Pop duo Sparks bring their recent shift to a more operatic sound to its natu- ral conclusion with Annette, screening at EIFF.

Super Aria Brothers

Pop duo Sparks bring their recent shift to a more operatic sound to its natural conclusion with Annette, a baroque musical they wrote for French director Leos Carax, which arrives at Edinburgh International Film Festival this month

Interview: Lewis Porteous

Edgar Wright’s recent The Sparks Brothers, a loving opus to the duo, has kickstarted an international Sparks love-in, but Ron and Russell Mael remain true to their reputation as forward-looking artists. Just a few weeks before the UK release of Wright’s film (read our interview with Edgar Wright on p. 43), the brothers opened the Cannes Film Festival with Annette, the screen collaboration between them and oddball French director Leos Carax. The musical, which focuses on the relationship between a stand-up comedian (Adam Driver) and an opera singer (Marion Cotillard), has since won Carax the Best Director award at Cannes and spawned a critically acclaimed album of soundtrack selections. With their screenwriting debut a resounding triumph, the Maels meet with us over Zoom to discuss it.

You seem to be in sync regarding music. Is this also the case when it comes to taste in cinema? Are there any areas of art and culture in which your sensibilities really differ? Ron: I might have more outside-pop-music interests than Russell in as far as digging deep into jazz and some esoteric classical pieces, but in general we share the same feelings about things. It’s the basic reason we’ve been able to continue for so long. Even as brothers, if we’d had different ideas about what constitutes the ideal pop song or film musical, there’s no way we could have gotten this far. Russell: One of the things Edgar wanted to stress in his documentary is how our situation is kind of different from just about every other brother act in pop music. It’s unusual for us to not only be getting along as brothers at this stage, but to be doing work that’s as progressive and provocative in this day and age.

So was Ron responsible for the band’s shift to a more operatic style, of which Annette seems to be the logical conclusion? Ron: My knowledge of opera is not as great as it might appear from the film, but I have a love of soprano singing, so I think that fed into [Marion Cotillard’s] character. We wanted to come up with two very separate and very distinct characters, and an opera singer was something I felt very comfortable writing for in a musical setting, even if the music is not truly operatic, but in the style of someone who’s coming from pop and imposing an operatic style on that form. The other thing was having a stand-up comedian, how to convert what a comedian does into musical terms. It was fun to try and figure that one out. Are the film’s two main characters representative of you both in some respects? Ron as the acerbic comedian, and Russell the open-hearted interpreter of songs? Is the movie about your relationship? Ron: Both revolting characters! Russell: We’re going to have to steal that as a motive, because we’ve been asked it more than once. We never saw that at all. But it’s like with Sparks songs, people sometimes ask if they’re autobiographical in any way. In most cases we say they’re not literally autobiographical, but they were written by Ron or maybe me, so they came from somewhere within us. Maybe those elements are there, unbeknownst to us.

You’re known to have tried to get film projects off the ground for decades. The lack of spoken dialogue in Annette plays to your compositional strengths, but was this always your intended approach? Have you worked on ‘straight’ screenplays over the years? Ron: I don’t think writing a non-musical screenplay is something we’d be strong at. Also, we don’t feel comfortable doing just a soundtrack either – there are so many people who are skilled at that sort of thing. Our strength is being able to engage with a story in musical terms. In the original version of Annette, there was even less spoken dialogue, but Leos felt it needed some breathing areas for the audience. We thought ‘they can breathe after the movie’s done!’ We’re really big fans of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which uses a similar kind of approach.

“Our strength is being able to engage with a story in musical terms”

Ron Mael

You run your own record label through which you can present music directly to a dedicated fanbase. Given the self-sufficiency you enjoy as musicians, what’s the appeal of the film industry with its headache-inducing barriers? Russell: We’re masochists, that’s the appeal basically! We’re wanting to find different ways to channel the music we can do. We love doing Sparks albums and we’re three-quarters of the way through a new one and we won’t ever abandon that, but it’s a different way of working and at this point it’s more interesting for us to have a variety of different ways to do music. Ron: We’ve always been such lovers of film that to be able to be a participant in that kind of essential way in a film is just a dream for us. It’s a little boy’s dream.

