Danny Boyle’s return to his ‘infected’ fable delivers the same nail-chomping tension, social commentary and energetic cinematography/soundtrack mash-up as his 23 year-old original – but now with added nightmare fuel, humour, hope and yes, profundity. As a meditation on mortality and Britain it’s unsubtle, but it’s also thrilling, moving and weirdly life affirming. It could be the best 115min you never spent in therapy.
Miya Mizuno/Sony
In 28 Days Later we had Cillian Murphy’s bewildered patient waking up in an abandoned London, in 28 Weeks Later (not written by Alex Garland or directed by Boyle) we had survivors holed up in a clean sector of the UK’s capital. Now we’re a couple of decades after the original outbreak of the rage virus and Britain is a quarantined island of naked body slurpers, the rest of Europe leaving normal lives while sending their fleets to patrol the coastline and ensure the madness stays within this scepter’d isle. Very Brexit.
While the mainland is over-run with grubby infected (fast-sprinting, slow and low, souped up ‘Alphas’), a group of survivors are self sufficient on Lindisfarne island having lapsed back into traditional roles and religious worship where the women raise children, teach and cook and the men protect, hunt and gather. When they want a party they drink home brew and sing ‘Delilah’ by Tom Jones while dancing by candlelight. Very Wicker Man.
Miya Mizuno/Sony
Jamie (Aaron Taylor Johnson) is an enthusiastic killer of the infected, who wants to take his 13 year-old son Spike (Alfie Williams) on his first hunt on the mainland, leaving his disorientated, ill wife Isla (Jodie Comer) to rant in her sweat soaked bed. The duo set off for a horrifying trip where blood splatters, the rules of the world are established and the glimmer of other life is seen through the trees. A fire burning far away could be evidence of the Kurz-like Doctor Kelson (Ralph Fiennes). By the time you’ve bitten every nail off, Spike and Isla are wandering through the wilderness of the North of England (and in a nod to recent British lunacy, past the Sycamore Gap) and meeting various zombies, a stranded Scandinavian sailor and the good doctor who has developed an ashes-to-ashes methodology to find solace in the dead…
Miya Mizuno/Sony
While still trading in jump scares and the mouth-drying fear of being hunted, Boyle and Garland are now more interested in finding the beauty in the horror. There’s moments when a thousand strong herd of deer undulate across a hillside, when Kelson explains his form of worshipful remembrance, when zombies splashing in a bucolic river look almost like forest sprites. And moments of human tenderness – the understanding between women that crosses insanity, the strength of a mother, the bittersweet taste of losing someone adored. How to love and lose is better than to never love at all. Tears will be shed on account of Comer’s stealth performance which sneaks up and gut-punches straight after an enjoyably silly bit concerning plastic surgery and a Shell petrol station missing its ‘S’. Fiennes is predictably perfect – iodine orange and making the most sense in a post-Covid world. The left turn comes at the end with a Jack O’Connell teaser for the sequel that nods to Jimmy Saville and a ride even more wild than this one. An infectious promise.
Miya Mizuno/Sony
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. 28 Years Lateris in cinemas now
Photographs & interview by GREG WILLIAMS As told to JANE CROWTHER
Kaia Gerber invites Greg Williams to her theatre dressing room and discusses her voyage of discovery in her acting career.
