When it comes to prominent leading women, French actors may well be on the tip of your tongue. Both Juliette Binoche and Julie Delpy have had long, critically-acclaimed, international careers, and the wonderful Isabelle Huppert continues to make stunningly subversive films at the ripe old age of 64. Director Blandine Lenoir’s debut feature-length Zouzou (2014) attempted to tackle 60-year-old women’s sexuality to mixed-reception. Her follow-up, I Got Life!, covers similar ground with a small twist: it’s unabashedly focused on the menopause.
I Got Life! tells the story of Aurore (Agnès Jaoui), a woman in her 50s who has recently separated from long-term husband Nanar (Philippe Rebbot). Her younger daughter Lulu (Lou Roy-Lecollinet) still lives at home with her brilliantly deadpan (and deadbeat) musician boyfriend, while her older daughter Marina (Sarah Suco) has just delivered the news that Aurore will soon become a grandmother. Meanwhile, an old flame, Titoche (Thibault de Montalembert), has moved back to the provincial town where the protagonist is experiencing employment issues owing to a slimy new boss. The cherry on this deliciously complex cake is that Aurore has also started to experience the menopause, as well as all the hot flashes and mood swings that come with it.
If this combination of bad coincidences sounds somewhat unlikely, it’s because it should be. The film is marketed as a rom-com and it fulfils that genre in a quirkily enjoyable way. There’s genuine pathos at play in a number of scenes – most notably in the examination of Aurore’s tempestuous relationship with Marina – yet director Lenoir does an excellent job of interspersing the emotional with the laugh-out-loud absurd. Whether it’s baby-equipment shopping with an amusingly out-of-touch in-law, or the ridiculous novelty of a restaurant with operatic waiters, the director crafts a wonderfully wild world that we can both empathise with and laugh at.
In mainstream Anglo-American cinema, we are often presented with deeply-drawn leading men, while younger women are ushered to the side – frequently as an object of ridicule and/or sexualisation – and older women are made completely invisible.I Got Life! sticks a defiant middle-finger to Hollywood by casting women of all ages, shapes and colours in a variety of roles. In fact, the majority of men in the film are lecherous idiots who are ruthlessly dispatched by the smart, assertive women that lead it. This doesn’t apply to every man – Titoche is a suitably sensitive soul – but there’s something satisfyingly unconventional about this significant role-reversal.
Of course, I Got Life! is at its most radical when showcasing Aurore’s full spectrum of experiences as a menopausal woman. There is a beautiful frankness about the way Lenoir integrates the menopause into the film. It comes and goes in waves – as is indeed the experience for Aurore – and is something that can be painful, yet connecting. It’s not brushed under the carpet, but it’s also not presented as embarrassingly burdensome or unbelievably empowering. In short: the menopause is present and therefore the protagonist deals with it. This is probably as realistic a representation as possible.
That said, the ending of I Got Life! is somewhat lacking. For a film that pushes so many boundaries elsewhere and seems to genuinely want to do something different, it concludes in a surprisingly swift and saccharine way. Nonetheless, the rest of the film is a joy to watch and makes for an excellent treat for International Women’s Day and Mother’s Day.
I Got Life! was out in cinemas on March 23rd. It’s out on VoD on July, 2nd.
Enjoying its European Premiere in the Panorama Section of the Berlinale last month, Hotel Jugoslavija is latest film from Swiss director Nicolas Wagnières. Telling a personal story about his relationship with the hotel in Belgrade and its symbolic relationship to a country that no longer exists, the film is a mesmerising documentary about identity, nationalism and nostalgia.
Our dirty writer Redmond Bacon attended the event and sat down with the director to discuss why he was drawn to the hotel, why Yugo-nostalgia persists and the current rise of populism in Europe.
.
Redmond Bacon – Where did the idea for the film first come about? When were you first inspired to make it.
Nicolas Wagnières – The very first idea was unconscious in a sense. I did a shooting for my diploma film in 2005, for the film school in Geneva, and my inspiration came from [visiting] Belgrade. I did some short fiction in the flat of my grandparents there. And for the film I had to find a hotel for one scene and I found the Hotel Jugoslavija. It was still open and I was [spoke] with the employees. They were very nice and curious about my interest. And I learned that the hotel was about to close, it was privatised, it was about to be transformed into a casino, and I said, I have to do something with this.
RB – The name has not changed. The fact that it’s still called Jugoslavija represents a certain Yugo-Nostalgia. This is very strong for some people. Why is there such a strong nostalgia in countries such as Serbia and Bosnia for Yugoslavia when it was still an authoritarian regime?
NW – That’s a difficult question, and as I say, my particular position is I haven’t lived there. I didn’t experience the regime. As far as I know it was still authoritarian, but it wasn’t like Stalin. Yugoslavia did a split with the very hard-line communists. And without judging the political I was more focusing on the level of it [being] an alternative. There was something like East, West and this country trying to do a third line. I think within the socialist regime, there is something that always goes with the identification to the country that is really stronger. And the country, I mean it ended really badly, but it had a nice golden time.
