{"id":11220,"date":"2020-03-10T12:40:11","date_gmt":"2020-03-10T11:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11220"},"modified":"2020-03-10T12:40:46","modified_gmt":"2020-03-10T11:40:46","slug":"manchester-international-film-festival-day-1-2-reviewed-by-peter-wild","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11220","title":{"rendered":"<strong>Manchester International Film Festival<\/strong> \u2013 Day 1 &#038; 2 | reviewed by Peter Wild"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Manchester International Film Festival \u2013 Day 1 &#038; 2<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In the first of a short series of reviews from this year\u2019s Manchester International Film Festival, we cover days 1 and 2 of the festival\u2026<\/p>\n<p>The festival opens with an opening night gala premiere for <em>Traumfabrik<\/em>, a romantic drama set in Berlin in 1961 (and France many years later), directed by Martin Schreier, who was on hand to answer questions at the end. Credit where credit is due: <em>Traumfabrik<\/em> looks wonderful. It has the broad romantic sweep of <em>Titanic<\/em> combined with the slightly tongue in cheek behind the scenes quality of <em>Singing in the Rain<\/em>. The leads \u2013 Emilia Schule as Milou and Dennis Mojen as Emil \u2013 are suitably bright and bushy-tailed (Schule is as gamine as Audrey Tatou in <em>Amelie<\/em> and Mojen smoulders like a young DiCaprio), and setting a broad strokes boy-meets-girl rom com against the backdrop of the Berlin Wall\u2019s first appearance feels risky enough to give proceedings an edgy frisson. It\u2019s not without its problems, though: it\u2019s overlong, for one thing, it\u2019s a little cliched (a boy-meets-girl rom com has to work hard to avoid the pitfalls of a genre that is by any stretch of the imagination long in the tooth \u2013 and <em>Traumfabrik<\/em> doesn\u2019t work hard enough in this regard), a little fake (in the Absolute Beginners \u2018every scene looks like it was filmed on a set\u2019 kind of way) and a bit cheesy. But if you liked <em>Titanic<\/em> you\u2019ll probably think it\u2019s great. <\/p>\n<p>Our next stop was shorts \u2013 particularly Shorts Session 1 &#038; 2, where we saw 12 films that lived up to the International flavour of the festival \u2013 we saw films from France (\u2018Nico\u2019, \u2018Sweepers\u2019), we saw films from Austria (\u2018Beyond\u2019), we saw films from the UK (\u2018From This Day Forward\u2019, \u2018This is English\u2019) and we saw films from the US (\u2018Adams\u2019, \u2018Bad Assistant\u2019). One of the great joys of watching short films packaged together for your edification and delight is that if you don\u2019t like one, you don\u2019t have to worry too much because there will be another along in a minute. We\u2019ll just concentrate here on the films that we got a massive kick out of: Tom Stern\u2019s \u2018Adams\u2019, which starred Patton Oswalt and <em>Portlandia<\/em>\u2019s Fred Armisen and was an adaptation of George Saunders\u2019 short story that first appeared back in The New Yorker in 2004, a high-octane, highly funny tale of neighbourly disenchantment; Karel van Bellingen\u2019s \u2018From This Day Forward\u2019, a beautifully shot love story starring Sheila Hancock which told the story of a wife\u2019s attempts to ease her husband\u2019s passage from this world; the hilarious \u2018This is English\u2019 which focused on a secret underground gang busy correcting errant apostrophes; and \u2018Bad Assistant\u2019, in which Jason Schwartzman plays a supremely egotistical film star, fresh from bagging a starring role in a new Marvel type movie who forces his put upon assistant to help move his friend\u2019s dead body because\u2026 you know\u2026 a corpse being found in his house would rather ruin his day. <\/p>\n<p>Appetite whetted from watching 12 short films in a row, we made our way to <em>Lost Transmissions<\/em>, something of a departure for its star, Simon Pegg, who plays Theo, a music producer with a history of schizophrenia. The film takes us from schmoozy parties with friends via a sort of <em>Star is Born<\/em> narrative (featuring Juno Temple as a young wannabe singer-songwriter) into a dogged <em>Leaving Las Vegas<\/em> style trawl through psychotic episodes and homelessness and upset. It\u2019s a hard watch and no mistaking, both because its subject matter feels quite raw but also because \u2013 and there\u2019s no nice way to put this \u2013 it\u2019s not a very good film. We know from the outset that what we are watching is based on a true story, and <em>Lost Transmissions<\/em> undoubtedly has a ring of authenticity about it, not least in the way that Pegg\u2019s character can quickly switch from angrily ranting about why he needs to contact the Princess of Time to rationally explaining how the people around him misunderstood his latest outburst. Speaking afterwards, Pegg explained what drew him to the part was quite simply that he doesn\u2019t tend to get offered these kinds of roles and it also presented him with the first opportunity in twenty plus years of acting in films of working with a female director, both of which are laudable. The problem is that <em>Lost Transmissions<\/em> seems to tangibly demonstrate the limits of what Pegg can do (this is not Jim Carrey in <em>Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind<\/em> or Robin Williams in <em>Awakenings<\/em>), and so there is an awful lot of rather over the top emoting. This, in turn, rather distances you from the film at a time when your sympathy for the character of Theo should be growing. By the time you stumble over the grizzled climax, you\u2019ve been looking at your watch for a half an hour and wishing the whole enterprise be done. <\/p>\n<p><strong>Coming soon: <em>Requiem for a Dream, Roy\u2019s World: Barry Gifford\u2019s Chicago, Memento, Le Champion and Sweethearts<\/em>. <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>by Peter Wild<\/strong>  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Manchester International Film Festival \u2013 Day 1 &#038; 2 In the first of a short series of reviews from this year\u2019s Manchester International Film Festival, we cover days 1 and 2 of the festival\u2026 The festival opens with an opening night gala premiere for Traumfabrik, a romantic drama set in Berlin in 1961 (and France [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[14,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Manchester International Film Festival \u2013 Day 1 &amp; 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