With cinemas open again, we can hope that the yearly film festival circuit can find its feet again. The 2020 edition of Glasgow Film Festival was the last vestige of genuine normality before everything went haywire, and although operating on a hybrid basis this year, it’s great to be anticipating the in-person experience of a major film festival once more. With tickets now officially on sale, our film editor Kevin Ibbotson-Wight has picked 10 films that have caught his eye from the extensive programme.
Charline Bourgeois-Taquet’s debut feature is described as being; ‘pitched between the worlds of Greta Gerwig and Eric Rohmer’, suggesting a modern update of the great French New Wave director’s Comedies and Proverbs period. The underrated Anaïs Demoustier (Elles, The New Girlfriend) stars as an aimless young woman who may find something meaningful with a successful writer (Valeria Bruni Tadeschi). Whether Bourgeois-Taquet finds a unique voice remains to be seen, but all the elements are promising, and nobody does romantic whimsy like the French. All the elements are in place and its place in competition in the Audience Award suggests a potential crowd pleaser.
Veteran provocateur Paul Verhoeven is much more of a known quantity. When even the dubious pleasures of Showgirls are receiving critical reappraisal, there’s never been a better time for the Octogenarian anarchist to release a piece of high-end nunsploitation. When young abbess Benedetta (Virginie Efira, An Impossible Love) begins to exhibit the signs of stigmata she appears to have been divinely chosen. But the church is unlikely to approve of her relationship with a young novice. Benedetta has been tearing up the festivals for a while now, and with more content warnings than you can shake a rosary at it’s surely a must-see for everyone who misses the heady days of The Devils.
Infinitely more tasteful are the elegant films of Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives). Following his last feature, A Quiet Passion’s take on Emily Dickinson, Davies turns to the life of another poet, Siegfried Sassoon. The great war poet is played at different stages of his life by Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi as he struggles with survivor’s guilt from his time in the trenches, and his identity as a gay man in the early 20th century. An impeccable pedigree and the harrowing, but ever-relevant subject matter suggest this will be a sombre but rewarding experience.
Current arthouse favourite Mia Hansen-Løve evokes the spirit of an old master in Bergman Island. Filmmaker couple Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs) and Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) arrive on Fårö, the Swedish island that was the long-term home of Ingmar Bergman, to work on new projects. One of these projects unfolds within the film as young couple Mia Wasikowska (Stoker) and Anders Danielsen Lie (The Worst Person in the World) also come to the island. Playing on Bergman’s documented life and loves as well as Hansen-Løve’s relationship with former partner Olivier Assayas, Bergman Island looks like chin-strokey cineaste heaven.
Jenna Cato Bass’ Good Madam examines the lingering ghost of Apartheid in this psychodrama fuelled by race and class. A young woman (Chumisa Cosa) moves in with her estranged mother (Nosipho Mtebe) following the death of her grandmother. Her mother is a live-in carer for ‘Madam’, a catatonic white woman living in the wealthy suburbs of Cape Town. Can the family bonds heal, or will the spectre of ‘Madam’ sever the link completely? A brutal allegory it may be, but a well-constructed psychological horror is always welcome, and an 18 certificate suggests a full-blooded affair that won’t shirk the tougher aspects of its country’s recent legacy.
Algeria’s submission for the international feature Oscar is a furious drama about French colonial atrocities in the country during the Second World War. Djaffar Gacem depicts the increasing tensions between French settlers and the local population, which led to the Sétif and Guelma massacre. It may be lesser-known episode of that conflict’s bloodshed on these shores, but Heliopolis ensures engagement with an approach that hinges on familiar tensions between Islamic and Western ideologies within the greater context of the unbalanced relationship between colonisers and colonised.
Call My Agent! star Laure Calamy, fresh from her Cesar award for best actress for My Donkey, My Lover & I, takes the lead role in the debut feature from Cécile Ducrocq. Her Way sees Calamy’s sex worker Marie determined to improve the life of her ungrateful son (Nissim Renard). His only passion is cooking, so Marie take increasingly drastic measures to pay for his place at a prestigious, and obscenely expensive, cookery school. Calamy is a delightful presence in almost everything she appears, and Ducrocq’s film paints a less bleak portrait of sex work than we’re used to seeing, instead focussing on celebrating an independent woman. It’ll be interesting to see how the sex work/ independence circle gets squared, given the complex questions around that subject.
Justin Kurzel is no stranger to depicting the darker edge of his home country of Australia. His debut Snowtown is arguably one of the most disturbing films of the century so far. In Nitram he turns his attention to the events that led up to the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania. The film has already taken best film and all acting prizes at the AACTA awards, including Caleb Landry Jones in the leading role of ‘Nitram’, based on the perpetrator, Martin Bryant. Jones also won best actor at the 2021 Cannes film festival. As the film caused controversy in Tasmania, with some questioning whether it should have been made at all, it’s bound to be compared Gus Van Sant‘s Elephant, and to Paul Greengrass‘ 22 July and Erik Poppe‘s Utøya: July 22, the two films made about the Norwegian mass murder committed by Anders Breivik.
Kirill Sokolov‘s debut Why Don’t You Just Die! was one of the most enjoyable genre films of recent years with its pitch-black humour matched by exuberant bloodletting. So his second film No Looking Back is likely to be awaited with great anticipation. Sokolov again leans towards twisted humour in this tale of Olga (Viktoriya Korotkova), newly released from prison. She intends to reunite with her 10-year-old daughter Masha (Sofia Krugova). However, Masha’s grandmother has been the girl’s principal caregiver, and isn’t prepared to give up the girl so easily. Billed as a ‘black comedy with a heart of gold’, it’s likely to be a little less nihilistic than its predecessor. However, it’s still very likely to be a bracing and bruising affair.
Whatever your opinion on arch cinematic agitator Gaspar Noé, any new project is going to be worth a watch, even if it’s just outrage fuel. The director of Irreversible and Climax is turning his nightmarish visual sensibilities to the tough subject of dementia. Evocatively dedicated to ‘all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts’, Vortex sees an elderly couple (played by Françoise Lebrun and, interestingly, Dario Argento, a man with his own extensive portfolio of vivid imagery as director of Suspiria, Deep Red, and Tenebrae among many others) are confined to their Paris apartment as their mental and physical capacities continue to degrade. Noé’s style seems tailor-made for the depiction of a fragmented mental state. If he can also get to the heart of his subject, Vortex may be the best of his career.
Glasgow Film Festival takes place at Glasgow Film Theatre, with selected films available for streaming, from Wed 2 to Sun 13 Mar 2022