CineSkinny 2015: Issue 1 (18-20 Feb)

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N0 1 / 18-20 FEB

20 Feb, Grosvenor, 8.30pm | 21 Feb, GFT, 11.15pm

Love and Death David Robert Mitchell tells us how he turned his childhood dream into indelible cinematic nightmare It Follows

I

t’s a dark and stormy night, and I’m heading into the cinematic equivalent of a haunted house – Islington’s Vue – to speak to indie filmmaker David Robert Mitchell, the mind behind It Follows, the most beautiful and ingenious American horror movie in recent memory. As I pass the pick’n’mix and popcorn stands, leaving puddles of rainwater in my wake, I catch sight of the filmmaker as he’s leaving the auditorium after introducing his film to the London

INTERVIEW: Film Festival audience – its chilling synth score fills the corridor, then fades as the cinema door slowly closes. “It’s a little quiet,” he says to the LFF liaison.

“Can they turn it up a notch?”

It seems like a reasonable request until minutes later he’s describing the concept for the score by composer Rich Vreeland (aka Disasterpeace). “We wanted to create a balance between a very beautiful and haunting, melodic piece of music,” he tells me, “and then at times it’s like a controlled noise – it’s assaulting the audience.” If you’re one of the few people to have caught Mitchell’s debut film, The Myth of the American Sleepover, a delicate and swoony comingof-age film, you might be surprised to find him

Jamie Dunn

delivering a brutal slasher flick as his follow-up. But take away the film’s central monster and we could be watching the same movie. “When I was writing It Follows I kept thinking about the idea of taking characters similar to the characters that I had written in Myth, and then imagining if they were placed in a nightmare and how they might react.”

The nightmare in question is Mitchell’s own recurring one. Perched on a bench in the multiplex lobby, he recounts it: “In the dream I sort of knew it was a monster coming to kill me but it looked like different people.” In the film, too, the eponymous ‘It’ takes many forms, sometimes seemingly-benevolent (a girl in pigtails, a lost-looking old woman) continues…

18 FEB H I G H LI G H T S

Opening Gala: While We’re Young GFT, 7pm Like Woody Allen at his most prickly, Noah Baumbach uses humour to heighten rather than conceal the anxieties of everyday life, but his mood sweetened when he entered the loosey-goosey world of Frances Ha. The neurotics and the hipsters look to collide in this new film, which the Guardian’s Catherine Shoard called “an almost perfect 90-minute hit of confident and inspired comedic commentary.” See you in the front row!

and some disturbing (a rape victim, the main protagonist’s father sans clothes). In old-school horror movie style, the creature was shuffling but relentless. “In the nightmare I could get away from it very easily but that wasn’t comforting because of the fact it was always coming towards me.”

The dreams stopped in adolescence, but the concept stayed with him. “I wanted to turn it into a horror film,” he says, “and I thought it would be really cool if this thing that was following could be something that could be passed between people.” Like a game of tag, the monster is transferred from character to character. It’s a familiar horror subgenre that contains at least two classics: Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon, where a cult leader curses his enemies using satanic symbols on parchment, and seminal J-horror Ringu, where watching a creepy video tape results in death seven days later.

Mitchell’s method of transference is ingenious and gives the film’s title a delicious double meaning. “It sort of dawned on me: if it’s sex, then that connects people both physically and emotionally, and we’re kind of followed by people that we sleep with and in a way we’re also connected to the people they’ve been with.” Anyone with an ex and Facebook will know exactly what Mitchell means. The story concerns Jay, a melancholy teen played by the charismatic Maika Monroe (The Guest), whose new boyfriend has had sex with her to rid him of the affliction. Jay’s only hope it to pass it on to her next sexual partner before “It” reaches her. Think of it, then, as a sexually transmitted haunting.

What makes the film’s thin story hum is its sophisticated visuals. It’s based on a nightmare and Mitchell’s dreamy aesthetic makes it feel like we’re in one. It’s full of unsettling long takes and voyeuristic tracking shots. Its slow zooms and 360 degree pans will make your hairs stand on end; film grammar has never been so terrifying. “There are subjective moments in the film, but a lot of these are fairly wide objective frames in which we present you with the environment and you are a character sitting within that physical

world.” These long takes, combined with a shapeshifting monster, result in the audience constantly playing a terrifying game of Where’s Wally? “The idea is that you’ll kind of look around the edges and look off into the distance – you’re looking out to see if something’s coming.”

Mitchell has another trick up his sleeve for keeping us off-balance: while the group of kids at the heart of the movie talk and act like modern teenagers, the world around them gives conflicting clues to the time in which it’s all taking place. “I wanted the film to live and breathe outside of time,” he explains. “So there are a lot of production design elements from the 70s and 80s, and there are some from the 50s and 60s and some things that don’t even exist” – for example, one character is often found reading from a futuristic e-reader designed to look like a 40s shell compact that looks like it could have been pinched from the set of Spike Jonze’s Her. “It’s just about blurring the lines of what’s real.”

Reading the premise, one might assume that It Follows is part of horror’s tradition of punishing beautiful teens for their sexual misdemeanours – a seedy practice stretching as far back, at least, as John Carpenter’s Halloween, which It Follows often recalls in its suburban setting and synth score.

