Art house gems curated for diverse tastes in new film streaming service
Missing the cinema? Overwhelmed by choice on streaming? Our film writer offers her selection of the best films and TV available now from your home.
So much time, so many choices. What a moment in history to be confined to our homes: never before have there been so many options competing for our attention. Thousands of TV series and movies, spanning decades and crossing borders and all available at the click of a button. Some are free, such as SBS and ABC, while paid streaming services continue to multiply. Netflix is dominant but then there’s Stan, Amazon Prime, Disney, Apple, YouTube and so on.
How to decide what is unmissable and what is a waste of our time? Every day, Philippa Hawker, The Australian’s deeply knowledgeable film writer, recommends a new show to watch.
Her suggestions reflect the full breadth of what’s on offer: a new release or an old favourite. A blockbuster or an obscure gem.
Go back to the X Files or check out what Heidi Klum did after Project Runway. Explore a beloved French comedy or satisfy cravings for cricket with a must-see documentary.
If that’s not enough, there are a lot more recommendations from Hawker here and arts editor Ashleigh Wilson gives a small selection of his own here.
Happy viewing!
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Happy Together
The streaming service MUBI, which can be found here, offers a rich array of movies for subscribers. At the heart of the service is a model — part treasure trove, part ticking clock — that involves a degree of time pressure: 30 titles available at any one time for a 30-day window. Films are added and removed daily, and there’s always the fear of missing something at the last minute. The range is eclectic but probably best characterised as an art house, film festival-style selection that includes contemporary filmmakers and classics and spans decades and languages: sometimes there’s an individual work from a new director, sometimes a retrospective or a spotlight.
Recently, however, MUBI has added a new component: a library of hundreds of titles from past curated selections that can be explored on a more leisurely basis.
In the monthly “Now Showing” selection, a recent arrival is a MUBI exclusive, Beanpole (2019), Russian filmmaker Kantemir Balagov’s second feature, a powerful, devastating drama of trauma set in the wake of World War II. Then there’s the rarely seen Fedora (1978), the penultimate film from Billy Wilder, that reunites him with his Sunset Boulevard star William Holden and with the subject of reclusive Hollywood legends.
Take Me Somewhere Nice (2019), another MUBI exclusive, is a first feature from Ena Sendijarevic. a deadpan, candy-coloured Balkan road movie, while classics include Mel Brooks’ The Producers and Michael Powell’s 1960 if-looks-could-kill exploration of the cinema’s gaze, Peeping Tom.
The spotlight on prolific French filmmaker Louis Malle still has a few films left: his World War II drama Au Revoir les Enfants; his surreal 1975 fable, Black Moon; and two American works, the leisurely encounter between Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory in My Dinner With Andre and his rural documentary God’s Country. Two films by Malaysian filmmaker Edmund Yeo, another spotlight subject, remain available: a short, Exhalation, and his second feature, Love Suicides.
The library offers the same kind of range: selection that spotlight individuals, national cinemas and genres, with curated strands and the odd. seemingly random pick.
The featured filmmakers, for example, range from Agnes Varda to Lav Diaz, Krzysztof Kieslowski to Jonas Mekas, Angela Schanelec to William Klein. Various strands — “modern masterpieces”, “women with movie cameras”, selections from Cannes and Directors’ Fortnight — offer entry points.
The Varda selection spans more than 50 years, from early documentaries and shorts to features to one of her last films, The Beaches Of Agnes, from 2008. The Diaz selection is an online first, a rare opportunity to see the these epic works outside a festival.
MUBI also provides supporting material on the films in its Notebook section, which can include specially written articles, links to other stories or reviews, and video essays. A year’s subscription is $71.88, with a monthly rate of $9.99.
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Happy Together
Wong Kar-wai’s haunting Happy Together (1997) is a welcome new addition to Kanopy, the free streaming service available through library membership. The film stars Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung as lovers who travel from Hong Kong to Argentina to try to salvage what has always been a difficult relationship.
Yiu-fai (Leung) is the initial narrator, chronicling in a spasmodic voiceover a story of constant separation and return, punctuated by the refrain from Po-wing (Cheung): “We could start over.” The dynamic between them is a perpetual cycle of endings and beginnings. Yiu-fai seems the calmer, steadier figure, although he has come to Argentina with a burden of guilt over how he acquired the money for the trip; Po-wing appears less committed, more evasive, elusive and volatile. Yet it’s not always clear who they are, separately and together.
