And the special prize goes to…
After the first few misfires at this festival I seem to be happening upon a steady stream of features I can, hand on heart, recommend not just to delegates here but to mates once I get home.
And Justin Edgar’s Special People is a big audience favourite, having been in the top five all week.
Edgar’s last feature, Large, got viciously panned for its gross-out laddish humour, but anyone who’s seen his recent short films will know that Justin has grown up and is making mature and poignant films (I remember having a chat to him about why Bach’s Goldberg Variations is the perfect music to write to after the screening of his short, Round).
The wicked humour is still there, of course, and Special People had its industry screening audience giggling throughout. Dominic Coleman is familiar from the sketch show Swinging, where he memorably played the seemingly self-deluded jilted boyfriend who bumps into his ex and tells her how he’s now head of IBM, or dating Gwyneth Paltrow. She’d make her excuses and leave, embarrassed at what a pathetic loser she’d made him, and then we’d see him get a phone call from IBM, or step into a waiting stretch limo.
His character here isn’t that far removed. Jaspar is a ‘filmmaker’ with a deluded sense of his own importance, failing to recognise that his life has fallen apart. When he takes the job of teaching filmmaking to a group of disabled teenagers, he’s not ready for what they can teach him.
Hilarity ensues, but there are also some genuinely touching moments and a couple of scenes of real beauty (the wheelchair dance and the hawk) and the ending is not the Dead Poet’s Society climax that Jaspar (and the audience, let’s be honest) envisage.