But Mitchell’s film’s themes are far more slippery than that. “I’m not trying to demonise sex, definitely not. These characters open themselves up to danger through sex, but it’s also the thing that can at least temporarily free them.”

Mitchell suggests one possible, more sex-positive theory: “[The film]’s dealing with mortality on a very simple level in the fact that we’re all here for a limited amount of time.

I think that love and sex are ways in which people can push death away. To me that’s one interesting read.”

Or maybe this is just a 100 minute night-terror that horror-nuts, critics and armchair Freudians have no hope of solving? “There’s no searching for truth or logic behind a nightmare,” laughs Mitchell. “It’s simply just a nightmare.”

R E VIE WS Catch Me Daddy 

19 Feb, GFT, 5.40pm 20 Feb, GFT, 3.50pm

Starring: Sameena Jabeen Ahmed, Conor McCarron, Gary Lewis, Wasim Zahir

It is never less than visually arresting

Daniel and Matthew Wolfe’s Catch Me Daddy opens to a creation myth recited with childlike naivety over images of a windswept, almost primeval landscape.

Though its story is set very much in the present-day UK, the film evokes the past in its intoxicating atmosphere. It easily recalls Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant, but this fable seems more savage and ancient – the mood is far grimmer.

Robbie Ryan’s intimate roving camera gets close-up to the point of abstraction,

but in doing so firmly places the viewer in the midst of the unfolding events, with the palette not drained, but cold, and the handheld visuals augmenting the dramatic urgency. It is never less than visually arresting.

Beauty and milieu can only go so far, though. While Sameena Jabeen Ahmed is a captivating screen presence – playing Laila, a girl on the run from her traditional family – the third act coalescence with a conventional thriller narrative breaks the spell with its rote machinations and violence. All that said, this remains an electrifying debut.

[Ben Nicholson]

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Illustration: Sophie Freeman

Director: Daniel Wolfe, Matthew Wolfe

19 FEB

Ozon’s film quivers between psychological thriller and playful farce

H I G H LI G H T S

A Night at the Regal

The New Girlfriend  Director: François Ozon Starring: Anaïs Demoustier, Romain Duris, Raphaël Personnaz

François Ozon’s favourite subject is the fluidity of sexual identity and desire. He’s been playing with this theme since early short The Summer Dress right up to last year’s Young & Beautiful. It’s at the heart of The New Girlfriend too, which centres on the relationship between Claire (Demoustier) and David (Duris), the husband of her recently deceased best friend, which takes a turn for the intimate when Claire discovers David dressing up in his dead wife’s clothes.

Theeb 

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

Loosely based on a Ruth Rendell story, Ozon’s film quivers between psychological thriller and playful farce. Initially it appears David’s cross-dressing is a way of keeping his wife alive, but from the graceful way he moves on heels we guess this isn’t his first time in garters. Claire’s motivation for encouraging David’s female alter-ego is hazy too: is she after a new BFF or a new lover? When Claire’s husband (Personnaz) gets in on the action, it becomes difficult to keep up.

But then that’s Ozon’s point: human sexuality is always in flux – go with it.

[Jamie Dunn]

19 Feb, GFT, 11am 20 Feb, GFT, 6.15pm

Director: Naji Abu Nowar Starring: Jacir Eid, Hussein Salameh, Jack Fox, Marji Audeh, Hassan Mutlag

Revenge, loss of innocence and the conflict between old and new permeate Naji Abu Nowar’s terrific debut, Theeb. Set in the desolate if beautiful landscape of Hijaz during the First World War, Nowar’s picture focuses on the titular Bedouin scamp (impressive newcomer Eid): first he and his brother Hussein (Salameh) act as guides to a British officer (Fox) and his companion (Audeh), then must adapt when things don’t quite go to plan.

Complementing those aforementioned and familiar thematic concerns, the director makes other nods to classic Westerns in his audio and visual cues, some more playful than others: “Say your prayers, Pilgrims,” threatens a bandit during a shootout, rather wonderfully.

And it’s brilliantly put together: one key scene scored by an onrushing steam train is particularly elegant, effortlessly correlating a burgeoning modernism and inevitable moral decay. That’s not to say this is pompous or too heavy at all – Theeb is a self-contained coming-of-age adventure at its core. A tense and really quite beautiful one to boot. [Chris Fyvie]

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

Appropriate Behaviour  Black Coal, Thin Ice  Pale Moon  Tales of the Grim Sleeper  White Bird in a Blizzard 

A Night at the Regal O2 ABC, 6pm The Sauchiehall Street gig venue turns back the clock to celebrate its former life as the ABC Regal with a night of sonic cinema.

The Grump GFT, 3.15pm Hollywood rag Variety tipped Finnish director Dome Karukoski for big things back in 2013. See if they were right with this comedy whose protagonist who makes Aki Kaurismäki’s characters look cheery.

Cinema-Going in Glasgow Through the Ages CCA, 6.30pm Glasgow adored cinema. She idolised it all out of proportion. If you get that cinematic reference, then this event charting Glasgow’s love affair with the movies is for you.