Kaia Gerber’s nails tell the story of her life. When I meet her at her Hollywood Hills home on a sunny Saturday in February, I notice her perfect almond manicure with chipped black nail polish over the top. She invites me inside and explains they represent two very different jobs she’s juggling at the moment. ‘During the week I have perfectly manicured nails for season two of Palm Royale,’ she says of revisiting the role she has on the Apple+ TV show as Mitzi, the not-as-daffy-as-she-seems beautician. ‘Then I put black nail polish stickers on top during the weekends, and I chip it. By Monday they’re perfect again. But this is a representation of my life right now, because the black nail polish is very Jane Jr., who I play in [live theatre play] Evanston Salt Costs Climbing, and then the beautiful manicure is very Palm Royale…’
Gerber has received rave reviews for her performance at the Rogue Machine Theatre on Melrose, where she plays a fragile young woman wrestling with mental health issues five shows a week. She has invited me over to hang out as she gets ready before her Saturday matinee, filling her downtime from filming Palm Royale with an acting job that is helping her finesse her craft. That student’s approach to work is also evident in the self-confessed bookworm’s love of reading and learning – as she gets her things together in the kitchen, I notice a baseball cap and tote branded with her hugely successful online book club, Library Science. ‘It’s shameless self-promotion everywhere I turn!’ she laughs, admitting she’s even been specifically nerdy about the type of highlighter pen the site sells. ‘I think partially because I didn’t go to college, I don’t associate literature with studying. I have a friend who went to NYU, and now he is a librarian, and has the greatest library in London. He would take me to the bookstore and assign books to me. But it felt fun. That’s how I started reading. And now I can’t stop. Library Science started during the pandemic. I was just doing interviews with people on Instagram Live, because I always wanted to be in a book club, and none of my friends wanted to do that with me. It just grew from there. We curate libraries for hotels or private homes. It’s the dream job. Now I do the interviews pre-recorded, thankfully, because anything live is really scary.’
For someone who finds live events scary, Gerber has been facing her fears (twice a day on Saturdays) with her role in Evanston Salt Costs Climbing – playing a part that demands singing, dancing, tears and introspection in an intimate theatre environment where she can lock eyes with her audience. Though she is a successful model (and the child of one), the Malibu native grew up loving theatre and felt the pull back towards it after a film debut in Babylon and roles in Bottoms and Saturday Night, and TV roles in American Horror Story and Palm Royale. ‘That was my first love. And then I started doing film and TV. But I’d always wanted to go back to it,’ she says as she gets comfy on her sofa in a lounge with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the garden. ‘But it’s scary. There’s nowhere to hide, and in modelling I got quite used to hiding and being able to conceal. Theatre terrified me, which made me realise that I needed to do it again.’ The process of doing theatre has been revelatory for her. ‘There’s something kind of thrilling about knowing that you could go up there, and you could do whatever you wanted, and that will be what happens that day. When you’re doing television, you rehearse once right before you film it. Almost every single day that I leave a film set, or I’m driving home, or when I’m falling asleep, I’m like, “Oh, that’s how I should have done it.” And when you’re doing a play, you can wake up the next morning and then try that thing.’
Being part of a company, where she does her own stage make-up and organises her own costume and props, has also been a gift. ‘I had this awakening, realising how almost infantilised you can be on a film set. You get there, and they do your make-up, your hair, physically put you in clothes, they hand you your prop, and they tell you where to stand. It’s like you have a babysitter all the time. But doing theatre, no one’s telling me what time I have to be there. I choose. No one’s telling me how to get ready or how to prepare. You’re forced into this place of figuring it out.’
The tempestuousness of that experience has been twinned with the fast-paced filming of season two of Palm Royale during the week. ‘They couldn’t be more on opposite ends of the spectrum,’ she says of the two roles. ‘But I also appreciate that because I’m not able to stay in one too much. A lot of who Jane Jr. represents is the darker parts of myself, and these dark thoughts that I’ve had. So I actually get off the stage, and I’m like, “OK, I’ve acknowledged that dark energy for the day.”’ There was certainly dark energy when, during the rehearsal period, the LA fires started. Gerber grabbed her dog, Milo, and her first-edition books and evacuated, not knowing if the play would go ahead or even be something the LA community would want to see in the wake of such tragedy. ‘We were all of a sudden like, “Oh, we’re talking about the end of the world in this play, about climate change, about this existential feeling of dread. And now we’re looking at how this sky is on fire, and this is all really happening,” she recalls. The show was only delayed and Gerber has found audience reactions gratifying. ‘What has made me really love the experience of doing this, is that people come up after and they’re like, “Me too”. It’s devastating that everyone relates to it, but it’s also comforting, I think.’
We go outside to soak up a little sun before heading to the darkness of the theatre and I ask how modelling now fits into this performing life she is carving out for herself. ‘Modelling has a performative aspect to it that ties into acting,’ she says, rocking on her chair on the deck. ‘But modelling is so much the awareness of the camera and you’re trying to look appealing. In acting you have to forget all that. That’s something I’ve had to unlearn and that was the freeing part. I still model sometimes. But the greatest gift it’s given me is that it’s allowed me to do something like this play, where I’m just doing it because I love it. It’s allowed me this freedom, especially as I’m just starting, to just do the things that I love – not for any kind of financial gain.’
