Whatever happened to.. knitting and watching Bergerac?

..that's what old ladies should be doing all day, surely - not spending hours in the dark at the Courtyard Theatre Hereford, 'whispering' loudly to their friends while I'm trying to watch a movie? One of the good things about being self-employed is that when something like the Borderlines Film Festival comes around I can take some time out and see a few films during the day. But of course that's also when all the seniors choose to go too. I'm not really moaning - at least they're not playing Angry Birds through the credits!

So, continuing my run-down of films I've seen at this year's Borderlines, let's move on to Gerard Depardieu. He's made a bit of a career in small to medium French films in which he essentially plays a slightly exaggerated version of himself - and why not, it's worked well for people as diverse as Steven Segal and Woody Allen for many years? In 'My Afternoons with Margueritte' he plays a slightly simple man in a small town, who is befriended by an elderly lady who reads to him in the park. It's not a film in which a whole lot happens, but that really doesn't matter. The performances are sharp and well-observed, the relationships between all the bar-room buddies and acquaintances are finely depicted and often laugh-out-loud funny, and the whole thing reeks of charm. When I checked today this film was topping the ratings for the festival, and frankly I'm not surprised - it's a hard film to dislike!

Next on my must-see list was Finnish documentary 'Into Eternity'.  Precious few laughs here, but instead a film so thought-provoking that I came out thinking that it should be shown in every school in the UK. The world. Then to all the politicians. Blimey, it's depressing stuff.  It looks at Finland's ground-breaking attempt to solve the problem of what to do with its nuclear waste.  Their solution is to create an unimaginably vast underground chamber called Onkalo (literally 'hiding place'), which will be filled with spent plutonium rods and the like, and then simply sealed up and forgotten about.  For at least 100,000 years, which is the minimum period we currently believe this material will remain dangerous.  The film is a beautifully shot piece, even though much of it is little more than 'talking heads' discussing the issues and the reasons for their approach.  One of the scariest sections considers how (or even whether) the builders should 'mark' the site for future civilisations in case it is discovered.  Comparing this huge radioactive dump with the great pyramids, the thinking seems to be that if we mark it in any way as a special place that must never be opened, human curiosity almost dictates that some future society will find it and wonder what treasure it might contain.  They even considered marking the site with the image of Munch's 'The Scream'.  Imagine how different we are as a race from the oldest humans we know about - then imagine how different again the people of 100,000 years time might be.  Should we really be leaving this awful time bomb in the hope that they simply never find it, or open it?  Scary stuff.

Almost as soon as Into Eternity ended, I had to rush to my seat for 'Black Swan', a film that had far more than its fair share of elderly ladies in the audience, even for this festival. Far, far more. I felt a bit like Tippi Hedren in The Birds, surrounded by all this white hair and sensible woollens.  Somebody had obviously told all these nice ladies that this was a lovely film about a ballet dancer. And I suppose, at its most basic level, it is.  But it's also a shocking psychological thriller about identity, psychosis and sexual repression.  It's also frequently quite viciously violent.  None of which bothered me in the least, but there were frequent and widespread gasps and murmurings from large parts of the audience at some of the more 'made you jump' moments.   The performances are fabulous, as everybody knows already of course. Natalie Portman, who's had a special place in my heart ever since Leon (not in a sleazy way!) is terrific, but so are pretty much all of the supporting cast. Her 'never quite as successful as I should have been because I had you' mother, in particular, is a great creation.  Overall, as studies of the nature of people driven by the desire to excel physically, Black Swan comes pretty close to Aronofsky's The Wrestler. I wouldn't like to guess who'd win in a drag-em-out battle between Portman and Mickey Rourke, that's for sure.

Tune in tomorrow for ultra-violence, 70's style, in NEDs, and muslim-extremist style in Of Gods and Men.  And John-Wayne-style, I suppose, in True Grit! Something for everyone :)