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The Girl with All the GIFs Comedian and early YouTube celebrity Bo Burnham makes his writing/directing debut with Eighth Grade, a tender, funny teen movie that’s partly about ‘being online’. We speak to him about presenting kids realistically and what most films about the web miss

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f all filmmakers to tackle the subject of the relationship of young people to the internet as it is now, Bo Burnham would be among the most qualified. After all, these platforms are responsible for where he is now. The 28-year-old American comedian, musician and actor began his performance career in 2006 with YouTube videos of self-penned comedy songs. The full trajectory of his path since is too convoluted to divulge here, but the important thing is that he has written and directed his first feature: a wonderful film called Eighth Grade that’s had a healthy

box office run stateside and has gone on to receive numerous major awards wins and nominations, including a Golden Globe nod for star Elsie Fisher, a thrilling new talent, and a Directors Guild of America Award win in the First-Time Feature category for Burnham just days after our phone conversation.

Eighth Grade follows the life and struggles of middle-schooler Kayla (Fisher) during her final week of classes before graduating to high school. Despite suffering social anxiety, she produces vlogs giving life advice for an audience of almost zero – when there are views, it’s likely they came from her possibly too supportive single father (Josh Hamilton). During these final days of eighth grade, she navigates a crush, a rare party invite, and the chance to hang out with a high-schooler she aspires to be like. It may sound small-scale, but the film is a personal epic that really captures the heightened confusion of this particularly awkward age range.

PREVIEW

28 Feb, GFT, 6.30pm | 1 Mar, GFT, 3.45pm

Interview: Josh Slater-Williams Burnham’s said on record that his own struggle with anxiety inspired the project’s inception, but he collaborated with Fisher constantly to make sure that the fictional diary of a teenage girl they were creating felt true to both a 13-year-old girl and, crucially, a 13-year-old girl right now. “I had never thought of a boy ever,” he says of writing the film. “Part of that was just because I didn’t want to do my own experience. I was not interested at all in transferring that to the decidedly new eighth grade experience which wasn’t mine. It being a girl fully made it so I could not project my own experience on to it, which helped a lot. I wanted to come into this experience fresh and without authority, which I didn’t want to have, because I think a lot of movies about kids feel like they come from an authoritative place. And I just wanted the focus to be the kids.”

This search for authenticity extends to the young characters’ dialogue, which is naturalistic and free >>

>> from the kind of smart aleck zingers screenwriters tend to write for their teen characters. Even the high school students Kayla encounters are allowed to be inarticulate, despite projecting a lot more confidence. “The problems that you have as a kid you can’t articulate yourself, so to try to fix that part of being a kid for the purpose of putting it on-screen, where kids are written to be super articulate in explaining their awkward teen problems, to me it robs the kid of the interior dynamics that makes them interesting to watch.”

“ The internet is this strange, heightened, higher-stakes and lower-stakes social meeting place where you can try out your own personality in a lower-stakes situation” Bo Burnham

Burnham describes the camerawork in Eighth Grade as “very subjective” and focused on how to “evoke what Kayla is feeling right now”, but the film’s dynamic aesthetic doesn’t solely concern its visual representation of its protagonist’s interactions with her devices and other people. British composer Anna Meredith, whose debut studio album, Varmints, won the 2016 Scottish Album of the Year Award, scored the film and provides what Burnham describes as “the subconscious of the film”.

“I wanted an electronic score but I wanted something a little more human and not so aggro,” explains Burnham. “Electronic scores can be a little cold. I wanted the score to not make [Kayla’s] experiences small but make them bigger and more visceral.

Anna’s music was exactly what I was hoping for and more. I wanted someone to be bold and take risks, and she’s incapable of not being bold.”

