Film reviews: Garnet’s Gold | A Fuller Life
Garnet’s Gold - Odeon Lothian Road, Edinburgh
***
The man in question is Garnet Frost, a garrulous Londoner whose roving mind and inability to focus has left him ruing his somewhat wasted life as a jack-of-all-trades but master of none. Having 20 years earlier discovered a staff in a river while lost and alone in the Highlands, he’s convinced himself that it was really a marker for Bonnie Prince Charlie’s lost gold and so resolves to retrace his steps in an effort to bring some sort of closure to a life that hasn’t turned out as he’d hoped. Director Ed Perkins spent four years following Garnet and at times the film plays like a sad and revealing portrait of a dreamer coming to terms with the fact that life might have passed him by. At other times, though, there’s a suspicion that Perkins’ beautiful and expressionistic camera work – particularly as Garnet (after a lot of false starts) makes it to the Highlands – is masking the possibility that his subject is really just a bit of a windbag. Still, the tension between these two dynamics proves oddly compelling.
• Garnet’s Gold, tomorrow [28 June], Odeon Lothian Road
For times and tickets see www.edfilmfest.org.uk
A Fuller Life - Filmhouse, Edinburgh
***
Someone who could never be accused of wasting his life was American filmmaker Sam Fuller. A crime reporter in his teens, a novelist and screenwriter in his 20s, an infantryman in his 30s, he became the only Hollywood director to storm the beaches of Normandy and then make movies about it. The punning title of A Fuller Life, then, is wholly appropriate. Directed by Fuller’s daughter, Samantha Fuller, it mixes readings from his memoir by friends, colleagues and admirers, with clips from his movies and recently uncovered 16mm films Fuller shot himself on the frontlines. The last of these makes this historically important (his first footage was of the Falkenau death camps) and although the prospect of watching actors and filmmakers reading from Fuller’s autobiography may not sound cinematically scintillating, Fuller’s writing is so pugnacious, so vivid, so alive with detail, it brings the stories behind the likes of Shock Corridor, Pick-Up on South Street and his butchered masterwork The Big Red One screaming to life.
• A Fuller Life, today [27 June], Filmhouse.
For times and tickets see www.edfilmfest.org.uk