The Subliminal Strand

Phantom Thread

One delight of a new Borderlines programme is the search for strands the team may not have known they had. A 'Phantom Thread’ if you like. It is usually a good idea to set a story in a time and place. A background of civil unrest or civil war forces each character’s personal credo into sharp relief; a milieu between the war movies and tales of the defiant dispossessed. Unlike The Death of Stalin (2017) here’s a place where people can represent competing political ideologies with only the occasional threat of sudden violent death. There’s a 'There’s a Riot Going On' season: Milou en Mai (1990; France 1968), I Still Hide to Smoke (2016, Algeria 1995), The Nile Hilton Incident (2017, Egypt’s Arab Spring 2011).

Borderlines 2018 boasts a rich seam for art lovers. Ai Weiwei is best known to occasional browsers of Sunday supplements as the artist behind the 'Sunflower Seeds' sculpture at Tate Modern, London, in 2010: millions of individually hand-crafted, porcelain, sunflower seeds. Weiwei directed Human Flow (2017), a documentary about the 65 million refugees currently displaced around the World. I predict, like Steve McQueen or Anton Corbijn before him, that the framing is impeccable.

Loving Vincent

There are two bio-pics of artists: Loving Vincent (2017, Vincent Van Gogh) is animated in his Post-Impressionist style. His paintings are brought to life. Find out what 'Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity's Gate)' was really like! Maudie (2016, Maud Lewis) is a big favourite of Toyah Willcox: “I love films! I have an expensive DVD library! One of the joys of where I live is that I'm 50 yards away from an arts centre that shows a film every Monday morning. I was blown away by Maudie with Sally Hawkins. It's about the naive artist Maud Lewis. Sally Hawkins’ performance in this is one of the best technical character journeys I have ever seen.” The Guardian

JR and Agnes Varda in Faces Places

Sally Hawkins’s last four movies are Paddington (2014), Maudie (2016), The Shape of Water (2017), Paddington 2 (2017). That is strong form. They all feature plenty of water. Agnès Varda’s latest documentary Faces Places (2017) was made with the artist JR. They are a good fit. He photographs the people they meet on their travels around France and turns these images into murals. His approach brings to mind Turner Prize winner Gillian Wearing’s 'Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say' (1993) on the scale of Turner Prize nominee Mark Titchner’s poster campaigns. Having found JR’s website –  – I’m reasonably wrong. His humour is much sillier. This is what JR displayed on a wall in Bethlehem.

The Nile Hilton Incident

Followers of Swedish cinema should note the five Ingmar Bergman films and three other Swedish directors. Look out for the acclaimed thriller The Nile Hilton Incident and the very enjoyable comedy A Man Called Ove (2017). Give the latter a go if you enjoy a swooping character arc but couldn’t stomach Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). Borderlines 2018 opens with Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winning The Square (2017), a study of ‘the art game’. Östlund’s previous film - Force Majeure (2014), an account of a family holiday at a ski resort that reveals a stark home truth - looked good and was good. The design left no shadows for the disgraced father to hide in.

The Square

The Square is a big favourite of Laurie Anderson: “There are not enough comedies now, so I was relieved to see this. It’s hilarious. It skewers the art world, which is long overdue: that whole scene is pompous and ready for satire. The film looks at what happens when people step out of their social structures in Stockholm, and it makes you realise how isolated people are within their scenes. Elisabeth Moss is fantastic in it.” The Guardian

I only pay attention to the film recommendations of female solo artists who had big hit singles during 1981. It has never let me down.

Robin Clarke

Festival Volunteer

How did we get to this place?

120BPM

 People keep asking us how we choose the films for Borderlines.

Jan Doran, one of our regular volunteers and a trustee of Arts Alive/Flicks in the Sticks, attended the BFI London Film Festival and kindly gave us access to her report:

It takes days of eyeing up the festival programme before I can build up to tackling it and establishing a system that ensures I’m not endlessly re-reading blurb or doubling up on dates. Once I’ve cracked it I’m cramming as much as possible into my four-day extravaganza.  

