Lauren Owen grew up in the suitably Gothic gatehouse of Escrick Park, an 18th-century mansion in Yorkshire, which had been converted to a girls’ boarding school. Her dad worked there, and she spent the holidays exploring the house and grounds and pondering the lives of the people who used to live there. With an MA in Victorian Literature, and the remembered sleepless nights from reading Robert Swindell’s scary Room 13, she set about writing the deliciously macabre The Quick (Vintage, £7.99), in which a shadowy aristocratic secret society, Dickensian urchins and a heroic maiden in peril rampage through the foggy, gaslit streets of Victorian London. Eithne Farry
‘It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms.’ Such is the view of Louis Mazzini, antihero of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). In spite of this impediment, Louis murders his way through six members of the D’Ascoyne family (all played by Alec Guinness) to inherit a dukedom.
Louis is a terrible man, of course. Not only a murderer, he’s also a cad – stringing along childhood sweetheart Sibella whilst courting the virtuous Edith.
He does have a wonderful work ethic, however. He adopts an impressive array of disguises and hobbies in his quest, mastering swimming, archery, photography, and shooting. Louis dreams big. The title he longs for is far off, but he gets out there and makes things happen. At first he works in a shop, pushed around by arrogant customer Ascoyne D’Ascoyne. Louis gets his revenge, though. Striking a blow for ill-used retail workers everywhere, he drowns D’Ascoyne, beginning an ambitious project of mass homicide.
Louis also has wonderful sang-froid. He begins the film waiting to be hanged, but it would take more than this unpleasant situation to shake his composure. When Sibella visits him in jail (having masterminded his conviction for murder), she explains that she couldn’t bear her last sight of him to be the look of hatred he had sent her in the courtroom. ‘In view of the fact that your evidence had put the rope around my neck, you could hardly expect a glance of warm affection,’ Louis replies. I first saw the film during my adolescence, and I always envied Louis’s superb self-control. If only I could treat my own teenage misfortunes with so much ironic detachment.
The final lesson I took away from Kind Hearts and Coronets was the risky seductiveness of putting pen to paper. Louis gets a last-minute reprieve from the gallows, only to leave his written confession behind him in his jail cell. We’ve had Louis’s cool, ironic narrative voice with us all the way through the film – making asides, hinting at what’s to come, more or less running the show. Now this source of Louis’s control will be his undoing. It’s a good lesson for everyone – particularly authors. Use your words very carefully.
Greg Klymkiw’s Colonial Report (on cinema) from the Dominion of Canada
Canadians are better educated, smarter, more socially conscious, modest, polite and quieter than our American brothers and sisters. This is fact. Alas, in the national pride department, Uncle Sam beats our insanely muted approach to flag-waving hands down. The exception to this rule is hockey. When Canucks play this greatest of all great games on an international sheet of ice, our pride-meter slides precariously close to the edge, rivalling even that of the Home of the Brave (though meekly, never besting it). I’m reminded of this rare equilibrium twixt our otherwise contrasting nations thanks to a pair of fine new pictures making their North American bows at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) on the heels of their triumphant Cannes debuts in the spring.
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Foxcatcher is released in UK cinemas on 9 January 2015 by Entertainment One. Red Army will be released on 19 June 2015 by Curzon Film World.
Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller, 2014) ****
Red Army (Gabe Polsky, 2014) ***
Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher and Gabe Polsky’s Red Army are sure to make a huge splash in Canada and the US, where they are being distributed by Mongrel Media and Sony Pictures Classics. Both will no doubt generate major Oscar-buzz here, which has almost become TIFF’s raison d’être, in addition to screening hundreds of movies and acting as an international press junket.
As a staunch denizen of the Dominion of Canada, what makes these two films interesting is how, as sports pictures, they help underline the differences between this vast northern Commonwealth colony and the good old US of A – especially how our respective propaganda machines relate to national pride.
In America, propaganda is everything.
In Canada, propaganda is, well, you know, it’s kind of okay, uh, you know, sort of, because it’s sometimes necessary, well, not necessary, or rather, yes, okay, it is indubitably, sort of vital, but not really, eh.
Foxcatcher, one of the most exciting American movies of the year, very strangely employs propagandistic elements within the narrative structure provided by screenwriters E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman, which, in turn, the director Bennett Miller superbly jockeys in his overall mise-en-scène. Astonishingly, the filmmakers manage to have their cake and eat it too. By offering a detailed examination of propaganda within the context of American history and society, as well as a mounting and ever-subtle critical eye upon it, Miller might continue to add accolades to his mantle in addition to the Best Director nod he copped at Cannes.
The maker of the taut and compelling baseball drama Moneyball (2011) and the well crafted, though somewhat overrated Capote (2005), dazzles us here with the true-life story of Olympic wrestling champions Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) and his older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo). Though the shy, unassuming Mark is a gold medal winner in his own right, he’s been overshadowed by his dynamic, gift-of-the-gab-blessed sibling. This all changes when the beefy, brawny mat-brawler is summoned to the palatial estate of John du Pont (Steve Carell in a performance so astonishing I forgot it actually was, uh, Steve Carell until the closing credits), heir to the powerful American dynasty of the du Pont family (who amassed their fortune mainly through the manufacturing of arms for America’s war machine). John offers his unqualified financial sponsorship to Mark, a palatial guesthouse to live in and a state-of-the-art training facility on the grounds of his home. The only catch is that du Pont will be the coach. He knows nothing about coaching, though, and hires brother Dave to be his assistant (and real) coach.
The film charts the friendship between the working class stock of Mark and the privilege of John du Pont, the brothers’ envy-and-love-fused bond, John’s desire to legitimise himself in the eyes of his horsewoman mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and, of course, the endlessly fascinating, meticulous, pain-steeped training and various qualifying competitions leading to the Olympics.
Optics is the ultimate tool-in-trade of blue bloods, and here is where the screenplay and Miller’s unerring directorial eye create a layer that permeates both the narrative and visuals. Even at a low-point early on, Mark keeps the faith in his poverty and loneliness by buttressing himself with the notion that he and those who are both around him and who will follow him must continue to persevere for the sake of America.
Granted, flags are preposterously ubiquitous in America, but one almost senses that those stars and stripes have been carefully included in the backdrop and foreground of the film. One breathtaking moment includes a travelling car interior point-of-view of a huge flag unfurling in the wind as Mark drives to the du Ponts’ Foxcatcher Farms estate.
Certainly, John himself is virtually pathological in his patriotism for America, strolling through the leafy Walden-Pond-like acreage of his estate, guiding Mark to points of historical interest from the American Revolution and spouting the most fervent patriotic rhetoric within the context of virtually everything, but especially within the contexts of both war and (naturally) sports.
