On May 12th 2019, the New Hollywood era – arguably the greatest epoch in cinematic history – categorically entered its fifties, for it was on this day in 1969 that Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider premiered at Cannes. Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967) may have preceded it, but Easy Rider would become the initial bookend of the era.
However, just 13 days later, on May 25th 1969, John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy opened in New York City. It had neither the indie micro-budget nor the free-spirited zeitgeist of Dennis Hopper’s film, but it still seeped transgression from its every grimy pore. Five decades later, the BFI’s stunning 4K restoration reminds you that Midnight Cowboy’s coming-of-age story retains much of the wit, sadness and visceral squalor that makes it a foundational entry in the New Hollywood canon.
Very much a New York film, one is hard-pressed to remember a colder, bleaker depiction of the city, even after The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971), Serpico (Sidney Lumet, 1973) and Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976). This is because Schlesinger took the stark realism of the kitchen sink movement and applied it to this decidedly American context. Indeed, it may not have captured the pan-cultural moment like Easy Rider, but Midnight Cowboy certainly preserved the zeitgeist of 42nd Street – a shifty, sleazy place before the gentrification of the early 1990s.
This gritty aesthetic, however, is also imbued with surreal dream sequences that are sometimes eerie, often ambiguous – always sad. We first see them as Joe Buck (Jon Voight) begins his cross-country trek; he brims with enthusiasm and ingenuousness, yet the recesses of his psyche reveal a sinister, withdrawn family and a terrible assault upon himself and a young girl – the consequences of which are unknown.
The best of these sequences occurs when Joe and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) are established hustling partners dreaming of Florida – it’s a bittersweet joy. Their dank, desperate gamble in a New York hotel is juxtaposed with the ethereal Florida scene that they hope will result from it, but as Joe’s presence causes a ruckus in the hotel, the vision in Ratso’s head also tumbles in a crescendo of snappy edits aided by the quirky tempo of John Barry’s Florida Fantasy.
Indeed, it is John Barry’s hauntingly evocative score – along with Harry Nilsson’s wistful Everybody’s Talkin’– that leaves the largest impression on many viewers, and rightly so. However, I hope that the BFI’s deft re-mastering of Midnight Cowboy will remind audiences of just how absorbing Joe and Ratso’s relationship is, of how the layers of pathos and humour pepper their abject condition with hope, albeit a mere semblance. After all, Voight and Hoffman deliver some of their finest work here, and Waldo Salt’s screenplay is laced with wit and free of narrative baggage. This, teamed with Schlesinger’s realist yet experimental style, causes Midnight Cowboy to be a defining, resonant classic of the New Hollywood period.
The 50th anniversary 4k re-edition of Midnight Cowboy is in cinemas Friday, September 13th. Below is the original film trailer from 1969:
The Gaza Strip, or simply Gaza, is just 25 miles long and seven miles wide. This little territory is home to more than two million Palestinians, who live in overcrowded and impoverished conditions. They are constantly under Israeli surveillance and never too far from a sniper rifle bullet. People in this 25×7 land strip experience anger and fear 24×7.
The high demographic density is combined with a number of factors that make life very primitive. Electricity shortages are extremely common, and many people have to fend with power for just four hours a day. The building are crumbling. The streets are littered with garbage and debris. The siege also means that it’s virtually impossible to leave the territory. Electric fences and snipers on watchtowers separate these people from Israel. The sea is hardly liberating, instead it’s dark and menacing, with giant waves and Israeli coast guard patrols.
Despite the difficulties, people in Gaza carry on with their lives. They find solace and redemption in a variety of a activities. The two Irish directors follow individuals as they dream and search for a meaning in their lives. A female teen plays the cello. A young woman wants to study international law abroad. Boys compete in sports. A man disabled (following an Israeli shooting) raps. Others have already allowed their dreams to die. We learn of a man who has played backgammon for the past 20 years.
Life is Gaza is like a car with flat tyres stuck in the mud. It moves neither forwards nor backwards. The majority of Palestinians in Gaza were born under Israeli occupation and have only seen their life deteriorate since. The prospects are daunting. The future does not look bright. Finding the will to carry on is very difficult. Oppression also comes from the inside: a middle-aged woman argues that Gaza was very liberal when she was young, when most women shunned the hijab. She regrets that the society has become so conservative since (something the film does not to explore in more detail).
We also learn that Israel dismantled settlements in the Gaza Strip in 2005, that Hamas was democratically elected in 2007, and have since ruled the territory. Israel has repeatedly attacked Gaza since. Nearly 2,200 Palestinians were killed in the summer of 2014, when the latest war broke out. A young boy aged just seven has already witnessed at least two wars. A parent questions whether they should have brought children into such world.