[Josip Broz] Tito was very charismatic, maybe a bit too extravagant with the film stars, with his way of showing off, so I think that’s building some very strong identification to your country. So when all this falls apart you miss some like Father Figure almost. When you think about a country that only exists because of one man and disappears when this one man leaves, something is wrong. The country should be still going without it.
RB – So, it’s a country based on a flaky myth?
NW – Yeah kind of. The very difficult social economic situation that came after the war, after the corruption, after all these awful things, I can understand that people think of some better times earlier with some nostalgia.
RB – I want to talk about Serbia in general about how it might be viewed by the outer world. You end the film with a shootout scene [from Luc Besson’s Three Days to Kill, 2014]. In traditional Hollywood movies, there’s a stereotype of Serbians that they are petty criminals or gangsters. Why do you think this endures so much?
NW – It wasn’t that much [of an] intention. I’m wondering why they came to Belgrade to shoot this scene. For me, this film goes more in parallel with this other fiction that goes in the film, with the 1970s Black Wave Yugoslavian film. Which is more for me to say how is this building used in its image, and how can we relay it to a moment of the society? In the 1970s movies, I think [its] more of a powerful critique. These anarchist gangsters go partying and have drugs and sex and alcohol in this building. It’s a strong meaning. And today we rent it to some Luc Besson, EuropaCorp massive production that explodes everything. Its more about the value that this building is carrying within its image in a film. And the figure of the Balkan, I don’t know, something is always a bit stereotypical. I mean, there’s strong mafia in Balkans, Montenegro is supposed to be a massive entry for drugs. So it’s not only an image you can have I think.
RB – So about 7% of the population of Switzerland is Balkan, and I wanted to know what the relationship between the two countries was. Why did so many people moved to the country from Yugoslavia?
NW – Switzerland has always been more prosperous than other neighbours. When I was a kid my mum was already a seasonaire — coming to work for one season. At the time they could have [a] work permit for nine months. Before it was the Italians who came to Switzerland, then Yugoslavians. My grandfather did his studies at the polytechnic school in Zurich. As people from Yugoslavia were not completely stuck in their country, not all the family but part of the family could move and study abroad and come back. Exchanges were made, and Switzerland has always needed a stranger population for its economy.
RB – There’s a lot of archive footage for the film? How did you find it?
NW – Mainly big searches at Television Serbia. And a structure called Filmske Novosti, which is the old news on film. [Typing in] “Novy Belgrade”, “Hotel Jugoslavija” keywords and spending time watching rolls and rolls. I found all the 1940s, 1950s material there. Then I had precise ideas. Because the film took some time, I had time to hear on the internet there was some footage just after the bombing by Nato. The Interior Minister came to shoot the thing, so I knew it existed. I tried to find out about this footage.
If I had to find out everything in two months it wouldn’t be so interesting. But because of the time, somebody told me about this 1970s movieYoung and Healthy as a Rose (Jovan Jovanovic, 1971) – it’s amazing, everything happens in the hotel. And then you find out on the internet there’s a film shooting with Luc Besson, because people post pictures and you see it and think it looks funny. Finding image[s] where the hotel was used— it could be advertising, it could be [a] video clip or whatever —was not just illustration but it would support a real subplot narration for the film.
RB – The film is only 78 minutes. But how much did you shoot in total?
NW – The shooting was organised at three different moments. The first moment was in 16mm, so with this material we don’t shoot gigabytes — you just shoot rolls. We had an hour for the first images. And the other one we shot on digital so we had a lot of material. Only 5% is used, I couldn’t tell exactly. We went all throughout the building without any real intention apart from filming the state of this place. [There] was a very big work on the editing table to find how to construct this — there’s basically three moments where we see the building in this different state. But yeah we used a small amount then.
RB – Did you have the narration in your head before it started or did it come later?
NW – No. It all came in editing.
RB – Coming back to the idea of nostalgia and looking back towards the past. Do you think there’s an inherent danger in that, because in Europe populism is on the rise? So countries are harking back to this idea to push their populist ideas. Do you think this is a dangerous thing and could occur in Serbia?
NW – I think the populists [are] pretty strong in Switzerland as well. The right party has a lot of power in the election, and Switzerland is against Europe. Well I think that we are at a moment that politically, socially, economically, we didn’t find out the right way to really understand what’s happening with the immigration question. What is it exactly, what is it[s] meaning after colonialism and all the wars and the Western world there? And we are at the start of understanding the new implication of all of that. It won’t be the solution to close border[s]. This will just go to civil wars or massive violence. I don’t have the answer.
