I just want to make note of this before I forget: the Atlantic International Film Festival staff have brought down loungers, chairs, tables and chaise longues to the Park Lane Cinema, and it’s totally classed up the joint. I hope Cineplex is inspired by this and keeps them there year round. I love the idea of the lobby being a cool hangout spot in between movies. Maybe they could serve cocktails.
In the past couple of nights I’ve slowed down a bit on the festival front. I watched Caught By The Tides via a streaming link, which I don’t think is ideal for this particular film — you need to be immersed on a big screen. It’s by Jia Zhangke (Ash Is The Purest White), who’s been called a cinematic witness to modern China. In this new work, shot over two decades, he tells the story of a woman searching for her ex-lover — but instead of taking the Boyhood approach toward a family-driven intimacy, the filmmakers go broad, the thinnest thread of character drama is only there to offer a human note a broad symphony of travelogue imagery, montage and music. It’s gorgeous, dreamlike, melancholy, and often opaque in the thematic stakes. Both alienating and engaging, it’s undeniably cinematic .
The Girl With The Needle is an astonishingly bleak period drama flecked with bits of thriller and a spoonful of horror. Set in Copenhagen just after the First World War, a young woman named Karoline is barely surviving working at a factory. She’s evicted from her flat, gets something cheaper and shittier. She hooks up with the factory owner and gets pregnant, but his family won’t agree to the marriage. Will she keep the baby? She winds up making friends with a woman who runs a sweet shop and a side hustle finding new parents amongst the wealthy for unwanted babies.
Shot in gorgeous, high-contrast black and white, I can imagine Guillermo Del Toro relishing the hell out of this picture — it’s entirely grim stuff, of a kind with Nightmare Alley. Vic Carmen Sonne, who plays Karoline, she’s a weird and wonderful amalgam of 1920s German Expressionist performers and Polly Harvey circa 1993. Trine Dyrholm as Dagmar, the shop owner, is equally impressive. Gothic Danish drama at its best.