The experience of the internet shown in Eighth Grade is one we rarely get to see in cinema: that of quiet, nervous people just trying to express themselves through a means that’s easier than in their daily offline lives. “For a lot of people, the internet is this strange, heightened, higher-stakes and lower-stakes social meeting place where you can try out your own personality in a lower-stakes situation. When I was 13, what I had was AIM, this instant messenger where you would have conversations you could never have with people face-to-face. “[The internet] is a strange arena for anyone.

There was this unmentioned experience of the internet which wasn’t the narcissistic losers that you see satirised all the time in media, or a super depressing

story of a kid who’s severely cyberbullied. It came to be between those two types of stories and we don’t really get to see the middle ground that most of us live in, which is, yeah, we’re on the internet and we live our lives that way. But it’s not some giant crisis, it just depends – living with it is what I was trying to visualise.” Less judgemental commentary, more honest portrayal.

We mean it as a compliment when we tell Burnham that watching Eighth Grade is like experiencing a 93-minute sustained panic attack. For people who can relate all too well to certain elements of it, the film can, in parts, play like a horror movie about ‘being online’. We wonder then what Burnham makes of the recent trend of genre movies – mostly horrors or thrillers – that are set in or around the online world, largely or sometimes entirely told through screenbased interfaces.

Pleasingly, Burnham seems to have seen most of them. “I think it’s great,” he says. “Unfriended I love, Searching… I really liked Cam, as well. It’s really cool and I think it’s an obvious thing that makes sense.

The internet’s pretty horrifying, so it makes sense to set horror movies there. It’s also very inventive in that we watch all these movies on screens. With movies like Searching and Unfriended, people actually watch those movies on their laptop; that’s what’s fun about those things. And even with my movie too, I want people to see this in the theatre but there is a sort of magic to watching a movie about a girl on her laptop while alone on a laptop. I think it’s great that people making movies like that are engaging with devices that we have as devices. It’s really smart.”

PR E VIE W

Follow the White Rabbit The Matrix turns 20 this year, but its pop philosophising and cyberpunk kung fu make it as potent as ever It’s 1999, the new millennium is looming menacinly. Panic is building, news cycles are infested with apocalyptic predictions of Y2K – the Millennium Bug that will plunge us all into darkness on the stroke of midnight. Planes would fall from the sky, prison gates would fly open, the entire infrastructure of our modern world would implode the instant 99 rolled confusedly back into 00. The end was nigh.

This atmosphere of techno-panic couldn’t have been better suited to The Matrix’s neo-noir tale of computer overlords. Its hero, Neo, is introduced with Keanu Reeves’ pale face illuminated by the sickly green glow of his computer, hunched over in his dank apartment. The scene reeks of alienation and paranoia, the state a modern mind can dream its way into while bent over a screen, alone in the dark.

By combining cutting-edge computer wizardry with old-school martial arts moviemaking, the Wachowskis created a sci-fi epic that wore its influences (undergrad philosophy, Terminator’s AI with a grudge against humanity, the cyberpunk stylings of Akira and Blade Runner) on its worn leather sleeve while offering audiences something they’d never seen before.

The Matrix was jacked directly into the zeitgeist of its moment, but its general message hasn’t faded over time. The Y2K predictions failed to come to pass, but we now live in an era where our personal details are harvested en masse and sold to megacorporations, used to tailor fake news to our tastes and sway elections from afar; computers shape our reality.

The Matrix’s explicit philosophy never gets much beyond stoner ruminations about “what even is real?” but the general

sense of it, the anxious off-ness of the whole thing, is rooted in the intuition that there is something wrong with the way the world is run. That we are all being kept in line by some form of sinister power, sleepwalking through our days at shitty desk jobs and nights plugged into the digital world’s plastic reality. There is a sense that technology – while allowing us to achieve incredible, mind-blowing things on a daily basis – is also being used to keep us docile, detached from one another and the world around us.

The question The Matrix asks, the one

that festers in your mind long after you’re done being dazzled by the pop philosophy and cyberpunk kung fu: sure you’re paranoid, but are you paranoid enough?

