myDylarama

Knife + Heart (Un couteau dans le coeur) by Yann Gonzalez - Fragments 2019

Abla Kandalaft — 2019-06-11T07:07:28Z

You And The Night, celebrated at Cannes's Critics' Week in 2014, cemented Yann Gonzalez's reputation as a truly original director, with his own brand of stylish, colourful and erotic filmmaking. With Knife+Heart, Gonzalez offers up a stylised slasher flick in the vein of Italian gialli, set in the heart of the gay porn industry in the seedier parts of 1970s Paris.

The film opens with a particularly gruesome murder in which a masked killer stabs his victim repeatedly with a dildo-shaped knife. The victim is a young actor, starring in one of producer Anne Parèze (Vanessa Paradis)'s kitschy pornos. Parèze then sets out on a mission to uncover the mystery behind the leather-clad killer, whilst trying to win back the affections of her ex-lover and editor Lois.

Knife+Heart is beautifully crafted, shot on 35-millimeter film, it is saturated with dazzling flashes of colour, which pulsate to the beats of a synth score, which make its dreamlike sequences completely hypnotic. Like his previous work, Gonzalez's latest effort is rich with obvious cinematic references, from William Friedkin's Cruising to Brian de Palma's Phantom of the Paradise, with some sequences perhaps unintentionally reminiscent of scenes from Nicolas Winding Refn or Gaspard Noé's films.

Vanessa Paradis is beautifully understated and commanding as the enigmatic, alcoholic Anne Parèze and there's a pleasingly great turn from Nicholas Maury (Call My Agent's flamboyant Hervé) playing Archibald with the same joyful abandon and dedication as he did the highly strung agent.

At times, the meticulous attention paid to the visuals overshadows the film's storyline and character development. The characters themselves tend to display little emotional depth, which means it's sometimes hard to fully engage with their trials and tribulations. After a bit of a lull in rhythm midway through the film, Knife+Heart ends on a thrilling high note, as the story unfolds and the killer's identity is revealed.

Knife+Heart will be screened as part of the Fragments Festival at Genesis Cinema on 12 June at 9 pm.

Searching Eva by Pia Hellenthal - Fragments 2019

Ania D. Brett, Coco Green — 2019-06-10T18:55:48Z

Searching Eva does not use titular character, Eva Collé, as a metaphor for Generation Z taken for granted intersectionality and ‘always on' social media. Eva's identity laundry list and reluctance to ‘be' a gender, culture or nationality is simply context. Its probe into her life through social media posts and vignettes is simply the setup. The true offering of this documentary is its reflection on perception and presentation. In the age of social media, whose domination isn't limited to just one generation, what does this mean for our fragmented selves and how do we project our resulting fears and anxieties on to others?

Today we ‘connect' with people, often instead of or prior to meeting, and Pia Hellenthal introduces the audience to Eva in a similar fashion. The opening scene begins with her followers responding to the first of several provocative blog posts. We then see her IRL and, within the first five minutes, we are shown a lover, friends, and beind-the-scenes modelling—as if we, too, are followers. Hellenthal uses vignettes to tell the stories behind the posts, and the natural dialogue helps us to feel an intimacy with the subject as we take this voyeuristic tour. However, it is up to us to provide the meaning.

As Eva performs, hangs out with friends, and visits family, we see that she puts serious work into how she's seen. Her hair, mannerisms, and posture rely on the demands of the situation. In one telling scene, the normally uninhibited Eva plays with her younger brother whilst he's sitting on her lap. She's seemingly at peace blending into the background and nurturing her young charge in that moment. The general malaise of her posts are nearly forgotten; and there is almost no trace of the coquettish sex worker posing for pictures.

However, these scenes are not shown to be contradictory representations nor to disrupt our notions about who Eva, a drifting, cosmopolitan, feminist, drug addict, is. Instead this is a way to bring in the audience as a central piece of the story. We are invited to understand her logic of forgetting the past and creating the present to form your own path. Eva rejects cultural identities or telling stories in narrative form, as this creates a past and, in some ways, relives it. Instead, she is in a state of constantly recreating the story. Moment to moment. Blogging is an ideal expression for this kind of self, but for those of us who feel we're part of communities and in relationships, this can feel unnerving and leave us searching for Eva's purpose, to find out what happens next, and trying to understand what made her this way (as many of her commentators do).

Yet, this film provides an alternative to experience a lifestyle that can only be expressed through clips and monologues, and to move beyond social media celebrity caricatures.

Searching Eva will be screening as part of the Fragments Festival at Genesis Cinema on Tuesday 11 June at 9 pm.
Find out more about the film here.

Normal by Adele Tulli - Fragments 2019

Abla Kandalaft — 2019-06-04T11:53:55Z

Normal is an experimental, non-fiction work, a series of observational vignettes displaying mundane actions carried out by men and women in Italy. Mum and baby fitness classes, hen dos, multiplayer video game sessions, performances of the rites of passage into adulthood that mark a woman's femininity and a man's masculinity. The film plays out chronologically. We start off with snapshots of kids undergoing their own initiations into their lives as a grown woman (having her ears pierced) and as a grown man (motorcycle race), then follow our girls and boys as they mature into screaming teenage popstar adulators and violent video game obsessives respectively, and then into adulthood with the usual rituals of club nights, beauty treatments, weddings and pregnancies. The superimposition of all these scenes only serves to highlight how extreme and destructive - I'm thinking more specifically of a pep talk by a marriage consultant teaching women how to treat and care for their husbands post-wedding - these expectations and behaviours can be. Another chilling highlight sees a young man schooled in how to handle "bitter women".

The power of the film lies in the accumulation and order of the sequences, edited to the tune of particularly evocative score. The first 5 or 10 minutes look unremarkable and mundane, but as they multiply, they start to paint a fuller, much bleaker picture, and weave together a powerful and eloquent critique of gender norms.

Normal (dir: Adele Tulli, Italy) screening Fri 14 Jun 18:30 at Genesis Cinema in London, as part of the Fragments Festival. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the director.