Here are some of the highlights from the Brock University Film Society’s 2019-2020 season.
March 26, 2020—Dark Waters (2020), dir. Todd Haynes [ONLINE]
Todd Haynes has been a significant figure in American cinema since he first made waves in 1988 with a poignant and subversive underground film called Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Within a few years, Haynes had become a superstar himself, winning acclaim and sparking controversy at the Sundance Film Festival with his feature-length debut Poison (1991), one of the opening shots of the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s.
Some of Haynes’s most famous films have focused on popular music, and the complicated—and sometimes tragic—figures who become pop stars (Superstar; The Velvet Goldmine [1998], which dealt with Glam Rock in the early 1970s; I’m Not There [2007], which examined the Bob Dylan phenomenon of the ‘60s and ‘70s). But in many ways, Haynes’s preferred genre has been the family melodrama, as evidenced by films like Safe (1995); Far From Heaven (2002), his ode to two masters of the genre, Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder; Carol (2015), based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith; and Wonderstruck (2017).
Now Haynes is back with a powerful legal/environmental thriller called Dark Waters, one that stars Mark Ruffalo as a lawyer who had the audacity to take on DuPont. And if this seems uncharacteristic, one should remember that Safe—quite possible Haynes’s greatest film—was not only a powerful family melodrama, it was also a brilliant study of privilege, overdevelopment, and the environmental crisis in America.
Ruffalo is joined by an all-star cast that includes Tim Robbins, Anne Hathaway, and Bill Pullman.
March 19, 2020—A Hidden Life (2019), dir. Terrence Malick [ONLINE]
There was a time when Terrence Malick’s output was sporadic, to say the least. Malick was one of the greatest talents to emerge out of the New Hollywood Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, but he only actually made two feature films during this period, and they were released five years apart.
The first of these, of course, was Badlands (1973), Malick’s bleak and haunting portrait of star-crossed lovers on a murder spree—a story that was inspired by the Charlie Starkweather/Caril Ann Fugate murders in 1958, and that starred Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. The second was Days of Heaven (1978), starring Richard Gere and Sam Shepard, a film that still stands as one of the most beautiful and poetic ever made, a true masterpiece of cinematography.
Then came a twenty-year hiatus (!), before the reclusive director returned with The Thin Red Line (1998), a masterful study of war, its follies, its absurdities, and its tests, one that was set during the United States’s campaign against the Japanese in the South Pacific, in a true Paradise Lost. Fittingly, the film featured a huge, all-star, ensemble cast, including Jim Caviezel, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, George Clooney, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, Elias Koteas, and many others.
Since The Tree of Life (2011), his epic—even cosmological—account of family, personal history, and morality starring Brad Pitt, Malick has been on a relative tear, releasing three feature-length films and a handful of shorts, and now A Hidden Life.
Malick’s latest film, A Hidden Life (2019), is yet another epic, this time dealing with the plight of a conscientious objector in a time of tyranny and war—namely, the rule of the Third Reich and the outbreak of World War II. It is his most highly acclaimed film—and his most majestic—in a decade, as well as the most pointedly political film he’s ever produced.
Pandemic Sign-Off:
Dear Friends of BUFS: it seems like a very different world than it was on Thursday night during our screening of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.
By the time we returned home that night, we found out that all non-essential Brock-related activities (such as those hosted off-campus) we're going to be cancelled. By Friday afternoon Brock had cancelled classes through the end of term, and the Performing Arts Centre (and, thus, the Film House) had announced that they were also shuttering their operations for a period of time.
This wasn't the way things were planned, but it turns out that A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was the final BUFS screening of our 2019-2020 season. In some ways, it was an eerily fitting end. It certainly was a moving one.
We would like to thank you for another fantastic season. Your support and your enthusiasm for our selection of "the best in independent and art house cinema" throughout the year was extraordinary.
We'd also like to thank our partners at the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre and at the Niagara Arts Centre for making this season possible. And let's not forget our host program, the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film, and the Faculty of Social Sciences at Brock University, who've been supporting cinephilia in St. Catharines since 1975.
Take care, play it safe, and we look forward to seeing you again in the Fall of 2020!
March 12, 2020—A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2020), dir. Marielle Heller
In 2018 the filmmaker Morgan Neville took the story of Fred Rogers and the impact he had on television broadcasting, on childhood, and on American culture and made it the subject of his award-winning documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Along with Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968-2001) stands as one of the boldest experiments in American educational television ever created—and also among the most beloved. More than anything, though, Neville's film was a profile in compassion and integrity for an era (our own) that so desperately needs it.
