BFI: Kirk Douglas: Ten Essential Films

      For Kirk Douglas' 99th birthday, I wrote about ten of his best films for the BFI. 

Top 10 Films of 2015

10. Crimson Peak, dir. Guillermo del Toro

9. Girlhood (Bande des filles), dir. Celine Sciamma

8. Whiplash, dir. Damien Chazelle

7. Sunset Song, dir. Terrence Davies

6. Carol, dir. Todd Haynes

5. Diary of a Teenage Girl, dir. Marielle Heller

4. Inside Out, dir. Pete Docter

3. Brooklyn, dir. John Crowley

2. Timbuktu, dir. Abderrahmane Sissako

1. Inherent Vice, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

Canvas by Grolsch: An Interview with Jeanie Finlay on Orion: the Man Who Would be King

I spoke to Nottingham-based documentarian Jeanie Finlay about her BIFA-winning film Orion: The Man Who Would be King over at Grolsch Canvas.

Little White Lies: Do Movies Turn Women into Masochists?

    I explored my dubious love for Peckinpah's heist thriller The Getaway in spite of its treatment of women over at Little White Lies. 

BFI: Ten Films set in Period New York

 I wrote about ten of my favourite films set in the New York of yesteryear - from Leone's Once Upon a Time in America to Kazan's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. You can find the list over at BFI. 

Movie Mezzanine: The Bold Melodramas of Nicholas Ray

   For the 60th anniversary of Rebel Without a Cause, I wrote about it and Nicholas Ray for Movie Mezzanine -- you can find it here. 

BFI London Film Festival: Liveblog

 I spent a handful of days at this year's London Film Festival, doing some capsule coverage and interviews over at the BFI's live blog. You can find all of that below:

•   Write-ups of two films from the DARE strand: Gust van den Bergh's Lucifer and Marco Bellochio's Blood of my Blood. 

•     Interviews with Bernard McMahon, director of American Epic Sessions --  and Pier Giorgio Bellochio, star of Blood of my Blood. 

•    A few thoughts on some disparate gems in the line-up, from Alex Ross Perry's Queen of Earth to Guillaume Nicloux's Valley of Love.

• Finally, some thoughts on the new documentary Steve McQueen: The Man and Le Mans

Preview: Mayhem Film Festival 2015

The time has come again -- it's October, and even the most skittish of moviegoers (including myself) are in the mood to watch horror movies. If you're in the Nottingham area and you want your Halloween viewing choices curated for you by film programmers who know all there is to know about horror, you'll be in good hands at the 11th annual Mayhem Film Festival. Located at Broadway Cinema from the 15-18th October, the festival boasts several world premieres and a few choice selections from the London Film Festival official line-up. Varying from psychological thrillers to subversive cannibal horror-comedies, Mayhem offers four days of the most audacious and thoughtful genre fare on offer. Here are some of the things I'm most looking forward to:

Future Shock: The Story of 2000 AD (dir. Paul Goodwin) Thurs. 15 Oct 

The opening night of Mayhem kicks off with a visit from director Paul Goodwin, producer Sean Hogan, and artist/writer D'Israeli for the screening of a documentary on the cult comic book label. The sci-fi brand introduced beloved writers and artists like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison to the comic book scene, influencing a generation of spin-off films and television shows. Seeking some recognition for the sorely under-appreciated label, Goodwin explores their idiosyncratic and unabashedly dark output in his doc.

Crumbs (dir. Miguel Llanso) Fri. 16 Oct

This Ethiopian/Spanish co-production is a a science fiction set in a future landscape ravaged by an earth-destroying war. It's meant to be utterly bonkers, with Spanish director Llanso trying out his maddest production design ideas on a rather limited budget. It's a risky proposition, but I'm curious to see if the oddness amounts to anything.

The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula live-reading, Sat 16 Oct

If you're a Hammer horror fan or missing the late Christopher Lee, brush up on your recently re-discovered Hammer films here. Jonathan Rigby, actor and Gothic film scholar, will be on hand to share the rare unmade story material, and to provide background on this almost-but-never movie project.

