Stages on Life’s Way, Søren Kierkegaard, 1845
My choice of the films, distributed in The Netherlands in 2023, I managed to see in cinemas and on streaming platforms. 2023 was a great year for cinema. The following is not a ranking of films. These films struck and appealed to me. I listed the films because of affinities in theme and tone, or by contrast. In compiling this list, I found that many films tell women's stories, or stories in which women play an important role. Fifteen of the 32 films presented here were directed by women . Gender equality, as reports on the U.S. and European film industry, among others, show, is still very problematic. Even though Greta Gerwig may win many awards at the upcoming Oscar ceremony with her third coming-of-age film, this time about a doll who wants to become a woman. And let’s remember that in May talented French actress Adèle Haenel retired over French film sector’s ‘complacency’ towards sexual predators. There is also a lot of focus on education, upbringing, family, children and the parent-child relationship. Quite a few debut feature films are included in the list, 9, to be exact. A good sign.
Anatomie d’une chute
Directed by
Justine Triet. France, 2023.
When the
husband of famous writer Sandra Voyter is found dead in front of their chalet
in the French Alps, there are only two explanations: murder or suicide. Pushed
down from the top floor by Sandra or he
jumped himself. In the trial that follows, the truth - with a crucial
role for their 11-year-old son - will emerge.
Language is
very much at the heart of what drives the film. In nearly an obsessional manner
throughout the entire film, people are striving to understand each other and
make themselves understood. The language moves between a language of passion
and impulse in the more familiar household setting to the language of explanation,
which is much more articulate, in the attempt to analyze and understand what
happened. There’s this ongoing attempt to knit reality through and against
language in such a way as to find an exit out of a predicament.
Is there a connection between the courtroom and
the cinema? Especially in Sandra’s trial, I feel there’s something similar in
that it involves artistic choices that people then try to interpret as
revealing of personal biography.
I mean,
there’s definitely the bridging fact of the audience and a public reception. Of
course, the judgment’s stakes aren’t the same in one, even though both are a
place where our narrations and stories are appropriated through interpretation.
In the courthouse, that recuperation is a lot more violent because it’s the
place where fiction actually begins and overtakes truth. The narrative event is
one of two different fictions being juxtaposed and laid out. Something that I’m
very fascinated by in a courtroom situation is closer to the writing room,
really, for me than in the screening room. It’s that place where fiction
begins.
Sandra the character gives voice to some of
this frustration in the opening scene when she asks her interviewer, “Do you
think one can only write from experience?” How, then, do you stimulate your
imagination to provide something that approximates reality without drawing from
it directly?
I’m a
vampire. I collect from what’s around me from my friends, etcetera, but it’s
not a relationship of direct theft. It’s rather a wringing or a deformation of
the things that we find so as to allow them to be revealed in a hidden manner.
The most important thing, and something that I think I’ve gained with maturity,
is for the gesture of vampirism to remain natural. Collect only things that
very profoundly concern us, which isn’t to say that they have an element of a
biographical narrative. But [we collect] things that speak to or at us in a
very personal way so as to not be the director that one is expected to be or
admired to be, but really the director that we are. I think that that’s
something that’s very much changed for me from my early 20s to now.”
Slant Magazine,
October 2, 2023.
Tár
Directed by
Todd Field. United States of America,
2022
Tár tells
the story of Lydia Tár, a celebrated conductor who abuses her position of
power: she waltzes over people, ruins careers and puts up with young women who
are impressed by her.
Well, I
like to watch Law & Order as much as the next person, but I’m not
interested in making procedural narrative. I’m not a plotter, I’m a character
person. So, the rules for this film were very, very simple. We spend three
weeks — with the exception of the denouement, the epilogue — with this
character at kind of arm’s length, but [we see her] fairly objectively. So, we
know what she knows in those three weeks, and we don’t know what she knew from
before. And so, if you follow those rules and you don’t break them, it creates
a very particular kind of narrative. You’ve got in late, and you get out early
with her. So that’s the thing. It’s not the “right” way of storytelling, it’s
just the way that I’m conditioned to chase.
Deadline,
March 6, 2023.
Zhena Chaikovskogo
(English title Tchaikovsky's Wife)
Directed by
Kirill Serebrennikov. Russia, France, Switzerland
2022.
Antonina
Miliukova is a beautiful and bright young woman, born in the aristocracy of
19th century Russia. She could have anything she'd want, and yet her only
obsession is to marry Pyotr Tchaikovsky, with whom she falls in love from the
very moment she hears his music. The composer finally accepts this union, but
after blaming her for his misfortunes and breakdowns, he wants to get rid of
her.
“Antonina Miliukova is an enigma in your
film. There are so many sensitive aspects to her relationship with Tchaikovsky,
for example, that she says she wanted to marry him for who he is and not for
his compositions. How do you yourself view her?
No doubt
she wanted to be part of something big and important. Of course she knew his
music and that played a role, but above all I think it was an ego thing.
Actually, you see two egos battling each other here. This is not a film about
music, but about people who can't listen to each other.
The late nineteenth century was a tumultuous
time, with the end of Tsarism and the Soviet revolution in sight. What was it
like to pick apart that era?
It's a
fascinating period because it was completely destroyed by war, revolutions and
the footprint of the Soviets. It wasn't easy to reconstruct. That's why we made
our own version of it - our version of a nineteenth-century painting, a work of
the belle époque. You can hardly imagine the revolutions that took place, even
technologically. People could move faster, see more of the world than ever
before. For example, I was immensely pleased to find out that Tchaikovsky had
climbed the Empire State Building. It took him two weeks to sail to America,
but he made that trip and in 1891 opened the then-new Carnegie Hall with his
Marche solennelle. He lived to see the telephone and the steam engine. How that
affected his art no one knows, but it's interesting to reflect on the impact of
all those shifts - technological, social, political - on the music of that era.
Although that is not the subject of this film."
Devotion is ultimately what your film is about
- to faith, to the arts and from a couple to each other.
When you
make a film you almost melt with your characters. I think it's unfair to make a
film from a distance, so you have to zoom in on them completely. In that sense,
this film, like any film, is a psychological process where I put everything of
myself into it. My life, my blood, my body, my sweat, my sperm - everything for
this strange creature called film. Actors and directors both throw their whole bodies
into the struggle to create something. And film absorbs everything from you. It
gobbles up everything."
With this film about a composer, it is all the
more striking how musical your films are: those long, moving shots, that
beautiful cinematography and then suddenly that total depiction of Miliukova’s
life.
I make
those long shots simply because I'm a lazy editor, haha. Besides, I love them
because they do something to the perception of time. Cinema is time. Every
schnitt makes time more artificial for the audience. That's not always fair to
the audience, not always truthful. It is better to construct a reality and film
it for as long as possible. That gives the audience truth, or some form of
truth - even in fiction."
Filmkrant,
May 3, 2023.
Roter Himmel
Directed by
Christian Petzold. Germany, 2023.
Young
writer Leon travels with a friend to the
Baltic Sea for a short vacation. There he struggles mainly with his new
manuscript and a noisy young woman who turns out to be staying in the same
house. What begins as a sultry, summer drama full of booze and sex slowly
unfolds as a biting satire about a self-absorbed artist.
“You
described Leon as “playing at” being a writer. Were you thinking of your own
role as a filmmaker when writing that character, or your own feelings about
artistic work and how it compares to manual or professional labor?
There’s one
movie of mine I always feel ashamed of. I never want to do a master class with
this movie. It’s my second feature, Cuba libre. It’s not so bad, but the time
when I made it was the worst in my life. Because I had made a movie, Pilots,
that was successful, and I got a lot of money very fast for a second movie,
just eight months later. I was impressed by what critics said, I had new
friends, I could sit in hotels like this and talk, and I lost control. I wrote
the script very fast, in two or three months, and it’s a script by a
charlatan—a charlatan who doesn’t know he’s a charlatan. It has so many
quotations from all my favorite movies; for example, I took the plot from
Detour. I wanted to show the world that I am a cineastic, intellectual young
man.
My favorite scene in the movie is the dinner
during which we learn that Nadja is a literary scholar. She references Heinrich
von Kleist’s novella, The Earthquake in Chile, and then recites “The Asra,” the
poem by Heinrich Heine. It reminded me of Paula’s lecture in Undine, which she
gives twice—and here she recites the poem twice, too, with a beautiful voice.
I studied
literature, and I read this essay which is mentioned in the film, by Werner
Hamacher. The content of the essay is that an earthquake that happened in
Lisbon in the 1700s was a breaking point in our history, because God left us
then. If God made earthquakes like that, it didn’t make any sense to believe in
him. Kant, Hegel, they all talk about this earthquake.
Von
Kleist’s novella is trembling in its structure, in its rhythm. It’s like an
earthquake not only in the content, but also in form. When you are at a
festival like the Berlinale, you are always talking about the content of
movies: it’s a movie about Ukraine, about the earthquake in Turkey, about Iran…
always movies “about.” What you can learn from Kleist’s novel and Hamacher’s
essay is that it is important not only to do things about; the author himself
must also be infected by the thing he or she is talking about.
When Nadja
is reciting “The Asra,” she’s not just talking about people who have to die
when they love—she’s also talking about rhythm, and about Germany, in a way. In
Germany, we have no music. When you see a movie like Heaven’s Gate, you can see
that all the Europeans are bringing their music to the U.S.A.: the Romani, the
Polish people, the Germans; there’s also the blues that the Africans bring. The
Nazis destroyed the music of the people. We also lost our lyrics. I read an
interview with Hannah Arendt. She had lived in New York for 30 years, and they
asked her in which language she dreams, and she said: in German, because of all
the poems she had read when she was a child.
I am interested in your use of these two
texts—“The Asra” and The Earthquake in Chile—because they’re both examples of
an ironic or disillusioned romanticism. In your other films, love is usually a
radical force: it re-enchants a capitalist world that is too rational, too
modern. Afire feels different, more cynical. Here, love is helpless in the face
of disaster and death.
The power
of love, the romantic, the black night of love—in this movie, I was not interested
in all these structures. I was interested more in the collective, in the group,
which has to learn something. Love doesn’t already exist. They have to work for
it. There is love in the poem, there is love in the views; there is also
physical love in the night, and between the two guys when they kiss. You can
see the love growing. It’s an agriculture of love. It’s not love in a romantic
way.
Film Comment, March 20, 2023.
Kuru Otlar Üstüne (English title About Dry Grasses)
Directed
by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Turkey, France, Germany, Sweden 2023
In About
Dry Grasses, art teacher Samet completes his three-year tour of duty in a
village in eastern Anatolia and dreams of transferring to Istanbul. An
alienated, detached cynic, Samet lives with his sunny colleague Kenan. A student
accuses him of sexual harassment, complicating his situation. But Samet only
gets moving when Kenan threatens to find love with English teacher Nuray, who
lost a leg in an Ankara bombing.
It
amplifies the feeling of remoteness that is already present in this isolated
place, in the middle of nowhere. The main character feels even more that life
is elsewhere. The story comes from reality, from the diary of Akin Aksu, who is
a co-writer of the film and who was a teacher for three years in another part
of Turkey. When I read this diary, at first I didn't particularly want to make
a movie about a teacher again, but several months later it was still on my
mind, so I thought we'd try to make a screenplay out of it, writing as a trio.
The writing took almost a year and I ended up with a very long script, twice as
long as the one for Winter Sleep. I filmed the entire script and it was in the
editing process that I cut it down.
The female character of Nuray seems a much
better person than her counterpart Samet. Is this your general view of women
and men?
For me, no
one is good or bad. It is true that Nuray is a strong woman. But it was not an
intention of principle, it was because it suited the character who lost a leg
in a deadly explosion in Ankara and who is also an activist, this kind of
activity sometimes makes you stronger. But Nuray is also very weak in other
ways. As for Samet, there are catalytic events that open doors to the
imagination and emotions: we understand more and more dimensions of reality.
Sometimes very small things serve as triggers for our souls. This is important:
there is a potential for change and I wanted to show this through the
character. The ending can even be seen as hopeful, it depends on how you look
at it. Because a face can be interpreted very differently. But what really
matters is that Samet, in my eyes, is weak in the end. Because I think that
genuine human relationships only reveal themselves through our weaknesses, not
through our strengths.
Both teachers are accused by students of
inappropriate behaviour. Is this a reflection on the current changes in
relations between women and men?
This event
simply happened in reality and it is present in the journal that we adapted. By
the way, there is no mention of abuse in the film at all, but of inappropriate
behaviour in class. Of course, the audience can imagine that this is hiding
something. But basically, there is always a special relationship with certain
students that you like more. Because their energy gives meaning to the job and
you create these kinds of relationships even more easily in isolated places. But
sometimes this delicate relationship breaks down by coincidence, like in the
film with this letter that will have unforeseen consequences. I needed such an
event to create a break that provokes many things, including between the two
main male characters. Life is like that and for Samet it is a big surprise and
a real disappointment because he thought that this girl liked him
unconditionally. He starts to be very cruel because this is also his character
and he can't help it. He uses his authority as a teacher, but he would do the
same thing if it were a boy. He behaves in the same way with his friend, the
other teacher, Kenan. But the disappointment is all the greater because this
student gave some kind of meaning to his life. It's like with Brutus: the more
confidence you have, the stronger your disappointment.
