Glory [FOUR STARS]
Dir: Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov
With: Stefan Denolyubov, Margita Gosheva
Runtime: 102mins
As with their engrossing 2014 film The Lesson, which also screened at EIFF, Bulgarian writer-director team Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov present a fierce critique of their country by using a small upset in the life of an honest but down-trodden public employee to start a desperate chain reaction that highlights wider societal issues.
The Lesson, set against the backdrop of the Eurozone crisis, turned on the theft of a small amount of money from a teacher. Here it's the discovery of a large amount by shy, reclusive, stuttering railway worker Tsanko (Stefan Denolyubov) which kicks things off. Honest to a fault, Tsanko reports his find, but the Department of Transport is under attack for corruption and the Minister's ruthless PR fixer Jules (Margita Gosheva, star of The Lesson) knows a good news story when she sees one. And so Tsanko is summoned to the city for a photo op and an award. The title refers to the brand name of Tsanko's beloved watch, a gift from his father, which is lost during the ceremony. It's his attempts to get it back that drive the film to its shocking climax.
As the plot moves forward the directors over-egg things a little in their desire to prove a point. Subtlety would be as potent a weapon. Still, Glory delivers an absorbing and affecting study of injustice, corruption and the abuse of power helped by powerful performances from Denolyubov and the ever-watchable Gosheva.
The Receptionist [THREE STARS]
Dir: Jenny Lu
With: Teresa Daley, Chen Shiang-Chyi, Amanda Fan
Runtime: 102mins
Screening in the Best Of British strand, but performed mostly in Mandarin and Taiwanese, Jenny Lu’s Kickstarter-funded film digs into the world of the UK's illegal massage parlours with a narrative made all the more shocking for its being based on a true story. Teresa Daley is Tina, a Taiwanese graduate living in London with her British student architect boyfriend. Unable to find work she ends up as a receptionist at a massage parlour. Wu, previously a participant in EIFF’s 2014 Talent Lab incubator scheme, sets most of the action there, giving the film a pleasing theatricality but pulling no punches in regard to the treatment dished out to the young sex workers. The Receptionist is clumsy at points, a little shrill at others, but there's no denying its weight.
A Distant Echo [THREE STARS]
Dir: George Clark
With: Stuart Baxter, John Clark, Brian Hibbert, Michael Parkinson
Runtime: 82mins
Screening in the experimental Black Box strand of the Edinburgh International Film Festival and here making its UK premiere, this intriguing film from Yorkshire-born artist George Clark was shot almost entirely in California's Mojave Desert but takes as its subject Ancient Egypt's lore and also its lure: additional footage was shot in the wood-panelled Leeds Library, the UK's oldest subscription library, and shows four men poring over old books stuffed with images of antiquities. Clark uses Yorkshire voices to narrate, too, though the words are inspired by Shadi Abdel Salam's 1969 film A Night Of Counting The Years, one of the most celebrated in Egyptian cinema.
A Distant Echo is presented in nine chapters and the steady procession of landscape shots – distant hills, sunsets, the serpentine dunes – is intercut with others: images of two figures in djellabas in the desert; animated geometric pyramids appearing on a black screen; and a recurring motif of three round, bone-white stones, sometimes held in a sand-encrusted hand. Adding to the film's mesmeric qualities is a choral soundtrack by Huddersfield-born jazz musician and composer Tom Challenger. Chewy stuff, but tasty with it.
Tokyo Idols [THREE STARS]
Dir: Kyoko Miyake
With: Hiigari Rio
Runtime: 88mins
Japanese-born director Kyoko Miyake studied the history of witchcraft at Oxford University, which seems at first glance to have little to do with the subject at hand here – Japan's obsession with “idols”, the thousands of teenage girls who perform in poky clubs for audiences of devoted (and mostly male) admirers, either as solo pop acts or in choreographed girl bands. But look closer: both subjects concern male attitudes to women and, as one of Miyake's feminist commentators notes here, the men who idolise the idols are essentially fetishising girlhood as a means of denying power and agency to grown women.
As for the wider sociological and economic forces at play, Miyake dips into them too. But mostly she follows Rio, a 19-year-old idol on the cusp of success, and the 43-year-old uber-fan who spends thousands of yen attending her shows in the company of a handful of other Rio-obsessed cheerleaders. And yes, it is all as creepy as it sounds. A fascinating and often disturbing documentary, though if the premise sounds familiar to watchers of BBC Four it's because a slightly shorter version with a different title screened in the channel's Storyville strand on Tuesday.
Barry Didcock
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