February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The film, which premiered in Dublin at the end of February, having won kudos at Toronto and San Sebastian film festivals last year, screened in this country for the first time on the opening night of the Fleadh. Jordan’s film reworks the 1955 French noir classic by Jean-Pierre Melville, “Bob Le Flambeur,” a downbeat heist movie shot in the Normandy drizzle of a wet November before color became the norm in European feature films. Jordan cranks up the beat and the heat with Johnny Halliday on the soundtrack and a locale shift to sun-drenched Nice on the French Riviera, to create that cinematic rarity, a remake that is better than the original.
Jordan’s main character Bob Montagnet, a professional gambler played with effortless charm by a disheveled Nick Nolte, takes one last crack at the big-time when his old cronies persuade him to rob the casino at Monte Carlo on the eve of the Formula 1 Grand Prix. Chronically addicted to alcohol, cigarettes and heroin as well as gambling, Bob sweats out his vices handcuffed to his bed in an effort to clear his head for the big heist. The prospect of having a police informer in his gang leads Bob to embrace his Judas by laying out a fake plan of his thieving intentions, while secretly plotting an even bigger coup: the theft of the casino’s priceless art collection. Add to the mix a rival robbery connived by a pair of identical twins from Dublin, and Jordan’s sly plot twists and coils around itself to squeeze some life out of that tired genre, the one-more-heist theme worked to exhaustion in the hands of lesser directors.
Romance and humor dominated the Fleadh schedule this year. David Blair’s comedy “Mystics” brings together two veterans of the Irish entertainment industry with more than a century of stage and screen performances between them – Milo O’Shea and David Kelly. The pair combine their comedic talents in this new feature expressly written for Kelly by the dean of Irish soap writers, Wesley Burroughs. Boroughs’s story presents O’Shea and Kelly as two aging actors scraping a living in a stock theatre company who supplement their income by faking clairvoyant powers for a profit. Operating out of the upstairs room of a local pub they offer their s