Education can drift into a toxic relationship.
There are
always struggles between human beings, even when they are young, and I wanted
to show the consequences. In this case, there is psychological abuse. The
teacher is in a dominant position which facilitates the humiliation and raises his
level of inner violence and his cruelty in general. I think this cruelty is
potentially in all of us. And all this happens because of a misunderstanding
about a letter. An incident that I thought was a good starting point for
creating passion between the characters.”
Cineuropa , May 22, 203
Directed by Aki Kaurismäki. Finland, Germany 2023.
Ansa and Holappa, two wandering souls in Helsinki, both just fired, have their first date in a movie theater. Ansa writes her phone number on a bill for Holappa, the bill gets lost. Will Holappa meet Ansa again? Fortunately, Ansa turns up again at the movie theater. She asks him to have for dinner at her place…
“It felt
like this bloody world needed some love stories now, but it doesn’t matter what
we do in Finland,” he added.
Documenting
the war in his movie was important so people can “watch it and understand how
cruel and stupid” the conflict was years down the line, he added. In a similar
vein, Kaurismäki pointed to his inclusion of the Tiananmen Square massacre in
1990’s The Match Factory Girl.
Fallen
Leaves star Jussi Vatanen said: “During terrible times, it is important to
remember there is beauty and love in the world, so in that sense this is an
extraordinarily important movie.”
Deadline,
May 23, 2023.
Alma Pöysti
: He’s such an auteur. He writes and directs it. He’s been doing it for 40
years. So he’s there on the set, building the frame, he’s got such a special
and visual talent. He’s there moving chairs, paintings, ashtrays and getting it
right. As I said, The vision is very clear. He’s very exact, but then he also
leaves space for us to bring our hearts and life to the characters. It was a
journey into old school filmmaking.
It’s shot
on 35 millimeter film. There’s a huge respect for that material. He cuts the
film before he shoots it. There is nothing extra done. He told us not to
rehearse; somehow knowing our lines, but not really getting too much. He said
that he prefers to do the shots in one take, which is a terrifying combination.
We came to the center and found out that it was actually true. It was quite a
shock at first, but then we started to love it when you get it right because
you realize that these moments you get when it’s the first and only time
something happens in front of the camera.
Those
moments are so precious, honest and pure that you really don’t want to mess it
up. He also said that if you mess it up, you take it two times and if it’s a
disaster, it’s free. It was a beautiful concentration on the set and this goes
for everyone. It’s the light, the camera and everyone needs to get it right for
that take. This was pretty unique. Both of us are digital kids, doing multiple takes with cameras and angles. You
can go on forever but this was here. You don’t have to dare to fail, you have
to dare to succeed in a way.
Jussi
Vatanen: It was a fun set to hang out. He has a very lovely sense of humor,
lovable God. But he also, I think he’s like a master in casting his films. If
you look at all the faces in, in those far scenes that are quite amazing faces,
but he also uses a lot of like amateurs even in, in speaking roles. For
example, those two guys who are after the film come out from the cinema and we
talk about the friends, those, those were obvious neighbors and he was like,
it’s very convenient. I get a ride home and it’s just something amazing that
somebody has a vision that I want those guys in my field and they can do it and
they definitely nailed those lines.”
Sweet Dreams
Directed by
Ena Sendijarevic. Netherlands, Reunion,
Indonesia, Sweden 2023.
In this relentless satire, set in colonial
times, the death of a Dutch sugar
manufacturer leads to an exuberant cat-and-mouse game as an Indonesian workers'
rebellion brews.
“How did this initially come about?
After
making “Take Me Somewhere Nice,” which I shot in Bosnia, my country of birth, I
felt the desire to do something in the Netherlands and I wanted to look at the
relation between Western Europe with the rest of the planet and this drew me to
the topic of colonialism. Dutch colonial history is something that I didn’t
know as much about as I wanted to and I wanted to learn more about it, so that
was the starting point.
I’ve heard this might’ve started out as
Agathe’s story and broadened into this ensemble film. How did it evolve?
It’s true
that it really started with Agathe, and with an image of a very lush jungle
where you would see a Western European woman there being completely out of
place, sweating in a white Victorian dress. This was Agathe for me and I first
started to write about this woman and as I was writing about how she would be
sitting in her mansion, being completely isolated and not being able to have a
certain kind of position of power through the legislation in that time, all the
other characters were, one by one, born into the story. Her husband and then
Siti, the maid, and then Siti’s child and the ensemble of characters grew until
they were six.
It shares a similar aspect ratio and vibrant
color palette with “Take Me Somewhere Nice,” though it’s a period piece. Did
you feel any urge you had to adjust your style to the historical setting?
There will
always be a core to the things I’m drawn to, so I wasn’t afraid to drift away
too much from my style, but for this film, we were definitely looking for its
own visual language. With this screenplay, I really started with just a blank
page to really look at what kind of visual influences could we use and what was
very important, for example, were these naive primitivist paintings from around
1900. There was this French painter Henri Rousseau, who would paint these very
tropical landscapes, even if he never left France, and he would paint them in
this very colorful, almost childlike way. There would be a certain exoticizing
viewpoint, which made it a bit edgy, so you also feel like, “Okay, is this what
I’m looking at? How should I interpret it?” And I thought that would be a
certain layer to the film that will make it more interesting, so we used him as
an influence a lot, especially when it comes to all the colors, not only the
flowers in the nature that we were shooting, but also in the house and all the
walls. That was very important to create this very stylized universe of its
own, [which] is what’s the same as “Take Me Somewhere Nice,” even if I use very
different ingredients in that film. Some ingredients are similar – certain lens
choices and things like that, but still, the idea to make a universe of its
own.
Once you get the script in the hands of the actors,
were there certain dynamics you could get excited about as you started to
rehearse?
Yes,
definitely. When I write, I also don’t really have actors in my head and that’s
because the characters change a lot during the writing process. The Agathe that
I started with is a very different Agathe than I ended up with in the writing,
and when the cast was complete, because it’s an ensemble, it was really like
mixing and matching all the time. And it was quite late in the process that we
could really lock the whole cast and I was still writing within the casting
process, trying to find bits and pieces and the actors that got the roles in
the end had a big influence on how the characters turned out. That’s the luxury
of being a writer and director – really, until the end, I could keep writing
and if there’s inspiration that comes in, because we’ve been in a location or
whatever, I can easily find ways to add it in the story and then the story
always keeps on growing.”
The Moveable Fest, December 5, 2023.
The Banshees of Inisherin
Directed by
Martin McDonagh. United Kingdom, United
States of America, Ireland, 2022.
Pádraic
(Farrell) and Colm (Gleeson), are two friends living on the fictional Irish
island of Inisherin. It is 1923 and a civil war is raging on the mainland, but
that is nothing more than the backdrop to the war that will ensue between
Pádraic and Colm when Colm cancels the friendship overnight. Pádraic does not
understand and refuses to accept Colm's decision. Even when the latter
threatens to cut off his own fingers if Pádraic continues to harass him.
“ How important is the fact that these are two
men going through this friend breakup? This film is set in the 1920s and coming
out in 2022, and it struck me how little masculinity seems to have changed. Are
men okay? I came away thinking men are not okay.
I’d go
along with that. [Laughs] Yeah, I think that’s probably true, sadly. But maybe
if there’s more films like this, it will help. But I doubt it! Yeah, not
speaking, not addressing one’s feelings, bearing grudges, all that stuff seems
like it’s never going to go away. I try not to, but it’s still there in me too.
I don’t know, I hope we are getting better as a species.
What fundamentally were you trying to unlock or
understand about the friendship between these two characters?
It was
about painting a truthful picture of a breakup, really. A sad breakup, a
platonic breakup, which can be as heavy and sad and destructive as a divorce,
as a sexual or loving relationship coming to an end. Just to paint that sadness
accurately was what I wanted to get over in the film.
It was fascinating to hear you talk about
balancing the perspectives of Colin Farrell’s character, Pádraic, and Brendan
Gleeson’s character, Colm, and how you shifted it from 60–40 in favor of
Pádraic to 49–51. Could you talk about how you approached that? How important
is it to make both characters in a breakup story relatable?
: I think
rehearsals and talking to Brendan was a big help in just figuring out where
[Colm’s] motives were. And his motives aren’t necessarily mean-spirited or evil
or anything like that. He’s in the right, I guess. But when you’re trying to
write a script or direct a film, I think you have to kind of be in everyone’s
head and see that they’re all—everyone the world over probably thinks they’re
in the right, but not all of us are. So it’s just to be truthful to that, to
try and see the story for each of the characters’ perspectives. But Brendan’s
especially. We talked about things like his opening gambit is very harsh and
cruel, but it’s probably not how he wants to be. He knows that that is the way
he has to be to get it through to Colin. You know, it’s about ripping the
Band-Aid off in one, in the first scenes. Some of the problems arise from just
trying to be nice after that fact, which opens up the gates for Colin’s character
to think there’s hope. And there is no hope.
And there is no hope! The most heartbreaking
moment for me is when Pádraic says “Oh, God,” realizing Colm is the one who
hasn’t been worth spending time on.
Oh, good,
good. I love that moment. And it is the time when [Pádraic] questions who this
guy was. You know, was he ever a decent man?
: Yeah.
Also, often, I write a lot of pauses into a movie script. And I don’t think
you’re supposed to! I think I missed that lesson in film school. [Laughs] But
it’s often in the reactions to a line where the heart of a film is. It’s an
obvious example, but when Colin Farrell hears “I just don’t like you no more,”
there’s like 20 seconds of just reacting to that. And it’s just on his face.
Now, you can’t write that. That’s the room for the actor to fill in the blanks.
But I think the rehearsal process and the talking about it means we know that
that room is there, that there will be space for that reaction.”
AV Club , October 24, 2022.
Killers of the Flower Moon
Directed by
Martin Scorcese. United States of America, 2023.
In the
early 1920s, dozens of members of the Osage tribe were murdered after oil was
found on their land. Among the victims were many Osage women, who were often
married to white men. A monumental film adaptation of David Grann's nonfiction
book of the same name is about one such couple: Mollie and Ernest Burkhart. The
not too savvy Ernest is a nephew of rancher William Hale, who turns out to be
the mastermind behind the Osage murders.
He hit
Play. “And when it started, I…I watched it.” Killers is a long, uneasy dream of
a film about love and deception and greed. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a
dissolute war veteran who returns to Osage County, Oklahoma, to work for his
uncle, played by Robert De Niro. Recently discovered oil has made the Osage
people some of the richest in the country—at least on paper. In time,
DiCaprio’s character marries an Osage woman, played by Lily Gladstone. And then
the Osage start dying. Killers is violent, it is sad, it is infuriating, and it
is sometimes very funny—in other words, it’s a Scorsese movie, and Scorsese
found himself absorbed. He thought maybe, somehow, whatever dulling might come
he’d staved it off, one more time. “I don’t know how it happened,” he said.
“It’s been about six years with this project, since 2017. Living with it. And
something about it…I just…I like it.”
Hmm, where
were we? Ah, yes, he was talking about how movies can be built or deconstructed
because of Killers, which has the elliptical, episodic structure of many of his
other films. Less narrative, more atmosphere, more information by way of
anecdote, by way of scene, by way of character. “What I had hoped to do, and I
didn’t do this intentionally, I didn’t put it in words, but I felt when I
started it that I was living in it,” Scorsese said about Killers. “I was living
there, and I was with them. And we are drifting through their world. We’re
immersed in their world. So I want the audience, by the time they're halfway
through the movie, they realize, Wait a minute, what kind of people am I with?”
What kind
of people are we with? Evil men. Killers, in Scorsese’s telling, is a story
about love and power and betrayal and white supremacy. It is about a community
of white folks who come onto someone else’s land and then systematically set to
taking everything they can, often by violence. “What I sensed was, it just
wasn’t one or two people,” Scorsese said. “I sensed it was everybody. And I
said, ‘Well, if it’s everybody, then it’s us too.’ In other words, we as
Americans, we are complicit.” Scorsese pictured himself in the same situation:
“What would I do? Would I shy away? Would I pretend I didn’t see anything?”
So Killers
is, in this sense, a story about America, in the same way that The Irishman,
about the Mob and the Kennedys and Jimmy Hoffa and the criminal element that
helped build our last century, is a story about America, and in the same way
that The Wolf of Wall Street, about a particular kind of relentless greed and
self-invention, is a story about America. This goes back through Scorsese’s
films all the way to Mean Streets, which he says is about what he calls the
American dream: “Get rich quick by any means necessary.”
