CineSkinny 2015: Issue 3 (24-26 Feb)

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N0 3 / 24-26 FEB

24 Feb, GFT, 8.40pm | 25 Feb, GFT, 12.45pm

Girl Power Céline Sciamma discusses the tender and tough Girlhood

C

onsider the coming-of-age movie for a second.

Cast your mind through cinema’s history and what titles flash before your eyes? Chances are there’ll be a fair few US films, names like Rebel Without a Cause, American Graffiti, Breaking Away and Rushmore. But practically every filmmaking nation has a classic film of teen turmoil, from Mexico (Y Tu Mama Tambien) to Australia (The Year My Voice Broke) via Senegal (Touki Bouki) to here in Scotland (Gregory’s Girl).

What’s lacking from the above list? To put it bluntly: women. Female stories are limited in all cor-

INTERVIEW: ners of film culture, but they’re particularly outnumbered in the coming-of-age genre. Praise be, then, for French filmmaker Céline Sciamma, who seems to be on a one woman mission to redress the balance. Her 2006 debut, Water Lilies, was concerned with the sexual awakening of a group of teenage girls in a synchronised swimming team. In the follow up, 2001’s Tomboy, Sciamma considered the body and identity issues of an androgynous ten-year-old, who reinvents herself as a roughhousing schoolboy after moving to a new town with her family. Her latest, Girlhood, centres on 16-year-old misfit Marieme (Karidja Touré), a shy black girl from a poor Paris suburb who comes out of her shell when she’s initiated into the mini-sisterhood of

Jamie Dunn

three streetwise firecrackers, who like fighting as much as they like dressing up and dancing to Rihanna.

Director Sciamma’s inspiration came from observing similar female cliques as she walked around her hometown. “I would pass by these groups of girls on the streets of Paris. They had this great energy and charisma, with style, and a solidarity,” she says. “I really wanted to look at them – that’s a good starting point for a movie, when you want so badly to look at someone.” She realised the irony, though, that in her profession these girl gangs were never looked at.

“Black girls in French cinema are totally invisible, they don’t exist. I figured OK, I have the intimate urge to look at them and there’s also a collective continues…

24 FEB H I G H LI G H T S

Mad Max 2

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior IMAX, 7.30pm How do you improve George Miller’s apocalyptic visuals and blisteringly dynamic action scenes? GFF’s answer is simple: put them on a screen five double-decker buses high!

Li’l Quinquin GFT, 1.30pm ‘A knockabout comedy from Bruno Dumont’ is not a phrase you hear very often.

We’re certainly keen to see the L’Humanité director’s lighter side.

Exit CCA, 3.30pm Tsai Ming-liang muse Chen Shiang-chyi gives a nuanced performance in this warmhearted drama, which won big at the Taipei Film Festival.

urge to do so, so I decided to go for it.”

Go for it she does. Like the girls at the heart of the story, the film is bold and brawling. It opens with a clashing of bodies as Marieme kicks ass on the field playing American football, and these clashes continue throughout – with rival girl gangs, her controlling older brother and the other men on the estate who want their women to be obedient, demure.

“In France we’ve been told for six to seven years now [in the media] that girls are getting violent, and I wondered if this was true or not.” She did some research and found it to be moonshine. “There have always been violent women, we just don’t talk about it. We don’t want women to know about their history of violence because it would be a story of their struggle. We don’t talk about the women who fought in the French Revolution and took the Bastille – we don’t because they are strong figures and they would inspire women to be activists.”

“ Black girls in French cinema are totally invisible, they don’t exist” Céline Sciamma

In the world of cinema, violence tends to be the catalyst for a character’s downward spiral. Sciamma’s film doesn’t conform to this trope. “Some violence is necessary, some violence is fulfilling, and some anger is legitimate,” she says forcefully. “I really wanted to show violence, not to stigmatise those girls but to empower them and show this violence should be looked at for what it is: they are rebelling, they are hitting back, because society certainly hits you.”