The Witch (dir. Robert Eggers)  --  Sun 18 Oct 

On a personal note, I've been fascinated with the Salem witch trials and the inquisition for years. The hysteria and misogyny of it all is head-reeling, and when you read a bit about the Malleus Maleficarum you'll fall down a rabbit hole of bizarre superstition. So when I first heard about The Witch -- Robert Eggers' debut film -- I was excited. Set in rural New England decades prior to the witch trials, an unseen supernatural entity torments a divided family. It's meant to be terrifying.

Aaaaaaaah! (dir. Steve Oram) -- Sun 18 Oct 

Directed by Sightseers actor Steve Oram, Aaaaaaaah! looks like the most inexplicable and batshit crazy thing to come out in the horror category all year. Apparently, it features little in the way of actual dialogue and more in the way of ape-like grunts and howls -- and if that can't sell you on a film, what will?

                         The Invitation (dir. Karyn Kusama) Sun 18 Oct 

   Kusama has a proven track record with films like 2000's Girlfight; her newest veers into different territory, taking place at an ominous dinner party. The first word out of London Film Festival press screenings suggests that nearly everyone felt positively about The Invitation; colleagues said it had serious Manson family vibes. It's also great to see more of the horror genre being taken on by female directors, as with last year's festival fave The Babadook.

Watergate Cinematek: Exclusive Interview with Director Philip Kaufman

With a joyous soundtrack featuring Dion and Frankie Valli, The Wanderers is among the finest of teen gang films. Set in the Bronx of 1963, Italian-American kid Richie (Ken Wahl) and his friends (Tony Ganios, John Friedrich) form their own greaser tribes and get in turf wars with other outlandish gangs like the Fordham Baldies. 

Bob Dylan is lighting up Greenwich Village, but Richie and company are in the next borough over -- and they might as well be on another planet. When Richie meets Nina (Karen Allen), he is drawn into the culture clash of the oncoming sixties. Warm and funny, The Wanderers moves through a pivotal loss of American innocence -where nostalgia is laced with a sharp hint of melancholy. 

The film’s director, Philip Kaufman, is an eclectic American filmmaker whose career began with small independent film Goldstein (1963). Kaufman went onto a distinguished Hollywood career, directing westerns (The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid), science fiction (1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and modern literary adaptations (Henry + June, The Unbearable Lightness of Being). His film about pioneering astronauts, The Right Stuff (1983), was nominated for eight Academy Awards. I got a chance to speak with Phil by phone to talk about The Wanderers -- you can find that conversation below: 

The Wanderers is, of course, an adaptation of Richard Price’s novel of the same name. It’s been said that you struggled to get an option on the book - why the discouragement? 

Kaufman:  It was really only once my wife and I spent a lot of time adapting the screenplay. The book was actually discovered by my son Peter who was 11 or 12 at the time, and he said, ‘Why don’t you guys make a movie of this?’ But once the screenplay was there and we started taking it around to studios —  it was another time and an another era. The studios were saying, very authoritatively, there’s no market for teenage movies. […] And they were saying in America nobody goes to movies in the summertime. Everything has changed so much. They just were at a point where, aside from American Graffiti, which they viewed as a freak event, they were interested in other kinds of films. We got rejected time and time again, but we just kept pushing on until we found somebody who would take it on.

Looking back now, teen gang films seem to have had a real vogue in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. American Graffiti, Boulevard Nights, even The Warriors, though it’s set in contemporary times. Later, Coppola did two S.E. Hinton adaptations with Rumble Fish and The Outsiders. What do you think attracted so many filmmakers to the material? 

Kaufman: I don’t know if there was a vogue. It was sort of, we were ahead of the vogue. We were developing The Wanderers for a number of years, and The Warriors was not yet being made - I knew Walter Hill and he was working on other things. He asked me what I was doing and I told him I was trying to make The Wanderers, and then that came into being mostly afterwards. Boulevard Nights was quickly put out, we had a problem we had when those movies were rushed into release before The Wanderers came out. Both of those movies incited violence - or violence happened in the theatres. As a consequence, The Wanderers — which came out shortly after that — couldn’t get into a lot of theatres. 

