Cult film screenings at independent cinemas are fairly common, be it in the form of late night presentations of infamous gorefests or regular showings of established anti-classics like The Room with encouraged audience participation. Less common, and a far more enticing prospect, is a festival devoted to showcasing a diverse range of film that have slipped through the cracks of movie history – no pretending commercially successful John Hughes fare counts as ‘cult’ here…
Monthly Archives: May 2018
Jeune femme (Léonor Serraille, 2017)
A ball of fire with a mane of fiery red hair, Paula (Laetitia Dosch) begins Jeune Femme by knocking herself out against the door of the Parisian apartment of her now ex-boyfriend. But a blow to the head and a stop at a hospital won’t see an end to this night’s outbursts, as she’s soon back on the street outside her former home to begin another fruitless screaming match through a building buzzer and up at a window above. All she reaps from this is the kidnapping of her ex’s cat and the brief acceptance of defeat – it’s basically the only defeat she accepts in the film…
The Cured (David Freyne, 2017)
The Cured, the debut feature from writer-director David Freyne, is a horror film that doesn’t end as well as it starts. But it does start very well, in part, because it’s blessed by a killer premise…
Stacy Martin on ‘Redoubtable’, Wiazemsky and Godard
It’s October 2017 and we’re interviewing Stacy Martin, the French-English actor currently best known for her breakthrough role in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. We’re here to discuss her part in Redoubtable, the latest film from The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius, but there’s an elephant in the room, and it’s not just that we look shaken up from an attempted mugging on our way to the interview (Martin very kindly poured us a drink upon discovering this).
Only a few days before our conversation, Anne Wiazemsky, the woman Martin plays in the biopic, passed away, aged 70. An actor and novelist, she made her cinema debut at age 18, playing the lead in Robert Bresson’s 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar. Wiazemsky didn’t make a huge number of films, but she collaborated with many of that period’s key European directors, including Pier Paolo Pasolini (on Theorem and Pigsty), and, crucially, Jean-Luc Godard, to whom she was married from 1967 until their official divorce in 1979, though their relationship had broken down as early as 1970.
Redoubtable is adapted from one of her many novels, Un An Après, which chronicles her time shooting Godard’s La Chinoise in the late 60s. As well as presenting a portrait of their romance’s rise and fall, the film documents a version of Godard’s personal and political conflicts across the surrounding period, including his ultimately successful efforts to have the Cannes Film Festival cancelled – Cannes-celled? – in light of the May 1968 civil unrest in France…
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