RB – I wanted to ask about older buildings in general. Do you think it’s important to keep older buildings in order to remind people in the past? For example, here in Berlin, they keep buildings that were built by Nazis and Communists. They are repurposed for different uses. Do you think it’s important, especially in places like Serbia to keep buildings like Hotel Jugoslavija so people always remember the past?
NW – I don’t think it’s important to keep. It’s my first time in Berlin and I haven’t seen much. I’m sure Germany is still not that clear about its past and its own history and I’m sure they are kind of in between two ways of wanting to erase something and wanting to keep [it] at the same time. Serbia still has big work to do. They still don’t recognise the concept of genocide, so they could make a memorial for what happened in Bosnia. It’s not so much keeping the building in a museum[-like] ideal, but respecting history somehow and where you come from. I don’t know whether it’s better to keep the thing, but just to destroy [it] completely and have no respect for architecture or cultural value – that may be a problem.
Stretching across eight countries and home to over 14 million people, the Alps represents Europe at both its most quaint and its most terrifying. On the one hand, you have cows with bells and clog-wearing cheesemakers, on the other you have avalanches, rockfall and fatally cold temperatures. This combination makes it a great case study on how civilisation and nature live side-by-side, in the process coming to some kind of uneasy compromise.
Filmed exclusively on a cineflex camera attached to a helicopter, A Symphony of Summits: The Alps from Above takes a God-like view to the mountain range, taking us on a tour across every sight from France to Slovenia. Filmed all year round, encompassing both chic skiers and lederhosen-wearing biergarten drinkers, the film’s 90 minute runtime is a great advert for the region — a place with seemingly endless activities no matter the weather. This film seems perfect for Discovery Channel orPlanet Earthlovers, combining wry and philosophical observations with stunning natural beauty.
Narrated by Emily Clarke-Brandt, this is an interesting mixture of physical and sociological geography, with a little bit of history thrown in, too. We are told that the mountains were formed over millions of years due to the collision of tectonic plates, creating extremely high peaks such as Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. Then we are told that a mummified man was found in 1991, believed to have been over 5,000 years old. It shows that we may have only started skiing in the alps in the past 150 years, but man has obviously been trying to set up shop there for a far longer time. Now man has seemingly conquered the mountains, the film displays just why it has become such a popular destination for tourists, taking in an annual 120 million visitors.
The number one reason is sports, something that is observed in thrilling detail. When viewed entirely from above, where people are seen as tiny compared to the vastness of the mountains, watching them engage in insane activities like off-piste skiing, dirt-biking, white water rafting, bungee jumping and mountain hiking feels even more reckless than it probably is. The flexibility of the camera means we can follow these people at their pace as they breathlessly weave through trees and rocks, trying not to fall over and crash off the side of the mountain.
Nevertheless, the film doesn’t exist merely to thrill, but takes its time to inspire a certain sense of awe as well. If your favourite moment in The Lord of The Rings film series was when the Fellowship hike across the perilous Misty Mountains, filmed in gorgeous widescreen, then this is the perfect movie for you. Its notable that these stunning mountains are dotted with crosses — how could a person climb these perilous peaks and not be filled with some kind of divine power?
The narration could’ve been more engaged and poetic, really engaging the viewer in why this land is so fascinating. Part of me imagines the (metaphorical) pinnacles the movie could’ve reached if someone like Werner Herzog narrated – à la Encounters at the End of the World (2007).As it stands, its a decent primer into one of the most beautiful regions in the world, and a fascinating look at how mankind has tried to carve out a life for itself there.
As forecast in the Bible’s The Book of Samuel, the time old story of David and Goliath is applicable to all most everything in life. Specifically, in the 2018 Oscar race, the contenders for the coveted Best Picture award appear to be a binary “big vs small”. Both The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro, pictured below) and, to a lesser extent, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh) operate within a certain sphere of atypical Oscar films; they possess marketing, star and pulling power towards Oscar voters and audiences.
Granted, at its heart Three Billboards is an anti-establishment piece about over asserting masculinity, this notion still applies through the heavy lifting required by the cast along with the tragi-comic writing of director Martin McDormand. Leading the way when it comes to the betting man’s wager, Del Toro’s The Shape of Water sits at 6/4, with McDormand’s Three Billboards at 5/6 (at the bookies). Although such a betting man cannot justly be trusted, it speaks volumes that after their clean sweeping at Bafta two weeks ago, the two are evidently the front-runners.
.
The little ones fight back
The antithesis, Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig) produced by indie darlings A24, is a film as far away from ‘Oscar fodder’ as one can get, unlike Darkest Hour (Joe Wright). Greta Gerwig – after years of working with her partner Noah Baumbach – has crafted a universal love story of mothers and daughters, unanimously adored by anyone with a beating heart. Comparable, before smashing the box office, Get Out (Jordan Peele) wasn’t on anybody’s raid, with it sweeping up audiences and critics in the racial concept of the ‘sunken place’. Eliciting a growing divide in the film industry’s production, these smaller films, on paper, are fish out of water, unlike the aquatic The Shape of Water.
