Sarah Gavron – Way Too Indie http://waytooindie.com Independent film and music reviews Fri, 02 Dec 2016 17:34:42 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Way Too Indiecast is the official podcast of WayTooIndie.com. Our film critics grip and gush about the latest indie movies and sometimes even mainstream ones. Find all of our reviews, podcasts, news, at www.waytooindie.com Sarah Gavron – Way Too Indie yes Sarah Gavron – Way Too Indie dustin@waytooindie.com dustin@waytooindie.com (Sarah Gavron – Way Too Indie) The Official Podcast of Way Too Indie Sarah Gavron – Way Too Indie http://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/waytooindie/podcast-album-art.jpg http://waytooindie.com Suffragette http://waytooindie.com/review/movie/suffragette/ http://waytooindie.com/review/movie/suffragette/#respond Fri, 30 Oct 2015 19:49:42 +0000 http://waytooindie.com/?p=41296 A modest, respectful film chronicling the dark days of the early suffragist movement.]]>

It’s a great relief that Suffragette isn’t a showy, glamorized, romantic period piece meant to wow us with its pretty locales and intricate costume design. The British suffragettes of the early 20th century deserve a more honest, grounded depiction than that, and that’s what director Sarah Gavron and writer Abi Morgan deliver. Their version of the suffragette movement is violent, thrilling and dirty. These women put everything on the line in the name of justice and equality, shattering windows and blowing up mailboxes at the risk of losing their jobs and families. Women may have won the right to vote here and in Britain a long time ago, but the tragedy is that many of the injustices the suffragettes rallied against in the past still stand strong today.

We see the movement through the eyes of Maud (Carey Mulligan), a working woman with a husband, Sonny (Ben Wishaw), and a son, George (Adam Michael Dodd). Maud’s not taken from the history books—she’s a composite of Morgan and Gavron’s research on suffragettes of the time, particularly those in the middle class. At the story’s outset she exists outside the suffragette circle, accepting of her lot working at a musty laundry where she’s sexually abused by her boss. Her inner activist is ignited when she sees suffragettes carrying out minor acts of vandalism all around East London in their fight for equal voting rights.

Almost by accident, Maud is recruited by her co-worker Violet (Anne-Marie Duff) and is further inspired by Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham Carter), a suffragist leader who holds secret meetings in the pharmacy she runs. Leading the larger suffragist charge as figurehead is Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep), who gives Maud a jumpstart of empowerment and inspiration (we see her only briefly, but Streep knows how to make her minutes count). The women may not have a voice in parliament, but they’ve got bravery and conviction to spare.

As she gets caught up in suffragist activities, Maud begins to realize the true scale of her sacrifice for the movement. She’s thrown in jail (where she’s force-fed—a gruesome scene) and villainized by most of her community, and Sonny hasn’t the patience or understanding to tolerate her new life’s mission. He kicks her out of their tiny flat and forbids her from seeing George, leaving her fellow female foot soldiers as her only allies.

Mulligan has a gift that allows her to embody strength and delicateness at the same time, and few roles would be better served by her talents than that of Maud. Heartrending are the scenes in which Maud sneaks George away from school to spend a few precious hours of quality time; you can see joy and anguish in equal parts on Mulligan’s face as Maud savors her time with her son. Also great are Mulligan’s scenes with Brendan Gleeson, who plays a detectie heading up a suffragette surveillance operation. He’s the only almost-sympathetic figure on the oppressor’s side of the story (he empathizes with the suffragettes but ultimately does nothing to help them), though the film never ham-fistedly villainizes the men in the story. Other filmmakers might have made the story about some sort of ethical awakening on the men’s side, but Gavron and Morgan are more tasteful than that; their story is about the women’s fight for justice, period.

There’s no effort to show off the film’s elaborate production design in a Hollywood-y way by Gavron, and that’s one of the film’s strengths. Every bit of East London we see looks detailed and painstakingly designed, but the characters are always the focus, which results in a more immersive period experience. This is the first movie ever to be allowed to film at the UK’s Houses of Parliament, and the filmmakers don’t squandor the opportunity by giving the location center stage. It’s the sign of a film made with dignity and care.

The thing working against Suffragette is that it’s not quite as rousing as you’d think it would be. It’s admirable in the way it respects the dark days these heroes endured to pave the way for future generations, but there’s something about the tone and pace of the movie that lacks an overarching sense of force and activist aggression, something a movie so unenamored with style could have done better with. On the other hand, I’ll take a melancholic but respectful historical drama over a glitzy, Oscar-bait-y one any day.

