Edinburgh – Day 12

All good things come to an end. Then again, all things that aren't completely good come to an end too, and that's probably where you would have to place the 58th Edinburgh International Film Festival. Yes, a lot of the films in the programme were well above average compared to those released into our cinemas week in, week out - and these daily diary reports have tried to focus on the best of them. But despite Artistic Director Shane Danielsen's speech on the opening night, echoed again at the closer, it really isn't just about the films. A festival is more than that, and this is where Edinburgh let itself down. If the film programme was enough in itself to be a big draw, then critics from all of the big national newspapers would be in attendance (as in past years), but the vast majority of them have been conspicuous by their absence. The best films on show - Hero, The Machinist, Old Boy, Kontroll, The Motorcycle Diaries - were hits at other earlier festivals, and so didn't generate a fresh buzz. Just before the closing movie rolled at the city's UGC cinema, Danielsen claimed that film festivals across the world were changing, and that star names were no longer the most important part of the festival experience. Not true. Without a few big-name actors in attendance, a UK festival feels like little more than a series of expensive preview screenings. Edinburgh had an admirable retrospective, a strong British line-up and a reasonable selection of titles that probably will not be screened in the UK again (but nothing that really won audiences over as a once-in-a-lifetime discovery). The screening of Stage Beauty was a case in point. In our opinion, it's one of the best films of the year. At the Edinburgh premiere, though, only director Richard Eyre and newcomer Zoe Tapper were present. The following night at the London charity premiere, Billy Crudup, Claire Danes and virtually every single key name in the cast waved to the crowds from the red carpet. Why did none of them get on the plane for the short ride to Edinburgh? That's a question that has to be answered, as it is symptomatic of this great festival's declining stature on the national and world stages. Perhaps the closing affair would have had a better sense of occasion had more been made of the festival's award winners. Instead, a closed-doors ceremony took place at lunchtime and the winners were announced at night via a PowerPoint series of projected slides onto the screen as the audience took their seats. Hardly the manner in which to bestow prestige on the prizes. Pawel Pawlikowski won the Michael Powell Award for Best British Film with My Summer Of Love (and actor Paddy Considine managed to find time in his schedule to fly up for the closing party), while the Audience Award went to Damien O'Donnell's Inside I'm Dancing. The Guardian Award for Best New Director was snaffled by Morgan Spurlock for his McDonald's diet documentary Super Size Me. Anyway, on to the closing film itself. The festival was dealt a further blow when Wong Kar-Wai's 2046 was withdrawn as the director continues to tighten up the editing after its Cannes premiere. The replacement was Untold Scandal, a Korean retelling of Dangerous Liaisons. It was everything you would expect from a foreign language, arthouse version of this story - handsome to look at and certainly well acted - but it lacked the bite or originality to turn the closing ceremony into a memorable event. In the audience, Stephen Frears - director of a previous adaptation that starred John Malkovich and Glenn Close, and in town for the Edinburgh Television Festival - had nothing to fear about his version being eclipsed. It was a solid but unspectacular movie. And that's an appropriate epitaph for this year's festival too.