Where does
that interest in America come from? Actually, that’s a tale unto itself. “I
tell you, it goes back to my immersion in New York Catholic teaching and
Catholic schools in the mid-’50s of the 20th century.” As a sickly kid,
Scorsese had nothing else to do but go to school. “My brother did his own
things, and the other kids in the street did their things. And I made some
friends in school. But what I’m getting at, I think, is what I found was that
it made sense, what they were talking about. Not necessarily the nuns. I’m
talking about a couple of priests, particularly that one that was a mentor of
mine, Father Francis Principe.”
GQ, September
25, 2023
Beurokeo
(English title Broker)
Directed by
Kore-eda Hirokazu. South Korea, 2022.
Bittersweet
family drama from Japanese grandmaster Kore-eda is set in South Korea. The two brokers
are in fact two men who take newborn babies out of a "baby box"
and then sell them to childless families. Their behavior is criminal, of
course, but that doesn't make them bad. The two baby thieves team up with one of the
mothers, who joins them on a road trip
to find customers ready to buy the child.
They also take a seven-year-old
orphan boy under their wing.
“You discovered the ‘baby box’ adoption
system used in Japan, South Korea and other countries around the world while
researching Like Father, Like Son (2013). Why did this make an interesting
starting point for a film?
When the
first baby box was set up in Japan, it was received very critically by the
public. The general view was that it would encourage young mothers to get
pregnant quite easily and they would abandon babies without deep thought. At
the time that criticism was very strong, so it became a topic that interested
me.
I’d
previously depicted a relationship between mothers and children in Nobody Knows
(2004), and in that film the perspective is very much that of the young boy and
the children. But it also debates their flaws [and explores] where women and
children are vulnerable figures. So that interest was already there in my head,
and the baby box idea develops that well, involving the fragile figures of
women, the baby, pregnant mothers. The presence of men has been completely
taken away from that.
You’ve described Broker as being almost a
companion piece to Shoplifters (2018), with the two films focused on criminals
who form an alternative family. What is it about this different type of family
that interests you?
I’m
interested in this innate human desire to form a familial unit. I experienced
that myself when I lost my parents. We all seem to have the desire to form a
unit with somebody close. I’ve experienced this in my work as well, where a
father figure of mine, a producer, passed away and then I needed to form a new
unit close to me.
We all go
through that process whether there are blood ties or not. I believe the family
unit is only a vessel, a container of what we experience. Life is more about
our own humanity.
No,
absolutely not. I have shot a film in Japan; it’s in the editing process at the
moment. It was a coincidence. I had been approached to work away from Japan and
I thought it would be crazy not to take the opportunity. COVID affected my
scheduling as well, because Japanese production came to a halt.
Which character do you most empathise with in
Broker and why?
I couldn’t
pick one character. Every character has a perspective, an element of myself.
Gang Dong-won and Bae Doona as well. Bae Doona was most critical of the mother
and the baby box, but I believe there’s a little bit of me in her character. If
I were to live my life as one of the characters in the film, then I would
choose Hee-joon, the boy who joins the journey, who grew up in the care system.
I think he would be able to live life and deal with its hardships.”
British Film Institute, February 24, 2023.
Aftersun
Directed by
Charlotte Wells. United Kingdom, United
States of America, 2022.
“Between the first draft of the script and
the completed film, what was the biggest change you made?
Charlotte
Wells: I removed a lot of characters. By focusing on the story of Sophie and
Calum, I got rid of the conflict between them. There was more friction between
them in the first draft. When I got feedback on that script, people asked me to
push the [source] of their friction further, and I realized that wasn’t what I
wanted to do. I didn’t want to make it about two people at odds with each
other. I wanted the conflict to come from within themselves and their time
apart, but I wanted them to have a positive experience for their time
together.
—The beauty of this film is how as an adult,
Sophie looks back on the home video footage and comes face to face with her
father, who’s no longer there. Plus, the father is barely in the videos.
Wells: I
think you’re the first person to notice that, so thank you. That was the
intention. In the birthday scene where Sophie points the camera at her father,
I directed Paul (who plays Calum) to avoid the camera, which is why he dances
from side to side.
The camera
was a record he had for himself that Sophie now has. The footage is the only
point of view of Calum that Sophie and we have. Through the camera, we have his
only direct point of view during their holiday in Turkey.
—You spoke in a different interview that
there aren’t any videotapes of your father left and that you only have one
photo of him. Why was a camcorder the medium of your choice despite that fact?
Wells: One
of the reasons is because it offered an interesting effect on the film in terms
of perspective. There’s one home video taken at home that I remember strongly.
My aunt tells my grandmother that the camera’s not on, but it is, and she
points it at my grandmother during dinnertime. And behind her, above the table
on the wall, is a picture of me looking straight down the lens. It was a
surreal experience, seeing my younger self looking back at my current self on
the couch. There was something about holding my own gaze, even though I wasn’t
there. It definitely informed the end of the film, where Sophie holds her gaze.
But Calum’s hands took the video. It’s like he’s an invisible person between
the two Sophies. “
Tokion,
June 6, 2023.
The
Eternal Daughter
Directed by
Joanna Hogg. United Kingdom, Ireland, United
States of America, 2022.
Julie and
her mother Rosalind (both played by Tilda Swinton) travel to an old family home
in Wales, now used as a hotel. In this remote mansion, where Rosalind spent her
childhood, old family secrets lurk that keep Julie awake at night. She hopes to
get to know her mother better, but is confronted by shadows from the past. As a
daughter, how close can you get to your mother?
“VC: Why did you want to make a film about
your own mother in the first place?
JH: I was
always drawn to working on material that I knew very intimately. And I was
always inspired by [Roberto] Rossellini, who was making films like Stromboli.
He once said, and I’m not quoting exactly, but he said something along the
lines of: “I have a need to draw directly from my own life. And whatever is
going on in my life at a particular time, then that becomes a film.” So that
idea of experiencing something in the present moment, and then turning that
into something creative, was really inspiring to me.
VC: Is autofiction a good label for your work?
JH: I mean,
it’s nice. But I don’t know if I can label what I do, because I’m always
looking ahead and looking to the future in new work. It feels dangerous to put
some stamp on that. And maybe what I do next isn’t related to my own life. I’m
always looking to actually move away from myself. [Laughs]. But I continually
come back to ideas and stories that have a strong connection, just because of
the nature of the way that I work. I go very deep into my subjects and stories,
and if I haven’t had some feeling of it directly myself, then I find it very
hard to access.
VC: Both The Souvenir films and The Eternal
Daughter deal with grief and death, and also with this idea of haunting. Do you
think of filmmaking as a kind of exorcism?
JH: Yes, I
have thought about that, and I had the misconception that making The Eternal
Daughter would help me with the experience of losing my mother when she
eventually died. I found that, of course, it was a very different experience.
It couldn’t prepare me for what I felt after she departed. I don’t know, maybe
there was some aspect of the rehearsal that helped. But my conclusion was that,
as much as I want my work to be cathartic on some level, I’m not sure if that’s
possible.
VC: In your films, there’s always such a strong
sense of place, whether it’s Julie’s apartment in The Souvenir, or the hotel in
The Eternal Daughter where Rosalind spent time during the war. How do you think
about the relationship between spaces and memory?
JH: It’s
fundamental to my life and therefore to my work. With all the films, they’ve
more or less started with a place before I’ve peopled those places. In my life,
I’m just very taken by the atmosphere of houses. The sense of the past that
those places have … just rooms, doorways and corridors, I’m really inspired by.
“
AnOther,
November 24, 2023.
Kar ve Ayi
(English title Snow and the Bear)
Directed by
Selcen Ergun. Turkey, Germany, Serbia
2022
Fear of
starving mountain bears is the talk of the day in a remote, snow-covered
Turkish mountain village where new, urban nurse Asli comes to occupy the local
medical post.When a man disappears from the village, wild speculation and a
search ensue. An eccentric naturalist is identified as a suspect.
“Cineuropa: What were your motivations for
making the film?
Selcen Ergun:
This story is a reflection of a core feeling that I have been experiencing
increasingly as a young woman, on a daily basis, for a long time. The feeling
of living under this constant pressure which is not fully visible, but which
surrounds us like heavy air; the perpetual feeling of not being safe, which
many people consistently face in various places on Earth, to different extents.
On the other hand, when I have started confronting this more and more, I have
also realised that I’m stronger than I thought I was before. In this film, I
wanted to explore all of these feelings of fear, confinement, struggle and
hope, in the microcosm of a small, isolated town where they would become more
tangible. This movie also reflects my contemplations on how we, as humans, see
ourselves as the centre of the world and the unfair way in which we treat
nature and all of its creatures.
Do you think the film reflects the situation of
women in Turkey nowadays?
Although
this story takes place in an imaginary, remote town, it is based on the
feelings and power relationships that I and many women of all ages around me
experience in their daily encounters. I think that many women from Turkey and
around the world can easily identify with the uncanny feeling that persists
throughout the film. For me, the comment by a viewer who watched the film at
its premiere at Toronto reflects the core of Snow and the Bear: “This film
meditates on a time when the winter will cease and the world will just let
women and nature be.”
What were the main difficulties when shooting
the film in a remote village in the middle of winter?
The
location and the weather conditions were the biggest challenges for us. We
needed the most extreme winter that we could find and as much snowfall as
possible, which would last for the entirety of our very tight 29 days of
shooting. Climate change also affected our filmmaking process: we discovered
that many locations in Turkey, which had been under the snow for months in
previous years, are now getting very little snow. In the end, we needed to go
to a high mountain village in the far north-eastern part of Turkey. During the
shoot, there were days when we could not leave the base to go to the village
where we were shooting because of snow storms and frozen roads. Some nights, we
needed to work at below -30 degrees. However, I’m grateful for all these
challenges, since they also enabled us to create the unique atmosphere of the
film.”
Cineuropa,
December 2022.
Metronom
Directed by
Alexandru Belc. Romania, France 2022
Bucharest,
1972. High school student Ana is just before her final exams when she learns
that her boyfriend and his family have been given permission to emigrate to
Germany. Shortly thereafter, at a party with her friends, she listens to a
broadcast of Metronom, a program of the banned station Radio Free Europe. The
Securitate, Ceauşescu's security service, raids the apartment.
“Ceaușescu's reign is still fresh in the minds
of some. Did this film emerge from a personal connection with the material?
"Actually,
this film was going to be a documentary about the life of Cornel Chiriac, the
host of the radio program Metronom. In that documentary, he would symbolize
freedom, since at that time he was seen as an enemy of the state by my parents'
generation. During that research, I discovered all the other interesting, human
stories that deserved a fiction film rather than a documentary. I saw it as a
provocation to then write fictional characters rather than a documentary
structure."
A provocation?
"Indeed.
All my previous films were documentaries. Now the challenge was to change tack.
I was used to shooting hundreds of hours of material and then puzzling together
my film in the editing room. Now I was staring at the blank page on my computer
screen to write a script."
How did the youthful romance end up in that
script?
"It
became an obsession of mine to make a coming-of-age. I had previously made a
documentary about two teenage girls and had read many coming-of-age books
before that. While reading the documents of the Romanian secret police, the
Securitate, an awful lot of files about teenagers came along. Then I thought:
let me combine these two obsessions - a coming-of-age against the background of
the 1970s."
Did your parents also have a Securitate
file?
"I
asked them to ask for it, but they didn't want it.They wanted to be left
alone.By the way, it must not have been a fascinating file, because as teachers
and factory workers, they were sort of model citizens."
But isn't that precisely the point of your film
- that even model citizens can suddenly find themselves blacklisted?
"Absolutely.
That's why the film is divided into two parts. The first part is idealistic in
nature - the young people enjoy their freedom and innocence. In the second
part, they face the threat of the state and the violence of the police. That
danger was not yet allowed to be felt in the first part. I did a lot of
research on that secret police and, among other things, came across information
documents on how the Securitate should strategically deal with young people. It
was a kind of psychological instruction pamphlet, cleverly written and well
supported by academic research. You have to realize: these men were not the
clichés you see in some movies, but intelligent people who studied law and
psychology. They were masters of manipulation and had snared all kinds of students
to secretly report to them what was going on in the universities."
Filmkrant,
May 3, 2023.
Love Life
Directed by
Kôji Fukada. Japan, France 2022
Taeko and
her husband, Jiro, are living a peaceful existence with son, Keita. A tragic
accident brings the boy's father, Park, back into her life. Taeko throws
herself into helping this deaf and homeless man to cope with pain and guilt.
The film is inspired by ‘Love Life’, a song by singer and composer Akiko Yano.
“Have you spoken with Akiko Yano about the
inspiration provided by her song?
