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52 Films by Women Vol 2. 46. OUTSIDE IN (Director: Lynn Shelton)

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  In the Church of Mumblecore - low-budget, low-fidelity, independently produced American films made between 2002 and 2009 - Greta Gerwig would be the High Priestess, obvs. Lynn Shelton, writer-director, who came late to the game, would be the organiser of community improvement activities. She would be herding her co-filmmakers to go out and clean the graffiti on President Obama posters (why does that one say ‘Yes, We Cancun’?). Shelton began her career with the documentary short, The Clouds That Touch Us Out of Clear Blue Skies , which sounds like a motto on the wall of a Waffle Dog outlet. (A Waffle Dog is actually a thing; I thought I made it up!) Taking its title from a W S Merwin poem, it describes what it is like to lose a baby through miscarriage. Shelton released her first feature in 2006, We Go Way Back , about a young actress, Kate who, at aged 23, looks back at her 13-year-old self. The hero is played by Amber Hubert and Maggie Brown, jarringly in the same reality. (OK, ...
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52 Films by Women Vol 2. 45. DARK RIVER (Director: Clio Barnard)

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  Stop me if you have heard this one before. In rural contemporary England, a young woman returns to the family farm after the death of a close family member. The farm is in difficult straits. The woman tries her best to fix things but also come to terms with demons from her past. That for the most part is the plot of writer-director Hope Dickson Leach’s accomplished feature debut, The Levelling . It is also a description of Clio Barnard’s third film as writer-director, Dark River , adapted from Rose Tremain’s novel, Trespass . British films have a habit of recycling Hollywood movie titles: Dog Soldiers , directed by Neil Marshall, about a group of soldiers on a military exercise who take on werewolves, is also the name of a 1978 Vietnam War movie directed by Karel Reisz. I can understand why Barnard did not take the name of a 1992 Walter Hill movie starring Ice Cube (and not a good one at that) nor for that matter a 2011 damp squib of a home invasion thriller starring Nicolas Cage...
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52 Films by Women Vol 2. 44. ON BODY AND SOUL (Teströl és lélekröl) (Director: Ildikó Enyedi)

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  On Body and Soul ( Teströl és lélekröl ) was the surprise winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. Its director, sixty-one year old Hungarian Ildikó Enyedi, had not had a film released in cinemas since 1999 - Simon Mágus or Simon the Magician , a French-Hungarian co-production starring Péter Andorai and Hubert Koundé, about a Hungarian magician asked to help solve a murder. Enyedi’s films deal with the fantastical – she made her feature debut in 1989 with the Cannes prize-winner, My Twentieth Century , about two identical twins separated at birth who meet for the first time on the Orient Express. Dreams feature a lot in her work, as they do here. For On Body and Soul deals with an unlikely couple, each desensitised in their way, who fall in love because they share the same dreams, of two deer, a stag and a doe, in a form of courtship ritual in a snowy forest by a small frozen lake. Maria (Alexandra Borbély) is the new meat inspector at a slaughterhouse. Sh...
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52 Films by Women Vol 2. 43. PRIMAIRE (Elementary) (Director: Hélène Angel)

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  A director’s past work is no indication of what they might produce. This is abundantly true of Primaire ( Elementary ) directed by Hélène Angel from a screenplay she wrote with Yann Coridian, Olivier Gorce and Agnès De Sacy. Set in Grenoble in France, a city in south-eastern France close to the French Alps, it describes the struggle to a young primary school teacher, Florence (Sara Forestier, redefined by this movie) to balance life and work. Both are thrown out of whack by two events. Her ex-husband wants their ten-year-old son Denis (Albert Cousi) to travel with him to Asia. Then a troubled kid, Sacha (Ghillas Bendjoudi) abandoned by her mother ends up having a fixation of her. Throw in a class inspection, a pupil who struggles with reading, Greek myth, a difficulty with the special needs assistant who is coaxing one pupil a little too much and an Oriental food delivery guy, and there is a super abundance of incident to keep viewers absorbed over the film’s 105-minute running t...
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52 Films by Women Vol 2. 42. DETROIT (Director: Kathryn Bigalow)

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  Not many people want to see a film about African Americans being beaten up and killed without reply. That’s my take-away from the poor box-office performance of Detroit , an exceptionally well-made, suitably angry film that has extremely limited appeal. It is taut. It is gripping. But where is the uplift? Where is the justice? Violence without justice is just pornography. Only shufflers in trench coats do pornography. Detroit is a work of outrage from 65 year old director Kathryn Bigalow, the only woman to date to collect the Best Director Oscar – and that was a long time coming. Whilst other women her age might think about retirement, Bigalow has immersed herself in the events of July 1967, when a police operation, the raid of a ‘blind pig’ (illegal drinking) party led to five days of rioting. Bigalow and her estimable screenwriter Mark Boal – he’s Paul Laverty to her Ken Loach – reproduce an atmosphere of uncertain violence agitated by the local police. The nub of the film is...
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52 Films by Women Vol 2. 41. EVERYTHING EVERYTHING (Director: Stella Meghie)

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  Everything, Everything , directed by Stella Meghie ( Jean of the Joneses) is adapted by screenwriter J. Mills Goodloe ( Age of Adaline ) from the debut ‘young adult’ (YA) novel by Nicola Yoon, first published in 2015. It deals with an eighteen year old girl, Maddy (Amandla Stenberg) who has a genetic disorder known as SCID – Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Disorder. The disease is rare but real – it is also known as bubble baby disease. The most famous ‘bubble baby’ was David Vetter, born in 1971 but died twelve years later. His condition inspired the John Travolta TV movie, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble , which aired in 1976. In real life, children born with David’s condition can live normal lives, thanks to a breakthrough in treating SCID which was achieved in 2002. This involved a two year old Palestinian girl, Salsabil, being treated with non-myeloblative conditioning. The process involves isolating haematopoietic blood cells and reprogramming them to contain the adenosine...
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52 Films by Women Vol 2. 40. ROUGH NIGHT (Director: Lucia Aniello)

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  The first laugh in a comedy is the hardest. The longer you wait for it, the more impatient you get. When there is something vaguely humorous, you begrudgingly acknowledge it but don’t enter the party spirit. You wait instead for the introduction of a comedy element at a different register, a Robin Williams at full blast or Steve Martin turning up as a dentist in Little Shop of Horrors (the musical). If it doesn’t happen, the film becomes tedious. Bad comedies are like food that has gone stale, wine that has turned to vinegar or a box set on VHS format left close to a magnet. No, no, no. So how do you get that first laugh? First off, you establish a convention: a Jaws -like scenario at the beginning of Airplane , a serious documentary voice at the beginning of Take The Money and Run . If you try to be funny right from the first beat, you will fail – and fail hard. So Ghostbusters (1984) begins with a ghost attack in a public library. Then you bring in the comedians. They make b...
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