It has become a truism that we recover from a break-up as we might recover from drugs, and science proves it: that the level of oxytocin flooding the brain resembles the pleasure principle of a good fix. The removal of the loved one, or the drug, leaves us bodily distraught. Is there any filmmaker who has coincided with this idle scientific fact and turned it into an aesthetic ongoing first princi…
Imagine a Valentine’s Day double bill of The Lobster and Her, two films that came out within a couple of years of each other, and which could be described as dystopian romances. While the romantic comedy often proposes, so to speak, two problems: how to find the love of your life and how to resolve the complications involved in making it happen when one factors in exes and insecurities, medd…
What is it to be self-indulgent? It is a term of abuse frequently applied to writers, filmmakers and musicians but rarely unpacked as a particular term. What is the opposite of self-indulgent? Is it to indulge others, or to avoid indulgence at all? Is it to avoid the self at all? The term self-indulgent is a label often aimed at French writing. The great publisher of Beckett, Duras, Butor and Sarr…
1 It was on the evening of the French election when they had their bags packed and were ready to leave. What they didn’t know was whether the bag would be packed for their usual summer vacation in Brittany, or to escape France and live incognito in another European nation. They were terrorists in Italy in the 1970s, escaped into France and lived for a decade under false names and with false …
Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg were co-signatories of Dogme ’95 but the key films they made after signing it - Breaking the Waves for Von Trier, Festen for Vinterberg- are projects with antithetical aims, despite in many ways a similar sensibility. In Breaking the Waves, Von Trier sets his film in a remote, religious Scottish island community (shot on Skye), while Vinterberg locates hi…