The images are fascinating to watch. The locals are charismatic and eloquent, and the joi-de-vivre at the face of adversity is indeed remarkable. The vast concrete jungle from above. The dark smoke from the bombs and the dark waves from the Mediterranean both prepared to swallow these vulnerable people. There’s poetry in the chaos of war. I have little doubt that some will describe this as poverty porn, but I prefer to see this as a denunciation tool and also the register of a people who have to find soul and beauty in the most precarious of places.
The image of a girl with a cello on the debris (above) is remarkably powerful. But it also has “Titanic” written all over it. The fiddler who refuses to abandon the sinking ship. I’d like to think that international pressure will eventually pile up and the state of Israel will be held accountable for its criminal activities, and Palestine will enjoy freedom and sovereignty. I hope that Gaza will not sink to the bottom of the sea.
This Irish-German-Canadian production does not, however, investigate the nuts and bolts of the fractious political landscape. For example, we never learn what Hamas has achieved since coming to power in 2007, the role of Netanyahu is the massive strikes against Gaza (and Palestine as a whole), and so on. Instead, Gaza is a collage of beautiful lives against a very ugly backdrop.
Gaza is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 8th. On VoD in April, 2020.
The glorification of male companionship has been celebrated in tragicomedies such as Withnail & I (Bruce Ronbinson, 1987) and Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996). Animals, on the other hand, showcases the triumphant revelry between two young women, decadent in their communal taste for fermented depravity. Effortlessly translating Emma Jane Unsworth’s book from Manchester’s streets to the Irish capital, Animals zips with inspired zest, an energised exposition of elastic wit and inspirited storytelling.
Laura (the British born Holliday Grainger, complete with killer Dublin accent) fancies herself a writer, fancifully fantasising through voluminous bottles with the coquettish Tyler (Alia Shawkat). Their thirties fast approaching, the women see little reason to halt their precocious abilities to party, until love threatens to put these halcyon days to pasture. Minesweeping to Alphaville, Laura walks into the enigmatic Jim (Fra Fee), a precocious Ulster pianist whose scale painting conjures composites of satiated sexual desires. Between these silhouettes, a solitary fox walks, echoing the lonely poetry the film displays.
Befriending a musician, Laura looks to the emptiness of her novel, a work which has amassed 10 pages in as many years, at a time when her sister, once a free spirit who put fire to her vaginal hair in the name of drunken mirth, has gifted their parents a darling grandchild. Beside her stands Tyler, bohemian in outlook and lifestyle, hiding her mournful tears for a parent behind copious amounts of drugs and beer.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the film works with cocaine speed, on cocaine ethics and cocaine rhythms, each shot more unsettling than the last. A communal poetry reading soon turns carnal, with powdered implements entering holes holier than nostrils, while a communal familial dinner is noted for some choice opinions on infertility. Tyler, proudly seeking pleasures from the world outside convention, turns to rhetoric to detail her every life. She chides her friend through an assemblage of wedding dresses as a bastion for idiotic men, while Laura prides her feminism on bringing modernity to the traditional wedding.
Animals is proudly liberal in its outlook. In a telling moment, Laura invites her fiancé to decide what to do with his body. The film makes use of both posteriors, Tyler walking to them with wine glasses to find her best friend in flagrante delicto beside a red brick wall.
Yet the film’s most intimate scenes concern the two women. Whether bed bound in conversation, rebounded in romantic interests or surrounded by Beatnik literati, the two saunter the Irish city with the contentment of deep friendship, one living through art, the other hoping to catch it. It really doesn’t get much better than this!
Animals is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 2nd. On VoD in April 2020.
An elevator to the stratosphere winches passengers up from Earth to the docked spaceship Aniara. The interplanetary passenger liner is effectively a gigantic shuttle taking people to Mars to begin a new life. As the journey can be mentally traumatic, Aniara has an on board facility called Mima, a room / interface into which users plug themselves to relive old memories. Both interface and its human client group are looked after by a facilitator called the Mimaroben (Emelie Jonsson). The clients lie down with their heads resting on something that looks like a neck brace and experience, say, a forest in Spring with a fresh brook running through it, “the Earth as it used to be”.
Early in the journey to Mars, Aniara hits space’s equivalent of an air pocket: the ship tilts and, for a short time, everything on board is total chaos. Then things return to normal. Only, they don’t.