Their plan has been to visit the Iguazu Falls, a symbolic destination that appears as a recurring image in various forms throughout the film. Trying to make enough money for the return trip, Yiu-fai starts working at the door of a tango bar, Po-wing becomes a hustler, and their relationship continues its erratic, painful course.
Deep into the film, a new character arrives: a Taiwanese traveller (Chang Chen) who works at the restaurant where Yiu-fai has found a job. He’s an enigmatic yet reassuring presence, offering a sense of possibility to Yiu-fai that he acknowledges in the final stages of the movie.
A novel by Manuel Puig (who had partially inspired an earlier Wong film, Days of Being Wild) was an initial influence, and there were many other familiar Wong preoccupations at play in the film’s erratic development: narratives of loss and longing, missed connections, explorations of time, intimacy and space. A theme of exile also emerged, heightened by the impending handover of Hong Kong to China that was very much on the filmmaker’s mind at that point.
The two actors, both of whom had worked with Wong previously, give striking, memorable performances. Happy Together was in competition at Cannes, and Wong won best director. Leung and Wong would return to Cannes three years later with the director’s next film, the ravishing, melancholy In the Mood for Love.
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High Fidelity
The record store is still called Championship Vinyl, and it’s still run by Rob, who is equally devoted to music and to making Top 5 lists of almost anything. But the TV series of High Fidelity (ABC iView) has made a few significant changes from Nick Hornby’s book and Stephen Frears’s film.
The most significant is that Rob — played by John Cusack in the movie — is now a female character. Rob, short for Robin, is played by Zoe Kravitz, who has many of the same qualities as the previous incarnations of the character, but also some significant differences.
Hornby’s book was welcomed for its sympathetic yet sceptical depiction of a certain type of flawed masculinity: the conviction that taste equals identity, and that ranking and categorising the world allows you to control it. Hence the Top 5 lists, hence the refusal to sell records deemed unworthy — and, it’s implied, hence the failure of the characters’ relationships with women.
The 2000 movie shifted the record store from London to Chicago; in the TV series, the shop is in a basement in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, and Rob’s two employees, friends and co-conspirators are now a woman of colour and a gay man. Cherise (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and Simon (David H. Holmes), both sharply drawn, are engaging characters. The philosophy they share — expressed this time by Simon — remains the same, from book to film to series: “The things that you like are more important than what you are like.” Yet in this version of High Fidelity, taste seems less exclusionary, less problematic, less directly linked to the problems these characters have in their lives.
Kravitz’s Rob — passionate about the music she loves, a stickler for detail — is, of course, much cooler and more desirable than Cusack’s. But she’s still a messed-up figure: impulsive, thoughtless, self-sabotaging, prone to making bad romantic decisions, and quick to head out the door at the smallest hint of difficulty. The long-drawn-out saga of her relationship with her onetime fiance, Mac (Kingsley Ben-Adir) runs through the whole series. His return sparks bouts of introspection and evasion that don’t have an obvious resolution in sight.
Yet the series, made up of 10 half-hour episodes, created by Veronica West and Sarah Kucserka, is entertaining and leisurely, with moments of intensity. It plays out gradually and artfully, in a range of styles, slipping easily from one mode to another. Moments and references recur, incidents are shown from different perspectives. Rob’s fourth-wall-breaking, address-to-camera moments are principally casual and throwaway.
There are some sharp, funny moments when we see how she wishes she had behaved (usually with extreme violence). And Parker Posey turns up in a welcome, heightened cameo as a vengeful artist who wants to sell her husband’s valuable record collection. (This sequence is extended considerably and changed somewhat from Hornby’s version.)
Music is an important part of the show, in the way it is talked about, experienced, played and heard: it skews a little older and more retro than you may expect, but this is, after all, a show set in a vinyl record store that embraces the past as well as the present. “Half the neighbourhood think we’re washed-up relics, the other half think we’re nostalgic hipsters,” Rob says wryly. So Debbie Harry turns up in a fantasy sequence, dispensing romantic advice — a more significant presence, emotionally speaking, than the figure of producer Jack Antonoff, playing himself.
There is, it seems, a second season in the works, and so the final episode is open-ended and a little inconclusive, not only for Rob but also for other significant characters: Simon has been given more of a place in the story so far than Cherise, whose musical adventures must be surely be part of Season 2.