[Ross McIndoe] Fri 22 Feb, Argyle Street Arches, 6pm Sat 23 Feb, Argyle Street Arches, 6pm GFF’s advice for these special immersive screenings of The Matrix: “Renounce your residual self image!

Conceal yourself in leather and remember your black sunglasses. Keep on the lookout: Agents may infiltrate the premises”

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Elaine May and Walter Matthau in A New Leaf

May Days

Words: Philip Concannon

The four feature films by Elaine May are among the finest in American cinema, but the poor distribution of the first three and financial failure of the fourth means they’re still little seen. Praise be then for GFF’s heaven-sent Elaine May retrospective

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laine May’s reputation has travelled further than her films. She has been hailed as a key influence by a whole generation of American comedians – including Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin and Woody Allen – but her work has been allowed to fall out of circulation and she’s been largely neglected

by Hollywood for over 30 years. The reason for that absence from filmmaking lies in another reputation that casts a long shadow. May’s long-delayed and over-budget comedy Ishtar (1987) was widely derided as a disaster before it even hit cinema screens and it quickly became the go-to title for hacks discussing the worst movies ever made. Its failure marked an abrupt and unjust end to a thrillingly unconventional directorial career.

Watching Ishtar now, it’s hard to understand how this goofy and frequently hilarious buddy comedy could have once inspired such opprobrium, but as May noted in 2012, “If all of the people who hate Ishtar had seen it, I would be a rich woman today.”

The film seemed a cursed project from the start, but behind-the-scenes drama was par for the course by the time May came to Ishtar. Two of her first three pictures led to long and acrimonious battles with Paramount, with the studio excising more than an hour from her debut A New Leaf (1971) before its release and then dumping a hastily assembled

version of Mikey and Nicky (1976) in a handful of cinemas following a two-year editing period. A brilliant improviser who had revolutionised sketch comedy with Mike Nichols in the 1960s, May brought that same improvisatory spirit to her filmmaking; the freewheeling, exploratory approach that made her such a headache for producers is what gives her films their unique rhythm and energy.

May’s comedies are hysterically funny, but they are also distinguished by their bitter undertones, jagged edges and uncomfortable pauses. “The nice thing is to make an audience laugh and laugh and laugh, and shudder later,” she said in a 1961 interview, and she remained true to this credo throughout her career. Her films all hinge on acts of selfishness and betrayal within a relationship. In A New Leaf, a bankrupt playboy (Walter Matthau) plans to marry and murder a socially inept heiress (played adorably

by May), and in The Heartbreak Kid (1972) a solipsistic newlywed (Charles Grodin) ditches his bride (Jeannie Berlin, May’s daughter) for the glamorous blonde (Cybill Shepherd) he meets on their honeymoon. A big success upon its release, earning critical acclaim and Oscar nominations, The Heartbreak Kid should be regarded as one of the canonical American comedies but rights issues have seen it disappear from the public’s consciousness. It’s a cynical screwball caper that is as excruciating as it is funny, a masterclass in sustained discomfort that mercilessly exposes its protagonist’s hollowness.

Although he was created by Neil Simon, The Heartbreak Kid’s protagonist Lenny is an archetypal May man. Across the course of her four features, we see a series of male characters driven by an unshakeable sense of entitlement and a complete

lack of self-awareness, and her films lay bare their insecurity, arrogance, deceitfulness and selfishness.

Few filmmakers have consistently skewered the male ego so incisively, and after subverting the romantic comedy in her first two films, May switched her focus to male friendship in Mikey and Nicky and Ishtar, which feel like two sides of the same coin. Both are stories about friends finding their loyalty to each other being tested, with one film playing it as tragedy and the other as farce. Mikey and Nicky is May’s darkest film and arguably her greatest achievement, the film in which she removed the buffer of comedy to reveal the pain, resentment and sadness underneath.