The film takes great pains to illustrate John’s attention to details that will accentuate his own accomplishments whether merited or, in the case of his coaching, decidedly not. He goes so far as to hire a film crew to document his work as a coach, and we’re afforded numerous moments where interviewees are cajoled into extolling his virtues, and where he delivers training and words of wisdom his team are already well versed in, which manage to take on mythic proportions through the lens of the cameras.
Foxcatcher
Brilliantly and with great subtlety, the film’s sense of optics and propaganda amongst the nobility feels infused to a point where non-Americans and certainly discriminating American audiences will sense that Foxcatcher is itself propaganda. As the tale progresses and John du Pont’s inbred eccentricities give way to his becoming slowly and dangerously unhinged, so too does the film shift gears into critical territory. The perception of the American Dream sours and leads to a sad, shocking and downright tragic film about delusions of grandeur transforming into psychopathic proportions – not unlike America itself.
Gabe Polsky’s feature length documentary Red Army is as much about the propaganda machine (of Cold War Russia) as it is pure propaganda unto itself, by placing undue emphasis upon the rivalry between America and the Soviet Union on the blood-spattered battleground of ice hockey competition. Polsky has fashioned a downright spellbinding history of the Red Army hockey team, which eventually became a near-juggernaut of Soviet skill and superiority in the world.
In spite of this, many Canadians will call the film a total crock-and-bull story. While a Maple Leaf perspective might provide an eye more sensitive to Miller’s exploration of the propagandistic gymnastics of American blue blood powerbrokers, there is bound to be more than just a little crying foul over Polsky’s film.
I perhaps have the bias of growing up intimately within the universe of world competition hockey. My own father, Julian Klymkiw, played goal for Canada’s national team in the 1960s, a team that was managed by Chas Maddin (filmmaker Guy Maddin’s father). Guy and I eventually became the respective director-producer team behind Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Archangel and Careful. Maddin went on to immortalise a ‘non-professional’ team from the wintry Canadian prairies in the Jody Shapiro-produced My Winnipeg. It even featured a beefy lookalike of yours-truly wearing a uniform emblazoned with the name ‘Julian Klymberger’ (the surname being one of my own nicknames in years past). To say we were both well aware of the true rivalry in international hockey would be an understatement.
But one didn’t need to actually grow up in hockey families intimately involved with various Team Canada hockey leagues to realise that the United States was a blip on the Soviet rivalry-radar. The only famous match-up between the Soviets and America happened during the 1980 Olympics, when a team of veritable untested ‘kids’ hammered the Soviets (immortalised as the 2004 Walt Disney Studios feature film Miracle starring Kurt Russell).
Polsky’s film uses this match as the film’s primary structural tent pole, and completely ignores the historic 1972 Canada-USSR Summit Series, which has gone down in most histories (save, perhaps, for America’s) as the greatest display of hockey war of all time. His film also ignores, though pays passing lip service, to the fact that the real rivalry throughout the 1970s and 1980s had virtually nothing to do with America and everything to do with Canada and Russia.
I know this all too well.
My own father eventually became the Carling O’Keefe Breweries marketing guru who brokered huge swaths of promotional sponsorship to Team Canada over 15-or-so years and, in fact, worked closely with hockey agent/manager/promoter and Team Canada’s mastermind Alan Eagleson. Dad not only spoke a variety of Slavic languages fluently, but his decades as an amateur and pro hockey player all contributed to making him an invaluable ally to both administrators and players of Team Canada. To the latter, famed Canadian sports reporter Hal Sigurdson reported, ‘Big Julie [Klymkiw] often rolled up his sleeves and got his hands dirty behind the Canadian bench.’
I’m not, by the way, arguing the absence of my Dad in this film – he did his thing, promoting beer to promote hockey and hockey to promote beer, which allowed him to travel the world and be with all the hockey players he loved – but what I’m shocked about is how Red Army can ignore my Dad’s old pal and colleague. The film includes ONE – count ’em – ONE off-camera sound bite from Alan Eagleson.
Polsky appears to have made no effort to even interview the man himself or include the reams of historic interview footage of Eagleson that fills a multitude of archives to over-flowing. Eagleson, for all the scandals that eventually brought him down, including imprisonment for fraud and embezzlement convictions, was the game’s most important individual on the North American side to make Soviet match-ups in the Western world a reality, and to allow professional North American players to go head-to-head with the Soviets. (Though Eagleson went down in flames, my Dad always remarked straight-facedly, ‘The “Eagle” never screwed me.’)
How, then, can a documentary about Soviet hockey so wilfully mute this supremely important Canadian angle to the tale? Where are the interviews (new or archival) with such hockey superstars as Gordie Howe (including sons Mark and Marty), Bobby Hull, Bobby Orr, Marc Tardif and all the others who battled the Soviets on-ice? Why are there only mere blips of Wayne (‘The Great One’) Gretzky, most notably a clip in which he sadly refers to the Soviets’ unstoppable qualities? Why are there not more pointed interview bites with the former Soviet players discussing the strength of Canadian players? It’s not like archival footage of this doesn’t exist.
There’s only one reason for any of these errors of omission: all the aforementioned personages and angles are Canadian. Ignoring the World Hockey Association’s (WHA) bouts with the USSR is ludicrous enough, but by focusing on the 1980 Olympic tourney and placing emphasis on the National Hockey League (NHL), the latter of which is optically seen as a solely AMERICAN interest, Red Army is clearly not the definitive documentary about the Soviet players that its director and, most probably American fans and pundits, assume it is.
Even if one were to argue that the story Polsky was interested in telling didn’t allow for angling Canadian involvement more vigorously, ‘one’ would be wrong. The story of Soviet hockey supremacy has everything to do with Canada – a country that provided their only consistent and serious adversary, a country that embraced hockey as intensely as the USSR and a country, by virtue of Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s official policy of Canadian multiculturalism, that reflected the vast number of Canuck players who had Eastern European blood and culture coursing through them.
As a side note to this, it’s also strange how Polsky, the son of Soviet Ukrainian immigrants, ignores the fact that a huge majority of great Soviet players were ethnically Ukrainian. I vividly remember meeting so many of those legends as a kid and listening to them talk with my Dad about a day when maybe, just maybe, Ukraine would have its independence and display Ukrainian hockey superiority over the Russians, never mind the rest of the world. (Given the current struggles between Russia and Ukraine, this might have made for a very interesting political cherry-on-the-sundae.)
