Last year, the BFI commemorated the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality with the release of Queerama, part of its Gross Indecency film season.
Henri-Georges Clouzot is one of the giants of French cinema history, such a versatile master of entertainment that his qualities as an auteur and art-house director are sometimes forgotten.
That this 1948 Tennessee Williams play is rarely performed seems nothing short of a travesty, thanks to the awe-inspiring case made for it by Rebecca Frecknall’s exquisite Almeida production.
Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel consists of three parts. The first follows the blooming relationship between Alice and Ezra (respectively an Assistant Editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer) in New York; the middle section comprises a series of reflections narrated by Amar, an American-Iraqi while he is held in detention at Heathrow en route to see his brother in Iraqi Kurdistan.
This album has been about in virtual form since last autumn but now receives physical release. In more ways than one. Since theartsdesk didn’t review it back then, its reappearance on CD and vinyl gives us an excuse to now. After all, Swedish musician Karin Dreijer – once of The Knife – is fascinating, an artist who pushes at the boundaries. She revived her Fever Ray persona last year amidst videos revelling in sci-fi weirdness and orgiastic BDSM imagery. Plunge is the musical life statement that follows.
Five years ago Dreijer divorced, shaking off the “Andersson” that once double-barrelled her name. She has since been exploring her mostly gay sexuality in an untrammelled physical manner, according to both interviews she’s given and the lyrics here. Where Fever Ray’s eponymous debut album, nine years ago, was morose, the sound of a woman trapped, depressed even, by parenthood, Plunge is an explosive liberation. With it comes a twisted electro-pop that upon occasion, as on the celebratory “To the Moon and Back”, is even light and accessibly melodic.
That’s not to say this is all easy stuff. On “Falling” she seems to be exploring her sexual identity via a chugging Gary Numan-esque machine rhythm, while the techno pulsing “IDK About You”, with its occasional orgasmic yelp samples, may be about Tinder hook-ups and trust. The true centrepiece and manifesto, though, is “This Country”, which stridently identifies sexual repression with political will. Many will turn to the line “The perverts define my fuck history” but, perhaps, it’s true core lies in the couplet “Free abortions and clean water/Destroy nuclear, destroy boring”.
Plunge is less art-obtuse than much Dreijer has been involved in, closer in tone to Björk and, musically, Santigold’s underheard 2016 album 99¢. She remains her own creature, not releasing this through commercial imperative but as a necessary proclamation, yet it’s as pop as anything she’s done since The Knife’s second album 12 years ago.
Overleaf: Watch the video for "To the Moon and Back" by Fever Ray
“Pussy is pussy” and “bitches are bitches” but Jen Silverman’s Collective Rage at Southwark Playhouse smashes tautologies with roguish comedy in a tight five-hander smartly directed by Charlie Parham.
The revival that almost didn't make it into town has got the Royal Court's 2018 mainstage offerings off to a rousing start. For a while, it looked as if this fresh appraisal of a benchmark 1982 Court title would close on the road, a casualty of the "metoo" campaign and charges of inappropriate behaviour that were brought against its original director, Max Stafford-Clark (himself a former Court artistic director).
Dario Argento’s Suspiria was confirmed as one of horror’s great fever dreams on its 40th anniversary re-release last year. The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971) and Phenomena (1985) are lesser book-ends of the director’s peak period, when his global genre influence was vast.
Modigliani was an addict. Booze, fags, absinthe, hash, cocaine, women. He lived fast, died young, cherished an idea of what an artist should be and pursued it to his death. His nickname, Modi, played on the idea of the artiste maudit – the figure of the artist as wretched, damned.
Wonder Woman was the film that defied all the predictions: a big-budget superhero movie directed by a woman which managed to please not only the feminists and their daughters but also the boys who love DC and Marvel. In its slipstream comes Professor Marston and the Wonderwomen, written and directed by Angela Robinson, best known for her work in TV on The L Word. It's surrounded by some controversy as it claims to be a based on a true story but there's not a lot of corroborative testimony from the central characters to justify its narrative.
It’s the tale of Harvard psychology professor William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans), who together with his brilliant, spiky wife Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall) designed a prototype lie-detector machine in the 1930s. We meet him lecturing and flirting with his all-girl class on his theory that male-female relations are based on dominance and submission. His argument is that women should play more of a dominant role upon occasion in order for the mental health of both sexes to thrive (Hall and Evans pictured below).
Watching his bravura performance at the lectern throughout is his wife, but Marston's eye is particularly drawn to Olive (Bella Heathcote), a student whose doll-like prettiness (and an aunt and mother who are pioneer feminists) intrigues him. His desire for Olive is briefly thwarted when she demonstrates that she’s more interested in snogging his wife than him, but they soon settle into a scandalous sexy threesome and Marston is forced to leave the university.
Churning out pop psychology articles doesn’t really pay their household bills or promulgate his theory, so Marston turns to comic book creations and launches Wonder Woman on the world with the help of DC Comics. The kinky costume and barely concealed bondage and spanking themes that run regularly through Marston's comic strips see him hauled up in front of a decency committee while his home life (he had children with both women) causes local scandal.
Angela Robinson has bathed the entire film with a nostalgic glow
Writer-director Angela Robinson cuts back and forth between scenes of Marston being interrogated by a decency committee and the three-way romance. It's a rather clunky narrative device. She has bathed the entire film with a nostalgic glow reminiscent not of the actual 1940s but of a 1990s Armani advertising version of the era. The much-hyped sex scenes are so wholesome as to be almost farcical.
Cutting through this schmaltz is a laser-like performance from Rebecca Hall, whose intelligence and line delivery is entertaining if anachronistic. Did women in that era, no matter how smart, really say things like, "When are you going to stop justifiying the whims of your cock with science?" Or describe someone as a "Grade A bitch"? Hall makes the other two players in her ménage à trois look like Ken and Barbie dolls; her performance just about saves the film, but it's a bit of a wasted opportunity to tell what was a remarkable story. The end credits contain a moving sequence of photographs of the two real-life women, who carried on living together for decades after Marston's death.
Overleaf: watch the official trailer for Professor Marston and The Wonderwomen