She said
that once her song is released, it belongs to the listeners and they’re free to
interpret it however they like. I sent her the script and she had no objections
to it, although she did say that she’d never imagined a story like this coming
from that song. I remember feeling that our worldviews overlap in a way. The
song ‘Love Life’ starts with this beautiful phrase: “I can love you even though
we’re far apart.” In the film, it’s being used as a song about love, but it
also talks about being apart and being lonely. That people are lonely is a
worldview I’m comfortable with, and she also said she sings about love as a way
of overcoming loneliness.
How did two main characters communicating in
Korean sign language most affect your writing and directing?
It wasn’t
always going to be sign language. I had the idea that the child would die and his
father would come back. And this love triangle would begin between the mother,
the husband and the ex-husband. But I wanted to get more tension into that
relationship, by having a shared language between Taeko and her ex-husband that
her current husband doesn’t understand.
I decided
to use sign language because when I was working on the screenplay I had an
opportunity to meet a lot of deaf people through the Tokyo International Deaf
Film Festival. I was invited to give a workshop, and all the participants were
deaf. I realised that rather than asking whether I should have a deaf character
in my new film, I should be asking myself why I had never had a deaf character
in any of my previous films. So I decided that Park was going to be deaf,
played by a deaf actor, and that I would use sign language.
I found it compelling that the deaf character
isn’t portrayed as an infallible saint in Love Life, as can sometimes be the
case in stories about hearing-impaired people.
When I have
hearing roles in films, no one ever asks, “Why is this character hearing?” But
as soon as there’s a deaf character, it’s, “Why is there a deaf character? Did
they need to be deaf? Is it reflective of some issues in society?” I really
hope that, in the future, we won’t need a reason; that in 10, 20 years’ time,
that question “Why have you got a deaf character?” will just be meaningless.
Concerning the Japanese film industry, could
you speak about the aims of the non-profit organisation you’ve established with
Hirokazu Koreeda and other filmmakers?
Things are
very tough for cinema in Japan. Independent cinemas suffered a lot through
Covid, and even before that, there’s very little money for culture in Japan.
With independent films – films where there’s a high degree of authorship like
with my own and Koreeda’s – it can be really hard to raise money, as opposed to
countries like France and Korea where they do have that kind of support and
subsidies and grants for moviemaking.
What we
would like to see is an organisation to
support film in Japan, maybe like the BFI in the UK, CNC in France, or KOFIC in
Korea. We are trying to encourage [Japanese] cinemas to put just a few percent
of the ticket price towards support for moviemaking. We’ve got a long way to
go.”
British Film Institute, September 11, 2023.
Past Lives
Directed by
Celine Song. United States of
America, South Korea 2023.
Nora and
Hae Sung, two deeply connected childhood friends, are torn apart when Nora's
family emigrates to Canada from South Korea. Decades later, Nora is reunited
with her childhood sweetheart during an all-important week.
“RM: I found your capturing of the passage of
time to be absolutely incredible. You come from the stage. So could you talk
maybe a little bit about the difference of how to capture the passage of time
in a film as opposed to capturing it on the stage and how maybe there are some
similarities you were able to carry over into Past Lives?
CS: Yeah.
Completely. I mean, part of the project is for me to capture what time feels
like to us. It’s always contradictory because 12 years can pass like this, and
two minutes can feel like an eternity. That’s what life feels like to us and
how time passes through our lives. I wanted it to feel like that in the movie
as well. But the thing is, to me, in theater and film, it is a completely
different approach to time and space because in theater it is figurative. In
film, it is literal. In theater, all you have to do to set a story on Mars,
this is usually the example I give, which is, if you want to set a story that’s
happening on Mars, all you have to do is have an actor sit on stage and say,
“So this is Mars.” The whole audience will come with you. They will cross time
and space, and they’ll come. Maybe you can help them a little bit. You can put
on a little red light. That’s all you need to do. You just have to say, “Well,
today on Mars, I’m going through this today.”
When it
comes to setting a story on Mars in film, you have to build Mars or go to Mars,
because time and space are quite literal in film. I think for this movie, I
knew that the story needed to be told in a film, in a cinematic way, because
time and space needed to feel quite literal, because, of course, the story is
about the way that … My joke is always that the villain of the story is 24
years and the Pacific Ocean. I don’t have any other villains. Those are the
villains, right? (laughs)
RM: (laughs) Yeah, that’s true.
CS: Then
the thing is, you’re always going to, because of that, you needed to see Seoul
and New York, and you needed to see the 12-year-old and then almost the
40-year-old. You need to see them literally, and you need to see them coexist.
I think the thing about my experience in theater, being so connected to it, is
all of it, because to me, I have so much more faith in the patience that the
audience has for silences. I know the audience is unbelievably patient as long
as they know clearly what the silence is about.
If they don’t
know what the silence is about, they cannot even take a two-second silence. But
the audience can be in an endless silence if they know what the silence is
about. So, in a funny way, the two minutes where they’re waiting for the Uber
and the silence of that only makes sense because you can only sit through that,
you can have stakes in that silence, because of the time you spent talking
about everything in the bar. In a way, it’s contradictory, but the silences
only work because of the language. By the time that we’re in the silence, we
know what they’re not saying.
RM: We can fill in the blanks.
CS: We can
fill in the blanks. We’re so busy filling in the blanks emotionally and so
deeply collectively that we can sit in that silence forever. That really was
connected to how I wanted to … So I decided when the Uber was going to come.
Nobody on set knew, including myself, when the Uber was going to come. All it
was, was I’m going to give a cue. That’s all it was. The actors only knew two
things. They’re the only ones who knew this. They knew that the Uber was not
going to come until they turned and faced each other. The second thing was that
they needed to turn to each other as slowly as they could possibly imagine.
That’s it. Those were the only two instructions they had. They didn’t know when
Uber was going to come. I was the one who was cuing it.
When I was
watching the monitor trying to decide on when it was going to come, I couldn’t
go by a number. I couldn’t go by anything except for the internal clock I had.
It’s a subjective thing. I wish it was a little bit more objective, but I
didn’t know how long it’s been myself. I didn’t know until I got to the moment
that the car should come then. But the thing that I’m trying to find in that
subjectivity, in that subjective search, is that I’m trying to find the moment
for the car to come that feels like both too fucking long and too fucking
short, because it somehow has to be that contradictory like we’re saying, the
two minutes that feel like an eternity.
Awardswatch,
November 3, 2023.
Les Cinque Diables
Directed by Léa Mysius. France, 2022
Eight-year-old Vicky lives with her parents in a village near the French Alps and possesses a particularly good sense of smell. When Vicky's aunt invades her life after her release from prison for arson, it brings secrets within the family to light.
“What was the idea that led to this movie?
The very
first thing that I had in mind was an image of fire at night and a young woman
screaming in front of the fire. It was that image. Then I had the idea of a
little solitary girl with this gift of having this extraordinary sense of smell
which somehow connects to memory.
The first
image connected to this passionate love I imagined this little girl would have
with her mother. I first thought the story would be about the daughter trying
to re-create the figure of the mother through the memory her smell would
provoke in her. Then I realized, rather than having a mother who’s dead, it was
more interesting to have a part of this woman, this living mother, which would
be dead, and the daughter, through this gift of bringing memories to life,
would re-create or give life again to this part of the mother. Instead of
having her own memories, she would enter her mother’s memories, which gave a
fantasy twist to the story.
The Five Devils is very focused on the female
characters — Vicky, her mother and Julia. The father, Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue)
is very much secondary and peripheral.
During the
development of the script, that was something I heard a couple of times, that
Jimmy, the husband, wasn’t developed enough as a character. I found it quite
funny because you never hear that about any female character. Maybe I have to
work on making my male characters more three-dimensional. (Laughs.) No, of
course this was exactly my intension, to have this man be the opposite of the
usual male character, to have him step back and withdraw, not just from the
main plot of the film but also from the love story. That’s part of his
character.
Where did you find the young girl, Sally Dramé,
to play Vicky? She’s incredible.
She was
signed to a child agency, and I don’t normally use those because often it’s the
parents of the kids pushing them to be an actor or singer, of whatever. But
here, her parents just wanted her to have the experience, more as a hobby. For
the casting, we asked maybe 40, 50, 60 girls to make up potions [Vicky creates
mixtures of scents to use her power to travel into past memories] and talk to
us about them. I immediately spotted Sally because of her incredible face. With
those big eyes she has something ageless about her.
A central theme of the film is the relationship
between the daughter and her mother. But the movie also seems to me to be about
the daughter asking herself if her mother would have been happier, would have
been able to live the life she wanted to live, have the relationship with
Julia, had she, the daughter, never been born.
That’s
interesting because I had never put it This way for myself. For me the question
was more an existential one, one that we all ask ourselves: why was I born?
Vicky asks herself why am I Vicky Solar and not someone else? As a child, this
was something I was obsessed with. If my parents hadn’t met, I never would have
been born. Or if I was conceived a second earlier, I wouldn’t be me.
I wanted to
put that question at the heart of the film. Then I read a text by Pascal
Quignard, a French writer, novelist, and he talks about “the invisible scene,”
which he says is a child’s conception of the world before they were conceived,
which Quignard says is a scene of chaos, of massacre. That’s how I came up with
the scene of the fire, that image of the world before Vicky is conceived. And
for Vicky, the question to her mother is not: ‘would you have been happier if I
was never born?’ but rather ‘did you love me before I was born?’ Because she has
this fear, when she sees her mother and Julia together, that her mother could
love someone else and that she might be taken away from her. So Vicky’s journey
is towards more maturity, to actually become more independent to be able to let
her mother love another person.”
The Hollywood Reporter, November 2, 2022.
Infinity Pool
Directed by Brandon Cronenberg. Canada, Croatia, Hungary 2023.
While
staying at an isolated island resort, struggling writer James Foster and his
wife Em are enjoying a perfect vacation of pristine beaches, exceptional staff,
and soaking up the sun. But guided by the seductive and mysterious Gabi and her husband they venture outside the
resort grounds and find themselves in a culture filled with violence, hedonism,
and untold horror. A tragic accident leaves them facing a zero tolerance policy
for crime: either you’ll be executed, or, if you’re rich enough to afford it,
you can watch yourself die instead.
“How did the movie come together? What
inspired you to start writing the movie?
It started
as a short story, actually. That was just essentially the first execution
scene, so I guess I was just interested in identity and punishment, and a scene
where someone is watching an exact likeness of themselves be executed and who
believes that he’s guilty. It eventually expanded out to include the resort
elements and the setting. So I was turning it into a feature script.
I was
thinking through the implications of the execution scene, and I guess the
natural extension of that is to look at how people behave when they are not
confined by conventional consequences: when they are socially permitted to do
anything, what that does to them. That developed through the resort settings
with the characters as I was trying to look at a sort of broader arc for that
initial idea.
James Foster isn’t quite part of the rich
people crowd, having married into money. What separates him besides that from
the rest of the characters?
There is
that sort of insecurity, that kind of desperation to be not just one of them,
but to be seen on many levels as someone who wants to be rather than someone he
is. It’s not just the money, although there is that, but also he’s someone who
wants to see himself as a writer, and he is maybe aging out of it. You know, he
is maybe reaching the point in his life where it’s becoming clear that he is
not going to be that person, or isn’t that person, and that leaves him
vulnerable to these people who are stroking his ego so I think that
desperation. That slight outsider status is what ropes him into that group, but
also makes it harder for him to fully embrace them without really…I don’t want
to spoil too much.
What made James Foster think that the resort
would be the ideal spot to find inspiration?
I guess a
kind of pathetic decision. It’s about the fact that he’s going to this country,
it’s obviously a very interesting country. It’s a fictional country, of course.
You can imagine it’s seemingly inspiring, but then to go there and go to a
resort and only be exploring the tacky Disneyland version of that country, of
that culture, and that history, was maybe a pathetic element of the character
and a bit of a joke about how resorts deal with culture in the host state.”
Complex,
January 27, 2023.
Superposition
Directed
by Karoline Lyngbye. Denmark, 2023
The
creative couple Stine and Teit and their young son Nemo leave their urban life
in Copenhagen behind in favour of an isolated forest in Sweden, where they hope
to find themselves as individuals. But their plan falls apart when it turns out
that a couple also lives across the lake. In a remote house, along with their
young son.
“Projektor: The film spends time setting up a satire of academics relating to nature, specifically how ego is often involved. What was the impetus for the story?
Karoline
Lyngbye: The modern ego in relationships was definitely one of the first
thoughts, along with “moving off-grid,” which is also entwined with the ego,
right? Everyone in my age group, myself included, is struggling with modern-day
life, and there are so many people who have anxiety or different types of
diseases that are difficult to diagnose. It’s just obvious that we’re just
going off the cliff with being so overloaded. But we also have this extreme
focus on ourselves. I was just interested in seeing if it was possible, in any
way, to take a step aside and [learn] what happens after that.
The film is about taking yourself outside of
yourself, looking at yourself from the outside. Were there similarities in the
writing backgrounds and experiences of your script collaborator Mikkel Bak
Sørensen? Or did the screenplay benefit from differences in your perspectives?
