Sitting here at midnight after too many whisky cocktails, in a ripped cocktail dress and a borrowed shirt, I wonder vaguely if I have yet made contact with the same Glasgow Film Festival as the regular punters, or if they have met mine. I keep losing track of the days. Sometimes this seems to have been going on forever. It's certainly going to be hard to go back to routine press screenings and the familiar run of awful films once it's done.
Officially, I took Monday off. I had a presentation to do on transgender theory and a lunch date with a complicated woman, but, of course, one never really gets away from it, and the first four hours of the day were spent editing reviews. Stuart got in touch promptly to recount his adventures of the night before, when he'd been covering the Optimo party in Glasgow's Sub Club. They had a red room there, with velvet drapes and a miniature Venus de Milo (or, as David Lynch put it, "the babe with no arms"), but it was too loud to actually hear the films screening there, so someone had had the idea of stacking up a pile of televisions, each screening a different Lynch short; one on its side just showing static. People gathered round to watch them nonetheless, whilst a woman dressed as a rabbit wandered by. It seems to have been a successful night.
Stuart was off, too, on Monday, but Drew went in to catch a screening of rarely seen Audrey Hepburn western The Unforgiven - the print had been flown in specially and was flown away again as soon as the showing was over. He was relieved to have seen it at all, having had difficulty arranging access - the Hepburn retrospective strand was selling particularly well. Organiser Allison Gardner stopped by to note that festival ticket sales overall are already over 40 per cent up on last year. Drew kept on bumping into her when she was carrying things in and out of the building, and worried that she ought to get some shoes without heels.
Donald, meanwhile, incurred my envy by going to see French thriller MR 73, but said it wasn't actually all that good - whilst he enjoyed it, he reckoned the people calling it 'the French Se7en' have been taking things a bit too far.
The following day I caught a Hepburn film myself - rarely seen classic The Children's Hour, which was nominated for several Oscars on its release but sadly now languishes in obscurity. It's a rare forceful role for Hepburn, and her anger, so rarely seen, makes quite an impression; it's a reminder that she was much more than a cutesy starlet. The story was important because, in its time, it broke new ground in introducing a lesbian theme to mainstream cinema. "It's a bit like The Killing Of Sister George," remarked one patron on her way out. "I didn't think they made films like that," said another, and a third recalled how much it had meant to her in her youth, when she and somebody she had previously thought of as just a friend left the cinema and embraced and were able to talk about their feelings for the first time.
After The Children's Hour I spent 15 minutes catching up with festival director Allan Hunter, who regretted that he was short on gossip as he had to keep rushing from screen to screen to make introductions, and then it was time for another tale of forbidden romance, Worlds Apart, based on the true story of a Jehovah's Witness who fell in love with a non-believer. It's difficult to deal with a subject like that without coming across as a little heavy-handed, and the film seemed stilted in places, but it was nevertheless an affecting drama, unusual in that it made an effort to understand both sides of the equation. It's an ambitious and interesting little film, yet to secure distribution in the UK - I really hope it does so, so that the rest of you can enjoy it.
By the time this film finished it was half past five, and I hurried home with no time to eat dinner, hastily typing in a review and stuffing some chocolate pudding into my mouth as I got changed. Stuart was on photography duty at the Audrey Hepburn themed party that night, and I assisted where I could as he did his thing. It was a party full of women in little black dresses, with cocktails going free for a while and later a free whisky bar, with assorted film directors blushing as their pictures were taken and with Allison showing them how it's done on the dance floor. A giant screen showed stills of the celebrated star and there were balloons and little cakes piled high with butter icing - far more, as it turned out, than anyone could eat.
As the evening went on, the theme wavered a little, with Angelo Badalamenti music getting played and other tracks hinting at tomorrow's planned Mexican bash. I left later than I'd intended and wandered home through alleyways, stopping every five minutes when Stuart found something to photograph. Since I have to be up early tomorrow, I'm going to call this a night, but watch this space, because more GFF news is coming soon.