A few years after its botched original release, May’s re-edited version of Mikey and Nicky was hailed by critics as one of the great films of the 1970s, and its reputation continues to grow with every passing year. All of May’s films have needed rescuing in some way – from compromised edits, from legal entanglements, from poisonous word-of-mouth – but with ongoing retrospectives and restorations, it feels like the world is gradually coming around to her genius. It’s a tragedy that we don’t have more Elaine May films, and it’s enraging that her career was brutally curtailed for the kind of maverick behaviour that male auteurs are often lionised for, but we do have four extraordinary films that couldn’t have been made by anybody else. We need to take every opportunity to celebrate them.

May Days: The Films of Elaine May A New Leaf: Mon 25 Feb, GFT, 1pm The Heartbreak Kid: Tue 26 Feb, GFT, 1pm Mikey and Nicky: Wed 27 Feb, GFT, 1.15pm Ishtar: Thu 28 Feb, GFT, 1pm

For more GFF reviews, features and recommendations, visit theskinny.co.uk

Heads Up: Films of the Day Compiled by: Jamie Dunn

Mid90s

The Vanishing

WED 20 FEB

THU 21 FEB

FRI 22 FEB

Mid90s

The Vanishing

Transit

GFF kicks off with this coming-of-age film from Hollywood star Jonah Hill. We follow an introverted 13-year-old boy with a turbulent homelife, who finds a release when he begins hanging out with a group of older skateboarders. As well as classic hip-hop tracks, the film also features an original score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. GFT, 7.30pm (also 21 Feb)

Scotland’s two great acting bruisers, Gerard Butler and Peter Mullan, are together at last, along with stripling Connor Swindells, as a trio of lighthouse keepers in this mysterious thriller set on a storm-swept island in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. GFT, 8.30pm (also 22 Feb) Runner-up: The Sisters Brothers, GFT, 3.35pm

Transit

Christian Petzold’s Transit is a dazzling study in fear and confusion as France is swarmed by fascists, although clothing and technology suggests the setting isn’t WWII, but a liminal fragment of history much closer to our own time. GFT, 6pm (also 26 Feb) Runner-up: Border, Cineworld, 5.45pm

I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians

TUE 26 FEB

WED 27 FEB

THU 28 FEB

I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians

Fugue

Eighth Grade

A darkly comic, politically timely meta-drama, ...Barbarians concerns an idealistic theatre director preparing to stage a grand outdoor historical pageant based on 1941’s Odessa massacre, one of the darkest moments in Romania’s turbulent history. GFT, 8pm (also 27 Feb) Runner-up: This Magnificent Cake!, GFT, 6.30pm

The director of flesh-eating mermaid musical The Lure is back with another curio: in this case, a memory-loss melodrama about a woman who enters a fugue-like state, only to emerge walking on some train tracks with a radically different personality. GFT, 5.45 (also 28 Feb) Runner-up: Out of Blue, GFT, 6pm

Fugue

Adolescence is hell in this spiky but tender debut from US stand-up Bo Burnham, which follows a painfully awkward 13-year-old on her last few days of middle school, with high school looming. GFT, 6.30pm (also 1 Mar) Runner-up: Lords of Chaos, GFT, 9pm

Eighth Grade

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Ray & Liz

Thunder Road

SAT 23 FEB

SUN 24 FEB

MON 25 FEB

Ray & Liz

Thunder Road

Under the Silver Lake

Award-winning photographer Richard Billingham dips his toes in moving image with this formally inventive cine-memoir reenacting his own childhood growing up in a cramped flat on a Birmingham council estate. CCA, 6pm (also 28 Feb) Runner-up: The Man Who Feels No Pain, GFT, 8.15pm

Expanding on his excellent short film in which he plays a cop honouring his late-mother at her funeral with an intense rendition of the eponymous Bruce Springsteen song, Jim Cummings’ offbeat tale of a law man on the verge of a nervous breakdown is reportedly a humanist gem. Cineworld, 9pm (also 25 Feb) Runner-up: Her Smell, GFT, 8pm

