"I Shot Andy Warhol" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
A perceptive rock journalist and theatre critic who went on to work in the field of television documentary, Mary Harron makes an assured feature film directing debut with the bold and complex I Shot Andy Warhol. Set in the 1960s heyday of Warhol's famous Factory in New York, it deals with a disturbed and disruptive young woman who hovered on the fringe of Warhol's clique.
A man-hating lesbian feminist and would-be playwright, Valerie Solanas was the founder and sole member of SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men, and the author of the SCUM Manifesto, which essentially advocated male genocide. She came into contact with Warhol when she managed to get him the only copy of her play, Up Your Ass, of which he staged a reading before losing it. In June 1968, Solanas shot and seriously wounded Warhol. Twenty years later she died impoverished in a San Francisco welfare hotel.
Mary Harron's incisive film digs deep into the life and psyche of Solanas and explores the cultural background against which she scraped her existence. She is played in a riveting performance, the best and most complete to date from the excellent Lily Taylor, an actress whose essentially appealing personality inevitably renders the Solanas character more sympathetic than she was.
Fuelled in equal measure by paranoia and determination, Solanas ultimately emerges as a sad character; abused, ridiculed and ignored, and a victim of her own hostile and volatile personality. At the same time the film perceives her as a feminist ahead of her time, someone who achieved her 15 minutes of fame - in a haven of celebrating celebrity - too early to build meaningfully upon it.
Crucial to the movie's achievements is the recurring dark humour which punctuates its stylised portrait of Solanas and her milieu. The film's picture of life at the Factory - a world of wild self-indulgence, rampant narcissism and boundless opportunism - seems even more seriously weird in retrospect as it is evoked here. Working on a very low budget, director Harron along with cinematographer Ellen Kuras and production designer Therese Deprez have worked wonders in capturing the distinctive look and feel of the period, and the atmosphere is enhanced by John Cale's score.
Warhol's entourage of hangers-on, the so-called Superstars, are all there, many of them played by the offspring of actors and singers who were prominent at the time - Gerard Malanga is played by Donovan Leitch, son of the folk singer, Donovan; Viva by Tahnee Welch, daughter of Raquel Welch; and Jared, Harris, the actor son of Richard Harris effectively plays Andy Warhol himself as an aloof and creepy presence. However, the most surprising performance in the movie comes from Stephen Dorff, Who is quite unrecognisable as the drag queen Candy Darling.
"Surviving Picasso" (IS), Screen, Dublin
Anthony Hopkins, Joss Ackland, Peter Eyre, Bob Peck, Joan Plowright... there's a distinctly British feel to this biographical reconstruction of the latter years in the life of Pablo Picasso (Anthony Hopkins), viewed through the eyes of Francoise Gilot (Natascha McElhone), the young art student who became his lover in 1943. She lived with him and ministered to his needs for 10 years, bearing two children, before finally summoning the strength to break the hold he had over her and leave him.
It's a Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala production, so we expect as much attention to be given to the cafe interiors as the nuances of characterisation. We get both, certainly, and it's not the actors' fault that the effort is disappointingly anaemic. Anthony Hopkins looks right and has a commanding physical presence, but somehow we can't believe in him or in any of the other characters.
The faults lie in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's script, and James Ivory's direction, which manage to reduce Picasso to a series of cliche's: the egotistical monster who destroys every woman in his path, who charms people and then discards them, who demands total devotion while being systematically unfaithful, etc, etc. The frequent use of voiceover from the sensitive Francoise, describing and explaining the development of her fascination with him is ponderous, while the frequent flashbacks to scenes from his earlier relationships with his first wife Olga (Jane Lapotaire), Dora Maar (Julianne Moore) and Marie Therese Walter (Susannah Harker) are melodramatic and faintly ludicrous.