Now the story of Fred Rogers has been transformed into a biopic, and the man who dons the iconic cardigan-and-Sperry-topsiders is none other than Tom Hanks. In other words, a famously decent man who won so many accolades over the course of his career, including a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 1997 and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002, is being played by another famously decent man who just won a Cecil B. DeMille Award for “outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment” at the 2020 Golden Globes.
Even better, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is directed by Marielle Heller, the extremely talented actor/filmmaker who brought us The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) and Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018). And here, too, the story of Fred Rogers takes on allegorical proportions. The film’s tagline says it all: “We could all use a little kindness.”
March 5, 2020—Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), dir. Céline Sciamma
Céline Sciamma has been one of the brightest lights of French cinema over the last 15 years, ever since Water Lilies (2007), her directorial debut, made a splash at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2007, before securing a coveted Louis Delluc Prize for Best First Feature later that same year. Sciamma followed this success with two more highly acclaimed and award-winning films—Tomboy (2011) and Girlhood (2014)—that together comprise a “trilogy of youth.” These three films established Sciamma as a modern master of the “banlieue drama”—contemporary narratives set in Paris’s sprawling and troubled suburbs. And all three have been praised for their subtlety and insight, as well as the depth and humanity that they’ve brought to issues of gender, youth, identity, sexuality, class, and, especially in the case of Girlhood, race.
With Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sciamma has taken on what appears at first glance to be a very different project: a costume drama set in pre-revolutionary 18th-century. Here again, however, Sciamma addresses issues of gender, identity, sexuality, and class, but she’s done so in a breathtakingly beautiful film, and one that stands as one of the most powerful studies of art and the creative process in recent times.
The story is of a young artist named Marianne (Noémie Merlant) who is brought to a remote part of Brittany to paint the portrait of young woman, Héloise (Adèle Haenel), so it can be sent to an Italian nobleman and thus secure her arranged marriage to him. The problem is that Héloise objects to having her portrait painted, so Marianne must do so surreptitiously, under the guise of being an innocent and understanding companion. What ensues is a rather remarkable love story, one that A.O. Scott of The New York Times has described as being, “like a lost work of 18th-century literature: at once ardent and rigorous, passionate and philosophical.”
Scott is far from the only one who has been impressed by Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Critics around the world have been effusive in their praise, and there’s not question the film has earned Sciamma her widest and greatest acclaim yet, including the Best Screenplay and Queer Palm awards at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, and the prizes for Best Actress (Merlant) and Best Cinematography at the 2019 Lumières Awards, France’s equivalent to the Golden Globes.
February 20, 2020—Little Women (2019), dir. Greta Gerwig
Greta Gerwig first began making waves as an actor, writer, and director in the early 2000s, when she became a key figure in American independent cinema’s so-called “mumblecore” scene. Within a few years she’d started to appear in bigger budget, more widely distributed “Indiewood” productions such as Frances Ha (2012), which she co-wrote with the director Noah Baumbach, and Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women (2016), where she was part of a terrific ensemble that included Annette Bening and Elle Fanning. Even when she wasn’t cast in a leading role, Gerwig was the kind of actor who could steal the show, and critics singled her out as, “one of the most original actors of her time.”
And then came Lady Bird (2017)…
Suddenly Gerwig was being lauded as one of the most talented writers and directors of her time, and one who’d managed to transform her adolescence in Sacramento, CA into a breathtakingly original film. Among other things, the film showcased Gerwig’s ability to gain the trust and harness the energies of a phenomenally gifted group of young actors, including Saoirse Ronan, Timothée Chalamet, Lucas Hedges, and Beanie Feldstein.
How does one follow up Lady Bird? With Little Women, apparently. Gerwig’s choice seems to have puzzled those who consider Louisa May Alcott’s 19th-century classic of adolescent fiction to be nothing more than that—a classic of adolescent fiction. (Not to mention one that’s already been adapted for the screen several times before.) Gerwig, however, had something entirely more audacious in mind. What’s she created is not a straight adaptation of Little Women, but an irreverent one, a mash-up that combines both volumes of Little Women (“Little Women” and “Good Wives”) with later works of Alcott’s (such as Rose in Bloom), elements of Alcott’s biography (including snatches from her journals), and a healthy dose of Gerwig’s own autobiography. The result is both a work of daring ingenuity and a study of ingenuity itself, as well as those forces, gendered and otherwise, that would restrain and impede it.