Girlhood is littered with these stirring images of feminine power, but the film is at its most potent when it focuses on the intensity of teenage female friendships. Sciamma put this quality down to the alchemy of the casting. “We had to pick strong individuals but also we had to find the right group, so we picked four girls who already had some chemistry, and then we really workshopped for two weeks before

shooting.” Sciamma reveals that she was also part of this group. “We would play games, we would sing and dance, we would just create some past between us, memories for that group. It was about getting to know each other, and also initiating the girls to the rules of the cinema – that is, to show them that it’s all about the present, that you have to evoke the right emotion, the right attitude for each scene.” The director stopped short of living at the house the girls shared during production, however. “A crazy house,” she laughs, “I couldn’t live there.”

Sciamma’s aesthetic seems in tune with her protagonists: like the girls on screen, her visuals pop. It’s a style that’s pleasingly at odds with the traditional depiction of poor neighbourhoods in art-house cinema. “I wanted to make it very colourful in the beginning, with some style, some grammar, and not go to any clichèd idea of how you should film the suburbs. Who has the right to mise-en-scène, you know?” Indeed: Girlhood’s shots are strikingly composed; colour threads through the film. “It’s about refusing the supposed frontier between the art film, which is delicate, subtle and looks at real life, which is supposed to be modest in its form,” explains Sciamma, “and the entertainment movie, which has spectacle and music and sound and vivid images.

For me it’s about bringing all the tools of cinema together.”

While her two previous films were well received, Girlhood’s added racial dimension is likely to bring it to a wider audience. “It’s the first time that a film with an all-black teen cast was made in France, so it’s gotten quite a bit of attention,” she says. “One movie can’t change it all but it can put the question out there.” Sciamma’s trump card is that she doesn’t stress morality for any of Marieme’s choices; by the end of the film her destiny is uncertain but still hopeful. “The fact that life is still ahead of her, that makes the audience kind of responsible for her in a way, and I really wanted it that way... In the end she’s coming into our world. What will become of her? I don’t know. If you’re optimistic you might think she’s going to be OK. If you’re not that optimistic you might be worried. But this world is ours and we can make something happen. That’s basically the message of the movie – let’s look after each other.”

R E VIE WS Man from Reno 

26 Feb, GFT, 4pm 27 Feb, CCA, 8.45pm

Starring: Ayako Fujitani, Pepe Serna, Kazuki Kitamura, Elisha Skorman, Derrick O’Connor

“Beautifully shot and elegantly paced”

Tired of her latest book tour, crime novelist Aki (Fujitani) high-tails it from Japan to San Francisco for some peace and quiet. There she meets a seductive stranger in her hotel bar, only for him to disappear after they spend the night together, leaving some quirky clues behind. Just down the coast, Sheriff Paul Del Moral (Serna) conducts his own investigation after running down a terrified and beaten Japanese man, who then similarly vanishes from his hospital bed.

Beautifully shot and elegantly paced, Dave Boyle’s dreamy, laconic neo-noir plays out kind of like an episode of Murder, She Wrote as filtered through the minds of the Coen brothers and Hal Hartley – which is about as high praise as you can get, really. Deadpan encounter follows deadpan encounter as Aki and Paul try to piece together all the strangeness, with broad and innumerable nods made to classic noir tropes up to a finale of genuine sadness. And it’s brilliantly played, Fujitani effortlessly flitting between melancholy and childlike enthusiasm for the hunt, while Serna recalls Jason Robards as the sharp, taciturn copper.

Cracking stuff. [Chris Fyvie]

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Illustration: Sophie Freeman

Director: Dave Boyle

“ A film of dark material with flickers of soulful hope”

25 FEB H I G H LI G H T S

Murder on the Orient Express

Life in a Fishbowl  Director: Baldvin Zophoníasson Starring: Hera Hilmar, Þorsteinn Bachmann, Thor Kristjansson, Sveinn Ólafur Gunnarsson, Ingvar Þórðarson

Icelandic ensemble drama Life in a Fishbowl follows three wildly different people, whose lives (and double lives) intersect in strange ways, exploring the roots of the country’s economic collapse in 2008. There’s a former athlete-turned -international-banker (Kristjansson), a famous author (Bachmann) haunted by addictions and past tragedies, and a debt-ridden young pre-school teacher (Hilmar) moonlighting as a prostitute in order to make ends meet and provide for her daughter.

