Screen

Thames bfi London Film Festivaldirs various19 October – 3 NovemberFairly bad behaviour abounded at this year’s London Film Festival, one of the finest in recent memory. The overriding theme of the past fortnight was that of dazzling female leads. Aamong the astonishing performances, Judi Dench delighted as a deliciously politically incorrect grand dame who enters the world of 1930s nude vaudeville courtesy of Stephen Frears in Mrs Henderson Presents. Come March, the Best Aactress Oscar will be highly contested.Yet it was Gwyneth Paltrow who threw the gauntlet down with an earth-shattering study of the many shades of suffering in John Madden’s gorgeously staged Proof. This chamberpiece, an adaptation of Ddavid Aauburn’s Pulitzer-winning play, deals confidently with constricting familial ties, mental illness and mathematicalgenius. Aanthony Hopkins, Hope Ddavis and especially Jake Gyllenhaal undertake supporting duties with real finesse.Honours for performer of the festival, though, must go to Juliette Binochewho is startling in two very different films, adopting perfect Eenglish for Bee Season and reverting to her native French for Michael Haneke’s Hidden. With their debut feature in 2001, The Deep End, Scott McGehee and David Siegel fashioned an elaborate film noir – in Bee Season the familiar visual panache is still in evidence, but the push and pull of family dynamics are explored with greater style and sophistication.Conversely, Haneke’s Hidden sees Binoche play one half of a media couple (along with a commendable Daniel Auteuil) who become the victims of a stalker in this subtly provocative psychological thriller. Whereas the Ddardenne brothers disappointed with the overblown social realism of the undeserved Palme-d’Or-winning The Child, Haneke revels in his explorationof a mediated society to destabilise his audience, using shot-within-shot, for example, to pose the urgent questions. Aand the suicide that forms the film’s climax is the stuff of a real nightmare, inciting more debate at Cannes than most films on show this year did in their entirety.Then arrived Walk The Line, James Mangold’s beautifully directed Johnny Cash biopic, which made me hurt in all the right places with Joaquin Phoenix and Rreese Witherspoon stepping up to the microphone for real and hopefully bagging Oscars for their pains next year. It came close to stealing the fortnight but the pick of this year’s crop was the debut feature documentary from famed photographer and video director LaChapelle, Rize. This is an intimately shot, extraordinarily fresh portrayal of the spirit and creativity in the youth of South Central LAa, as it follows the evolution of krumping, a striking new dance form. LaChapelle’s film is as striking in its honesty as his fashion photography is in its audacity.It is in the appearance of such a film in the programme that the perennial joy of the London Film Festival becomes apparent. That artistic director Sandra Hebron is enough impassioned by great film to throw such an inventive piece as Rrize in an already provocativerepertoire can only be a good thing. With this forty ninth London Film Festival being such a success, one can only imagine the delights in store for next year’s half-century celebrations.ARCHIVE: 4th week MT 2005