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Sarah Gavron and Abi Morgan On Carey Mulligan, ‘Suffragette’ http://waytooindie.com/interview/sarah-gavron-and-abi-morgan-on-carey-mulligan-suffragette/ http://waytooindie.com/interview/sarah-gavron-and-abi-morgan-on-carey-mulligan-suffragette/#respond Fri, 30 Oct 2015 16:36:06 +0000 http://waytooindie.com/?p=41546 Suffragette, written by Abi Morgan and directed by Sarah Gavron, takes a sobering look at gender inequality through the eyes of the trailblazing suffragettes of early-20th-century Britain. Carey Mulligan stars as Maud, a fictional composite of several women and experiences of the time. A working woman, wife and mother, Maud gets swept up by the suffragette movement, […]]]>

Suffragette, written by Abi Morgan and directed by Sarah Gavron, takes a sobering look at gender inequality through the eyes of the trailblazing suffragettes of early-20th-century Britain. Carey Mulligan stars as Maud, a fictional composite of several women and experiences of the time. A working woman, wife and mother, Maud gets swept up by the suffragette movement, changing her life forever as she becomes a militant activist for women’s rights. Evading the authorities in their fight for equality, the suffragettes’ crusade puts a strain on their home lives, with the future of Maud’s family hanging in the balance as she’s scorned by her disapproving husband.

In a roundtable interview we spoke to Gavron and Morgan about Suffragette, which also stars Helena Bonham Carter, Anne-Marie Duff, Grace Stottor, Romola Garai, Meryl Streep, Ben Wishaw, and Brendan Gleeson. The film opens today in select cities and expands wide on November 20th.

Suffragette

What inspired the project?
Sarah: It was a long genesis for me. I wanted to do it for about ten years. I grew up with a mother who became a local politician. I watched her agency in a very male world. We haven’t learned about suffragettes in school. We just knew the very sanitized Mary Poppins version like everybody did. It’s not a widely known story. There was a really good TV series called Shoulder To Shoulder that made an impact. So, people were discussing it, but there wasn’t a big screen version of it. It seemed extraordinary and such a timely story, overdue in terms of telling the story. But also, it seemed to resonate with the world we live in in so many ways. The two producers, Faye Ward and Alison Owen—it occurred to them at the same time. They had a conversation about doing a film about this, and it made sense for us to talk to Abi because she was the writer who had worked on Brick Lane.

Abi: From my point of view it was very exciting because I had done biopics before, but this felt like a different way of looking at a biopic. We started to focus in and think, “Okay, we could do ‘The Extraordinary Life of Miss Pankhurst’ or Emily Wilding Davison.” But those women will have at one point have a film about their lives. I hope they do. But when we started to hone in on the lives of the working women, there were surprising details everywhere we looked. The police surveillance records, which were only opened in 2003, where you’d see a tiny bit of an interview. Or you would read a testimonial of a woman who had been taken when she took the deputations to the House of Parliament. These women are really interesting because the jeopardy on their lives is so profound. So many of these women were being appallingly treated at work. Their working conditions were just chronic. They tried to manage having working lives and children and they didn’t have a wealthy husband or family wealth. They were fighting for equal pay and dealing with sexual violence. There were so many issues they were dealing with, and they were so profound and so 21st-century.

I started to think, what if we took a woman who was outside of that, in a place of passivity, who didn’t realize just how downtrodden and difficult her life was. And then, through engagement with the movement, moves towards militant activism and change, realizing it’s the ordinary women who change history. Then we though, that might be a story for us all. I think that was when we started to feel like it could be a proper movie.

Talk about Maud. She’s a composite of many women.
Abi: Originally, she was a character I put in the house of Alice Houghton, played by Romola Garai. I had this idea that the lady upstairs was going to fall in love with the maid. Through that, they would emancipate each other. But when I started doing more research and we started looking at the world of the laundries in East London, you started to look at the extraordinary working conditions and the ailments and the injuries these women had. There seemed to be a contradiction from the photos you would see of these laundries, which actually looked quite clean and civilized. It’s like, okay, this is interesting. Then, within that, you realize some of the women in these places joined the movement. When they were in incarceration, they couldn’t pay their bail. They lost their jobs and sometimes their children. That story started to have a real sense of jeopardy.

Sarah: Maud was drawn from these working women. Many of them didn’t write their own stories, but there were some who wrote their own stories, or other people wrote their stories, or you could piece together their lives from police records. Hannah Mitchell was a working woman, Annie Barnes, Annie Kenney—you could find Mauds in the research. It was about being liberated from the biopic.