Coppola did his movies later, and Barry Levinson, who I had been talking to, was just starting to make films — he made the film Diner a few years later - and I think it was perhaps influenced by the tone of The Wanderers. But it’s hard for me to say, when you look back you can say these movies appeared around the same time, but I don’t know that there was a real vogue when we put The Wanderers together. It was sort of a one-off type of movie. And George Lucas’ version of coming of age in Graffiti was quite different to coming-of-age in The Wanderers. He wasn’t familiar with the tough greaser — he didn’t even know that guys who were tough New York greasers were also athletes. He had a very different version because he came from Modesto, California. 

The film, following on from Price’s novel, is set between ’62 and ’63, and JFK’s assassination features prominently. It’s an event often referred to as the real end to the 1950’s. What was the importance for you in capturing this change in mood, and what it means for Richie and the boys?

I mean, we all grow up and we all in some ways wish we weren’t growing up - which is somehow linked to nostalgia, and we remember the good things perhaps out of proportion —  but the bad things too. Our adolescence is a very vivid time. So maybe we were coming of age and beginning to think back to that. When Peter showed us the book, we put things together in a way that could both include my adolescence, my wife’s, and Richard Price’s. The Wanderers is a series of short stories, so we blended a number of stories into one narrative and again, you know, put in events that I experienced. Centering it around ’62, ’63 — really, the Kennedy assassination — began to define the boundaries of what that era was about. So it was an era of personal reminiscence.

I actually grew up a little bit before that time, but I would put The Wanderers into that time as being a sort of end of that period. And the Kennedy assassination, in broad strokes, is not only the end of that period, but the beginning of another kind of turbulent political period that begins to move into hippie times and anti-war sentiment — things change, and that era in the early sixties is pretty much gone.

It’s interesting that there was something like an overlap in the early sixties between these two cultures — the dominant one and the growing counterculture — and how that gap grew. But these boys who are quite young at the beginning of the sixties still so clearly belong to a different world. 

It was a strange time. When I was shooting my first feature, it was in 1963 - a small film called Goldstein. We were shooting in Chicago and we came out from lunch with a small crew and camera. It was probably three or four men and a couple of actors — and we were on this boulevard. Suddenly people are coming by crying and teary-eyed. We followed them and moved into this store with all these TV’s on, and there was the Kennedy assassination. That was something I sort of tried to replicate in the film with Richie  — that same mood and feeling -- the tragedy.  Music, politics, everything was altered in that moment. 

It seems to me that The Wanderers is much more grounded in a kind of reality than other ‘nostalgia’ films - with abusive or absent parents, etc. Yet other scenes almost feel fantastical, as with the battle on the football field. Were you conscious of striking a balance between realism and more fantastical elements? 

Reality is a funny thing, because when you’re younger and smaller you look at the world from a different perspective. Comic books seem totally fantastical, but for younger kids there’s a certain reality in them. With the Fordham Baldies — when you’re small, and you look at big tough guys in the neighborhood, they seem so much more monstrous and gigantic then you later realize they were when you've grown up. […] So I wanted to get that sort of perspective, which is sort of reality, but is sort of — is the truth factual or is it just the way in which we experience things? 

You cast Ken Wahl as Richie and Tony Ganios as Perry — and plenty of the others were either unknowns or first-time actors. You’d worked with Hollywood actors like Warren Oates and Donald Sutherland prior to that, so what decision-making was behind your casting choices? 

You try to cast the right actors. This was meant to be something without stars — I can’t think of a star who would have been right to be in the movie. We did make an approach to the manager of a young up and coming singer/rock star - a guy named Bruce Springsteen - who could have played Richie. But he was busy doing concerts, so that ended that. Springsteen was a type of guy who could have played Richie. But these guys who were cast - most of them had no acting experience at all. Ken Wahl was trying to be an actor and hadn’t done anything yet. I was shown a photo of him and I liked it. We called someone in LA to fly him out to New York where we were shooting the movie, and when he got the call he was on the way to his job in a pizza parlor.