Saoirse Ronan stars as the tempestuous Jo March, while Timothée Chalamet, Florence Pugh, and Meryl Streep shine in supporting roles.
January 16, 2020—Parasite (2019), Bong Joon Ho
In a 2019-2020 schedule that has already offered us so many highlights (The Farewell, The Souvenir, Pain & Glory, The Lighthouse), Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite might be our most eagerly anticipated film yet.
Bong has been a dominant filmmaker on the international stage for roughly twenty years. Over that span of time he’s shown himself to be a master of genre, moving with ease between everything from the crime thriller (Memories of Murder [2003], Mother [2009]), to the monster film (The Host [2006], Okja [2017]), to the post-apocalyptic sci-fi film (Snowpiercer [2013]), while wowing audiences and racking up numerous awards and widespread critical acclaim along the way.
With Parasite, however, Bong appears to have hit true pay dirt. He’s created an international sensation that has taken his career straight into the stratosphere, winning the Palme d’or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival and the prize for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2020 Golden Globes, while making countless Best Films of 2019 lists, as well as many Best Films of the Decade lists. And he’s done so by making another brilliant genre film—this time a taut psychological thriller, one whose mastery of suspense and sly, morbid wit have drawn comparisons to the work of Alfred Hitchcock.
November 21, 2019—The Lighthouse (2019), dir. Robert Eggers
Pardon the pun, but Robert Eggers first made waves as a director at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, when The Witch (a.k.a., The VVitch) wowed audiences and took both the Directing Award and the award for Best Horror/Science-Fiction Film. The Witch was set in Eggers’s native New England in the 1630s, in and around the Plymouth Colony in what would come to be known as Massachusetts, but it was actually shot in Mattawa, in Northern Ontario. The Witch established Eggers as a director of rare talent and vision, one capable of creating a supernatural horror film that was all the more unsettling precisely because he hadn’t made much of it up—its disturbing account of superstition and witchcraft was based on actual histories, court documents, and folk tales from the 17th century.
If The Witch was a work that was surprisingly Hawthornean for an early 21st century horror film, The Lighthouse, Eggers’s follow-up, is a 19th-century psychological sea yarn that was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and is positively Melvillean in its treatment of good and evil, masculinity and madness in a remote coastal area of New England. The film stars Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, it had its premiere at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, where it won a prestigious prize for direction, and acclaim for the film has been thunderous.
November 14, 2019—Pain & Glory (2019), dir. Pedro Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar burst onto the art house film scene in the early 1980s. His flamboyant, highly topical, and provocative (even outrageous) films announced a bold new talent, and one whose work signalled the emergence of a post-Franco Spanish cinema. Within a few years he’d asserted himself as a master stylist, and his films found more and more acclaim around the world, at prestige film festivals such as those of Venice, Berlin, and New York and beyond. His first major international breakthrough was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), a film that combined Almodóvar’s interest in melodrama with a knack for screwball comedy, and that earned him an Academy Award nomination.
Almodóvar reached the peak of his international influence around the turn of the century, winning back-to-back Oscars for his 1999 film All About My Mother (Best Foreign Language Film) and his 2002 film Talk to Her (Best Original Screenplay), and following up these triumphs with such hits as Volver (2006) and Broken Embraces (2009).
Like Fassbinder before him, Almodóvar is known for working with an ensemble of actors who reappear in his films over and over again. He’s also known for having cultivated muses. Antonio Banderas worked repeatedly with Almodóvar in the 1980s, from the time of Labyrinth of Passion (1982), his second film. Penélope Cruz has been Banderas’s primary muse since she first appeared in Live Flesh in 1997, including standout performances in All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Volver, and Broken Embraces.
In his latest, Pain & Glory--a film that has been compared to Fellini’s 8 1/2--Almodóvar tells the tale of a late-career film director who was once a brash, young renegade, but has since slipped into decline. Pain & Glory features the talents of Banderas and Cruz together in an Almodóvar production for only the second time in his career (they were paired in a cameo in the 2013 comedy I’m So Excited), and, luckily, there’s no sign of decline in Almodóvar’s treatment of his semi-autobiographical material. Banderas, in particular, has been singled out for delivering a career-defining performance, and many critics are claiming that Pain & Glory ranks among the Spanish Maestro’s greatest.
