – and I always feel like I’m a smarter film watch­er after spend­ing time with the great man.

Howards End (Ivory, 1992)

Made in England isn’t the only film about film­mak­ing in the pro­gramme. I didn’t pre­view Merchant Ivory: The Documentary but I will take the oppor­tun­ity to point you towards their two Emma Thompson/Anthony Hopkins clas­sics in the schedule.

The Remains of the Day (1993) adapts Ishiguro and will look a pic­ture on a big screen fol­low­ing a recent res­tor­a­tion. I’m going to take this oppor­tun­ity to recycle my review of Howards End from earli­er this year:

Judging and con­trolling beha­viour is at the heart of Howards End. Wealthy busi­ness­man Henry Wilcox (Anthony Hopkins) seems to start every sen­tence with “My advice to you is …” and, at the oth­er end of the scale, poor clerk Leonard Bast (Samuel West) is fatally con­strained by his own sense of shame at not being able to provide for his wife Jacky (Nicola Duffett).

The Schle-gals (includ­ing Helena Bonham Carter as sis­ter Helen) , the Wilcoxes and the Basts are thrown togeth­er by fate (and Forster) dur­ing that serene peri­od in England where the mod­ern world of the motor car and tele­graph had arrived but World War One hadn’t.

The Schlegels are from a German emigré fam­ily and appre­ci­ate art and pro­gress­ive polit­ics. The Wilcoxes are becom­ing rich bey­ond meas­ure thanks to their exploit­a­tion of African nat­ur­al resources. And the Basts are tossed around by fate – “The poor are the poor. One is sorry for them, but there it is,” Henry fam­ously says at one point.

The British and Irish Film Festival actu­ally star­ted yes­ter­day (23 October) and runs until 13 November in mul­tiple ven­ues across the country.