My week in film: Trainwreck, The Diary of a Teenage Girl and more…

Posted on by harrietwarman

It’s been over a year since I updated my weekly film journal here on Cinematic Investigations and in that time I’ve worked for three festivals, visited four more (including IFFR and Alchemy in Hawick) and seen a host of fantastic films. Working for festivals means that any writing I do is mainly of the brochure copy kind, so it’s time now to catch up on viewing and share some thoughts on the latest cinema releases, my neglected stack of DVDs and the ever-increasing ‘to watch’ list of old and new classics.
6One I missed at EIFF was The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel starring Bel Powley and Alexander Skarsgård. Powley plays Minnie, a fifteen year old living with her mother, Charlotte (Kristen Wiig) and younger sister, Gretel (Abby Wait) in 1976 San Francisco. Minnie becomes involved with her mother’s boyfriend, Monroe (Skarsgård) and this first sexual experience awakens for her, a torrent of feelings about sexuality, power and responsibility. Powley’s performance is remarkable, portraying acutely Minnie’s potent teenage combination of naivety and self-awareness. Minnie is at once defiant in her desire for Monroe, whilst struggling with the feelings of vulnerability that such passion creates. Heller handles her directorial debut with confidence, always maintaining the perspective of her enthralling central character. Sara Gunnarsdottir’s animation perfectly incorporates Minnie’s inner world and the creativity that she’s just learning to harness, enhancing the narrative by opening up possibilities for the character beyond what she sees and hears.

The Diary of a Teenage girl is successful in presenting a female character unafraid of her sexuality, Minnie learns that her self-esteem has to come from accepting herself, rather than approval from men around her, as her mother has tried to teach her. It was interesting to compare it to Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck, which also presents a female character apparently content with their sexuality and autonomy within a male-oriented world (the office of a men’s lifestyle mag). Written by the very talented and funny Schumer, and directed by Judd Apatow (who I would only really give credit to for producing Girls), Trainwreck fails to support the independence of its central character – but what was I expecting from a film with such a judgemental title?
14-trainwreck.w529.h352.2xAmy is introduced as having been trained to reject monogamy by her father since childhood, now comfortably living alone and working as a writer for a magazine (Tilda Swinton is hilarious and almost unrecognisable as her editor, Dianna) and enjoying regular one-night-only sex with various men, and dates with sort-of boyfriend Steven (John Cena). Not an unusual lifestyle you might think, though perhaps one not represented in mainstream cinema so much, and yet despite Amy Schumer’s reliably feminist output in her TV show Inside Amy Schumer, Trainwreck seeks to delegitimise is protagonist’s choices. Amy’s refusal to ‘settle down’ is attributed to a fear of rejection and her ultimate lesson [sigh] proposes that her life until she falls in love with a nice doctor (Bill Hader) has just been training for ‘the main event.’ It’s a disappointing descent into romantic comedy cliché, where Amy is presented as just another immature Apatow-type rogue, one that must conform to marriage and children to be truly ‘happy.’ Where Schumer regularly critiques a culture that infantalises women and makes them complicit in attempting to attain sexual desirability – and certainly Trainwreck’s Amy is presented as the product of such hypocritical messages – it’s the resolution for the character that’s problematic here. How radical it would have been if Amy had instead learned to love herself, and maybe started her own magazine.
mistress-americaAnother, more effective and charming portrayal of female lives is Mistress America, the second collaboration between writer/actor Greta Gerwig and director Noah Baumbach following the brilliant Frances Ha. Gerwig plays Brooke, a self-proclaimed autodidact who tumbles into the life of soon-to-be stepsister Tracy (Lola Kirke) who is trying to navigate the awkwardness of college for the first time. Tracy becomes fascinated with Brooke’s life, which encompasses various jobs including maths tutoring, spin class instructing, interior decorating and her latest enterprise, opening a restaurant. Unbeknownst to Brooke, Tracy uses her as subject of new short stories, her whirlwind of costume changes, appointments, confident declarations of advice and apparent self-awareness giving Tracy the impression of someone maintaining the illusion of togetherness. This fast-paced screwball comedy doesn’t require its characters to learn anything though they are given plenty of opportunities to do so. Rather that Tracy and Brooke are in altered circumstances by the end of the film feels entirely convincing as having come from the characters themselves. Tracy looks at Brooke and thinks that, as a person twelve years her senior, she should have life ‘figured out’ by now and both judges and admires her. Whereas in Brooke’s mind her experience tells her that the years she has on Tracy are irrelevant.

Also watched:

Hedwig and the Angry Inch, dir John Cameron Mitchell, 2001. Sing-a-long screening at Filmhouse.
Inside Out, dir Pete Doctor, co-directed by Ronnie del Carmen

IFFR 2015: The Chambermaid Lynn, interview with director Ingo Haeb

Posted on by harrietwarman

Approaching his adaptation of Markus Orths’ novel, director Ingo Haeb knew that he couldn’t take the narrative of a cleaning-obsessed chambermaid only at face-value; ‘’it was clear that it was a modern, adult, fairy-tale’’ says Haeb. Whereas the novel presented the experience of Lynn plainly, without any doubt as to the actuality of her experiences, when envisioning the source as a more ambiguous, cinematic work, for Haeb; ‘’the distance between the audience and the character is gone, so I wanted to keep it open.’’