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Beat Girl
Beat Girl (Amazon Prime), a 1960 British film set in the degenerate coffee bars of Soho, makes the most of its young star’s first entrance, as she walks coolly downstairs to a basement club, all tousled blonde Bardot hair and insouciant stare.
Jennifer (Gillian Hills) hits the floor, dancing on her own, seeking refuge from the dullness of middle-class life and the expectations of her wealthy architect father (David Farrar), who has just brought home his new wife, a young Frenchwoman, Nichole (Noelle Adam). “Admire my taste?” he says to his daughter complacently. “I’m sure you’ll have a lot in common.”
Hills (the credits call her Hill) was 16 when she made the film. She went on to have a short, interesting career that included a lead role in the TV adaptation of Alan Garner’s novel The Owl Service, and small roles in A Clockwork Orange and Blow-Up. In France, she became a ye-ye singer; it’s her song Zou Bisou Bisou that’s used to such memorable effect in Mad Men, when Megan Draper (Jessica Pare) serenades Don for his birthday party.
Other careers were launched or marked by Beat Girl and its earnest foray into teenage frustrations. Shirley Anne Field (Alfie, Saturday Night And Sunday Morning), plays one of the coffee-bar beatniks gets to sing a memorable number called It’s Legal. Pop star Adam Faith makes his film debut as a singer and guitarist: Peter McEnery (Victim, Negatives, Entertaining Mr Sloane) is another first-timer, and there’s a wild-eyed jittery young Oliver Reed, unfazed by lines like “Hey baby, you feel Terpsichorical, let’s go downstairs and fly.” Among the veterans there’s Christopher Lee, debonair and shady, as a figure from Nichole’s past and Soho’s stripclub present.
The film gets much of its drive from the score by John Barry, who two years later worked on the James Bond theme for Dr No, and went on to score 11 Bond movies and win five Oscars.
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Orlando
Sally Potter’s elegant, audacious Orlando (SBS On Demand) makes the complexities of adapting Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel — with its time and gender shifts — seem almost effortlessly graceful. Her trump card is Tilda Swinton, whose performance as the title character is a heady combination of fluidity and specificity, but the film is a visual spectacle that Potter makes very much her own.
In her version, Orlando, a courtier at the time of Queen Elizabeth I (Quentin Crisp), lives on by royal command, century after century, becoming a woman, facing death, disinheritance, romantic heartbreak, political machinations and poetic rivalry, all the way to a scene set in contemporary England (Potter made the film in 1992).
It’s a loose adaptation, yet is faithful in significant ways to the wit and energy of the book, its engagement with past and present, its narrative of loss, change, impermanence, and its playful experiments with identity and consciousness.
Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film The Hours (Stan, Amazon Prime, Foxtel Now), adapted by David Hare from Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The Hours was Woolf’s working title for her 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway, and an imaginative engagement with her narrative, its workings and its central character are at the heart of Cunningham’s book and the adaptation.
The movie is a sorrowful, expansive interweaving of the lives of three women from different eras, each at a particular moment of despair in the midst of quotidian life: Kidman as Woolf; Julianne Moore as a 1950s wife and mother; and Meryl Streep as a New York book editor planning a party for her oldest friend.
There are other Woolf-related films to be found on streaming services. Actor Eileen Atkins, who makes a fleeting appearance in the Streep section of The Hours, has a long association with Woolf in various capacities, playing her in a theatrical version of A Room of One’s Own and also adapting her work for stage and screen.
Atkins wrote the screenplay for Marleen Gorris’s Mrs Dalloway (Amazon Prime), in which Vanessa Redgrave plays the title character as she plans her party, and Natasha McElhone is the young Clarissa Dalloway in flashbacks.
Atkins also co-wrote the script for Chanya Button’s 2018 film, Vita & Virginia (available for rent or purchase on iTunes), adapted from her stage play of the same name. It’s an account of the relationship between Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki) and Vita Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton), the relationship that inspired Woolf to write Orlando in loving tribute.
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Infernal Affairs
Infernal Affairs (Netflix) is a cool Hong Kong crime drama, a high-stakes cat-and-mouse story of parallel undercover operations, with a relentless plot and immaculately matched lead performances. Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, the 2006 movie that landed the director his sole Oscar, is an adaptation, made four years later.