October 24, 2019—The Souvenir (2019), dir. Joanna Hogg
The British director Joanna Hogg has established herself in recent years as the film critic’s filmmaker. She’s the kind of director who’s inspired The New York Times’s Manohla Dargis to exclaim, “Joanna Hogg — where have you been all my movie-loving life?,”upon seeing Hogg’s utterly captivating and highly unconventional family melodrama Archipelago in 2014.
Hogg is back, and The Souvenir, her most recent film, is another complicated, wrenching, and gripping take on the family melodrama. Based in part on a chapter from Hogg’s own life, the film tells the story of Julie, a film student, and her mysterious and twisted relationship with Anthony, her boyfriend. Adding further layers to the proceedings, Julie is played by Honor Swinton Byrne, and her mother—who isn’t sure what to make of Julie and Anthony’s relationship—is played by her real-life mother, Tilda Swinton. And to make things even more convoluted, Julie’s thesis film has a protagonist named “Tony,” and her work on this project is a major source of tension between her and Anthony (in other words, “Tony” is getting between Julie and Anthony).
Once again, critics have been left spellbound by this latest film of Hogg’s. In fact, A.O. Scott, Dargis’s colleague at The New York Times, was so moved by The Souvenir that he began his review as follows: “‘The Souvenir’ is one of my favorite movies of the year so far, but I almost want to keep it a secret. Partly because it’s the kind of film — we all have a collection of these, and of similar books and records, too — that feels like a private discovery, an experience you want to protect rather than talk about. A direct message like this, beamed from another person’s sensibility into your own sensorium, isn’t meant to be shared.”
Well, sorry, A.O. The cat’s out of the bag. The Souvenir will be gracing the screen of The Film House, and the Brock University Film Society is happy to share it with you, dear viewer.
September 19, 2019—The Farewell (2019), dir. Lulu Wang
We’re so glad to be returning to the Film House at the First Ontario Performing Arts Centre for another season of the Brock University Film Society. Our 2018-2019 season—our very first with the Film House—was truly a banner year, and we thank you for your support. Our 2019-2020 season is shaping up to be another excellent one. We’ve already got many outstanding films lined up for the fall term, and we’re confident that our programming for the remainder of the year will be just as strong.
Ironically, we’re starting off this year with a goodbye—a convoluted, highly elaborate, emotionally wrenching, but ultimately life-affirming goodbye. Yes, we’re very excited to be launching this year’s program with Lulu Wang’s justly celebrated The Farewell. As the film’s clever tagline (“Based on an actual lie.”) alludes, The Farewell is the fictionalization of a true story—one involving a whopper of a lie.
Though Wang is primarily a filmmaker, she first developed the story that forms the core of The Farewell back in 2016 as a truly wonderful work of nonfiction for the radio—for WBEZ Chicago’s highly acclaimed This American Life, to be precise. The episode in question was called “In Defense of Ignorance” (#585: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/585/in-defense-of-ignorance ), it was focused on the issue of denial and its occasional merits, and Wang’s segment was tantalizingly titled “What You Don’t Know.” In it, Wang told a riveting and extremely personal story of her extended family, of the Chinese diaspora, of health and the human psychology, of white lies, of reunions, of mortality, and of the bonds that connect us across vast geographies, and across time.
Wang’s adaptation of her own work stars the talented rapper and actress Awkwafina (Crazy Rich Asians) as a version of the director herself, and though some liberties are taken (here, for instance, the protagonist of the tale is a writer, not a filmmaker), Wang mostly stays very close to her original material. Reenacting her family’s melodrama and giving it visual form, however, generates fascinating alchemical reactions. Wang’s film retains much of the nuance and detail that made her radio documentary so compelling, but turning this material into motion pictures and bringing it to the screen allows Wang to introduce many new subtle, yet powerful observations to the mix through her cinematography and editing. As a result, The Farewell is much more about the Old World versus the New World, than “What You Don’t Know” was, and especially about how the former Old World of China has suddenly become the New New World. In other words, in this version, the personal is the geopolitical.
The Farewell was a hit at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, where it premiered in January, and it has impressed critics and charmed audiences everywhere it has played ever since. In the process it has become something of a indie sensation. We’re thrilled to be launching our BUFS 2019-2020 season with Wang’s film.