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N0 1 | 15 – 17 FEB
Thu 16 Feb, GFT, 9.00pm
An Audience with the Pope (of Trash) John Waters’ little-seen sophomore feature Multiple Maniacs is getting a revival. Despite its new polish, it’s as outrageously grotesque as ever. The filmmaker takes us back to its making at the tail end of the 60s
J
ohn Waters has been transgressing ever since he was in short trousers. His original sin, appropriately enough, happened in a house of God. “My mother told me the first thing she remembers me rebelling against is that I refused to take the Legion of Decency pledge in church,” the 70-year-old filmmaker tells us proudly down the phone from San Francisco. The
pledge was an initiative of the Catholic Church to identify and combat objectionable content in motion pictures. The young John Waters’ beef was that these were exactly the films he loved. “I wanted to see condemned movies! It inspired me to see condemned movies! And I wanted to make them!” The pint-sized revolutionary wouldn’t know it at the time, but two decades later he would make a movie so outrageously filthy that it would be described by those same Bible-thumpers as “the most disgusting film ever.” While there’s nothing explicit in the Good Book about transvestites eating dog poop, Pink Flamingos – Waters’ riotous third feature – went straight to the top of the Legion of Decency’s shit list.
Interview: Jamie Dunn
We can only presume they hadn’t seen Waters’ sophomore effort, Multiple Maniacs, for it contains a sex scene so uproariously blasphemous that it makes the antics in Pink Flamingo look rather quaint. “Even I look at that now and think what my father used to always say to me, ‘What were you thinking about?’” admits Waters. Picture the scene. Lady Divine (played by drag queen Divine, Waters’ larger-than-life muse), a fierce freak show impresario who makes a living by robbing her patrons at gunpoint, has just been raped by a man in drag and has stumbled into a church for sanctuary. Inside, she’s hit-on by Mink (played by Mink Stole, another Waters regular), a prostitute wearing a nun’s continues…
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WED 15
Handsome Devil
Handsome Devil GFT, 7.30pm The GFF brochure promises that this gala opener is a film ‘to lift your spirits, warm your heart and bring a big smile to your face.’ We don’t know about you lot, but that sounds exactly what we need right now. It centres on the bond that forms between two lads at opposite ends of the social strata at an all-boys boarding school. The vibe we’re getting from this Irish coming-ofager is a queer Rushmore with a dash of Dead Poets Society thrown in in the form of Andrew ‘Moriarty’ Scott’s inspirational teacher, which sounds mighty fine to us.
>> habit, and they begin to make love in the pews. In their fits of passion, Mink puts her rosary beads somewhere unmentionable. Or, as Divine describes it in her breathless inner monologue, “It was then that I realised she was using her rosary as a tool of erotic pleasure!” Just as we think this “rosary job” scene can’t get more sacrilegious, Waters crosscuts it with a reenactment of the Stations of the Cross. How did he get away with that in 1970? “Easy,” Waters says nonchalantly. “There was no law, religious or otherwise, against a rosary job yet because who would ever want to do it? I mean, nobody has ever tried to give me a rosary job.”
“I’ve lived through liar Nixon, AIDS, killer Reagan, dumbbell Bush, I’ll get through this idiot” John Waters Multiple Maniacs, along with Waters’ other early films, has a delightfully freewheeling quality. It feels out of control, dangerous even. Anarchy was his ethos back then. “Maybe I didn’t know it at the time,” says Waters, “but [Multiple Maniacs] was a punk rock movie before there was punk rock.” At first glance you might assume the film was a retaliation against his middle-class, Catholic upbringing, but Waters and his friends found the late 60s counterculture to be just as square. “It was a movie made to horrify hippies, but the hippies that came to see it wanted to be horrified and probably turned into punks, you know, five to eight years later.” How did Waters and his friends self-identify back then? “Oh I was a yipee, not a hippie. We went to riots for fun. Political demonstrations were our social life. We were like a cell and what we were doing was a terrorist attack on the tyranny of good taste.” How things have changed in 45 years. A lovingly restored version of Multiple Maniacs is soon to be unleashed across
the UK by Park Circus, a distributor who usually specialises in refined classics. Waters himself, meanwhile, is positively mainstream. “People looked at my early pictures and called them the most disgusting things ever,” he once lamented, “and now Hairspray is being done at every school in Britain and America.” The Baltimore-based filmmaker is as confused by the current critical ardour for Multiple Maniacs as he is by his own national treasure status. “The most shocking thing about the revival was that Criterion and Janus films even wanted to release it because they were known as the fanciest art distributors of Bergman and Godard and stuff. But they approached me with a great sense of humour about it too and that’s why I think the release has been received very well, certainly way better than when it came out. On Rotten Tomatoes we now have 100% favorable reviews, which even I think is ridiculous.” This is a first for us, a filmmaker talking down his own movie. “Well, you know, I mean, it has its flaws, God knows. I should be in jail for zoom-lens abuse for one thing.” While it’ll be great to see another John Waters film in theatres, it’s a pity fans can’t be celebrating a new feature. And the sad truth is, we may never get one. “I don’t think I even make movies any more,” he says. “I haven’t made one for ten years.” We urge him to get back in the saddle. In Trump’s America, we need disobedient filmmakers like him more than ever. When we bring up his nation’s new overlord, Waters is surprisingly laid-back. “I’ve lived through liar Nixon, AIDS, killer Reagan, dumbbell Bush, I’ll get through this idiot,” he says. While the chances of a new John Waters film in the near future are slim, we can take heart that his influence is everywhere. Filmmakers as diverse as Pedro Almodóvar, Todd Solondz and Harmony Korine all owe him a debt for smashing down cinema’s barriers of respectability. Waters reluctantly agrees to his legacy. “Let’s say I made bad taste 1% more respectable. Even that fancy Tom Ford movie [Nocturnal Animals], which I liked, when you see one of the killers taking a shit... I don’t know, without me maybe it wouldn’t have gone quite as far,” he says, cackling with delight. “I realise that’s a dubious thing to take credit for.”