The music in the film, from Dion to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, is so memorable. How did you go about choosing the soundtrack for The Wanderers?

I must say Richard Price was a big help with that. Richard was a total expert and fanatic about the music of the time, and he would send me these little recordings of all of his favourite songs. But we spent a lot of time laying in that music over the scenes and it permeated the experience of that time. It was just perfect.  I still occasionally listen to that music, and in some ways there’s none better. That music was so great, and you know, maybe it’s because my time in that world has passed a little bit […] I wonder if the music of today is nearly as good as the music of that time.

And then you use Dylan very cleverly as a signpost of a different kind of time and a different kind of music. 

That wasn’t in the book. I knew Dylan, I’d been working on a project that was never made with him. So he gave us the right to use The Times They Are A-Changin’ and that to me, along with the Kennedy thing, was another signpost. If Richie had followed Nina (Karen Allen) into Folk City snd sat with her, he might have gone on to another — I hate to say it — more civilized existence. His music is Dion and her music is Dylan. Dylan, The Beatles, and the Rolling Stones made anthems for another generation, and that generation displayed their affiliation with music in quite different ways, with Woodstock, etc. The earlier culture around the Four Seasons and Dion was riding in cars and dancing in basements. 

I think The Wanderers really has this thrill. It’s rare I come across anyone who’s seen it who doesn’t love it. I was watching the film with my twelve-year-old brother in law today, and he said to me, ‘Where can you buy a Wanderers jacket? I want one!’ 

We had this thing happen at the Telluride Film Festival […] I’ve been up there a number of times, and my wife Rose and I went up many years ago. We were standing in a square and suddenly 30 people in Wanderers jackets came running out to surround us. Everybody who was working at the festival had made their own jackets —and they were all Wanderers — they knew every line in the movie. And I’ve been back a few times — and they keep the tradition of the Wanderers alive, up there in the mountains. And I had no idea! 

I’ve got some of the original jackets — a guy named Bob Demora, was a great costume designer. They really are beautiful jackets with great colors and a couple of times i’ve gone up to Telluride with the original jackets and stood on corners and everybody marvels at them.

Who or what would you consider to be your greatest influence? 

We screened a lot of Fellini at that time.  Amarcord, I Vitelloni — another coming of age movie — both have a magical quality. And going back to your earlier question about some of the American movies coming out at that time, I think you could then go back to Fellini and that sort of coming-of-age that some of the Europeans were doing which was influential. Pasolini made a film I saw living in Europe called Accattone, Truffaut had done The 400 Blows, and when you start looking at Shoot the Piano Player and Jules + Jim, there’s a kind of playfulness with the narrative. A certain kind of romp where the characters are having fun, but underneath there’s tragedy — or tragic elements. So I’d say that a lot of the influences that I had, and certainly I think my contemporaries in America had, came out of sort of the playful European New Wave. In England of course there was more of the kitchen sink drama, which was important, with great acting, but they were anchored in a sobriety that wasn’t coming out of this New Wave. I would say that that was maybe the most influential — the freedom of the New Wave. 

You get the sense that the boys are on the cusp of a big change. Do you ever think about what might have happened to them afterward?

Well, that’s it — Richie’s fate is sort of sealed. I don’t know if you’ve seen The Sopranos […] I get the feeling that the Richie character would end up like one of the Sopranos. That’s sort of prefigured when he goes back and gets one of those Hawaiian shirts and Chubby Galasso says ‘You’ll grow into it’, meaning he’s going to become a big fat tough guy — living that life. Whereas Joey and Perry go off on an adventure - in the longer version, (the directors cut) there was a more of a suggestion that there was kind of innocent sexuality between the two them, heading out to San Francisco. It’s hard to say what their fates would be. 

