Cineskinny 2: GFF17 18-20 Feb

THE CINESKINNY THE

FREE OFFICIAL GFF GUIDE

THESKINNY.CO.UK / CINESKINNY

N0 2 | 18 – 20 FEB

Sat 18 Feb, GFT, 6.15pm | Sun 19 Feb, GFT, 1pm

Prêt-à-Poltergeist The ever versatile Olivier Assayas returns to genre territory with strange and mysterious ghost story Personal Shopper, which centres on a knockout performance from Kristen Stewart.

When we meet the French filmmaker, he has nothing but praise for his star

A

sk any director the aspect of filmmaking they enjoy least, and 99 times out of 100 they’ll tell you it’s talking to the press. And who could blame them? Having to hear those same unoriginal questions over and over again. “Where did you get the

initial idea?” “Who are your influences?” and then of course the obligatory topical question, which for the next four years will be: “What do you think of Trump?” French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, however, is part of the elusive one percent.

“It’s always interesting to discuss your own films because somehow you are reinventing them by talking about them,” Assayas says when we sit down to chat at a London hotel. He explains that while in director mode, he doesn’t have the opportunity to verbalise to his cast and crew his intentions for the film. “I’m not a very theoretical person when I’m on the set. There I’m making decision after decision after decision every day, and once the film is finished,

Interview: Jamie Dunn it’s then that you can try to understand why you made those decisions.”

This is music to our ears, as we’re here to discuss Personal Shopper, a beguiling and unclassifiable film full of mysteries and nuances. It centres on a dissatisfied young American woman called Maureen, played

by Kristen Stewart – who became the first American actor to win a César Award (basically the French Oscars) for her performance in Assayas’ previous film Clouds of Sils Maria. By day our hero works as personal shopper and general dogsbody for a bitchy supermodel who’s based in Paris. Maureen’s side gig, however, is far more interesting.

She’s a medium, and the film opens with her on continues…

Highligh t s

SAT 18 Contemporary Color

Contemporary Color CCA, 8.30pm Avant-garde pop meets Middle America pageantry in this lively performance film where David Byrne ropes in some pals (St Vincent, Ad-rock) to collaborate with the baton-twirling, cheerleading, flag-waving excess of a high-school colour guard parade.

Catfight GFT, 9pm

This looks a riot. Anne Heche and Sandra Oh play college frenemies who reunite in middle age and reignite their bitter rivalry. We love these two fiery actors and we can’t wait to see them kick the living shit out of each other.

Headshot GFT, 11pm

Iko Uwais – the pint-sized, kickass hero of The Raid – stars in another knockout Indonesian action thrill ride.

Take the title very literally.

>> the job, but it’s one to which she has a personal connection. Maureen’s been commissioned to check out the dark and creaky villa her twin brother Lewis’s girlfriend inherited to see if any unwanted spirits linger there. It turns out, however, that Maureen has her fingers crossed it is haunted, as she’s eager to speak to one spirit in particular: Lewis, who died in the house of a weak heart a few months back.

While this description might be conjuring up ideas in your mind of a hipster Conjuring, Assayas, as he often does, has wrong footed us. The rest of his ghost story won’t take place in the usual spaces of haunted attics, creepy basements or spooky cemeteries, but very much in the modern world of boutique hotels, penthouse apartments and, in one of the film’s most thrilling setpieces, the Eurostar. And instead of communicating via ectoplasm stains or creaking door hinges, the ghosts in Personal Shopper use text messages.

What makes the film so unusual and compelling is this tension between the real and the supernatural. “I really wanted a character who is anchored, who is grounded, and who’s very human,” explains Assayas. “That’s what Kristen brought to me. She has this screen presence, she’s this really solid person. It really matters that we relate to that character, because she opens those doors into the unknown.”

Much of the joy of Personal Shopper is the opportunity to observe Stewart at her most stripped back, her most raw.

She dominates the film, but in an understated way. It’s a performance that feels very alive, full of subtle gestures and tiny character details, and none of the histrionics that characterised the role that made her famous in the Twilight franchise. Like all great actors, her charisma pulls you closer to the screen, like a magnet.