Infernal Affairs opens with scenes of induction and expulsion in a world where criminals and police are already intertwined. Two young police cadets are set on separate paths. One remains in the force, the other is expelled from the academy but is given a cover, so that he can infiltrate a criminal gang.
We then meet this pair 10 years on: Yan (Tony Leung), the disgraced cadet, has become the trusted offsider of a triad boss, and Ming (Andy Lau) is rising up the police ranks. As viewers, we already know the secret at the heart of the film: that the criminal is a really an undercover cop, and that the cop is working for the triad boss. The constantly rising tension revolves around whose cover will be blown first.
Yet, in one of many shrewd touches in the film, the first encounter we see between the two men is entirely casual. Ming wanders into a shop — one of the gangster’s fronts — where Yan is hanging out, watching the store while the owner is out. Their exchange is amiable and relaxed, an exchange of hi-fi tips.
Shortly afterwards, they are working with and against each other, as triad boss Sam (Eric Tsang) closes a drug deal and police superintendent Wong (Anthony Wong) leads an operation to catch him in the act. By the end of this operation, both sides are aware that they have been infiltrated, and set in train a hunt to reveal the traitor in their midst. For both Yan and Ming, their work of deception becomes even more elaborate.
Infernal Affairs is directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, and written by Mak and Felix Chong. Lau often shoots his own films. On this occasion he shared the duties with Lai Yiu-fai; Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle, a frequent collaborator of Wong Kar-wai, came on board as a visual consultant, assisting with colour, lab work and printing, and with a striking rooftop scene.
Subplots set outside the criminal world — involving Kelly Chen as Yan’s psychiatrist and Sammi Cheng as Ming’s writer fiancee — have intriguing possibilities, but are not fleshed out as well as they might have been. The leads give rich, contrasting performances. Lau is all sharp edges and angles; his character is driven and tightly wound. Leung brings a more melancholy, weary air to Yan.
In the film’s opening we see two younger actors, Edison Chen and Shawn Yue, playing Ming and Yan as teenagers. The pair went on to star in Infernal Affairs 2 and 3, also available on Netflix — not up to the standard of the first movie, but definitely worth a look.
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Hollywood
Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood (Netflix) is a splashy seven-part miniseries, a double dream of post-World War II Tinseltown that mashes up history and possibility.
He has created an alternative Hollywood of the late 1940s populated by an array of real and fictional characters. In cramming together the real and the imagined, Murphy has a particular goal: he wants to give us a dream factory that creates a more equitable and diverse kind of dream. He depicts racism, homophobia and sexism in Old Hollywood but he is also keen to show us a business model in which these repressive, destructive realities are transcended. “Can one movie change the way America sees itself? Who knows?” asks a breathless newsreel presenter reporting on the fictional film at the centre of the series. Yes, Murphy seems to suggests, it can.
Murphy’s heightened positivism — his determination to put the marginalised at the centre, to write and right the wrongs — can work to powerful and entertaining effect in shows such as Glee, American Horror Story, American Crime Story and Pose. But here, the positive spin and upbeat optimism feel unearned, the real-life injustices glossed over.
Interestingly, there is one particular real-life aspect of the era that Murphy steers clear of: the blacklisting of filmmakers charged with being Communists or Communist sympathisers. It’s there, unacknowledged, in the final episode, set at a semi-fictionalised version of the 1948 Oscar ceremony: several of the real-life nominees that are mentioned went on to be blacklisted.
In Murphy’s Hollywood, there’s a character called Ernie (Dylan McDermott) who runs a petrol station where men and women can pick up handsome young men for sexual liaisons: all they have to do is use the codeword “Wonderland”.
This may seem like a Murphy invention, but it is based on fact, and provided part of the impetus for the series. Matt Tyrnauer’s 2017 documentary, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (Amazon Prime and Kanopy), introduces the story as told by 90-year-old Scotty Bowers, who wrote a book about providing just such a service out of a petrol station at 5777 Hollywood Boulevard.
Bowers, a sprightly and amiable man, has quite a tale to tell, not just about the stars he claims to have known in every conceivable way, but also about his own life, then and now.
In the miniseries, Murphy’s depiction of Rock Hudson is meant to be redemptive, yet it turns him into a rather pallid figure. For a very different approach to Hudson and Hollywood, there is Mark Rappaport’s excellent 1992 essay film, Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, which can be found on Amazon Prime and Kanopy.