I still model sometimes. But the greatest gift it’s given me is that it’s allowed me to do something like this play, where I’m just doing it because I love it. It’s allowed me this freedom, especially as I’m just starting, to just do the things that I love
As Gerber gathers her matcha tea, smoothie and an energy drink with ‘a diabolical amount of caffeine in it’ to keep her going through her performance, we talk about turning fear into excitement. ‘They’re such close feelings. I don’t think you can hate someone unless you’ve loved them. If you shut down fear or anger or sadness, you can’t do that without shutting off excitement and happiness and love. I would rather feel. Some of the most painful moments of my life, I can look back and be like, “Pain is an indication of how much you cared and loved.”’
We hop in her monster pick-up truck (on loan from her dad) and wind our way down the canyon to the theatre. While stuck in LA traffic, she tries the ‘impossible task’ of narrowing down her five favourite books. ‘Maybe five most formative. Just Kids by Patti Smith. The Lover by Marguerite Duras. Clarice Lispector – all of her books; all of Joan Didion. And maybe Camus – The Stranger. Right now, I’m revisiting Anaïs Nin. I’m rereading Frankenstein. And a lot of Linda Gregg and Jack Gilbert poetry.’ I ask if she’s tempted to write herself. ‘It’s the art form that I respect the most. I think my taste level is so much higher than what I could accomplish, and that’s a very difficult position to be in. But I’ve always written songs and poems. I would love to start adapting novels and books. And I would love to go back to school and actually get a degree in library science. I think that will happen, probably in the future.’ She does not, she says, simply want an easy life. ‘Who said that was a thing to achieve? Who put that as the ultimate sign of happiness? I don’t think that that’s the goal. The goal is contentment.’
Gerber gets to the theatre early to set out her things, walk the stage, get into hair and make-up and warm up. As we squash into her cosy dressing room (which is shared via a dividing wall with her co-star, Hugo Armstrong) she applies her pale make-up, gets changed and winds her hair on her head in readiness for the wig she cut herself. As she completes the transformation, she stares in the mirror at herself. ‘There she is, there’s Jane Jr.’. It’s approaching curtain up, and Gerber keeps an ear out for the music that denotes the audience arriving in the auditorium and sips Throat Coat tea to prep her voice as she does vocal warm-ups. When the show starts, she listens to the audience from the side of the stage, gauging the people she’ll perform for. ‘We’ll see what it is today.’ After the show, she likes to mingle with the audience in the lobby. ‘I’ve felt like I’ve been able to really get into really deep conversations with people after the play that I normally wouldn’t, just upon meeting someone.’
I leave her to join the audience and watch the show. Personally, I thought she was incredible, her characterisation recalling something of the fragility of Shelley Duvall in The Shining. The Stage and Cinema review describes her as an actor ‘shedding her chrysalis…delivering the production’s most startling revelation’. After the show, I find backstage bustling with well wishers, one woman crying with the emotion of Gerber’s performance. She is tired but happy, and ready to do it all over again in the evening performance. What has this live experience taught her on-set? ‘It really got me comfortable with embarrassment. I felt much freer on set because I was just more comfortable with going through these really big feelings with an audience around me. Just learning that whether the audience is the crew on a film set, or an actual audience paying to sit and watch – not to try to ignore that, to be accepting of that and use it.’
I feel lucky enough to have been able to focus on being a small part of these really incredible projects with filmmakers that I look up to so much. I love seeing the choices that actors make, and trying to connect those dots
I leave her to rest between shows and we catch up with her again the day after the Oscars, when Gerber attended the Vanity Fair party in ethereal 1997 couture Valentino. ‘I’m alive and ok!’ she jokes, post-celebrations, while driving her truck. She has only a few shows left at the theatre and is finishing up on Palm Royale where she teases that her character will have ‘quite an evolution’ in a way that she could be talking about herself as a growing artist. ‘Nobody really takes her seriously – even audiences. But how aware is she of the way that people perceive her, and how can she use that to her advantage?’