The Falling 

24 Feb, GFT, 8.15pm 25 Feb, GFT, 11am

Director Zophoníasson gives his network narrative ample breathing room, allowing his stars to add nuance to roles that, as written, are too often stereotypes for ‘THEMES’ – it’s never close in quality to the Altman-style it takes hints from. The magnetic Hera Hilmar (best known to UK audiences for TV show Da Vinci’s Demons) is the film’s standout as struggling mother Eik, and her character’s relationship with occasionally parodic writer Móri brings unexpected warmth. It’s a film of dark material with flickers of soulful hope amid its doom and gloom, and it’s these moments that help it transcend its more routine elements.

[Josh Slater-Williams]

ONLINE REVIEWS Head to theskinny.co.uk/cineskinny for more reviews, including...

Mommy  Girlhood  Land Ho!  Stray Dog  Life’s a Beach  Radiator 

Murder on the Orient Express Trades Hall, 8pm After six straight days of watching movies you’ll want to exercise those little grey cells of yours. What better way than a murder mystery night set to Sidney Lumet’s star-stuffed Agatha Christie adaptation?

Dress to impress and watch your back, the murderer(s) could be anyone! Ólafur Arnalds plays Broadchurch O2 ABC, 7pm Give your peepers a rest as composer Ólafur Arnalds performs his score to ITV’s much-loved crime drama.

X+Y GFT, 6pm (The kid from Hugo [Asa Butterfield] + Timothy Spall’s progeny [Rafe]) x math genius plot = Beautifully acted and uplifting coming-of-age drama.

26 Feb, GFT, 8.40pm 27 Feb, Grosvenor, 8.30pm

Director: Carol Morley Starring: Maisie Williams, Maxine Peake, Monica Dolan

Carol Morley’s woozy, eerie, 1969-set girls’ school mystery has proved divisive on the festival circuit – at London Film Festival, where it premiered, it was hailed as a masterpiece by a few, walked out on by many. After establishing a dreamy, nakedly emotional, sexualised and menstrual milieu, the film segues into tragedy and then charts a strange fainting epidemic that takes over the pupils and some of the teachers.

Borrowing freely from Nicolas Roeg

(and produced by his son Luc), as well as making reference to pagan folklore, The Falling invites us to wonder whether something supernatural is afoot, or the mass-blackouts are merely a psychosomatic rebellion.

Without spoiling anything, we can say that the film promises to resolve much but moves on to other themes, and we found it evocative but unsatisfactory.

Still, Morley offers much to ponder, and it may be that this is a work that plays better with age – in hindsight, perhaps it can be appreciated for all that it puts on the table rather than for what it answers. [Ian Mantgani]

“Morley offers much to ponder”

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26 FEB H I G H LI G H T S

Jauja

“ I’m interested in people at crossroads” Aaron Katz

24 Feb, Grosvenor, 8.30pm | 25 Feb, GFT, 3.30pm

Big Country Aaron Katz swaps the aimless 20-somethings of his earlier films for a pair of 60-somethings, who turn out to be similarly directionless, in his joyous comedy Land Ho!

A

aron Katz is sitting in the corner booth of a cosy London restaurant, but he looks dressed for the elements in a chunky blue pullover. Perhaps the 33-year-old is still trying to thaw out from making Land Ho!, his wise and witty new comedy set against the mythic landscapes of Iceland.

With his first three features (Dance Party USA, Quiet City, Cold Weather) Katz gave the indie movie world a trio of perfectly formed studies in aimlessness, with their Gen Y protagonists gently groping their way through the fog between adolescence and adulthood. They were urban movies, set within the cramped house parties and poorly-furnished shared apartments of Portland and Brooklyn.