R E VIE WS The Autopsy of Jane Doe Director: André Øvredal Starring: Brian Cox, Emile Hirsch, Ophelia Lovibond
“A less flashy take on CSI, but with dark, occult ideas slowly seeping in from the edges”
Like Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn, André Øvredal’s latest film is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It starts out as a lean and logical tale, dealing with the incongruous and impossible in a serious and scientific manner, before changing the rules of the game at the halfway mark. A Sheriff looks over a house full of bodies, and the only corpse without
Fri 17 Feb, GFT, 11.30pm Sat 18 Feb, Grosvenor, 11.00pm
a mark on it is that of a half-buried woman. He sends the body to the local coroner, Tommy (the ever-compelling Brian Cox), who is assisted by his son, Austin (Emile Hirsch, not so compelling, but likable enough). What follows is a less flashy take on CSI, but with dark, occult ideas slowly seeping in from the edges. It’s during this stretch that The Autopsy of Jane Doe is at its most interesting, but at the halfway mark it goes from cerebral thriller to supernatural horror, and loses something along the way. That it then forgets to have a third act, doesn’t help. [Tom Charles]
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THU 16 The Woman Who Left GFT, 1.30pm At only 228 minutes, this is a fiddler by Filipino director Lav Diaz’s standards, whose longest film (Evolution of a Filipino Family) clocks in at nearly ten hours long. We follow a schoolteacher who was wrongly convicted 30 years ago, who’s now emancipated and looking for payback. Last year’s Venice Film Festival jury adored it, handing Diaz the Golden Lion.
“Z paints a vivid picture of those fleeing poverty and conflict”
Director: Midi Z Starring: Ko Kai, Wu Ke-Xi, Wang Shin-Hong
Returning to narrative features after his last two documentaries, Taiwan-based Burmese filmmaker Midi Z directs his attention towards a pair of illegal Burmese immigrants navigating a new life in Bangkok, and the results are devastating. Despite the title, the eponymous city of Mandalay – with its exotic imagery and reputation – plays no part in Z’s film. Instead what is portrayed is the quiet desperation of those fleeing poverty and conflict for a fresh start in a foreign land.
Heal the Living Director: Katell Quillévéré Starring: Tahar Rahim, Emmanuelle Seigner, Anne Dorval, Kool Shen, Monia Chokri, Finnegan Oldfield
Heal the Living is the story of one heart that touches many lives. When a teenage surfer (Gabin Verdet) is killed in a car accident, his grieving parents (Emmanuelle Seigner and Kool Shen) have to make the decision to donate his healthy organs to those in need. Writer-director Katell Quillévéré divides her film into two halves: first focusing on the family’s emotional shock and ethical dilemmas before introducing us to the woman (Anne Dorval) who will receive the heart in question.
Thu 16 Feb, GFT, 8.30pm Fri 17 Feb, GFT, 3.45pm
The sole part of Burma we see is the borderlands with Thailand, where strangers Guo and Lianqing – Wu in a steely performance – are packed into a van bound for Bangkok. With sparse dialogue and clinical imagery, Z paints a vivid picture of those fleeing poverty and conflict for the chance of opportunity and a brighter future. Tracing the paths of Guo and Lianqing through their new lives and relationship in Bangkok before building to a sudden and violent climax, The Road to Mandalay powerfully portrays two people being torn apart by all the promises and illusions of the immigrant experience. [Michael Jaconelli]
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Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey
Crime Wave CCA, 8.15pm This insanely original cult artifact from John Paizs centres on a disturbed young filmmaker who’s struggling with his scripts, of which we see gloriously lurid snippets. Be braced for a film that’s truly hallucinogenic as well as piss-your-pants funny.
