To Do List №10 September 2020

52 minute read

 

 

  It's September, and we've got that "Back-to-school" feeling. Do you remember preparing for this... buying backpacks, pencils and folders, empty binders, the promise of being MORE ORGANISED this year! If we were lucky- new outfits, new shoes, new haircut. The anticipation of new friends and experiences, perhaps a new romance was all so buzzy and amazing. As we grow up we lose that imaginative moment in time, and the electricity of something social and academic to look forward to. 

 

Now most of us work year round, so all we have to wait for are moments like Halloween, Easter or the end of year holidays. I think it's important to try and plan that feeling for ourselves outside of the government holidays or school setting! For this issue of the To-Do list is a study of sorts, homework to inspire the mind. A back to school moment for grown ups using the magic of cinema. Enjoy!

 

 

first off, it's Virgo Season, your advice is from https://www.moonomens.com/virgo-season-2020/

 

Virgo season 2020 is starting: self improvement and healing will be the main themes. The Sun enters earthy Virgo on August 22, at 11:45 AM EST and the cosmic energy is going to ground significantly.

 

The shift is palpable: after the expansiveness of Leo season, we are likely to feel the need to introspect, reflect, and spend more time alone. As Virgo season begins, we will naturally shift our focus from the external world to our inner state: this will be particularly evident after Mars turns retrograde, on September 9.

 

During Virgo season, many of us may feel the need to write long to-do lists and implement practical actions to improve our health, diet, well-being, and work-life balance. Our ability to focus is likely to skyrocket if we use this energy wisely: we have the chance to make significant progress in our work, in our personal lives, and in our healing journey.

 

Virgo: Ongoing Self-Improvement

 

Virgo can be considered a transitional archetype: it represents the shift from a phase of evolution focused mainly on the self (from Aries to Leo) and the inclusion of other people in the picture (from Libra until Pisces).

For this reason, this sign has been traditionally associated with service to others: we learn to relate with people from a position of equality only through Libra. Learning to be humble and to serve is part of the function of Virgo, but it is not everything we are supposed to learn through this archetype. Its real purpose can be easily distorted if we see Virgo only through this lens.

The deepest mission of Virgo is committing to a process of ongoing self-improvement. Through Virgo, we strive to constantly get better, to develop the qualities and the skills we need to be able to relate as equals to those we look up to.

Virgo has a strong correlation with our physical body, in particular with our digestive system and with our diet: it is the sign related to health, healing, well-being, and wellness.

During Virgo season, we may notice we are developing hypersensitivity to our environment, or to what we eat: if we don’t honor our sensitivity, our necessity to rest and wind out, our need to eat healthily, to live in a quiet and neat space, we may be prone to all kinds of issues related to stress and overworking.

Virgo season represents an invitation to be careful about what we consume, not only in terms of food but also on a more subtle level: the information we take in, the people and the energies we surround ourselves with.

Self-sacrificing to the point of masochism, neglecting our own needs and desires, feeling guilty when we put ourselves first, or when we don’t help others in some way are huge shadows of Virgo. They represent distortions of the real mission of this sign we have to be aware of and try to keep in check during the upcoming weeks.

These attitudes can be exacerbated to the point of regularly doing too much for other people and too little for ourselves. Through Virgo archetype, we learn that sometimes helping others can have the opposite effect, as it may prevent them from helping themselves and learning their lessons.

Because of their need and desire for continuous self-improvement, Virgos are famous for being quite critical towards themselves and others. During Virgo season, we may lose contact with the awareness of the perfection of the present moment, with the unconditional acceptance of ourselves and of the way things are now, a theme related to the opposite sign, Pisces.

We are going to feel the conflict between these contrasting forces as Mercury and the Sun in Virgo are going to oppose Neptune in Pisces on August 30 and September 11, shortly before and after the Full Moon in Pisces coming up on September 2.

 

One of my favourite ways to grow and find deep inspiration is through film- foreign film to be exact. For that reason I'm assigning many more movies than usual this month! In my opinion, the best foreign, female led films of all time. I usually am drawn to female directors and leads, I feel a better connection to the stories. These are all incredibly inspiring and mind opening, I highly recommend to watch as many of these as you can. I haven't included ones I've recommended in the past such as Swimming Pool, My Life As A Dog, and Adrift but if you didn't watch those I'd add them to the list! I hope you will truly walk away from each one of these feeling wide awake and inspired for fall.

1. Three Colors

 The Red White and Blue Trilogy (3 films)

 

For some cinephiles, reconsidering Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colours trilogy is like finding an old photo of yourself in 90s clothes and a 90s haircut. This series of three conceptually interlocking movies – his last work, in fact, before he died following heart surgery in 1996 – was by far Kieslowski's biggest international hit, helped in this country by poster campaigns featuring the luminous stars of each: Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy and Irène Jacob, a gorgeous young aristocracy of French cinema. The films were co-written by Krzysztof Piesiewicz, a lawyer by training; now a parliamentarian and somewhat conservative figure in Poland.

And, yes, there is a definite touch of dinner-party trendiness that clings to the memory of these movies now, together with a touch of critical doubt, a suspicion that the Three Colours were contrived, over-determined, self-conscious and slow. When the third of these films, Three Colours: Red, was beaten for the Palme D'Or at the 1994 Cannes film festival by Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, it was a real market correction for a certain type of high arthouse cinema.

Well, the bygone hype that once surrounded the Three Colours may have dated. But watched again sympathetically, the movies themselves stand up, not as the dreamy conversation-pieces of a thousand studenty parties – with blokes pretending to like them to impress their dates – but as an operatic triptych, a dramatic cine-poem of intense strangeness, indulgent and confident, set somewhere which looks like the real world, but isn't.

The trilogy shifts gear from high tragedy to low comedy to intense drama in a world of happenstance and coincidence: it is variously sentimental, grandiose, sexy, eerie and uncanny. The movies are shot through with moments of bizarre black comedy, anxiety and cynicism about Europe itself. With the Eurozone and the European ideal in such crisis, now is an interesting moment to watch the Three Colours again.