On a really
basic level, it was quite nice to have a male and a female perspective on it.
He was very on point with the male character. But also, he’s more into satire
and genre, where I’m more [into] in-depth, psychological kind of things– and
also genre. The starting point for the idea was mine, but I came to him at a
fairly early point in time, and we developed the doppelgänger as a joint
effort. They go to find themselves, so what is the strongest metaphor? What
would be the worst thing for these people to encounter?
Did you have any doppelgänger or
science-fiction films – eerie and uncanny ones – that acted as a reference
point?
We didn’t
really have that many references because, well, I think there are not that
many. [Sørensen] is very much into the films of [Ruben] Östlund, the Swedish
director who won Cannes with Triangle of Sadness. Östlund is very much more
satire, but there are similarities, it’s like extended reality, in a way. In
terms of references, it was more like, don’t do Us [Jordan Peele’s doppelgänger
thriller]. And making sure the metaphor was not something we’ve seen before,
and I actually hadn’t seen that before.
Usually
doppelgänger stories, you meet either a great version of yourself, or you need
a horrible version. It’s a mirror, of course, always. But we were very
interested in the fact that they were actually the same. I mean, the
circumstances are a little bit different, but also the same. What can happen if
you’re just in tiny different circumstances?
In terms of your direction, the doppelgängers
are written very similarly. When you’re directing these actors, how did you
articulate to the actors the differences between these copies? Or did you trust
them to come up with their versions and play off themselves?
It was
definitely a combination. We talked about it as being just different
circumstances, being a bit further in. One couple thinks they have lost a
child, another couple hasn’t, so that’s pushed them in a direction in their
relationship as well. We called the two male characters Teit 1 and Teit 2.
Fairly quickly, Teit 1, the original, is ridiculed, so he has a different
drive. And the other one is in the second couple – they have already
experienced the worst, and have decided to split up. They have that combination
of being less desperate, but also more bitter. But I feel like I was actually
surprised when I first saw Stine 2 come to life. Marie [Bach Hansen] did an
amazing job – you feel instantly that she’s different. She’s another character.
That was a
big concern, and [now] one of the things that I’m really excited about, because
it was clear in the editing process fairly quickly that you accepted the
doppelgängers and you completely understood. It’s not just glasses off and on.
Everyone saw and understood the difference between them.
A Good Movie To Watch ,September 1, 2023.
Irgendwann werden wir uns alles erzählen
Directed by
Emily Atef. Germany 2023.
It is a hot
summer in 1990 in a village in Thuringia, former East Germany. Maria is almost
19 and lives with her boyfriend Johannes on the farm with his parents. In order
not to have to worry about her future, she loses herself in reading books. After
‘Die Wende’, the atmosphere of a new era is in the air but she cannot deal with
it. The same goes for her neighbor. The attractive but 20-year-older Henner
seeks rapprochement and one touch is enough to unleash an overwhelming passion.
It's the beginning of a secret, all-dominating relationship.
“Cineuropa: What interested you enough about
Daniela Krien’s material to make you want to turn it into a film?
Emily Atef:
When I read the novel, I directly saw a movie in front of me. The book is
written so cinematically, so sensually: the hot summer, the insects, the
bodies, the sweat, Maria’s feeling of longing, the emancipation of this young
girl. That interested and inspired me.
The book is written in the first person. When
did you decide that the film would not be told from a first-person perspective?
For me,
it's still a first-person perspective: it's her perspective on that summer and
on that relationship, but without words. And that was exactly the challenge –
to recount everything without her speaking, without a voice-over. Cinema is
images; cinema has to be as sensual as possible. This relationship between
Maria and Henner exists without many words anyway. They hardly speak, yet we
understand their desire for each other. We understand that it's an amour fou
that, like all amours fous, can only end tragically.
How did you work with the actress to give her
this air of mystery?
I saw a lot
of girls, 60 in all. I was looking for someone who would have a down-to-earth
quality. The character has a kind of old soul, even though she's very young.
Marlene Burow has a certain strength that gives the role a kind of
determination. You should believe that she wants it that way and not that she
is being manipulated. She is also very minimalistic in her acting, which was
important for this role. Beyond that, we prepared carefully. She read a lot,
she kept a diary, we talked a great deal, and we discussed her backstory. The
novel is, of course, fantastic for an actress because it contains a lot of the
character's thoughts. Because she doesn't talk much, she seems particularly mysterious.
Did you have an idea of what Maria had to look
like, and how close did the actress come to that image?
Of course,
I had an image in my head subconsciously. But I was basically looking for a
girl who would be very natural and who would also have a certain strength in
her body. In the end, it was her aura that convinced me more than her looks. It
was important what happened between her and the male lead.
The novel is set in a specific historical era,
shortly after the reunification of Germany. What connection do you have to
this, and how did you approach the visual aspects of the time?
I was born
in West Berlin, but then I emigrated as a child. I remember the moment the wall
came down very clearly. It wasn't until later, in 2001, when I came to Berlin
to study at film school, that I had friends who were from the East, and it
wasn't until then that I realised exactly what was happening. I had Daniela
Krien, the author of the novel, by my side as an advisor, in order to portray
that time authentically. It was important to us that the East should not only
be portrayed as grey and sad. I wanted the characters to be shown in a
multi-layered and lively way, as the people there are and were.
Where did you shoot?
We shot in
Thuringia. I only discovered it through working on the film. I really liked the
local natural surroundings. We also met some fantastic people who helped us and
gave us a warm welcome.
You have already made other films in which
nature plays an important role.
Nature
inspires me a lot; it is sensual. For me, it's like a chorus in the Greek
tragedies, watching what's happening and seeming to say, “Watch out!”
The aesthetic of the film is rather bright, and
there are hardly any scenes in the dark. Could you tell us more about your
ideas for the way the film had to look?
For me, the
light-dark contrast was very important. I saw Henner's house as a cave; it’s
cramped and is often dark in there. It's like a forbidden place, but the light
always finds a way to get in.”
Cineuropa, February
23, 2023.
Le Bleu Du Caftan
Directed by
Maryam Touzani. France, Morocco, Belgium,
Denmark 2022.
Master
tailor Halim has been happily married for years to Mina, who is terminally ill,
but with the arrival of Youssef, a new
apprentice who wants to learn the trade, things change. United in their love, they help each other
face their fears.
“The inspiration for the caftan itself - which we
see Halim intricately working on during the course of the film, came from
Touzani’s own family.
She says:
“I actually grew up seeing my mother wearing this beautiful black caftan that
is identical to the one in the film. And this is the caftan really, that
inspired the fact that Halim would be a captain maker. As a little girl I would
see her every time on big occasions wear this beautiful garment. It
particularly fascinated me because of the very intricate work and she always
explained how it had been made, the time it had taken, all the artists’ work
behind it. I tried it on so many times growing up, as a little child and as an
adolescent, but it was always too long, too large, too big. And then one day it
fit me and so she gave it to me.
“I remember the look in her eyes and the look
in my father's eyes when I wore it for the first time when I tried it on. It
was just a beautiful, beautiful emotion. I had a feeling I was wearing a part
of her, a part of her souvenirs, a part of her life and things that she had
experienced. This garment was so emotionally full. When she gave it to me, I
felt the beauty of tradition, the beauty of transmission, because it's
something that had been given to me by her. And it carried so much within it.
“So,
unconsciously Halim became a caftan maker. I did not know that I was going to
make an identical caftan to my mum's. My mum’s was black, this one was blue but
the work is exactly the same. I began by looking at a lot of different
embroideries. It took me months - and every time I was getting closer to the
one I had actually grown up with. And one day I said, ‘I'm going to just take
it out’. Because I have it in my closet, it's like a treasure.
“When I
took it out, I realised this is basically what I had been looking for and I was
circling back to it.”
The film
celebrates the work needed to make such a delicate garment, so it was ironic
when Touzami took it to a master craftsman who asked if, because she needed
multiple caftan’s whether she wanted them to be machine-made in order for it to
be quicker.
“I said
no,” she says. “I had taken my time to plan things in advance and I really
wanted every bit of it to be handmade.”
Touzani
adds: “As for the blue. I mean, I didn't realise at the beginning why it was
blue. But it's true that when I write it's emotional, I never plan, it's not
something conscious. Almost from the very start this caftan was that particular
blue. I think it's just because this colour makes me feel there's this feeling
of freedom. When you look at the horizon, when you look at the sky, the ocean,
there's immensity there, it's like all these different possibilities and the
colour blue inspires that feeling very strongly. So I think that's naturally
why it became blue.”
Eye For Film, April 30, 2023.
“Although not a self-consciously queer film, The Blue Caftan looks at a gay Moroccan man through an empathetic and hopeful lens.
“Homosexuality
is still illegal in Morocco, between 3 months and 3 years imprisonment,
although it is not often enforced. For me, what is more problematic is not the
law, it’s the mentality. Because of the law people can think this is the wrong
thing, because the law is against it. For me what is most important is to be
able to change le regard-the perception. And once society’s perception starts
to change, then the laws have to evolve. Morocco is a very complex country.
There is modernity and conservatism living side-by-side, and there are a lot of
things that are accepted, as long as they are done behind closed doors. And
homosexuality is one of them. And that is sad, because I believe there is
nothing that should be kept in the shadows. People suffer because of this.
I just
really wanted to be with my characters, in their intimacy, and explore what’s
happening inside of them. Yes it’s important for me to have a certain social
anchorage, in order to understand the context in which these characters evolve,
but I really wanted to talk about emotions. Of course when you talk about these
characters you are also making a social statement. I want to give this
community a voice: to tell these stories that are not told.”
The Blue Caftan is a textual and detailed as
the eponymous garment itself. Yet Touzani empahasizes that its theme is simple
and clear.
Glam Adelaide, May 11, 2023
Temporada de Huracanes
Directed by
Elisa Miller. Mexico, 2023.
From the
opening scene in which a snake crawls out of the corpse of someone called
"the Witch," the film plays with that which usually remains hidden.
The atmospheric film adaptation of Fernanda Melchor's novel of the same name
builds on the rumours, gossip and superstition that prevail in small
communities. By telling the story through different perspectives, the
underbelly of a Mexican town is slowly revealed. A mesmerizing, chilling
indictment of machismo in Mexican society.
“The story
is based on the successful novel of the same name by Veracruz-born Fernanda
Melchor, which explores violence. Miller (Mexico City, 1982) says in an
interview "that she was bitten, completely pierced by the book," and
adds happily:
Miller
studied English Literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and
at the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica, where she graduated with the
short film "Roma", which won the García Bross Award at FICM. She is
also the director of "Vete más lejos Alicia", "About
Sarah", "El regreso del muerto" and "El placer es mío
(which premiered at FICM 2015)". Also "Ver llover" won first
prize at FICM in 2006. She recalls how "Temporada de huracanes" was
born:
"Around
2018, my daughter's dad gave me the book with the threat that I was going to
love it. I read it very quickly. Instead of saying that it fascinated me, it
rather pierced me, broke me down, shattered my heart. And above all I entered
into an absolute admiration for Fernanda Melchor and her pen and her play with
form and language. She is like our Juan Rulfo of my generation and she is a
girl my age from Veracruz. I became obsessed with the novel. I read it, read it
and read it and read it, and I said: 'What a great movie'... I remember I told
my dad about it on my way to Yautepec, which is a plain, a road full of sugar
cane, and I told my dad, and he said: 'It's a great project!
"At
the end of 2018 Rodrigo calls me and expressed to me that they had bought the
rights to the novel and wanted me to adapt and direct it. That's when a very
nice process began. I first called him a film extraction of the book and they
came out with the script, which I worked on for almost a year along with
Daniela Gómez, a screenwriter who came in at that time for that process. All of
2019 we were writing and then came the pandemic in 2020. We wrote about two
versions. It was complicated because it was ripping the literature out of the
volume and translating it into film, which was a painful process, because I
love the book very much. It was very complicated. I wanted everything to be in
the script.
"In
2019 we wrote the script and we were very close to having a folder ready for
the Eficine but the obvious came which is the pandemic and two years passed and
then we took up the idea of financing with Eficine and Foprocine, and also some
funds fell. It was like everything started to get complicated. I had made a
commissioned film for Netflix and well Woo Films has a very good relationship
with that company, and at one point there was a lot of discussion about whether
it should be a series or a film because the novel was very long and very broad,
but I was always sure it was a film, and they bought the script as we had it to
make the feature film, and we proceeded with the financing and we filmed a year
and a half ago in Tabasco because it was very dangerous in Veracruz. We made
this film with a lot of love and a lot of pain."
How they
were children, kids or teenagers or young people without any kind of illusion
and that was what turned them into these beings who let themselves be swallowed
by their basest instincts, they have nothing to hold on to in these desolate
contexts that our entire country is plagued by these situations, without
dreams, without education, without possibilities. We worked with pain as a
driving force, how these children in early childhood do not want to have them,
the one who raises them is the grandmother who does not want them well either.