I did a film called Rising Sun with Sean Connery, and I used Tony Ganios (who plays Perry) as a guy who was a bodyguard for a gangster. I felt that was what had happened to Perry - years later he took odd jobs. I even had Tony Ganios have a toothpick in his mouth, like Perry does when you first meet him. 

And Tony said to me, ‘Hey Phil, do you mind if I had a matchstick with a different color at the end, so I’m not the same guy exactly?’  In my literature, that was what happened to Perry many years later, after he left The Bronx.

Thanks for talking to us, Phil. Anything you’d like to share with the audience for our screening? 

Well, we are trying to get an American company — the rights have been so complicated — one company passed on to another. But there’s a company who’s now trying to release the blu-ray in America. I have such a fond spot in my heart for this movie. It’s not only what it says about those times, but my time of making it with all these then-young guys. You know, it was such a great time.

Watergate Cinematek Screening Notes: James Toback's Fingers (1978)

Fingers is the sort of film too unruly to be easily labeled — even over thirty years after its release. Writer-director James Toback’s 1978 crime drama is a curio of its moment; a flamboyantly violent trip into the psyche of a man torn between art and the underworld. Harvey Keitel is Jimmy ‘Fingers’ Angelli, a gifted pianist who dreams of musical success while working as an enforcer for his aging mobster father. (Played by a wonderfully grumpy Michael V. Gazzo.) Following his queasiest and most questionable urges, Jimmy is increasingly drawn into the undertow of New York’s retaliatory mob culture.

An oh-so-seventies portrait of brooding machismo and psychosexual dismay, Toback’s film explores male weakness, loyalty, and self-delusion. Fingers sustains itself on the raw energy and lurching oddity of its central performance; Keitel provides a nervy, darkly funny intensity. He’s situated in the kind of role that makes his companion in Mean Streets — Robert De Niro’s Johnny Boy —  look positively well-adjusted by comparison. 

There’s no question that Fingers is marred by a deeply disturbed viewpoint on gender relations. Some may look to the French remake of the film - Jacques Audiard’s exemplary The Beat My Heart Skipped (2005) - for a more palatable contemporary update. Yet, for all its flaws, Fingers remains a fiercely individual assault on sensible, polite filmmaking — and an unflinching look at the struggle between street life and the artistic soul. 

       

Find Watergate Cinematek at: 

www.watergatecinematek.co.uk 

twitter.com/watergatecinema 

BFI: Ingrid Bergman: Ten Essential Films

 For the centenary year of her birth, I wrote about ten unmissable films from the career of the luminous Ingrid Bergman. You can find it over at the BFI. 

Broadly: An Interview with Carol Morley - Where are the Women who want to Booze and Screw on Camera?

 I spoke to filmmaker Carol Morley, director of The Falling and The Alcohol Years, over at VICE's new women's interest site Broadly. We talked about boozy women onscreen, her new book, and why 'young women aren't allowed to be carnal'.

BFI: Robert Redford: Ten Essential Films

   In celebration of his 79th birthday, I wrote a fun list of the essential films in Robert Redford's career, from Downhill Racer to All is Lost. You can read it over at the BFI. 

BFI: 10 Lovers-on-the-Run Films

  I wrote about great lovers-on-the-run films --- from Visconti to Malick --- over at BFI. 

VICE: Romany Gypsies + Racism

I took a break from the cinema and wrote something rather personal over at VICE about my relationship with the Romany Gypsy community -- you can find it here. 

Grolsch Film Works: Interview with Billy Corben

I talked to Florida-based documentary filmmaker Billy Corben (of Cocaine Cowboys fame) about his new film, Dawg Fight -- and capturing bare-knuckle 'backyard fights' in the suburbs of Miami. You can read it here at Grolsch Film Works. 

Movie Mezzanine: Musical Martyrdom and Asif Kapadia's AMY

      I wrote about Asif Kapadia's documentary AMY and the difficulty of making films about dead musical icons over at Movie Mezzanine. 

