Great Scots

A little over a week ago, the Guardian ran a fascinating profile by Tim Cumming of a writer and editor I hadn't known much about before, the late Alexander Trocchi. It's a frustrating one as well, a story you've heard before: "But just as Trocchi seemed on the verge of success and literary prominence, he blew it, substituting reckless experiments in sex and drugs for experiments in narrative and form."

Recently, interest in his work has been revived by the likes of Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner and a film, Young Adam, based on one of his novels, has been making the rounds at festivals. The IMDB doesn't list a release date for the US, but it's hard to imagine that a movie with Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton and Emily Mortimer won't rouse the interest of one distributor or another. The film has, in fact, landed McGregor on the cover of the September issue of Sight & Sound and Ryan Gilbey writes: "His face, which we are so accustomed to seeing flare into life with romance or mischief, looks here as doomy as the river from which Joe and Les (Peter Mullan) drag a woman's corpse one slate-grey morning." But the piece is really about the film itself: "[Director David] MacKenzie's achievement with this difficult film seems even greater when you realise he has conjured a plausible nightmare from what is essentially your everyday tale of one man's fear of commitment."

The film also gives us an excellent excuse to revisit Andrew O'Hagan's Diary in Slate. The scene: Yesterday, at the Edinburgh Festival:

The feeling was summed up rather brilliantly several years ago in the film of Irvine Welsh's novel Trainspotting. Renton (Ewan McGregor) and his mates are sitting in a local pub nursing their pints as if nursing their wrath, when in walks an American tourist, a gentleman of a certain age wearing sky-blue shorts and a Nikon camera, asking for directions to the bathroom. The gentleman goes in, quickly followed by the pub regulars, who proceed to fleece the visitor of everything he's got. A title appears on-screen: 'The First Day of the Edinburgh Festival.'

Speaking of Ewan McGregor, there is some disgruntlement along the Royal Mile at the local-lad-made-good's nonappearance for the premiere of Young Adam... McGregor - like former local milkman Sean Connery - is a big hit with the ladies of Morningside, so his being tied up in Australia with the new Star Wars came as a bit of a blow to organizers fighting a rearguard action against neighborhood resentment.

Irvine Welsh is here, though... The last time I saw Irvine was in Chicago, and before that in Calcutta, so it's almost disorienting to see him on home ground. 'I'm shagged,' he said...

Finally, returning to the Guardian, Shane Danielsen, artistic director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, has a bone to pick: "Amelie might charm audiences from Leicester Square to Launceston; Crouching Tiger might kick commercial ass in a way that second-rate Hollywood blockbusters can only dream of. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of foreign-language cinema continues to be viewed with suspicion and even fear: the irrational terror of the subtitle."

Posted by dwhudson at August 16, 2003 10:15 AM