For us, these were very important starting points for the construction of this
story".
Proceso,
October 23, 2023.
Saint Omer
Directed by
Alice Diop. France, 2022.
The films
follows Rama, a university professor and
a novelist who attends the trial of
Laurence Coly, who murdered her 15-month-old baby, at the Saint-Omer Criminal
Court, to use her story to write a
modern-day adaptation of the ancient myth of Medea, but things don't go as
expected.
"Sandoval: You put Laurence front and center,
and she talks about herself, her perspective and her life, but it’s not in a
way to simplify her, to explain herself. She remains complex, layered, an
ambivalent woman. How do you strike a balance between having, essentially, a
protagonist who, until now, has been invisible and unheard, without necessarily
having her justify what she did or explain herself in order to become
“sympathetic”?
Of course,
I was faced and confronted with the mystery of this woman who herself is unable
to say or understand what she did. The idea was not to claim to enlighten
people about her mystery, but on the contrary, to work from that mystery. The
mystery of this woman in the film functions in a way that sends the viewer to
his or her dark places, into the complexity and unspeakable nature of his or
her own connection to maternity. In a sense, that mystery of this woman is the
real subject of the film, and the whole essence of my work was to approach it
without diluting it. That is really what’s at the core of the film.
Sandoval: Having been at the trial of Fabienne
Kabou, was there a particular moment that you decided to make a film based on
her and, as a documentary filmmaker, to make that film a fiction film?
Diop: First
of all, for me, there’s no difference between fiction and documentary. This is
something that I say often, but I think that I will continue to say it. The
most important thing for me in a film is the mise-en-scène, the direction and
finding the best or the most accurate form for each film. In the case of Saint
Omer, fiction imposed itself. I went to the trial with no idea of making a film
of it. I had to go through the entire experience of the trial to understand
that I wanted to make a film. And, because that was after the fact, it became
impossible to do a documentary. Also, if I had made a documentary, I think I
would’ve been stuck in the literal nature of the trial. I would’ve been reduced
to the criminal aspect. Incidentally, there is a very literal aspect to the
film, which is that everything you hear in the trial is drawn verbatim from the
transcripts. But fiction allows us to make this material heard in a way that
really focuses us on the essential issues at stake. So, it’s the character of
Rama who is fictional, who reveals to the viewer these essential issues, which
have to do with motherhood. I think that without Rama, I would’ve had a great
deal of difficulty delivering this disturbing material to the viewer, and I
think I might’ve gotten into something obscene and voyeuristic
Sandoval: I’m curious about the character of
Rama because I read her as essentially a surrogate for the author. How personal
or autobiographical is the fictional character of Rama in Saint Omer?
Diop: It’s
strange, because I want to say that Rama is both not at all autobiographical
and totally autobiographical. I haven’t found the right answer for this
question because often I say no, but then I say to myself, “Come on, you really
can’t say that.” There’s an essence in the character of something that I
experienced, but that’s really only interesting to me, that I then built
fictionally so that [the character] can welcome all French Black women whom I
know personally and who also have this very complex, tortured relationship to
motherhood, and specifically to their own mothers, who were molded by the
violence of exile. But then, this is also a character [who] welcomes all the
women in the world who are grappling with their own mothers and their own motherhood.
So, it’s like this nested Russian doll with three layers—myself, the French
Black women that I know and all the women in the world. “
Le Ravissement
Directed by
Iris Kaltenbäck. France 2023.
This debut
film is loosely based on a news report
about a young woman who used a friend's baby to trick a man. Lydia, a dedicated
midwife, is in the middle of a breakup. At the time, her best friend Salomé
tells her she is pregnant. One day, she comes across Milo - a one-night stand -
as she is carrying her friend's newborn child in her arms...
“Le ravissement impresses with its perilous
but fully realized balance between naturalism and romance. In particular, there
are several scenes of childbirth in the film, which are very much documentary
in nature. They're very strong visually, and at the same time very well staged,
whether with tenderness or tension. How did you integrate these images into the
rest of the film, which has a very romantic dimension?
Iris
Kaltenbäck: I wanted to detach myself from the news story and indulge the
viewer in the pleasure of storytelling, while at the same time managing to
inject as much reality as possible into the fiction.
With the
whole film team, with the actors and actresses, we worked to mix genres, to
bring fiction back into documentary, and as much reality as possible into
fiction.For example, I asked Hafsia Herzi to be present during the documentary
shoot.
She really
connected with the mothers, giving them all the care they needed, supervised by
a midwife. On the other hand, we shot the fiction with a light, highly mobile
crew, always in natural settings.
We immersed
Hafsia in the streets of Paris, because I wanted to film the city in which I
grew up as impulsively and realistically as possible.
We followed
the midwives' shifts, and Hafsia always assisted them: there's a lot of medical
stuff, but also a lot of care and gestures that you can learn. When the mother
agreed, Hafsia performed the gestures directly with her.
Then there
was the rather perilous question of Nina Meurisse's childbirth, which had to be
totally redone in fiction.
Nor was it
to stand out too much from what had been done in the maternity ward. So we followed the same documentary filming
process, using the same camera and the same few resources, but we had to
completely redo the set, as we couldn't shoot the scene in the hospital ward.
The two main characters, played by Hafsia Herzi
and Alexis Manenti, embody loneliness, and have invisible jobs themselves. Did
you want to use them to illustrate the suffering and precariousness of these
jobs?
Above all,
I didn't want to make any speeches: I wanted these characters to exist, but
without this ever being backed up by some kind of social cinema discourse.
My ambition
for this film was to go for a very romantic cinematic gesture, and turn
ordinary people into ordinary heroes.
It's really
a film about loneliness, and I was even inspired by other films about
loneliness, and that's what links the three characters.
Lydia and
Milos, because they have amazing jobs, where they are absolutely essential to
society, and at the same time these jobs place them on the bangs of society
because of their hours, their pay, their working conditions.
Lydia has
to do night shifts and sleep during the day, she works a lot; it's a job that
isolates easily.
The bus
driver's job is much the same. Milos works a lot at night, he's out of sync.
These are
also characters who are very much tied to the city, to an idea of wandering.
The film evokes Lydia's mental health, without
revealing it, of course, in the finale, which questions the character's
psychiatric and psychological diagnosis... How do you feel about Lydia's
psyche, which remains hermetic throughout the film?
I don't
have any answers at all, and the whole point of the film was to ask myself
questions about this character, who fascinated me without ever really having an
answer.
But it was
very important for me to mention this, because in my experience in criminal
courts, I've attended trials. In particular, I had attended a major trial of a
woman, and I had been very struck by this battle between psychiatrists and
psychologists seeking to make a diagnosis.
In law,
there is this constant reference to "how a reasonable man would act".
In my
memory, they were practically all men, and I remember sitting in the courtroom
and thinking to myself that this woman was no longer being heard, she was
covered up by these expert reports.
I told
myself that cinema was there to give this woman a voice, perhaps, or to put the
question back in the right place.
I'm not at
all saying that psychiatrists and psychologists aren't important; I'm a great
believer in psychoanalysis and the unconscious.
But it was
very important to tell the story that this debate had taken place, that the
question was still open, and that Milos had made the effort to put himself in
his own point of view and try to tell his story from that point of view, with
all his questions, notably that of his own role and complicity in this story.
Baz.art, October 9, 2023
Das
Lehrerzimmer
Directed
by Ilker Çatak. Germany , 2023.
When there
appears to be theft at a high school, the administration takes drastic measures
to find the perpetrator. Teacher Carla Novak recently began working as a tutor
at the school and questions this approach. When she herself discovers who the
alleged perpetrator is, she sets in motion something that also has major
consequences for herself.
“The school is just the backdrop for a series
of social issues that are dealt with in the film. Why did the setting lend
itself so well to this?
For one
thing, Johannes and I had had this experience in our childhood, and for
another, his sister, who is a teacher herself, had also experienced a similar
series of thefts at her school. We realized relatively early on that the
location would give us the opportunity to tell the big story in miniature.
There is already a fantastic French film, DIE KLASSE by Laurent Cantet, which
does exactly that, as well as DER WERT DES MENSCHEN by Stéphane Brizé, which
deals with the subject in a different way. But I had a great desire and at the
same time a great respect for working with children. I knew that if you're
making a movie like this, where there's a lot of talking and discussion, then
you simply need something like these pupils. For me, they represent a kind of
future and also a certain innocence, although of course they are not innocent
lambs themselves. This creates a great contradiction.
The action only takes place within the school
walls. This creates a feeling of confinement. At the same time, the confined
setting offers the opportunity to explore other perspectives. How did you deal
with this?
It was
clear to us from the outset that we wanted to live out our creativity in the
reduction. For me, the worst thing is to have all the possibilities, to be able
to do everything and not have to do anything. I think it's much better if you
set yourself rules and limits. In this case, that meant that we wouldn't leave
school. It was also important to me that only four or five classical
instruments were used in the music. And I wanted to get by with as few shots as
possible during filming and editing. Less is more was a very big issue. We
often ended up shooting an hour or two ahead of our actual schedule because I
didn't want to repeat anything. Every now and then my camerawoman, Judith Kaufmann,
would take me aside and say: "Come on, let's do one more take, we can't
leave it like this." But I find it more exciting to move within this
self-imposed corset. At that moment, I feel freer than when I have the
opportunity to work completely unrestricted.
Your films often focus on female characters.
What interests you about them?
I think
there is a certain curiosity and a fundamental interest in discovering the
opposite sex for myself, in understanding it in all its complexity. In my last
short film SADAKAT, for example, the focus is on a young woman in Istanbul,
because Turkey is a male-dominated society and this automatically places a
character at the center who has to overcome more resistance. The moment
friction arises, you're already on the right track. On the other hand, it also
gives me the chance to create characters that I myself experience in my
environment and that I would like to see in the movies. So my grandmother, my
mother, these are women I take my hat off to. It's amazing what they have
achieved in their lives and what they are still doing.
Carla Nowak is also a character who is anchored
in two cultures, which she tries to cover up or suppress, at least in her
professional life. Why?
The problem
of identity is of course always an issue for me, but the reference to Polish in
Carla's case came after I read Margarete Stokowski.At one point, she writes
very well about how she came to Germany in the 1980s and grew up here, but was
still called Polish at school.I also had a key experience with a colleague who
speaks Turkish very well, but whenever I wanted to talk to her in Turkish, she
always answered in German.I wondered for a long time why that might be, and
maybe it's just an intimate space that you don't want to open up.In any case, I
had all these thoughts and ambivalences in my head that I wanted to express,
also because it makes the character more three-dimensional. “
Indie Kino Magazin, May/June 2023.
Dalva
Directed
by Emmanuelle Nicot. France, Belgium, 2022.
Dalva lives
alone with her father. Until the police raid their home one night, placing her
under juvenile protection. Dalva is not like other 12-year-old girls. She
behaves and dresses like a grown woman, and doesn't understand at all why she
was so rudely torn away from her father. With the help of her roommate Samia
and her companions at the shelter, Dalva will have to learn to become a child
again.
“You delivered an overwhelming and at points painful-to-watch story. The close contact of the camera with Dalva’s face is a slow-burning revelation of a new perspective to the audience. We watch a girl that doesn’t feel abused, being forced to confront a crime committed against her. She is violently asked to change her reality. How did you construct such a unique character as Dalva’s? What research did you have to do while making the film?
I did a big
research work. I was meeting with phycologists, educators, and judges for
children’s cases. I also did lots of reading of testimonies and psychology
books. Some of the characters in the film were inspired by real children I met
when researching and visiting shelters.
For me, the
central question of the film is around the idea of ‘emprise’-a very difficult
word to translate in English; being under the control of somebody,
psychologically and romantically. That was my personal question as well. I was
searching for the emotional truth of this, while getting out from the
manipulation, the control, the grip. For the script, I was aiming to keep the
audience very close to Dalva, from the beginning to the end. And to maintain an
awareness, ‘le prix de conscience.’
I didn’t
want to use flashbacks at all. What interested me was the resilience of Dalva,
and all the marks that incest left on her.
I found particularly delicate the character of
the male caretaker. Dalva went from the dangerous hands of her father directly
to another male. While the figure of the mother was somehow collateral to the
story. In a reversed way, Dalva’s transformation without the female figure
evokes female empowerment. Was this a conscious choice?
Indeed, the
mother is not developed as a character. Dalva is about to meet, to know her
better, after the film line. I wanted to show that for the first time, Dalva
encounters her mother, she perceives her as a competitor, an opponent. During
the whole film, we understand that her father has led her to take the place of
her mother. In the end, she stands beside her mother, as a little girl, she and
the mother are two different people. She sees her mother as an alliance.
