Monday 17 - Saturday 22 June, 7.30pm Tickets from the Old Athenacum Box Office 041-332 2333, Ticket Centre, Candlcn'ggs ()41-227 551 l & all Tickctlink outlets
ENTERTAINING THE ' WORLD FOR 300 YEARS!
FIRST TOUR OF
SCOTLAND FOR 30 YEARS!
ggbfllELngHgA RK JUNE 4’9 JUNE 10-16
KIRKCALDY- ICE RINK CAR PARK
TICKETS AVAILABLE FROM: THE TICKET CENTRE, 31/33 WAVERLEY BRIDGE, EDINBURGH Tel: 031-225 8616 0 Fax: 031-225 8627
L___ ._ ___ _ - _ ___ ___-_______,
FILM INDEX
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
The Silence OfThe Lambs (18) (Jonathan Demme, US, 1991) Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine. 119 mins. After all the sensationalist brouhaha that has preceded it, Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of the best-sellerturns out to be a chillingly restrained investigation of pain and personal identity in a world of hellish cruelty. Brilliant psychiatrist and psychopathic killer Dr Hannibal Lecter (an intensely disturbing Anthony Hopkins) advises the neophyte FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster, impressively steely) in her quest to track down serial slayer ‘Buftalo Bill’, to reduce each piece at evidence to its first principles, its purest simplicity. The Silence Of The Lambs then, is a tilm about what people will do when the agony of being themselves demands some kind of achon.
Establishing a sombre note early on through the abundance of grey tones and an unsettling score, Demme does not stint in his efforts to reveal the extent of the horror humankind wlll perpetrate on its fellows, nor does he revel in the discomtorts oi the charnel house. The madman on the loose skins women alive to sew together the pieces and wear them as a gender-shifting
bodysuit, parading before the mirror with his genitals tucked away. His need to become that which he is not, seems clear. In a sense though, this particular
set of nefarious activities creates a
motif of inadequacy and transformation that almost as easily describes the plight of Foster’s FBI tracker, Starling.
A bright student brought on to the case by Scott Glenn's glacial chief officer, her uneasy struggle to
complete basic training and compete in the aggressively masculine environment of the bureau is compounded by her interrogation sessions with the iearsomer intelligent and physicallythreatening Lecter. The good doctor wheedles out at her a family history that has left her orphaned, and the story of an adolescent trauma which continues to leave its traces: her revelations gradually unearthing insecurities of class and gender, and a gnawing need to change the imperfect world around her by combating wrongdoing. lnadequacy and transformation: Starling’s FBI vocation is about
challenging the eternal put-down ot the .
patriarchy and salving the wounds of the past.
Lecter appears to be an example of what happens when the most extreme tensions remain unconfronted. He otters assistance to Starling because she’s acute enough to realise that for all his taste and knowledge of high culture he can’t turn the spotlight on himselt. The result is a man wound up much too tight, exploding intermittently into acts of ferocious violence, a release from some damning personal demon.
Certainly, you’ll want to see this absorbing and disturbing entertainment for yourself, but as the warning in the iilm goes: ‘You don’t want Hannibal Lecter inside your head.’ (TrevorJohnston)
From Fri 7 June. Glasgow: Cannon The Forge, Odeon. Edinburgh: Odeon, UCI. Strathclyde: Kelburne, Odeon Ayr, Odeon Hamilton, UCl Clydebank, UCI East Kilbrlde, WMR Film Centre.
24 The—Lister ’May- 13 jun; 1991