SPECIAL EVENT: Crossroads + filmmaker Q&A with Tremayne Miller

by Tremayne Miller

Yesterday I attended the 2002 screening of Crossroads, an American comedy-drama road film, including a Q&A with Director, Tamra Davis.

Crossroads is written by Tamra Davis and Shinda Rhimes.

It stars pop singer Britney Spears, Anson Mount, Zoe Saldana, Taryn Manning, Kim Cattrall and Dan Aykroyd.

The story centers around three teenage girls, who on a road trip make discoveries about themselves.

Spears came up with the concept in 2001, which Rhimes then expanded on. Principal filming took place in March over a period of six months.

Although it gathered negative feedback from Critics, it was deemed better than 2001 Mariah Carey film, Glitter and grossed

over $61.1 million worldwide in the space of three months.

*The 14^th London Short Film Festival ran until the 15^th January, 2017, for further details about what precisely it covered in order to prepare yourself for next year’s, please visit SHORTFILMS.ORG.UK

http://shortfilms.org.uk/events/2017-01-15-special-event-crossroads-filmmaker-qa

c. Tremayne Miller

Tremayne Miller is a film writer and critic.  She writes for heyuguys.com and you can catch her guest spots on LifestyleMK, Tuesdays 7pm.

Sit up for this 60's Soho Classic: The Small World of Sammy Lee discussed by Critic Tremayne Miller

THE SMALL WORLD OF SAMMY LEE

RELEASED ON DVD FOR THE FIRST TIME ON BLU-RAY ON 14th NOVEMBER 2016

WRITTEN & DIRECTED BY

KEN HUGHES

STARRING

ANTHONY NEWLEY (Oliver Twist, Doctor Dolittle) WILFRID BRAMBELL (A Hard Day’s Night, Steptoe and Son) JULIA FOSTER (Dad’s Army, Alfie)

The Small World of Sammy Lee based on a BBC television program is set in London's Soho district, where a seedy milieu of strip clubs, billiard halls, smoky Jazz clubs and East End markets lie.

Andrew Newley plays Sammy Lee, a strip-club compere who owes a large amount of money to Fred (Kenneth J. Warren), a bookie, which he must produce within the space of a day. He acts with determination with the aide of his brother, Lou (Warren Mitchell), who owns a deli.

In the midst of raising the money, under threat of being beaten up by Fred’s lads he finds himself helping Patsy (Julia Foster) who shows up at the club he manages ready to strip.

The film is shot in a most distinctive black and white by cinematographer Wolf Suschitzky (Get Carter, Ulysses).

In an interview Mike Hodges, director of Get Carter is asked what films influenced him, and he mentions Brighton Rock, along with lost gem, The Small World of Sammy Lee.

He says “I only saw it once but I remembered it and I remember being impressed by it and indeed, when I was asked to make Carter I sought out the cameraman, Wolfgang Suschitsky who had shot that film in black and white and I thought he was the only person I would want for my film.”

It’s a race against time, with Newley providing a seemingly effortless, yet important performance as Sammy.

Patsy follows closely behind as he goes about his sadistically humorous schemes amidst a graphic portrayal of a more dingy side of 1960s Soho,

The Small World of Sammy Lee. was given an X certificate when it came out . No film like it had been released before, and it was a coming-of-age film for the then young star, Anthony Newley, whose engrained Hackney hustling style fit the role perfectly.

It could very well be the best pre-Mod Mod film in existence, directed by Ken Hughes (who would later find fame with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang). Its Music should also be noted.

 “love coming cheap,” “money coming hard.”

The opening sequence, for example, is accompanied by a most melancholic jazz track, which speaks the light of Soho at that time, whilst echoing sensations of ‘the morning after.’

The composer Kenny Graham, like many a Jazz mavericks was too ahead for the time. A true forward-thinker; and whilst this film may not have reaped the rewards it deserved, likely because its star was not known, it certainly did pave the way for programmes like The Sweeney. This lost gem of 1960s British cinema, however, is finally given a  re-release in the form of a brand-new 2k restoration, with extended special features including new interviews.