Eventually, the captain announces over the ship’s large screen video, public address system that Aniara swerved to avoid a fatal collision with an asteroid. The passengers and crew are very lucky to be still alive. The manoeuvre also involved jettisoning all the ship’s fuel. Now Aniara is drifting having been knocked off course – not a problem since once it approaches a nearby planet or other celestial body, the crew can use the planet’s gravitational field to slingshot themselves back on course. However as the Mimaroben’s world-weary, astronomer room mate (Anneli Martini) points out to her, the ship isn’t going anywhere near any such planets or bodies. So they’re just drifting through space with little likelihood of either reaching Mars or being rescued.
What follows, unusually and refreshingly for an sci-fi film ostensibly about space travel, is a study of a self-enclosed society in crisis as it moves from a consumerist passenger liner model to something much more prescriptive and co-operative. Food production shifts to algae-based crops which may provide a less pleasant diet but nevertheless ensures all the ship’s the population are adequately and healthily fed.
As more and more people want to use Mima as a form of temporary respite from the ship’s seemingly hopeless predicament, the facility eventually reaches a point where it can no longer cope with the client numbers and breaks under the strain. Accused of shutting down the now inoperable system, the Mimaroben is moved to more menial tasks.
Despite her initiating the occasional unsatisfactory sexual encounter with a male pickup, the Mimaroben’s main romantic interest is to be found in a pilot named Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro) with whom she eventually moves in and forms a household. This works for the two of them, at least for a while, but elsewhere on the ship the social tension becomes more and more strained. Fundamentalist quasi-religious cults arise, their dubious practices involving gathering for mass orgiastic rituals, partly for the purposes of procreation. Meanwhile, the marginalised Mimaroben may have a long term solution to all the unrest: she harbours a dream of building a VR display of sorts outside the ship to show images to the population in order to help them cope with their situation.
It’s never discussed exactly what has befallen planet Earth, but images of conflagration jostle with Mima’s ‘past’ imagery of healthy woodlands and fresh running water suggesting global warming has taken its toll. Crew notwithstanding, the implication is that everyone on the ship possesses sufficient financial resources to buy their way out. When disaster occurs, their bubble of self-preservation is burst and they enter into a sort of social free-fall where anything goes. Perhaps the piece overreaches itself a little with its religious orgies which play out as compelling spectacle even as you half wonder exactly what they’re doing in the narrative. Otherwise, though, it’s impressive as a piece of sci-fi, refreshingly intelligent as a portrait of a society in crisis. Overall, it’s wholly fascinating.
Aniara is out in the UK on Friday, August 30th. On VoD in March. Watch the film trailer below:
Twenty-five year since its release, Hoop Dreams has lost neither its nuance nor its relevance. The basic structure of the film, its rise-and-fall-and-rise-again narrative retains a distinctive elegance. This is not just a film about two high-school basketball players hoping to make it to the NBA. This is a film about challenging race and class orthodoxies in the US. It’s a film about the place sport has in the imagination and dreams of millions of people around the globe. And it’s also a film about how human love and talent become exploited.
Director Steve James started filming William Gates and Arthur Agee more than 30 years ago. They were just smart teenagers who were good at basketball. Recruited by the fee-paying St. Joseph’s school, their families were informed that, so long as they played well, they wouldn’t have to pay. Eventually, Agee has to return to an underfunded inner-city school, and the two players undergo contrasting fortunes as the stars of their respective schools. Gates is the golden boy hailed by all, but gradually brought low by injuries. Agee is the underdog lifting an underperforming team above its weight.
The Wasp, puritan work ethics embodied by St. Joseph’s head coach, Gene Pingatore (who passed away just a few weeks ago), a serial winner and highly respected sports coach, is very questionable. It drains the love and passion out of the young players. He reduces the sport to a series of set plays in which there is only ever one right decision, and that is the one the coach wants you to make. Make the wrong one, and you’ll get a volley of verbal abuse. Such coaches want to be chess-masters, but there’s too much chaos in most team sports to guarantee that level of control. In my opinion, this method of coaching has spread to almost all professional sports.
Both Agee’s and Gates’ families look upon St. Joseph’s with hope, as a route out of inner city poverty. When Agee is dropped from St. Jo’s, he also has to contend with his father falling foul to drugs and the law, whilst his mother loses her income and goes on welfare. The sense of responsibility and pressure he must have felt at the time is enormous. Yet he tackles his problems effectively. He doesn’t emerge an outright victor, but he’s a fighter, and does his best to get through it.