Land Ho!, which Katz co-directed with fellow North Carolina School of the Arts graduate Martha Stephens, considers that other directionless period we’re all destined to go through: retirement. “I’m interested in people at crossroads,” Katz tells me when I ask why he wanted to make a film focused on older characters “Whether you’re 25 or 65, I think that we always think that in five years from now we’re going to be settled, an adult, but in the film they’re realising, ‘Oh, we’re in our 60s and things can still change.’”

The “they” in question are ex-brothers-in-law Colin (Paul Eenhoorn) and Mitch (Earl Lynn Nelson), who decide, on a whim – well, Mitch’s whim – to embark on a tour of Iceland.

Katz’s most recent film, Cold Weather, took the form of a skew-whiff detective story and he’s back tinkering with an established genre here: namely, the odd couple road movie.

“I really like exploring these genres that are satisfying and fun in ways that we expect, but then you can surprise the audience, take them off guard, by coming at [the genres] from an unconventional point of view.”

INTERVIEW:

Jamie Dunn

The film is deceptively loose; initially it feels like a home movie, something Katz and Stephens shot on a lark. But its emotional heft creeps up on you. Much of the praise for this should go to the yin and yang double act at the heart of the movie. It’s built around – and thrives on – their tension.

Mitch is a loudmouth who likes to get stoned and leer at women half his age; Colin’s a softly spoken gent who spends most of the movie apologising for his boorish companion.

“Martha just suggested, ‘let’s take Earl Lynn to Iceland and make a movie,’” Katz reveals. “He’d been in Martha’s previous two films and he’s just so incredibly charismatic and larger than life – I didn’t think twice.”

The question was, though: who can play the straightman to this irrepressible rascal? “We were talking about pairing him with a nephew, someone younger.” You can imagine that being the Hollywood route – ballast the old codger with someone hip. But a lightbulb went off in Katz’s head when he saw This Is Martin Bonner (by Chad Hartigan, another North Carolina alumni), which centres on an extraordinarily subtle, lived-in performance from Paul Eenhoorn.

“I loved it and I loved Paul’s performance. And then it dawned on us: brothers-in-law. It’s such a strange relationship: they’re not really friends and they’re not really related.” Eenhoorn’s calming presence gives the film an emotional anchor. “Earl Lynn is this big, larger than life guy, you don’t know what he’s going to do – ever. Paul... Paul’s very focused. Not to say he can’t be loose, but he would always keep things on track.”

The final star is Iceland. Those primordial landscapes lend this small movie some grandeur, some magic. “Location is really important – even if you’re making a sci-fi film on a fictional planet [as Katz reveals he’s doing on his next project] you’ve got to make the audience feel like they know it. I just think that so much of our experience, like what we’re experiencing right now, in this interview, is so determined by where we are. A location isn’t simply a place for the character to be: their experiences are their interactions with that place.”

Jauja GFT, 6.20pm Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso is interested in the relationship between people and the landscapes that surround them. It was only a matter of time before he tackled the western, then, with Viggo Mortensen the man alone in nature.

Revenge of The Mekons CCA, 8.45pm A place in the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame is not a prerequisite for a great music doc, as films like Dig! and Anvil! The Story of Anvil prove. So too Joe Angio’s study of cult punk five-piece The Mekons, who formed at the University of Leeds in 1977 and have, against the odds, kept rocking for 35 years.

AlgoRhythm The Art School, 7pm Always a highlight of the Crossing the Line strand, this year’s AlgoRhythm explores audience participation combined with image and sound.

Produced by The Skinny magazine in association with the Glasgow Film Festival: Editor

Jamie Dunn

Designer

Sigrid Schmeisser

Illustration

Louise Lockhart

Digital

Peter Simpson

Subeditor

Will Fitzpatrick

GFF Box Office Order tickets from the box office at www.glasgowfilm.org/festival or call: 0141 332 6535 or visit: Glasgow Film Theatre 12 Rose Street, Glasgow, G3 6RB

The Skinny Short Film Showcase Thursday 12 March | 7.15pm, CCA, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow FREE ENTRY: tickets available on the day from CCA box office

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