Glasgow Film Festival: Ecstasy | Salmon Fishing in the Yemen | Your Sister’s Sister

By Alistair Harkness
Published on Thursday 16 February 2012 00:00

IN the first of his round-ups of the Glasgow Film Festival, Alistair Harkness finds some gems and a couple of real stinkers

THIS year’s Glasgow Film Festival gets off to an amusing start tonight with the British premiere of American indie film Your Sister’s Sister (****). It’s the latest effort from Seattle-based filmmaker Lynn Shelton, who builds significantly on the promise of her 2009 festival favourite Humpday with another astutely observed relationship comedy in which sex impacts in confusing ways on a good friendship.

That friendship exists between the endearingly shambolic Jack (Mark Duplass) and the bright, vivacious Iris (Emily Blunt), whose previous relationship with Jack’s recently deceased brother has already complicated a platonic friendship destined for further travails. With Jack still on a bit of a grief-fuelled downward spiral, the film kicks into gear when Iris stages a mock intervention and sends him to stay in her father’s idyllic holiday home, little realising her older sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt) has shacked up there for reasons of her own. Upon arrival, initial misunderstandings swiftly turn into a tequila-tinged, hilariously frantic and mutually unsatisfying one-night stand as Hannah takes Jack up on a drunken offer of sex. But it’s when Iris turns up unannounced the next day that Shelton’s film starts to reveal itself as an incredibly skilled piece of work, with Jack and Hannah’s attempts to work out how best to proceed in terms of confessing their shared mistake to Iris leading to lots of wry, knuckle-gnawing tension and skin-crawling laughter.

It helps that it’s brilliantly performed throughout, with Blunt cracking the code for adorability, Mumblecore veteran Duplass finding just the right balance between self-effacing glibness and heart-breaking despair, and DeWitt negotiating the trickiest character journey of the three with amusing spikiness, but also genuine grace. Shelton has a real flair for creating characters that feel like living, breathing people and, as she effortlessly drops in several twists, she expertly guides the film towards a finale that’s as charming as it is disarming.

Emily Blunt pops up again in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (*), but sadly even her presence – as a management consultant trying to help a wealthy sheik breed Scottish salmon in the Middle East – can’t save Swedish saccharin addict Lasse Hallström’s woefully unfunny, grindingly twee adaptation of Paul Torday’s bestselling novel of the same name. Still, at least she doesn’t make this sitcom-level caper actively worse. The same cannot be said for Ewan McGregor. Cast as the film’s tweed-sporting, sandwich-carrying, mild-mannered hero, McGregor acts as if he’s been time-warped into modern-day Scotland from the 1950s. Granted, his fishing-obsessed civil servant is supposed to be a bit old-fashioned, but McGregor takes the repressed Presbyterian thing a bit far, playing him with almost Rain Man levels of social awkwardness. It’s his worst performance, made even stranger by his seeming inability to even do a convincing Scottish accent any more. The vigour and promise of Trainspotting certainly seems a long way behind him now.

A similar observation could be made about Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy (**), a belated and dated attempt to bring one of the stories contained within the Trainspotting author’s slapdash 1996 “Chemical Romance” triptych to the big screen. Based on Ecstasy’s longest story, it revolves around Lloyd (Adam Sinclair) an ageing Leith clubber who begins to suspect there may be more to life than dealing drugs and popping party pills after falling for Heather (Kristin Kreuk), a frustrated Canadian office drone – the film is a Canadian production – who has walked out on her boring Scottish husband to find herself in the midst of the local rave scene.

That’s about it for character development, and the drama gets short shrift too with a wafer-thin plot involving Lloyd playing one local gangster off against another to get himself out of debt. The script’s eulogistic appraisal of ecstasy as a love-drug capable of taking users to higher states of consciousness all sounds drearily quaint too, and the absence of specific period detail fails to say anything interesting about the 1990s rave scene (when Es were the scourge of the government and the tabloids) or today’s youth culture.

A far better film boasting a Scottish connection is Silver Tongues (****), the debut effort from Glaswegian writer/director Simon Arthur. Set in New York State (where Arthur is now based), it’s a psychologically creepy effort following a married couple (played by Generation Kill’s Lee Tergesen and Boardwalk Empire’s Enid Graham) who get their kicks performing role-playing tricks on unsuspecting victims. Arthur sets up these cruel and unusual scenarios with great skill and executes them with a pleasingly ambiguous tone that toys with multiple interpretations of his characters’ motivations and the realities of their relationship. The end result is a cold, bold, strange and intriguing effort that establishes Arthur as a film-maker to watch.

There’s more strangeness in This Must Be the Place (****), the English-language debut of the supremely gifted Italian director Paulo Sorrentino, whose masterful political drama Il Divo played the GFF in 2009. Revolving around an ageing, retired Goth rock star who embarks on a road trip across America to hunt down his dying Jewish father’s Nazi tormentor, it features an incongruously whimsical turn from Sean Penn as the film’s Robert Smith-inspired hero, Cheyenne. Just watching Penn wander around with backcombed hair and with lipstick accentuating Cheyenne’s deathly pallor is a surreal experience. But while he’s funny and sweet and more than a little bit kooky, Penn plays Cheyenne with utter conviction, never treating him – or the pleasingly oddball premise – as a joke, which makes the film as moving as it is eccentric.

Finally, for anyone yet to sample the naturalistic wonders of the Dardenne brothers, the Scottish premiere of their latest small-scale treasure is a good place to start. The Kid with a Bike (****) is their most humane film to date – and their most openly joyous. Following the titular always-on-the-move Cyril (played by newcomer Thomas Doret) as he searches for stability in his life, it’s a heartfelt celebration of youthful tenacity in the face of adversity, one that reconfirms the Belgian directors as true heirs to the Italian neo-realists. Unmissable.

• Your Sister’s Sister, is at GFT tonight and tomorrow; Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, GFT, 26 February; Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy, GFT, 18 February and Cineworld, 19 February; Silver Tongues, GFT, 18 February; This Must Be the Place, Cineworld 20 and 21 February; The Kid with a Bike, Cineworld, 17 February, GFT 18 February.

• THE 2012 Glasgow Film Festival runs from today until 26 February, showing over 200 films in 16 venues across the city, including a swimming pool.

Highlights this year include a centenary retrospective of the films of Gene Kelly (launched earlier this week with a Singin’ in the Rain flashmob at Glasgow Airport) and a superhero strand curated by Mark Millar.

Our coverage continues in The Arts pullout next Thursday with another review round-up by Alistair Harkness and an interview with Aki Kaurismaki, director of the festival’s closing night film, Le Havre. For a full festival programme, visit www.glasgowfilm.org/festival.

Logged in as:

Comment here. Start typing your comment here:

Post comment

Please adhere to our Community guidelines

Your view

Please sign in to be able to comment on this story.