Category Archives: Curzon Journal

Curzon Journal, Features, Film

Festival Report: Glasgow 2023

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In October 2022, the British film world was rocked by news that the Centre for the Moving Image – a registered charity comprising Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Edinburgh Filmhouse cinema and the Belmont Filmhouse in Aberdeen – was suddenly going into administration, with immediate closure of its various operations. At the time of writing, a shorter reincarnation of the film festival for 2023 has just been announced for August, through the support of the month-long Edinburgh International Festival, but the fate of the two major Scottish exhibition hubs is still in question.

That cloud looming in the east must surely have affected the organisation of Scotland’s other big film festival over in the west to some extent. That said, it’s hard to gauge just how much of this year’s Glasgow Film Festival programming may have been directly influenced by increased desire to showcase up-and-coming independent talent – whose films don’t necessarily have wider distribution lined up as of yet – in light of the abrupt closure of another crucial launching pad. Until an acquisition announcement mere days before the festival started, this was the status for director Adura Onashile’s opening-night film Girl, fresh out of Sundance for its UK premiere, which also happens to be a Glasgow-shot production…

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Curzon Journal, Features, Film

Estate Agency: The Authorised Music Biopic Debate

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Directed by Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou [1997], Harriet [2019]) and written by Anthony McCarten (Bohemian Rhapsody [2018]), I Wanna Dance with Somebody (2022) follows the life of late American pop icon Whitney Houston, played by Naomi Ackie. Among the film’s executive producers is Clive Davis, the record producer who discovered Houston, while close involvement from Houston’s estate has reportedly come through representative Pat Houston, Whitney’s sister-in-law and long-time intermediary.

Much like print tome biographies, an authorised music biopic presents a veneer of authenticity. Consultation with living artists, or their family members and close confidantes if they have passed, would seem to ensure a certain degree of verisimilitude, rather than solely depending on unsubstantiated hearsay. When it comes to films, it’s also a considerable benefit to have access to the artists’ actual recordings (the 2020 David Bowie biopic Stardust suffered in this regard). Clive Davis, speaking to Variety about the Houston movie, said, ‘For me, it was important for the film to answer all questions honestly, authentically, about who Whitney was. Whether it was her sexuality, whether it was her addiction, whether it was how she and I worked together… We wanted to get it right. We wanted to get the music right, above all.’

And yet, despite such seemingly honourable intentions, authorised biopics still manage to inspire heated debate among both film and music critics, as well as the fanbases of the respective artists; the more famous and beloved the artist, the more passionate the debate. The genre can so often be defined by the things left out of a story, as opposed to the effective adaptation of what’s kept in…

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Curzon Journal, Film, Interviews

Park Chan-wook on ‘Decision to Leave’

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Josh Slater-Williams speaks to Park Chan-wook about Decision to Leave, the latest characteristically genre-slippery film from the great South Korean director of Oldboy (2003), The Handmaiden (2016), Thirst (2009) and many more. The story sees a happily married detective get a little too close to someone under his surveillance: a wife suspected of wrongdoing regarding her husband’s mysterious death in the mountains.

A warning: while director Park doesn’t give away explicit plot spoilers in this interview, he does discuss a tonal shift in the film’s second half and also alludes to one specific scene from that section…

Full interview for Curzon Journal

Curzon Journal, Film, Interviews

Director Cécile Ducrocq Discusses Sex-Worker Drama ‘Her Way’

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Coming from a largely female creative team, writer-director Cécile Ducrocq’s Her Way is a sex-work-positive drama that’s anchored by a very fine performance from Laure Calamy (My Donkey, My Lover & I [2021], Call My Agent! [2015-2020]). But although Ducrocq deliberately sought to make a cinematic portrait of sex work that’s more balanced and nuanced than audiences are perhaps used to, she’s keen to emphasise that Her Way is, at its heart, a family story.

‘For me, the film is not about a prostitute,’ Ducrocq says of her debut feature as director. ‘It’s about a mother-and-son relationship, and the love she gives to her son. She will do anything and everything for him. And she refuses that social determinism that because she’s a prostitute, her son cannot have a good life. I think this idea can be shared with everybody. The film talks about education, what you can give to your children, and, of course, how it’s easier if you have money’…

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Curzon Journal, Film, Interviews

Director Laura Wandel Discusses Her Schoolyard Drama ‘Playground’

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Premiering to acclaim at Cannes in 2021, Playground, the full-length debut of Belgian writer-director Laura Wandel, deservedly later won the Best First Feature award at the London Film Festival.

