Paranoia, kick-ass moves and burgers. Lots of burgers 58th Edinburgh International Film Festival

David Watson

Sometimes, no matter how carefully you choose your film, you find yourself watching a dog. If it's Scooby Doo 2 then it's probably because you've found yourself babysitting an 8-year-old and the choice was out of your hands. But sometimes you have no excuse. Sometimes you ignore the warning bells ringing in your head and choose to see a film you know might suck. Usually it's an art film. An ART in capital letters film. Pretentious, portentous, self-indulgent, and self-important. Which brings me to this year's EIFF and Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell.

Depending on whom you listen to Catherine Breillat is either a courageous libertine, justifiably notorious for 1999's Romance with its frank, explicit depiction of a woman's search for sexual fulfilment. Or she's a pornographer who courts controversy by livening up her ennui-laden films with the sort of hardcore sex scenes more suited to mail-order.

Her latest film, Anatomy of Hell, based on her own novel Pornocratie, is another challenging voyage (or wallow) in the limits of sexual discovery. When a young woman's attempted suicide in the toilet of a Paris gay bar is thwarted, she embarks on a perverse, joyless, masturbatory relationship with her saviour. When the heroine removes her soiled tampon, dips it in a glass of water and gives it to the hero to drink, or the hero inserts the handle of a garden fork into the sleeping heroine's vagina, I defy anyone to keep a straight face. With scenes like these, Anatomy of Hell was the funniest film I saw during the Festival. Shame it didn't realise it.

Laughs were thin on the ground in Edinburgh this summer, with two big, fat, dark shadows hanging over this year's Film Festival programme. Despite not having a film on show, Michael Moore loomed stylistically in every frame of this year's most over-rated film, Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, in which a crusading young American film-maker risked his life by eating at McDonald's® every day for a month. By the end of the month, Spurlock's doctors were begging him to quit his new diet and Spurlock seemed genuinely surprised that after only a month of cramming double portions of junk food into his big fat gob, his blood pressure had gone through the roof, his bowels had become sluggish, he was clinically obese and had become impotent. Well, like, Doh! Anyone who needs a 90-minute documentary to tell them that eating junk food morning, noon and night, might not be such a hot idea deserves the ‘man boobs’ and impotence the burgers will give them.

The other dark shadow over this year's Festival was the one cast by September 11, a direct or indirect influence on some of the more thought-provoking and diverse films, among them Ken Loach's Glasgow romance Ae Fond Kiss, Antonia Bird's chilling The Hamburg Cell, Kenny Glenaan's Yasmin and Jehane Noujaim's documentary Control Room. The best of these was Control Room, which followed the fortunes of the Arab news channel Al Jazeera throughout the Iraq conflict. Funny, intelligent and remarkably even-handed, Control Room cuts through the spin of Operation Shock and Awe to show us the human side of the conflict, the side that our masters don't want us to see.

Despite the obvious disappointments of a lacklustre opening film, Walter Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries (Che Guevara's beautifully shot but ultimately vapid and sexless early years) and a non-existent closing film, Wong Kar-Wai's long-awaited 2046 (which was pulled at the last minute in order to allow the director to take the film back into the edit room and dribble over it some more), this year's Festival gave us an intelligent, eclectic mix of films from around the world, with home-grown British films well represented. Eleanor Yule's Blinded was a Gothic Scots take on The Postman Always Rings Twice, boasting a performance of seething malice by Peter Mullan as a blind misogynist and Jodhi May on fragile form as his unhappy wife. Shane Meadows gave us Dead Man's Shoes, a dark Midlands-set revenge thriller, and Richard Eyre's Stage Beauty, a witty, intelligent romp that will forever be cursed by comparison to the inferior Shakespeare in Love.

It wasn't all quality on the British front though, as Richard Jobson unveiled his new film The Purifiers. Anyone who's ever seen The Warriors has seen The Purifiers. They just saw a superior version. The plot revolves around a multiracial Glasgow gang of pretty people (and the ugly hobbit from The Lord Of The Rings) trying to get back to their turf after refusing to join megalomaniac Nazi politician Kevin McKidd in his bid to take over the city. Really. In the film's press notes Jobson admits he was inspired to make the film by his son who wanted to see a film with ‘lots of people beating each other up, chases on motorbikes — and some girls with big boobs.’ Shame Jobson Jr didn't ask for a good script and some decent performances.

After the idiocy of The Purifiers, Zhang Yimou's stunning martial arts epic Hero was a welcome relief. Set in the distant past, it opens with a nameless hero being granted an audience with a paranoid king who wishes to know how the hero rid the kingdom of three fearsome regicidal assassins. But as the hero tells his tale, the king starts to suspect the hero may have a darker agenda of his own … The film owes as much to Rashomon with it's complex narrative structure and emphasis on the unreliability of it's narrator as it does to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon whose lyrical fight scenes and gorgeous mise-en-scene it echoes. The film is a feast of colour and spectacle but it's central romance between assassins Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung is heartbreaking and Jet Li's nameless charismatic hero (as playful in his storytelling as in his numerous martial arts scenes) is engaging. It is fitting that his final act of self-sacrifice gives birth to an empire whose mark the world still bears.

The overwhelming atmosphere of this year's programme though, was one of paranoia, doubt and fear. If the rest of the world wasn't out to get you (Belgium's Calvaire or Korea's Old Boy), then it was the face looking back at you in the mirror. Marc Evans followed up his wonderfully nasty chiller My Little Eye with Trauma, a study of grief, psychosis and stalking made all the more unsettling for the performance of housewives' choice and TV's Mr Darcy, Colin Firth, as the fracturing personality at the film's heart. Just as disturbing was an emaciated Christian Bale, who lost 63 pounds for his title role in The Machinist. Bale is magnetic as the obsessed, paranoid insomniac whose guilt is literally consuming him and his eventual epiphany is a shattering experience.

The secret lurking at the dark heart of Old Boy, Park Chan-Wook's follow-up to 2002's Sympathy for Mr Vengeance is equally shattering but our journey to it is a lot more fun. In a set-up that screams high-concept Hollywood remake, we watch as an anonymous wage slave is kidnapped, framed for murder and held in Terry Waite-style isolation for 15 years before being released without explanation. His demented search for the reason behind his imprisonment, and his attempt to exact retribution, leads to bone-crunching violence, some decidedly amateur dental work and a revelation that even if you see it coming, still shocks.

Calvaire on the other hand is just repellent. Playing like an episode of The League of Gentlemen (with the laughs substituted with buggery, bestiality, torture, crucifixion, cross-dressing), I realised about halfway through just how a country as boring as Belgium could produce serial child abuser and killer, Marc Dutroux.

The most satisfying film for me though was Kontroll, a stylish, hyperkinetic, fluorescent and neon-soaked ride through the Budapest subway system. With not a frame of natural light in the entire movie, Kontroll juggles the antics of a group of misfit ticket inspectors with the hunt for a hooded serial killer shoving travellers under trains and the troubled hero's tentative romance with a fare-dodging girl dressed as a bear. Dark, hypnotic and shot through with a humour that's blacker than a Budapest tunnel, Kontroll works both as a conventional thriller and, on a deeper level, as a metaphysical battle between good and evil for possession of a man's soul with the healing power of love as the redemptive force that tips the balance. The most successful Hungarian film of last year, Kontroll's remake rights have already been snapped up by Hollywood but do yourself a favour — see it before they remake it.