The Digital Film restoration was funded by STUDIOCANAL in collaboration with the BFI’s Unlocking Film Heritage programme (awarding funds from the National Lottery).

Special Features:

*  New Interview with Julia Foster

*  New Interview with Mike Hodges

* New Locations featurette with Richard Dacre

Blu-ray Tech Specs: Running Time: 107min approx / Aspect Ratio: 1.75:1 / Region B / Black and White / English / SDH Subtitles

DVD Tech Specs: Running Time: 103min approx / Aspect Ratio: 1.75:1 / Region 2 / Black and White / English / SDH Subtitles

Music score:

 

The unreleased jazz score to the classic ‘60s Soho underworld thriller, recorded in 1963 is now available for the first time ever on vinyl, CD and download. The CDs come with an 8-page booklet and rare stills from the film.

Writer c. Tremayne Miller

Revolution: New Art for A New World is out on Limited Release this Thursday write LifestyleMK's Tremayne Miller

ARTS ALLIANCE presents by Tremayne Miller  REVOLUTION - NEW ART FOR A NEW WORLD A Margy Kinmonth Film

Margy Kinmonth
Created with the support of Alisher Usmanov,
Founder of the Art, Science and Sport Charity Foundation
Matthew Macfadyen (Anna Karenina, Frost Nixon, Ripper Street)
Tom Hollander (Pirates of the Caribbean, The Night Manager)
James Fleet (Sense and Sensibility, Love and Friendship)
Eleanor Tomlinson (Jack the Giant Slayer, The Illusionist)
Daisy Bevan (The Two Faces of January, Elizabeth)

Director:

Featuring:

The feature documentary “Revolution — New Art for a New World” looks at artists of the Russian Avant-Garde, such as Chagall, Kandinsky and Malevich.

It was filmed on location in Moscow, St. Petersburg and London, with access permitted to the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum and the State Hermitage Museum, in co-operation with the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Kinmonth says: “I was inspired as an artist to discover how many of the descendants of Russian Avant-Garde artists are themselves working as artists today. Access to their intensely moving stories brings to life this extraordinary period of artistic innovation, which continues to exert such a powerful legacy a hundred years on.”

Contributors to the film include museum directors Mikhail Piotrovsky and Zelfira Tregulova, and the film’s director Margy Kinmonth

The Tsar's were under threat from the late 19th century up until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and by the end of the World War the clouds broke and a revolutionary storm began, which brought an end to the 300 years of Tsarist rule.

During this period right up until 1916 Russia had no income tax, and so The Tsar regime raised money by taxing the produce of peasant farmers. As a consequence they protested, only highlighting the unhappiness of the vast majority. 

In the 1880s Marxist ideas circulated throughout Russia, ideas that were based on those of German economist, Karl Marx, which put forward the notion of the working class fuelling a rebellion in order to establish a fairer society. 

The Bolsheviks and other socialist parties campaigned for the conflict to be brought to an end, and militias under their control became The Red Guards.

In the October the Bolshevik party, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Provisional Government in Petrograd and the Russian SFSR was formed.

 ‘..artists undertook a revolution.’

Soviet film director, Sergei Eisenstein, a pioneer in the theory and practice of montage, made October (Oktyabr), recreating the final days of the Soviet Revolution, and despite its inaccuracy and simplistic stereotypical characterizations, the films visuals were brilliantly complex.

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (February 23, 1878 – May 15, 1935) was himself a pioneer in geometric abstract art and the creator of the avant-garde Suprematist movement. Malevich produced the iconic painting The Black Square (Black Square or Malevich's Black Square), often invoked by critics, historians, curators, and artists alike as being the “zero point of painting", where references are drawn from a whole host of catalogued historical events.

