Glenn's last report from the Stockholm Film Festival...
The Stockholm International Film Festival is now over and as I try and drain the last remaining symptoms of jetlag out of my body (not to mention any recurring dependence on restaurant food, great wine, and luxurious European comfort that such a trip offers) it’s time to take one last look back. I will miss seeing the image of Uma Thurman lording over her loyal subjects as I walk down Drottningattan every day.
The FIPRESCI jury – combined of myself, Quirijn Foeken of The Netherlands, and Dieter Wieczorek of France – awarded our price to Hungry Hearts from Italian director Saverio Costanzo. The film stars Adam Driver and Alba Rohrwacher (you may remember her from I Am Love) as a couple whose impending child brings about an avalanche of potentially fatal paranoia. It was the first film that we saw at the festival and despite some rallying by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Tales, Xavier Dolan’s Mommy, and Dietrich Brüggemann’s Stations of the Cross, it just felt right.
For what it’s worth, this was my top ten, hastily scribbled on a napkin...
(ABBA, Bergman’s chair, drinks with Debra, Force Majeure, and more after the jump…)
1. Hungry Hearts (Saverio Costanzo)
2. Mommy (Xavier Dolan)
3. Love is Strange (Ira Sachs)
4. Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
5. Stations of the Cross (Dietrich Brüggemann)
6. Tales (Rakhshan Bani-Etemad)
7. Birdman (Alejandro G. Inarritu)
8. The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum)
9. Northern Soul (Elaine Constantine)
10. Eden (Mia Hanson-Løve)
Nobody on the jury was particularly fond of Lone Scherfig’s The Riot Club, which plays like an elongated short film, and an excessively brutish one at that, Asia Argento’s Misunderstood or François Ozon’s tone-deaf The New Girlfriend in which Romain Duris becomes “Virginia” after the death of his wife and mother of his child. For a film navigating such rich terrain as sexual identity and desire, Ozon’s latest film is awfully clunky and old world about gay stereotypes. Varying jury members also had kind words about David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn, Julie Lopes-Curval’s High Society and Pascale Ferran’s Bird People alongside all previously mentioned hits and misses.
I had never been to Europe before, let alone Sweden and it was an appropriate city to steal away my cross-Atlantic virginity given my home country’s Abba-obsession (myself included) – more on that in a bit! I will likely review a few more of the festival films on my own blog, but to wrap up my sojourn coverage for The Film Experience, here are ten other amazing things from my visit.
1. Stellan Skarsgard welcomes you at Stockholm's international airport and it is wonderful. I'd prefer Alexander in the flesh, but I'll still take it.
2. Firstly, it must be said that to be sent to a city such as Stockholm to watch movies is rather spectacular in and of itself. But then factor in getting to spend time with amazing writers, filmmakers and industry personel and it’s just heaven. I was lucky to get to chat to the competition jury that included filmmaker Debra Granik (Winter's Bone), Daniel Espinosa (Safe House), Erica Wasserman and actor Johannes Kuhnke. Debra and I got into a very animated conversation about Whiplash, cinema’s responsibility to the representation of art and all sorts of other topics that just make me giddy. I shamelessly asked for her a photograph. Hopefully you get to see her latest doc, Stray Dog, soon.
Kuhnke is the star of Force Majeure so it was appropriate we had a healthy discussion about Oscar’s foreign language category. I didn’t go so far as to say his film – which is titled rather blandly as Tourist in its home country – will win the prize, but I do wonder if the statue is between that and Ida (or Mommy if they bother to nominate it).
3. At another function, I spoke briefly to Céline Sciamma who made the excellent Tomboy and whose latest film, Girlhood, the festival's winner for Best Film, will reach American shores next year. Later again I spent an evening sharing a glass of red wine with Scottish short film-maker Ian Waugh and American documentarian Matt Livadary. Unfortunately, Camp X-Ray director Peter Sattler was unwell and couldn't attend a function we were to be at together and as a result I didn't get to tell him about that time my review of his film got swept up by hordes of Kristen Stewart fans as a cause celebre. I'm sure he's heard it before, come to think of it.
4. Did you know Ingmar Bergman sat in the same seat of the same cinema every time he would watch one of his own movies? Because he did, and I got to see it. Don’t get too excited though because it’s just an average cinema seat, the same as every other. Sweden’s greatest director doesn’t watch his finished product nestled in a throne, but it was the closest I got to one of those while in Stockholm. I did visit the royal palace, but it’s mostly kept private. Perhaps because of the ghost that is rumored to haunt the halls.
5. Swedish cinema is very similar to Australian cinema in that they can find a couple of hits a year and then the rest struggles. This year’s biggies are the aforementioned Force Majeure and Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. I got to speak to somebody from the nation’s largest distributor of local content and we got to compare notes on trans-themed films 52 Tuesdays (an excellent film from Australia) and Something Must Break (an even more excellent film from Sweden). Sigh.
6. Speaking of Roy Andersson, I got to sit next to him and his wife Anne-Marie at a festival dinner. Despite our language difficulties, they were lovely people. Andersson was being feted by the festival with their visionary prize, but Uma Thurman and Mike Leigh who were recipients of career achievement prizes from the festival were not there that night, sadly. Uma did get a drink named after her (Jameson, Ice tea and Lemonade) and her face was on the cover of the program guide and subsequently plastered all over the city.
7. Did you know Nina Persson wrote music for a Swedish animated movie called Tank Om…? I discovered a poster for this one night and there really is a whole different world of movies out there that we don’t even hear about.
8. I also didn't know there was a stage musical based on Flashdance. There are posters in Stockholm advertising it and from the videos I have since seen it's hardly surprising it won't be arriving on Broadway anytime soon. It's a curious coincidence though, since "Flashdance... What a Feeling" features prominantly in Hungry Hearts!
9. Swedish cinemas are gorgeous. Or, at least the ones I got to visit were. And the audiences were pretty great too. What was disappointing, however, was seeing an old cinema that had been repurposed into a retail outlet for Urban Outfitters, and another converted into an American-themed bowling alley. History, am I right?!?
10. ABBA! Yes, I visited the ABBA museum, which is glorious. From the five-minute Jonas Akerlund movie that surrounds you when you first walk in, to the room filled with original costumes, LP artwork, and gold records; from the telephone that rings occasionally throughout the day with a recorded message from the band to a lucky visitor, to the props (the Arrival helicopter! The “Fernando” guitar!). Despite the lack of reference to Muriel's Wedding and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, I was in heaven for two hours before I had to rush back to reality and see a movie about a hotel cleaner who turns into a sparrow. Of course.