robert carlyle film festival: the world is not enough

*SPOILER ALERT*

I only watch Bond films if I have a very good reason to do it. I never liked Sean Connery in the role (way too smarmy and self-satisfied). Roger Moore was less arrogant, unsmirkingly underplayed everything, and so demanded less of my attention, which I very much appreciated.

Because you don't watch Bond films for Bond, do you? At least I don't. It's always for the villains and their incomparable sidekicks. I watched one once (not a very good one, I think) for Michael Gothard in the evil right-hand-man role. I watched Casino Royale for Mads Mikkelsen, and all I really remember is the tear of blood. When I was a kid there were a couple featuring the "Jaws" sidekick, one with a great Carly Simon theme song, and those felt like the epitome of Bondiness. In the end, though, I think nothing will ever surpass Live and Let Die, with its wildly contagious Paul McCartney theme song and its immortal Trio of Malevolence played by Yaphet Kotto, Julius Harris and Geoffrey Holder.

The World Is Not Enough I ventured into the cinema to watch because of Robert Carlyle, and found it vaguely disappointing, it being my first Bond film in many years. I watched it again last night and was better pleased. Directed by that able craftsman Michael Apted, it moves along easily through the necessary Bond-ish wackiness to its inevitable, all's-well-with-the-world-and-007-gets-laid denouement. The discrepancy which made this an unsatisfying experience for me in the theatre was, I think, that the villains were not sufficiently cartoonish. Pierce Brosnan as Bond is appropriately superficial, as is his Russian cohort (Robbie Coltrane). This year's Bond Girl (Denise Richards as a valley-girl nuclear physicist in short shorts and tight t-shirts) is risibly cartoonish. The villains, on the other hand, are tragic.

Sophie Marceau is the heartrendingly beautiful Electra King, the ultra-wealthy survivor of a terrorist kidnapping, a plight she escaped not through outside rescue attempts but by her own terrible efforts. Now, some years later, her father is assassinated and the family oil-pipeline is threatened by the same terrorist.

Carlyle plays the malefactor, a man who has taken a bullet in the head which is moving slowly through his brain, guiding him inexorably towards his premature death, and, as it goes, removing his abilities to connect with the external world. His sense of touch is gone. He feels no pain, and is therefore monstrously strong. He is, at the same time, wretchedly in love with his old hostage, and although he cannot smell her hair or feel her skin, his heart breaks for her. She, on the opposite side, owns a heart so thick with scar-tissue that she only knows how to give herself as a manipulative tactic, and can feel no tender emotion for anyone. Together, this team of unfeeling villains is so well-conjured as to make the cartoon-characters around them seem trivial and, frankly, difficult to bear.

This role, Renard, is a great triumph for Carlyle. He has transformed himself in subtle ways, both physically and vocally, and the depth of feeling communicated in his eyes is fascinating, whether he's caressing his beloved or the super-weapon which will end his life and bring about the dreams of his beloved. It's a case in which a fine performance outshines its vehicle, making the vehicle itself seem too shoddy a frame to hold it.

And there's a wonderful, old-fashioned, very Bondy theme song by Garbage.