Ultimately, Red Army is American propaganda, or at the very least, is deeply imbued with American propagandistic elements. Given that it’s about Soviet hockey players, I find this strangely and almost hilariously ironic, which in and of itself, gives the movie big points.
All this kvetching aside, Red Army is still a good film. Focusing on the historic and political backdrop of Joseph Stalin and those leaders who followed him, all of who built up one of the greatest, if not the greatest series of hockey teams in the world, this is still a supremely entertaining movie. Polsky’s pacing, sense of character and storytelling is slick and electric. The subjects he does focus upon, the greatest line of Soviet players in hockey history, all deliver solid bedrock for a perspective many hockey fans (and even non-hockey fans) know nothing or little about.
Polsky even interviews a former KGB agent who accompanied the Soviet players to North America in order to guard against defection to the West. Here again, though, I’ll kvetch about a funny Canadian perspective. Dad not only played hockey, not only was he a marketing guy, but he even squeezed in a decade of being a damn good cop in Winnipeg, and when Team Canada went to Russia, Dad would go from hotel room to hotel room, find bugs (not the plentiful cockroaches, either) and rip the KGB surveillance devices out of their hiding places for himself, his colleagues, players and administrators from the West.
I’ll also admit to enjoying the interviews with the likes of NHL coach Scotty Bowman and Soviet goalie Vladislav Tretiak; however, the most compelling subject in Polsky’s film is the Soviet defenceman Slava Fetisov, who movingly recounts the early days of his hockey career, his friendship and brotherhood with the other players and his leading role in encouraging Soviet players to defect for the big money of pro hockey in North America. It’s also alternately joyous and heartbreaking to see the juxtaposition between the balletic Soviet styles of play with that of the violent, brutal North American approach.
Contrast is, of course, an important element of any storytelling, but in a visual medium like film, it’s especially vital. It’s what provides the necessary conflict. With Red Army, however, the conflict is extremely selective. It is, after all, an American movie, and as both this film and Foxcatcher prove, if Americans do anything really well, it’s propaganda. Us Canucks here in the colonies can only stew in our green-with-envy pot of inferiority. We know we’re the best, but we have no idea how to tell this to the rest of the world, and least of all, to ourselves.
Kudos to Polsky and America are unreservedly owed. They show us all how it’s done.
From the Dominion of Canada, I bid you a hearty ‘Bon Cinema’.
Blouse are a Portland-based band who made their 2011 debut with a retro-tinged, dreamy self-titled album, released on Captured Tracks (one of the more dynamic labels around at the moment). The synth-based music, mixed with singer Charlie Hilton’s ethereal vocals, has given way to a more guitar-led sound on their latest album, Imperium, which balances band members Jacob Portrait and Patrick Adams’s Pacific North-west background with Hilton’s southern Californian singer-songwriter roots. Both albums are evocative and beguiling. Blouse support Slowdive in Geneva on 9 September, with other live dates following across Europe. For more information on the band and to buy their albums, visit the Captured Tracks website. Below, the band pick their 10 favourite films.
1. True Stories (David Byrne, 1986)
‘This isn’t a rental car – it’s privately owned.’ The line might not look like much on paper, but ever since I watched David Byrne deliver it from a burgundy convertible as he, dressed in a full cowboy suit, cruised down an empty highway toward an imagined town in Texas, True Stories became everything to me. It’s not just the things he says, it’s how he says them, and there are so many good lines in this movie. It’s like a stretched out, three-dimensional Talking Heads song, and it gives us a pretty good idea as to how David Bryne views the world. After I watched it for the first time, I was convinced he was a genius. Oh, and this film introduced me to one of my favourite Talking Heads songs, ‘Dream Operator’, which is performed during a very Dada-like fashion show at the local mall. Charlie Hilton
2. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
I love sci-fi films, and I can’t think of a better one than Alien. I watched it when I was a teenager and I had never seen anything more terrifying. And yes, being terrified is a good thing when you can do it from the safety of your ordinary life. That’s one of the reasons we watch movies. We get the chance to feel things really intensely without the possibility of being physically or emotionally hurt. It’s wonderful to feel like you’re about to die, like you’re witnessing the most awful thing you’ve every seen in your life. And H. R. Giger’s designs of the alien monster are so incredible, they’re almost hypnotic. But they aren’t over the top, like a lot of the monsters I’ve seen in movies throughout my life. In fact, there is something very classy about the movie as a whole. And Sigourney Weaver is the hottest woman I have ever seen in a tank top. Charlie Hilton
3. Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)
I have a weakness for epic films about the human condition (and for anything starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman), so this is definitely in my top 10. It’s such a beautiful film, I don’t even feel qualified to talk about it. But I will say that I love how there’s this parallel between the viewer and the protagonist. Just as the lines between fiction and reality become blurred for the playwright, you feel desperately confused as well. You start to wonder if you’re watching the movie or the play and, like him, you feel like your life is slipping away from you right before your eyes. Charlie Hilton
4. Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
I was 13 years old and had lived through the first big wave of dino-craze. I was moving away to France for a year and took my girlfriend at the time to see Jurassic Park the day before I left. We held hands for the first time and it was the greatest cinematic experience of my life. Such an adventure! Also cool when Newman gets squirted in the eyes with goo and Samuel L. Jackson says ‘hold on to your butts’. Patrick Adams
5. Titanic (James Cameron, 1997)
I was 17 years old and Titanic was the biggest movie ever. I didn’t really care to see it, but then the girl I had been crushing on since the first grade invited me to go. She told me she had already seen the movie four times in theatres, but she really wanted me to see it. We did not hold hands but I really enjoyed the movie. Leo was such a heartthrob! The film really tugged at all your emotions. I was very sad when Leo died, but the memory of their time together on that big boat will last an eternity. Patrick Adams
6. The Life Aquatic (Wes Anderson, 2004)
This film embodies the quirky and whimsical life I fantasise about leading. I enjoyed the attention to detail in the art department/set design. Also, Bill Murray. Paul Roper
7. Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000)
A film with a shocking emotional journey. I deeply appreciated a lot of (lead protagonist) Cvalda’s outlook on life. Paul Roper
8. Nowhere (Gregg Araki, 1997)
It’s the perfect film. It has a young Heather Graham, Ryan Phillippe, Mena Suvari and a million other actors before they were famous. The soundtrack is all Slowdive and shoegaze bands. Random namedropping of Siouxsie and the Banshees. John Ritter as a televangelist. It is the most 90s thing ever made. All of my favourite things in one movie. Arian Jalali
9. The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)
I love all of Robert Altman’s films from the 70s because they were all kinda attempts at making films of various genres, but totally off. The Long Goodbye is Altman’s attempt at a noir film, but it’s way cooler than any real noir. Elliott Gould is also one of my favourite actors, and he plays the coolest detective ever in this film. Arian Jalali
10. Noriko’s Dinner Table (Sion Sono, 2005)
I really liked Suicide Club and when I found out this was the ‘prequel’ I had to see it. It’s one of the weirdest and eeriest films I have ever seen and I felt really uncomfortable and mentally drained at the end of the film. It’s also really interesting how it takes the horror of Suicide Club and totally warps it. Arian Jalali
Danish filmmaker Ada Bligaard Søby makes beautiful, oblique, rock’n’roll Super 8 documentaries that look at big issues in Western society from an individual perspective. In the brilliant Petey and Ginger, she examined the economic crisis from the viewpoint of two of her American friends, San Francisco-based Petey, former bassist of Thee Oh Sees, and New York fortune-teller Ginger, both of whom have worked in the sex industry.
