Something different in the script at the London Film Festival

Celebrating its 55th anniversary, this year’s London Film Festival also marks the last one for artistic director Sandra Hebron, whose leadership over the past nine years has helped the festival reposition itself as the UK launchpad for the award season’s brightest contenders. It’s a shame, then, that she has decided to launch her last festival with a film as awful as 360 (2 stars)

Despite boasting a big-name ensemble cast (Anthony Hopkins, Rachel Weisz, Jude Law) and the poetic visual style of City of God director Fernando Meirelles, the film – which, somewhat tellingly, has yet to find a UK distributor – can’t quite transcend Peter Morgan’s clanging, multi-stranded, Crash-esque script, which follows the lives of a number of mostly dull characters in contrived and unbelievable situations as they grapple with various mini crises arising from the various love and sex-based decisions they’ve made in their lives.

“A wise man once said if you meet a fork in the road you should take it,” is Morgan’s way of kicking off his platitude-vomiting script, and he proceeds to spin the characters off in phony directions in order to get them to say what he clearly believes are illuminating things about seizing every moment in life because, you know, we only live once.

Never mind that such a trite observation is the kind of stuff you’d expect to read in a rubbish self-help book, Morgan – who has somehow become the UK’s most in-demand screenwriter thanks to The Queen – clearly sees this as the stuff of viable drama. The therapy sessions and AA meetings that he has some of his characters attend are his lazy way of weaving in these little bumper-sticker homilies and he also seems to be under the impression that having his characters point out the ridiculous plot points he deploys to drive the story forward excuses his use of them in the first place.

Somewhat more galling is the fact that, having already been responsible for one facile tale of global interconnectivity this year – Hereafter, Clint Eastwood’s worst ever movie (even in a career that includes Pink Cadillac) – his attempt to pull off the same trick again backfires just as spectacularly. It’s a shame because you can see the likes of Weisz and Hopkins pushing against the strictures of the writing in an effort to create interesting characters. The only one who really manages this, however, is Ben Foster, cast here as a newly released sex-offender who finds temptation in every direction when he’s stranded in an airport en route to a halfway house. But even then his brief, wiry, intense performance is undercut by the film’s decision to throw in his path a nice girl who is determined to be reckless for once in her life.

Meirelles, who has never quite recaptured the giddy highs of his debut film (which premiered at the LFF in 2002), at least makes the film look beautiful. Even so, in the end, it all comes back to Morgan’s paper-thin script, the only truthful moment of which occurs when one character inadvertently offers her own critique of the film. “This dialogue,” she says, “is ridiculous.”

Negotiating ridiculous material in a far more believable and interesting manner is Miss Bala (4 stars) which gets its British premiere at the festival this weekend. A sort of Mexican Miami Vice that delves into the complexities of the cross-border narcotics trade, it’s built around a ripped-from-the-headlines story involving a local beauty queen who became embroiled in the drug gangs that rule the streets of Baja California.

Though writer/director Gerardo Naranjo has fabricated all the other details of the story, he’s created a plausible, hard-hitting action thriller that explores the ways in which no facet of life is able to escape the stench of corruption and violence that trafficking generates. Naranjo gets a terrific, grounded performance from newcomer Stephanie Sigman as the working-class girl whose modest dream of achieving a better life via the titular beauty pageant are railroaded in the most horrific way imaginable after she witnesses a gang hit on an American DEA agent. Naranjo reveals himself to be a pretty accomplished action director as well, and his ability to tease out the details of his complex, socially aware story in subtle, sophisticated ways ensures it remains compelling through to its thrillingly ambiguous ending.

Also impressive is Weekend (4 stars). Andrew Haigh’s low-budget Brit drama about two men falling for each other over the course of a weekend offers up the kind of subtle, truthful relationship drama that’s all too rare in cinema. Populated with believably human characters, it’s the antithesis of 360: a film about people dealing with the minutiae of their lives in ways that feel real and relatable because of how organically the drama seems to evolve from the characters, not the screenwriter.