The films are Three Colours: Blue (1993), Three Colours: White (1994) and Three Colours: Red (1994), notionally colour-schemed in the manner of the French flag, and – again, notionally – structured around the classic themes of the French republic: liberty, equality and brotherhood. With a little effort, the relevance of each can be detected in each film, but as Kieslowski himself cheerfully conceded, these concepts were there because the production funding was French. The real themes of the trilogy are more disparate, more chaotic, less high-minded, and far more interesting: the unending torture of love, the inevitability of deceit, the fascination of voyeurism and the awful potency of men's fear and loathing of women. To throw everything away, including one's very identity, and start again – that is another powerful, recurrent motif.

They are about entirely different people in different cities, though there are little overlapping, disorientating touches in which the leading character of one film is glimpsed in cameo in another, a technique which effectively points up the artifice of everything that is being presented on screen. (Lucas Belvaux's Trilogy (2002) was similar, but the Venn-diagram overlaps were much closer, and the three films more intimately interconnected.)

 

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/nov/10/have-three-colours-faded

 

2. Shoplifters

 

“I don’t portray people or make movies where viewers can easily find hope,” said Mr. Kore-eda, during an interview in his studio in the Shibuya neighborhood of Tokyo. “Some people want to see characters who grow and become stronger over the course of a film. But I don’t want to make such a movie.”

 

"One day, coming home on a freezing night after a hard day stealing from supermarkets, Osamu and Shota come across a little girl of perhaps six or seven shivering in the cold. Impulsively, Osamu decides to take the poor homeless little waif in for a few days. She appears to have marks on her body consistent with abuse and she wets the bed: another classic sign. Osamu’s wicked old heart is evidently melted, and he says that they will keep this little girl, Juri (Miyu Sasaki), and train her up in the ways of shoplifting, which include making odd little hand gestures to your thief-partner to indicate when and what you intend to steal. And this despite the TV news broadcasts about this little girl having gone missing.

But it is not just a question of Osamu finding redemption in doing good, nor is it a simple irony in Osamu’s crook-family fulfilling the function of the social services and the caring state – the state that would disapprove of and indeed prosecute Osamu if it knew what he was up to. The point is that Osamu has, in his amoral way, stolen Juri in just the same way as he steals everything else. And it isn’t the first time he’s done it. His ambiguously benevolent abduction of Juri is part of a larger pattern of concealment in which the whole family unit is involved. Nothing is what it seems.

It is a movie made up of delicate brushstrokes: details, moments, looks and smiles. Shoplifters is the story of a group of frightened, damaged people who have made common cause with each other, banded together under the convenience flag of family, under the radar of the law, making the best of things from day to day, until they realise they have been making the worst of things. A rich, satisfying and deeply intelligent film."

 

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/21/shoplifters-review-hirokazu-kore-eda

 

3. Mustang

 

Not too long after the film Mustang was released in Turkey last October, its director and co-writer, Deniz Gamze Ergüven, was interviewed by the Nobel prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk. “He was curious about how I’d lived through its reception,” she says, with a characteristically wide-eyed smile. “Well, I was gloomy. I explained how I’d been attacked. I’d had some very aggressive, negative critiques there [in Turkey], the kind of thing I hadn’t received anywhere else. So I loved his response. First of all, he said that lots of people around him had seen it, and liked it. Then he said: ‘But you will be attacked.’ And he explained why. After all, he knows: he’s had plenty of violent criticism himself. ‘Don’t get depressed,’ he told me. What he was saying was: keep going.”

 

Ergüven is certainly doing that. Mustang, nominated for best foreign language film at the 2015 Oscars and the winner of four César awards in France, has opened countless new doors for its director and, as a result, her appetite for work is more voracious than ever. Even so, she finds it hard to imagine working in Turkey again. Her second feature, which she is shortly to start shooting, is an English-language picture set in Los Angeles at the time of the 1992 riots. “I detested the response [to Mustang] in Turkey, and so I withdrew from it.”

Not that such a turning away is a new experience for her: “My father was a diplomat in the 80s, at a time when there were many assassinations, when the country had problems with every one of its neighbours, when there was a permanent sense of conflict. Every once in a while, I do feel like taking a break and going to the other side of the world.”

 

The extraordinary Mustang is set in rural Turkey. It tells the story of five orphaned sisters, who live with their grandmother in a large and remote house. The family is not poor, but it is conservative, and when the girls are seen by neighbours splashing around in the sea on the shoulders of a group of local boys – the gossip is that they have been “pleasuring themselves” on the boys – an uncle steps in, telling his mother (the girls’ grandmother) that things must change. The family’s respectability is at stake.

 

The sisters, having first been beaten for their misdemeanour, are removed from school, and thereafter kept like prisoners at home, where they are taught to cook and to sew the frumpish “shit-coloured” clothes with which they must now cover their bodies. One by one, it seems, they are to be married off, whether they like it or not. The older girls can do little to resist. But Lale, the youngest, is rebellious and courageous and increasingly determined not to submit. Some critics have likened the film, with its dream-like intensity and mostly female cast, to Sophia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides. Its director, though, thinks it’s more like Escape from Alcatraz – with frocks.

 

Where did it come from, this story? Ergüven, talking from her home in Paris, says she had long had an abstract desire to tackle the question of what it is to be a woman in Turkey. “But it only became concrete when one of my cousins married. Everything that happened around the wedding was beautiful, synergetic, especially the vividness of the young Turkish people who were present at the celebrations.”

 

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/may/15/deniz-gamze-erguven-mustang-turkey-interview-rachel-cooke

 

4. Atlantique

 

"You hear that there's a film about Senegal, you hear that there's a film about men drowning crossing the Mediterranean; right away you expect a certain kind of film," Rich says. "But that's not what this film is — not at all. No, no, no. This is a film that is about magic. It's about good magic and black magic. ... It's about the in-between spaces, between here and there, between Europe and Africa, between those who are alive and those who are dead, between the past and the present and in a way between documentary and fiction."

 

"In interviews, Diop has said she was inspired by the djinns of Islamic culture, supernatural spirits that can possess human forms. An early scene in the film introduces the concept. A subset of djinns specific to Senegal are “faru rab,” or lover spirits, which are spirits of men who take possession of women’s bodies at night. They also are believed to sometimes communicate with loved ones, and punish those who wronged them. In the film, they represent the young men who left and died at sea.