In 1918 Moscow became the capital, and new strategies came out of The Imperial Academy of Arts, some of which lead to individuals their thinking that they could change the world.

Atheism was like a state creed, as it promoted the idea of abolishing everything that was old, and The Black Square represented something new.

‘Art believes it can exist without things..’

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Imperial Academy went through a number of changes; formally it was abolished in 1918 and the Petrograd Free Art Educational Studios (or Pegoskhuma) replaced it. But in 1947 once the Academy had moved to Moscow, the building referred to then as Leningrad was given the name the Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866 –1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist, credited for painting one of the first purely abstract works of art.

Kandinsk, born in Moscow spent his childhood in Odessa but

in 1896 Kandinsky settled in Munich, where he studied first at the private school of Anton Azbe and then the Academy of Fine Arts.

Kandinsky's creation of abstract work followed a long period of development. He referred to this devotion as “inner beauty;” that is to say ‘fervor of spirit.’ His abstracts were never completely removed but always connected to figurative images.

Kandinsky while in school studied a variety of fields, including law and economics. Later on he revisited his fascination in colour, within which he recognized a sort of symbolism.

‘each colour lives by his (or her) mysterious life.’

He then returned to Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I.

The sun melts all of Moscow down to a single spot that, like a mad tuba, starts all of the heart and all of the soul vibrating. But no, this uniformity of red is not the most beautiful hour. It is only the final chord of a symphony that takes every colour to the zenith of life that, like the fortissimo of a great orchestra, is both compelled and allowed by Moscow to ring out.

— Wassily Kandinsky

The diverse artists around 1917 would make up part of a cultural dynasty.

Nikolay Punin, born in Helsingfors (now Helsinki), studied the history of art at St. Petersburg University ) from 1907 to 1914 under the guidance of professor Dmitry Aynalov. He completed his studies in 1914, when he embarked on a career in art critiquing and editing but it was Punin's involvement in the schools such as Acmeism, Constructivism, Formalism, along with other developments in art and culture, that would eventually make him one of the key figures in the Russian art world, despite barely being known outside of Russia.

Punin protected many western artists’ paintings. These particular works would acquire the name "decadent bourgeois art,” seen as communist propaganda. Punin was himself in danger as he rose his voice in opposition to the Soviet officials.  As a curator of the Hermitage Museum and the Russian museum he managed to recover many an important masterpiece.

Attitudes towards the revolution were changing, as a New Wave in Russian Art immerged. Artists’ work was deeply rooted in national identity, where a history of artistic oppression and enforced ideologies lay.

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin a Russian, later Soviet, painter and writer, was exposed to art as a child. After failing the entrance exams in college during his late teens, he took Art up again but this time under the direction of Fedor Burov.  And through taking up odds days, here and there, and help from his mother, he was then invited to study in St. Petersburg, from 1895 to 1897. 

The soviet government in support of Petrov-Vodkin’s works meant that Lenin could see the relevance of Art fusing together with Politics, a marriage of convenience, one might say.

Although the irony is that Petrov-Vodkin’s works were largely ignored immediately after he died, until a renewed gathered interest arose in the mid-1960s.

By 1921 Russia’s economy had been affected by the effects of War Communism, and Lenin was concerned. He responded to the poor economy with a new plan called the New Economic Policy, or the N.E.P.

But an assassination attempt of Lenin by Fanya Kaplan on August 30, 1918 helped pave the way for a new leader.

Soviet Artists found it impossible to sell pieces of Art, except to the state; and people feared for Petrov Kotov’s life when he refused outright to do a portrait of Stalin.

Many Artists were then classed as “enemies of the state,” every third family practically.

This also stretched as far as Poets, even Scientists.

Gustav Klutsis  (January 4, 1895 – February 26, 1938) was a pioneering Latvian photographer and a prominent member of the Constructivist avant-garde movement; known especially for the Soviet revolutionary and Stalinist propaganda he co-produced with his wife and Valentina Kulagina.

