CineSkinny 1: GFF16, 17-19 Feb

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N0 1 | 17 – 19 FEB

Thu 18 Feb, GFT, 1pm | Fri 19 Feb, GFT, 9pm

Sins of the Fathers Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín continues to scratch at his nation’s dark past with fifth feature The Club, a chilling study of guilt and punishment

“T

he Church thinks that it can only be judged by the eyes of God, not in a courtroom,” Pablo Larraín says in an even tone as he sips coffee in a London bar. The Chilean filmmaker makes the same point much more forcefully in his extraordinary new film The Club, a caustic and chilling indictment of the culture of concealment in the Catholic Church. The film’s set-up recalls Father Ted: four priests and their

stickler housekeeper live out an oddball cohabitation in an overcast coastal village. But cosy clergy sitcom this is not.

The 39-year-old Larraín, best known for a loose trilogy of films (Tony Manero, Post Mortem and No) that picked at the scab of his country’s military dicta- torship, won the Silver Bear award for The Club at last year’s Berlinale and he’s speaking to us on a warm October morning ahead of the film’s screening at London Film Festival. It all began, he says, when he came across an incongruous photograph. “I don’t know if it was on the internet or in the newspaper, but it was a picture of a very beautiful house where a German congregation holds priests like these ones.

INTERVIEW:

Jamie Dunn

One of the priests there was Chilean, and he was accused of child abuse, but before he was grabbed by the justice he left to live in this house.” This is the one moment in the interview where Larraín is compelled to sit bolt upright from the armchair he’s lounging in. “It was incredible! It was all green fields and mountains.

It looked like it was a Swiss chocolate commercial or something. I started wondering about this house…”

In The Club, Larraín’s protagonists have also been posted to a rural congregation and swept under the rug. But it takes a while for us to understand why these clergymen have ended up in their secluded purgatory.

“Cinema is very good at mystery,” he says, “and I think it’s essential to deliver the information in a certain continues…

HIGHLIGHT

WED 17

Hail, Caesar!

Hail, Caesar!

GFT, 8pm This is how you open a festival!

GFF gets off to a glamorous start with the Coen brothers’ love letter to the Golden Age of Hollywood. George Clooney’s thespian gets kidnapped, Channing Tatum is a songand-dance man, Scarlett Johansson wears a mermaid’s tail, and Josh Brolin is a fixer trying to keep the studio’s house in order. This is reportedly the Coens’ funniest since The Big Lebowski. See you in the front row.

way, to build it so that you want to know what’s going on.”

Those unfamiliar with this filmmaker’s penchant for put- ting crimes of the Chilean state under a grim microscope might initially think they’ve stumbled into a geezer comedy as we see these strange little men take constitutionals on the beach and train their greyhound for local dog races.

What are these quaint old fogies doing at a “centre of prayer and penance”? This slow burn adds to Larraín’s themes. “It’s confusing, because you get the impression that these guys don’t even know what they’ve done; they don’t understand why their behaviour was so harmful; they’re in denial.”

Their sins of the past come into sharp focus when a new priest joins the club, and brings with him some unwanted attention. One of his victims, a weather-beaten fisherman named Sandokan (Roberto Farias), pitches up outside the priests’ home and declares at the top of his lungs and in pornographic detail the various sexual abuses meted out to him as a child by the new arrival. It’s an extraordinary scene, part protest, part confessional.

If you felt that the similarly-themed Oscar hopeful Spotlight was too coy in its depiction of institutionalised child molestation, The Club is its antidote, and brings viewers uncom- fortably close to these criminals and their crimes.

“What’s interesting is that when Sandokan describes what happened to him, the audience has to complete those images in their heads,” says Larraín, “and those images are often way more dangerous or violent than what I could shoot. I try to create a tone and story that needs an active audience: they have to use their own biography and their own ethic and moral perceptions to represent the movie.”

In the last decade or so, the scandal of child abuse inside the Catholic church has flooded the press and lapped embar- rassingly around the feet of the religion’s high command, who in the past have simply denied the charges and paid off the victims. The recent watershed of exposure, says Larraín, has been because of a change in our attitude towards victims. “Back in the day, you wouldn’t speak because you didn’t want to be that guy – not just because of the experience but because of the way people would look at you,” he suggests. “Today, there is respect for these people for speaking up and there’s

more protection.” The key, however, has been the media’s response. “I think what happens here is that the Church has more fear for the media than they do for hell. It’s a new paradigm.”

“The Church has more fear for the median than they do for hell” Pablo Larraín

The central section of The Club concerns an investigation by a Church emissary, Father García (Marcelo Alonso), into the goings-on in the house, and the residents’ resistance to any suggestion of wrongdoing for their crimes, which are revealed to be myriad, from pederasty to selling bastard children on the black market to Larraín’s favourite subject: complicity with Pinochet’s regime. If this all sounds too grim, what makes it palatable is Larraín’s deft marshalling of tone, creating an atmosphere that’s clammy, unnerving, quietly compassionate and darkly funny. The latter is a qua- lity that runs through all of Larraín’s work; his signature touch. “There are some ideas that you can’t say with a straight face because you can sound preachy,” he suggests. “It’s as if you’re trying to make a statement instead of telling a story.