David Robert Mitchell channels Hitchcock and Welles in this shaggy LA noir following Andrew Garfield as a feckless loser who embarks on a surreal odyssey across Hollywood in search of his missing neighbour. GFT, 8pm (also 28 Feb) Runner-up: Benjamin, GFT, 8.30pm

Under the Silver Lake

Happy as Lazzaro

FRI 1 MAR

SAT 2 MAR

SUN 3 MAR

Happy as Lazzaro

Vox Lux

Beats

Alice Rohrwacher’s drama about a village of peasant farmers cut off from society spills from poetic realism to dreamy fantasy to tell a spellbinding story that’s a potent allegory for the pervasive evils of modern capitalism. GFT, 1pm (also 2 Mar) Runner-up: Making Montgomery Clift, CCA, 3.30pm

In Brady Corbet’s wildly ambitious Vox Lux, Natalie Portman portrays a drug-snorting pop sensation who found fame after being shot during a mass shooting as a teen.

Critics have been split down the middle on this film, but all agree it’s jaw-dropping. Cineworld, 8.30pm (also 3 Mar) Runner-up: Genesis, GFT, 5.30pm

On-fire Scottish playwright Kieran Hurley adapts his acclaimed Fringe show for this bittersweet comingof-age film centred on two best friends who lose themselves in the freedom of Scotland’s 90s rave scene. GFT, 7.15pm Runner-up: A Bread Factory 1&2, GFT, 1pm

Vox Lux

For more GFF reviews, features and recommendations, visit theskinny.co.uk

Beats

Tue 26 Feb, GFT, 8pm

Truth and Tell

Wed 27 Feb, GFT, 3.15pm

Bucharest-born filmmaker Radu Jude (Aferim!) is back on blistering form with meta-fictional satire I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, following a theatre director attempting to re-stage the Odessa Massacre

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ne of the more inventive voices to emerge from the Romanian new wave, Radu Jude has long been a director who challenges expectations. His contemporaries like Corneliu Porumboiu, Cristi Puiu and Cristian Mungiu are better known for examining the legacy and dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu; Jude’s work, however, is known to probe much deeper into the national psyche. His latest, I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, does just that, borrowing its title from an infamous speech by Ion Antonescu, who sanctioned a brutal massacre on Europe’s Eastern Front during the Second World War. The film sees Jude return to the topic of antisemitism, a subject he’s explored in his previous three films. First, in 2015, with Aferim!, a quasi-western that follows a pair of lawmen on the hunt for a fugitive Roma. Jude returned again a year later with Scarred Hearts, a period drama based on the autobiography of Romanian author Max Blecher, in which a sanatorium for tuberculosis sufferers mirrors a society where antisemitism is becoming increasingly virulent. Following this was last year’s The Dead Nation, a documentary in which Jude juxtaposes glass-plate photos from the 1940s with the diary entries of a Jewish doctor to illustrate the chasm between personal experience and political propaganda.

Barbarians feels like the culmination of all three of these films, chronicling the difficulties of Mariana Marin (Ioana Iacob), a young theatre director attempting to stage an historically accurate re-enactment of

the Odessa Massacre – in which Romanian soldiers slaughtered tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews before switching sides to fight against Germany in 1944. Although Antonescu was later executed by a military firing squad for his wartime crimes, Romania’s history of antisemitism remains a prickly topic. “The Holocaust is not common knowledge in Romania, it’s still deeply polemic,” explains Jude, when we sit down at the Hamburg Film Festival to discuss his latest film. “To this day it still creates huge debates. This film has upset a lot of people. Some have even called me a traitor.