As the majority of the population in Senegal are Muslim, this was undoubtedly Diop’s way of incorporating local cultural folklore into the film. But the concept is fascinating on many levels. The idea of men possessing women’s bodies, and the very direct way Diop dramatizes and visualizes it, is a literal representation of the way men control and police women’s bodies. Diop saturates her film in symbols of the life options, or lack thereof, for a working class woman in Senegal: Ada’s arranged marriage, the way her friends fawn over the freedom she will enjoy as a rich man’s wife, and a harrowing trip to the doctor to check that her hymen is still intact — all paint the picture quite vividly. But the subversive gender dynamics at play also provide a fascinating backdrop. By using traditional folklore as a major plot point in her film, Diop both honors Senegalese culture and gently exposes its queer implications. In other parlances, the idea of a man’s spirit in a woman’s body has often been used to describe the way a transgender person might feel. This is certainly not the original intention of the “faru rab,” which is more often used as a way to dissuade women from dressing provocatively for fear that they will become possessed

 

The possession myth also situates “Atlantics” in the contemporary genre canon, and all that it has grown to encompass in recent years. While the film is a far cry from “The Exorcist,” “Paranormal Activity,” or other classics of the demonic possession horror, it rides the line of the genre just enough to be considered a cousin — if a distant one. While possession films usually end with the possessed person going mad and terrorizing their loved ones, Diop is gentle with her characters. In her final sex scene with Souleiman’s spirit, Ada leaves with a sense of peace and resolution. Souleiman, and his chosen human body, is gone in the morning, suggesting his spirit is also at rest.

Diop’s handling of the migration narrative from a feminist perspective, all within the gorgeous package of a haunting mood piece and stunning feature debut, deserves all the praise it has garnered. The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes, was bought up quickly by Netflix, and has been chosen as Senegal’s official submission for the Best International Feature Academy Award. In its poeticism and spiritual roots, the film also plumbs the depths of its source myths to unearth a dazzling patchwork of ideas about gender, sexuality, and cultural mores."

 

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/11/atlantics-netflix-mati-diop-feminist-gender-1202193087/

 

5. Eat Drink Man Woman

 

  The title comes from one of the Confucian classics, describing the basic human desires and the need to accept them as natural. The film’s subtitles translate the maxim as, “Eat, drink, man, woman. Basic human desires. Can’t avoid them.” And Old Chu, the hero (Sihung Lung), complains, “All my life, every day, that’s all I’ve ever done. It pisses me off. Is that all there is to life?” I suppose Ang Lee and Chu might answer, Yes, and that’s enough. 

    The title has no connectives and mixes verbs and nouns, and that's okay in Chinese grammar. Critics call his first three movies his “father knows best” films. In them, he wanted to make the best things of Chinese culture available to world-wide audiences. He wants Americans in particular to appreciate the cuisine, martial arts, tai chi, but above all, the basic Confucian value of li, translated as ritual or propriety, and associated with the centering role of the father in the family.

 

 The story centres on revered Taiwanese master chef Mr. Chu (Lung) the cantankerous, widowed father of three single daughters. The youngest, Jia-Ning (Yu-Wan Wang), works in a fast-food burger franchise. The eldest, lonely and religious schoolteacher Jie-Jen (Yang), is expected to look after their father for life. While in the middle, beautiful, resentful Jie Chien (Wu) is a high-flying executive eager to break away from the family and her father's fastidious, ritualised meals.

Food preparation is a central metaphor in the film, an elaborate act of love that substitutes for conversation, leaving the family dinners (maddeningly untouched) as fraught with unexpressed matters of import as in families in conflict the world over. Meanwhile, the troubled principals are engaged outside the home in separate trials of frustration, desire and romance that produce a whole series of bombshell revelations back at the dinner table.

 

6. My Summer Of Love

 

 

Set in a radiant West Yorkshire, “My Summer” (loosely adapted from a novel by Helen Cross) makes do with minimal plot. Two sixteen-year beauties at loose ends – spunky working class Mona and posh poseur Tamsin — form an intense friendship and fall in love. Their first meeting is stunningly conveyed through twinned shots of Mona’s eye, and the eye of Tamsin’s white steed rearing over her like in some 19th century romance. Casting a shadow over their rapturous summer is Mona’s older brother Phil, a former criminal and born-again Christian. Played with a feral volatility by the magnetic Paddy Considine (of “Last Resort“), Phil has converted the family pub into a spiritual center and is intent on mounting a giant cross on a hill overlooking town. The drama is triangulated when the Nietzche-spouting Tamsin (“God is dead,” she drolly informs Phil), is tempted to test his religious convictions.

 

But a bare-bones synopsis in no way conveys how gorgeously this film lives and breathes on screen — quite literally, feels blown forward through time, even in its fades and absences. Critics have seen in the film’s DNA elements of “Heavenly Creatures” (an influence the director vehemently disowns). Certainly, Tamsin, showing Mona through her luxurious Georgian manse and inducting her into a world of privilege and culture, echos Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder. Though perhaps the film’s manner comes closest to the dreamy ruminative rhythms of a “Ballade” by Pawelikowski’s compatriot, Frederic Chopin.

 

https://www.indiewire.com/2005/06/pawel-pawelikowski-exploring-the-unreal-and-the-dreamlike-in-my-summer-of-love-78183/

 

 

7. Black Girl

 

 

The Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène, habitually described as the father of African cinema, was a lifelong critic of patriarchy. An avowedly political artist — he had been a labor organizer and a novelist before turning to filmmaking — Mr. Sembène grounded his attacks on colonial oppression and post-independence corruption and compromise in a feminism that could be both subtle and blunt.

 

“When women progress, society progresses,” he remarked late in his career — he died in 2007 — and the suffering and stoicism of women figure in all phases of his work. His penultimate feature, “Faat-Kiné” (2001), is the portrait of a defiantly independent entrepreneur in Dakar, Senegal, a single mother who refuses the melodramatic options of pity or shame that would have been her conventional cinematic fate. Mr. Sembène’s final movie, the indelible “Moolaadé” (2004), followed a group of women in a rural village organizing to stop the traditional practice of genital cutting. The empathy and the radicalism that animate those films were present much earlier, in “Black Girl,” his first feature, which begins a weeklong run at BAM Rose Cinemas on Wednesday before its release on DVD by Criterion.