Steve James seemed to instinctively understand this. The camera is patient. The time that the director spent building up a relationship with both families is crucial to the film’s success. This cosy relationship also extends to the viewers.
The basketball footage is riveting. Even though this is a 25-year-old film relaying results that are 30 years old, my palms were sweating as James’ narration takes us through the story of each individual game. The poetry of sport is pervasive. Chaos has a habit of creating unbelievable narratives, seeping into the collective folklore of mass history.
Let’s not forget, however, the dark forces behind these stories: the dirty money, the non-remunerated players, the international skulduggery, and so on. Hoop Dreams reveals that sports are a route out of poverty for many, but also a bumpy road filled with dangerous turns and lies. For coaches it remains a means to an end. Either you become a winner or you get out. For the institutions, there’s more money being funnelled into the game than ever before.
The two protagonists find a glimmer of hope in the end of the movie. Both Gates and Agee enter college, and they talk about their dreams. Five years earlier, they have said “NBA” without hesitation. Now, they’re not so sure. Basketball has given a scholarship into college, and with that the springboard to something a bit more stable, if not quite as opulent as the promised land of the NBA. The way they speak of it suggests that they feel a sense of relief, that a burden has been released. Perhaps NBA isn’t the only way forward!
Hoop Dreams showed at Cinema Rediscovered in Bristol, and it’s out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, October 25th. On Mubi in June, 2020.
The extraordinary power of Notorious does not come through its plot (although the story concerning Nazis hiding in Brazil was renowned for its topicality and thematic resonance) or Ben Hecht’s Academy-Award nominated dialogue (although every line either reveals something about the plot or character) but rather its two central performances from Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman; two lovers bound together by a mutual self-loathing.
The concept is simple. Ingrid Bergman plays Alicia Huberman, the daughter of a disgraced Nazi traitor to the US government. To mask the pain of her father’s betrayal she drinks copiously, hosting parties where she fails to pretend that nothing is the matter. Government agent Devlin (Cary Grant) meets her at one of her parties, and recruits her to travel to Brazil, where she will use her father’s name to infiltrate a group of Nazi spies plotting a deadly uranium attack.
Released in 1946, the central concept was highly timely. WW2 had only just ended, people were afraid of Nazis on the loose in South America, and concerns about atomic warfare had been heightened after the deadly bombs America detonated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By roping Cary Grant and Ingmar Bergman in on the tale, Hitchcock scored a true box office hit and created one of his most gloriously romantic films, perhaps only bettered by the James Stewart-starring Vertigo (1958).
In true Hitchcock fashion, the film is a classic not because of its story but how it goes about telling it. With Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, Hitchcock found the perfect correlatives for his twin themes of love and fear, and how often they can be two sides of the same coin. Her Alicia Huberman is a totally broken woman, a compulsive alcoholic, drawn into the arms of Cary Grant’s infinite cool, while Grant’s Devlin is a failed attempt at a posturing blank slate; his eyes fearful of ever conveying anything other than pure detachment. Nonetheless, as part of his plan, she must be driven into the arms of Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), sending Devlin into a spiral of jealousy.Suddenly the previously composed government agent has to face up to his true feelings, lest he loses the first person he’s ever really cared for.
Hitchcock has always been known for the way he co-mingles sex, lust and love with the creeping fear of the unknown, yet Notorious is so seeped in its glorious, doomed romanticism that its images of love transcend the bounds of the conventional thriller into something incredibly gripping, vital and actually rather unconventional.
It’s best known for its Hay Code-skirting kiss scene, in which Grant and Bergman trade endless three second smooches for the better part of three minutes (a duration completely novel at the time), yet these moments keep on recurring, making it a true film of smushed-together faces, filmed in glorious close-up. Here Hitchcock innovates the use of the zoom. While the best example is the long pan from the stop of the stairs down to Alicia in the ballroom holding the key for the basement, Hitchcock also uses fast zooms during romantic sequences as well, suddenly getting us up close and personal with our subjects in the midst of passion. Every close-up becomes a tightening of the vice, another way of rushing to the heart of the matter, carrying us, the viewer, along with him.
While these love scenes — filmed in cars, hotel balconies and gorgeous ballrooms — are part of the plot per se, Hitchcock, with help from cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff, frames them in such a tender way that all “thriller” elements seem completely subsumed by nakedly erotic passion. It is this very woozy passion that is the heart of Notorious —a film obsessed with trust, brokenness, addiction and poison — and what makes it a particularly adult and unconventional thriller, even now.