BFI: Marilyn Monroe vs. 10 Great Directors

 I wrote about Marilyn Monroe and her work with 10 great directors - from Billy Wilder to Howard Hawks - over at BFI for their June Marilyn season. You can read it here.

Movie Mezzanine: Junkies on Film - a 1990's Revival

  I wrote about junkies on film, the nineties obsession with heroin addiction, + the Safdie Brothers' new movie Heaven Knows What over at Movie Mezzanine. 

Grolsch Film Works: Everything you Need to Know about Jim Jarmusch's Secret Society

      Jim Jarmusch has a secret society and Tom Waits/Iggy Pop/Thurston Moore are all in it. If you want to know what it's all about, I wrote a shocking exposé over at Grolsch Film Works. 

Review: Girlhood

Girlhood [Bande des Filles] 
Dir. Celine Sciamma 

Something Sylvia Plath once wrote comes readily to mind when thinking of Celine Sciamma’s Gilrhood: ‘What does a woman see in another woman that she can't see in a man? Tenderness.’ In the film, the powerful influence of female friendship becomes one of the only reliable bastions of sixteen-year old Marieme's life. The young Parisian - nicknamed Vic - forges a friendship with three more outspoken girls at her school. She struggles at home under the tight circumscription of her bullying older brother - and a boyfriend who later tells her they should marry to ‘protect her reputation’. 

In Girlhood, even when men mean well, they are inclined to be paternal and controlling. Thus, tenderness - and in equal measure, a collective ferocity - can only be found in Vic's sisters - and in her new friends. Respectively, they are Lady, a hard-as-nails leader of the pack (Assa Sylla) Adiatou, a fashionista (Lindsay Karamoh), and Fily, the quiet one of the bunch (Mariétou Touré). The girls enact all the tribalism and bonding rituals of modern women - they shop, drink, dance, and talk about boys. They also shoplift and fight for the fun of it. During a fight scene between two women, one knifes off the other's bra and waves it in the air like she’s taken a prize scalp. It’s triumphant, nasty - and a refreshingly direct female confrontation.

In countless male 'buddy' and teen gang films, violence is a crucial and common element. It's practically a male rite of passage; a schoolyard fistfight with a bunch of jeering onlookers. But to see young women unapologetically and brazenly fight each other isn’t just novel - it’s positively thrilling. 

It’s important to say that Paris, or Sciamma’s Paris, is not the all-white, postcard city of Woody Allen cliché - it is La Haine’s city - one of the rough, multicultural banlieue. It’s a remarkably isolated, distinct part of the metropolis. Vic’s world is one of car parks and stairwells, of concrete quadrangles tucked in between looming apartment buildings; it feels semi-enclosed. The film moves quickly and with finesse - scenes are occasionally bracketed by black-screen ellipses and a pulsating, poppy soundtrack. Kadija Touré, as Vic, is a revelation - she has a quiet radiance and a knowing, watchful quality that suggest a wisdom beyond her years. Sciamma lights her film invarying shades of blue, as if her luminous first-time star were a nightclub chanteuse of the jazz age.

Sciamma has a real visual preoccupation for the physical details of the young women who inhabit the banlieue. Girls of all races, shapes and sizes get the same appraisal from Sciamma’s lens; slow pans or close-ups relishing in their tossed hair, their earrings, their painted fingernails or their legs while they dance. It’s a curious gaze - de-eroticised, joyous - an implicit celebration of women’s great multiplicity. The pleasure that many women take in accoutrement - of any kind - often extends to watching other women, too. In many ways, Sciamma’s lens feels like a woman’s stare. She recognises that a use of lipstick, piercings and the like are vital to women in staking out their identities. In a scene where Lady meticulously applies red lipstick, she isn’t preparing for some kind of romantic intrigue - she’s going to a public fistfight with another girl. Her lipstick isn’t a symbol of sexual attractiveness -- or at any rate, it’s not only that. It’s war paint. The suggestion is that women’s appearances are important, but not in the way that we've all been told. 

