A lot of screen actors, particularly British ones, have stage resumes that are more interesting (or at least more challenging) than their film work. But unless you’re a frequent visitor to London or Manhattan, that part of their careers can only be an object of regretful yearning. I was lucky, though, with Maggie Smith.
At age 18, at the end of a teenage backpacking trip in England, my friends decided that a night of theater would be in order—and that it would be the then-already-dated musical smutfest Oh! Calcutta! I was like “Nuh-uh,” and instead went off on my own to see a play called Night and Day. I probably had no idea who Tom Stoppard was, and had as yet zero understanding of the semi-post-colonialist African politics it mused upon. But I knew Smith, who’d replaced Diana Rigg in the lead, and she was phenomenal. Years later in a huge Stoppard bio, I read that the ironic layers she brought to the role (which I assumed were written into the character) had surprised and enthralled its author.
A year later I road-tripped to Stratford, Ontario, where the Shakespeare Festival was having a stupendous season involving some major guest actors. I got to see Smith as Virginia Woolf in a play by Edna O’Brien; trading barbs with Brian Bedford in Much Ado About Nothing; and as Arkadina in The Seagull. It was an incredible experience which the Canadian cultural watchdogs rewarded by reportedly deciding artistic director Robin Phillips’ festival had gotten “too starry,” and letting him go.
Smith—who died last September at age 89—did do some diversely amazing things onscreen, both before and after. But it became increasingly rare to see movies or TV stretch her outside the niche she owned, which showed just a fraction of her talent: The witty, bitchy, very managing dowager best known to later generations via the Harry Potter films, Downton Abbey franchise, and miscellaneous sassy-old-git vehicles with titles like The Lady in the Van, My Old Lady, and Ladies in Lavender. It was a little reductive, for a personality purportedly so non-tranquilizing in real life, to be put in the service of so much cinematic comfort food.
Still, even (or especially?) in those spiky-spinster roles, Smith made an audience sit and up and take notice to the end, suddenly much gladder to be watching whatever they were watching. To many, she exemplified what they liked about British entertainment—and she certainly exemplified what SF’s own Mostly British Film Festival (February 6-13 at the Vogue Theatre, SF) largely celebrates. Fittingly, that festival’s 17th edition will include a two-part salute to her, with films that also pay tribute to other talents spotlit this year.
Though it encompasses “Films from the UK, Ireland, Australia, India, South Africa, and New Zealand,” Mostly Brit has always leaned most towards Numero Uno on that list, with a special fondness for well-loved veteran names. That focus kicks things off this Thurs/8 with The Penguin Lessons, a Dead Poets Society-esque tale. It has crusty Steve Coogan as an English teacher at a private school in mid-1970s Buenos Aires, where he tries to instill a love of poetry amidst political upheaval. It’s directed by Peter Cattaneo, who almost thirty years ago scored one of the biggest British sleeper hits of all time with The Full Monty.
The next afternoon there commences a short tribute to what some consider the greatest UK filmmaking team of all time, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Thrown together by chance in the late 1930s, they began a run of projects that raised the art form in general, and in particular amongst Brit auteurs—Hitchcock aside, style had been in short supply before them.
Martin Scorsese’s documentary from last year, Made In England, examines this roughly twenty-year partnership. (We covered it when it previously played the Roxie here.) That’s followed on Friday by 1945’s I Know Where I’m Going!, a Scottish romance that was atypically small-scale for them at the time, but has emerged as a favorite for many. Of course, its cultural impact was slight in comparison to The Red Shoes three years later, a worldwide success that no doubt turned many little girls into ballerinas—even though it’s a madly flamboyant, color-saturated portrait of artistic pursuit becoming a deadly obsession.
The other great British filmmaking duo, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, weren’t really that at all—one was from Bombay, the other Berkeley. But they became primarily associated with literary adaptations that, while sometimes derided as Masterpiece Theatre cinema, took a particular sort of aristocratic costume drama to a very high level. The festival will show Stephen Soucy’s documentary Merchant Ivory (which we also covered previously here) on Mon/10, followed by their 1985 breakthrough A Room With a View from E.M. Forster’s novel. It was a career-launching enterprise for young stars Helena Bonham Carter, Julian Sands, Rupert Graves, and Daniel Day-Lewis as Edwardians abroad in Italy, and a perfect showcase for Maggie Smith as their highly disapproving chaperone.
Still alive to enjoy his tribute is Hugh Bonneville, another esteemed stage talent who’s become known to wider audiences via Downton Abbey, Doctor Who, the Paddington movies, and more. He’s appearing at Berkeley Rep in Uncle Vanya starting next week, so he’ll be in the Bay Area to attend the festival’s Sat/8 honorary evening, which will also include screening of the under-seen 2009 feature From Time To Time—another collaboration with his Downton colleagues Smith and writer Julian Fellowes. (You can always try your luck at showtime, but this event is sold out.) A few days later, he can be caught in a sneak preview of the new franchise installment Paddington in Peru.
