EauDouce

I saw this film at the Hippodrome Festival of Silent Cinema with a specially commissioned live score by Shona Mooney that was so mind- blowingly good that it's hard to separate out the film itself from the combined experience. However that's silent films I suppose, they are new each time in a way that talkies aren't. Although I've just had the best night out at the cinema for a long time, the film as a stand-alone item isn't perfect. That said it's pretty damn good and, note, one of those ones where you'd be foolish to decide whether to go and see it based on a You Tube clip. Like a Scott novel, you might dip into it and think it ludicrously antiquated, but accept its own rhythms and logic and you get hooked. The film really is Annie Laurie, it's her (Gish) and not any of the men who is the pivot, who makes the important choices good and bad, deals with the consequences, drives the narrative and has a full physical part in the very well-done and action-packed finale. It's funny at times, romantic or suspenseful at others.

The music though, in the performance I saw: simply stunning, and the best live film score I've experienced. The performers were, appropriately, Scottish traditional musicians and aside from being good music, pure and simple, the score was pitch perfect at every point in interpreting and enhancing the action. As one small example, one of the film's big problems, for a modern audience, is that the male love interest Ian MacGregor (this is the old story of the Campbells and the MacGregors leading up to Glencoe) is hard to take seriously. Unlike the character of his brother, who gets the 'other' girl and could probably pass muster in a current Hollywood film in a Paul Rudd kind of way, the way Kerry plays Ian, and the way his character looks, are just not what we are conditioned to expect and initially seem comic. However Mooney's music believes in him, just as Annie Laurie does, and it's the music that, building up to a climactic and decisive mid-river kiss, made us feel the moment as Annie Laurie does and, at that point and thereafter, buy into the deal that she does.

Even a ridiculous Hollywood postscript comes, rather nicely, in colour when all else is in black and white; whatever the actual explanation, it felt like a cool, self-subverting marker that we'd shifted realities, and made for a great close - reminded me of a similar effect from the extending of the aspect ratio in Dolan's Mommy - which I'd recently seen.

All in all, go to see Annie Laurie at any point, but if you get a chance to see it with the Shona Mooney score (the HippFest audience were told it would be touring at least to the Barbican in London), you should go considerably out of your way not to miss it.

I found this a very difficult watch at the 2013 Glasgow film fest. Not particularly because of the subject matter, which involves "difficult" themes (bullying, abuse, mental illness), but because of the worthy, dull, predictable and o so British way with which they were dealt. Some of the acting from the established actors is quite good, but really the plot is dire. A critical scene, which sums up the film, involves a character in a coma envisaging a dream world in a church where they are being called to death on one side, while a character appears in the light of the church door and urges them instead towards the light of life. If that appeals to you then I suppose you may enjoy this film.

I went to see this with low expectations as a filler between more apparently heavyweight films at the Glasgow Film Festival but it turned out to be the best film of the festival. A lot more than just a gay romance, it's very funny, very sexy and clever. Although not apparent from the English subtitles, the film flows between Catalan and Spanish as comfortably as it flows between sexualities and the Galician outsider, who is neither quite Castillian nor Catalan, effortlessly occupies a hitherto undreamed of aspirational space which acts with centrifugal force on the other characters. I loved the peripheral characters and their world - something rang very true about them. With the main plot there is drama, there are plot twists, and an ending which is somehow so lovely that you will leave the cinema with a smile on your face. Go see.