“I belong to a generation that grew up with large parts of its history hidden,” he explains when asked about the abuse he’s received and his fascination with this dark period of Romanian history. “I’m not really interested in history, but I went to school just after the communist dictatorship ended. What followed was a heightened period of nationalism. So when I entered my 20s, [I] discovered all these stories and artefacts that didn’t fit with the narrative I had been taught. This discovery didn’t shock me – I’m not that naïve – but I was angry. I wanted to know why I was lied to.”

This might explain why some Romanians have found Barbarians’ depiction of their country’s role in the Second World War difficult to swallow, but for Jude it was important to avoid getting caught up in the factual inaccuracies surrounding the Holocaust.

“This isn’t a film about finding the truth, it’s a

Interview: Patrick Gamble film about research,” he explains, before getting side-tracked when questioned about the antinomy between history and truth. “I mean... what is that word… truth? I’m not against it. I’m not a postmodernist forcing a philosophical perspective on the audience, but I believe there are different types of truth. When you talk about algebra or mathematics there’s a precise truth, but it’s not the same when you speak about history.”

“ All history is a story.

You can’t escape that” Radu Jude Comprised of various production meetings and rehearsals in which Mariana’s quest for authenticity is met with opposition on multiple fronts, the film plays out as a series of confrontations. Actors are uncomfortable with performing a version of history they don’t recognise, while local officials insist Mariana should dilute her depiction of the atrocity.

Conversations about representation, nationalism and intellectualism unfold in Jude’s typically playful style, including one particularly heated debate in which Mariana quotes Marx’s famous adage that history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce.”

She could quite easily be talking about Jude’s >>

>>

Keep up-to-date with our daily online GFF coverage over at facebook.com/TheSkinnyMag, @theskinnymag and @skinnyfilm

>> approach to history, as here – much like in his previous films – the uncomfortable laughter that accompanies this scene is rooted in the disturbing parallels he makes between the past and the present.

“I think it was Rohmer who said that words should belong to cinema. I wanted to create a film that was one long discussion.”

From the film’s Brechtian opening, when Mariana addresses the audience directly, it’s clear that Jude wants to avoid the type of sentimental narrative that has become synonymous with Holocaust dramas, instead provoking a conversation with the viewer, even if his heavily didactic approach can feel like being trapped in a one sided argument. “I wanted to create an extended dialogue built around the questions raised when you embark on projects like this. These conversations are meant to represent society speaking. However, despite my best intentions, I still get asked the same old questions at the Q&As: ‘Why did you make a film about this?’ or ‘Why didn’t you make a film about the Romanians who were massacred by the Soviets?’ You can’t win sometimes.”

Barbarians continues a recent trend of docu-

mentaries that use historical re-enactment to explore lingering trauma for cathartic effect. From Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing to Lola Arias’ Theatre of War, these films question if it’s ever really possible for filmmakers to balance the demand for historical accuracy with the kind of messy, unresolved truths of real life. “You can’t separate history and narrative,” argues Jude. “I think it was the French historian Paul Veyne who defined history as a synthesis of past events turned into a narrative with real people. All history is a story. You can’t escape that, but for me, every film should somehow inform the viewer that what they are seeing is a form of reconstruction. Sadly, most films tend to imply that what they’re showing is the truth” One of the most widely-accepted ideas about historical thinking is that “history is always written by the victors”. Jude doesn’t disagree with this assertion, but believes it shouldn’t shape historical narratives. “I think it’s important when you look at history,” he continues, “that you don’t put yourself in the position of the victim. A lot of people think I’m Jewish because my surname is Jude, but I’m

not. I wanted to make a film about the Holocaust from a Romanian perspective, not from a victim’s perspective. If I was Jewish I probably wouldn’t have made this film. I would have made a film about Palestinians. I think when you make a film where you symbolically victimise yourself it becomes very problematic, because it creates a kind of hate speak towards somebody else. I think it’s always more modest and more important to discuss history when your position was not that of the victim.”