Gerber’s sharpened toolbelt of acting skills will be seen in a number of buzzy upcoming projects. She’ll appear in Outcome, a Hollywood-skewing comedy from Jonah Hill where she’ll play an actress opposite Keanu Reeves, movie star experiencing an epiphany. She also has a role in Shell, Max Minghella’s dark comedy about a wellness guru, and in David Lowry’s Mother Mary, starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel. She will also feature in TV show Overcompensating, following a student hiding his sexuality. ‘I feel lucky enough to have been able to focus on being a small part of these really incredible projects with filmmakers that I look up to so much. I love seeing the choices that actors make, and trying to connect those dots.’ Having nearly finished the run, what has she learned from doing the play? She pauses for a moment. ‘Doing the play was everything you are told not to do in front of people, that you know is opening yourself up for criticism – dance, sing, cry, scream. So it opened up my mind to: “Why have I limited myself from doing these things?”
Photographs and interview by GREG WILLIAMS As told to JANE CROWTHER Outcome, Shell and Mother Mary will be released in cinemas soon. Overcompensating is streaming on Prime Video now
Writer-director John Maclean follows off-beat Western Slow West with more genre-spliced fare – this time a Scottish oater/samurai actioner. In the blustery 1790 glens we meet a young Japanese woman (Kôki) running for her life across moors and through forests. In pursuit, a motley team: leader Sugarman (Tim Roth), his son Little (Jack Lowden) and a crew of desperate thieves and murderers who’ll slice the throat of a random circus performer as easily as a colleague who failed a mission. The Sugarman gang are looking for gold that they believe the girl knows the location of – and in a midsection flashback, we’ll discover if she is merely another pawn in their path of destruction or if she has skin in the game.
Norman Wilcox-Geissen/IFC Films
As the marauders trash a stately home, the wagon of the girl’s father (Takehiro Hira) and the camp of an acting troupe (led by Joanne Whalley), the woman at the centre of the story turns from quivering quarry to an avenging force, and Sugarman’s infantry start to drop. ‘Remember my name, Tornado…’ she intones darkly while wielding a blade. There will be blood – spurting out of slick throats and lopped-off limbs…
Norman Wilcox-Geissen/IFC FilmsNorman Wilcox-Geissen/IFC Films
Roth can play this sort of casual menace in his sleep and his relaxed brutality towards his lads, his son and anyone in his path is chillingly effective. Lowden, playing off Roth’s energy, becomes a nasty piece of work, while Kôki manages to sell her arc from girl to goddess in a screenplay that asks for little sympathy for anyone. The characters all circumnavigate a boggy lake and damp woods as their morality play unwinds – like souls in purgatory, tethered to a place. Audiences will need to accept this conceit to get the most out of people constantly bumping into each other when there’s plenty of directions to run. But, welcome the dreamlike quality of proceedings (helped by beautiful lensing by Robbie Ryan of brackish waters, auburn grasslands and fairytale forests whipped by gale-force winds) and Maclean’s rain-lashed, dark fable will cast a spell. And make you yearn for a cosy blanket.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs courtesy of IFC Films Tornado is out in cinemas now
That title is somewhat cumbersome but Ana de Armas’ off-shoot of the Keanu Reeves action franchise is thankfully more cut and thrust. No such exposition in this brisk 90-minute knock-em-down set during the third John Wick instalment which opens with flashback as a wide-eyed child watches her father killed by ‘The Chancellor’ (Gabriel Byrne) and is taken in by Angelica Huston’s ‘The Director’ of the Ruska Roma to be trained as both a ballet dancer and an assassin. Growing into de Armas’ Eve Macarro, the ballerina begins to question the ethos of the shadowy world in which she lives when she discovers a lead to The Chancellor during a protection gig. Like Wick before her, Eve may trade in death but the demise of a beloved sets her on a scorched earth path to revenge – tracking The Chancellor and his cult to New York, Prague and a delightful alpine village full of contract killers in cosy knitwear.