My Life as a Courgette Frantz Neruda
Sun 19 Feb, CCA, 3.30pm Tue 21 Feb, GFT, 1.15pm
This is Quillévéré’s third feature, and it is both her most ambitious to date and her most accomplished. She weaves a rich emotional tapestry through multiple characters – family members, doctors, paramedics – and while it’s easy to imagine this material feeling contrived or soapy in the wrong hands, she pulls it off with unerring elegance and lightness of touch. With the assistance of Alexandre Desplat’s beautiful score, Quillévéré also crafts a number of exhilarating cinematic coups, from the entrancing opening sequence to a rousing flashback that displays the strength of the young man’s heart, in both a physical and romantic sense. [Philip Concannon]
“Quillévéré weaves a rich emotional tapestry through multiple characters”
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Illustration: Raj Dhunna
The Road to Mandalay
Weirdos GFT, 6.15pm The brill Bruce McDonald is back with this period road movie centred on two teen misfits who’re blowing off small town Nova Scotia for the big city. Hitting the road with them, bizarrely, is the laconic ghost of Andy Warhol.
Thu 16 Feb, GFT, 6.30pm | Fri 24 Feb, GFT, 1.15pm
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FRI 17 Leave Her to Heaven GFT, 10.30am A dreamlike film noir shot in lurid Technicolor, this neurotic family soap stars Gene Tierney as an insanely jealous woman determined to keep her husband’s attention on her at all costs. Berlin Syndrome GFT, 8.15pm Like her mentor, Jane Campion, Claire Shortland’s films tremble with emotion, and their chief forms of communication are texture and mood. We’re fascinated to see how Shortland adapts this distinctive style to her first genre piece, which is being described as a kinky confinement thriller.
“Mifune could evoke whole mountains of emotion in the smallest gestures”
The Last Samurai Toshiro Mifune is a film icon. Ahead of Glasgow Film Festival’s retrospective celebrating this ‘great warrior figure of world cinema’ and Steven Okazaki’s documentary Mifune: The Last Samurai, we take a look at what made Mifune so special
T
he hero is outnumbered. A circle of sneering enemies are slowly drawing in, convinced they’ve got the drop on him. He remains unruffled, practically unresponsive. They move closer, snarling, spitting threats and insults. Quietly, calmly, he offers them the chance to leave. They can’t believe their ears. They howl with laughter and wonder if this guy isn’t crazy. His tone is all deadpan, just the hint of a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth as he unlocks his jaw just enough to let one rough shard of sarcasm fly. It’s blood to the sharks. The audacity of this little punk sends them into a full on feeding frenzy. They don’t care whether he’s dumb or crazy anymore, and all at once they hurl themselves onto him, spit flying, wide-eyed, ready to tear him limb from limb. A few moments later, he’s coolly stepping over the bodies piled on the floor, walking out the door and strolling off into the night. This hero has been re-incarnated throughout the cinematic universe time and time again: the gunslinger of the Wild West, the gumshoe of the big bad city, the killer with a code. We all know him, we’ve seen him kicking ass and taking names all across the world in every era, speaking different languages and wearing different clothes but always defined by that same gnarled valour, that hard-edged heroism. He’s the good guy with the bad attitude, the one who saves your life then tells you to go fuck yourself while he lights another cigarette and orders another beer. He’s been known by many names – and often by no name at all – but in the beginning, this hero was Toshiro Mifune.
Words: Ross McIndoe Taking the archetype of the clean-living, well-mannered samurai and rudely smashing it to pieces, Mifune created a newer, more complex type of protagonist. His roving warrior was a roughed up, red-blooded loner, immovably devoted to his own moral rules and completely uninterested in anyone else’s. He could get drunk and lose his temper, piss off everyone in sight and still save the day. Mifune’s new kind of hero stormed into the centre of the audience’s imagination and demanded its full attention. Some 50 years later, he still holds it. It’s often the new work on show that grabs the headlines at film festivals – the up-and-coming directors, breakthrough actors and the master filmmakers’ latest offerings – and that’s to be expected, but they also offer a chance to get people in a room with older movies that risk getting lost in the contentblitz of the digital era. Narrated by Keanu Reeves, documentary Mifune: The Last Samurai aims to shine a spotlight back upon the man, bringing his talents to a new audience while reminding the old one why they loved him in the first place. His work with Akira Kurosawa is the stuff of cinematic legend and only a fraction of Mifune’s own legacy, accounting for 16 films of the some 160 plus which form one of the most impressive filmographies of his or any era. Just like Hemingway could tell a story in six words, Mifune could evoke whole mountains of emotion in the smallest gestures. An actor of unrivalled physicality, each movement he made spilled a whole sentence out onto the screen, making his characters much more than just slick anti-heroes with a talent for grim one-liners. The raw emotional power of his performances found their perfect counterpart in Kurosawa’s intricate visions, giving birth to modern masterpieces like Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and Throne of Blood, which would in turn inspire a generation of Hollywood filmmakers to come. Simply put, cinema has never been the same since Mifune’s swaggering samurai came to town.
Predator GFT, 11.15pm Arnie leads half-a-dozen beefcake mercenaries into a verdant jungle on a rescue mission, but before he can yell “GET TO THE CHOPPER!” his team gets picked off one by one by a tooled-up ET in camouflage. Delirious fun.
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