AUTUMN FILM Special AU
Arthouse Highlights MARGIN CALL
Museum Hours
Like your fi lms to be a cerebral, atmospheric affair? Tom Dawson selects the best arthouse fl icks coming to cinema screens in the next few months
T h e S e l i s h G i a n t
B l u e i s t h e W a r m e s t C o l o u r
‘A huge mass of interlocked facts, characters and anecdotes, all gravitating around Rome’, is how Italian maestro Paolo Sorrentino (Il Divo) has described his magnii cent cinematic spectacle The Great Beauty (Fri 6 Sep). Toni Servillo’s ennui-laden sixty-something journalist Jep Gambardella, a man unexpectedly haunted by memories of a long-lost love, is our Flaubert-quoting guide through a sacred and profane Eternal City: think La Dolce Vita for the Berlusconi era (see review, page 57).
Meanwhile British writer-director Clio Barnard follows up her acclaimed experimental documentary The Arbor with the tragic social realist fable The Seli sh Giant (Fri 25 Oct), inspired by an Oscar Wilde short story. Two adolescents (newcomers Conner Chapman and Shaun Thomas), who have been excluded from school, are drawn into the dangerous world of scrap metal collecting. Set amidst the housing estates of contemporary Bradford and the surrounding Yorkshire countryside, The Seli sh Giant has already attracted favourable comparisons to the work of Andrea Arnold, Shane Meadows and Ken Loach. Expectations are also high for Blue is the Warmest Colour (Fri 15 Nov), the Palme Expec , thee Palme Abddellatif d’Or-wi d’Or-winning lesbian love story directed by French-Tunisian i lmmaker Abdellatif Kechich r its three- Kechiche (Couscous). Based on a graphic novel, this intimate epic charts over its three- hour run betwween a hour running time the intensely passionate relationship that develops in Lille between a 17-year-o ol stuudent 17-year-old working class schoolgirl (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and an art-school student (Lea Sey (Lea Seydoux) from a wealthy bohemian background. Intrigui Cohhen’s Intriguingly poised somewhere between documentary and i ction, Jem Cohen’s poignant US indie Museum Hours (Fri 6 Sep) has the slenderest of plots: a gentle, poignan a genntle, middlemiddle- Museum um middle-aged attendant (Bobby Sommers) at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Art Museum befrien wn one befriends a Canadian woman (singer Mary Margaret O’Hara), who’s in town one winter oration winter to visit her hospitalized cousin. It’s an u nderstated yet absorbing exploration of both of both a city and of how enduring art connects to our everyday experiences. Another autumn highlight is The Crash Reel (Fri 4 Oct), the remarkable real- Ano real- life st ng for life story of champion American snowboarder Kevin Pearce, who in preparing for the W on a the Winter Olympics in 2010 suffered a life-changing brain injury. Drawing on a mult own multiplicity of visual sources, British documentarian Lucy Walker (Countdown to Z nate to Zero) combines dynamically edited action sequences with a compassionate exa examination of familial love in profoundly challenging circumstances.
The Great Beauty
The Crash Reel
24 THE LIST 11 Jul–22 Aug 2013