When you are summoned to a hospital club, you might be more than a little apprehensive.But an invitation to a screening at The Hospital Club, a sumptuous private members art-hot-house nestling between Drury Lane and Covent Garden ,in the heart of London ,is a rather more appetising prospect, and means you are to be treated to a screening of a film, and not subjected to a medical investigation. Thusly , on the evening of Monday 21st March 2011, the pleasure was magnified when the film in preview in the luxurious screening-room of some 36 seats, was much shorter than the receptions preceding and following its twin screenings! For it was a preview of the mini-erotic-drama Tourniquet, the fiction graduation project of Irina Mestieva (noted previously at the year-end showcase of the London Film Academy) which was now being celebrated as a selection at the forthcoming 2011 East End Film Festival. And sandwiching, as it were, two screenings of this immaculately-photographed tale of romantic rivalries in a smart London house, was a welcoming champagne reception, and a subsequent buffet of tasty snacks and plenty of quality Russian vodka.A snart audience of bankers, Russocrats, the film director Mike Sarne,who studied Russian at Cambridge and after making a name for himself in Hollywood (with Myra Breckinridge) is now back again in London, directing film and theatre and acting, and the American-born producer-director Mark Forstater, also now Albion-based.Sundry promising actors and the glamorous editor of a glamorous Russian magazine published in Brtiain, also were in attendance.Tourniquet in barely a dozen minutes deftly sketches the conflicts within a too-modern bourgeois family where the son's girlfriend is somewhat too close to her fiance's father.The soundtrack of Satie is very satisfying and it is encouraging to see a film-school short with such professional polish.
Phillip Bergson
06.04.2011 | Phillip Bergson's blog
Cat. : Albion Albion British people Cambridge CDATA Covent Garden Director Drury Lane East End Film Festival editor Entertainment Entertainment Film film director Irina Mestieva London Mark Forstater Mike Sarne Mike Sarne Myra Breckinridge New fiction short TOURNIQUET previewed in sumptuous surrounds in London Person Attributes Person Career Person Location Phillip Bergson Preview Private The Hospital Club United States Shorts