“Black Girl,” which turns 50 this year and has been restored, is one of those works of art that is at once powerfully of its moment and permanently contemporary. Sixty-five minutes long, filmed in a handful of locations in narrow-screen black-and-white, with sound dubbed in afterward, the movie can be regarded, among other things, as a masterpiece of thrift. Mr. Sembène, working with the French cinematographer Christian Lacoste and a small, nonprofessional cast, had the ingenuity — the vision — to turn material limitations to artistic advantage. The unsynchronized dialogue, which seems to float above the heads of the characters rather than emerging from their mouths, gives the action a dreamlike quality and infuses an objectively grim, realistic story with poetry and longing.

 

His predicament is not unlike that faced by Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), the title character of “Black Girl,” whose daily routines of drudgery and tedium drive her into depression and worse. But while both characters are representative of a social condition — the poverty and injustice that fester in Senegal after independence; the inequalities that persist between white French citizens and their former colonial subjects — they do not seem like puppets in a political passion play.

 

On the contrary, the force of Mr. Sembène’s art — the sheer beauty that is the most striking feature of his early films — lies in his humanism. The task “Black Girl” sets itself is not just to note the facts of Diouana’s life but also to assert her visibility, to ensure that she is seen. Several years before the phrase “black is beautiful” entered the lexicon of American racial politics, “Black Girl” insisted as much from its very opening frames. Ms. Diop, dressed in a white polka-dot dress and turban, moves through a world dominated by blinding, literal whiteness.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/18/movies/ousmane-sembenes-black-girl-turns-50.html

 

8. Sister

 

 

In Ursula Meier’s “Sister,” the talented Lea Seydoux plays Louise, a complex maternal figure to a young boy named Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein). Though most know the beautiful, wayward Louise as Simon’s older sister, she regularly leaves him alone without a parent, finding affection in the arms of a man and leaving the boy to make ends meet hustling stolen skiing goods. Seydoux had hesitations about playing such an upsetting character, and as she told us in an interview this week, she initially found the character, “Cruel. She’s completely selfish.”

Where Seydoux found a common ground with the character was in her youth. “She is a kid,” Seydoux explains, “so that’s why maybe you can forgive her behavior. I spoke with Ursula for hours, saying, I don’t know why she’s so cruel. But the kid can be cruel as well, he’s very tyrannical. When you understand it’s about two kids, it becomes less [emotionally] violent.”

 

“I’m a sensitive person, so [this story] has an influence on me,” Seydoux explains. “And I’m okay with that. I was focused on the fact that she was the sister. It’s true that in the second part, she becomes more of a woman. A responsible person.” But Seydoux made sure to never lose sight of the age of both these characters, who only barely support each other. “They are like kids, so they’re not conscious of real life. They live in their own world, but they always find a way to feed themselves.”

 

https://www.indiewire.com/2012/10/lea-seydoux-on-the-emotional-difficulties-of-sister-the-excitement-of-starring-in-a-more-faithful-beauty-and-the-beast-105366/

 

9. Show Me Love (Fucking Åmål)

 

With a title like “Fucking Åmål,” Lukas Moodysson‘s debut feature was bound to garner attention. But the title alone cannot explain how successful the film has been. Now called “Show Me Love” in America, the film broke box office records across Scandinavia — even beating that big-budget movie about the very big boat. After playing numerous festivals including Berlin, where it won the Teddy, and the recently concluded Flanders fest where it won the Student Jury Prize. The Swedish language film has been sold to over 20 territories and is currently playing in the U.S., care of Strand Releasing.

 

Calling “Show Me Love” a coming of age film is like calling “Star Wars” sci-fi: Yes it is, but it’s also much more. “Show Me Love” is about two very different girls — one a suicidal dyke-in-training and the other an angst-ridden straight girl — who find they have more in common than mutual animosity towards their small, home town, Åmål. What gives their personal drama such resonance is the nuanced backdrop Moodysson creates of high school life in the ’90s. Whether it’s the cliques, bullies, boredom or dreams of escape, the characters and situations are recognizably real.

 

https://www.indiewire.com/1999/10/interview-from-fucking-ml-to-show-me-love-scandinavian-smash-comes-to-america-82011/

 

 

10. We are The Best

 

Add one more thing to the list of the world’s cutest epiphenomena, alongside panda cubs, kissing otters and Ronan Farrow: 13-year-old all-girl Swedish punk bands. Based on a graphic novel written by his wife Coco, which itself was based on her own experiences of growing up as a teenage punkette in Stockholm in the 1980s, Lukas Moodysson’s We Are the Best! is warm, exuberant and almost absurdly catchy. It's the movie equivalent of one of those summer pop songs that drifts out of shop fronts and car windows – you can’t help humming along to it and it leaves you grinning like a fool.

 

It’s 1982, and the Human League is playing in the suburbs of Stockholm. Two school friends, Bobo (Mira Barkhammer), and Klara (Mira Grosin), decide to form a punk band when the school’s resident heavy metal group fail to put their names down on the rehearsal room roster. Admittedly, Bobo and Klara only seem to have one song, about hating PE class, called Hate the Sport (“The world is a morgue and you're watching Björn Borg”)

 

Also, they don’t know to how play any instruments. “Do drums have chords?” asks Bobo, bespectacled and boyish in a chunky square-patterned sweater. Klara is a little more promising, a blithe provocateur with a pixieish mohican, even if it is kept up with her brother’s help. “Is that egg?” asks one of the school’s resident blondes, one of a pair with matching perms and lip gloss, who chew their gum in tandem. 

 

Undeterred, Bobo and Klara seek out a third member for their group and sign up Christian, friendless Hedvig, after seeing her play classical guitar at a school talent show. “We’ll influence her away from God,” plots Klara, but in fact something like the opposite happens. Hedvig is soon introducing them to the alien concept of chords and harmony (“What the hell is that?”) while her lilting rendition of a punk anthem has them squealing in delight.