Annette has its UK premiere on 21 Aug as part of Edinburgh International Film Festival

Annette is released in UK cinemas on 3 Sep, and streaming from 26 Nov, via MUBI

Feature

— August 2021

A Fairer Future

As the Edinburgh Festival Fringe returns to in-person venues for the first time in two years, we assess the festival’s past problems, whether anything has changed, and what a fairer Fringe could look like in the future

The fact that Edinburgh – a tiny, old, beautiful, ramshackle and cobblestoned city – hosts the world’s largest arts festival is incredible to me. Every August the streets hum with the opportunity to experience something brilliant at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with an estimated five million attendees taking in shows across the city. The economic boom to Edinburgh businesses, as well as Scotland as a whole, is huge. But this festival was not without its problems, long before COVID-19 forced the Fringe and Edinburgh’s other August arts festivals to screech to a halt. In 2017 an organisation called Fair Fringe was founded, which sought to tackle exploitative and illegal working practices at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. For three years running they unearthed major Fringe venues hiring unpaid staff and housing them in unsafe buildings, crammed into tiny rooms. These unpaid workers were expected to put in gruelling hours of work all in the name of

‘gaining experience’. If venues did pay staff, it was often below the minimum living wage despite Edinburgh being one of the most expensive cities in the UK to live in. Workers talked about feeling unsafe, exhausted and about how their experiences of the festival damaged both their mental and physical health. Of course, these jobs perpetuate inequalities within the arts as only those who are financially stable enough to take up unpaid work can comfortably take these positions. Those from low-income households – particularly women, disabled people and BIPOC+ people – are left behind, unless of course they are just so desperate they take up any work that they can get. It’s not just workers’ rights that have been continuously ignored at the festival. BIPOC+ representation has remained a largely ignored subject. Travis Alabanza wrote about their time at Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2019 saying: “Spending a month in Edinburgh with the trials of doing daily shows, press, reviews, late nights, it wasn’t my work that exhausted me, rather the elongated feeling of not seeing others that look like you occupy public space.” Alabanza isn’t alone in recognising the paucity of BIPOC+ representation at the festival. In 2018 Fringe of Colour was founded in response to the lack of shows by Black people and people of colour programmed at the Fringe. During the last “normal” Fringe in 2019, accounts emerged from women claiming they had experienced sexual harassment during the festival. From flyering for their shows, working front of house for a temporary venue, or even on stage, women were experiencing rampant sexual harassment. Most worrying of all perhaps were accounts of women living in temporary accommodation housed by their “employers” with tens of other people, feeling unsafe to even climb into bed at the end of an exhausting shift. What happens at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is a concentrated version of the performing arts; the opportunities to see and experience incredible things are more intense, but so too are the racism and sexism which thrive within the performing arts sector. Take ten years’ worth of shows and cram them all into one tiny city over just four weeks and of course these extreme circumstances will breed extreme inequalities. Sustainability, too, is something that the August festivals have largely failed to account for. Due to the sheer number of people attending the Fringe, Edinburgh International Festival, Edinburgh International Book Festival and Edinburgh Art Festival, Edinburgh’s carbon footprint in August is immeasurably large. If you’ve ever wandered the streets of Edinburgh in August you’ll have experienced just how overwhelming the sheer volume of abandoned, littered stuff is. Performers are often encouraged to print around 4,000 paper flyers for a month-long show at the festival. If all 3,800 shows registered with the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2019 took that advice, over 15 million flyers would have been produced, distributed and tossed away. Waste from food trucks, posters, all of those plastic cups, the energy needed for temporary streetlights, bar fridges and sound systems as well as an increased number of cars and taxis – the list is endless and it all adds up. The strain the city feels, not just from the pollution, but from having to house literally millions of temporary visitors every year is felt by everyone in the city. One in six homes in the centre of Edinburgh is an Airbnb, with thousands of empty flats in the city only used for short term holiday lets. The city has almost 3,000 families (and 12,000 individuals) waiting for appropriate council houses which are simply not available despite almost twice that number of homes sitting empty most of the year. Rent has increased by a breathtaking 42% in just eight years, almost double that of the UK average. Affordable housing in the capital has been described by the Edinburgh Poverty Commission as “the single most important factor in reducing poverty.” It’s desperately needed. In their manifesto Edinburgh Reimagined: The Future Will Be Localised, inspired by conversations with Edinburgh’s cultural sector and published in April 2021, Morvern Cunningham notes how the mantra “build back better” prevailed during lockdown. Over the last year, cultural leaders have been forced to examine their own privilege as Black Lives Matter publicly exposed the institutional racism looming within organisations, stories of gender-based violence unfolded as the trial of Scottish actor Kevin Guthrie reignited discussions around women’s safety within the performing arts, and the brunt of a global pandemic was felt most by BIPOC+ people, women, people with disabilities and those from low-income households. Inequalities were growing and much of the dialogue around the arts, including the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, was to “build back better.” But, two years on from the last “normal” Fringe, and as the August festivals return to in-person venues for 2021, has anything changed? Has it built back better? In short: no. Fringe of Colour’s concern for better representation of BIPOC+ work at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe has not been addressed. Despite the “build back better” mantra ringing in organisations’ ears when adapted versions of the August festivals took place online last year, Fringe of Colour “noticed that many organisations gladly fell back on the “safe”; read: white, straight, cis, able-bodied, neurotypical, wealthy or middle class, for online content.” At the time of writing, 2021’s Fringe programme has a similar percentage of work by BIPOC+ artists as 2018 and big, temporary venues are currently hiring for staff, with several advertising positions listed as unpaid. It feels like the “build back better” mantra has been long forgotten and the festival seems determined to forge forward into 2021 blindly. The work being done to encourage a fairer Fringe by large organisations is, at best, tokenistic: a recent promotion for a gin, the profits of which would be used to bring new and emerging artists to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, suggests it is an attempt to level the uneven playing field at the festival. Of course, this does nothing to tackle the issues facing the festival’s workers, sustainability, BIPOC+ representation and women and people of marginalised genders’ safety. In fact, bringing more and more acts to the festival will only continue to add strain on the city. There is no strategy here, other than “onwards and upwards”.