It’s success rests upon Ingrid Bergman’s beautiful face, playing a woman endlessly oscillating between self-hatred, doubt and fear; both of the enemy and the far more terrifying prospect of opening her heart to another man like she did to her traitorous father. Is there any actress in history of cinema that could pierce quite so fiercely into the heart as her? Whether its as Rick Blaine’s ex-lover in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942), the wife in a failed marriage in Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954) or the terrifying matriarch in Autumn Sonata (Ingmar Bergman, 1978), no actress before or since has ever been so effective at conveying vast emotions through the power of close-ups alone. Watching her act I find my critical faculties melting away in favour of pure adoration of such an evocative range of facial expressions. It’s hard to imagine any other actress playing that same role.
The plot of Notorious might be concerned with violence and death, yet these moments almost entirely take place off-screen. Whether it’s the agitated guest who is euphemistically “driven home” or the iconic final scene where Sebastian walks back to the mansion and an almost certain death, everything is suggested rather than depicted. The MacGuffin may concern hidden uranium, yet no bombs go off, voices are rarely raised, and there are no wild chase scenes. Rather the most violent scenes are the love sequences, both players losing themselves in the midst of incredibly raw and evocative passion.
Hitchcock understands better than any other mainstream director that love and sex can be far more terrifying than gunshots and creatures in the dark. It is rare to see a romantic thriller where both characters are ostensibly so weak-willed, yet one where their love for each other eventually sees them through to a happy ending (eighties and nineties noir updates almost always end up with betrayal or death). Instead Notorious stands out for its belief that love can just about keep persisting, even when you hate yourself, drink obsessively, and are surrounded by Nazis. While Psycho (1960), Vertigo (1958) and The Birds (1963) are often considered to be bigger reinventions and artistic leaps in terms of Hitchcock’s technique, Notorious deserves credit for its uncommonly powerful, optimistic yet mature romantic vision; completely undimmed by the passage of time.
Notorious is back in cinemas across the UK more than 70 years after its original release on Friday, August 9th.
The last major film festival of the summer season before Oscar hype ramps up in the autumn, Locarno’s reputation is builtupon its eclectic and unconventional programme. Its standout cinema is the Piazza Grande — with over 8,000 available seats, it’s the largest outdoor screen in the world (pictured below) — which crucially means that queueing is a lot less stressful than during Venice or Cannes. This year’s Festival, curated for the first time by Lili Hinstin since Carlo Chatrian moved to the Berlinale, might be low on the big names, but nonetheless offers an exciting, experimentaland challenging line-up. From the Moving Ahead section, focusing on cinema’s most obscure edges to the retrospective Shades of Black — celebrating black cinema in all its forms — this year’s Festival champions that which is daring, different and auteur-driven. The event takes place from August 7th to the 17th.
Here are the 10 films we are most excited for!
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1. 7500 (Patrick Vollrath):
Joseph Gordon-Levitt has a great knack for taking traditional genre fare and turning it into something that seems vital. He stars in 7500 as a young pilot tasked with negotiating with plane hijackers. Given that this premise is one of the most overcrowded of micro-genres, it will be interesting to see if 7500 — referring to the code pilots use in the event of a hijacking — can rise above its predecessors into something truly worthwhile. The claustrophobic clips released so far suggest a rather minimalist and claustrophobic approach, requiring Gordon-Levitt to really step up and carry the film all by himself.
Easily the most anticipated film at the festival, Tarantino’s ninth film sees the postmodern auteur return to the LA locale of his first three films. Received to rapturous applause at Cannes, this Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt-starring lament for a passing age of Hollywood, set against the backdrop of the Manson Murders, has been touted by some as a return to form following the middling The Hateful Eight (2015). Known for provoking endless discussion, it will be fascinating to see how he tackles the horrendous Manson murders and makes it entertaining and meaningful.
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3. Days of The Bagnold Summer (Simon Bird):
Yes, its Will from The Inbetweeners (2008-2010) with his debut film playing in competition at a major international film festival! Days of the Bagnold Summer, adapted from the graphic novel by Joff Winterhart, looks like a classic coming-of-age tale, telling the story of a young heavy-metal loving teen who is forced to spend his holiday’s with his annoying mother. Featuring an airy Belle and Sebastian soundtrack, and performances from Tamsin Greig, Rob Brydon and Earl Cave, it seems to be another thoughtful addition to the British oddball teen canon.