Abi: It allowed us to kind of create this ensemble of women, so you could find the Edith Ellyns who had perhaps been educated, but at that time weren’t able to pick up their degrees. [They would] marry into relationships where they were really the brains of the relationship and would have entitlement to a business. Someone like Violet had a very abusive relationship, which you couldn’t talk about. It might be talked about when noticing someone’s bruises, but there was no refuge, nowhere for these women to go. I worked on an adaptation of Nelly Ternan’s life, who was the lover of Charles Dickens. I’d already looked at Victorian East London 40-50 years earlier, and to look back at 1912 and realize that so many of these issues that Charles Dickens was drawing upon are still affecting women today, I thought, this is interesting.

How important was it that the protagonist be the total package—be married, be a mother, be someone who has essentially accepted her lot in life and only gradually begins to see that it doesn’t have to be her lot in life?
Abi: I think those are the strains that feel very familiar to us all. I was trying to create a character who was identifiable. I don’t think you have to be a woman who is married. The film is about empowering women to say, globally, there are these huge inequalities we deal with. For Maud, we wanted to create a woman who was not even yet engaged with how unhappy she was. This is a woman who’s been institutionalized from an early age. She’s been abused by her employer, her mother was most likely abused before her. Maud has a scar on her arm, and the idea was that she was there when her mother was burned to death at the laundry. You’re meant to realize this woman has a huge legacy that she has just suppressed and suppressed. Engagement with a group of women who say, “We’re equal. You no longer have to deal with these conditions. Your life can change,” that’s the thing that activates her. It was very important that we created all of those pressures women of today have. They have to bring in money, raise their children, deal with sexual violence or sexual intimidation. They have to find their voice, and the whole point of the film is trying to give these voiceless women a voice.

Sarah: By looking at a marriage at the center of it, we were able to explore the politics of the marriage in terms of the power balance and the parental rights issue and the lack of economic power within a marriage.

It also raises the stakes so much higher.
Abi: Absolutely. And that’s a good point. The film couldn’t just work [politically]. It had to work as a piece of genuine human drama. We were trying to consecrate that jeopardy. That’s something Sarah worked really hard on.

Brendan Gleeson’s character is interesting. I think his conversations with Maud are important.
Sarah: The police archives opened up in 2003 and revealed this undercover surveillance observation, which was so extraordinary because it showed the level of threat the government perceived these women posed. They took this cutting-edge technology to the streets, and it all seemed so intriguing. There are these two Irish policemen we honed in on, and Abi drew on them for Brendan Gleeson’s character. What was exciting was that he was a character who wasn’t single-faceted. He changed and had many dimensions. He was upholding the law, but the very act of surveying those women meant that he was seeing them up-close and understanding their dilemma, actually.

Abi: In fact, that was what was so great about working on this film together. It was actually Sarah who found those two detectives. That’s amazing. We’d be working on a police officer and he wouldn’t feel fully rounded, so Sarah would go and research. I’d written it as an Irish character, but when Brendan came onboard it really made sense. He had his own history he was bringing to the table. So many of the techniques used on these women went on to be used in Northern Ireland. There were so many layers to that journey of making him, and it really is about the fusion of a great actor who brings his own baggage to the table and a director who’s constantly going, “Let’s shape, let’s shape, let’s shape.”

When I was watching the movie I thought about the Magdalene laundries in Ireland.
Abi: It was more about the metaphor. These women wash and clean and restore and get rid of the dirt and stains of London, starching men’s collars. They send them out clean again only for them to come back dirty. It was this relentless cycle these women were in, always trying to maintain order, and yet there was this underlying chaos. You’re always looking for a visual metaphor to somehow have a relationship with the themes of the film. I think the laundry was really important.

The costumes and locations are extraordinary, but the film doesn’t seem concerned with showing them off like other period movies are.
Sarah: We did want to embed it in the period and make it feel very real. We chose a lot of real locations and didn’t do set builds whenever possible. We closed off a central London street for that opening sequence where they smash windows in Central London. We got access to the House of Parliament, which was exciting because it was a place no film crew was ever allowed to film in. We petitioned like suffragettes and they agreed. [laughs] Just to be in that place where history had happened felt like a marker of how far we had come. But also, as you say, we didn’t want to make the locations a character or foreground them. We wanted you to follow the characters through their world, glimpsing life as they did. We created a 360 degree world so we could capture their actions instead of staging it.