Despite his loyal service to the communist party, Klutsis was arrested in Moscow on January 17, 1938, just at the moment he prepared to leave for the World’s Fair in New York. For months Kulagina agonized over his welfare, and disappearance, until eventually in 1989 it came to light that he had be executed, order of Stalin.

Many a breathtaking piece came out of the Avant-Garde mouvement, from which inspiration can be drawn today.

From the mouvement an ideology spread, which transformed the world of art, where forms appeared to move, at the same time new ones were born. An absurdity of sorts, where The Black Square was no longer seen as a forbidden fruit but of a pivotal moment in history.

REVOLUTION : NEW ART FOR A NEW WORLD is in cinemas 10^th November, 2016

Writer © Tremayne Miller

Catch Tremayne on LifestyleMK tomorrow from 7pm speaking about "Norfolk" 

"...lingering eeriness" writes LifestyleMK's Tremayne Miller of "Norfolk" directed by BAFTA nominated Martin Radich

CREATIVE ENGLAND, BBC FILMS & BFI PRESENT

AN SDI PRODUCTIONS, CRYBABY FILMS & IFEATURES PRODUCTION

NORFOLK

STARRING DENIS MÉNOCHET AND BARRY KEOGHAN

Running Time:  90 mins.

The UK release of NORFOLK premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and in the UK at The Edinburgh International Film Festival. 

With an exciting European cast made up of Denis Ménochet (Assassin’s Creed, Inglourious Basterds, Robin Hood), Barry Keoghan (Dunkirk, Trespass Against Us, ’71), Eileen Davies (High-Rise, Sightseers, Another Year), Sean Buckley (The Fifth Element, Les Misérables) and newcomer Goda Letkauskaite. 

“dreamlike”

Screen International

NORFOLK, the second feature from BAFTA-nominated writer/director Martin Radich is a disturbing thriller about a father and son who live away from society but the strong connection they hold is placed in jeopardy when the father’s past creeps up behind them.

Set amidst the idyllic backdrop of Norfolk, with its brooding landscape, where people spend their days hunting, fishing and daydreaming.

Then, quite out of the blue, the father, who is a mercenary, is handed a final mission, which threatens not only to obliterate the target but also the love between the father and son. 

Denis Ménochet (40) in the film, Norfolk, is perhaps best known for his role playing Perrier LaPadite, a French dairy farmer, interrogated by the Nazis after harboring Jews, in 2009 Quentin Tarantino film, Inglourious Basterds.

Elizabeth Weitzman, film critic for the New York Daily News praised Ménochet for his work alongside Christoph Waltz (Django Unchained, 2012) in the opening scene.

Weitzman writes "The terrific opening .. feature(s) a hailstorm of bullets. What you'll remember best, though, is the haunted silence of actor Denis Ménochet, playing a French farmer accused of harboring Jews.”

Rising talent, Barry Keoghan, whose film credits include’71 and Standby with Brian Gleeson, recently completed the filming of Trespass Against Us with Michael Fassbender, Brendan Gleeson and Rory Kinnear. He will also appear in much spoken about epic Dunkirk alongside an all-star cast including: Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Kenneth Branagh, and Mark Rylance.

Martin Radich’s pastoral tragedy follows the fallout of vindictive mercenary and his idealistic son.

In Denis Menochet we find a stone cold human being, against a backdrop of violent, yet stylized images, even if these on occasion do appear to conflict with the narrative. 

The film is likely to be better received by festival

goers, as opposed to international distributors.

A comparable but slightly more accessible film, also set amidst the flatlands of Norfolk is Guy Myhill’s “The Goob,” which featured at The Venice Film Festival in 2014.

 “Norfolk” is different from The Goob, in that it wastes no time in establishing a distinct style, where characters wave around shotguns and stare expressionless at a series of television sets. Director of Photography, Tim Sidell’s heavily processed lensing fused together with J.G. Thirlwell’s atonal score bring an element of surrealism to this ‘end-of-days’ style film.