“When I was writing [Personal Shopper] I didn’t know I was actually writing for Kristen,” explains Assayas, “but I think if I had not made Clouds of Sils Maria with Kristen, had not spent time with her, then I would not have created a character similar to Maureen. When I finished writing and I ended up giving Kristen the screenplay she read it and loved it, and all of a sudden there was an inner logic to it all.”

As is the case with many critics, it took Assayas a while to cotton on to Stewart’s talent. His first saw her in Walter Salles’ On the Road. “I liked what I saw on screen,” he recalls,

“but I never saw something that I thought was completely accomplished.” It wasn’t until working with her on Clouds of Sils Maria that he realised how good she really is. “She was something else, she was unique. She really has this extraordinary mix of intuition. She’s completely, incredibly natural.

She’ll never do the same thing twice.”

“I think Kristen has an unlimited range” Olivier Assayas

Assayas was so impressed, in fact, that he felt his material had let her down. “I was a bit frustrated because the character I wrote for her in Clouds of Sils Maria was one dimensional,” he laments. “She didn’t have a lot of space to create a character. I was extremely happy with what we did together, but it was a bit frustrating because I felt that we could have gone much further. I think that she has an unlimited range that needs to be challenged.”

With Personal Shopper, they’ve done exactly that. What so impresses is that most of the film plays out focused on Stewart’s character on her own in medium shot, dashing through the Paris streets on errands or simply reacting to the latest – possibly supernatural – text on her phone. So compelling is her performance, however, that you never want to take your eyes off the screen, even when she’s seemingly doing nothing. Assayas thinks, as an actor, she’s innately cinematic: “She moves within the frame like a dancer, you know? She has a way of playing with her body and with the camera, and she has this understanding of the space. For a filmmaker that’s pretty unique.”

Perhaps what’s so exciting for film fans is that Assayas reckons Stewart has only just scratched the surface of her talents. “After two movies, I get the sense there’s more space there. I think it’s the first time that it’s happened to me with an actor that I’m not sure where their limit is.”

This sounds like the start of a beautiful director-actor partnership.

R E VIE WS

“Partridge-esque in its clueless pomposity”

Mindhorn  Director: Sean Foley Starring: Julian Barratt, Essie Davis, Simon Farnaby, Russell Tovey, Steve Coogan

From To Be or Not to Be to Tropic Thunder, the idea of actors being inadvertently pulled into real-life jeopardy has served as a durable comic premise for years, and Mindhorn is a particularly English spin on that concept. Richard Thorncroft (Julian Barratt) is a washedup actor whose one big hit, the 80s detective series Mindhorn, is now long forgotten, but he’s given an opportunity to revive his career when a delusional killer on the Isle of Man tells the police

Mon 20 Feb, GFT, 8.30pm Tue 21 Feb, GFT, 3.45pm

that he will only negotiate with the legendary Mindhorn himself.

He believes Mindhorn actually exists, and Barratt and his co-screenwriter Simon Farnaby (who also appears as Thorncroft’s skimpily dressed love rival) make every effort to make him feel real, showing a valuable attention to detail in their portrait of naff 80s television conventions and merchandising.

While the thin plot starts to feel overextended in the final third, the absurd gags come fast enough to ensure the film is always entertaining and occasionally hilarious, and Barratt’s excellent central performance is almost Partridge-esque in its clueless pomposity. [Philip Concannon]

Keep up-to-date with our daily online GFF coverage over at facebook.com/TheSkinnyMag, @theskinnymag and @skinnyfilm

Highligh t s

SUN 19

“A fine showcase for the hypnotising Florence Pugh”

Director: William Oldroyd Starring: Florence Pugh, Cosmo Jarvis, Naomi Ackie, Christopher Fairbank, Paul Hilton, Golda Rosheuvel

Not another spin on ‘The Scottish Play’, William Oldroyd’s tense, darkly comic feature debut is actually an adaptation of a 19th century Russian novella, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Nikolai Leskov, the story now transported to Northern England around the same time.