Jude has created a film that approaches the past with its own questions and strategies, resulting in a deeply resonant film that not only unmasks his own nation’s collective amnesia, but challenges the audience to consider the role history plays in shaping political ideologies and personal assumptions about the way the world works. “I’ve upset a lot of people with this film,” he states with a mischievous smile on his face. “But it’s worth it when people say to me this is the first they’ve heard about this incident, and that they want to know more! This is the reaction I want when I make films. It pleases me when I hear that people have gone on and discovered something new.”

PR E VIE W

Private Dicks

Mon 25, GFT, 8pm | Thu 28 Feb, GFT, 1.15pm

Under the Silver Lake is David Robert Mitchell’s shaggy riff on the film noir, but it’s hardly the first film to play with the codes of the private detective movie. Here are cinema’s other feckless sleuths David Robert Mitchell loves to play with genre. In his disarming debut film, The Myth of the American Sleepover, he tinkered with the familiar tropes of the teen movie to create a coming-of-age story that’s altogether more elegiac and otherworldly than its crass forebears.

There was something ethereal too going on in his imaginative slasher It Follows, in which a group of suburban teens were haunted by a sexually transmitted ghoul.

The talented director’s new film, Under the Silver Lake, is his loopy riff on the private eye movie. An unkempt Andrew Garfield plays the feckless Sam, who wanders through the film in a confused daze. He has plenty to be concerned with – he’s jobless, about to be evicted, and he stinks of skunk (both the animal and the recreational drug) – but he’s focusing all his low wattage energy on discovering what happened to his missing neighbour. This obsession takes him down a wormhole into LA’s secret underworld where he encounters a dog serial-killer, an owl-faced female assassin and a string of subliminal messages more convoluted than clues in a Scooby-Doo episode.

Mitchell isn’t the first director to give the film noir a zesty revision.

Robert Altman, like Mitchell, loved to make genre riffs. With 1973’s The Long Goodbye, Altman gave us the first great stoner noir, turning Raymond Chandler’s ice-cool private eye Philip Marlowe into a shambolic ne’er-do-well who can’t even take command of his cat, nevermind a case.

The Coen brothers took Altman’s vision of the aimless detective to its logical conclusion with the hilarious noir homage The Big Lebowski, where a counterculture burnout who’s dubbed himself The Dude (played to weary perfection by Jeff Bridges) finds himself at the centre of a loopy kidnapping plot.

Dressed in shorts, sandals and crumpled cardi, The Dude remains adorably clueless as body parts start arriving in the mail and a Nazi electro band break down his door threatening to have their pet marmot bite off his johnson.

Talking of johnsons, Rian Johnson was more respectful to the genre with his debut feature Brick, which transports the lightning-fast lingo of Chandler and Hammett to

the lunchrooms and hallways of high school. Joseph Gordon-Levitt played the weary beyond-his-years teen trying to find the whereabouts of his missing ex-girlfriend. Cold Weather, meanwhile, was Aaron Katz’s fun marrying of the low-key rhythms of mumblecore with the gumshoe thriller, with most laughs coming from when these opposing sensibilities collided.

Perhaps the closest relative to Under the Silver Lake is the biting comedy

series Search Party, in which a group of hopelessly self-centred millennials gets in over their heads when their similarly entitled friend from college goes missing on purpose, seeking attention. Like Under the Silver Lake’s amateur detective, Search Party’s heroes are aimless narcissists looking for purpose; they’re awful people, but we can’t help rooting for these clueless sleuths to solve their labyrinthian mystery. [Jamie Dunn]

For more GFF reviews, features and recommendations, visit theskinny.co.uk

Love Hurts

Sat 2 Mar, GFT, 5.30pm | Sun 3 Mar, CCA, 11.30am

Three teens take romantic leaps of the heart in Quebecois director Philippe Lesage’s bruising but tender coming-of-age film Genesis

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orget Xavier Dolan; writer-director Philippe Lesage may be the most exciting filmmaker to emerge from Quebec in the last few years. But unlike the director of Mommy and Heartbeats, Lesage has had some struggles getting his films wider distribution, at least in English-language territories.

