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Festival
Verdict: Inside Edinburgh Fringe
Feature Film - 2005 - 107 mins
London - August 05
Festival is a film dramatisation of the experience of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
It follows an ensemble of characters involved in the Festival, from start to finish. Serious performers struggle to move their audiences. Comedians struggle for laughs, fame and fortune. Everyone else seems to struggle with inner demons.
While most of the characters are in some way sympathetic - with the emphasis on pathetic - almost no-one is shown in a good light. Stars are vile. Hollywood talent-scouts stalk them with the intent to change their surface, and throw away their substance. Comics are needy failures. Agents are marginal and disposable. Serious artists range from the sincere-but-untalented, through the loopy, to the deeply-disturbed. Critics and judges are clueless amateurs who are willing to trade a vote for a shag. Locals worship the performers like false gods.
By the end of the Festival, a few dreams have taken wing. But everyone is scarred, and in dire need of evacuation.
Festival asks: what's so bloody important about comedy? The Festival, it says 'used to be about Polish street-theatre' - and now it's all attention-seeking comics who aren’t funny. The message seems to be - stay home.
Oddly, it presents comedy as tragedy. It holds a funeral for a cultural event that is clearly still very much alive. To feel the full impact of Festival, perhaps it should be viewed whilst quickly downing lots of hard liquor. That way, by the end, the viewer can have a bad headache - and want to go home and forget all about it.
Or, perhaps, catch Festival at the end of the actual Festival, when you may already feel that way.