Humour is the best tool to hide something that can be inte- resting and smart and it can maybe be even more sophisticated if you can put it in a joke.”

Humour is also another way in which Larraín wakes us from our complacency. “It can be threatening for the audience when they realise they are laughing about something that they shouldn’t be laughing at,” he says. “It’s a moral conflict inside any of us if we laugh at something that maybe we shouldn’t and when that happens, it’s amazing.” For Larraín, this phenomenon is key to cinema’s future: “if you watch the movie alone, maybe you wouldn’t laugh that much, but in a cinema, it’s an electric thing. It’s why cinema will never be replaced.”

R E VIE WS James White  Director: Josh Mond Starring: Christopher Abbott, Cynthia Nixon, Scott Mescudi, Makenzie Leigh, Ron Livingston, David Call

“ A low-key but devastating drama”

A troubled, white 20-something New Yorker, also an aspiring writer, struggles to take control of his self-destructive tendencies. Based on logline alone, James White sounds like a simple rehash of storylines and character clichés that are beyond exhausted in American independent cinema. Don’t trust that preconception.

Hinged on blazing, brutal performances from Christopher Abbott (best known to UK viewers as Charlie in Lena Dunham’s Girls) as the eponymous lead and Cynthia

Fri 19 Feb, CCA, 6.30pm Sat 20 Feb, CCA, 1.15pm

Nixon as his cancer-ridden mother, this is a low-key but devastating drama with more raw authenticity than a hundred examples of Sundance landfill. Or, to put it another way, it’s much closer in spirit and execution to John Cassavetes than Zach Braff.

Director Josh Mond, making his feature debut, has been part of the band of producers behind Martha Marcy May Marlene and Simon Killer, and his film is similarly evocative of the wild emotional states brought on by disorientating circumstances and conflicts of communication. Crucially, he strikes a perfect balance in examining his volatile protagonist – never vilifying nor glorifying, simply observing. (Josh Slater-Williams)

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HIGHLIGHTS

“A go-for-broke adaptation of JG Ballard’s beloved novel”

THU 18

La belle équipe

La belle équipe GFT, 6.30pm The first of three films from Julien Duvivier, a peer of Marcel Carné and Jean Renoir’s, who seems to have fallen through the cracks of critical opinion. These are films ripe for rediscovery.

High-Rise 

Thu 18 Feb, GFT, 8.20pm Fri 19 Feb, GFT, 3.15pm

Director: Ben Wheatley Starring: Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Luke Evans, Sienna Miller, Elisabeth Moss, Keeley Hawes, James Purefoy, Sienna Guillory, Dan Renton Skinner, Enzo Cilenti

It’s the near future, though it (deliberately) seems to be the near future as imagined in the 1970s. Dr Robert Laing (Hiddleston) has set up home in a lavish high-rise designed by a grand architect (Irons). Presiding on the 25th floor, he develops trysts with the higher classes and friendships with those relegated below, including a documentarian (Evans) keen to provoke the dangerous social situation between levels. Violence and

From Afar 

disarray are but a ticking time bomb away.

A go-for-broke adaptation of JG Ballard’s beloved novel, Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise is a vigorous and ferocious blast through a dark, dystopic labyrinth that only lets up in a third act that starts to lag – mainly because its pummelling nature can’t help but eventually exhaust.

The novel’s slower, icy detachment and alienation are reimagined by Wheatley and writer Amy Jump as a hedonistic whirlwind; imagine a lone location Mad Max film with less motors and more upper-class twits, as filtered through a cocktail of the creative sensibilities of Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Joseph Losey and Ken Russell. (Josh Slater-Williams)

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

Hail, Caesar!  The Club  11 Minutes  Hyena Road 

Altered States The Old Hairdressers, 7pm Cult classic from Ken Russell about a nutball scientist who uses himself as guinea pig.

Like the doctor, your senses will be overwhelmed.

Libeled Lady GFT, 10.30am A rarely screened sardonic screwball, this is the first of the Dream Team on the Silver Screen strand, although in this case the duo of Myrna Loy and William Powell are joined

by Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow. Free, and screening from 35mm.

Thu 18 Feb, GFT, 8.35pm Fri 19 Feb, GFT, 3.45pm

Director: Lorenzo Vigas Starring: Alfredo Castro, Luis Silva, Jericó Montilla, Catherina Cardozo, Marcos Moreno, Jorge Luis Bosque

From Afar opens with gay cruising on the streets of Caracas. Armando (Castro), a middle-age loner, is shown in shallow focus, casually waiting at a bus stop. The depth of field then shifts to the object of his gaze, an athletic blade – and without a word the hunt is on. It’s an opening of pure cinema that perfectly tees up From Afar’s themes. This is a film about the anguish of desires – as the title suggests – held at a remove.