A self-contained coming-of-age adventure at its core

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19 Feb, GFT, 3.45pm | 20 Feb, GFT, 11pm

20 FEB H I G H LI G H T S

Stop Making Sense

Girls Behaving Badly It’s not in every debut that you find a bisexual Iranian woman angrily brandishing a strap-on in public – but you’ll find this and more in Desiree Akhavan’s boundary-pushing comedy Appropriate Behaviour.

“I

find your anger incredibly sexy – I hate so many things too,” Shirin (Desiree Akhavan) deadpans when first meeting her soon-to-be girlfriend Maxine (Rebecca Henderson). Shirin’s attempts at flirting are as awkward and misguided as nearly everything else she does in Appropriate Behaviour, but her guileless need to please can’t help but charm. Whether angrily and very publicly brandishing a strap-on (in her hands, that is) or spending a blind date boozing out of paper bags in the Brooklyn streets, Shirin’s life is laid bare emotionally and physically. She’s so plainly spoken that before roleplay she suggests to Maxine that they make their safe word “safe word” to avoid any misunderstandings. It could be said that Shirin is open to a fault – except when it comes to revealing her bisexuality to her Iranian immigrant parents. “[Shirin]’s incapable of being anything but genuine,” says writer-director Akhavan, who makes her feature debut after the cult success of online web series The Slope, which she co-created with ex-partner Ingrid Jungermann. “The title was a commentary on all these different subcultures she belongs to, the many identities of what it means to be a child of immigrants, or queer, or in New York even. To me, each one of those identities has their own very strict set of rules, of what’s appropriate, what’s inappropriate. The character of Shirin is someone who is incapable of being appropriate in any setting she finds herself in.” Disingenuous is a word that pops up often during our conversation, and it’s obvious that Akhavan considers it a dirty one. Still, Shirin’s (and Akhavan’s) self-effacing, almost kittenish vulnerability mitigates her inappropriate, at times painfully blunt attitude. In Appropriate Behaviour, Akhavan strikes the perfect comic balance between cheeky and needy without ever seeming precious or posed.

INTERVIEW:

Michelle Devereaux

The film’s storyline – which follows Shirin’s attempts to deal with an overbearing family and win back Maxine while tracing the arc of their relationship through flashbacks – bears more than a passing similarity to Akhavan’s own life.

While writing the screenplay, she was dealing with a breakup and the aftermath of having come out to her family.

Akhavan is herself the daughter of Iranian immigrants and openly bisexual, two pivotal facets of her life she rarely sees depicted onscreen. “Just the very fact that I’m an out bisexual and Iranian is completely inappropriate,” she says, insisting there’s a unique “neither here nor there” stigma attached to being bisexual. “We have depictions of gay couples and gay life and what it is to be gay, but that’s a very clear-cut division in the sand, you know? Gay people feel the way you feel about the opposite sex but with the same sex. [Bisexuality] is in the messy grey area. There’s also this weird implication of cheating and lying.” As for Iranian portrayals in Hollywood, she’s even more disheartened.

“There are very few depictions of Iranians, period. It’s like, Argo and Not Without My Daughter.”

Akhavan regularly tackles taboo subjects within the queer community, such as internalised homophobia, power dynamics in queer relationships, trans men versus butch lesbians, and lesbians who start playing for the other team.

The tagline for The Slope, a hilariously irreverent takedown of queer Brooklyn hipsters, is “superficial, homophobic lesbians”; one of the shorts even features a scathing parody of the near-universally beloved ‘It Gets Better’ anti-suicide campaign. (“Don’t kill yourself,” Akhavan counsels, “because suicide is super gay.”)

That brashness, though it may be intrinsic to Akhavan’s button-pushing proclivities, feels a little toned down in Appropriate Behaviour. But there’s still plenty of the blissfully bitter mixed in with the sweet. Ultimately, Akhavan says, she’s interested in redefining the parameters of what’s acceptable: “The more people who come out, the more people who demand respect for themselves, the more the culture bends to them,” she insists. Her beguilingly awkward take on boundary pushing certainly demands respect, even as her fumbling, funny alter ego suffers from a lack of it.

Stop Making Sense GFT, 11.15pm Jonathan Demme’s best films centre on kooks and in David Byrne he found his perfect subject. This isn’t just a concert movie – it’s a celebration of the alchemy of a band, of creation.

Square Legs, Round Bowls Stereo, 7pm The most mysteriously titled event in the GFF programme, this is a night of new commissions by artists whose work straddles the mediums of music and visual art.

Jodorowsky’s Dune GFT, 4pm What’s the greatest film never made? Tarkovsky’s proposed Hamlet? Darren Aronofsky’s Batman? Our money’s on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune.

GFF have the next best thing: this incredible doc unearthing the wild auteur’s sci-fi vision.

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

Jamie Dunn

Designer

Sigrid Schmeisser

Illustration

Louise Lockhart

Digital

Peter Simpson

Subeditor

Will Fitzpatrick

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

The Skinny Short Film Showcase Thursday 12 March | 7.15pm, CCA, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow FREE ENTRY: tickets available on the day from CCA box office

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