LionsgateLionsgateLarry D. Horricks/Lionsgate
Throughout her odyssey Eve does what she was taught at Ruska Roma – to ‘fight like a girl’. That means inventive deployment of household objects (pans, skates, ice picks, plates), using her smaller stature to outsmart hulking goons (grenade headache being a highlight) and fighting yin with yang (a fire hose vs flamethrower set piece sizzles). Like Wick, she seemingly has rubber bones and doesn’t spill a great deal of blood apart from the most attractive of grazes, but Ballerina isn’t much interested in logic or reality. Those who’ve already spent time at the Continental Hotel will understand the drill and de Armas displays as much charisma as Reeves in making relentless stunts entertaining (the Director might as well be saying ‘again’ repeatedly as she does during dance rehearsal). De Armas more than matches Reeves when they meet for a brief, bruising encounter and ensures he’s not missed when he departs. Consolidating the action promise she showed as a scene-stealing Paloma in Bond’s No Time To Die, and sharpened in Ghosted and The Gray Man, de Armas is setting up Ballerina for a franchise and has zero figs to give about pausing for breath, let alone an exploration of who Eve is away from a fight. That will surely come in future films – which, based on the star’s assured performance, are as much of a given as the fact that this pirouetting killer will definitely make use of everything in an armoury (including a covetable flame retardant coat) when she breaks into it. ‘Cool,’ she nods in approval on opening a box of lethal weaponry. Well, indeed.
Last year Cannes boasted Ozploitation The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage as a wave rider who becomes unhinged when tested by locals at an Australian surf spot. This year, the festival saw Jai Courtney get his crazy on in a similarly willfully silly but entertaining horror-actioner that features surfers in the land down under.
Mark Taylor/Vertigo Releasing
Premiering in Directors’ Fortnight, Sean Byrne’s video nasty stars Courtney as a salty seadog, Tucker, who trawls for female victims, not just fish, and gets off on feeding them to sharks while taping them with a camcorder. ‘So no-one knows you’re here?’ he asks a dopey backpacking couple who arrive at his Gold Coast boat looking for a day trip, and within ten minutes we’re treated to his bloody MO. Cut to feisty surfer Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) who meets-cute with a local, Moses (Josh Heuston) before taking off for some dawn tubes and falling victim to Tucker’s abduction techniques. Will the surfer outsmart the psychopath aboard his rusting ship before the great whites circle for dinner time?
Mark Taylor/Vertigo Releasing
Courtney is clearly having great fun as a leering shark enthusiast with Mummy issues and an inexhaustible line of fishy analogies in a grindhouse-style film that has little truck with logic and a squeamish moment involving a thumb and a pair of handcuffs. Harrison makes good work of fighting for survival while maintaining perfect hair and the CG sharks chew on people inconsistently (yes to one struggling, splashing girl; no to another swimming, splashing girl). It’s not designed to test the brain or bum, but if you like a brisk, nasty little horror that understands its genre and purpose, Dangerous Animals is decent bait.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs courtesy of VIRTIGO RELEASING Dangerous Animals premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival and is in cinemas now
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Interview by JANE CROWTHER
History of Sound actor/producer Paul Mescal brings his period romance to Cannes as he reflects on masculinity and love.
When Paul Mescal last came to Cannes he was arriving off the back of hit TV show Normal People and wowed the festival with his delicate portrayal of a father in crisis in Aftersun in 2011. Now he’s bringing a film to the Croisette in the wake of All of UsStrangers and Gladiator II – and as a producer. Oliver Hermanus’ The History of Sound, based on Ben Shattock’s short story, follows music student Lionel (Mescal) who falls for fellow undergrad David (Josh O’Connor) and embarks on a folk song collecting expedition through 1919 rural New England.
The role is another nuanced role from Mescal who says that cinema is shifting from dated male stereotypes. ‘It’s ever shifting,’ he says. ‘I think maybe in cinema we’re moving away from the traditional, alpha, leading male characters. I don’t think the film is defining or attempting to redefine masculinity, I think it is being very subjective to the relationship between Lionel and David.’
He and O’Connor have followed a similar trajectory in their careers and knew each other before getting on set together, which only added to the actors’ ability to get into character and craft a heartbreaking love story. ‘We’ve known each other for about five years and we were definitely friendly so that foundation of safety and play was there, but that relationship really deepened in the three or four weeks we were filming. I felt very lucky that myself and Josh knew each other well enough to begin with but we had a canvas to keep painting on during the filming process.’