The way women look, of course, is still inescapably fraught - each choice has a potential consequence. Vic stumbles through this process - between expressive femininity and binding down her breasts to wear baggy clothes. But the latter transformation has reasons, too; we see how ‘feminine’ women are treated much of the time. At sixteen, trying different identities on for size is par for the course. But in Vic's environment, it can take on a risky dynamic. 

What's crucial is that even when Vic gets it wrong, she does it on her own terms completely. Early on in the film, a poised Lady tells Vic, 'Repeat after me: I do what I want.' And Vic takes the advice wholeheartedly. She's nobody's victim. Girlhood recognises and celebrates what Plath saw as the inherent tenderness in women's friendships; but Sciamma also sees their ability to support and galvanise female strength. It's this strength - a certain steely resolve - that is breathlessly empowering to watch.

BFI: Derby Film Fest 2015 Preview

  I wrote a festival preview for this weekend's start to Derby Film Festival, held at the QUAD cinema.    Have a peek at BFI online to see what I thought was worth watching!

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. 

New Empress Mag: Town Without Pity (DVD Review)

I reviewed the Simply Media disc of the 1961 courtroom drama Town Without Pity - starring Kirk Douglas - over at New Empress Magazine. Click to read it here. 

Grolsch Film Works: The 1940's + the Glory Years of the Boxing Movie

I wrote about the great thread of social and class consciousness in boxing movies of the 1940's over at Grolsch Film Works. 

Grolsch Film Works: The Story of the Filmmakers who Escaped the Nazis

In response to the upcoming Robert Siodmak BFI retrospective in April, I wrote about the great European emigré directors who worked in Hollywood in the 1940s. You can read it here, at Grolsch Film Works.

Review: Catch Me Daddy

Daniel and Matthew Wolfe's debut feature - the elegant and brutal Catch Me Daddy - is an exercise in opposing qualities. We're first privy to the sight of a dilapidated mobile home, perched on a desolate hillside of the Yorkshire moors. The forbidding vision is accompanied by a deeply Northern voice-over, imparting a cryptic tale about the magical creation of the geography. The Wolfe brothers' brand of poetic realism cleverly blends bleak authenticity with a heightened, quasi-mystical element - making for an unsettling visual mosaic.

The story concerns Laila, a young British-Pakistani girl (Sameena Jabeen Ahmed) living with her unemployed boyfriend, Aaron. Such unemployment seems rife in Laila's corner of the world; even she, as an apprentice hairdresser, is struggling to pay her way. A distinct sense of the ominous is discernible long before any real assertion of danger; the filmmakers utilise wide-angle shots often, exploiting the inherently moody backdrop of the moors. The unnerving effect is particularly notable when two gangs of men - up to no good - meet at a service station; the camera is fixed across the motorway from them, almost at CCTV-level distance.

It soon becomes clear that Laila is a runaway. Her father - a conservative Muslim - has sent her brother, Saheed, to collect her and bring her home.  It isn't immediately clear what's transpired between Laila and her family, but a glance at her dyed pink hair, pierced nose, and affinity for getting stoned give us some clues about the rift. Laila's family are so desperate to find her that they're willing to employ two white thugs-for-hire; an uneasy pact is formed between races. They're united in their hunt for the girl, but the mutual contempt is palpable. Pursued by these two roving gangs, Laila and Aaron are eventually driven out of their home and into the freezing night. A chase - almost queasy in its intensity - then unfolds into the wee hours.

With frequent close-ups of Ahmed and her otherworldly green eyes, DP Robbie Ryan gives the film  a tinge of the occult. He has an eye for the fluorescent lights of late-night kebab shops and nightclubs, but also for nearly psychotropic imagery: aqua-blue nailpolish, albino pet pythons, and Laila's stoned, frenzied dancing to Patti Smith. It's an exquisitely singular aesthetic, in spite of a familiar Northern milieu.

