Tales of infidelity at the London Film Festival

By Kevin Lally

FJI Executive Editor Kevin Lally reports on some highlights from the recently concluded Times BFI London Film Festival.

I'm back from aweek's vacationin London, England, but I couldn't avoid making it a bit of a busman's holiday, since the 53rd annual Times BFI London Film Festival happened to coincide with my visit. I left before the closing-night screening of a film this Beatle fan can't wait to see, the John Lennon drama Nowhere Boy, and I was too late to secure one of the remaining press seats for the Q&A sessions with Clive Owen and Julianne Moore, but I still managed to sample a number of intriguing films amidst my theatregoing and museum-gazing.

This year's festival, which hosted 193 feature films, sought to raise the event's profile with more star-driven U.K. premieres and a new awards ceremony. Among the stars turning up to represent films like The Road, Chloe, A Serious Man, and the George Clooney trifecta of Up in the Air, The Men Who Stare at Goats and Fantastic Mr. Fox were Bill Murray, Julianne Moore, Viggo Mortensen, Emma Thompson, Colin Firth and, of course, Mr. Clooney himself. Jacques Audiard's acclaimed A Prophet took the award for Best Film and Defamation scored the Grierson Award for Best Documentary.

For my own screening choices, I opted for films that haven't yet screened in New York or may never appear stateside. By sheer chance, a recurring theme of my selections was the price of marital infidelity.

Chloe, the new film from Canada's Atom Egoyan, is a remake of the 2003 French drama Nathalie, about a gynecologist(Moore) who hires a young call girl (Amanda Seyfried) to test the faithfulness of her college professor husband (Liam Neeson). But Seyfried's Chloe is more of a wild card than Moore ever anticipated, and the experiment wreaks havoc on the elegant wife and mother's pristine home life. Moore brings depth and subtlety to her performance, but ultimatelyChloe is anunconvincing melodrama that goes way over the top.

A much more persuasive infidelity tale is Leaving, a French-language drama with a sensational performance by Kristin Scott Thomas. The bilingual actress plays a married mother of two teenagers who falls madly in love with the Spaniard (Sergi Lopez) who's been hired to fix up a home office for her return to work as a physiotherapist. But husband Yvan Attal refuses to accept this attack on his marriage and does everything he can to thwart his wife until she agrees to return to him. Briskly directed by Catherine Corsini, this feminist look at a woman's right to choose passion could be a smart pickup for an American distributor.

Infidelity also propels the narrative in Adrift, a 1980s-era Brazilian drama from writer-director Heitor Dhalia. The story centers on 14-year-old Filipa (poised and pretty newcomer Laura Neiva) during a summer holiday with her family at the beach. The girl adores her novelist father, but soon discovers he's having a fling with an attractive American who lives nearby. As Filipa deals with the sexual games of her teenage friends, she also learns that her parents' marriage is far more complex and troubled than she ever knew. The film is well-acted all around (including by French star Vincent Cassel showing off his fluent Portuguese) and the locations are handsome, but this coming-of-age tale is far too familiar to travel much beyond its native Brazil.

A more original family drama came from Spain: Ander, the story of a single, forty-something Basque farmer whose life changes when he breaks his leg and his family hires a Peruvian ranch-hand to take over his chores. The awkward rapport between Ander and his temporary replacement suddenly turns sexual, and the lonely farmer struggles to come to terms with what he has made of his life. With distinct echoes of Brokeback Mountain (and a similar leisurely pace), this debut feature from Roberto Castn, director of the Bilbao Gay Film Festival, should intrigue audiences at various gay festivals, but its understated style limits its theatrical potential.

Groundbreaking music-video and feature director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) has also been in a family frame of mind lately. His documentary The Thorn in the Heart pays tribute to his feisty Aunt Suzette, a teacher who worked at various schools in rural France from the 1950s to mid-'80s. This is a film of very modest pleasures, with far more resonance for the admiring director than for a general audience. Still, it wouldn't be a Gondry film without quirky touches like the makeshift cinema he builds in one village, or the experimental short he creates with a group of schoolchildren wearing "invisible" bluescreen costumes. The one dark element in the portrait is Suzette's relationship with her struggling gay son, a model-train aficionado who built the miniature villages which charmingly introduce each stop in Gondry's nostalgic journey.

Finally, family is the enemy in Glorious 39, the new melodrama from well-regarded British writer-director Stephen Poliakoff (Gideon's Daughter, Close My Eyes). Romala Garai (Atonement) stars as a young actress in 1939 Britain who discovers that the aristocratic clan that adopted her as a child is full of dark secrets, mainly driven by their desire to appease the growing Nazi threat at any cost, including murder. The movie is like a Merchant Ivory version of a paranoid thriller�lushly appointed and completely daft. Top Brit actors like Bill Nighy, Julie Christie, Jeremy Northam, David Tennant, Hugh Bonneville and Christopher Lee try but fail to lend this overwrought tale some credibility.

The London Film Festival also showcased the British premieres of many of the year's most acclaimed festival films, such as The White Ribbon, Lebanon, Mother, Precious, Vincere and Sweet Rush, plus "Treasures from the Archives" like Abel Gance's J'Accuse, Anthony Asquith's silent Underground, Capra's Dirigible, Bergman's The Touch, and John Stahl's Leave Her to Heaven. It's a world-class festival and a treat for Londoners, who probably don't care that the earlier Toronto and Venice events get a lot more press.