“Those campaigning for a fairer Fringe are campaigning to organisations who pass the buck back and forth”

But fear not, all need not be lost. One of the overriding themes among all of these exhausting and upsetting issues is a lack of accountability. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe itself is just a collection of venues, promoters, artists and workers. It is often confused with the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, which cannot and do not regulate venues operating during August. There is no one who can actually ensure representation is considered, that workers’ rights aren’t exploited, that women and people of marginalised genders are safe and that the city isn’t lost to a pile of flyers and Airbnb-ers. Those campaigning for a fairer Fringe are campaigning to organisations who pass the buck back and forth, from the Fringe Society to Edinburgh City Council to landlords to venues. There is no one organisation ensuring accountability for any of this. We need a captain for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe ship. In order to genuinely “build back better”, a steering group of artists, venues, members of the Fringe Society, MSPs and Edinburgh City Council should develop a clear and sustainable plan for the city’s Fringe, ensuring ethical practices are centred and not sidelined. A Fringe Festival Council, to whom venues, programmers and employers are accountable; a group that could steer the festival into a more equitable and ethical place. This may be a pie in the sky dream of mine, but, until the Edinburgh Festival Fringe changes dramatically to put workers’ rights, women and people of marginalised genders’ safety, BIPOC+ representation and sustainability on the agenda, then I would urge us all to demand better. If the Fringe won’t improve itself, then we need to cut it off from the only thing that feeds it: us, the audience, the artists and workers. We have the power to demand better and boycott those unwilling to adhere to ethical, sustainable, responsible practices. Until the Edinburgh Festival Fringe improves, we can also support the incredible creative work that is being promoted and programmed ethically by some organisations. By taking action and demanding better we are paving the way for a fairer Edinburgh Festival Fringe in the future.