Virginie Sé;lavy talked to the director about suicidal Santas, losers and winners, and the magic of Super 8.
Virginie Sé;lavy: Petey and Ginger is part of a trilogy, is that right?
Ada Bligaard Søby: Yes, it’s part of a trilogy with Black Hearts and American Losers, about my friends in America. American Losers is about two people who are really amazing but haven’t done well in life. The movie reflects on what a loser is and what a winner is. I come from a very academic background, my parents are very educated, but I’m not very academic, so I felt like a loser. And I’m always attracted to the people who are not doing so well, because they take more risks and it’s more fun. So I made that film because American society is so bent on making money. Black Hearts is about some friends of mine who got married when I was living in New York. I filmed their wedding in Super 8 and gave it to them as a wedding present. And 10 years later they got divorced, so it’s their divorce story – why do people get divorced, why does love fail. I’m using 9/11 as a background for the story as I was in New York then, because 9/11 was also the American dream that crumbled. All those immigrants going to America to do things in a new way, because they’re not welcome where they come from, so they want to start a new world and a new society. That’s the same when you get married: you feel like you’re going to conquer the world your way, and then it collapses, and whose fault is it?
Petey and Ginger is available on VOD in Europe and North America. For more information visit www.peteygingerfilm.com.
The film is explicitly about the economic crisis, but it seems that it’s just as much about America.
It’s about America, but it’s also about the Western world and how we are fucking ourselves up. We’re going to be finished soon, I think. Petey and Ginger don’t know each other, but what they had in common was a certain chaos in their lives and the fact that they were not part of the rat race, they were tagging along, struggling along. They didn’t own anything so they didn’t lose anything in the financial crisis. But it trickled down and touched them in very strange ways, and I found that very inspiring.
You use Super 8 as well as still photographs, which makes everything look very melancholy and beautiful, including dereliction and poverty. It seems like you find a beauty in America, but you also feel a little sad and distant from it.
Yes, definitely, I couldn’t have said it better. The slums are beautiful. They’ve got soul. But it’s also super sad. If I could I’d look at everything through Super 8. Because it lifts up the ordinary to another level. But that’s impossible.
You film America from an outsider’s perspective. What is the thing that fascinates you the most about the place?
Because I come from a Scandinavian place, I meet these people and they seem a lot like me, but the platform on which we have to build our lives is very different. Here it’s very safe and secure and stable. If you have a baby it doesn’t cost you anything. If you’re unemployed they help you. Over there, circumstances are very different and that makes people feistier. Those extreme conditions bring out some things in people that are very creative and beautiful and vibrant that you don’t find here, because things can’t go that bad, so people don’t make that much of an effort. I’m fascinated by that effort that Americans have to make to help other people, because they might need that help back to develop their talent.
For you, what were the most interesting things that Petey and Ginger said about the financial crisis?
I found it interesting that when she was working as an escort, Ginger could feel within her clients that something was wrong, because she’s so intuitively intelligent. She could pick up that something was not right. These people think they’re partying, but they’re not partying. And with Petey I think it’s hilarious that he’s selling dildos and shipping fantasies to the world, and meanwhile the world economy is a fantasy, and money is a fantasy – money doesn’t really exist.
That’s another thing they have in common: they both work or have worked in the sex industry, in more or less unusual ways. Was that also something that you were interested in exploring?
It’s connected to the fact that when you’re in America you have to work with what you’ve got. And sometimes you might end up in something that is considered dirty, but that’s what you can get at that point in time. In San Francisco there’s no film industry because it’s in Los Angeles, but there’s a huge porn industry. So many people work in porn, and there are also many people who deal weed because there are a lot of weed farms. And that might be illegal, but that’s what’s going on. I like that casual approach to things that people may look down on. I have seen that a lot in America. People have to trudge in the dirt, or the reality of things. And the reality of things is that a lot of people want escort girls and a lot of people order porn.
Ginger became a fortune teller after working briefly as an escort girl (which she did for unusual and fascinating reasons). Were the people you filmed real clients?
They were friends. We gave them a free reading and asked if we could film them. We made sure they were all dudes because we thought it was interesting that she used to provide one kind of service, and now she’s providing another kind of service. It’s all about feeling good, it’s all about solutions to your problems.
With Petey, you could have made a documentary about him and Thee Oh Sees.
I wasn’t interested in making a band film. I would have liked to make more of the complexities of being in a band, but it was very hard because there are so many layers to everything and so many things to talk about. You have to keep a focus when you’re doing a film like this. And also because they’re like a family – they were a family, they’re not together anymore, Petey has left the band – it was a hard environment to break into. They let me in but they were very aware of the camera and what that means. When you enter a family like that there are many things that are going on that they might not want revealed to the outside world. I was a big fan of their music and of all of them, they’re all my friends. But there would have been too many angles if I’d done a band film.
The music is obviously really important in the film and you’ve got a great soundtrack.
When I worked in San Francisco I became friends with all these bands. There’s a big music scene that is really amazing. I bought a lot of records while I was there and then I asked if I could use the songs. For New York, the bands I wanted I couldn’t afford, because New York is always so hip.
Do you still have the same relationship with your friends?
Yes, I have an even better relationship with them. They really trusted me and they were very brave. But being there with a camera sucks. When you’re making a film, you’re the observer, you’re trying to make your friends talk about things, you’re manipulating them. But I think I’m so bad at manipulating people that they just look at me and go, OK we’re going to have to help her.
What did they think of your films?
I think they liked them. American Losers was tough because I used the word ‘loser’ without knowing how hard it was. Kevin, one of the characters, said to me, ‘you’ve got it so wrong that you got it right’. It was really tough to call someone a loser in America. But I had to have that title to have an effect. Maybe my friends were a little sad about that but I think they understood that I didn’t mean to harm them. When you make art you’re not supposed to please, you’re supposed to push, otherwise why do it?
