Horror Actressing: Fatma Mohamed in "In Fabric"
Monday, November 18, 2019 at 3:00PM by Jason Adams
Dunno who's noticed but Twenty-Nineteen is making its last lap before it leaps, and so the time for taking stock of What Was is nigh now -- that is to say for the next several weeks of our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series I'm going to be looking back at my favorite female performances from horror films that I saw this past year. And what better way to start this project than with a film I saw at the start of the year when I reviewed it for Tribeca, one that's only now just being released, hitting screens on December 6th.
I speak of Peter Strickland's In Fabric, a bifurcated anthology-of-sorts that's strung together via one possessed red dress that ruins the lives of all those who come into contact with it...
The first half of the film follows freshly single mum Sheila (a fantastic Marianne Jean Baptiste) looking to move on with her life -- she heads down to the local high-class boutique emporium called Dentley and Soper's and there she meets, we all meet, the sales-woman Miss Luckmoore, an unforgettable amalgam of sophistication and grotesquerie played to the bewigged hilt by Fatma Mohamed.
Mohamed has been in all of Strickland's films, including Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy, but this is the first time he's let her steal an entire film and steal it she does. She steals the film not only visually, looking like the Grand High Witch in her totally immersive Goth Victorian Drag, but Strickland feeds her these gobbledegook lines of overripe retail speak, things like, "Dimensions and proportions transcend the prisms of our measurements," and "Did the transaction validate your paradigm of consumerism?"
And Mohamed pointedly delivers these lines as she's just learned our language phonetically, upping the sense of disconnect that the film revels in -- Miss Luckmoore feels at all times like a thing, dark as outer space, living inside of a person-suit. Not just horror but high comedy comes from the trance she and her fellow witchy salespeople have clearly put this place under -- they rhythmically outstretch their arms, as if clutching piles of scarves to their bosoms, drawing their clientele inward, but for those of us watching it's anything but inviting. It's bizarre and off-putting, the sort of thing you instinctively step back from.
And yet everyone in the film behaves backwards; they step forward. And somewhere in the recesses of our brains we regret to get it -- Mohamed is so hypnotic, so funny and alluring and so so strange, something in us too finds it impossible to turn away. When she's not there we want her there -- even more we feel her there, black eyes like two inverted suns staring down, an eclipse in silks and crinoline.
Reader Comments (4)
Thanks for this article, Jason. I am strangely attracted to this strange film -- what a unique concoction of simmering, brewing and ejectile-spewing cinematic experience. I can't decide whether to laugh or be horrified/embarrassed when I do when watching scenes from this film like when sales ladies do their wiccan curtsies to the customers, or to deeply empathize with the plight of the working class and the way they can't get out of their Guy de Maupassant lifeworlds. Plus tableaus were staged the way Edward Kienholz staged his art pieces. You rightly noted the excellence of Marianne Jean-Baptiste (so so good to see her back on the screen as a kitchen sink character molded by Ken Loach and Mike Leigh and tackling something as meaty as Sheila since her recent appearance in the TV series Homecoming and even way back in her breakout role in Secrets & Lies) but Fatma Mohamed's Miss Luckmore is one of the most original filmic creations this year. That faintly Slavic, consonant-preferring way of speaking is both creepy and weirdly comforting (at least to me; my wife thinks Miss Luckmore is an uproarious drag queen through and through). My favorite line of hers is something like: "A purchase on the horizon, a panoply of temptation, can a curious soul resist?" Creepy, seductive, intellectual all at the same time.
In my ideal world, Mohamed should be in this year's supporting actress conversation, as is Jean-Baptiste's borderline-lead turn, but I think both actresses are better off not in the radar of something superficial as this as I am sure their characters and this absurdist comedy by Strickland will live and continue to have an afterlife among the rabid and faithful fans of midnight screenings and cult movies, and of cinephiles wanting something that demands beyond passive spectatorship.
Oooh I forgot about this movie after seeing a preview earlier this year - it looks like it has an eerie retro aesthetic, something like "The Love Witch" and Jean-Baptiste is always compelling - I look forward to seeing Mohamed.
I saw this film over here in the UK back in the spring and adored it even as it made me squirm in my seat. How can something be so beguiling and fascinating whilst at the same time skin-crawlingly strange? THe way in which Mohamed embodies the role she's given and makes it her own is a wonder and a marvel. One of the best performances of the year. And I write that as an Olivia Coleman fanboy.
Why has the movie taken to so long to be available. It came and went so quickly from theaters over here and then it's just was gone all of a sudden.