Want yet more familiar faces? Mostly British has got them: The distinctive Irish actor Ciaran Hinds factors in Patrick Dickinson’s Cottontail, in which a Japanese man (Lily Franky) journeys to England to scatter his late wife’s ashes. Former 007 Pierce Brosnan plays a WW2 vet who takes a nostalgic road trip in Stuart Keirle’s The Last Rifleman. 82-year-old Ian McShane is still kicking arse as a professional hitman in Spanish director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallejo’s suspense tale American Star, acting opposite the equally fabled likes of Fanny Ardant (from France) and Thomas Kretschmann (Germany).
His elder Ian McKellen, age 85, plays an acerbic title figure in Anand Tucker’s black comedy of the 1930s London theatre world, The Critic. James Norton gives a beautiful performance as a terminally ill, working-class Belfast single dad trying to prepare his 4-year-old son for the worst in Uberto Pasolini’s Nowhere Special, which we reviewed here. Chris Haywood, whose career stretches back to the Australian New Wave breakthroughs by Peter Weir, Philip Noyce and Bruce Beresford, plays writer-director Bill Bennett’s alter ego in The Way, My Way, about hiking Spain’s Camino de Santiago as a senior.
And England-born, Australia-raised Guy Pearce, who’s having a well-deserved moment thanks to his Oscar-nominated turn in The Brutalist, does more strong work as a missionary cleric caught between Maori intertribal wars and colonialist cruelty in Lee Tamahori’s The Convert, set in 1830 New Zealand. We also covered that one previously here.
Not everything in Mostly British this year is driven by old favorites. The official closing night on Thurs/13 is writer-director Laura Piani’s Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, whose story of a clerk at Paris’ famous Shakespeare & Company bookstore can’t seem to locate that titular scribe’s happy ending in her own real-life romantic life. German actress Aylin Tezel makes her own writing-directing feature debut with Falling Into Place, another quest for love, this one roaming from London to Scotland’s Isle of Skye.
Traveling yea further abroad, Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu’s We Were Dangerous dramatizes the plight of young women in 1950s New Zealand who were sent to a harsh “Christian” correctional institution to have the rebelliousness beaten out of them…by paddle, or Jesus, or both. Not quite so brutal, albeit confining in its own way, is the modern-day elite co-ed boarding school in the Himalayas where 16-year-old Mira (Preeti Panigrahi) comes of age in Girls Will Be Girls. Shuchi Talati’s film, a hit on the festival circuit that briefly played theaters here last fall, was one of last year’s best.
There’s also documentaries here about subjects other than famous filmmakers. Though Never Look Away, which examines the career of flamboyant Kiwi photojournalist Margaret Moth, was made by someone famous—TV’s “Xena: Warrior Princess” Lucy Lawless, making her directorial bow. Cara Holmes’ pastorally lovely Notes From Sheepland puts center-stage Irish multimedia artist turned livestock farmer Orla Barry… whose art is now, naturally, mostly about sheep.
In an “Irish Spotlight” further encompassing Maurice O’Connell’s female boxing drama Swing Bout and Dan Sparks’ biopic Rose’s War (about “the Patty Hearst of the IRA”), a particular nonfiction gem is Jenn Fallon’s Housewife of the Year. That was a nation-wide annual contest from 1967 to 1995, a period that began amid strict, old-school church control of society (complete with legal bans on contraception and divorce). By its end, feminism had reached even the Emerald Isle, demanding major changes—including the eventual demise of a competition whose celebration of domestic servitude had grown embarrassing. With many onetime winners interviewed decades later, and loads of archival footage, this is a charming and poignant march towards collective liberation.
Two of the festival’s best movies don’t fit into any of the above categories. Michael Winterbottom, a Mostly Brit regular who’ll be interviewed post-screening via Zoom by its founder Ruthe Stein, is back in peak form after a few too many throwaway comedies with Shoshana. It’s a tense fiction set in the Palestine of the late 1930s. Then, it was under a British control that attempted to chart a middle path between the demands of Arab residents and an ever-increasing flood Jewish refugees, both populations claiming it as their “homeland.” Terrorist violence is on the rise, though at this point in time, it largely issued from the hands of Zionist extremists. Balancing a conflicted love story against politics, bombs, and assassinations, this provides one compellingly nuanced, complex backstory for dynamics that have only worsened nearly a century later.
In an entirely different vein, Adam Elliott’s Oscar-nominated Australian Memoir of a Snail is an unusually adult animation about orphan twins separated in youth. Focusing primarily on the life of Grace (voiced by Sarah Snook), it’s a whimsically detailed yet fairly merciless head-on treatment of depression and introversion. It’s the first stop-motion feature to be nominated for an Oscar since Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa a decade ago—a film that, curiously, also paid discomfiting close attention to exactly the same mental health issues.
MOSTLY BRITISH FILM FESTIVAL runs Feb. 6-13 at the Vogue Theatre in SF. Full program, ticket and schedule info can be found here.