 

The film repeatedly pulls off the same trick: channelling punk’s sneer in the direction of more charitable embrace, Moodysson has fashioned a sweet, spirited misfit anthem, a spirited ode to anarchy, teen spirit and home-made haircuts. He may be the only film director in whom the legacies of Ingmar Bergman and ABBA might be said to be, if not reconciled, then put on the same page: hawk-eyed observation of his fellow humans duking it out with the equally acute desire to join them when they bum-rush the dancefloor.

 

11. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

 

Deneuve was just 20 when she made this film, her first major success, and her elegant, almost ethereal presence is still a potent screen icon.

Also a visual knockout is the film’s wall-to-wall color scheme, which presents a world where almost everything has taken on the most wonderful pastel hues. Among the things that are so colored are the characters’ clothes, the walls and furnishings of their apartments, even the very umbrellas that come out frequently in this very rainy town.

 

Yet “Umbrellas of Cherbourg” has none of the pastel fakery of something like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Demy and cinematographer Jean Rabier took pains to make this a nonartificial world, anchoring the film’s pure visual poetry to the specifics of urban reality.

 

Perhaps the film’s biggest gamble was Demy’s mandate that all dialogue be sung. That’s right, there’s no periodic stopping and breaking into song, à la “Singin’ in the Rain,” every single “oui” and “non” and all the words in between are sung as if this were some kind of cockeyed opera. People must have thought that Demy was out of his mind when he had this idea, but it continues to work brilliantly.

 

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-xpm-2014-mar-13-la-et-mn-umbrellas-cherbourg-review-story.html

 

12. Maria Full of Grace

 

  Catalina Sandino Moreno was 2005's dark horse Oscar nominee for best actress in this movie from writer-director Joshua Marston - losing out to Hilary Swank. She is a first-time actress playing Maria, a dirt-poor Colombian teenager, pregnant by a feckless and uncaring boyfriend, who is offered undreamed-of riches to be a drug mule, bringing narcotics into Kennedy airport from Bogotá. Thousands of dollars can be hers. All she has to do is swallow 70 sachets of condom-wrapped heroin, each approximately as long as a fat tampon, and hope that one or more does not split open inside her stomach on the flight over.

 

 A film with this truly horrible image, and this title, might appear to offer a excoriating parody of the sacrament and the Roman Catholic church, with Maria as the hyper-contemporary sacrificial lamb. Perhaps that is tacitly what the movie is doing. But, though there is one shot showing Maria at prayer, the church is not obviously indicted as part of any great geopolitical hypocrisy; neither, conversely, is it shown standing up to the drug barons and the hard men who exploit South America's working poor. The United States itself, whose slavering thirst for drugs drives the whole connection, is also notably exempt from criticism, and there is even a stirring speech from one respectable Colombian immigrant in New York saying how proud she was to receive her first American pay-cheque and she can't imagine going back to the old country.

 

In fact, it is difficult to see exactly what larger moral or political framework is being built around the terrible story of Maria and her friends who are caught up in a business which dehumanises them - as the job description candidly announces. Everything hinges on the central experience of Moreno and her terrifying plane journey. Her performance is indeed outstanding: subtle, understated, passionate and quietly defiant when she quits her demeaning "straight" job: sweatshop work removing the thorns from roses intended for export to the US. Symbolism is certainly at work there.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_Film_of_the_week/0,,1445109,.html

 

 

13. Things to Come

 

   Is there a more commanding screen presence than Isabelle Huppert? From the spiralling American madness of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate to the diverse demands of Claire Denis’s African-set colonial parable White Material and Brillante Mendoza’s Philippines hostage drama Captive, Huppert has proved ready to rise to any challenge. Claude Chabrol famously cast her as a teenage murderer in 1978’s Violette Nozièreand a covert poisoner in 2000’s Merci pour le chocolat, while Chris Honoré called upon her to tackle the taboo subject of incest in Ma mère. Most famously, in Michael Haneke’s unflinching The Piano Teacher, she took cinemagoers to the very edge of a masochistic abyss, with harrowing results.

 

Despite her reputation for going the extra mile, however, Huppert’s true talent is for understatement, conveying complex conflict through restrained physical gesture, a quality too often misdescribed as “cool”. In Joachim Trier’s recent Louder Than Bombs, she was a war photographer who dominated the drama in absentia, a ghostly presence in a fractured family. Now, in this Berlin Silver Bear winner from Mia Hansen-Løve – writer-director of such intimate films as Father of My Children and Goodbye First Love – Huppert delivers a note-perfect warm and wry performance as a philosophy teacher whose life is defined by ideas rather than circumstance, a woman of substance – intellectual, emotional, financial – who faces unexpected constraints and freedoms when the assumed certainties of her domestic life unravel.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/sep/04/things-to-come-review-mia-hansen-love-isabelle-huppert

 

14. Monsoon Wedding

 

  Monsoon Wedding is aptly titled. Though it’s set during the rainy season, it’s also a downpour of emotional situations and stylistic types. This convergence of various conventions and odd juxtapositions bears some resemblance to a traditional product of Bollywood, where random interjections and breaks in tone are customary, if not expected. Bollywood films often have a sense of heightened stimulation through a multitude of plots, colorful asides, random music numbers, and shifts in emotion, making every scene something new and unexpected, and thus infectiously watchable. Then again, Monsoon Wedding also deserves comparisons to Western wedding tapestries, such as Robert Altman’s A Wedding (1978) or Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married (2007)—or even the extended opening sequences of The Godfather (1972) or The Deer Hunter (1978). The sheer number of characters and events going on over the film’s four days of festivities allows Nair to examine every character within the expansive drama, giving them dimension through her empathetic observations. Her approach is such that, despite the evident influence of Bollywood, she ushers the material along with a social consciousness that feels removed from conventional Indian cinema. 