Rappaport uses many clips from Hudson’s movie career to propose alternative readings of them, and there’s also a fictional autobiographical narration by actor Eric Farr. Playing Hudson, Farr reacts to and interacts with the clips, reflecting on his life and his films, and speaking posthumously about what was revealed and concealed on screen and off: a secret history of life, death and performance that’s entertaining, elegiac, full of complexities.
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What Happened, Miss Simone?
Liz Garbus’s Oscar-nominated 2015 documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone? (Netflix), begins with a magnetic, mysterious moment. It’s the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976, there’s an enthusiastic introduction, a round of applause from the audience, and Nina Simone comes to the stage. She bows slowly, pauses, and looks around and out at the crowd. She waits a little longer, then sits at the piano. She bids a kind of advance farewell to the audience, introduces the song and begins to play.
Throughout the film, her performances — whether at Montreux, singing I Loves You, Porgy on Hugh Hefner’s Playboy’s Penthouse TV show, or singing Mississippi Goddam to civil rights marchers — are powerful, distinctive, urgent, challenging. It’s the same when she’s being interviewed: she’s clear, frank and surprising.
Towards the end of the film, Garbus takes us back to the Montreux performance and, by that time, we’ve followed a remarkable trajectory. Simone learned the piano from an early age and played for her mother, a preacher, at revival meetings and in church, before being recognised as a talent to be nurtured. “I studied to become the first black classical pianist in America, and that’s all that was on my mind,” she says.
Garbus takes us through the frustration of these ambitions, her time playing in clubs to support the family, her adopting a stage name, her popular success, her civil rights activism: there is testimony to her virtuosity, her strength, her conviction, but also her pain, her vulnerability, her suffering. Mississippi Goddam, written in the aftermath of the 1963 church bombings at Birmingham, marked a turning point for her. Nothing after this song would ever be quite the same.
As well as old interviews with Simone, who died in 2003, there are talking-head interviews with people who were close to her, including her daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, an executive producer of the film. There is archival footage and excerpts from Simone’s journals.
The film’s title is taken from a story that Maya Angelou wrote in 1970 for Redbook magazine that asked, among other things, “Miss Simone, you are idolised, even loved, by millions now. But what happened, Miss Simone?” Garbus places that quote at the beginning of the film, as if what follows will provide an explanation. Her documentary doesn’t give a simple answer; nor should it, perhaps. In any case, it’s the presence of Simone herself, in concert, that makes the strongest impression.
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Dead to Me
The second season of Dead To Me (now streaming on Netflix) picks up where the first left off: it’s a sharp, entertaining black comedy that deftly balances absurd plot twists and dramatic interludes, heightened by excellent performances from Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini as its two central characters, whose close friendship is forged under extreme pressure and maximum duplicity.
In Season one (no spoilers to follow), creator Liz Feldman immediately established the dynamic between the two: Applegate is Jen, a suburban real estate agent in mourning for her husband, who had recently died in hit-and-run accident. At a support group she meets Judy (Cardellini), who is also coming to terms with loss. On the surface, it’s a friendship of opposites: Jen is volatile, simmering with anger, ready to melt down at a moment’s notice, whereas Judy is warm-hearted, freewheeling, almost impossibly chill. They turn out to be more complicated and unpredictable, however, and bring out the best and worst in each other.
The plot makes the most of the possibilities, in a giddy cascade of secrets, lies and betrayals. Season one ended on a cliffhanger: Season two plunges us back into the midst of the chaos without a recap, although some key plot points are revisited within the narrative. The wine consumption is amped up, the plot twists pile on, new characters arrive and familiar ones have new parts to play, an identical twin turns up, and an actor Applegate worked with years ago plays a significant character from Judy’s past.
On TV, Cardellini’s previous roles include the recent Bloodline and Mad Men (as the neighbour Don Draper was obsessed with in season six). And on Stan, you can see her in an early lead role, in the splendid Freaks and Geeks, a 1999 series that lasted less than a season on air but has become a legendary high point in high school comedy-drama.
She is Lindsay Weir, high-achieving 1980s student and dutiful daughter, who wants to stretch her wings a little: James Franco, Jason Segel, Seth Rogen and Busy Phillipps play some of the slacker classmates she’s drawn to. Meanwhile her little brother (John Francis Daley) and his friends negotiate typecasting issues of their own.
