re:mote voices

Title: Festival
Cast: Amelia Bullmore, Billy Carter, Jonah Lotan, Stephen Mangan, Raquel Cassidy, Stuart Milligan, Daniela Nardini, Chris O'Dowd, Lucy Punch, Clive Russell
Director: Annie Griffin

Festival is a film about the Edinburgh Festival, a series of 7 individual festivals which take place every August in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh. In particular, Festival focuses on characters involved in the Comedy Festival and The Fringe (a range of theatre/art performances that take place anywhere from a theatre to a porta cabin). The film is something of an ensemble piece, following a range of characters through the period of the festival, going through their ups and downs and the points where the storylines cross paths.

The film starts with the arrival of a young actress in Edinburgh, she gets off the bus, emerging into the chaos of the festival. Immersing the viewer in the feel of the city, as she immediately becomes involved in promoting her one woman show about Dorothy Wordsworth. Which she is performing in the same theatre as a man performing a show about sexual abuse with in the Catholic church. The two become friends, watching a show a by a Canadian art/dance troupe, also performing in the same theatre. A troupe who have rented a flat in Edinburgh for their stay, and form strange relationships with the woman who owns the flat, and a random Scotsman who comes in off the street.

Then we have Britain's funniest comedian, who is in Edinburgh to judge and present the comedy award, but is more interested in securing a high profile role in Hollywood. His long suffering PA, who is trying to co-ordinate his career, while trying not to stop him driving her to drink. The young blonde he is having a fling with, who is also a struggling young comedienne trying to make her mark. There is the Radio Scotland art's critic, who he has an argument with and who is also on the panel for judging the comedy awards.

Mixed in there, we have the two Irish comedians, one who has lost his glove puppet, and feels that he isn't funny without it, and his veteran friend who is on the edge of a breakdown. They have an inside on the comedy panel, an Irish woman from a small theatre group, who won a place from a competition. Trying to increase his chances the veteran comedian sets about seducing the radio critic.

Given an 18 rating in the UK, Festival could quite easily have been a 15, giving it access to a wider audience. The reason that Festival is an 18 is clear - the penis shot. There is one scene, where you very briefly and actually quite unnecessarily see a penis, a rubber one at that. Given the nature of the scene, the performance suggests everything it needs to without that shot.

The cast of characters provides ample material to work from, perhaps too much. Festival almost feels as though it has been hacked to bits in the final edit, trimming it down to get a cinema release. The team behind the film were involved in the Glasgow based sitcom for UK's Channel 4 The Book Group, and Festival shares some of the sensibilities of that series. Which leads to the suspicion that the material might have worked better as a series of 6 half hour TV episodes, allowing more time to get into the characters.

Instead Festival is a curious mess. A chaotic assault, jumping from strand to strand, while at times pushing the limits of decency. There are moments that work quite well, characters that have a certain potential, and the film manages to catch Edinburgh as a city and the Festival as an event - though there is at least once where I was sitting thinking that a character was obviously taking the wrong route to where they were supposed to be going. Some of the chaos is deliberate, as evidenced by the brash and grating soundtrack which is used to punctuate individual scenes.