 

Nair’s roots belong to the documentary. After studying acting and filmmaking at Harvard, she made documentary shorts about social issues affecting modern-day India: she addressed the stigmatized profession of erotic dancing in India Cabaret (1985), which exposed the double standard of seemingly respectable men who attend a striptease show but later demean the women performers; she also madeChildren of a Desired Sex (1987), about the practice of aborting female fetuses in favor of a male child. Her debut feature, Salaam Bombay! (1988), charted the lives of underprivileged children on the streets of Bombay, earning her an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. She continued to inject a streak of realism into her subject matter with Mississippi Masala (1991), which begins with Uganda’s anti-Asian policy that forces several Ugandan Indians to relocate in Greenwood, Mississippi. Though she has made several other films, Monsoon Wedding remains her most celebrated work. When it debuted at the Venice Film Festival in 2001, she became the first female filmmaker to win the Golden Lion Award. 

 

Nair called the film “a Bollywood movie, on my own terms.” Her style of filmmaking can be situated somewhere in-between the social realism of Satyajit Ray and the flights of fancy explored in Bollywood. But Monsoon Wedding isn’t a film composed of the randomness and fragmentation of typical Bollywood productions; when she makes use of music and dancing, they exist within the diegesis. The song performed at the Mehndi party is observed with the camera as a participant, as opposed to breaking the narrative progression with a musical interlude. Likewise, the wedding dance performed by the cousin Ayesha (Neha Dubey) occurs naturally within the drama—it’s discussed earlier in the proceedings and built up in the plot. Other Bollywood characteristics, such as its tendency for sensory overload through a full array of colors, personalities, and a vast mosaic of characters, have been administered with a touch of naturalism, as weddings are, at their essence, multicultural and overstimulated affairs. Nair’s cinematographer Declan Quinn uses a predominantly handheld 16mm camera, observing the unfolding situation with fly-on-the-wall realism. And periodically in the film, Nair uses a transitional device in which she cuts away to the world outside of the wedding drama to the streets of Dehli, where the less privileged scrape to get by and endure the monsoon season without umbrellas or the multicolored, waterproofed canopy in the Verma’s backyard.  

 

https://deepfocusreview.com/reviews/monsoon-wedding/

 

15. Force Majeure

 

  

  For a fleeting moment, one could reasonably mistake Force Majeure for a disaster movie. Certainly, its characters might wonder, through their panic and fear, if they’ve somehow stumbled into one. The pivotal scene arrives early, on the second day of a blissful family vacation. Seated for a relaxing lunch on the terrace of a French ski resort, married Swedish parents Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke) and Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) are alarmed by the rapid approach of snow, tumbling down the adjacent slope in their general direction. As the wall of white seems to close in on them, expanding outward with menacing speed, Thomas makes an instinctual flee for safety, completely abandoning Ebba and their two young children. The avalanche, as it turns out, is controlled; what looks like certain doom is just a false alarm, a dramatic billow of powder. But as the smoke clears, so too does any illusion Ebba might have held about Tomas and his paternal instincts. There’s no going back from such a flagrant act of self-preservation, however involuntary it might have been.

 

 Force Majeure, in other words, is a kind of disaster movie, one in which buildings are left standing while a marriage—and a fragile masculinity—buckles at its foundation. The film’s director, Ruben Östlund, ticks down the aftermath in days, showing how Tomas’ failure of nerve—which he vehemently denies for as long as possible—reverberates through every subsequent scene. Ebba, frustrated by her husband’s refusal to own up, begins confronting him about it in mixed company, turning polite dinners into gauntlets of social awkwardness. (In a particularly shrewd touch, many of the bystanders to these spats rationalize Tomas’ actions, even as they assure themselves that they’d respond differently.) The film recognizes a fundamental split in how its protagonists approach what happened: For Tomas, skirting personal responsibility is a way to avoid thinking of himself as a coward; for Ebba, the problem runs much deeper. How can she love a husband who would leave her, and their children, to die alone? (A mid-film monologue eloquently addresses that question, the film earning points for delaying the inevitable cut from Kongsli’s poignant delivery to her co-star’s sheepish reaction shot.)

 

At its core, Force Majeure is about the false equilibrium gender roles sometimes create in relationships, and what can happen when that balance is disrupted. The film smartly teases such interests in its opening scene, in which Tomas, Ebba, and their adorable moppet kids awkwardly pose for a pushy photographer, looking like some model of the traditional, nuclear family. If there’s any fault to find in this expertly directed, frequently hilarious study of imploding male ego, it’s that Östlund basically arrives upon a perfect ending—one that brings the movie full circle, both dramatically and visually—and then bypasses it in favor of a more muddled one. But as climactic missteps go, it’s not exactly disastrous.

 

https://film.avclub.com/force-majeure-is-a-darkly-comic-study-of-male-ego-in-co-1798181694

 

16. The Square

 

  

 A satire on the contemporary art world sits edgily alongside a skewering of male privilege and middle-class altruism in Ruben Östlund’s surreal Palme d’Or winner

 

 The Square features Terry Notary as performance artist Oleg, stripped to the waist, mounting a table at an upmarket dinner and glowering with animalistic rage. It’s an arresting tableau – baffling and intriguing, promising anarchic action and titilatory spectacle. The fact that this in-your-face image only partly represents the film itself seems entirely appropriate, since one of the key themes of Östlund’s surreally cerebral and increasingly weird art-world satire is “the difference between art and marketing”.

 

“The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring,” reads the rubric for the art installation of the title: a floor-level, illuminated outline of a space in which altruistic behaviour is compulsory. “Within its bounds we all share equal rights and obligations.” Such aspirations are noble but hardly headline-grabbing – until two youthful PR creatives conjure up a shockingly offensive promo video (think Wag the Dog meets Michael Bay) that promptly goes viral. Meanwhile, suave museum director Christian (Claes Bang) is too distracted by the whereabouts of his stolen wallet and mobile phone (ringtones constantly interrupt the drama) to pay proper attention to his job, or the people with whom he works.

 

Throughout, one word is repeated, and repeatedly ignored: “Help!” From the homeless beggars whom the museum’s PR firm seem happy to exploit, to the elegantly attired patrons terrorised by Oleg’s performance-art primate in the film’s audaciously alarming set piece, such unanswered pleas become the plaintive refrain of The Square. Some audience members may find themselves similarly crying out for assistance as this Oscar-nominated oddity swings between the carnivalesque and the cruel. Should we read the movie as a polemical cry against bystander apathy, a scalpel-sharp dissection of male hypocrisy, or just a playful swipe at the emptiness of modern art, replete with bizarre riffs on that old chestnut, “A monkey could have done that”?

