Crediting “Art Curator: Damien Hirst”, its world premiere attended by such local royalty as Ian Rankin, Boogie Woogie’s satirical take on the more scabrous aspects of the lucre-dominated art world promised a dose of glamorous sophistication for the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Based on Danny Moynihan’s notoriously à clef novel of New York’s artists, dealers and collectors, the plot has been transplanted across the pond with a distinguished Anglo-American cast, and has suffered a sea change into something rich and banal.

The multi-strand stories of connivers, lechers and modish self-advertisers make one long for Altman. Rather than richly disparate, the movie seems merely fragmented. Director Duncan Ward’s first feature gives glimpses of the requisite swish and style but none of the characters are more than token villains or martyrs and you wait for something to unite the bittily episodic. Danny Huston’s wolfish charm as a (double, triple) dealer recalls Jack Nicholson as a panto villain. Gillian Anderson does a self-conscious grande dame turn as a millionaire collector’s wife who pleasures young artists as avidly as her husband grabs art – any art – while the film proceeds to equate acquisitiveness with lust, art with sex.

The general bile is relieved by Christopher Lee’s brief appearance as the dying owner of the eponymous Mondrian, the object of scheming cupidity throughout the film. This genuine art lover adds decency to the Hogarthian roistering – though given that he is an unbelievably wealthy plutocrat, it is hard to understand his wife’s (Joanna Lumley) worries about penury. A glitzy cast (Charlotte Rampling, Alan Cumming, Heather Graham) makes a token effect. Abrasively consistent, uncompromisingly real, Jaime Winstone emerges as the one convincing human being, a cockney lesbian video-artist whose autobiography ruthlessly films everything from Sapphic sex to suicide. Otherwise the film fumbles too many chances (custody squabbles over poodles, a gift-wrapped foetus): it should have been blacker and funnier.

At the other end of London Bohemia’s social scale, Unmade Beds goes for the lovable vote. Young polyglot squatters drift through picturesque parties, waking up with strangers, all sympathetic and supportive. Spanish Axl is looking for the English father he never knew. Belgian Vera, glumly Gallic, dissuades customers from buying at the bookshop where she works. Argentine-born director Alexis Dos Santos evokes a sweet-natured, slightly hallucinatory world where music and fashions may have changed since the sixties, philosophy not much. The elfin Fernando Tielve’s adolescent confusion typifies the film’s mixture of mischief and yearning.