One of the most memorable images in Petey and Ginger is that of Santa Claus about to commit suicide from a rooftop. How did you get that?
On one of my research trips to San Francisco I went to Petey’s house, and I found this picture in his old photos of Santa Claus trying to commit suicide. He told me the story of how he was walking in the Mission in San Francisco and he saw that situation, and I thought it was the perfect image for that film. So I recreated it. I got someone to wear a Santa Claus outfit on a roof.
Why did you think it was perfect for the film?
Because Santa Claus is this guy who doesn’t have any problems, he has presents coming out of his arse, there are no limits to his goodness or his willingness to share what he has. And there’s nobody asking where he gets the presents from, so it’s the perfect picture for the financial crisis and people’s relationship to money, to the environment, to everything. There are no limits – I want more, more, more, and I’m not going to think about the consequences.
The film is subtitled ‘A testament to the awesomeness of mankind’.
My friend Brian came up with this phrase and I thought it was perfect. It’s a celebration of people – some people doing the right thing. I feel that Petey and Ginger have figured it out from the beginning: there’s no free lunch, there’s no Santa Claus, there’s no gold coming out of the river, you have to work for things, and you have to be honest, and you have to try and understand things. They’re smarter than everybody else.
It feels like it could be the subtitle to all of your films. Does that define your approach to filmmaking?
I don’t know. I’ve stopped making films because I was so worn out. I think my old approach is not going to work anymore, I have that feeling that something else is going to have to enter the scene. I will do something in a new way.
Petey Dammit is an American daredevil who became an icon in the 1970s for his incredible motorcycle stunts. Some of his most famous include riding through fire walls, jumping over rattlesnakes, flying over Greyhound buses, and nearly dying from a launch over the fountains in front of Caesar’s Palace in Vegas. Before becoming a stuntman, he had a greatly varied career in underground music, including such bands as Big Techno Werewolves, Dylan Shearer, The Birth Defects and Thee Oh Sees. He broke 37 bones and one guitar during his lifetime. He is also one of the main characters in Ada Bligaard Søby’s documentary Petey and Ginger. Below Petey picks the 10 films that have most affected him.
1. The Castle (Rob Sitch, 1997)
This movie centres around the Kerrigans, an Australian family who has to fight to keep their home from being taken away by a neighbouring airport expansion. I watched this movie on a flight to Australia the first time we toured over there, and it gave me pretty much everything I needed to know about the amazingness that country had to offer, and I instantly fell in love. Everything about this movie is great and works really well together. The low-budget look of the film and set designs go perfectly with the acting, and the Kerrigan family as a whole. Although it’s a great comedy with constant dry laughs and memorable quotes, I can’t help but tearing up in happiness at the end with the amount of love the family members have for each other.
2. Raising Arizona (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1987)
I think I’ve watched this movie more times than any other movie throughout my life. I could quote it word for word while watching it. In fact, I don’t like watching it with other people, because I know how annoying my ability to speak along with the dialogue must be. There is a pencil sketch of Nicolas Cage hanging on my wall that I bought at a tourist trap here in San Francisco, and I can’t look at it without thinking, ‘My name is H.I. McDunnough… Call me Hi.’ Nicolas Cage is the man!
3. Wristcutters: A Love Story (Goran Dukic, 2006)
This love/buddy/road-trip black comedy is set in an alternate, afterlife limbo designated for people who commit suicide. The main character is distraught after his girlfriend breaks up with him, so he decides to kill himself. As punishment, he finds himself in a new world where everything is pretty much the same as when he was alive, except slightly crappier. For such a depressing (yet extremely interesting) concept, it’s surprisingly upbeat and has a lot of cameos from great people like Tom Waits, John Hawkes, Will Arnett and Eddie Steeples.
4. Festen (Thomas Vinterberg,1998)
Oh man, whenever I try to talk about this movie to friends, I explain that after watching it you will either call your parents and tell them you love them, or you will never speak to them again. This is a pretty heavy film, and the first of the Dogme 95 films. I think this works to Vinterberg’s advantage, because the simplistic nature of the filming and acting make it seem more believable, as if you were there at the party witnessing all the events unfold. I feel pretty gross after watching it, and that’s why it’s one of my all-time favourite movies. Not for that feeling of grossness, but because it makes me feel it so much.
5. Wild Zero (Tetsuro Takeuchi, 1999)
Guitar Wolf, the coolest rock’n’roll band in the world, get a feature-length film that is just as cool as they are! This movie has pretty much everything that you’d need for a Saturday night – zombies, gratuitous blood and gore, UFOs, fire-spurting microphones, hot pants, a transsexual, a naked girl firing guns, and the best takedown of an alien mothership ever put to film! Just watch it!
6. Mother Night (Keith Gordon, 1996)
I’m a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut’s writing, but I can’t think of too many examples where his books have been translated to film with much success. This one is about as good as it can get. Nick Nolte is perfect as Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American-born playwright in Germany during WWII who spews Nazi propaganda that is laced with important hidden messages for the Allies on a radio show. Years later he is living in New York and his former life comes back to haunt him. I find a lot of this movie to be pretty powerful without being cheesy or in your face. It’s great for Sunday afternoon, lying around the house movie watching.
7. Jerkbeast (Brady Hall and Calvin Lee Reeder, 2005)
A friend in Seattle played this movie for us during some down time on tour and it changed my life. Jerkbeast started as a small, public-access TV show where viewers would call in to dial-an-insult the cast (including Brady Hall in a giant, papier mâché monster costume). The cast was known to assault the callers with hilariously foul-mouthed insults at rapid-fire speed. After the TV show ended, they decided to amp up the insults and create a feature out of the carnage. Starting a punk band with many name changes (Blood Butt, Anus Pussy and Steaming Wolf Penis) they hit the road to perform shows for no one, slinging as many insults as possible, such as, ‘I don’t know how I resist the urge to stab you in the face with a frozen stream of horse piss!’ until fame and fortune finds, and then ultimately destroys them. This no-budget (purportedly $5,000–$6,000) movie is perfect for sitting around with your mates getting drunk and laughing until you can’t even sing the words to ‘Looks Like Chocolate, Tastes Like Shit’ any longer. Co-director Calvin Lee Reeder has also made the surreal films The Rambler and The Oregonian, which are also worth checking out if you want to take a drug-free journey to bad acid town. A lot of great clips from the public access show are up on YouTube.