The answer is in the eye of the beholder. Like Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma’s oddly off-kilter rendition of Ave Maria, which echoes throughout the drama, The Square is a strange mix of pop and profundity: archly entertaining, occasionally grating and consistently uncomfortable.

 

 

 

17. Dogtooth

 

  

 

The Greek thriller “Dogtooth” has an original premise that should pique interest for the sake of its ingenuity alone, but the major accomplishment of director Yorgos Lanthimos’s Orwellian story emerges from a careful navigation of moods. Few movies convey such a deeply unnerving atmosphere in nearly every scene while simultaneously capitalizing on an absurd black comic sensibility. Ostensibly designed as bizarre commentary on suburban control, “Dogtooth” blends satire with psychological dread.

 

Set in a bland household alternately defined by boredom and claustrophobia, Lanthimos’s script (with co-writer Efthimis Fillippou) centers around a family of nameless characters mysteriously engaged in abnormal routines. The dictatorial father (Christos Stergioglou) and strangely distant mother (Michelle Valley) force their three teenage children to occupy themselves with an endless series of games that serve little purpose other than to distract them from contemplating the outside world. The parents manage their offspring with a mixture of homegrown propaganda and brutal prison tactics. When the son (Hristos Passalis) hurls rocks over the backyard fence, the main boundary of his daily reality, he’s forced to hold Listerine in his mouth until it burns.

 

Their entire lives are seemingly defined by the lies their parents feed them: Having experienced nothing beyond the driveway, the youth believe they can only leave the house within the safety of the car. They eagerly await the coming-of-age experience that will arrive once one of their “dogtooths” drop. They think passing airplanes are life-size beings, so the parents leave toy planes in the yard as if they had “fallen” to earth. Even their language has been distorted by some undefined logic of limited knowledge: when one of the daughters asks the mother to pass the telephone at the dinner table, she hands her the salt. 

 

Lanthimos’s patient approach makes for a slow immersion in the systematic lifestyle of this grotesquely abnormal clan, but he strays from providing too many answers. It’s clear that the father works at a factory where he hides his twisted parenting tactics from co-workers, but his motives never fully reveal themselves.

 

The matter-of-fact manner in which “Dogtooth” slowly builds to a violent climax forces confusion on the viewer to the point where it becomes easier to simply accept the lack of explanation and laugh at the freakshow of distorted truths that the parents tell their clueless kids. When the father reveals to the children that their pregnant mother “will give birth to two children and a dog,” the moment inspires nervous laughter. Lanthimos blends pity for the subjects of this inexplicable social experiment with the fear that, at some point, their bubble has to burst.

 

18. Raw

 

  

“Beautiful” and “classy” aren’t usually the first words that spring to mind when you think about cannibal films, but director Julia Ducournau manages to pull off both with her feature film debut Raw. It’s a stunning arrival for a new cinematic talent, demonstrating a clarity of vision and confidence of execution that makes for an insightful, nuanced film that’s difficult to pin down. 

 

In essence, Raw is a college-set coming-of-age story between two sisters; there just happens to be some skin-crawling, flesh-eating moments along the way. It’s an examination of the awkward and uncomfortable years when we first step out of from the protection of our parents and start the messy process of finding out who we really are and what we really want…even the naughty stuff we know we shouldn’t. It’s also unexpectedly sexy with a streak of wry, irreverent humor that works as a highlighting contrast to the horrors along the way.

 

As far as horror allegories go, cannibalism is right up there with vampirism as a means of exploring corruption and carnal desire, but it’s definitely the dirtier and messier of the two. Perhaps that’s what makes it so flawlessly fitting to Ducournau’s story about coming of age through carnage. Exploring independence is messy, and discovering who you really are is dirty work. Ducournau uses the eating of human meat as a metaphor for sexual awakening and experimentation (sexual and otherwise), but Raw is just as interested in how our identity and concept of self evolves through exploration, and cannibalism also comes to represent Justine’s changing understanding of herself — both where she comes from and where she’s going.

 

Raw is intimate, it’s relatable, and that means we can feel its bloody blows when they rain down. That realism and dedication to keeping it simple allows Justine’s bloody rights of passage to transcend sadism and schlock into something singular and special.

 

https://collider.com/raw-movie-review-julia-ducournau/

 

19. Let The Right OneIn

 

  

"Let the Right One In" is a "vampire movie," but not even remotely what we mean by that term. It is deadly grim. It takes vampires as seriously as the versions of "Nosferatu" by Murnau and Herzog do, and that is very seriously indeed. It is also a painful portrayal of an urgent relationship between two 12-year-olds on the brink of adolescence. It is not intended for 12-year-olds.

 

Oskar is lonely. His parents have separated, neither one wants him, he is alone a lot. He hangs around outside in the snowy Swedish night. One night, he meets a kid named Eli (Lina Leandersson) who is about his age. Eli is lonely, too, and they become friends. Oskar is at that age when he accepts astonishing facts calmly, because life has given up trying to surprise him. Eli walks through the snow without shoes. Eli has a faint scent almost of a ... corpse. "Are you a vampire?" he asks Eli. Yes. Oh. They decide to have a sleepover in his bed. Sex is not yet constantly on Oskar's mind, but he asks, "Will you be my girlfriend?" She touches him lightly. "Oskar, I'm not a girl." Oh.

 

Oskar is cruelly bullied at school by a sadistic bully, who travels with a posse of two smaller thugs and almost drowns him in a swimming pool. At a time like this, it is useful to have a vampire as your best pal. A girl vampire or a boy vampire, it doesn't really matter.

 

Remove the vampire elements, and this is the story of two lonely and desperate kids capable of performing dark deeds without apparent emotion. Kids washed up on the shores of despair. The young actors are powerful in draining roles. We care for them more than they care for themselves. Alfredson's palette is so drained of warm colors that even fresh blood is black.

 

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/let-the-right-one-in-2008

 

20.Whale Rider

 

The movie, which takes place in the present day in New Zealand, begins with the birth of twins. The boy and the mother die. The girl, Pai (Keisha Castle-Hughes) survives. Her father, Porourangi (Cliff Curtis), an artist, leaves New Zealand, and the little girl is raised and much loved by her grandparents Koro and Nanny Flowers.

