Spank's Edinburgh Diary, Wednesday 21/08/2024

Reviewed today: Mark Nelson: Getting Better Man, Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust, Simon Munnery, Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland’s Girl Bands.

I couldn't tell you how many years it's been since I was last in the Cameo cinema. (Well, I could, but it'd require more research than I'm prepared to do at 8.35 in the morning.) Walking into the building after a dozen or more years away, I'm struck by a huge wave of nostalgia for all the Edinburgh International Film Festival screenings I've attended here. It feels like a luxury experience watching a film here, though I'm prepared to admit that might just be in comparison with the last three films I've seen in a university lecture theatre. I sit back in my reclining seat and get that comfortable pre-film festival feeling all over again.

This feeling is disrupted somewhat when one of the producers of Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust proceeds to introduce her film with a paper bag over her head.

You've not seen anything like Ishan Shukla's film before. Actually, you've probably seen about thirty things that look like small bits of it, just not all at the same time. It's a smart combination of form and narrative. The form is animation, using the Unreal Engine system typically employed for gaming, which allowed Shukla to render his visual effects in real time. It gives the whole film a lo-fi look, though, reminding me of those early experiments in greenscreen filmmaking where everything's a bit fuzzy and a bit brown because the computer power to render things properly wasn't really there yet. This is where the narrative intersects with form quite nicely: the story's set in Schrirkoa, a dystopia where complicated things like faces don't have to be rendered. That's because the key feature of this society is that everyone wears a bag on their head for maximum conformity.

For the first half this works magnificently, with a visual style all of its own emphasising the claustrophobia of the place. We're introduced to our hero, known only as 197A, as he's angling for a top job at the council. But when he meets a bagless rebel - inevitably, this society has a few of those - he starts to wonder what life outside Schirkoa is like. About halfway through, we get to find out the answer to that question, and the film loses a huge amount of its focus. Partly because the free-for-all of the rival state of Konthaqa feels too much like everything being hurled at the screen at once: partly because the clunky dialogue starts sounding more and more like it's been shoved through translation software: and partly because, sadly, Unreal doesn't really do faces. I haven't had chance yet to confirm or deny this, but I suspect that the short film version of Schirkoa that Shukla made several years ago may work better. Have a look for yourself.

“Went to a funeral last week. Caught the wreath.” Simon Munnery likes that joke so much that a few years ago, he named a whole Edinburgh show after it. He's still telling it in today's show, just because he can: he's such an established fixture on the Fringe now he can do whatever he likes. He can even perform the ending from last year's show, Jerusalem, because he's only just got around to writing it.

As I've said in the past, Munnery has evolved way past basic stand-up and become his own genre. Nobody else could just throw together all the things he does here and dare to call it a show. Quite a lot of it involves anecdotes about his comedy and home lives, which may or may not get more fictional as they progress. We also get nitpicking deconstructions of song lyrics, obituaries for his dead mates (the tribute to Andy Smart gets us a bit wistful), a long Bob Dylan pastiche, unexpected prop comedy (the hotel teabag is a highlight), and a few genius oneliners that come out of absolutely nowhere. (The best one doesn't quite work written down: "I saw the sound of music last week. That was really good acid.”) It's the usual mix of bits that almost work and bits that work spectacularly, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Then we see some more conventional comedy with Mark Nelson, who's still in our good books for the magnificent work he did compering the Stand's lockdown livestream in 2020 and 2021, making Saturday nights at home feel better than all the other nights at home. Two years ago, his show "Comedian" was a bit of self-analysis, looking at his various identities as a man, a father, a comedian and so on. This year's show, Getting Better Man, seems to be treading similar ground, using the title of an Oasis song to ask himself: is he getting better? As a man, as a comedian, as a father, as a supporter of the Scottish national team? The last one is more topical than usual, because he went to see Scotland at the Euros a couple of months ago. You know how these days every Edinburgh comedy show has to have a sad bit about forty minutes in?

To be fair, Nelson isn't one of those comics who agonises over the dramatic arc of his hour (although the final punchline to this show is beautifully set up). He grumbles about this early on, being told by Monkey Barrel management that he can't play in one of their nicer rooms because his show has jokes in it. And there are loads of great jokes here, all delivered with that characteristic Nelson twinkle in his eye so that when every so often he crosses the boundaries of common decency, we're following him every step of the way. "I had my first three walkouts of the run last night," he says cheerfully.

It's back to the Cameo for the closing film of EIFF. You may remember that we saw the closing film of the 2022 festival, After Yang, at a screening that was lacking in any sense of occasion at all. This one starts half an hour late because of an overrunning awards ceremony, but perks up after that with excellent contributions from the film's two directors.

Since Yesterday is credited to Carla J Easton and Blair Young, but it feels like a particularly personal project for Easton. She used to be part of a Scottish girl band called TeenCanteen, currently residing in the Where Are They Now files, along with many other Scottish girl bands from the last 60 years. Since Yesterday aims to tell the stories of these women who've been written out of pop history, starting from the Mckinley sisters who supported the Beatles, and moving ahead in time from there.

Quite a few of the bands described here didn't make it far out of Scotland. For an Englishman of a certain age, once we hit the 1980s there are a few familiar names. One is Strawberry Switchblade, whose biggest hit gives the film its title, and whose Goth Holly Hobbie image took them as far as Japan. The other is the band who started out as Sophisticated Boom Boom and became His Latest Flame: the reason for the name change is the first example of a plot twist that happens several times in this film, where women are forced out of bands because they've got pregnant.

The timeline of Since Yesterday proceeds in fits and starts, illustrating Easton's thesis that representation is important: women start bands because they see other women starting bands, but when they fizzle out it’s years before another band starts the cycle off again. The film's built around an excellent set of interviews, featuring a parade of middle-aged women being slightly rueful about their life choices. But it ends on a note of hope, rattling at high speed through the dozens of Scottish girl bands out there today, and the support networks that they’re building themselves. It’s one of those documentaries that demands you do your homework afterwards – find these bands, find some more that the film hasn’t covered, and support the hell out of them.