Created by Paul Feig and executive produced by Judd Apatow, the series gives its title characters equal time, in a vision of adolescent life at its most awkward, messy, uncomfortable and heartfelt. Only a dozen episodes went to air at the time: Stan has all 18.
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Dead Ringers
David Cronenberg’s 1988 Dead Ringers (SBS On Demand) is a riveting combination of the visceral and the cerebral, a strikingly original film illuminated by a remarkable, subtle double performance by Jeremy Irons.
Dead Ringers is based on the true story of a pair of identical twins, both gynecologists, who lived intertwined lives. They have been transformed into Beverly and Elliott Mantle (played by Irons), brilliant medical students who become proprietors of a successful, upmarket fertility clinic.
The slicker, more confident Elliott tends to dominate his twin, the shy, inward-looking Beverly, although they are careful to cultivate their similarities in public and keep their differences to themselves. They call each other Bev and Elly: two halves of one name, an acknowledgement of their interdependence.
Together, they cynically exploit the women they treat, without repercussions, until one of their patients, Claire (Genevieve Bujold), becomes the catalyst for their separation: Beverly falls in love with her, a development that leads to a wholesale disintegration of their relationship and separate identities.
Dead Ringers is a film about halves and wholes, philosophical distinctions and physical addictions, a movie with an elegantly cool surface and disturbing undercurrents. Many actors passed on the film, uncomfortable with the demands of the dual role, and the supposed taboo of the characters’ profession. Irons is terrific, subtle yet devastating, and the cinematic combining of the two performances is seamlessly and effortlessly done, without unnecessary flourishes.
The film and his performance were ignored at the Oscars: the following year, Irons won a best actor award for playing Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune, a win that felt almost like a belated recognition for his work in Dead Ringers. In his acceptance speech, he thanked David Cronenberg.
Irons and Cronenberg also joined forces for M. Butterfly (1993), an adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s play of the same name, in which Irons plays a French diplomat in love with a Chinese opera star (John Lone). It’s available to rent or buy on iTunes.
Other Cronenberg films that can be found on streaming services: A Dangerous Method, on on SBS On Demand, the story of the relationship between Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Jung (Michael Fassbender): Eastern Promises, a drama about sex-trafficking, which stars Mortensen and Naomi Watts, is on Stan. His singular William Burroughs adaptation, Naked Lunch, is on Amazon Prime, and his first two features from the 1970s, Shivers and Rabid, low-budget works that already show some of his distinctive preoccupations, are on the free service Tubi.
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Unsane
Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane (Amazon Prime) is a tense, confined 2018 thriller, with a suitably taut and precise performance from Claire Foy, exploring other options after a couple of seasons of The Crown.
She plays Sawyer Valentini, a young woman who has recently moved to a new city, and keeps herself isolated and at a distance from co-workers and a creepy boss. When she seeks help from a counsellor, and talks about why she left her hometown suddenly and in secret — a brief prologue has already given us an indication — she has a moment that feels like relief.
But she has unwittingly signed a form that allows her to be detained for 24 hours. In an instant, this involuntary confinement is set in train: the stay is extended, and her treatment becomes more repressive and brutal. The more she insists she’s fine, and that she has good reason to be in fear of her life, the worse things go for her. The institution seems designed to exploit and punish her, and it’s as if everything she has fled is there in front of her. Or, the film seems to ask, is it possible that her fears are groundless?
Soderbergh — with a script by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer — made the movie in ten days, shooting it himself on iPhones that give him claustrophobic proximity to Sawyer and her distress. One way or another, the film indicates that digital technology can allow people to get uncomfortably close: this is one of the realities that Sawyer is struggling with.
You could say that “gaslighting” is one of the things going on in Unsane. And if you want to explore the cinematic origins of this frequently used term, you could go back to the 1940s and George Cukor’s period psychological drama, Gaslight (1944), starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, which is available on Foxtel Now. Bergman, who won an Academy Award for her performance, plays a young woman, increasingly isolated by a controlling, manipulative husband, who starts to doubt her own sanity.
This was preceded by a 1940 English film of the same name, directed by Thorold Dickinson, with Diana Wynyard as the hapless wife, and a thoroughly sinister Anton Wallbrook as her husband. It is based on a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton that had runs on Broadway, under the name of Angel Street, with Vincent Price and Jose Ferrer playing the husband. When MGM acquired the remake rights, a clause in the contract called for prints of Dickinson’s film to be destroyed. Although it didn’t entirely disappear. it’s much less well-known. It’s available for rent or purchase on iTunes.