In the end, the concentration on the complicated love-life of the artist seems beside the point and curiously uninteresting. We have little sense of his work (which is treated as almost incidental, and shown only in pastiche versions), or of what distinguished Picasso from any other arrogant, obsessive painter, or whether all these fascinated women were celebrity groupies or masochists. Why the film was based on Arianna Stassinopoulos's somewhat sensationalist biography, Picasso: Creator And Destroyer, rather than on Gilot's own, My Life With Picasso, is a mystery. The latter gives a much more rounded and complex portrait of their relationship.
There is a difficulty, of course, in showing an artist, played by an actor, creating his or her work on film, particularly when it is as well known as Picasso's. This is demonstrated here in an extremely silly scene in which two of his former wives attack each other with fists, while the painter works, magisterially unperturbed, on the canvas of Guernica - which, the voiceover informs us, is an extremely important painting. The whole thing, like this team's last biographical film, Jefferson In Paris seems badly conceived. Maybe they should stick to those literary adaptations; they're a safer bet.
"The Mirror Has Two Faces" (15) Savoy, Virgin, UCIs
The mirror has two faces, and both of them show enlarged reflections of Barbra Streisand in a glowing light. This is a lesson in how one woman (Rose Morgan, a university lecturer played by Streisand, who also directs) can have it every way, by being a warm, vibrant person with an "attractive mind", and then transforming herself into a siren of glamour and desirability as well, in an effort to kindle the desire of her husband (Jeff Bridges) - who really thought she was gorgeous all along. Confused? So is the direction.
This shamelessly narcissistic vehicle for Streisand's ego hurtles through any semblance of credibility, before crashing in total confusion, as Streisand-as-director first insists that the duckling is not ugly (beauty comes from within, stupid), but is, nevertheless, in need of a complete make-over just in case.
While Streisand's attempts at New York Jewish wise-cracking have a jaded weight, there are plenty of unintentionally funny moments, especially from Jeff Bridges, shuffling sheepishly through his role as the hapless maths lecturer who marries Rose because he thinks there is no danger of finding her attractive, only to be confronted half-way through by her transformation into, well, Barbra Streisand - an alarming spectacle, complete with big-blonde hair, false eyelashes and cleavage. Understandably, he looks a bit shell-shocked.
Lauren Bacall, as Rose's bitchy mother, gets some sharp, snappy lines - but even her performance is not enough to recommend this laughable mulch of "issues" about self esteem, sibling rivalry, female conditioning, eating disorders - and sheer vanity.
"Starmaker" (15s) Screen on D'Olier Street
The Italian film-maker Giuseppe Tornatore is probably fated to be forever known as the director of the hugely successful and highly sentimental Cinema Paradiso. Of the films he has made since, none has appealed so widely to an international audience, and the same is likely to be true of his latest offering, but Starmaker is a perceptive if uneven film which has much to recommend it.
In Sicily in the early 1950s, a travelling cameraman (Sergio Castellito) moves from town to town, offering to film the local people for a fee of 1,500 lire, as part of a film studio's search for "New Faces In The Movies". Thousands of Sicilians, from housewives and policemen to bandits and mafiosi, part with their money in pursuit of their dreams. Of course, Castellito is a con man and there is no film in his camera, but his victims open their personal lives as well as their wallets to him, revealing their innermost desires in front of his cynical eyes and useless lens. Only when Castellito himself falls prey to a confidence trick does his own heart soften, and he finds himself falling in love with a young woman (Tiziana Lodato), with disastrous consequences.
Cinematographer Dante Spinotti provides some remarkable images of the harsh landscape and labyrinthine towns of Sicily, but the most striking element of Starmaker is in the performances direct to camera of Castellito's victims, many of them portrayed by non-actors. The leisurely, episodic structure framed around these vignettes, some of them tragic, some highly comical, creates an engaging fusion of naturalism and dream-like artifice reminiscent of the neo-realist Italian film-makers of the period, particularly De Sica, who is mentioned several times. It's a shame, therefore, that the film veers towards melodrama in its last half-hour, losing much of its charm and not gaining much in the process.
. Due to an editing error Michael Dwyer's byline was omitted from last Friday's cinema column. He reviewed the films Evita, Shine and Sleepers.