These aesthetics are occasionally peppered by acts of pungently clear-eyed violence; a crushed skull here, a cut throat there. Given the film's focus on the multicultural working-class - and vaguely, on oppressive religious beliefs - it's treading on sensitive ground. Its unwillingness to squarely engage with the specifics of Laila's home life might prove problematic, for some. It seems unfair, though, to expect contemporary subject matter to be privileged over the parameters of genre. Catch Me Daddy is ultimately a crime thriller, and should be allowed the latitude to work itself out within the confines of its storytelling mode. That its chosen mode is oblique makes it leanly effective in the best sense.

With final sequences of ruthless, devastating power, Catch Me Daddy is a grim look into a web of masculine pride and ethnic division.  It's compellingly pessimistic, and a stunning debut.

Review: It Follows

In the brightly-lit, leafy green suburbia of middle-class Detroit, a teenager is pursued through the streets by an invisible force. Her bewildered neighbors and parents call after her, but she escapes by foot and then by car, pressing on as if some unseen horror were hot on her heels. It's with this unsettling sequence that David Robert Mitchell's teen horror It Follows begins.

Not long afterwards, we meet Jay - a long-limbed nineteen-year old girl with the last blush of teenage innocence about her.  She kills time as most girls her age do; hanging out with friends, floating around in the pool, and going on the odd date. On one such date, Jay has a sexual encounter -- and finds her entire world thrown into chaos.

The film's premise has a misleading simplicity -- the 'rules' are delineated early on, when Jay's date frantically explains to her that he must sexually 'pass on' a curse to her before it kills him. In order to save herself and countless others before her, Jay must sexually transmit the curse onto some other poor soul, entrusting him to do the same. The curse takes the form of a malevolent shape-shifter that stalks its victim ad infinitum -- sometimes resembling parents and friends. It's like sexual hot potato, only you can lose the game based on others' sexual activity - not just your own.

It's not long before Jay begins to see strange figures moving toward her with eerie purpose; she turns into a quivering wreck, surveying different exits and ready to leap out of windows at any moment. It's a film of broad daylight scares, accompanied by Rich Vreeland's prickly, nerve-tingling electronic score. Smooth, quietly watchful tracking shots are accompanied by a soundtrack which paranoiacally pings and throbs -- cleverly mimicking Jay's heightened awareness.

The sense of being hunted is omnipresent; in one circular pan, the camera spins around a high school corridor and stops where it began. Nothing looks out of the ordinary, but it's unnerving. Later, a lingering shot out of a rain-streaked window reveals nothing unusual; again, the expectation is frightening in itself.

Navigating teenage sex in the horror film is material rife with cliché. In the slasher film pecking order, the promiscuous are never long for the world. Riffing on this reactionary idea, sex in It Follows is both the catalyst and the only cure for the curse.  But if Mitchell is driving at a reconsideration of horror movie tropes, the precise reasoning remains inconclusive. If Jay knows the curse will return to her, why does she continue to try to pass it on? Is it out of desperation, spite, or just lust? The metaphor loses some mileage in the final quarter of the film; it morphs from thought-provoking to mildly confusing, and some of the nerve-shredding terror is lost along the way.

Still, the film's retooling of a backwards-looking generic tendency proves interesting. Is the monster some kind of psychosexual teenage creation, borne of hormonal terror at one's own body? Or could it be representative of the irrevocable change brought on by sex - the way it comes to inescapably define and rule our adult lives?

Even if you don't want to tap into the film's muddled exploration of teenage sex - It Follows is unusually clever, and its atmospherics are hard to beat. It's a film where space itself - and the potentialities for who and what can move into that space -- become frightening. School courtyards, kitchens, playgrounds and backyards seethe with hidden danger. In this way, the film plumbs a deep well of primal dread - tapping into the sharpened sense of prey being stalked. Being pursued by an inescapable, mysterious force is the basis for countless nightmares; and Mitchell's film conjures the same blind, incoherent panic of a bad dream. For that feeling alone, it's worth seeing.



Now showing at Broadway Cinema Nottingham

Canvas by Grolsch: How Katharine Hepburn Smashed the Patriarchy

  I wrote a little something about Katharine Hepburn in time for her BFI Southbank retrospective this month. You can find it over at Canvas.