FILMS/
THE TIGER’S TAIL
World Cinema
Ireland, 2006, 107 minutes
SHOWTIMES
Fri, Apr 24 / 4:30 / Kabuki / TIGE24K
Sun, Apr 26 / 12:00 / Castro / TIGE26C
CREDITS
- dir
-
John Boorman
- prod
-
John Boorman, John Buchanan, Kieran Corrigan, John McDonnell
- scr
-
John Boorman
- cam
-
Seamus Deasy
- editor
-
Ron Davis
- mus
-
Stephen McKeon
- cast
-
Brendan Gleeson, Kim Cattrall, Ciarán Hinds, Sinéad Cusack, Sean McGinley
- source
-
Outsider Pictures, 1127 9th Street, #104, Santa Monica, CA 90403. EMAIL: paul@outsiderpictures.us.
“What ever happened to good old-fashioned, honest corruption?” snarls nouveau riche developer Liam O’Leary, stuck in Dublin’s maddening downtown gridlock as he discovers that his latest grand real estate deal has just fallen apart. The boom times for turn-of-the-millennium Ireland are coming to an ominous end in this timely new thriller from veteran writer-director John Boorman. O’Leary’s mounting business debts are only the beginning of his troubles: it seems that he is being stalked by an elusive doppelganger who has designs not only on O’Leary’s bank account, but also on his mansion in the suburbs, his alluring wife and indeed his very existence. Award-winning actor Brendan Gleeson, a longtime Boorman collaborator, brings a brooding pathos to the riven O’Leary, whose unsettling story is at once a study of a newly stratified society and the long-ago stratified life of a man. Initially, O’Leary’s family and friends attribute his increasingly manic behavior to the demands of his high-flying work, but soon he is accused of being an imposter in his own home, and finds himself descending into the carnival of poverty and menace that is the underside of contemporary Dublin. Boorman, whose five decades of filmmaking include the chilling backwoods classic Deliverance (1972) and the semi-autobiographical World War II epic Hope and Glory, makes use of a shadowy palette and the contours of classic melodrama. He works up a jittery morality tale that, strangely enough, seems both throwback and very much of its time.
—Mark Follman
Presented in association with the San Francisco Irish Film Festival. West Coast Premiere.
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