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4. Space Dogs (Elisa Kremser, Levin Peter):
Laika was the first living creature to ever be sent into space by the Soviet Union, dying in the name of scientific progress. Legends say that the dog returned to earth and lives among the streets of Moscow as a ghost. Experimental documentary Space Dogs looks to be an unconventional look at animal-human relations, and how progress can easily come at a cost to the earth’s most friendly animals. Interestingly enough, this film comes with a content warning while the inevitably violent Once Upon A Time In Hollywood doesn’t. Dog lovers beware!
Asif Kapadia has established himself as one of the best profilers in the documentary business with character portraits of legends such as Amy Whinehouse (Amy, 2015) and Brazilian F1 Driver Artyon Senna (Senna, 2010). For his latest work, he turns to arguably the greatest footballer of all time, Diego Maradona, utilising an extraordinary 500 hours of unused footage to go deep on his mythical stature. With critics saying that deep knowledge of football is not required to enjoy the movie, it seems that Kapadia has found a way to use Maradona’s tale to enquire into deeper truths regarding the human condition.
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6. Wilcox (dir. Denis Côté):
The preeminent Quebecois auteur Denis Côté’s previous film, Ghost Town Anthology (2019)may have already been released this year after positive buzz at Berlinale, but he’s already back at it again with the experimental film Wilcox. Running only 63 minutes long and featuring no dialogue, it seems Côté is taking his minimalist instincts to a new level; telling the quiet story of a hermit living beyond the normal bounds of society, surviving on his wits alone in the vast countryside.
Wilcox is also pictured at the top of this article.
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7. Echo (Rúnar Rúnarsson):
The most exciting contemporary director to come out of Iceland, Rúnar Rúnarsson tells sensitive, family-focused tales set against the beautiful backdrop of the rugged and barren countryside. Often filmed in grainy 16mm, his body of work does a lot with little dialogue yet strong and evocative gestures. His latest is set during Christmas time, and features only 56 scenes; foregoing a traditional narrative to create an entire portrait of Icelandic society. Judging from his boldly shot trailer, this could perhaps be his best film yet.
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8. The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Joe Talbot):
Already released to highly positive reception in the USA, The Last Black Man in San Francisco makes its debut on European shores. At tale of gentrification that leaves the African-American community of San Francisco behind, it has been touted as a highly lyrical and dreamlike depiction of a city that has changed beyond measure. It stars Jimmie Falls playing a version of himself, attempting to reclaim his childhood home built by his grandfather. Picked up by A24, currently the hottest independent film studio in the USA, it’ll be interesting to see how it plays over the pond.
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9. A Voluntary Year (Ulrich Köhler):
The Berlin school — comprised of directors such as Christian Petzold and Angela Schanelec — have been making serious waves on the arthouse scene recently, from Berlinale to beyond. Ulrich Köhler may not specifically be from Berlin, but his work — bold, uncompromising and completely its own — fits the ticket exactly. His last film, In My Room (2018) took a wistful look at the end of the world, while the upcoming A Voluntary Year tells the story of a girl taking a gap year volunteering abroad, possibility separating her from her father. It’ll be fascinating to see what Köhler does with the topic here.
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10. To The Ends of the Earth (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa):
An Uzbekistan-Japan co-production, To The End of The Earth is a clash of civilisations story; depicting a young Japanese woman’s travels to the central Asian country to film the latest episode of her travel show. Here she has the bizarre aim of capturing a legendary fish; once again showing Kurosawa’s love of blending genres together, mixing together comedy, thriller and romance for good effect. The closing film of the festival, it’ll be the second Kurosawa film to premiere at Locarno after Real (2013).
DMovies critic Redmond Bacon will be at the festival. Follow DMovies for our exclusive coverage of the event!
British filmmaker Peter Strickland’s fourth feature film In Fabric stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hayley Squires, Leo Bill, and Gwendoline Christie. Set mostly around an antiquated Thames Valley department store, the film follows the journey of a killer red dress from its first wearer to its last. Lavishly stylised, In Fabric sees Strickland flexing his inimitable style and challenging orthodoxy once again with satire and horror, this time exploring themes concerning consumerism and the rituals, superstitions and fetishes that surround clothes and retail culture.
Just as the film gets released on Curzon Home Cinema, Lara C. Cory had a word with the director in order to find out where his inspiration came from, the mythologies behind the movie aesthetics, his relation with music, working with Stereolab and much more!
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Lara C. Cory – Please tell us about the department store that inspired the setting of this film? What elements particularly captured your imagination?
Peter Strickland – A department store in Reading called Jackson’s was the main inspiration for the film. Everything from its pneumatic money chutes to the mannequins was pivotal to the script I was writing. The film is essentially a childhood’s perspective of department stores, evoking the perceived mystery of these places when one is too young to know where a dumb waiter goes.