The journey to showing the film to audiences at Cannes has taken a number of years, with Mescal first reading the script at the age of 24, filming at 28 and presenting it in France at the age of 29. For the actor it’s been a rewarding experience to track a project from start to finish both in front of, and behind, the camera. And the end result is a feature that explores love without words. ‘What I found so moving about the screenplay is that it’s never really described in words, it’s described in actions and things you don’t see … That’s something I’ve learned in my own life, kindness is wildly underrated in romantic relationships and should be celebrated.’
The History of Sound premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival and is out in cinemas now Read our review here
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Interview by JANE CROWTHER
The lead of Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme tells Hollywood Authentic how Cannes was the secret ingredient in their latest collaboration.
Though he’s been to Cannes many times to premiere many films before, Benicio del Toro admits to still getting nerves when he climbs the famous red Palais stairs to sit in the dark with an inaugural audience. ‘It’s the best,’ he says of the festival and the experience. ‘Always fun but always nerve-wracking. You bite your nails, you feel good, you feel bad, you feel good, you feel bad, you feel good, you know? But then you try to leave on a good note.’
He left the cinema on a good note this year; his headlining performance as tycoon Zsa-Zsa Korda trying to get his business deal off the ground via international funding in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme was warmly received by critics. The premiere was a full circle moment for this project – the actor was last in Cannes with Anderson in 2021 with anthology The French Dispatch where he appeared in one of five stories, and it was during that festival that the auteur first told him about his plans for this film. ‘He was saying he was doing his next movie, and he wanted me to be a part of it. When he sent The French Dispatch to me he sent me just the pages of my part, so when he sent the first 20 pages of The Phoenician Scheme, I thought it was going to be something similar, because he’s been doing these films where there’s a lot of characters moving around, and with several stories. But then he sent the next 20 pages, and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m still in it’… When he sent the next 20 pages, the fear started to take over. And then it was like, ‘Wow, this is heavy’. But, at the same time, his writing is so three-dimensional and so thorough. Aside from original, unpredictable, and funny, there’s also this heart to it that is super-exciting and one hell of a challenge for any actor. I just took the challenge and went for it. It’s really an honour. A gift.’
The heaviness that del Toro refers to is the fact that he appears in practically every scene, juggling the machinations of a complex business deal with an emotional arc that see the tycoon reunited with his nun daughter, Leisl, played by Mia Threapleton. ‘Then there’s also, you could say, the reconstruction of Zsa-zsa. But through the relationship with the daughter, is what will help him become a better person.’ The most challenging aspect of balancing a business arc with one of redemption and parental love was hard to pick for del Toro. ‘I had to know where he’s going to be. At the end, he will lose everything. I had to make a choice. How could this man have been working for decades, and has all this fortune – why would he throw it away? He has this ‘win at all costs’ mentality – and that remains the same until the end.’
As a veteran of Anderson’s films, del Toro surely had advice for newcomers to the stable, Threapleton and Michael Cera, who plays Norwegian tutor, Bjorn? ‘No advice,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘Mia was probably the youngest of the group, but most of the time she behaved like a veteran. She is strong as an actress, prepared. But there were moments that we were getting tired. I was like, ‘Let’s just have fun. Don’t forget that this thing that we do – it’s at its best when we’re having fun, you know?’’Anderson’s intricate sets, huge casts and practical effects look like a great deal of fun, so Hollywood Authentic wonders if del Toro and his director were cooking up another treat during this festival that they might serve up in the Croisette in another three years time? ‘I would love to work with Wes again,’ del Toro smiles. ‘We’re not talking about something in the near future, but he knows that my door is open for anything he needs. And I like the pressure…”
The scheme at the centre of Wes Anderson’s latest is as precisely matriculated and detailed as the auteur’s work. Wily 1950s business tycoon Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) decides to go full hog on a business plan to build an Empire via infrastructure, deals and percentage financing after surviving his sixth plane crash (one of the film’s best sequences). A Charles Foster Kane crossed with Trump egotist who wants to win at all cost, Korda is determined to leave a legacy – in business via his scheme, and generationally via his offspring. Though he has nine sons, he reconnects with his 20 year-old daughter Leisl (Mia Threapleton), a nun who carries unresolved family hurt and a pipe. Korda’s biggest deal then involves globetrotting via complex sets and dioramas, to raise capital and outwit a bureaucratic group who are falsely inflating costs – all while handing out hand grenades as gifts and outrunning a mysterious assassin who keeps trying to pop him. Along for the ride: Michael Cera’s delightful Norwegian tutor Bjorn, who has a dazzling collection of insects and ends up working above his paygrade as Zsa-zsa suffers another plane crash, quicksand and a battle to the death in a luxury hotel.
