LOCAL/LOCALE season at EFG: Tired Moonlight

Posted on by harrietwarman

The final screening in the mini season LOCAL/LOCALE at Edinburgh Film Guild is the UK premiere of Britni West’s Slamdance award-winning Tired Moonlight. Set and shot in West’s hometown of Kalispell, Montana, Tired Moonlight uses mainly non-professional actors and a ‘documentary’ approach to capture the atmosphere of this simultaneously ordinary and special place. The director went back to Kalispell over the summers of 2012 and 2013, working from an 80 page script but with the flexibility to allow the performer’s own personalities and experiences to influence the film’s direction.

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Liz Randall as Dawn and Rainleigh Vick as Rainy

The film’s main characters are the poet Paul Dickinson, who plays himself and whose writing features in the film, and Dawn, played by Liz Randall, a woman who lives alone. Dawn’s ‘small’ story is essentially about the new connections she makes, first with a four year old girl and then with Paul, and Tired Moonlight relishes the awkwardness and vulnerability of opening up to others, within the a setting where it might be assumed that everyone knows each other. tired moonlight2Beyond this central conceit, West’s method while shooting was to allow the town to guide her in terms of what was important to portray, just as can be seen in the work of Miguel Gomes, in last week’s EFG screening Our Beloved Month of August and Arabian Nights. Says West; ‘We would see what was happening, who was around, try and figure out if there was something more interesting that we should be focusing on. It was loose, but also held together by this thread of my experiences, care for the environment in which I grew up, and love of the people I was working with and meeting along the way.’* tired moonlight5Shooting on Super 16mm, cinematographer Adam Ginsberg (Stinking Heaven, Nathan Silver, 2015) captures the beauty in the landscape and the small moments between people, making Tired Moonlight’s sense of place so evocative. The result of this looseness and beauty in shooting, the affection for the location, and a narrative lead by ‘real’ people is a film that succeeds so well in describing the experience of living in Montana, without treating those who do as curiosities.

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Paul Dickinson

Tired Moonlight screens at 7pm on Sunday 6 December. If you’d like more information about the whole mini season check out the EFG page here, or the other programme notes here on Cinematic Investigations, listed below.

Sunday 8 November: MAN OF THE STORY (KATHAPURUSHAN). Adoor Gopalakrishnan/India, Japan/1995/102/Malayalam with English subtitles.

Sunday 15 November: WHITE COAL. Georg Tiller/Austria, Poland, Taiwan/2015/70 min/English and Chinese with English subtitles.

Sunday 22 November: ALLUVION/EVERGREEN. Alluvion/Sasha Litvintseva/UK/2013/31min. Evergreen/Sasha Litvintseva/UK/2014/50 min.

Sunday 29 November: OUR BELOVED MONTH OF AUGUST (AQUELE QUERIDO MES DE AGOSTO) Miguel Gomes/Portugal, France/2008/147 min/Portuguese with English subtitles.

Sunday 6 December: TIRED MOONLIGHT. Britni West/USA/2015/76 min.

*Britni West, Press Notes for Tired Moonlight

Aniston of the week: Friends with Money

Posted on by harrietwarman

After the horror of last weeks’ Horrible Bosses, rather than dive right back into that misogynistic pit for the sequel, we look back to one of those ‘serious’ roles where Aniston shows that less is more. Aniston is also in very good company, among a solid cast who all underplay in order to hold up the film’s weighty, worthy theme.

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Aniston as Olivia

FILM: Friends with Money
DIRECTOR: Nicole Holofcener
YEAR: 2006
CHARACTER NAME AND PROFESSION: Olivia, Maid/Housekeeper
PLOT SUMMARY: Three couples are friends with Olivia, they are all wealthy, she is not. Christine (Catherine Keener) and David (Jason Isaacs) are screenwriters who work together, have one son and are having an extension built on the top of their house that will allow them to see the ocean. Franny (Joan Cusack) is a full time mother (with full time help), married to Matt (Greg Germann) who is a doctor (I think). Jane (Frances McDormand) is a fashion designer married to Aaron (Simon McBurney), who owns an organic ‘LUSH’ type cleansing product company, they have one son. Olivia (Aniston) used to teach at a very fancy private prep school, but she left because it was ‘unbearable’ – the children teased her because they perceived her as poor. She now works as a housekeeper/maid and Franny, in particular wants to fix her. She starts dating Franny’s trainer Matt (Scott Caan) who treats her very badly.

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L-R: Joan Cusack as Franny, Catherine Keener as Christine, Jennifer Aniston as Olivia, Frances McDormand as Jane.