The female
dimension is very present. The big idea of the script is that this girl thinks
of herself as a woman. We watch her return to a child. The grip is materialized
through the clothes. Which also symbolizes the influence of the male gaze. When
you are under the influence of someone, you dress as he wants you to be
dressed. And Dalva, as a woman, takes off the clothes, removes the sensuality
and sexuality, and returns to being a child or teenager.
The subject of outcast minorities, especially
when thinking of children, has been examined in many films over the last few
years. I remember the great example of the French ‘The Worst Ones’. Sadly, it
remains socially relevant and cannot be exhausted. What do you hope your film
primary brings to what we have already seen?
I was
always interested to talk about social minorities. My short films were about
that as well. I started to work on the project of ‘Dalva’ years ago. Back then,
nobody talked about incest. It was before the French ‘MeToo’. Maybe that was
the upcoming subject. But I never thought in these terms. I am not at all
strategic. I just wanted to tell this story.”
The People’s Movies, February 3, 2023.
An
Cailín Ciúin (English title The Quiet
Girl)
Directed
by Colm Bairéad. Ireland, 2022.
Set in
1981, the film follows a withdrawn nine-year-old girl raised by neglectful
parents among many other siblings, who experiences a loving home for the first
time when she spends the summer on a farm in Rinn Gaeltacht, County Waterford,
alone with a married couple who are distant relatives.
“It’s
remarkable how faithful an adaptation this is, but were there things that you
knew you might adjust for the purposes of a film?
It’s all
there. I do feel it’s quite faithful to Claire’s original, because to me it’s a
perfect little story, and I just wanted to honor that as much as possible and
it was the opposite of what the usual process of adaptation is. Usually you’re
trying to whittle it down and distill the original into a manageable form, but
with this, it was more of a question of having to expand it ever so slightly so
that it would fit the canvas of a feature film. When you read “Foster,” the
first few pages, you’re in the car with the girl on the way to the Kinsellas
and I felt it was important that the audience should experience her home
environment before she gets [there] so that you have an understanding of what
the contrasts are between where she’s come from and where she is for that
summer.
But even
saying that, a lot of the stuff that’s in the opening act of the film is based
on small references that are in Claire Keegan’s original. The girl remembers
when she’s in the Kinsellas’ house in the source material, overhearing her
parents discussing [her] as her mother’s writing the letter to the Kinsellas,
so these little things are breadcrumbs that Claire had left in the novella that
I was picking up. The other big change obviously is linguistic in that “Foster”
is an English-language text, so it was a question of transposing the action of
the story to an Irish-speaking community in a way that felt authentic and
believable, particularly for an Irish audience, because in Ireland, the Irish
language is a minority language. It’s not spoken everywhere, and I like to
realistically portray the language, so the setting has to be apt for it to make
sense.
As I understand it, this is a real reflection
of the culture in Ireland where emotions are withheld. Did that add to why you
wanted it to be in the Irish dialect?
Yeah,
partly. In a way, the film — and Claire’s original — says a lot about Irish
people and our emotional and psychological makeup in a sense, so there was
something quite fitting about the notion of presenting that portrait of us as a
people, but doing it through our own native language, which even though most
people in Ireland don’t speak Irish, still is a part of us. Even the English
that we speak has all of these inflections and holdovers from the fact that we
all used to speak this entirely different language that over several hundred
years was unfortunately phased out of the country, so it always felt quite
fitting. Even in Claire Keegan’s dialogue when you read it in “Foster,” there’s
so many of those sentences and the syntax and the color of them that as an
Irish speaker, I can see how the Irish language has affected that form of
English.
But then
the Irish language has just been a central part of my life since I was born. My
dad raised us through the Irish language. We grew up in Dublin, which is an
English-speaking area, but my dad just spoke Irish to us always, and my mom
spoke English, so it was a bilingual household, kind of like Cáit’s house in
the film. And all of my work so far has been in the Irish language, so when I
read “Foster,” I saw an opportunity to make an Irish language film that I felt
could be quite universal and that could travel. Thankfully, that’s proven to be
the case so far.
Yeah, I was
born in 1981, so a lot of the detail in the film would still would’ve existed
when I got to an age that I would be able to absorb it, so it all does all feel
fairly familiar to me, though probably more familiar to people who’d be a
little bit older than I am. Really, it came from a place of just trying to
authentically render this environment. The whole film is built on a philosophy
of authenticity and across all departments, just trying to present things as
truthfully as possible. With production design, we did a great deal of research
and we have our mood boards and figure out a lot of what we’re trying to do,
but miraculously, the two main interiors — Cáit’s biological family home and
then the Kinsellas’ house that she goes to — even though we had to bring props
in and certain things, they’re essentially time capsules.
The first
house the farmer who lives there hadn’t updated it in decades, and it had
gotten quite run down and it was perfect for Cáit’s biological family, their
homestead. Then the Kinsella house, there was another farmer living there on
his own and what happened was the last surviving relative above him was that
his stepmother, and on her deathbed, she asked him not to modernize the house,
so we we’re so grateful to this dead stepmother for saying that. [laughs]
Cleona [Ni Chrualaoi], the producer of the film who’s also my wife, found that
location, and when we walked in, it felt like we had just walked into the
story. It was extraordinary. If you go into that house, that’s what that
kitchen, which features so prominently in the film, looks like. It has all of
the old tiling and the old Formica table and none of the windows have been
modernized, which is usually what you’re trying to shoot around and hide when
making a period film. But with this house, it felt like it was meant to be. It
was almost as important as the casting because it’s such a character.
Then we
were very careful through production design in terms of situating the film in
the correct era, but also not trying to make it too nostalgic [because] my
sense was always that we’re making a film in the present tense. We just happen
to be in a different time period. It’s not that we’re looking back fondly in a
way on that particular time. We’re more focused on the characters and their
dynamics.”
The Moveable Fest, November 22, 2022.
Retour à Séoul
Directed by Davy Chou. France, Germany, Belgium, South Korea, Romania, Cambodia, Qatar 2022
.
The film, based
on the life of Laure Badufle, a friend of the director, tells the story of an adopted woman who by chance ends up in her native South Korea. There,
with fresh reluctance, she sets out to find her biological parents. Her journey
takes a surprising turn.
“NOTEBOOK: I can honestly say I had no idea
what awaited me as the film went on, and part of that is because of the film’s
structure. Did you always know it would unfold in the way that it did?
DAVY CHOU:
The basis of the film was a story shared by my friend and the chronology of her
relation with Korea. The first idea I had was that the film would be a
succession of only lunches and dinners with Freddie and different members of
her biological family in Korea: her father, her aunt, the father again, and
then her mom. Maybe I was influenced by Ozu and Hong Sang-soo, thinking it
would only be these very long scenes, but at some point I felt that I needed to
develop the story into more scenes, with more characters, following the life of
this woman.
Even though
the structure didn't end up that way, the idea of unfolding the story over the
course of years with ellipses and time jumps was there, along with this idea
that we need to evolve over time. But I don't remember how I finally came up
with the three-parts thing, maybe it was after watching Moonlight. I like having
these three different moments, and if you look carefully, each is structured a
bit differently. Part one and three have a kind of mirroring where you find
similar scenes: the adoption center, a restaurant again with the father, the
Korean female friend is replaced by a French boyfriend. The middle part, the
shortest, is very different because it's not your usual second act where you
have very big story developments. It was a challenge audience-wise because it
wasn’t going to tell you much—it's just a slice of her life two years later,
where you get to see, and be, in one night and day in the life of Freddie. But
if you look carefully, there are things happening in that part, too, as well as
realizations for her character.
NOTEBOOK: Going back to what you said earlier
about each film being structured differently. The visual language of your film
also varies from segment to segment, and is quite different from your previous
film.
CHOU: I
don't know how many films I'm going to do. I can see that I need time to make
films because I'm producing in between, so I find it challenging and exciting
to dare and try to make a film in opposition and resistance to my previous
ones. I was very excited to try to find different approaches for Return to
Seoul, which has many more shots than the long takes of Diamond Island, which
were maybe too obviously inherited from the masters of modern Asian cinema.
I had the
idea that the evolution of the film visually would reflect the evolution of the
character and her relationship with Korea. In the first part, she's young and
everything feels exciting. She's discovered this new environment—it's very
colorful, but at the same time, it's too colorful. There's too many signs and
she's confused because she doesn't know which ones to follow—she even speaks
metaphorically about these signs in one of her early monologues.
The second
part is much more coherently curated—black, yellow, and green [palette]; neon
lights—and it identifies one specific universe, the underground Seoul
nightlife, that Freddie seems to have elected as her environment. Meanwhile,
the camerawork is a bit more fragile, shaking, organic, and it kind of matches
the vulnerable state of this character who has found a place that she can call
home, at least in that moment of her life. But everything still looks very
unstable.
Interestingly,
I usually do a precise shot list, but I wasn’t totally ready for part two,
compared to part one. I don't usually use a shallow camera, because it’s a
grammar that I find can become a bit simplistic and created in editing, but
since I was late, I just followed my instinct and thought, Let’s go there,
let’s do that, for what ended up being the tattoo salon and birthday party
scene. Then you go to part three and it’s still shots again.
NOTEBOOK: Freddie is very much an agent of
chaos. But what struck me was that what she does and says is very much
reactionary and that she uses it to get the upper hand in a situation. It's not
unprompted, maybe with the exception of the scene on the bus. How did you
modulate this disorder?
The scene
when she stands up and invites herself to another table and places people
around [it] is very much a metaphor for being in hostile territory, which is
basically the country that’s rejected her. She's taking control by remapping
the table and people. If you think of the restaurant as a metaphor for Korea,
then I think you get the idea. These are survival instincts; it is not about
being a control freak. “
Mubi, July
7, 2023.
Tótem
Directed by
Lila Avilés. Mexico, France, Denmark, Netherlands
2023.
This film
follows the seven-year-old Sol and her family, on the day day leading up to her
father Tona's birthday party. It soon becomes clear that the gathering will not
only be a celebration, but also a farewell: Tona, in fact, is seriously ill.
“You followed a worker in a Mexico City hotel
in your debut The Chambermaid. This time you’ve shifted to a very different
canvas — a home populated by a multigenerational family.
In life, in
society, we tend to focus on what’s going on outside, and see the outside shell
rather than what’s inside. I wanted to explore the idea of the house and the
home as our inner world, of ourselves and our family, which is the root of it
all.
I became a
mother when I was very young and, somehow, I needed to go back to my childhood,
those first years where everything is so fragile. Go back and reacquaint myself
with little Lila now that I have a teen daughter. And to revisit our losses
too. I see it also as a present to my daughter. That was the starting point.
Very lucky.
In my life I’ve had many jobs. I’ve worked as an assistant director, make-up
artist, costume designer, production assistant and actress. I did not go to
film school but I learned on the go, and all the time I kept dreaming of
becoming a filmmaker one day. It’s a joy to be able to be where you feel you
belong and I feel I belong in the world of cinema. Colleagues always warn you
about the second feature. It’s become a bit of a cliché or taboo. The truth is,
if things don’t go well you can always have a third or fourth try. Filmmakers
we all admire had the chance to play, explore their options, and that’s what I
would like to keep on doing.
How did you approach making Tótem?
This film
is warmer [than The Chambermaid]. It was the only way to do it. I wanted the
cast and crew to feel loved and free, and give them the tools they needed to
feel at home. With our cinematographer Diego Tenorio, we tried to find a
playful approach to the camerawork, with long takes that required a lot of
work before shooting but then flow naturally.
How did you find the child actress?
Gabriela
Cartol [who played the main character in The Chambermaid] worked with me in the
casting process. We became close during the making of my first film and I knew
she would help me find the child actress we needed. I was very aware the film
would not work if we failed there. It’s like a Cassavetes film: that’s where
the salt and pepper is — it’s in the acting. We ended up finding Naima Senties,
who is the niece of the actress who plays her mother in the film. She came to
the casting having never worked in film before and she was amazing. When I
started talking with her, it just felt right. She is very chatty, so small but
so wise.
You even look a bit alike.
Her mum
jokes about that: “She’s really your daughter, isn’t she?”
Do you feel there are more opportunities now
for women filmmakers working in Mexican cinema?
Yes, and
we’re ready for everything. There is a new generation of women directors in
Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Colombia. [It’s] a result of what women have fought
for in the past, and that we will have to keep fighting for thinking of future
generations. Cinema has given me everything and the work, at the end of the
day, speaks for you. Art builds bridges that go beyond the socioeconomic
gender codes, idiosyncrasies or other labels. As women filmmakers, we are
saying we are here. We have a voice. “
Perfect Days
Directed by
Wim Wenders. Japan, Germany, 2023.
Hirayama is
a taciturn middle-aged man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo. His existence is
monotonous, he has no friends and is virtually invisible to those around him.
But he doesn’t seem to be unhappy, mainly because he manages to find beauty in
the smallest things (like sunlight shining through the leaves, which he takes a
picture of every day). Some unexpected encounters gradually reveal more about
his past.
