The tag line of this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival is “What Will You Discover?” together with some fetching graphics, name-checking great movies screened here before their reputation was assured – Man on Wire, Amores Perros and The Hurt Locker among them.
Edinburgh is a festival that showcases new films by little-known British directors, an early indicator of intriguing talents.
The major cause for excitement on the first day’s 'voyage of discovery’ was Skeletons, an unusual work from feature film debutant Nick Whitfield, with a largely unknown cast.
Andrew Buckley and Ed Gaughan (both excellent) play Bennett and Davis, a black-suited pair who travel the English countryside, exorcising clients’ painful memories by means of a mysterious “procedure”; metaphorically, they remove skeletons from cupboards.
This starts out as comedy; Davis approaches his work like a bureaucratic salesman, ensuring the correct forms are completed, while Bennett frets about the effects on clients.
But the tone of Skeletons changes gradually when they encounter an attractive middle-aged woman (Danish actress Paprika Steen) mourning her husband, who disappeared years before, and her daughter (Tuppence Middleton) struck mute by some trauma.
From this point, there’s an appealing tenderness in the story, which resolves itself ingeniously. One hesitates to over-praise such a delicate, small-scale work, but Whitfield seems like a major talent.
As for the Little and Large combo of Buckley (a big, portly man with sweetly sad features) and Gaughan (small, dark, with restless energy), they have a terrific screen chemistry, playing off each other with the relaxed ease of a veteran comedy duo.
If only that were true of a film that literally is about a comedy duo. Huge is the film debut of comedian Ben Miller (from Armstrong and Miller). Its leading men, Johnny Harris and Noel Clarke, play aspiring stand-ups Warren and Clark, who share a passion for Morecambe and Wise.
Harris’s Warren, who has a pleading intensity, feels that together he and Clark could become, well, huge. Clark -- cheerful, nice, unambitious “ has his doubts. After some humiliating episodes in comedy clubs, Warren finds himself unemployed awhile Clark is donning a chicken suit for soulless but well-paid commercials work.
Miller and Simon Godley adapted the film from a 1993 script by Godley and Jez Butterworth. The story concentrates on the cut-throat side of stand-up comedy. But it’s one thing to present a story about comedians without many laughs, it’s quite another never to show what might have made them funny in the first place.
Out of the Ashes is a British documentary with an appealing subject – the underdog Afghanistan cricket team and their surprising progress in their attempts to make it to cricket’s World Cup. Their coach, Taj Malik, is a funny, larger-than-life character; his journey from refugee camps to beautifully-manicured cricket grounds in more fortunate countries is heartening.
Skeletons: * * * *
Huge * *
Out of the Ashes * * *