Running at only 72 minutes, it’s a compact, confident work, with creative visual and aural devices impressively realised throughout. The film’s images are conveyed entirely from a child’s point of view, the camera’s position staying at the height of its young lead (Maya Vanderbeque). Meanwhile, the soundtrack lacks any musical score, and reflects only what the protagonist can hear from her perspective…

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Curzon Journal, Film, Interviews

Dénes Nagy on Natural Light

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When it comes to film adaptations, directors and screenwriters sometimes opt to take only the barebones of a source material’s premise in order to explore their own thematic or narrative interests; Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 sci-fi novel Under the Skin is one recent notable example. But it’s likely few adaptations could be called as loose as that of Natural Light from Hungarian writer-director Dénes Nagy, based on Pál Závada’s 2014 novel of the same name. The reason: it’s based on roughly one per cent of the book…

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Curzon Journal, Film, Interviews

Moomin-mania: Alma Pöysti on playing Tove Jansson

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With Tove, a film about (part of) the life of Swedish-speaking Finnish multi-hyphenate Tove Jansson, director Zaida Bergroth and the film’s remarkable leading actor, Alma Pöysti, had an unenviable task: doing justice to a gargantuan popular culture icon in Finland and Sweden. Her Moomins books, in particular, have made her globally renowned, often in countries where the details of her fascinating personal life are perhaps not as well known…

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Curzon Journal, Features, Film

Edinburgh International Film Festival: ‘The Traitor’

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Towards the end of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), mobster-turned-informant Henry Hill is confronted with the following statement from a contemptuous defence attorney in court: “People call them rats because a rat will do anything to survive. Isn’t that right, Mr Hill?” In Scorsese’s film, the viewer follows Hill across several decades of involvement with an Italian-American crime syndicate, up to the point that various complications of his Mafia career collide in a disastrous fashion. Convinced that he and his family are marked for certain death, Hill eventually decides to become an informant for the FBI, testifying against his former friends and then entering the federal Witness Protection Program.

“Rats” and informant characters are not uncommon in crime movies, though in cases where they may be the protagonist you will often find them serving the part of a double agent or mole. They may be an undercover FBI employee infiltrating the mob, such as in Mike Newell’s Donnie Brasco (1997). In Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs (2002), and Scorsese’s subsequent American remake The Departed (2006), you even have informants on both sides of the law: an undercover cop, deep in the criminal underworld, trying to smoke out a mob mole lurking in the police department.

In mob movies where the lead eventually turns informant after some pressure, this will traditionally happen in the third act after a few hours of transgressive highs of the lifestyle leading to destructive lows. A rarer commodity is a film mostly set after the mobster’s choice has been made to spill the beans. After all, the derogatory term “rat” is used to denote that such a person is the lowest of the low in an environment that may posit the notion of honour among thieves. The perceived wisdom may be that audiences won’t want to follow such a character for a whole film; one that would, by its very nature, skimp on some of the glamour and success Mafia tales usually show before things go terribly wrong. But that is exactly what revered Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio has made with his subversive spin on the mob movie, The Traitor, in which the title character heads down the informant path within the opening half-hour…

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Curzon Journal, Film, Interviews

Interview: Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson, Star of ‘A White, White Day’

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A veteran performer who has worked extensively in his native Iceland, Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson is perhaps best known to British audiences as one of the leads of hit crime series Trapped, which has aired on BBC Four, and for the eccentric dark comedy Of Horses and Men (2013). His credits in international productions include roles in HBO’s Succession, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018), Everest (2015) and Kathryn Bigelow’s K-19: The Widowmaker (2002).

The thrilling A White, White Day — which won Sigurðsson an acting prize in the Critics’ Week section at last year’s Cannes Film Festival — offers his greatest showcase to date. The sophomore feature from Icelandic writer-director Hlynur Pálmason, it explores how anguish and resentment can manifest in dangerous and disturbing ways.

Sigurðsson plays Ingimundur, a prickly widowed police officer who processes the loss of his wife in a car accident by focusing his attention on a labour-intensive building project to provide a new home for teenage granddaughter Salka (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir) and her mother. When evidence suggests that Ingimundur’s late wife was having an affair, his quest for the truth begins to consume him and puts the safety of Salka in jeopardy.

Here, Josh Slater-Williams speaks to the actor about A White, White Day and the current state of Icelandic cinema…

Full interview for the Curzon Blog

Curzon Journal, Film, Interviews

Interview: Atom Egoyan, Director of ‘Guest of Honour’

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Behind some of Canadian cinema’s most acclaimed films, Atom Egoyan is best known for a string of breakthrough independent features he made in the 1990s, including The Adjuster (1991), Exotica (1994) and The Sweet Hereafter (1997), the latter earning him two Oscar nominations. Regularly playing with the conventions of melodrama, his time-jumping narratives are characterised by their gradual teasing of information with the full nature of characters’ relationships never immediately clear.

Egoyan’s latest, Guest of Honour, is another tale about past sins and moral dilemmas of the present. It gives the great David Thewlis a rare leading role as a widowed health inspector, Jim, whose mind dwells on the incarceration of his adult daughter, Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira), for a crime she didn’t commit. In a parallel timeline, a now released Veronica discusses her father with a local priest (Luke Wilson) in order to compose a eulogy.

Here, Josh Slater-Williams speaks to the writer-director about his storytelling interests and the genesis of Guest of Honour…

Full interview for the Curzon blog