8. Duel to the Death (Ching Siu-tung, 1983)
I love kung fu/wuxia films, and this one has it all. Duel to the Death is from my favourite era of these films, because it was made in the days (and was among the first) where invisible wires and matting worked alongside the martial arts action to create the fantasy style which I greatly love. I generally don’t like CGI-heavy films as they don’t seem real enough for me, or they look slightly off enough that my brain can’t trick me into believing what I’m looking at is real. In this film, a Chinese swordsman is pitted against a Japanese swordsman to determine who is the best, and which nation has the greatest honour. Leading up to this battle, we find that this year’s fight is rigged and no one is to be trusted. The incredible fight scenes aside, this movie features a lot of bad ass ninjas! Kite-flying ninjas, buried-in-sand ninjas, a naked ninja and a fifteen-foot-tall ninja who explodes into multiple ninjas. Why would you not want to watch that?
9. Bunny and the Bull (Paul King, 2009)
OK, I know I just said I don’t like CGI-heavy movies, but I love this movie. The effects create the world within the movie instead of enhancing the world that we know, and it’s amazing. I’m a huge fan of British comedy shows, so finding out this starred many of my favourite people was a treat.
10. Four Lions (Chris Morris, 2010)
Chris Morris, Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain? I’m there!! I’ve gotten tired of being constantly bombarded with the ‘War on Terror’ and terrorists. It’s frustrating, because I know that those words/phrases are primarily used as a scare tactic to divide our nation and make us afraid of people/cultures that we don’t know or understand, so we will be complacent while the government continues to make the world a worse place by keeping cultures and people apart. The War on Terror is also a great vehicle for continuing a pro-Christian agenda, which also separates society into a hopeless us vs. them scenario. I think Four Lions does a great job of satirising our fears without exploiting any one. Even though the main characters are jihadists trying to kill people, I still want to hang out with them. I still want to help them, and I’m saddened that their plans fail or when they die in the most idiotic situations. On top of it being a great movie, I love it because of that aspect. It’s nice to see a movie where Muslims who are normally portrayed as negative stereotypes are here portrayed as people, who happen to be Muslim. We’re all people, we have different ideas, but that’s what makes the world interesting. Rubber dinghy rapids, bro!
Cast: Robin Wright, Harvey Keitel, Paul Giamatti, Danny Huston
Israel, Germany, Poland, France 2013
120 mins
In 2008, Ari Folman astounded audiences with Waltz with Bashir, in which he used a mix of animation and live action to tell a devastating account of his experience as a soldier during the 1980s Israel-Lebanon war. Six years later, he returns with a remarkably ambitious, intelligent science-fiction film loosely based on Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress. Richly resonant, multilayered and beautifully psychedelic, The Congress again combines live action and animation to tell the story of Robin (Robin Wright), an ageing actress forced to sell her scanned image to her studio Miramount for them to use as they please. Twenty years later, she attends a congress on the future of cinema, which takes place in a zone of chemically-induced animated hallucinations. But following a violent intervention by rebels, Robin finds herself propelled into a strange future world that is even less real.
Virginie Sélavy talked to Ari Folman about transposing Stanislaw Lem’s novel to our world, the merits of escaping from reality, and why The Congress is a documentary.
The Congress is released in the UK on DVD + Blu-ray on 8 December 2014 by Studiocanal.
Virginie Sélavy: Waltz with Bashir was a very personal film, while The Congress is a much larger-scale speculative reflection on our world. Was adapting a novel a way of getting out of the realm of your own personal experience?
Ari Folman: Making Waltz with Bashir was very tough, travelling with the film afterwards was very tough, so I needed an escape route from Bashir, from myself, from history, from war, from everything you can imagine. And I thought The Congress was a good one because it’s a novel I read when I was very young and I loved it. I’m a sci-fi buff.
Stanislaw Lem’s idea of a world that is made of grimmer and grimmer layers of reality disguised by illusory appearances feels fairly prescient. Was that one of the reasons why you wanted to adapt it?
Yes, it was. In many aspects I think that The Congress is a documentary. I only make documentaries – and sci-fi. The Congress is documentary sci-fi. When I wrote the script I had no clue that they’d been scanning actors in LA for a long time now. In the film it’s supposed to be an X-ray-machine room, and when I arrived in LA I read for the first time about the scanning facilities that they have over there. Technology has changed tremendously, in cinema you now have CGI, motion capture, scanned actors and everything. They can make movies with no actors. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to do it, but it could be done. So that’s the first part of the movie. The second part is more inspired by Lem’s novel, it’s about identity, human identity. So yes, I’d say it reflects our lives in many ways.
That’s one of the major changes you’ve made to the book: space traveller Ijon Tichy, the main character in the book, becomes an ageing actress, and you shift the action from the world of science to the world of cinema.
When I optioned the book I didn’t know what I was going to do. Then in Cannes I met this ageing American actress, very famous, from the 60s-70s, and I didn’t recognize her at all. I had this vision, it was going to be her, a goddess from 45 years ago who now is a nobody. That was the starting point for the script. I went backwards in time, thinking about identity. I didn’t live in Poland in the late 60s communist era when Lem wrote his novel, so I had to make this translation to things that I’m really into. That’s how I ended up talking about cinema and the future of cinema, which is represented by an ageing actress in our world.
That adds another layer to the novel’s blurring of fiction and reality, because of course cinema is also about reality and its representation.
Not all cinema – I don’t think that it is what cinema always does. But in general, for me, good cinema is taking this real time that we live in, which is the time that our subconscious lives in, and trying to make it one piece of time that you work into a movie. It’s what I try to do, this combination really attracts me.
Was Robin Wright the actress you wanted from the start?
No, it was meant to be Cate Blanchett, and I wrote the treatment for her. But then I met Robin Wright by chance in LA, and the moment I saw her I knew that it could only be her.
That adds even another layer, as she plays ‘Robin Wright’ in the film. How involved was she in the project?
She was very much involved from the very beginning. I researched her and I pitched the project to her, then she joined me and we worked on the character together, and I went home and wrote the script. She was involved in many aspects, from the writing until the end of editing. She was a great partner, very intelligent woman, very sharp. She really was the best partner that I could have.
As in Waltz with Bashir you use a mix of live action and animation, but with different implications: here it is perfectly suited to the exploration of the real and the unreal. Do you see this mix of filmic forms as essential to your work?
After Waltz with Bashir I decided I wanted to explore, I wanted to make something that mixed the two, live action and animation, no matter what I was going to do, I wanted to try, for the sake of the experiment. With The Congress, and with Waltz with Bashir as well, we decided to start with documentary rather than fiction, and fiction rather than sci-fi, because otherwise it can be a bit conventional. I try to explore new things, and here the biggest challenge was writing and directing a movie where you go from a first, straight hour with a lovely actress and a story, and then in the second hour she breaks the conventions and she becomes animated, and that was a big challenge for me as the director to make it happen.