Del Toro, in practically every frame, is a hoot as Zsa-zsa, a man who is casual about death, serious about cards and a fan of hot baths. He’s matched by deadpan Threapleton who can transmit an exasperated eyeroll without actually moving her peepers. Another newbie to the Anderson stable, Riz Ahmed, makes an impression as Prince Farouk, while the returning troupe (Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray et al) do their fast-talking, comedic thing. But it’s Cera who really steals focus with a performance so singularly sweet and a lilting Scandinavian accent so charming that one wishes Anderson had given this character a whole film to himself.
Though there’s plenty of physical gags and willfully opaque business speak which could be interpreted as Anderson criticising capitalism, the matter at the core of the hijinks is the redemption of a man and the relationship between a father and daughter. And to that end – and the film’s end – there is emotional satisfaction. As expected, production design is a whimsical trove and monochrome scenes set in heaven (with Murray as God) are quirky sojourns. Anderson fans will likely not be unduly disappointed.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs courtesy of TPS PRODUCTIONS/FOCUS FEATURES The Phoenician Scheme premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival
Ben Shattuck’s short story about two young men falling in love with each other and folk music is a thing of absolute beauty, filled with yearning, want and bucolic imagery. Shattuck has also written this screenplay and built out his fragile tale to a two hour movie that though handsome, well intentioned and delicately acted, fails to fully match the source material’s emotional resonance.
Gwen Capistran
We first encounter Lionel (Paul Mescal) and David (Josh O’Conner) as they meet-cute – a couple of music students at a Boston Conservatory in 1917 who connect over a piano in a bar, and then in bed later that night. Their fledgling romance is interrupted by WW1, with David getting drafted and Lionel returning to his family’s Kentucky farm. Lionel pines for his lost love so when David reappears post-conflict and invites him on a song collecting trip around New England, he jumps at the chance. The two men camp and hike to remote communities, archiving folksongs on a phonograph, cuddling in their tent and not saying what’s really on their minds like a folksy Brokeback Mountain. But David is tightly-wound, clearly rattled by his experiences in Europe and the trip cannot last forever…
Gwen Capistran
Shattuck’s short story is economic with detail but gives more lived-in texture to the affair than Oliver Hermanus’ stately film does which is as coy with its sex scenes as it is in showing the duo’s passion for music. The ‘history of sound’ is what Lionel yearns for in recalling his relationship with David as an older man (played by Chris Cooper) – not the ditties picked up and preserved on wax cylinders but the vibrations of being with someone in nature, in love. ‘Sound is invisible but can touch something, make an impression,’ Lionel explains at one point in a beautifully composed farmhouse tableau. Audiences might want more evidence of this than they are afforded in a film that creates striking visuals (an old man collapsed in a sun-bleached tree, the crystalline lake beneath an oar, Rome at magic hour) and haunting audio of fluting harmonies. Mescal and O’Conner are excellent, of course – carrying regret like the backpacks they shoulder – and production values are exemplary. But The History Of Sound offers something akin to blank sheet music, requiring the viewer to add notations.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Photographs by GWEN CAPISTRAN Courtesy of FAIR WINTER LLC The History of Sound premiered at the 78th Cannes film festival
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Interview by JANE CROWTHER
When Hollywood Authentic meets up with Adria Arjona and her Splitsville castmate (and co-producer) Dakota Johnson in a suite at the Majestic Hotel on the Cannes Criosette it doesn’t take long for talk to turn frank. ‘In your penis scene, you saw balls?’ Arjona asks. “Not in your penis scene. In my penis scene,’ Johnson replies. It has to be said, Splitsville has a number of penis scenes to choose from in a comedy that charts the emotional fallout of two couples – Arjona’s Ashley and her spouse Carey (Kyle Marvin) and Johnson’s Julie are her other half Paul (writer/director Michael Angelo Covino) – as they break-up and try to negotiate open relationships. That’s explored by male nudity, destructively funny house fights, goldfish on rollercoaster disasters and an opening scene that sees Arjona singing The Fray during a car ride that starts with a handjob and ends with death and divorce.
