Grolsch Film Works: Female Hysteria on Film

I wrote about female hysteria, witchy women, and male directors being terrified of them for Grolsch Film Works. You can have a read about it here. 

Review: The Falling

   The Falling, Dir. Carol Morley 

There always was that one girl at school. The one who seemed preternaturally worldly, wearing expensive perfume or just that slightest bit more self-assured than the rest. Maybe she had an older boyfriend; maybe she was the first in her group of friends to smoke cigarettes or lose her virginity.  It would gain her admiration and resentment in equal measure.

In Carol Morley's new film The Falling, that girl is called Abbie (Florence Pugh). A pert-nosed, blonde haired beauty, Abbie and her closest friend Lydia (Maisie Williams) mark themselves as leaders of the pack in their cloistered girls school. It's England circa 1969, but this is a world far removed from swinging London and its environs. The girls’ strictly regimented existence could just as well belong to a century before; skirt lengths are measured and craggy schoolmarms watch over them with a stern eye. Nonetheless, Abbie manages to lose her virginity - much to Lydia's chagrin. 

The nature of Abbie's influence on the other girls -- and by extension, Lydia's -- is at the crux of the mystery central to The Falling. When a series of fainting spells blooms into a full-scale epidemic - seemingly at Lydia’s behest - the mostly female staff is alarmed and nonplussed. The en masse illness appears to be psychosomatic - in Lydia’s case exacerbated by a hyper-sexual older brother, an emotionally distant mother, and most of all her intense and physically close relationship to her best friend. 

Lensed by Agnes Godard, the film has a preoccupation with elements of virginal girlhood - long hair, knee-high socks - and the lush green verdancy of the surrounding countryside. There’s a certain hallucinatory lyricism here; a foreboding if clunky link made between sex and nature. In parts, an obvious debt is owed to Peter Weir’s classic of female hysteria, Picnic at Hanging Rock. Moments that imply Lydia has a supernatural power - as when a boy taunts her and subsequently falls off his bike  - even offer up a pallid suggestion of Sissy Spacek’s own tormented schoolgirl, Carrie.

It's a shame, then, how overheated and over-articulated The Falling sometimes feels. It's a film loaded with fascinating ideas, and it branches in many directions - offering up plenty of intriguing tangents and implications. We never learn just how real certain symptoms are, or the particulars of any occult leanings. But trouble starts when Morley makes far-reaching attempts at explanation. It’s a subject too dreamy and muddled for clear-eyed analysis, and the latter portion of the film sags considerably under the weight of the attempt. Certain lines of thought are better inferred than stuffed into actors' mouths, and result in some clumsy moments. 

The first portion, though, lingers - it's potent stuff. The girls are guilty of dramatic eulogizing, attention-seeking, copycatting, and maybe worse. But the physical effects of their hysteria - the bruises, tics, and twitches - are very real indeed. Their illness even spreads to one of the younger teachers, suggesting something more encompassing than a hormonal phase. 

This is evidenced by the glimpses we get of the adult women in the film - troubled by unwanted pregnancies, sexual assault, and the inability to communicate. Instead of making the locus of hysteria purely sexual, Morley mines rich veins of female love, envy, and comradeship. In this director's hands, the 'female hysteria' phenomena is ripe for  revision. Though flawed, The Falling's study of shared powerlessness remains compelling. 

Now showing at the Broadway Cinema Nottingham

Grolsch Film Works: The Hallmarks of the Southern Gothic Sub-Genre

This May, the BFI Southbank runs a season called 'Southern Gothic: Love, Death and Religion in the Deep South'. I wrote about what the sub-genre is, where it comes from, and why it's so damn strange over at Grolsch Film Works.

Verité Film Mag: Missing Welles - The Other Side of the Wind

For this month's issue of Verité Film Mag, I contributed to a section on the centenary birth year of the inimitable Orson Welles. I chose to write about his unfinished project The Other Side of the Wind, starring John Huston - which sees a release later this year. Click on the images above to enlarge or to read the whole magazine for free here. 

Brief Thoughts: Wild Tales + While We're Young

Wild Tales
Dir. Damon Szifron

Wild Tales, a series of darkly absurd vignettes from Argentinian director Damian Szifron, begins with striking photography of various species of predatory wildlife. Those opening credits, like the plane crash that prefaces it, aren't what you'd call subtle in getting their point across. Gaze into the coolly appraising eyes of a jungle cat or African crocodile and it's clearly implied that we share the same primal malevolent streak. But one thing not shared between species is the capacity for personal revenge; that particular drive is unique to humanity. Szifron takes on the subject of revenge, big and small - with mordant, hilarious aplomb.  From spurned ex-lovers to victims of road accidents, the constraints of civilised social behaviour are forgotten in exchange for ruthless payback. Whether the incidents are savagely petty or cathartically righteous, they tend to be Old Testament in their judgement.

The resulting vignettes are both bitterly funny and genuinely harrowing; some reach their prescribed end goal with more satisfaction than others, but almost all have an over-the-top streak of comic book violence. The wealthy seem pitted frequently against the struggling poor, who are nonetheless corruptible where money is involved. Hints at lurking South American inequality abound. A portion involving a wealthy teen guilty of a hit and run reaches a breathtaking conclusion; but my favourite is the final vignette, a joyous wedding that goes disastrously, jaw-droppingly wrong. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, indeed. Szifron is clever in avoiding the cheap thrill of further violence; he reaches an unexpected equilibrium that hints at the ultimate futility of retribution. It's a film that does occasionally feel a bit gimmicky - and while it might not necessarily be ripe for repeat viewing, it's a hell of a lot of fun the first time round.

While We're Young 
Dir. Noah Baumbach 

Baumbach's follow-up to Frances Ha - his likable profile of meandering hipsterdom - is another affable, witty exploration of New York creative life and neuroses. Ben Stiller is Josh, a veteran documentarian married to producer, Cornelia (Naomi Watts). The middle-aged couple, surrounded by friends who keep reproducing, seem content with one another - but there's a growing hint of malaise about them. Baumbach has a real talent for drawing richly-observed characters, and charts the complications that ensue when the older couple make friends with a pair of twenty-somethings.

Adam Driver is Jamie, a charming young aspiring documentary filmmaker who lives in Brooklyn with his wife Darby. The young creatives become friends with the older couple on the basis of a shared, polite adulation of Josh's career. Josh, who has been working on a stalled project and is beginning to feel the stagnation, is flattered and enlivened by the attention. The resultant episodes seem to flit between insightful and goofy, with Cornelia awkwardly joining Darby's hip-hop dance class, and Josh taking to donning a fedora.

But their neediness is real, as are their anxieties about fading into insignificance - both artistically and personally. Jamie and Darby, on the other hand, are steeped in trendy self-belief, but their work is all shallow posturing and empty irony. They lack sincerity, and Baumbach's view of them is accordingly caustic. Yet Josh's final remark about the conniving Jamie is ambivalent: 'He's not evil. Just young.'

 While We're Young is a thoughtful and funny exploration of incestuous cultural circles, and the generational values that divide them. It seems that Baumbach's final conclusion is that there's just no way around the essential careerism and insincerity of modern youth. It's not a good thing or a bad thing - it's just a thing. This is ultimately a little bit unsatisfying. Josh complains that the only feelings he's capable of are 'wistful or disdainful' -- but he finally comes full circle, resulting in something like a wistful shrug.

Now showing at the Broadway Cinema Nottingham.

Grolsch Film Works: A Brief History of Hollywood's Bad Boy Movie Moguls

 I wrote about the tenacity and bravado of the old Hollywood studio heads over at Grolsch Film Works. Have a peek here.