Just when the world thought British cinema had been reduced to gangster flicks and air-head comedies, a movie about old men so understated it rarely gets beyond a funeral march has charmed the San Sebastian film festival and looks set to scoop a clutch of prizes.
Last Orders, based on Graham Swift's Booker Prize winning novel about a group of half-sozzled south London geezers who gather to scatter the ashes of an old mate off Margate pier, reduced critics to tears at its premiere yesterday.
With a cast that reads like a who's who of British cinema from the 1960s onwards, Oscar nominations are already being suggested for Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, Tom Courtenay and David Hemmings.
Ray Winstone turns in arguably the performance of his career as Caine's car-dealing son Vince, but it is Last Orders' endearing mix of grave insights, sly laughs and lack of sentimentality that has had the film industry paper Variety hailing it as a "delicately handled, superbly textured treat".
Made without public funding, the film's Australian director Fred Schepisi, best known for Six Degrees of Separation and his adaptation of David Hare's Plenty, revealed last night that they had run out of money halfway through the shoot.
Only a hastily arranged loan cobbled together by executive producer Nik Powell saved the production. Schepisi was scathing about the way money for "adult films" has evaporated in a "teen obsessed" film industry.
"We made Last Orders for less than I made Plenty for 17 years ago, and that was seen as low budget back then. Because of the way the system works now, it is almost impossible to make the kind of quality films we once could. You can make really big films or tiny ones. You can have an amazing film, but with only £3m or £4m to play with, you just cannot do these stories justice. It's just mad, it has got to stop."
Schepisi, who has had several projects die under him of late, including Don Quixote starring John Cleese and Robin Williams, said even star power was no longer enough to secure funding.
Besides money woes, there were other disasters. The Bermondsey pub they recreated was flooded the day shooting started and thieves made off with their entire stock of fake beer. The film was also an emotional rollercoaster for Caine, who read the script and said: "Damn, I knew one day I would have to play my father."
Last Orders's main rival is likely to be The Grey Zone, a powerful and unsettling American film about Jews in the Nazi death camps who worked the ovens in the hope that they might be spared for a few months. Based on the memoirs of Miklos Nyiszil, a Hungarian Jew who was forced to carry out experiments on his fellow inmates in Auschwitz, it stars Harvey Keitel, Mira Sorvino and Steve Buscemi and is written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson, best known from Oh Brother Where Art Thou.
Despite events across the Atlantic, which kept many stars away, the festival produced a bumper crop of crowd-pleasers, including three English-language Scandinavian films, Truly Human, Elling and Point of View. There was also a rapturous reception yesterday for a sublime, heart-warming Spanish documentary, Under Construction, about the building of a yuppie apartment block in one of Barcelona's toughest barrios.
But the biggest buzz has been around a truly appalling Spanish sci-fi epic called Stranded, a film so bad that the Guardian's veteran critic Derek Malcolm was forced to inform its cast that its English script made "Star Trek sound like Shakespeare". Starring the American actor Vincent Gallo and Maria de Madeiros, of Pulp Fiction, it has become an instant cult classic, with critics clamouring for extra screenings.