““Perfect
Days,” which world premiered in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival, is
reminiscent – in some ways – of “Groundhog Day,” but whereas in the latter film
Bill Murray’s character, Phil, is trying to escape the repetitive nature of his
existence, in Wim Wenders’ film the protagonist, Hirayama, is “embracing it,”
the German director tells Variety.
Both films
show the lead characters waking at the same time each morning, but whereas, in
“Groundhog Day,” Phil is awoken by an alarm clock, in Wenders’ film, as he
points out, Hirayama, played by Cannes best actor winner Koji Yakusho, “wakes
up on his own, or he wakes up because there’s an old lady brushing the street
outside, always on time. He doesn’t need an alarm clock. He doesn’t even own
one.” There is a sense that this is a man in harmony with nature, and at peace
with his existence, rather than wrestling with it.
When he
opens his eyes, he’s happy that this new day starts. And that’s where the
similarity with ‘Groundhog Day’ abruptly stops,” Wenders says, seemingly happy
to escape the comparison. “He’s not suffering from having to go through his
routine.”
Part of the
reason for the contrast between the two characters may lie in differences
between certain aspects of traditional Eastern philosophy, where the idea of
repetition doesn’t necessarily have a negative connotation, and the
restlessness of contemporary Western culture, with the aspiration to move onto
something new, rather than appreciate what already exists.
In Japanese
crafts, pottery for example, there is an emphasis on the nobility of the
process, with the repetitive nature of making a pot again and again leading to
perfection. Hirayama is, admittedly, no craftsman, he cleans and maintains
restrooms in Tokyo – which are works of art in themselves – but he nevertheless
approaches the task with the same eye for detail, pride and dedication with
which a master potter approaches ceramics.
Wenders
says: “You know, the potter’s secret is doing it for the first time each time,
and for our man, Hirayama, it’s the same. Each day, he’s doing it for the first
time. And he’s not thinking how he did it yesterday, and not thinking how he
will do it tomorrow. He’s always doing it in the moment. And that’s the
potter’s secret as well. And that’s what gives a whole different dignity to any
repetition.
“Repetition as such, if you live it as
repetition, you become the victim of it. If you manage to live it in the
moment, as if you’ve never done it before, it becomes a whole different thing.
You’re totally right. Crafts in Japan have a whole different tradition and are
still lived in a different way than crafts in our Western culture, in which
crafts are disappearing rapidly, dramatically. It’s really a shame. I’ve seen
some of the last of their craft, trying to find somebody who was going to take
it over, but they couldn’t.”
Hirayama
notices things that other people don’t, like the homeless guy who’s always
standing underneath the same tree. Hirayama has got the kind of vision that
maybe some of us have lost, of seeing everybody, or at least not ignoring them.
Wenders
says: “The skill is very simple: for him, all people are equal. For him, there
are no nobodies. In his own opinion, he is not a nobody either. So, he
recognizes the ‘nobodies’ around him very acutely. That homeless character,
too, is an important human-being in his eyes. Because Hirayama notices him, we
see him, and we see how amazing he is. We wonder what life he had. In Los
Angeles, I made a film, ‘Land of Plenty,’ and we shot among the homeless
community. And the amount of heartbreaking stories you’d hear… people who were
professors, teachers, with academic degrees who were now out on the street.
There are no nobodies!”
Variety,
May 29, 2023.
The Fabelmans
Directed by
Steven Spielberg. United States of
America, India, 2022.
Although
the main character in this two-and-a-half-hour growing-up drama, set in the
1950s and 1960s, is named Sammy Fabelman, the story is largely autobiographical. Fabelman discovers
his passion for film at a young age, much to the delight of his creative
mother, Mitzi. Sammy's father, on the other hand, sees it more as a hobby. At
16, he discovers a heartbreaking truth about his mother that changes the family
dynamic forever.
“As an
account of Spielberg’s roots, The Fabelmans, which he co-wrote with his
frequent collaborator Tony Kushner, is more immediate than any written memoir
could be. It also took him years to be ready to make it. The movie details not
just his beginnings as a precocious child filmmaker, but also a secret he
shared with his mother Leah until her death at 97, in 2017. At age 16, he
learned that his mother was in love with a close family friend, whom Spielberg
regarded as an uncle. Spielberg’s mother and his father Arnold would eventually
divorce; Leah married that family friend, Bernie Adler, in 1967. But only
Spielberg and Leah knew the specifics of the timeline—an instance of a young
man having to reckon with his parents as full human beings before reaching
adulthood himself.
The
Fabelmans, a story about adult lives, is in some ways a companion piece to
E.T., which also has a broken family at its center. The children who connected
with E.T. at the time of its release 40 years ago are now the grownups to whom
The Fabelmans is speaking. They may have grown out of certain anxieties and
fears, but there will always be new ones to grow into, an uncertain frontier as
mysterious as science fiction. Kushner, who has worked with Spielberg on four
movies across 20 years, pinpoints what’s distinctive about The Fabelmans.
“There’s no grand historical context for it. It’s this very naked film,”
he says. “There are no aliens, no
dinosaurs.”
Spielberg
will tell you that there’s a little bit of himself in every movie he’s made.
But he has long resisted telling his own story. “The more I was in denial that
I would ever really need to tell my own story, the more I realized, Why am I
having this conversation with myself again and again?” He says the decision
hinged not so much on waiting for his parents to pass; it was more about
overcoming that resistance.
He’d spoken
to his mother about it when she was still alive, unsure whether she’d want him
to tell their family story in such a public way. “There’s a little bit of this
story in all your films. But you’ve always felt safer using metaphor,” his
mother said. “And I think you’re probably scared of the lived experience.” She
told him if he thought he could make something he would be proud of, he should
go ahead and make it.
In one of
the most gorgeous and haunting scenes in The Fabelmans, set during a family
camping trip with Uncle Bennie in tow, Williams as Mitzi whirls and twirls in a
gauzy Mexican dress, exactly the sort of thing a cool bohemian mom of her era
would wear. As she dances, she’s backlit by the headlights of the family’s
parked station wagon. Her daughters, like little generals, urge her to
stop—everyone can see through her dress! But the men, including Sammy—the
movie’s version of awkward boy-genius Steven, played by Gabriel LaBelle—watch,
enchanted. Sammy captures it all with his 8-mm camera.
Later,
while editing the footage, Sammy will see Mitzi and Bennie walking, almost hand
in hand, thinking they can’t be seen—but Mitzi’s face is clearly that of a
woman in love. In the real-life story this, Spielberg says, is how he learned
of her secret. His parents had often fought bitterly. He speaks of “knowing”
what was going on between Bernie and his mother without really acknowledging it
to himself. It was the footage he’d shot that opened the window onto his
mother’s secret life. “What’s weird for me is that I didn’t believe the truth
that my eyes were telling me. I only believed what the film was telling me. And
so that became my truth for many things. If the film told me the truth, I would
believe it to be a fact.” As he talks, Spielberg seems to be unspooling a truth
he’s only recently articulated for himself. But with The Fabelmans, he’s also
fully sympathetic to his mother’s unhappiness. The idea of the unhappy
midcentury mom is a cliché only if you didn’t have one.
Dads of the
’50s had different burdens, worries about providing for their families, and
fears about being seen as weak. What comes through, both in Dano’s performance
and in the way Spielberg shapes it, is Spielberg’s current understanding of how
much his father loved him—and how much his father loved Leah, even after the
marriage crumbled. Spielberg describes him as someone who didn’t shed tears
easily. “I was a crier. My dad wasn’t,” he says. “Once when I was a kid, he and
my mom had a huge fight. It was dark outside, in the middle of the night. I
remember hearing a sound I had never heard before. Of a man sobbing. But it was
a high, almost a falsetto. I’d never heard that kind of a sound before. It
sounded like there was a ghost in the house.” Spielberg says he got out of bed
and tiptoed to the kitchen, where he saw his mother holding his father, who was
bent over on her lap. “His back was heaving, he was sobbing so hard.”
Time,
November 16, 2022.
May December
Directed by
Todd Haynes. United States of America,
2023.
Loosely
inspired by the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal, the film tells about an actress who
travels to Savannah, Georgia, to meet and study the life of the controversial
woman she is set to play in a film—the woman being infamous for her 20-year-long
relationship with her, which began when he was 13 years old. Family relationships come under pressure
during the stay of the actress.
“DEADLINE: May December seems so much like a
classic Todd Haynes movie, it was a surprise to discover that you didn’t
actually write it yourself…
TODD
HAYNES: No, it came fully intact out of the mind of Samy Burch. There was a bit
of a buzz about this script. I didn’t know any of this at the time, but at the
height of COVID, when everything was shut down, a lot of stuff was being
circulated, speculatively, for when we would all get back to work. I was
reading a lot of stuff that was coming to me — interesting books, or ideas from
actors, or this or that. I had my own plans about what I wanted to do once we got
back to work, but no one knew when that was going to be. I had time to read,
and so I read May December. It was a completely singular endeavor that really
made an impression on me. I just thought it was really smart, so I was very
happy to take it to the next step.
DEADLINE: How did it come to you?
HAYNES: It
came through Natalie’s producing company, with me in mind as director. There
was an interest in us finding something, someday, to do together, but we didn’t
know what that would be, or when. Based on this script, we started to talk, and
we talked about the script and what we liked about it. I found her to be so
remarkable, and so bold and so risky in what interested her and what drove her.
Like, pushing people — pushing viewers — into places that were not comfortable.
She was very mischievous about the idea that people might project onto her
aspects of Elizabeth Berry as an actress, and that this would be some insight
into Natalie Portman herself. She relished playing around with that. It was
exciting. Our notes about where we thought the script could move to the next
stage were very synchronous, so the whole experience was encouraging.
DEADLINE: How did you move it along?
HAYNES:
Basically, we talked to Samy, which was all, of course, done remotely. Natalie
was still in Australia, working at the time [on Thor: Love and Thunder]. I
loved talking to Samy. So bright, so excited about having it be in the hands of
Natalie Portman and myself. She did another draft really quickly, based on our
thoughts. Very quickly after that, I started to sort of court Julianne on the
sly for the other role. Then, when I felt like I could count on that, I shared
that idea with Natalie. She was completely exhilarated by it. So we had a
really compelling package, but we didn’t know when we were going to do it. We
were all busy, and nobody was working, so it just went on to the top of the
shelf, basically.
DEADLINE: It really fits into the lineage of
Superstar, Velvet Goldmine and I’m Not There, in that it’s an intelligent, meta
take on a specific form of storytelling, which in this case could be a
sensationalist ‘Movie of the Week’. Was that what attracted you?
HAYNES: No,
I didn’t have ambitions in that regard. I didn’t necessarily plug it into
established themes, or other films of mine, and find immediate correlations. It
came to me as its own strange concoction. The thing that excited me is that I
felt like it presented problems and challenges that I hadn’t undertaken before.
It was very much specific to its own time and place. In this way, it was distinct from other films of mine
about female characters. It was really about these women whose desires and
convictions and wills were driving the train in their lives. This is certainly
true for Gracie and her backstory, but as more is revealed about Elizabeth
through the course of the film, you find similarities in her that are troubling
and fascinating, and you feel that she sort of met her match in the character
of Gracie. In all those ways, it really felt different, and how much female
desire was really calling the shots. That’s not necessarily the case in films
of mine about women.
DEADLINE: Well, that’s certainly shown
visually: There are rhymes, echoes and visual duplications. Was any of that
spontaneous?
HAYNES: No,
no, no. Nothing about this was spontaneous. We shot the movie in 23 days, so
there was no room for spontaneity of any kind whatsoever, except in what the
actors themselves did once I said, “Action”. Where the camera was and how many
setups there would be per day and what the visual language of the movie was,
and how we were going to tell the story… It was all planned. To a degree that
is still incomparable to anything I’ve done before.
For
example, the music itself was absolutely and totally decided upon before we ever
started to shoot the film. I say “decided upon” meaning I wanted to use the
Michel Legrand score [from Joseph Losey’s 1971 film The Go-Between, starring
Julie Christie and Alan Bates] as an example of how strongly music might play
in the film, in the finished film, in the film as an experience. The Go-Between
was a recent discovery, or a rediscovery for me, and the music just floored me.
I just was astonished by it. Fell madly in love with it. I said, “OK, guys,
this is something like what we’re going to need for this movie. It’ll change
the way every scene is read. The way every moment of the film is perceived will
be in the contradistinction of this music.”
I saw that
actually occur from the very first shot we shot on our schedule, which was
Natalie driving up in the car, then parking outside the community center to go
into the flower arrangement course and meet Gracie. That was the first shot we
did. I pointed to Ben, my assistant, I said, “Hit it.” He punched his phone and
started that first music cue. The whole crew was like, “What the f*ck? What is
this? What are we doing?” And then three takes later, everyone’s humming it and
singing melodies. We had an entire live chorus of vocalizing.
Deadline, November 25, 2023.
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