The Chambermaid Lynn follows its titular heroine as she goes about her weekly routine, working at the Eden Hotel cleaning the rooms with a fastidiousness that outstrips the efforts made by the other chambermaids. Lynn (Vicky Krieps) is fascinated by the lives of the hotel’s guests, and examines the remnants of their lives – clothes, books, etc. that they leave behind when they go out. One day hiding under the bed to avoid detection, Lynn is immediately hooked on another aspect of one guest’s life, when he hires dominatrix, Chiara (Lena Lauzemis). Having compartmentalised her sexual life, much like work, exercise and cleaning, Lynn is desperate to know what it would be like disrupt the order that she has created, and so makes a date with Chiara too.

Visualising Lynn’s world involved meticulous planning by Haeb, who focused on the smallest details, such as the colour of a telephone, or the way Lynn’s hair is parted, in order to convey the structures that the character has put in place in order to go unnoticed, which meant that for the production design; ‘’everything becomes important.’’ This careful approach also extended to making sure the audience could understand the origin of Lynn’s obsessiveness, through the relationship with her mother (Christine Schorn). To do so, Haeb consulted a psychologist/philosopher, who could advise what kind of maternal relationship would produce Lynn’s particular coping methods, and her attitude to sex – says Haeb; ‘’with this kind of mother, she [Lynn] would have the psyche that ‘I never had sex, but sex is done to me’.’’ Such an important relationship becomes key to understanding Lynn’s initial reticence when attempting a less passive approach to intimacy with Chiara.

Far from being the familiar story of a sexual awakening however, The Chambermaid Lynn is successful in showing the shifting power dynamic between Lynn and Chiara. For someone for whom sex is simply a perfunctory activity, it is feeling at all – rather than feeling for a woman – that is important. Says Haeb; ‘’this is not a coming out story’’ rather, Lena was cast as Chiara for her androgyny, having neither the particular energy of a man or a woman; ‘’she’s neutral [to Lynn].’’ While Lynn begins to gains confidence in the new feelings she’s experienced, for Chiara, her feelings – and Lynn’s – make her vulnerable. Plunging into something new is all part of human nature for the director however, and though we see Lynn grow and take risks in the film, for Haeb; ‘’getting what you want and going too far’’ is inevitable.

Originally published in the Daily Tiger, 28 January 2015. Republished with permission from International Film Festival Rotterdam.

IFFR 2015: Director Nicolas Steiner’s Above and Below

Posted on by harrietwarman

For his second feature film, director Nicolas Steiner set out to discover people hidden from the world. Those who have chosen a life away from the cities and communities – and the luxuries therein – that most ordinary folk take for granted. Above and Below documents the lives of Cindy, Rick, and Lalo who live in the flood tunnels below Las Vegas, David, who lives in a reclaimed military bunker in the Californian desert, and April, a geologist living out a red planet expedition simulation for the Mars-Society. Though each protagonist seems to be wilfully rejecting a normal life, for Steiner, they represent the will to survive that is natural to all of us, and created their own kind of ‘normal’ by which to do this; ‘’It’s amazing how fast a human being attaches to its surroundings and what the formula of three walls and a ceiling can be.’’

What’s striking about Above and Below is how successfully it makes seemingly ignored lives cinematically epic, whilst retaining an intimacy with the protagonists. Shooting wide and employing strategic use of a crane, Steiner and DoP Markus Nestroy convey the scale of the desert, the Mars-like terrain and the Las Vegas skyline, in such a way that the individuals who inhabit these mostly forgotten lands, appear heroic in their choice to live apart from the mainstream. For Steiner, this wide scope was essential to the concept of Above and Below, allowing him to visualise the connections between his star-gazing and tunnel dwelling protagonists. For the most part however, a looser, more spontaneous approach was needed, in order to remain discrete; ‘’we didn’t want to attract too much attention from the “outside” world, because especially in the underground of Las Vegas we were shooting illegally. We were constantly trespassing.’’

Building an intimacy with his subjects was also vital to achieving Steiner’s vision for the film. Before shooting he spent months with each protagonist without the film’s crew, which allowed the director to gain their trust, and whilst filming, this effort to respect their lives remained important; ‘’[During the] shooting period (which was over 2.5 months), we didn’t shoot that much daily, instead we spent a lot of time with them as well. Often times we went down into the tunnels for example, without any equipment. It was more “to hang out” and helping them: driving around, organizing stuff, collecting bottles, trying to help fix Dave’s RV etc. We did what we could to be part of the whole life system within.’’

Such respect and empathy for the subject is what makes Above and Below so effective, allowing for moments in which the protagonists reveal the difficulties that have come from their life choices. For Steiner, this closeness dismantled what he had imagined such hidden lives to involve; ‘’the true story is sometimes so much harder than anything that you could possibly even think of.’’

Originally published in the Daily Tiger, 26 January 2015. Republished with permission from International Film Festival Rotterdam.