Names bare no importance in the story, and Menochet, a mercenary lives contentedly off the land.

There is no evidence of a mother, apart from a tattooed band on the father’s ring finger. 

However, the nervous father and son pairing is brought to an abrupt end, when the man is given one final bloody mission to carry out.

But as the details emerge of the assignment it does not appear as professional as it did from the outset.

The son, in the meantime, is torn, caught in the middle, having fallen for a young Lithuanian girl, who’s under the care of “the revolutionaries,” the people the man has been asked to dispose of.

The saga, not complexed can be hard to pick up on sometimes, as the visual formats shift, and the symbolism can go from being a kind of dystopian sci-fi to a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

Whilst this form of storytelling may have an impact on our over all understanding of the film, the mere edginess of Menochet makes up for it, whether he’s delivering hardened monologues, such as “Some say it’s God who makes the decisions, some say it’s the Devil… neither gives a s***,” or peeling a hard-boiled egg in absolute silence.

Tremayne Miller

Menochet’s lingering eeriness make him the unconventional leading man that he is.

For further information on the film please visit: www.norfolkthefilm.com /twitter: @NorfolkFilm

Writer: c. Tremayne Miller

Tremayne Miller is in pursuit of silence: Film review

by LifestyleMK's Tremayne Miller

DARTMOUTH FILMS and QUIET MARK

Presents

IN PURSUIT OF SILENCE

In cinemas 21 October

‘In Pursuit of Silence is a meditative film the explores our relationship with silence, sound, and the impact of noise on our lives.’

A film by Patrick Shen

Produced By: Patrick Shen, Andrew Brumme, Brandon Vedder

Inpursuitofsilence.co.uk

Running Time: 81 minutes

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64c_1MtQUlM

DIRECTOR’S FILMOGRAPHY

Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality (2005)

The Philosopher Kings (2009)

La Source (2012)

Hypaethral (2015)

In Pursuit of Silence (2015)

The film begins with 4 minutes 33 seconds of experimental silence paying tribute to the composer, John Cage, and his famous composition, 4’ 33”.

Momentum is gathering for silence to be introduced back into people’s lives, and it should be noted that the film is not silent all the way through, Shen, however, does combine static camera shots of a tree in a field and a petrol station at night, alongside interviews with individuals whose interests lie in the consideration of sound and silence across the globe, a mixture of academics, monks and audiologists.

Silence then breaks with an introduction to Greg Hindy, a Yale graduate, who’s taken a vow of silence and is walking across the United States to get away from noisy distractions, found in electronics and entertainment.

Shen hopes that the film will bring about change, “..slow down and on some level make the world new again ..”

The Noise Attitudes Survey by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in 2012 states that 48 per cent of people in the UK felt their home life was spoilt by noise.

Only a small amount of the world isn’t flown over by planes, and road noise can significantly be louder. According to the World Health Organisation, eight million people across Europe suffer from insomnia as a consequence.

A normal human conversation is set at around 50-60 dBA, and anything higher will require people to raise their voices.

“All of our physical rhythms are being affected by sound..,”says Julian Treasure, a “sound evangelist,” as well as chairman of  The Sound Agency.

He goes on to say that our bodies are affected by noise in four different ways; and the farther we get away from silence, the more we lose our sense of humanity and we begin to resemble a synth not unlike those in Channel 4 Series, Humans.

Physiologically

Sudden noise can cause the body to produce a shot of cortisol, “the fight-or-flight hormone.”

Psychologically

Sound affects our mood. “If you’re surrounded by noise .. it has a .. bad effect on the spirit,” says Treasure, hearing that many scenes of domestic violence tended to involve police at the scene of the crime having to turn down loud device, often those emitting music.

Cognitively

The reason we cannot understand two people talking at the same time is because our auditory input channel is distinctly limited in its bandwidth. The equivalent to 1.6 human conversations.