Castro, the ghostly actor known for his work with Pablo Larraín (see interview, left), adds to this alienation; his deadpan visage holds us at an emotional arm’s length and keeps us guessing as this study of an autumn-spring romance shifts imperceptibly into thriller.

The film does have an emotional kick: street tough Elder, the young man with whom Armando makes an exception and begins a tentative relationship. His moments of violent outbursts and tender yearning seem to take the actor (impressive newcomer Silva) by as much of a surprise as us, the audience.

(Jamie Dunn)

“ A film about the anguish of desires”

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Thu 18 Feb, CCA, 8.45pm | Fri 19 Feb, CCA, 1.15pm

HIGHLIGHTS

FRI 19

Goodnight Mommy

“ I’m making films I want to see on the screen” Jerzy Skolimowski

Organised Chaos Veteran director Jerzy Skolimowski returns to his native Poland for 11 Minutes, a fragmented thriller concerned with chance and cosmic timing

J

erzy Skolimowski wants to talk about the ending of 11 Minutes, his new movie. Normally it’s customary to omit such spoilerific chatter from a film interview, but here we can make an exception. Skolimowski is cinema’s great cynic, you see; happy endings are not his bag. If we reveal that his cunning thriller ends in a cataclysm, those familiar with the Polish filmmaker’s work won’t bat an eyelid.

It’s also appropriate to begin at the end, as it’s where Skolimowski got started. “The very beginning of this idea was when I visualised the finale,” he says. “Suddenly I had a vision of it really happening step-by-step, exactly as it is in the film, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’d love to end one of my films like this.’” We can see why: it is a doozy.

11 Minutes takes a handful of characters and sets them in motion. Composed of intricately-edited vignettes featuring 11 stories, with the shards of each story adding to approximately 11 minutes, the film is a virtuosic orchestration of close shaves and chance encounters, building to an operatic moment of bravura nihilism.

“But of course I didn’t know the protagonists,” says Skolimowski. “Who are the people who are participating in that incredible catastrophe? So I had to work backwards to create a palette of characters, and to find for them the ways to find themselves at the same place at the same time.” It’s a virtuosic piece of reverse engineering.

It’s great to see the 77-year-old on such sprightly form, but it’s also heartening to see this once-prolific filmmaker back on the scene at all, having only returned to filmmaking relatively

INTERVIEW:

Jamie Dunn

recently in 2009 after a 17-year hiatus. “I’d felt that I’d burnt out,” he says of his break from cinema. “I’d started making movies that I didn’t want to make. I wasn’t an artist any longer.”

He charged his batteries by taking up painting – and he proved pretty good at it. “Quickly I reached a level where people were buying my paintings,” he recalls. “When I realised it had been more than 15 years of not making movies I had begun to feel like an artist again, and a young artist, so I went back to filmmaking.”

How did the break change him? “I now work without any compromise,” he says proudly. “From now on, which is already three films done, I’m making films I want to see.”

If there were some compromises in those earlier films, there was a lot of artistry too. Skolimowski’s circuitous path in filmmaking began when Polish cinema was blowing up in the 60s. He was taken under the wing of Andrzej Wajda (Ashes and Diamonds), and later co-wrote Knife in the Water with Roman Polanski. When the banning of Hands Up! (1967) by Polish authorities forced him abroad, Skolimowski took his fatalistic sensibility to the UK, where he made some acutely-observed but little-seen gems (Deep End, The Shout, Moonlighting).

While Skolimowski’s cinema might be unfamiliar to a younger generation of film fans, his face, still handsome and tough, certainly is. During his break from directing he’d take the odd acting job, playing small roles in the likes of Mars Attacks! and Eastern Promises. And then, in 2012, he incongruously popped up in Avengers Assemble, as a KGB general who gets his arse handed to him by his prisoner Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). How did that come about?

“Well you know,” Skolimowski says with a sly grin, “occasionally I act in a movie, but I do it for one reason and for one reason only: it’s the easiest way for me to make money.”

Ladies and gentlemen, Jerzy Skolimowski – cinema’s great cynic.

Goodnight Mommy GFT, 11pm We love this nerve-shredding premise: a woman returns home from surgery with her face swaddled in bandages and her twin sons begin to suspect she might be an imposter. For more parent-child strife, catch Carrie on Imax (7.30pm).

Dheepan GFT, 5.45pm This fine-grained immigration drama from Jacques Audiard (A Prophet) feels even more vital now than when it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes eight months ago.

Eisenstein in Guanajuato GFT, 6.15pm A typically raucous affair from Peter Greenaway here, telling of legendary Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s sexual awakening in Mexico, aged 33.

Produced by The Skinny magazine in association with the Glasgow Film Festival: Editor-in-Chief Rosamund West Editor

Jamie Dunn

Subeditor

Will Fitzpatrick

Lead Designer

Sigrid Schmeisser

Picture Editor

Sarah Donley

Digital Editor

Peter Simpson

Comm. Director Nicola Taylor Sales

George Sully

Claire Collins

Illustration

Elena Boils

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 info@glasgowfilmfestival.org.uk

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