Two films loosely on a space theme premiered in San Sebastian this week. The first was Le Skylab by Julie Delpy, whose obviously autobiographical film features one of the largest casts in the festival, so big that the first 15 minutes seems to consist of little more than people saying hello, kissing each other and shaking hands. It begins with a family of four crowding onto a packed Eurostar and finding that there's no room for them to sit together. Having been relegated to, er, the seats they actually booked and paid for, having not thought to make sure they were sitting together (I had a hard time summoning any sympathy for this), the mother tries unsuccessfully to get some strangers to move then, settles grumpily into her window seat. As she fumes in a very French way about people not bending to her petulant will, the woman has a flashback that spirits us all the way back to to 1979.
We're on another busy train now, and the 11-year-old Albertine (Lou Avarez) is going to visit her paternal grandmother at the seaside with her bohemian parents Anna (Delpy herself) and Jean (Gainsbourg's Eric Olmosnino), a pair of street theatre performers. It's hard to say in a narrative sense what happens next since, strictly speaking, nothing does, and this is both the film's strength and weakness. On the debit side, it frequently meanders and has an episodic quality that makes it feel like a stream of reminiscences rather than an actual story that Delpy has been aching to tell. However, on the plus side, Le Skylab does frequently hit some really engaging highs, with some very touching observational comedy.
The summer of 1979 is very beautifully evoked, with Albertine's fussing, feminist mother fretting over the fall of debris from the crumbling NASA space station that is rumoured to be crashing down on southern France. Against this backdrop, Delpy beautifully captures the closeness and tensions of large families, frequently diverting to the activities of the children (a village disco scene provides the best adolescent comedy since Son Of Rambow) and pitching the hippy Jean/Anna combo against his military brother Roger (Inglourious Basterds' fantastic Denis Menochet), who gives the film some much-needed political relevance in a raw, drunken and, somewhat alarmingly, semi-naked confession scene.
Because it has nowhere to go, the ending can only be disappointing and simply seems to be the visual equivalent of Jefferson Airplane's Let's Get Together. But Delpy does seem to understand people, what makes them tick, and, unlike the horrible Little White Lies, which featured a sterling French cast in a smug maelstrom of self-indulgence that had me applying for NRA membership, Le Skylab does have a universality that will help it find a UK audience.
So too does Nacho Vigalondo's super-charming Extraterrestre (pictured), which I must admit I need to see again, having caught it at the film's late-night world premiere at a time when my faculties were failing me. Vigalondo's breakout feature was the lo-fi 2007 Sundance hit Timecrimes, which I have yet to see, and this is another micro-budget science fiction project with a similarly ingenious twist. Here, Vigalondo has embarked on a genre mash-up that I don't think I've seen before: alien invasion movie meets slacker romcom.
It begins in familiar style, with the hungover Julio (Julián Villagrán) waking up in the apartment of a woman he doesn't recognise and trying to piece together the night before. The woman, Julia (Michelle Jenner), is similarly shellshocked, and for a time the comedy comes from the embarrassment of this awkward situation. Noticing that the streets are strangely empty and that the TV channels have gone blank, Julio sees an enormous spaceship out of the window and realises, not without some incredulity, that the two have drunkenly slept through a real-life War Of The Worlds. The introduction of an overattentive neighbour, Angel (Carlos Areces), who has a fanatical crush on Julia introduces an extra element: the aliens are apparently shape-shifters who can adopt new, human identities at will. Who can be trusted? And what will happen when Julia's boyfriend appears out of the blue?
Thinking about Extratrerrestre now makes me laugh more than it did at the time, because there's a lot of dialogue in this movie and I kept thinking I wasn't enjoying it as much as the rapt Spanish audience seemed to be. However, I'll be seeing it again for sure, simply to catch up with some of the subtleties I missed the first time. I spoke to Vigalondo briefly beforehand and I'm impressed by his vision; I suspect he will soon make a great deal of impact in Hollywood with films that cost much more and look much better than Extraterrestre, but he seems to be the kind of guy who can't resist the urge to express himself on a shoestring. If this is one of those inbetween films, I look forward to many more – fans of Edgar Wright will definitely see a kindred spirit at work here, and this may well be Spain's Shaun Of The Dead.
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