What kind of homework did you give the cast?
Sarah: They’d never had so much homework in their lives! [laughs] We gave them these packets. We got the whole team assembled for weeks and were feeding them stuff from the minute they committed. We fed them books and background and took them to laundries and police cells—whatever we could do to really bring the world to life for them. We created these research packages for each aspect of [the story], and that was great. We had Carey on for months and had a three-week rehearsal period.

Abi: What’s great is that the Olive Schreiner quote we used at the end of the movie is from her book Dreams In A Desert, and the book became very important to Carey. There were a few scenes we had to end the movie, and we suddenly realized we needed something that truly symbolized the fact that the fight goes on and that it’ll be the next generation they’ll pass it on to. She found that quote. We wrote a scene where Emily Wilding Davison gives her the book. That’s what was great—she could really go in and participate in that way.

It feels like it’s the right time for this film to come out.
Sarah: We hope so. When we were developing it, it strangely felt like it was becoming more timely, or at least the world was becoming more receptive to these themes and ideas. Abi honed in on this period that felt particularly resonant, so there was there was the police surveillance operation, which echoed all the issues around surveillance. Violence and protest and this journey towards activism, custodial rights, sexual violence. We were also hearing from more women around the world, probably because the digital world was allowing those women to be heard. It seemed the time to tell it. Feminism has also suddenly become less of a dirty word. Hopefully not a dirty word. [laughs]

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MVFF38 Diary Wrap-Up: ‘Suffragette,’ ‘Embrace of the Serpent,’ ‘Princess’ http://waytooindie.com/news/mvff38-diary-wrap-up-suffragette-embrace-of-the-serpent-princess/ http://waytooindie.com/news/mvff38-diary-wrap-up-suffragette-embrace-of-the-serpent-princess/#respond Mon, 19 Oct 2015 20:20:41 +0000 http://waytooindie.com/?p=41340 The 38th annual Mill Valley Film Festival was a memorable 10-day celebration indeed. A few excellent films emerged as sure-fire Oscar contenders, like Tom McCarthy’s newsroom slow-burner Spotlight, Cary Joji Fukunaga‘s Netflix powerhouse Beasts of No Nation, László Nemes’ heartstopping Son of Saul, and Kent Jones’ incisive documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut. Actors further cemented their cases for awards consideration as well: Michael Keaton […]]]>

The 38th annual Mill Valley Film Festival was a memorable 10-day celebration indeed. A few excellent films emerged as sure-fire Oscar contenders, like Tom McCarthy’s newsroom slow-burner Spotlight, Cary Joji Fukunaga‘s Netflix powerhouse Beasts of No Nation, László Nemes’ heartstopping Son of Saul, and Kent Jones’ incisive documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut.

Actors further cemented their cases for awards consideration as well: Michael Keaton again went toe-to-toe with last year’s Best Actor Oscar-winner, Eddie Redmayne, as their two films, Spotlight and The Danish Girl, took center stage on opening night; Brie Larson gives the best performance of her career in Lenny Abrahamson’s Room; and Sir Ian McKellen charmed festival-goers for two days, reminding us of his heartfelt, unforgettable turn as the aging Mr. Holmes.

Some under-the-radar films made lasting impressions as well, like Mitchell Lichtenstein’s gothic ghost story Angelica and Gunnar Vikene’s Nordic dark comedy Here Is Harold (my personal favorite of the festival).

My MVFF experience ended off as strong as it started, with two very different but equally spellbinding foreign features and yet another film that may be picking up a few golden statues come February.

Suffragette

Fight (And Burn Stuff) For the Right

With feminism becoming less and less of a dirty word as women and feminist allies become more and more galvanized around the fight for gender equality, Sarah Gavron‘s Suffragette looks back to the early feminists who sacrificed home and health to demand their right to vote in early 20th-century England. Carey Mulligan stars as Maud, a working-class wife and mother who gets swept up by the British suffragette movement, participating in explosive acts of protest alongside her fellow footsoldiers (played by the likes of Helena Bonham Carter, Anne-Marie Duff, and Meryl Streep). The cost of Maud’s actions are steep, however; her husband (Ben Wishaw) refuses to abide her newfound passion for activism, kicking Maud out of their home, away from their son. Screenwriter Abi Morgan’s story is as rousing as you’d expect for such inherently inspirational subject matter, but the film’s real strength is in its humility and dignity; it’s a period piece brimming with stunning locations (it was the first production allowed to be shot in the British Houses of Parliament since the ’50s) and elaborate costumes, but never lets the production design take precedence over the characters’ plight unlike other, showier period pieces. Mulligan is typically wonderful though she doesn’t reach the emotional depth of some of her greater performances. Still, it’s a fine film all involved are surely proud to have been a part of.