Behaviourally

The World Health Organisation writes that noise pollution is a “major public environmental health burden, second only to air pollution,” which can greatly affect one’s concentration.

Children in schools under flight paths are said to have a lower reading ability than their peers whose studies are conducted in a quieter environment.

Noise is also apparent in hospitals, where doctors must make critical decisions.

“..delays in decision-making, errors in receiving information, errors in transmitting information, errors in calculations of medication dosages and a whole series of other downstream problems” have been linked to noise pollution.

Noise is the cause behind some hospital admissions, and Professor of Psychiatry at Queen Mary University of London, Dr. Stephen Stansfeld says that recent studies prove that “hypertension, high blood pressure .. cardiovascular disease, heart attacks and even death” can be tracked back to noise pollution.

FACT: Mumbai is thought to be the loudest city in the world, with its most common cause being motor vehicles. Other sources include - generator sets, office machines, aircraft and activities from industry and construction.

It took the rape of a 10-year old girl one year at the Ganeshotsav carnival for people to stand up and fight against the levels of noise, which on this occasion prevented anyone from being able to hear the child’s cries for help.

‘So why is silence good for us?,’ you ask. Well, scientists are finding that time spent in solitude can be beneficial to our health – both our body and mind.

“silence is where we hear something deeper than our chatter..”

A Japanese environmental researcher who features in the film discusses the silence of the forest, a place where a human’s health and well being can be vastly improved.

“There is a deep wonder in silence and quietness and when you start to experience it, it becomes the thing you want to run to find because in it you feel topped up, inspired. You get genius ideas out of nowhere that make the rest of the day go well.”

This could be because sitting in quiet, without noise or stimuli to distract us, helps to activate the brain’s “default mode”.”

The silent movement

A change is already beginning, particularly in the world of consumer goods. The buying director of John Lewis, Johnathan Marsh says that there is now a higher demand for quieter appliances, especially among those who have an open-plan kitchen, sitting room or dining room.

In Pursuit of Silence a vision of the future is painted, where not only buildings but road networks and entire cities are constructed with auditory impact in mind, as Treasure shockingly reveals an architect in the UK can train up to five years, and only devote one day to sound! It’s no wonder, therefore, that [buildings are] entirely ocular, he says.

It should not be forgotten that we once used silence as a means of survival, and to lose sight of it completely would represent a huge loss within true selves.

In Pursuit of Silence ‘pays homage to the ineffable qualities of silence,’ proving the contention that the balance of noise and silence in our lives has fallen dramatically out of sync.

Silence does not really exist in this modern, artificial world we live in, we just pick up on other sounds.

FILM FACTS

*The film was launched with a Kickstarter campaign in 2013, and was then further helped in autumn 2014 with a second successful Kickstarter campaign.

*In Pursuit of Silence is the first major film to be made about noise pollution, shooting in 8 different countries, including The U.S., Japan, United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, China, Taiwan and India. This took place over a 2 year period.

* La Source Shen’s third documentary premiered in 2012 at AFI Docs. It was narrated by Oscar nominee, Don Cheadle, and told the story of Josue Lajuenesse. Lajuenesse, a janitor at Princetown University, visits Haiti post the earthquake of 2010 to deliver clean water to his village.

*‘Patrick has received a grant from the Fledging Fund and for the past three years has been selected by the U.S. Department of State and the USC School of Cinematic Arts to participate in the American Film Showcase..’

Writer © Tremayne Miller

Tremayne Miller regularly presents her reviews on LifestyleMK Tuesdays 7 - 8pm.

Queen of Earth - Review by Lifestyle MK's Film Writer, Tremayne Miller

Queen of Earth

Dir Alex Ross Perry (Listen Up Philip).

With

Elisabeth Moss, Katherine Waterston, Patrick Fugit, Kentucker Audley, Keith Poulson, Kate Lyn Sheil, Craig Butta. 

Produced by Elisabeth Moss, Alex Ross Perry, Joe Swanberg, Adam Piotrowicz.