Having recently been bowled over by Andrew Garfield’s fine performance in Angels in America I welcome the opportunity to see him in Breathe and to see what Andy Serkis might do as director.  

The film opened with titles in a lurid yellow, very traditional font and within the first five minutes we witnessed cliched scenes of cricket matches and afternoon tea with gorgeous young leads stealing glances followed by an open top classic car scenario driving along idyllic country lanes……much fun and laughter. Forty minutes in and I was on my way out.

This really was an unfortunate start, nothing here to recommend I’m afraid. I didn’t care about these wealthy young things, couldn’t identify with them or their plight and was irritated by the music trying to tell me what to feel.
By contrast I entered Brigsby Bear, passing a life sized version of the gross cartoon character wondering why I was taking up a recommendation to see this film. Perfectly described in The Guardian as The Truman Show meets Room it was both surprising and amusing with an utterly delightful performance by Kyle Mooney as he engages with the real world following his isolated, dysfunctional upbringing. 

A trip over to Hackney led me to my first encounter with a Picturehouse picket. Wasn’t expecting that - much dithering and off to find a drink elsewhere to think this one over. Compromises and resolutions a plenty in the following days but in I siddled to see 1%. 

This Australian film likened by its director, Stephen McCallum, to Romper Stomper, Animal Kingdom and Snowtown was a riveting and hard edged, brutal portrayal of biker gangs. Universal themes of succession, rivalry, and loyalty were made more compelling with strong females and untypical themes of sexuality and disability driving the plot. The performances were strong particularly Matt Nable as the brutal gang leader who also wrote the screenplay. 

Queues across Leicester Square at 8am on a Saturday heralded Battle of the Sexes - a naff title that hadn’t raised my expectations. It proved to be a shocking reminder of just how sexist attitudes could be in the 70s watching the battles women encountered constantly. Emma Stone and Steve Carrell are very good and the costumes are wonderfully nostalgic for those of us who dressed like that. Billie Jean King’s struggles with her sexuality, along side the battles with the tennis world, on and off the court, provides plenty of plot lines. 

Wonderstruck, directed by Todd Haynes, failed to deliver in the way Carol had. It was particularly ambitious with settings in the 20s, black and white, and the seventies, brown and orange, with a silent film thrown in. The plot unfolded cleverly initially intertwining parallel stories but became tedious as it continued. Not sure who what sort of audience the film targets? 

Dark River

Not sure what sort of audience Clio Barnard’s Dark River targets either. It was superbly performed with a sparse script leaving much to body language, cinematography and editing, particularly evident when a rabbit is skinned and gutted interspersed with drunken attempts at arson. The film is an utterly bleak portrayal of isolation, abuse and collusion experienced by a tenant farming family. Emotionally strangled siblings, unable to communicate and consumed with anger, struggle following the death of their father. Powerful performances. This film had everything that Breathe lacked. 

120 BPM, so gritty and gripping and claustrophobic in its intensity, followed the campaigns of Act Up, a pressure group demanding better treatment and resources for Aids/HIV sufferers in 90s Paris. Unlike the black screens with white text in Meyerowitz Stories the transitions in this film were very effective: dramatic changes of focus from club scenes to intimate sex to passionate debates and radical action with sharply contrasting rhythms, volume, colour and camera work. Music was notable and arresting.

Vicarious Cannes

Palme d'Or winner The Square

Cannes is not a film festival that we Borderlines staff get to, but it's probably the biggest deal of all. Word from the press screenings about the new crop of major films reverberates throughout the year and, as a matter of course, movies that are premiered at Cannes will find their way to Borderlines, many of them as previews.

Luckily our programmers at the Independent Cinema Office and their colleagues are there in force, weaving in and out of queues and movie theatres. So to grab a shaft of light into the future, read their Festival Reports from the ICO blog  (there are 5 posts and if you only have time to read one, make it Jonny Courtney's - he works directly on Borderlines) and, like us, experience Cannes vicariously.