Live action in your films is always about a terrible reality, and animation is a way of escaping, or dealing with, the full horror of that reality. Is that fair to say?
I hadn’t thought of that but that’s an interesting idea. . I think that maybe live action is there for bad issues and actions.. It happened with Waltz with Bashir, and here again I make the most of the beautiful creatures of the animated world, because we are exposed to a very tough and harsh world, and it can probably be shown only in animation. I think animation gives you many more layers as a director – I’m talking about animation for adults, which is a rare thing, unfortunately.
At the end, there is no easy answer as to what is best, whether living in the real world or hallucinating a more beautiful world. Was that openness essential to you?
Yes, absolutely. With my films, it’s a matter of interpretation, you have to decide what you think with what you are, with your conscience, your psychology. It’s not my duty to guide you towards a decision as to what is best. It’s a conscience that we experience in the Western world every day of our lives, because the world of hallucinations is a metaphor for a lot of things: it could be money, it could be addiction to sex, it could be addiction to many things, it doesn’t have to be just drugs. In the book, of course, Lem goes for drugs, and it looks very cinematic and psychedelic, but everyone has to find an escape route, which can be very addictive and has nothing to do with real life. And it’s your own decision to know what’s best.
Some elements in the film suggest that what we see from the moment it becomes an animation could be the product of Aaron’s (Robin’s son) mind. Is that a possibility that you wanted to put in the audience’s heads?
I’ve heard this interpretation. It was not one of my intentions, but I really like to hear other people’s interpretations of the film. When I walked out of the premiere in Cannes, my sister came to me and she was very pissed off. She loved the movie and she couldn’t understand what happens to Aaron at the end. She said, ‘it’s a shame, you shouldn’t have done that’. I tried to explain to her that it’s not like that. I told her, ‘I wrote the script, I know what I wrote’, but afterwards I gave up and I liked that interpretation. I thought, OK, this is what she saw in the movie and she has her own specific reading, and that’s fine.
Would you make the same choice as Robin at the end?
To celebrate the UK theatrical release of Ari Folman’s The Congress on 15 August 2014, we are pleased to be able to publish the following excerpt from one of Stanislaw Lem’s greatest sci-fi short novels, The Futurological Congress, which served as loose inspiration for the film.
The Congress is released in the UK on DVD + Blu-ray on 8 December 2014 by Studiocanal.
Born in 1965, Adam Roberts was educated at ‘a rundown’ state school in Kent and the ancient University of Aberdeen. While teaching English Literature and Creative Writing (at Royal Holloway, University of London) he set about eschewing the traditional path of a science fiction novelist – constructing 10 volumes of the one epic story written over a large number of years – and instead challenged himself to invent something new and original with every book. With that as his motto he has penned, among other things, a steampunk fantasy, where Swift’s Lilliputians are enslaved by the British Empire (Swiftly), a Soviet-era paranoid conspiracy theory novel (Yellow Blue Tibia), and an imagined second English Civil War where hackers and tech heads take power from the Establishment (New Model Army). His latest novel, Bete (Gollancz), concerns the nature of intelligence, artificial intelligence and talking cats. Eithne Farry
If I were offered the chance to be any film character, I would like to be Solaris. I’m talking, of course, about the films made from Stanislaw Lem’s great science fiction novel Solaris (first published in Polish in 1961; first English translation 1970). The first movie was made by the peerless Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and was released in 1972. The second – Soderbergh’s 2002 film – suffers from not being by Tarkovsky; but I’ve always liked it. It has a very different feel, and lacks some of the potently rebarbative strangeness and slowness of Tarkovsky’s film; but it’s closer to the novel and achieves an eerie beauty just this side of the real-deal uncanny.
‘So,’ I hear you ask, ‘which character in either – or both – of these films would you like to be?’ But you misunderstand. I’ve already explained who I’d like to be. I would like to be Solaris. That is, I’d like to be the sentient planet around which the human characters are in orbit, and which interferes in their lives by (for instance) recreating a material, living-breathing-thinking version of Hari (renamed ‘Rheya’ in the 2002 film), the main character Kelvin’s dead wife, out of his memories. If this choice looks as though I have delusions of grandeur, then permit me to explain myself. We watch these movies and naturally identify with the situation of the human characters, because we are human ourselves. I choose to read them differently. Lem famously objected to Tarkovsky’s version of his book, saying that he had taken a story about the alienating nature of man’s encounter with the radical otherness of the cosmos and turned it into Crime and Punishment. But it has always seemed to me that Solaris, the entity, is a proxy for The Writer (‘So: Lem is… ‘). At a pinch, it could stand in for the film director – for Tarkovsky, or Soderbergh.
As a writer myself, this interpretation resonates with me. Writers and directors create characters, summon them into life from nothing, out of the neutral nothingness of metaphorical neutrinos. We do so for our own reasons. Solaris is a book, and two films, that situate this act of creation on (as it were) the receiving end. It is Euripides’ Alcestis recast not only as science fiction, but as the disturbing fable of the arbitrary power of art to embody on any terms. Just as Euripides the writer – as mysteriously distant and alien to his created world as the planet in Lem’s novel – takes a widower and forces him to meet again with the simulacrum of his dead wife; so Solaris gets to the heart of how unnerving that power is. And, what is more, it understands how sometimes a piece of characterisation can look perfect from the outside, and yet be strangely and unsettlingly wrong and alien. So I’d like to be Solaris, not because I crave the godlike powers of a planet-sized being, but because I recognise in it – him? her? – a fellow worker in the unforgiving field of ‘making characters’.