Running time: 89 MIN.

Mad Men and Top of the lake - the extensive repertoire and talent of Elisabeth Moss.

The Critics Consensus of ‘Queen of Earth’ seems to be that it is led by a scorching performance by Elisabeth Moss, with the addition of strong writer-director Alex Ross Perry, who has an impressive filmography to date.

Queen of Earth unlike other short stories surveys the different stages of one woman’s psychological breakdown.

- ‘an utterly fearless central performance by Elisabeth Moss.’

Although the “misanthropic signature” of Perry mightn’t appeal to all, for connoisseurs of “auteur cinema” this may well not be the case.

Perry’s film appears to carry a deep affection towards the late 1960s and early 1970s alt-Hollywood cinema, with narratives mirroring those of Brian De Palma’s “Sisters.”

As I set about writing my review on unnerving new thriller, ‘Queen of Earth’, starring Elisabeth Moss (Man Men) and Katherine Waterston (Inherent Vice, Steve Jobs and forthcoming Fantastic beasts and where to find them, penned by JK Rowling), so do I draw parallels with early 1950s Bette Davis film, What Ever Happened To Baby Jane.

In What Ever Happened To Baby Jane

Jane Hudson (Bette Davis) is an aging child star who is left to care for wheelchair-bound sister Blanche (Joan Crawford), also a former child actress. As they live together in a Hollywood mansion, Blanche intends to get even with Jane for the car crash that she imposed, which left her crippled. However Jane is desperate that Blanche should remain imprisoned at the same time she sets her heights on rising to fame again. Why, she even goes so far as to try and hide Blanche from doctors, visitors and neighbours.

Perry cites Woody Allen’s “Interiors” as a key influence. The obligatory woman in this instance being an on-the-edge Catherine (Moss, also a Producer of the film), who decides to spend a week of exile at the lake house of her friend, Virginia (Katherine Waterston), this is instigated by the death of her father and a messy breakup from her boyfriend, whereupon we find ourselves somewhat immersed in the haunting tranquility of the Hudson River Valley, where the silence is most deafening.

We learn that Catherine’s late father was a notable artist, and that she worked for him as a kind of bumped-up assistant. In contrast Perry shows us what life was like at the lake house a year previous, when Catherine had visited. The Catherine then was in a blossoming romance with James (Kentucker Audley), a continually laid-back fellow whose influence over Catherine is a source of “pronounced irritation”.

In the present, circumstances have changed, and Virginia is now under the control of (Patrick Fugit), who lives next door.

‘The flashbacks in “Queen of Earth” are like little Proustian splinters that lodge under the skin of the characters as they run their hands along the bannisters of the past.’

Perry provides structure to the film by assigning chapters.

The wooden house is scarcely left, and seems to play out like more of a Bunuelian prison, and eeriness is enhanced by the piano’s score.

In Perry’s world he defines what his interpretation of friendship is.

Despite Waterston being the passive-aggressive one, the film belongs to Moss, who, did the same in “Listen Up Philip,” when she played the neglected girlfriend.

She reacts to Catherine’s downward spiral with such unpredictable rhythm that every gesture appears to be in the moment.

Together, Perry and she draw us in, into a sort of orbit, which, although wild, begins to make sense.

  “Queen of Earth,” like ““Listen Up Philip” is aesthetically pleasing, courtesy of cinematographer Sean Price Williams; that is to say, a warm 16mm lense that favours tight close-ups. Fittingly the credits at the front and back end of the film are set in an elegant font, and read almost like invitations to a party that no-one would dare attend.

  “Queen of Earth” will had a limited theatrical release in the UK & Ireland on 1 July 2016.

©Tremayne Miller

 - https://www.wearecolony.com/

*We are Colony is a startup that’s trying to be like the next Netflix for behind-the-scenes film footage, whilst connecting you up with great movies and exclusive behind-the-scenes footage from your favourite filmmakers and Talent.

 Overall result 1 star.