It’s pretty Shakespearean, though, with a dash of Flaubert, thanks to murderous intentions brought about by young bride Katherine’s displeasure with her sexless marriage and subordinate role in provincial life. More wilful sadist than

All This Panic  Director: Jenny Gage

All This Panic follows seven very different teen girls from Brooklyn across three years. A few are connected by blood or years-long friendships, but what ties them all together – besides their postcode – is an articulate introspection on their hopes and worries for how their lives are going, from issues of feminism and sexuality to the uncertainty that comes with losing support systems.

Regarding the latter, Lena M., our ostensible ‘lead’, has her parents’ divorce to contend with alongside a move to

Sat 18 Feb, GFT, 6pm

a distressed damsel, Katherine offers a fine showcase for the hypnotising Florence Pugh to veer from endearing puckishness to dangerously disturbed.

Though less elemental in its visual palette, Lady Macbeth echoes Andrea Arnold’s bold adaptation of Wuthering Heights, particularly with some race-related subtext that occasionally bubbles to the surface.

The juxtaposition between the freeness offered by the rural landscapes and the oppressive interior environments is also a key factor in both. Shorn of the extravagant decorations common to stately homes in most period dramas, with a chilly blankness to all its rooms, you could plausibly rename Katherine’s new home ‘Abstinence’. [Josh Slater-Williams]

Sun 19 Feb, CCA, 6.30pm Mon 20 Feb, CCA, 1pm

college education, but when it comes to the other players, the doc is particularly astute in examining the familial tensions that arise with anyone in the stirred up ‘panic’ years of late adolescence.

The overall result is a tender, kaleidoscopic portrait that captures the dreamy haze of a particular point in youth, in all its freneticism and fragility. Though a far shorter project, it is worthy of comparison to Michael Apted’s Up series, in offering a considerably more compassionate depiction of the transition into adulthood than is provided in most films, whether fiction or documentary. [Josh Slater-Williams]

Raving Iran presented by Sub Hub Barras Art and Design, 6pm Music is protest here as two DJs defy Iran’s outlawing of western music by hosting clandestine raves in Tehran.

The screening is hosted by Sub Club, and Persian street food is on the menu beforehand.

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

David Lynch’s Factory Photographs / La Jetée The Glue Factory, 7pm Part one of this night celebrating Lynch and Marker is a sonic response to the Eraserhead director’s Factory Photographs, while La Jetée receives a new live narration and score. Keep your phone handy, as the performance explores digital mobile technology and surround sound diffusion.

Personal Shopper  Elle  Illigitimate  Folk Hero & Funny Guy 

“Compassionate depiction of the transition into adulthood”

Want to join our team?

We're recruiting for an Operations and Finance Manager at The Skinny.

@theskinnymag /TheSkinnyMag @theskinnymag

Full job specs at: theskinny.co.uk/about/getinvolved

Include #cineskinny in your tweets and we’ll include the best in The CineDaily, our daily online guide to the festival

Illustration: Raj Dhunna

Lady Macbeth 

Housekeeping GFT, 3,30pm We all know Bill Forsyth’s glorious Scottish comedies, but the director’s first US production shows that the lyrical magic of Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero could cross the Atlantic. This screening is a real rarity: don’t miss it.

Mon 20 Feb, CCA, 8.45pm | Tue 21 Feb, CCA, 1.15pm

Highligh t s

MON 20

“After the American election I thought my story was telling something different”

Margaret Tait Award GFT, 6.45pm Named after the great Orcadian experimental filmmaker, the Margaret Tait Award screening is always a GFF highlight. This year’s winner was Kate Davis, and her new film questions how the essential, but largely invisible and unpaid, processes we employ to care for others and ourselves could be reimagined.

Cholé Robichaud

It’s a Mad, Man’s World Three smart women find themselves surrounded by chauvinistic mansplainers in Boundaries, a wry political fable from Québécois talent Chloé Robichaud. The 29-year-old writer-director explains how the film she wrote feels even more vital in a post-Trump universe

T

he meaning of works of art change with time. An artist’s message can be repurposed and repackaged decades later by new generations who find something fresh in the work relating to their own time and place. For a prime example, take a look at the recent surge in sales of George Orwell’s 1984 to see how art can have a new resonance when the cultural climate takes a swift right turn.

