We'll have a barrel of fun at the EIFF opening gala night

Published on Friday 20 June 2008 16:20

"IF the air raid siren sounds you must make your way to the nearest shelter." This printed warning, which appeared in most theatre programmes of the 1940s, is one with which wartime audiences across the Capital would have been familiar.

Twice in the last week I've been transported back to the decade that changed the face of Europe forever.

First was on Sunday, when I buckled up for a low-level flight over the city in an aging Douglas DC 3 Dakota aircraft; second was on Wednesday at the opening gala of the 62nd Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Both events ended with that very polite British tradition, a round of applause – which I could understand at the end of the flight in the 64-year-old aircraft as the crew who had safely returned us to terra firma were sitting just feet away, waving from the cockpit.

The logic of applauding at the end of a film however, escapes me. Clapping ethereal images on an inanimate screen is just plain wrong – like watching your bus driver take a puff of his Ventolin inhaler as he drives up the High Street.

Of course, if the 'talent' (film industry talk for cast and creatives) happen to be present that's different, a show of appreciation, if deserved, is natural. If they are not, well, I've yet to see the characters of a movie pop back on screen after the credits to take a bow. Now there's a gimmick for any budding film makers out there.

The Edge of Love – a Dylan Thomas bio-pic – is a beautifully shot movie, but the real surprise comes from its female leads. Both Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller bring an unexpected sense of truth to their roles. Miller especially is captivating.

Like the trip on the Dakota, the film transported those in attendance back to more innocent times. To an age when sexual liberalism was still treated with suspicion.

Indeed, attending the after- show party where the bars of Teviot had been decked in Union Jack bunting, the pokes of fish and chips came wrapped in newspaper reports of the Blitz, and many of the guests had dressed in fashions of the period, was like appearing in an episode of Dad's Army. You know, the one where they throw a party in the church hall.

But back to the film. Before the screening at Cineworld, director John Maybury had introduced his talent, in this case Knightley, Miller, and Matthew Rhys along with members of his production staff and writer Sharman Macdonald, Knightley's mum.

The evening no doubt brought back memories of the last time the Hollywood star and her mother appeared on a red carpet in Edinburgh, for the opening of MacDonald's play The Girl with the Red Hair, at the Royal Lyceum in 2005.

A memory no doubt shared by Lyceum artistic director Mark Thomson, who was also a member of the gala audience alongside other recognisable faces such as comedian Phil Kay, STV's Steven Jardine and actor Jeff Rawle, best remembered these days as newsroom editor George Dent in Drop The Dead Donkey, but to an earlier generation as the quintessential Billy Liar.

Along with patron Sir Sean Connery, all would no doubt agree that the organisers of Edinburgh's 62nd film festival 'rolled out the barrel' with style.