‘What it’s about is something that has always really intrigued me,’ Arjona says of the lure to both acting and exec-producing on the project from the team behind TIFF hit The Climb. ‘This is fun – a movie about messy relationships. And I’ve never played a character like Ashley. I was like, ‘Oh, I get to be bonkers for a little bit’. Johnson nods; ‘It’s very authentic,’ she laughs.
Johnson’s company TeaTime Pictures part-financed the film and she is used to producing, but for Arjona this was an opportunity to refine her behind-the-camera experience further and give herself more agency within the industry. ‘I’ve produced the last couple of things that I’ve been in. [Last year’s AIDs drama] Los Frikis was the first that asked me to do that. And I learned so much. You have a seat at the table. You have a little bit more ownership over your character. And then you’re so much more invested, I feel, as an actor. It’s not that I’m not invested in movies that I don’t produce. But when you do produce them, you get the best schooling in the world. You get to be a part of the edit, and you get to really understand how movies are made. As an actor we do our job, and then we leave. And a whole other movie is formed without us being present. So really getting to understand how filmmakers’ brains work, has been a really big gift. I think I’ve become a better actor by producing, because you’re just understanding planning, the schedule, the budget and the editing. You see the world completely differently. I’m acting but I’m also thinking ‘we’re losing time. We’re losing light…’’
It sounds like Arjona, who has recently worked with Zoë Kravitz on her directorial debut, Blink Twice, might be working towards helming a picture herself? A huge smile breaks out across her face. ‘I would love to direct. It’s probably one of my biggest dreams. But I’m terrified. I’ve got a lot more filmmakers to work with before I decide to make my own movie, and I also haven’t found the story yet.’
For now she has a full slate to continue learning from in preparation. She’s got Adam Wingard’s horror-actioner Onslaught upcoming in which she plays a mother fighting to protect her family opposite Dan Stevens and Rebecca Hall. She also produced. ‘That one is a wild one. It’s crazy. It’s Adam going back to what he’s great at, what he proved to the world he could do with The Guest. So I played in the service of Adam’s vision. It’s the most extreme thing I think I’ve done. And it was a great experience.’ She’s also just completed filming on Amazon Prime’s buzzy new show, generational mob drama Criminal, acting alongside Charlie Hunnam, Richard Jenkins and Emilia Clarke. ‘Charlie is insane. He’s so cool and so sweet. It’s broken down into two sections. I’m four episodes, Emilia comes in the other four. It was a cool experience.’
Cannes, she says, is also a cool experience – and a switch-up from when she visited three years ago with Olivier Assayas’s TV show, Irma Vep. Then she was a relative unknown, now she’s the star and producer of the film she’s presenting to the festival, having made waves since in Hit Man and Andor. ‘It’s a very different experience. Irma Vep was a big ensemble cast and it’s very much Alicia [Vikander’s] show. So coming now, with this, and being with these guys, was pretty special. In a way, it kind of felt like my first time.’She’s also glad to bring the rom-com vibe to the festival. Splitsville is certainly romantic and comedic – but with a modern twist. ‘Oh, man, rom-coms are my favourite. You make all these movies, but then you come home, and you’re like, ‘I just want to curl up, and watch a really good romcom.’ And to be a part of them, too. I think we’re in this really interesting era of redefining what that is, or what romcoms are for this generation. And what resonates for people – the more I watch things, or watching people’s reactions – is things that are a little bit off-centre, and things that touch on complex subjects. Because there’s nothing more fun than watching people fall in love, fall out of love, and then fall back in love. And messily…’
Splitsville premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival
