Since its inception a decade ago, the Mostly British Film Festival has carved out an unusual niche, distinguishing itself among a crowded field of local festivals as a reliable source for classic and first-run English-language movies from abroad - foreign films without the subtitles, if you will - while maintaining a loyal audience for a mix of lesser-known titles and big-ticket fare headed for theatrical release. On its 10th anniversary, MBFF's founder, former San Francisco Chronicle movie editor Ruthe Stein, has once again brought a discerning eye to the programming.
If the current political situation and the goblin running the country aren't scary enough for you, there's "The Lodgers," a gothic ghost tale from Irish director Brian O'Malley. The atmospheric 1920s period piece was shot in the Irish countryside at a gloomy 700-year-old mansion that stands in for the dilapidated estate that's home - make that a prison - for its sole heirs, orphaned twins held hostage in the house by an ancestral family curse. They rattle around the premises encountering ghostly presences, the lodgers of the title, who haunt the drafty rooms and call the shots after Midnight, giving new meaning to "You can check in, but you can't check out."
After this bout of terror, one can seek refuge and comic relief in the mischievous literary humor of Cambridge Footlights alum and gay activist Stephen Fry, whose 1994 novel "The Hippopotamus" has been adapted for the screen. Roger Allam, a fine English character actor who specializes in dyspeptic men of a certain age, plays a cranky, second-rate poet who's sacked from his day job as a newspaper theater critic after he indulges in a bellicose, if well-deserved, rant during a ludicrous London performance of "Titus Andronicus." Later, swilling his misfortunes away at a private pity party - alcohol being one of the major food groups and drinking his true vocation - he's approached and offered a substantial sum to investigate miracle cures at a country manor. Equipped with the wit, erudition and whip-smart acerbic observations one has come to expect from Fry, our dissolute hero tracks down friends and adversaries on a booze-infused quest for truth.
A trio of gritty classics is on a triple bill dedicated to the British New Wave. The term refers to the mostly black & white kitchen-sink dramas released during the 1960s that exposed the fault lines of an archaic British class system and the shabby hardscrabble lives of the working class. In "Darling," director John Schlesinger's stylish essay in emptiness and a misspent life in swinging 1960s London, a young and lovely Julie Christie stars in her Oscar-winning role as an attractive though unremarkable woman who enters into a series of bleak, dead-end liaisons with predatory media types and jet-setters (Dirk Bogarde, Laurence Harvey), culminating in a loveless marriage to an Italian prince. In a famous scene, she's seated alone at the head of a mile-long dinner table in her husband's luxurious palazzo, a veritable prisoner sentenced to solitary confinement in a gilded cage. In terms of its sly critique of the alienation that can come in the wake of unfettered freedom and aimlessness, "Darling" is a companion piece to "Alfie" (1966), which has endured largely due to Michael Caine's irrepressible, career-defining performance as a roguish, self-styled Casanova - a callous Cockney cad who objectifies a string of women whom he beds with what passes for charm and discards without conscience. One of the first British films to address sex, abortion and homosexuality, Tony Richardson's "A Taste of Honey" (1961) features a script co-written by an 18-year-old playwright, Shelagh Delaney, and a touching Rita Tushingham as a pregnant teenager whose connection with a young, compassionate gay man offers her love and acceptance she has found nowhere else.
Based on an unconventional 2011 hit London musical, "London Road" takes as its unlikely subject a serial killing spree and its impact on the working-class inhabitants of a small English town. The film draws on interviews playwright-screenwriter Alecky Blythe conducted with locals, and the real-life 2006 case in which a predator nicknamed "The Suffolk Strangler" murdered five prostitutes in six weeks. The raft of suspects includes a slovenly cab driver played by Tom Hardy bringing his usual queasy brew of sordidness and menace, and there's a turn by the dependably sterling Olivia Colman, who portrays a woman mounting a valiant struggle to salvage her neighborhood's reputation.
The festival closer, "Journey's End" is also based on a theatrical production: R.C. Sherriff's 1928 drama, which premiered in London 10 years after the horrific trench warfare of the so-called Great War had ended. The dialogue-driven scenario focuses on a British infantry division trapped in a foxhole on the edge of a no-man's-land in Northern France. Their ranks include an introspective, intellectually inclined senior officer (Paul Bettany), a naive young soldier eager for action (Asa Butterfield), and a respected captain (Sam Claflin) crippled by his increasing reliance on the bottle. They employ a variety of strategies to maintain their sanity in the face of insane, unbearably claustrophobic, terrifying circumstances underground, while anticipating the dreadful barbed-wire grave that awaits them above. Looming over it all is our retrospective knowledge of the mass slaughter to come and the waste of promising lives. The closing-night dessert party might be just the thing to lift the spirits; or better yet, the whiskey and gin tastings, available in-between select screenings.
Feb. 15-22 at the Vogue Theatre. Info: mostlybritish.org.
Photo: Courtesy MBFF
"The Lodgers" is a gothic ghost tale from Irish director Brian O'Malley. Photo: Courtesy MBFF