 

Koro is the chief of these people. Porourangi would be next in line but has no interest in returning home. Pai believes that she could serve as the chief, but her grandfather, despite his love, fiercely opposes this idea. He causes Pai much hurt by doubting her, questioning her achievements, insisting in the face of everything she achieves that she is only a girl.

 

The movie, written and directed by Niki Caro, inspired by a novel by Witi Ihimaera, describes these events within the rhythms of daily life. This is not a simplistic fable but the story of real people living in modern times. There are moments when Pai is lost in discouragement and despair, and when her father comes for a visit she almost leaves with him. But, no, her people need her--whether or not her grandfather realizes it.

 

Pai is played by Keisha Castle-Hughes, a newcomer of whom it can only be said: This is a movie star. She glows. She stands up to her grandfather in painful scenes, she finds dignity, and yet the next second she's running around the village like the kid she is. The other roles are also strongly cast, especially Rawiri Paratene and Vicky Haughton as the grandparents.

 

One day Koro summons all of the young teenage boys of the village to a series of compulsory lessons on how to be a Maori, and the leader of Maoris. There's an amusing sequence where they practice looking ferocious to scare their enemies. Pai, of course, is banned from these classes, but she eavesdrops and enlists a wayward uncle to reveal some of the secrets of the males.

 

And then--well, the movie does not end as we expect. It does not march obediently to standard plot requirements but develops an unexpected crisis and an unexpected solution. There is a scene set at a school ceremony, where Pai has composed a work in honor of her people and asked her grandfather to attend. Despite his anger, he will come, won't he? The movie seems headed for the ancient cliche of the auditorium door which opens at the last moment to reveal the person that the child onstage desperately hopes to see--but no, that's not what happens.

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/whale-rider-2003

 

Thinking ahead to 2021, three of my favourite calendars to hang by the desk for 2021.

 

 

Beautiful soft pastel looted pencils with romantic color names... by Irojiten

 

 

Steel outline clips from Hay

 

 

Tate Modern

Craving a trip to the Museum? If you're not in London (If you are, we are jealous) the Tate Modern has an incredible archive of their exhibits and art from multiple angles. It may not be a day at the museum but it still sparks the imagination!

 

 

The Met

New Yorkers are lucky enough to have the Met museum open once again, but for the rest of us the Met has a great website with tons art uploaded in their archives. They also have all sorts of videos!

 

 

The Princess De Lamballe Dream Sweater

Selkie

 

This oversized sweatshirt is not only the softest magic, but it also features side zippers, extra long sleeves, and a high quality print of Marie Thérèse Louise of Savoy, Princesse de Lamballe, Portrait by Antoine-François Callet, 1776

 

The princesse de Lamballe had a role to play in royal ceremonies by marriage, and when the new DauphineMarie Antoinette, arrived in France in 1770, she was presented to her along with the Dukes and Duchesses of Orléans, Chartres, Bourbon and the other "Princes of the Blood" with her father-in-law in Compiégne. During 1771, the Duke de Penthiévre started to entertain more, among others the Crown Prince of Sweden and the King of Denmark; Marie Thérèse acted as his hostess, and started to attend court more often, participating in the balls held by Madame de Noailles in the name of Marie Antoinette, who was reportedly charmed by Marie Thérèse, and overwhelmed her with attention and affection that spectators did not fail to notice. In March 1771 the Austrian ambassador reported:

 

"'For some time past the Dauphiness has shown a great affection for the Princesse de Lamballe. . . . This young princess is sweet and amiable, and enjoying the privilèges of a Princess of the Blood Royal, is in a position to avail herself of her Royal Highness's favour."

 

The "Gazette de France" mentions Madame de Lamballe's presence in the chapel at high mass on Holy Thursday, at which the King was present, accompanied by the Royal Family and the Dukes of Bourbon and Penthièvre. In May 1771, she went to Fontainebleau, and was there presented by the king to her cousin, the future Countess of Provence, attending the supper after. In November 1773, another one of her cousins married the third prince, the Count of Artois, and she was present at the birth of the future Louis-Philippe of France in Paris in October 1773. After her cousins had married Marie-Antoinette's brothers-in-law, the royal princes, Marie Thérèse de Lamballe came to be treated by Marie-Antoinette as a relation, and during these first years, the counts and countesses of Provence and Artois formed a circle of friends with Marie-Antoinette and the princesse de Lamballe and spent a lot of their time together, the princesse de Lamballe being described as almost constantly by Marie-Antoinette's side.[2] The empress Maria Theresa somewhat disliked the attachment, because she disliked favorites and intimate friends of royalty in general, though the princesse de Lamballe was because of her rank regarded as an acceptable choice, if such an intimate friend was needed.

 

On 18 September 1775, following the ascension of her husband to the throne in May 1774, Queen Marie Antoinette appointed Marie Thérèse "Superintendent of the Queen's Household", the highest rank possible for a lady-in-waiting at Versailles. This appointment was controversial: the office had been vacant for over thirty years because the position was expensive, superfluous and gave far too much power and influence to the bearer, giving her rank and power over all other ladies-in-waiting and requiring all orders given by any other female office holder to be confirmed by her before it could be carried out, and Lamballe, though of sufficient rank to be appointed, was regarded too young, which would offend those placed under her, but the queen regarded it a just reward for her friend.

After Marie Antoinette became queen, her intimate friendship with Lamballe was given greater attention and Mercy reported:

"Her Majesty continually sees the Princesse de Lamballe in her rooms [...] This lady joins to much sweetness a very sincere character, far from intrigue and all such worries. The Queen has conceived for some time a real friendship for this young Princess, and the choice is excellent, for although a Piedmontese, Madame de Lamballe is not at all identified with the interests of Mesdames de Provence and d'Artois. All the same, I have taken the precaution to point out to the Queen that her favour and goodness to the Princesse de Lamballe are somewhat excessive, in order to prevent abuse of them from that quarter."

 

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https://selkiecollection.com/collections/collection-n-8/products/the-princess-de-lamballe-dream-sweater

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