LCC – The film had an unusual story arc of two stories, one long, one short. Was this intentional or simply a result of budgetary limitations? How did you choose whose stories or which strands to follow?
PS – I did have more stories, but that all fell by the wayside. It ended up feeling strange with three victims, but in two stories. I could’ve incorporated more victims for the dress had I made each story shorter, but the problem with that is the characters feel more dispensable. I wanted the audience to relate to the characters and not want them to die, and by spending time with each character the audience hopefully connect more.
LCC – Talk us through some of the themes and mythologies that fed into the story and aesthetic of the film?
PS – The ultimate thing for me was to explore the darker side of our connection with clothing – unspoken fetishes, superstition, body dysmorphia, things that clothing often emphasises. I love the idea of an inert piece of fabric provoking such strong reactions in people. How a dead person’s clothing has its own haunted power. How another piece of clothing can disgust someone or turn them on. Clothing is this strange conduit between one human and another. Without the human imprint on it, clothing is not so interesting for me as a subject.
Of course, the allure of clothing and its aspirational or cosmetic ability to hide or reveal who you are is of relevance in the film, but ultimately, I was fascinated by the visceral nature of a human’s presence found in clothing and even in second-hand clothing. You can often smell the previous owner’s body odour in the armpits of jackets and shirts. If you dwell on it long enough, it’s a very bizarre form of proxy intimacy. All this is not exactly a mythology, but that was my preoccupation for the film.
LCC – The time-zones in the film felt rather fluid and difficult to pin down and I was told you gave the various crew members different time periods to work within. What can you tell me about this and the significance it has in the larger narrative?
PS – The film is set in January 1993 and only has one flashback to a man’s childhood in the 1970s in which an erotic twitch is ignited by a sales rep’s hosiery. What I loved about Jackson’s in Reading was the feeling of stepping into a different period and I wanted to maintain that anachronism with In Fabric. I didn’t give anyone different time periods. I gave numbers to the actors according to the reality of the environment they were appearing in. A one was close to social realism, while a nine was close to completely surreal.
LCC – There are some very disturbing scenes in this film, some explicit and some more subtle. How do you know how far you can push the boundaries when it comes to graphic bodily function? Do you ever worry about being gratuitous or are you waving the flag for uncensored self-expression?
PS – I don’t know about uncensored. I’d fully respect any individual’s choice to walk out of In Fabric or not see it, but that’s not for censors to decide. It’s an incredibly complex thing and censorship can only be on a case-by-case basis. It’s really hard to write about unless one writes an essay. I sound as if I’m contradicting myself and a lot of films I admire are extremely troubling or toxic, but there are things that I personally would find too distressing to see and in a world without a censorship body. You open up a Pandora’s box of transgressions way beyond what we’re already accustomed to. But when do things shift from an infinite variety of personal limits to something clearly defined as unacceptable?
In Fabric might push its eroticism into uncomfortable areas, but on a purely technical and legal level, all the ‘sex’ scenes in the film are consensual, which is why I feel this particular film shouldn’t be cut even though the cuts were minimal. I disagree with the US censor on In Fabric, but I’d still rather have a world in which I disagree with a censor than having no censorship at all. I find the normalisation of extreme violence in film far more troublesome than Fatma’s character from In Fabric tasting a bit of menstrual blood, but still – the vast majority of films with extreme violence shouldn’t be censored either.
LCC –In Fabric feels like a series of obfuscated mysteries more than a haunting tale with a traditional story arc, did you set out to tell such a diffuse and abstract tale? Does sharing only portions of the ‘bigger picture’ make for more intriguing cinema?
PS – To me, the film is not abstract, as long as one accepts that the dress is the protagonist and everyone else plays second fiddle to it. The characters are disposable, but that doesn’t mean I can’t invest all my love in them. The three victims of the dress might have their flaws, but I couldn’t write those characters if I didn’t believe in them or didn’t see something of myself or people close to me in them. That doesn’t really answer your question. Only sharing portions of the ‘bigger picture’ does make for a more intriguing cinematic experience, but I think In Fabric does share pretty generous portions, in which case it’s probably not an intriguing cinematic experience.
LCC – I really love the music in this film. I understand you engaged Tim Gane (of Stereolab) to work on the score before the film was made. Can you tell us some of the triggers or ideas that you gave him for the soundtrack and was there much adjusting to be done or did you find yourself bending to the will of the music as you wrote and shot the film?