Usually it takes years, or even decades, for these reappraisals, but sometimes a piece of work’s meaning can change on a dime. That’s what 29-year-old Québécois writer-director Chloé Robichaud discovered when she sat down to watch her sophomore film, Boundaries, ahead of its Quebec premiere.

“The last time I watched the film was strange because of the timing,” Robichaud says speaking via Skype from Palm Springs, California, where she’s attending the city’s film festival. “[Boundaries] was released in Quebec the week after the American election. I was there at the premiere in Montreal and for some reason I decided to sit in and watch the film.

You know, I’d seen it many times, while editing and at other festivals, but after the American election I thought my story was telling something different about these female characters.”

It’s easy to understand why watching this bone-dry, razorsharp political satire would feel different post Donald Trump’s election win. Set on the fictional island of Besco, off the coast of mainland Canada, it follows three women involved in the smaller nation’s tense negotiations with Canadian government officials over mining rights on the island. There’s Besco’s president, played by Macha Greno, who’s under the kind of pressure to achieve a favourable deal with which our own Prime Minister might empathise; Félixe Nasser-Villeray plays a young attaché to the Ottawa team, who, much to her chagrin, is expected to look pretty and keep quiet during the proceedings; and Emily VanCamp plays the bilingual mediator from Chicago brought in to help stop negotiations descending

Interview: Jamie Dunn

into playground name calling, which is difficult given that the talks take place in a local high school around student desks.

Suffice to say, a fair amount of mansplaining goes down as the boorish male leaders of the Ottawa delegation try to bully their way to a one-sided contract that will give them free reign of Besco’s natural resources. The satire of these sad little Napoleons seems even more necessary now given the US election results. “I honestly thought when I was writing the film that a woman would be President of the United States today,” admits Robichaud. “I think I had the intuition that it was hard for women to be in politics, and the American election just showed that to the world. I guess the film is even more, how would you say in English... pertinent?” Indeed it is.

And its resonance is likely to be even stronger when it screens in Glasgow next week in the city’s film festival. Nearly three years on from the Scottish Referendum, and with a second possibly looming in the future, Boundaries’ theme of a smaller nation’s exploitation by its larger neighbour is sure to fire the imaginaton of the local audience. Being Québécois, the director recognises the dynamic that exists between the two nations in the film all too well. “Here in Quebec we are a small population and we speak French, and we’re in this huge Canada, so I guess people from Quebec always felt different and I think the people of Besco, the island in the film, kind of feel the same.”

The key to Boundaries’ success, however, is the choice of a fictional nation as its setting: it gives it an allegorical quality. “I wanted to reach people from Argentina, from France, from China, and I felt that if my story was taking place in Quebec about the mining industry here my film wouldn’t be able to reach those people,” explains Robichaud. “So I thought, let’s just build an island and I’ll be able to talk about whatever I want to talk about, and create my own political issues.”

Like all great political comedies, much of the satire stems from the writing. But what makes Boundaries sing is that Robichaud matches the script’s sharp wit with immaculate framing and an eye for physical comedy: imagine Wes Anderson directing an episode of The Thick of It. “It’s all about small talk and being real, but I do love details too,” she says.

“I think you can create a lot of comic instances with details.

Wes Anderson is a great example. Like him, I try to use the space; use the artistic direction to make you laugh.”

End of the Game CCA, 6.30pm For two decades, documentarian David Graham Scott has quietly been amassing a fascinating and deeply personal body of work. His latest sees the filmmaker – who’s a strict vegan – accompany a big game hunter on a trip to South Africa to snag a Cape Buffalo.

GFF Quiz Saramago Terrace Bar, 8.30pm Are you a walking-talkingIMDB? Can you tell all the blond moviestars named Chris (Evans/Pine/Hemsworth) apart? Do you know your PT Anderson from your PWS Anderson? Then assemble your squad and start working on a witty and topical team name.

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

Rosamund West

Editor

Jamie Dunn

Subeditor

Will Fitzpatrick

Designer

Kyle McPartlin

Picture Editor

Sarah Donley

Digital Editor

Peter Simpson

Sales

George Sully Sandy Park

Illustration

Jake Hollings

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

Include #cineskinny in your tweets and we’ll include the best in The CineDaily, our daily online guide to the festival