Reportedly drawn from autobiographical experience, The Demons, his acclaimed narrative debut after a string of documentaries, earned strong notices – including at Glasgow Film Festival 2017 – and favourable comparisons to the thriller stylings of Claude Chabrol and Michael Haneke. In it, a young boy in Montreal begins experiencing the adult world, as he enters adolescence against a backdrop of local child kidnappings.

For his latest feature, Genesis, Lesage strays into autobiographical territory once more for a tale of teenagers in love. In fact, Genesis loops us back in with the filmmaker’s alter ego Félix (Édouard TremblayGrenier), the lead of The Demons, at an older age. This is not a literal sequel, though, which is perhaps wise considering the erratic distribution of Lesage’s films mentioned earlier. Think François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series, where seeing every entry isn’t required, but if you do seek them all out you’ll get a little something extra out of the experience.

Félix is not the main focus for most of the new film, though. For the majority of the runtime, we follow the stories of two older teen step-siblings – Charlotte (Noée Abita) and Guillaume (Théodore Pellerin) – as they navigate romantic travails; she with various mediocre male suitors, he with coming to terms with his sexuality and feelings for a friend in an all-boys boarding school. Then, once their concurrent stories conclude, Lesage’s final act focuses on Félix at a summer camp, experiencing the pangs of first love with a girl who seems to like him back.

“The interesting thing about it is that if I were to do a film about my childhood ten years from now, it would be completely different,” says Lesage, when we sit down to speak to him in a sweltering café after the film’s world premiere at Switzerland’s Locarno Festival last summer. “Your own perception and memory are always changing in the long run and the perception you have of your childhood, of your teenage years is constantly evolving as well.”

Regarding why he’s interested in these particular age ranges when it comes to matters of the heart, he tells us: “The Demons is really focusing on the kid discovering that these adults around him are animated by something strange called sexuality, and then the moment where he’s discovering his own sexuality and being afraid of it in a way. And here [in Genesis], it’s a bit different. The fear is not there but you have these strong passions when you’re a teenager. You feel love like it’s hitting you like a truck and it’s really strong. And the drama or the tragic aspects of loving when you’re a teen is that you have a big chance to be surrounded by the wrong people and to love the wrong people.

“ The perception you have of your childhood, of your teenage years is constantly evolving”

Interview: Josh Slater-Williams plot threads). That said, Lesage is keen to emphasise the overall streak of optimism in their stories and his genuine affection for his characters: “These characters, especially Charlotte, they’re passionate and they’re not protecting themselves. That’s why I love them and I respect them: because they’re fearless. They’re not trying to protect themselves.

“It’s very sad when I see friends backing off from somebody that they could actually fall for, where they’re backing off from something that is love. And they’re backing off because they’re afraid and I think that’s cowardice, but it’s also to protect themselves because they’re afraid to be hurt again. And these two characters are, for me, like romantic heroes in the sense that they are fearless and they just go through it completely. Even if they have to touch the bottom of the barrel, they will still go for it.”

Philippe Lesage “Also, I was interested in the fact that at that age, I don’t think people always have all their sexual preferences worked out, or it’s something that is moving and it’s something that changes depending on what you’re experiencing at a very young age. That’s why I think it’s a very rich period where you struggle because you don’t really know who you are and then you’re experiencing this and experiencing that. And then this is going to have an impact on the trajectory of your own love life or sexual life for the rest of your life. And for the rest of your life, I still think that is something that is moving and changing.”

Lesage puts his characters, or at least Charlotte and Guillaume, through the ringer, with emotional and physical abuses of varying kinds cropping up by the end of their stories (for prospective viewers, we should mention that potentially distressing themes of sexual assault make an appearance in both their

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