PS – Tim initially made a series of long pieces for me to immerse myself in. There was no story at that point, but I knew I wanted to work with him. Some of the demos were remastered for the film and I didn’t want much to change there, but other pieces of music were created by Tim and the band after they saw the rushes. Sometimes the music would inform the images, such as with the ‘fire alarm’, which is a slight mutation of a demo Tim did for me several years back. Otherwise, it was a back and forth with Tim adjusting music for a scene and adjusting the edit for the music.
In terms of references, I tried to avoid them as much as possible. Of course, there were a few [musical] references, such as Merry Clayton, Mick Jagger and Bernard Parmegiani, but even then, we tried to allow ourselves to deviate as much as possible. A lot of our conversations were about mood and instruments. Tim suggested the celeste and that worked out really well.
Initially, we spoke a lot about the score being very drum-machine heavy, which felt quite cold and hard in a good way. Tim sent a lot of rhythms, but in the end, we didn’t use so many, as I eventually felt that cold and hard was not the way. I wanted something more romantic, but not to always use that music where you would expect it. The sex ritual with the mannequin has the film’s most romantic music (which was initially composed for the love scene with Sheila and Zach), but I really loved the counterpoint of that dark sexuality with lush, romantic music and the Sheila/Zach lovemaking with more ominous music. I wanted Tim to take the lead as much as possible. Of course, I had my thoughts and suggestions, but I can never tell a musician what notes to play and even if I could, there’d be no point in asking someone to do a score. When you ask someone to do a score, it’s important to remember why you asked them and not try and mould them into a Hans Zimmer or Ennio Morricone prototype.
Picture at the top of this article by Marek Szold. The other images are stills from In Fabric.
I must confess my ignorance regarding the storied feud between the titular Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), but the pair bring a welcome humour to their dynamic – tongues are firmly in cheek amongst all the macho-posturing and smouldering intensity.
The only problem is that this banter is lame and contrived – it raises little more than a smirk. Consider the following line: “Listening to your voice is like dragging my balls across shattered glass”! You could find better trash talk in the worst Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle or WWE pay-per-view. Johnson’s natural charisma does break through on several occasions, though. Indeed, his humour and hulking physicality (he’s never been bigger) give him an action hero’s screen presence. He just needs to find that defining role – something edgy, something dirty.
However, the same cannot be said of Jason Statham, whose tough guy shtick never quite lands. He has developed this strained, unnatural mid-Atlantic cockney accent that mangles almost every line he’s given. Again, though, he may find new facets as a performer should he land the right role in the right film. Even less interesting is Vanessa Kirby, who seems to have wandered off the set of Mission: Impossible – Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie, 2018) and onto the Universal lot for Hobbs & Shaw, only this time her character is even flatter (but much less annoying). There’s also Idris Elba, who coasts along as the hackneyed, megalomaniac stock character Brixton Lore.
Ultimately, neither Johnson nor Statham fill the action hero void. They’ve seen success in both franchises and star vehicles, yet they don’t have a single iconic performance between them. They don’t have the insouciance of Clint Eastwood, the absurdity of Arnold Schwarzenegger, or the gruff, everyman appeal of Bruce Willis. However, this may speak to the state of the action film rather than their personal capabilities. After all, both the action film and the summer blockbuster has – with some exceptions – been diluted to family-friendly fare; 12A fodder with swear word quotas, weightless action and all manner of high-tech nonsense. We can’t expect another Harry Callahan, T-800 (Terminator) or John McClane in this infantilised milieu.
Contemporary action’s most egregious trend is, of course, the cut-heavy, shaky-cam aesthetic popularised by the Bourne and Taken films. 2014’s John Wick – which was co-directed by Hobbs & Shaw helmer David Leitch, alongside Chad Stahelski – signalled a mainstream pushback against this hideous style of filmmaking, yet Leitch could have done a lot more in Hobbs & Shaw to promulgate John Wick’s emphasis on fluid camera work and genuine physicality. The combat is definitely high-impact, but too much of this impact is derived from quick cuts rather than Johnson and Statham’s physicality – which they doubtlessly possess.
The action sequences are at their best when Hobbs & Shaw are running, jumping and driving – not fighting. An early moment when Hobbs abseils down the Leadenhall Building, for example, is so ridiculously elaborate that you can’t help but enjoy the ride. Then there’s the climactic chase involving four or five massively powerful deuce coupes and a military helicopter, which also sucks you into its boyish fantasyland. Everything in-between though – the combat, the characters, the narrative – is decidedly middling.
Fast and Furious: Hobbs & Shaw is in cinemas Thursday, August 1st. On VoD in April.