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High Tide
Gillian Armstrong’s High Tide (available on the free streaming service Tubi) is a fine, little-seen 1987 feature that marked her reunion with Judy Davis, star of My Brilliant Career, the movie that launched them both. It’s a story of choices in a very different context from that of the Miles Franklin adaptation. Here Davis plays the restless Lilli, who’s working as a backing singer, supporting a touring Elvis impersonator (Frankie J Holden) — a job she treats with playful, spiky contempt.
They arrive at a NSW coastal town for their next show. The Elvis revue moves on, but Lilli, out of favour, and with a broken-down car, remains behind. And, at a vulnerable moment, she meets a young teenager, Ally (Claudia Karvan), unaware at the time that this is the daughter she has not seen for years. Ally has already glimpsed Lilli through a window, intrigued by her style, her careless bravado: on this occasion, she sees her in another guise.
Gradually, we learn the background to this story: how Lilli departed and Ally was brought up by her brash yet protective paternal grandmother, Bet (Jan Adele). It remains a secret, however, as Lilli stays on, without revealing her identity to Ally. She keeps her distance, at Bet’s insistence, and also begins a relationship with a local, Mick (Colin Friels). It’s a volatile situation, however, impossible to maintain — something has to give.
High Tide is a story about bonds and constraints, the push and pull of the mother-daughter bond, the sensuous immediacy of maternal longing. Even before we know any of the mother-daughter story, Armstrong gives us a vivid introduction to their lives. At the beginning of the film, there’s a transition that sweeps us from Lilli on stage, in a platinum wig and tight green sparkly evening dress, like a sequinned mermaid or doll, to Ally, in a wetsuit, peacefully floating on her back in a rock pool — two characters already linked yet sharply differentiated, as they are throughout.
The screenplay, by Laura Jones, had been written for a male character. This was the script that Armstrong was preparing to film: it wasn’t until the casting stage that she decided that it would be more interesting, and more of a departure, to make the central figure a woman.
And if you want to revisit My Brilliant Career, it’s available on Stan and SBS On Demand.
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Model Shop
Quentin Tarantino is a big fan of French director Jacques Demy’s 1969 American debut, Model Shop, now streaming on SBS On Demand. Such a fan, it turns out, that he provides an introduction, mid-film commentary and wrap (with writer Kim Morgan) to extol the virtues of a work he screened for the crew of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. It was the movie’s portrayal of a certain part of 1960s Los Angeles that he loved and wanted to share with them.
Demy came to Hollywood after the success of his haunting, exquisite musical, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. He wanted to cast then-unknown Harrison Ford as the lead, but the studio insisted on Gary Lockwood, fresh from his role in 2001. Lockwood plays George, an unemployed architect with a lingering sense of futility the shadow of the draft hanging over his head. He has a vintage MG that is about to be repossessed. Driving around, trying to borrow money to keep his creditor at bay, he comes across Lola (Anouk Aimee), a beautiful French woman who drives a white convertible and works in the model shop of the title.
There’s rich detail in the apparently casual course of George’s path around the city. Fateful meetings and fleeting encounters define Demy’s movies, and in the same way, characters criss-cross his cinematic universe: towards the end of Model Shop, Lola refers almost off-handedly to events and characters who have a part to play, to varying degrees, in four of his earlier films.
It all started in 1961 with Demy’s black-and-white first feature, Lola (now screening on Stan), which introduces the title character, the men who are drawn to her and the story of the first love she is still waiting for. Lola gives us many of the images, themes and preoccupations that Demy would explore in subsequent works: it’s a work of comings and goings, disappearances and arrivals, resistance and resignation, a film with an easy grace and the restless momentum of the everyday.
Also on Stan is Demy’s second feature, Bay of Angels (1963). Jeanne Moreau, with a cloud of platinum-blonde hair and a Cardin wardrobe, plays Jackie, a compulsive gambler who soon draws a sober young bank clerk (Claude Mann) into her world of obsession. She’s a woman on the edge who knows the inevitability of loss but keeps playing, no matter what is it stake. And, we learn in Model Shop, in events that take place after Bay Of Angels, she also happened to turn Lola’s life upside down. Watching these three films — in chronological order, for preference — is pure pleasure.
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