Brighton Festival 2018 Preview
Theartsdesk celebrates its media partnership with the south coast's premier arts festival
This weekend sees the Brighton Festival 2018 kick off. Anyone visiting the city on Saturday 5 May would find this hard to miss as the famous Children’s Parade makes its way around the streets, a joyous dash of colour and creativity. This year’s theme, in honour of Brighton Festival guest director David Shrigley, is “Paintings”. Thus every school in the area has been assigned a famous painting on which to base their parade presentation. The results are guaranteed to be an eye-boggling public showcase.
After the success last year in taking the Festival to outlying areas of Brighton, Your Place returns in 2018. This means that, once again, local groups and committees in Hangleton and East Brighton have joined forces with the Festival - its artistic and theatrical resources and contacts - to put on a raft of events and activities in those areas. Much of this will be happening later in the month on the weekends of 19-20 May and 26-27 May.
Elsewhere its art a-go-go from the start with a free exhibition at the Phoenix Gallery from Californian painter Brett Goodroad, whose figurative abstract work is attuned to the subconscious, and David Shrigley’s Life Model II, a free interactive piece wherein visitors can contribute their own visions of his nine foot tall female sculpture.
Shrigley will also be putting on his own “alt-rock/pop pantomime”, Problem in Brighton, which will surely be worth a look, and giving a talk (“numerous rambling anecdotes but will not be in the slightest bit boring”) later in the festival (23 May).
Others involved in interviews and talks include novelists Rachel Cusk and Rose Tremain, local Green MP Caroline Lucas, London psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, children’s author Michael Rosen, and musicians Brett Anderson and Viv Albertine. In fact, this year’s Festival is particularly strong on contemporary music, with performances by Ezra Furman, The Last Poets, Deerhoof, Malcolm Middleton, Amanda Palmer, This Is The Kit, Joep Beving, Les Amazones D’Afrique, Jungle, Xylouris White and others.
All the above, of course, only skims the surface of Brighton Festival 2018’s hive of activity. There’s also a feast of theatre, circus, classical, children’s fare, dance and hosts more. It’s a very good time to hit the south coast.
Overleaf: Watch a 15-minute guide to BSL-interpreted, captioned and highly visual performances at Brighton Festival 2018
Beast review - mesmerising and murky in equal measure
Two compelling leads navigate a labyrinthine plot
Two fast-rising actors, Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn, lend genuine flair to a thriller that needs its mesmerising star turns to rise above the murk. Densely plotted, if sometimes suffocatingly so, TV director Michael Pearce's feature film debut keeps you guessing on matters of culpability right through to the closing exchange. But one can't help but feel in places that less would be more, however pleased one is to clock the continued career ascent of its leading players.
The near-ubiquitous Buckley plays the novelistically-named Moll, who has a job as a tour guide that she loathes and a mum, Hilary (Geraldine James, pictured below), who doesn't exactly offer much by way of succour. First glimpsed at a choir rehearsal presided over by the (literally) barking Hilary, Moll is shadowed by traumatic events from her past and is about to fall under the sway of a shadowy figure very much from her present. That, in turn, would be the rifle-toting Pascal (Flynn), an apparently sensitive soul whose own feelings of maternal abandoment surely help to propel him into Moll's arms.
While Moll's family (two none-too-accommodating siblings included) fret and cluck and condescend in her direction, she drifts towards the drifter that is Pascal. Are the newfound lovers in fact Janus-faced sides of the same damaged coin, or might one have something curative to offer the other?
Pearce's probing camera forsakes the theatrics promised by his film's title to concentrate on the Jamesian beast that exists within us all. Murderous goings-on are seen meanwhile to be overtaking the island of Jersey, the film's unusual setting, and may implicate Pascal, or not. The soundscape at times goes into overdrive, and clouds are put to both metaphoric as well as literal use, but not before Pascal remarks of the couple, "We're the same". Which, in context, may not be quite what Moll needs to hear.
Arguably in undue thrall to its own ambiguity, Beast feels like it isn't entirely sure just how arty or atmospheric it wants to be. Buckley, interestingly, can adjust her face into the sort of purposeful lockdown that will surely serve her well if she wants to go the action heroine route, while Flynn long ago proved himself a dab hand at "sensitive souls" who may be hiding a less beneficent side. (His breakout stage performance in Martin McDonagh's Hangmen kept you shifting perspectives by the second.) The film ends with an encounter that challenges the audience to make of it what they will, but when it comes to the charisma evidenced by its sterling cast, on that topic there can be no doubt.
- Read more film reviews on theartsdesk
- Overleaf: watch the trailer for Beast
DVD/Blu-ray: They Came to a City
A Priestley experience - stagey but fascinating wartime social fantasy
Ealing Studios veteran Basil Dearden may have directed it, but 1944’s They Came to a City is mostly a JB Priestley film, an engaging blend of the mundane and the metaphysical.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society review - artery-furring whimsy
Lily James seeks postwar secrets in a Channel Islands weepie
There’s a serious film to be made about the German occupation of the Channel Islands. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society is not that film. The absolute gobful of a title more than hints at artery-furring whimsy.
Journeyman review - Paddy Considine wins on points
Fictional story of a brain-damaged boxer has a soft centre
Boxing movies are often about redemption in the ring. From Somebody Up There Likes Me to last year’s Bleed for This via Rocky, the story stays the same: boxer seeks peace though punching. In Journeyman, Paddy Considine travels along a different path. The sporting action happens towards the start, but the heart of the story is in its aftermath.
Blu-ray: Derek Jarman Collection, Vol One 1972-1986
Voyage through an alchemical universe: the magical realm of a flawed English genius
This BFI boxset of Derek Jarman films from the first phase of his career, brilliantly curated by William Fowler, is an exemplary package: a treasure trove of extras accompanies his first six features, here presented in re-mastered form, and a thorough, well-illustrated and thought-provoking 80-page booklet with extensive material about the films and a wealth of essays.
DVD: Queerama
A glorious film reclamation of Britain’s troubled gay past
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.
Crowhurst review - plucky indie wins race with rival
The low-budget indie bests the recently released film about the same maritime disaster
Perhaps it’s fitting that Donald Crowhurst should once more find himself in a race. Even more aptly, it’s a race against himself. You wait half a century for a biopic about the round-the-world yachtsman who disappeared off the face of the earth, and then two turn up at once. This sort of clash sometimes happens in film, and one movie always ends up trouncing the other. Dangerous Liaisons seduced audiences away from Valmont. Capote killed off Infamous.
You Were Never Really Here review - a wild ride to the dark side
An intimidating performance by Joaquin Phoenix as a remorseless lone avenger
The gripping paradox of Lynne Ramsay’s terse, brutal thriller is suggested in its title. Adapted from Jonathan Ames's novella, it’s a film distinguished by the force of its images and the compression of its narrative, and while its impact leaves you dazed, you can’t quite believe that what you’ve just seen ever happened.