CHARACTER TRAITS: Low self-esteem, kind, depressed, thoughtful.
NOTES ON PERFORMANCE: Aniston really holds back here and is very convincing. Olivia is the kind of person with enough self-worth to remove herself from a bad work situation (the fancy school), but not enough to stop pining for her married ex-lover, or be defiant against the awful Mike, who insists on splitting her earnings when he accompanies her to jobs, despite sleeping with her and cleaning a couple of shelves. Aniston moves through each scene as though not actually present, and it’s only really when she’s calling her ex that we see a spark of energy. It works, because the film is leading to a set-up that requires us to believe she’ll start a relationship with someone who has ‘people problems’ just like her.

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Ain’t no snooty store clerk gonna deny Christine her sample!

NOTES ON FILM: Writer/Director Holofcener (Enough Said, 2013) here is pretty broad in her judgement of the wealthy versus the poor, with Franny wondering aloud whether she’d be friends with Olivia if they met now – we’ve been wondering the same thing. They’re all oblivious and Olivia’s acceptance of them is explained by her passiveness generally. There are some nice details here, such as Olivia’s gathering of sample creams, which demonstrate that she’s still aiming thriftily at the luxury she used to enjoy unimpeded. Her last act union with Marty (Bob Stephenson) isn’t wholly convincing, due to their lack of chemistry, but it’s almost believable that these two people’s combined issues would lead them to each other. It’s also worth noting that Frances McDormand is excellent, as ever.
CONCLUSION: A low-key, commendably reserved performance in a half-interesting film.

 

LOCAL/LOCALE season at EFG: Our Beloved Month of August

Posted on by harrietwarman

This coming Sunday at 7pm the LOCAL/LOCALE season at Edinburgh Film Guild continues with a film by celebrated Portuguese writer/director Miguel Gomes. The director’s second feature film following The Face You Deserve (2004) is a sun-drenched portrait of a rural town in the region of Arganil, whose title, Our Beloved Month of August (Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto, 2008) proclaims the affection with which Gomes treats his subject. The film is at once a narrative about a family dance band and a blossoming romance and a meditation on the nature of filmmaking itself. Gomes dissolves the supposed distance between documentarian and subject, writer and actors, blending all such elements together into one glorious idiosyncratic work of cinema. AQMA_039Like Gomes later film, the multi award-winning Tabu (2012), the concept of playing lightly with notions of narrative and performance is familiar in Our Beloved Month of August, though the influence of the locals themselves is more apparent. Much like Gomes most recent trilogy of films, Arabian Nights: Volume 1 – The Restless One, Volume 2 – The Desolate One and Volume 3 – The Enchanted One non-professional actors play themselves – and other roles – whilst Gomes ‘the director’ appears as himself, struggling to reconcile budget, script and schedule on the shoot. Gomes’ ever present anxiety of creative vision hindered by financial limitations only seem to imbue him with a sense of inventive inclusion, as though what must be cut from a production gives rise to the feeling that everything and anything can and should be the film. AQMA_027Kieran Corless on Our Beloved Month of August: ‘It inhabits its chosen world and landscape so fully and imaginatively, so intimately, it’s almost as if it’s inhaling it. Slowly, stealthily, the fantastical flowers in this everyday scenario, credibly and breathtakingly. We experience that rarity in cinema, a sort of flowing, fluid buoyancy, when everything in a film is singing, all the elements are fusing in harmony.’

This will be the penultimate screening in the LOCAL/LOCALE season, with the UK premiere of Britni West’s award-winning Tired Moonlight following it on Sunday 6 December, a film which combines the docu-fictional elements of Gomes with the loose, intimacy of the low budget American indie.

Here’s the full run down of the season below. You can join the Facebook event here, and get more info on the Edinburgh Film Guild here.

Sunday 8 November: MAN OF THE STORY (KATHAPURUSHAN). Adoor Gopalakrishnan/India, Japan/1995/102/Malayalam with English subtitles.

Sunday 15 November: WHITE COAL. Georg Tiller/Austria, Poland, Taiwan/2015/70 min/English and Chinese with English subtitles.

Sunday 22 November: ALLUVION/EVERGREEN. Alluvion/Sasha Litvintseva/UK/2013/31min. Evergreen/Sasha Litvintseva/UK/2014/50 min.

Sunday 29 November: OUR BELOVED MONTH OF AUGUST (AQUELE QUERIDO MES DE AGOSTO) Miguel Gomes/Portugal, France/2008/147 min/Portuguese with English subtitles.

Sunday 6 December: TIRED MOONLIGHT. Britni West/USA/2015/76 min.