Short but sweet

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