Film REVIEWS
DOCUMENTARY JIG (PG) 97min ●●●●●
A year on from being named one of the UK’s top ten directors by Broadcast magazine, documentary filmmaker Sue Bourne would seem to actually be obeying the law of diminishing returns. Her last film for Channel 4’s Cutting Edge series The Red Lion was a pointless and depressing foray into Britain’s pub culture and now Jig – a film about the 40th Irish dancing World Championships (held in Glasgow in 2010) – is just plain dull. It’s all a far cry from the empathetic simplicity of her earlier films My Street and Mum and Me. Taking her lead from Jeffrey Blitz’s Spellbound and Marilyn Agrelo’s
Mad Hot Ballroom, Bourne builds up her portrait of parental obsession and ingénue determination with indulgent interviews and padded backstory, all edited to create some kind of mild conflict within the competing age groups. Back and forth we go. We meet their coaches, who for the most part seem to be angry yelping terriers obsessed with succeeding in their minority sport. Then there’s the wigs, the overpriced dresses, the financially challenged parents. It’s all very My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.
It takes a long time to get to the tournament itself, by which time it’s difficult to care or even understand what’s going on. There are a couple of problems here, and the biggest one is structural. By its very nature Irish dancing lacks the romance of ballroom dancing or the nerdy familiarity of the spelling bee, so it needs to be tenderised for public consumption. Jig lacks those lyrical segues, the poetry, those moments snatched from eternity that make Blitz and Agrelo’s films so compelling. The film also lacks context and conflict, a little archival footage and foul-mouthed abuse would have gone a long way.
Though undoubtedly a work of intense research and hard work, Jig drags when it should be making you root for a winner, a sure sign of a short film stretched beyond its content. (Paul Dale) ■ GFT, Glasgow, Fri 6–Thu 12 May and selected release. See profile, page 52.
DRAMA RED HILL (15) 97min ●●●●●
With its tale of a convict on the loose and a rookie cop on his first day on the job, Red Hill is hardly original. Written and directed by debuting Aussie director Patrick Hughes, if you crossed No Country for Old Men with Assault on Precinct 13, you wouldn’t be far off this modern-day western. Yet what it lacks in originality, it more than makes up for in bravado and tension. True Blood star Ryan Kwanten plays Shane Cooper, fresh from the big city and ready to settle for a quiet life in the titular town with his pregnant wife. Boy, did he pick the wrong day to make his transfer. Scar-faced Jimmy Conway (Tommy Lewis) escapes from prison and returns to Red Hill to revenge himself upon the townsfolk who put him away.
If Red Hill has a problem, it’s that it tries to do too much (there’s even a subplot involving a deadly panther). But anchored by Kwanten’s impressive performance and Hughes’ ability to orchestrate his action scenes, this is a highly watchable potboiler. Alongside recent crime film Animal Kingdom, it shows that the Australian genre film or Ozploitation is in rude health. (James Mottram) ■ General release from Fri 13 May.
54 THE LIST 28 Apr–26 May 2011
DRAMA LE QUATTRO VOLTE (tbc) 100min ●●●●●
Le Quattro Volte is a difficult film to define, part human drama part anthropological study, it explores the interconnectedness of life in a hilltop village in Calabria, Italy. The film loosely links together four narratives: the story of an elderly goat farmer
who staves off bad health by taking a daily concoction of water and dust from the local church; the experiences of a baby goat as it makes its first steps in the world; the journey of a majestic fir tree chosen as the focal point of a local celebration and the same tree’s eventual transformation into charcoal.
Carefully paced and without dialogue, Le Quattro Volte relishes the small details
of rural life, encouraging audiences to immerse themselves in the rhythms and traditions of the community. Even with its meandering quality Le Quattro Volte never becomes tiresome;
director Michelangelo Frammatino continually throws up unexpected visual treats: the surreal sight of villagers in fancy dress as part of a religious parade, an escaped goat standing on a kitchen table and ants swarming a forgotten magazine scrap. With its shifting perspectives and unusual juxtapositions Le Quattro Volte offers
up much food for thought and is intriguing and beautiful in equal measure. (Gail Tolley) ■ GFT, Glasgow and Filmhouse, Edinburgh, Fri 27 May–Thu 4 Jun.