Mussolini’s Dream Factory: Film Stardom in Fascist Italy
By Stephen Gundle Berghahn Books
320pp £62
Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution
Edited by Brett Martin
Faber & Faber
303pp £14.99
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
By Dean J. DeFino Wallflower Press
106pp £10.50
‘History is but the nail upon which the picture hangs,’ wrote Dumas Jr, and in an excellent exemplar of this adage, Stephen Gundle has painted a fantastically detailed picture of the intricacies and politics of Italian cinema during the Fascist era. In a bravura performance of research, fact-finding and analysis, the author presents a well laid out and reader-friendly narrative that Italian film scholar, Peter Bondanella, has called ‘an outstanding book in every respect’ in which ‘a complete revision of our thinking on Italian cinema takes place’. And so it does. From deep in the archives of several collections, Gundle unearths and interprets a mass of facts and minutiae, giving fresh insight into this relatively ignored 20-year time frame, which had its own infrastructure of stars, distribution, exhibition and, above all, production. The latter took place at Cinecittà, the legendary film studio where, as the author notes, on the morning of 29 January 1936, Mussolini arrived by car to lay the foundation stone of ‘what would become the largest studio complex in Europe, eclipsing even the German UFA studios in Berlin’. The importance of this development to the regime, and the complex story of Italian cinematic history, is fascinatingly told through the meticulous investigation of national Fascist cinema, the Italian star system, gentrification, commercial culture and revealing case studies of stars (many conveniently forgotten after the war), such as Isa Miranda, Vittorio De Sica, Assia Noris, Amedeo Nazzari and Alida Valli. The facts and the scandals, the films and the performances – on and off screen – are engagingly told. The final part of the book focuses on the aftermath of Fascist cinema and its star system, with the self-evident chapters ‘Civil War, Liberation and Reconstruction’ and ‘Survival, Memory and Forgetting’. As Gundle finally concludes about the stars of the period: ‘No one blamed them for Fascism or for contributing with their glamour to the pattern of consent on which the regime rested. Rather they were seen as men and women who, through their screen personas, had shared with their fellow countrymen and women the most tragic and divisive period in twentieth-century Italian history and, in their best moments, granted some relief from the deadly beat of the Fascist war drums.’ A persuasive conclusion to what is already a key text of cultural Italian historiography.
Difficult Men by Brett Martin, on the other hand, takes a more journalistic and less scholarly – though no less informed – approach to his topic: ‘The wave of new shows on the cable channels which dramatically stretched television’s narrative inventiveness, emotional resonance, and artistic ambition – shows such as The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Six Feet Under, Dexter, Deadwood and Boardwalk Empire, which tackled issues of life and death, love and sexuality, addiction, race, violence and existential boredom.’ Especially male existential boredom and post-feminist angst. Martin notes, as many have since, that this new ‘third golden age’ of television is squaring up to movies and providing nothing less than addictive 12 or 13-hour narrative extravaganzas with characters ‘whom, conventional wisdom had once insisted Americans would never allow into their living rooms: unhappy, morally compromised, complicated, deeply human’ who play a seductive game with the viewer, daring them to invest emotionally in, even root for, even love, a gamut of criminals whose offenses comprise adultery, polygamy, vampirism and serial murder. These shows feature storylines and characters who are ‘more ambiguous and complicated than anything that television, always concerned with pleasing the widest possible audience and group of advertisers, had ever seen.’ The storylines and plotting allow plenty of room for narrative ruthlessness and ‘give little quarter for what might be the audience’s favourite characters, offering little in the way of catharsis or the easy resolution in which television had traditionally traded’ and of course, which had, until then, set the movies apart from the limited narrative palettes and strictures of television. This was nothing short of a television revolution made possible in part, by new forms of media platforms and cultures of prosumers. A recommended and enjoyable read which is at turns pithy, sharp, gossipy, smart, insightful and extremely timely – though as the parade of ‘new television’ productions continues to proliferate, ‘timely’ is most assuredly a relative term.
Finally, short space is left for a short book: Dean J. DeFino’s hagiographic homage to the great Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! . By turns poetic, analytical, confessional, hyperbolic and factual, this compact compendium is a loving contribution to the growing literature on filmmaker Russ Meyer. This is a well-informed addition to the ‘Cultographies’ series that Wallflower publish, and an extremely personal take from an obviously smitten author, which is insightful and generous in observation – even as some of the rhetoric occasionally careens into ‘pseuds corner’ territory.
Emma Jane Unsworth was born in Prestwich and lives in Manchester. She has a tattoo of one of the big metal lions that resides outside Heaton Park on her arm and a Betty Trask award for her debut novel Hungry, the Stars and Everything. Her second novel, the visceral and vulnerable Animals (the title comes from a Frank O’Hara poem) has been described as ‘Withnail with girls’. It heads out on the town with hedonistic Laura and Tyler as they riotously down shots, take drugs, ponder poetry and physics, art and religion and do their level best to defy the strictures of polite society. It is therefore maybe not entirely surprising that Emma should choose the murderous Tina from Sightseers as her filmic alter ego. Eithne Farry
Gawky, ginger, immature, sadistic… Really there was no competition when it came to selecting my cinematic alter ago. It had to be Tina from Sightseers. Released in 2012, Ben Wheatley’s dark British comedy sees Steve Oram playing Chris, a caravan fan, who takes his new girlfriend, Tina (Alice Lowe), on a road trip round Northern England to showcase his favourite tourist spots. It’s no walk in the park. The holiday quickly escalates into a bloody rampage, provoked initially by Chris’s fury at a man dropping a Cornetto wrapper on the floor in a tram museum. Oh come on, we all know what it’s like – sometimes the smallest things can tip you over the edge. Besides, it’s important to respect your heritage and the environment. People have to learn…
Pot pourri fetishist Tina is, it would seem, overwhelmed by the world even before she hits the road with Chris. Aged 34, she lives at home with her mother, a megalomaniacal whinger grieving the loss of the family pet terrier, Poppy. For Tina, the caravan holiday with Chris signifies both an escape from depressing daughterly responsibility, and tardily won sexual liberty. The landscape they traverse – the rolling hills, the winding roads, the wide open sky – is the proverbial wilderness, fraught with possibility and peril. Especially when Tina gets out her crotchless knitted underwear. Very Viz. But before long the playful observational comedy becomes an ominous counterpoint to brutality. We enter a nightmarish moral hinterland as the couple indulge (Tina albeit reluctantly) in a full-blown killing spree and find themselves on the run. Like a less sexy Bonnie and Clyde. In a caravan.
There’s a timelessness as well as a lawlessness to Sightseers. It could easily be set in the 60s, 70s or 80s without changing a frame. Tina is no everywoman, though. She is a constant, excruciating surprise. I love this film because it’s absurd, and dark, and funny. Also because I’m interested in social disobedience; in people operating on the outskirts of what’s considered acceptable, and the animalistic urges within human nature that can leave you out on a limb. Also because I’m obsessed with campervans and have set my third novel in one. Caravans and campervans offer a strange mix of adventure and domesticity. I mean, really, what kind of maniac wants to live in what is essentially a Wendy House on wheels? Well, this kind of maniac. And Tina. It beats being at home with her mother.
Animals is out now with Canongate (£12.99). More information on Emma Jane Unsworth can be found on emmajaneunsworth.com.
Emma Jane Unsworth
A Deviant View of Cinema – Features, Essays & Interviews