In these four films (The Shape of Water and Three Billboards vs Lady Bird and Get Out), it’s clear there is a divide in this year’s Oscar race,big vs small, compared to previous year’s saturation of Oscar bait pieces i.e. The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010), The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum, 2014) and American Sniper (Client Eastwood, 2015). With the Time’s Up/#MeToo movement and eradication of Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax Oscar bait releases, see Chicago (Rob Marshall, 2002), the widespread love for something such as Lady Bird (pictured below), with Jordan Peele’s personal representation of race, yields the ability to defeat the Goliath’s it up against, showing the cinema is a universal language.
.
Just the same old beast?
In a break away from the reality of her Baltimore apartment, Eliza’s (Sally Hawkins) world in The Shape of Water momentarily turns into an MGM musical stage. At the centre of this stage, she dances with her Amphibian Man in a moment of nostalgic magic-realism. Outlining the film’s desires to pluck on the heartstrings of its viewers, as La La Land (Damien Chazelle) did to great effect last year, this break from reality alludes towards the swooning romance at hand. Cloaked as an inter-species relationship, the one at hand in Del Toro’s film is as heteronormative as that of Gosling and Stone’s in Chazelle’s smash hit, spawning musical adaptations worldwide.
Though it has been hailed as subversive for its adult themes, with having a mute central character, it’s still a big fish operating in a big pond, simply from viewing the crucial romance. My criticism is not to discredit the engaging performance of Hawkins or the level of loving craft deployed by the film-makers, still, one cannot help but feel we have seen film’s comparable scoop Best Picture previous.
.
Learning from history
Distinctly contrasting, Lady Bird and Get Out hold little comparison to previous year nominations or winners; they are unique pieces. After widening the scope of what truly is the Best Picture winner, Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight demonstrated that the little birdie can indeed soar high above the bigger fish of the Oscars. Previous to this, the first female Best Picture winner, Kathryn Bigelow repeated a similar feat in 2008 with The Hurt Locker (pictured below), outmuscling James Cameron’s Avatar. In a recent interview on A24’s podcast, Greta Gerwig and Jenkins sat down to discuss one another’s works. In that discussion, it became clear that what is so fundamental to Lady Bird is its acute eye for what constitutes home. Granted, far from an autobiographical film of Gerwig’s youth, the narrative, characters and milieu, all come from somewhere special in her writing.
On a related note, Jordan Peele’s extended metaphor for racism in the contemporary US distinctly comes from a place of idiosyncrasy to him, broadening and becoming applicable to a wider demographic of African-American audiences. Yet, the emotional tapestry that is embedded in Daniel Kaluuya’s character, it produces empathy from any perspective.
The emotion of empathy extends not just to Get Out but the Bafta juggernaut Three Billboards. Taking five awards, it is hard not to see a similar occurrence occurring this Sunday in the writing and performance categories, minus Oldman. The Guardian recently reappraised the director, stating ‘McDonagh has long coaxed comedy from the friction between the idiotic, the unthinkably painful and the bana’l. Holding a greater deal of admiration towards the film than of The Shape of Water, it is trying to ignore the undeniably heavyweight acting of McDormand, Rockwell and Harrison. Simply in this regard, it is a Goliath.
In a world filled with the strangest of political happens and a post-Moonlight world, the Best Picture category appears to be a changing one. Regardless of the outcome on Sunday, this slow change has the potential to filter and permeate the mindset of voters and The Academy itself; leaving the most famous awards ceremony in the world as a pillar of filmic and societal diversity.
In the ever-growing age of podcasts, the team at DMovies thought it only right that we get in on the fun! Starting with a deep dive into the 2018 Oscar’s, and their socio-political elements, our editor, Victor Fraga, as well as senior film critics at the site Alasdair Bayman and Jeremy Clarke, explore the animation category, gender and tokenism, anti-war movies and many more topics.
In the thought process behind the podcast, the DMovies team looked to peel away from the normal giving voice to dirty and thought-provoking cinema, as our motto. Merging the writings on the site, particularly in Richard Greenhill’s review of Darkest Hour (Joe Wright),with the vocal skills of our critics, the podcast seeks to blend the two mediums; creating something entirely original.
Further, celebrating some of the dirtier picks in this year’s nominations, such as Agnes Varda and JR’s Faces Places (pictured above),the creative process of the podcast channelled the critic’s personal opinions into an analytical discussion on a plethora of our dirty preferences.
Overall, we are all overjoyed with how the show has turned out. And don’t forget to subscribe to our MixCloud channel. We hope you enjoy and watch this space for filthier content in the future!
