Joss Whedon

Suck it and see

Should it be a French flick about a moustache or Britain’s first Dogme movie? Andrew Pulver visits the Edinburgh film festival to pick this year’s winner of the first-time directors award

The Edinburgh film festival is the time of year when we go in search of the novel and unusual for the Guardian new directors award, and the 2005 edition did itself full justice in this regard. Increasingly, film festivals are the places where unheralded talent makes its first bow before a paying public. Hence the value, we feel, of an award that recognises innovative and potentially important film-makers at the outset of their careers; if nothing else, the award might show there’s a virtue in not always playing safe.

That said, discovering excellence is always the award’s aim. This year, there were many strong contenders to examine, and much to consider. For example, one of the festival’s strengths is in showcasing British-made work, and there seemed to be a higher number than usual of homegrown first-time directors jostling for recognition. Lynne Ramsay is the only British winner of the Guardian award, when Ratcatcher premiered here in 1999. Could anyone follow her this time around?

In the end, no. None of the British features on show were felt to be strong enough to outdo all others. Song of Songs, directed by Josh Appignanesi, was undoubtedly the strangest: a tiny-budget account of a Jewish brother and sister - one ultra-orthodox, the other a rebel - indulging in sado-masochistic power games while their mother lies dying upstairs. While certainly innovative, and filmed with some verve on digital cameras, its snail-speed pacing and wilfully oblique narrative style told against it. Gypo, marketed as the first British Dogme film, was another shot-on-the-run verite effort about friction between locals and refugees in Margate, but was rather too obviously following in the footsteps of another Edinburgh award winner from 2000, Last Resort, without matching that film’s sophistication of narrative or performance.

Edinburgh also marked the first British screening of the already notorious The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, which also takes as its subject the pent-up violence of a run-down seaside town. While some may appreciate the film’s beautiful camerawork, and may wish to admire the shock tactics of director Thomas Clay, any virtue in the film’s evocation of small-town nastiness is totally wiped out by the gloating and unacceptably misogynistic torture-rape-murder finale.

British film-making also offered first-timers of a more conventional nature: Richard E Grant’s Wah-Wah, Gaby Dellal’s On a Clear Day and Steven Woolley’s Stoned. The nature of the award makes it difficult to pick a winner from these, though Woolley’s film, a biopic of the late Brian Jones, scored points for an ambitious and complex storytelling style, full of flashbacks and carefully designed fake-retro footage.

So, if not the UK, where do we go to find something along the lines of Amores Perros (winner in 2000), or American Splendor (2003)? Hollywood’s big offering at Edinburgh was - amazingly - a world premiere by a first-time director. But this first-time director was Joss Whedon, already a legend for creating Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alias and Firefly. His film, Serenity, opens out of the last of those TV series, which was cancelled after only 15 episodes. Though everyone loved the film’s beat-up sci-fi stylings, and it was enormously popular in the audience votes, it seemed against the spirit of the award to recognise not only someone who is already a household name, but also whose film is derived from already well-known filmed material.

A more viable contender was Gavin Hood, with the South African thriller Tsotsi, adapted from an Athol Fugard novel. Tsotsi isn’t Hood’s first film, but his earlier film, A Reasonable Man, made little impression outside its country of origin. Tsotsi also proved popular with the festival audience voting system, and it’s not difficult to see why: it’s a visceral, brutal tale of a township hoodlum who reconnects with his troubled childhood after kidnapping a baby. Intense and powerful as it is - and Presley Chweneyagae’s lynx-eyed stare in the lead role is unnerving from the outset - Tsotsi is, in the end, a little too overwrought to escape from the straitjacket of conventional film-making.

The real pick of the festival, then, boiled down to three films. Fateless, an adaptation of Imre Kertesz’s Holocaust novel about the deportation of Budapest Jews, was a sombre, powerful and intelligent treatment of its subject matter, filmed with classical brilliance by former cinematographer Lajos Koltai. Despite its length (two hours 10 minutes), it never flagged, and the sensitivity and insight it showed to the plight of its Jewish protagonists put the callow attitudinising of Song of Songs firmly in its place.

La Moustache, which made a splash at Cannes, is a wonderful study of mid-life bewilderment, filmed by Emmanuel Carrère from his own novel. The idea is simple: a man looking for an image change shaves off his moustache, and becomes increasingly flustered and dismayed when no one he knows, his wife least of all, appears to notice any difference.

And thirdly, there was Thumbsucker, a determinedly quirky oddity from music-video specialist Mike Mills and the latest to follow Spike Jonze’s lead. Thumbsucker is another adaptation, this time from a novel by Walter Kirn, and it focuses on a Donnie Darko-ish disturbed teen, still sucking his thumb at 17, who is put on Ritalin and undergoes a dramatic personality change. It’s a pretty funny movie, as well as everything else, with Keanu Reeves nicely self-parodic as a mantra-spouting dentist.

So who will come through? Only nitpicking will eliminate two of these three films. Fateless, mighty though it is, sits firmly in the mainstream camp, so perhaps drops back for an award designed to reward innovation. La Moustache follows a sedate, straight-faced logic until its final act, when it steps somewhat awkwardly into fully fledged surrealism; in the final analysis, it doesn’t do itself quite enough justice. Thumbsucker, though not perfect itself, is the most exciting film of the three, and the one that succeeds best in treading along the cutting edge of cinema, marrying the traditional virtues of story and character with whimsical style and seductive design. Hence the Guardian new directors award goes to Mike Mills.