Embrace of the Serpent

Amazon Enlightenment

The most sublime, heart-achingly beautiful thing I saw at MVFF was an Amazonian upriver tale called Embrace of the Serpent, by Colombian director Ciro Guerra. It’s a magical, almost religious experience when a film breaks free completely from modern cinema norms and puts you in a state of mind you’ve never known, and that’s what Guerra does here. Shot on Super 35 black and white, the film follows two white scientists (Jan Bijvoet and Brionne Davis) as they scour the Amazon for a rare healing plant, their journeys separated by decades (one’s set in the early 1900s, the other 40 years later). The foreigners share a common guide, Amazonian shaman Karamakate (Nilbio Torres and Antonio Bolivar). The story is a dirge-like lament on the soul-sucking effect colonization has had on the once pure Amazonian culture. Otherworldly and yet bound to the earth and all her natural glory, Embrace of the Serpent is as can’t-miss as they come.

Princess

Sin and Splendor

Inside a cozy little house lives a family fractured by sexual awakening, paranoia, and depravity in Tali Shalom-Ezer‘s bone-chilling Princess. A most unsettling topic—child molestation—is explored delicately and artfully by the Israeli writer-director, whose story gently unfolds in a series of quietly intoxicating, increasingly unsettling glimpses of domestic implosion. The protagonist is Adar (Shira Haas), a bright 12-year-old who lives with her mom, Alma (Keren Mor), and her mom’s boyfriend, Michael (Ori Pfeffer). Adar and Michael have fun horsing around at home while mom goes off to work, but Michael’s playing grows inappropriate before long (he starts calling her “little prince”). Adar’s new friend, a boy named Alan (Adar Zohar-Hanetz), bears a staggering resemblance to her, and when he’s invited to stay with the family for a while, he becomes the new object of Michael’s affections. Sumptuously-lit and fluidly edited, the film’s presentation is lovely, which is a nice counter-balance to the difficult subject matter. Like Ingmar Bergman’s PersonaPrincess creates a beautiful sense of dreamlike disorientation and mirror-image poetry that arthouse lovers will treasure.

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Full BFI London Film Festival 2015 Program Revealed http://waytooindie.com/news/full-bfi-london-film-festival-2015-program-revealed/ http://waytooindie.com/news/full-bfi-london-film-festival-2015-program-revealed/#respond Tue, 01 Sep 2015 16:34:07 +0000 http://waytooindie.com/?p=39935 Beasts of No Nation, Black Mass, Son of Saul and more highlight BFI's 59th film festival lineup]]>

The 59th BFI Film Festival today unveiled its selection of 238 feature films and 182 shorts set to screen during the 12-day festival. While it was already known that the Sarah Gavron feminist drama Suffragette would open the festival, Danny Boyle‘s Steve Jobs biopic would close it, and the Cate Blanchett / Rooney Mara film Carol would feature in a Headline Gala, several other high-profile additions were part of today’s announcement.

The European premieres of Trumbo, Brooklyn, as well as The Lady In The Van highlight the Gala selections, while other anticipated movies like Black Mass, High-Rise, and The Lobster occupy other slots.

Thirteen features make up the Official Competition line-up, including Cary Fukunaga’s Netflix-bound Beasts of No Nation, the Cannes-awarded Son of Saul, and Sean Baker‘s iPhone shot Tangerine (which has already been released in the U.S.). The First Feature Competition highlights twelve other films from debut filmmakers, with Krisha, Partisan, and The Witch set to take part.

Tickets go on sale to the public September 17th, 20 days before BFI kicks off on October 7th. Check out the full lineup on BFI’s website.

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Carey Mulligan-lead ‘Suffragette’ Has 2 New Trailers, Opening BFI London Film Fest http://waytooindie.com/news/carey-mulligan-lead-suffragette-trailers/ http://waytooindie.com/news/carey-mulligan-lead-suffragette-trailers/#respond Wed, 03 Jun 2015 15:33:57 +0000 http://waytooindie.com/?p=36779 One of the early Oscar buzzed films of 2015, Suffragette, now has two trailers for viewing pleasure.]]>

Following The Imitation Game last year and Captain Phillips in 2013, Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette has set its European premiere date for opening night of the 59th BFI London Film Festival. A story of women fighting for women’s rights at the end of the 19th century, the feminist drama will debut on Wednesday, October 7th at the Odeon Leicester Square with simultaneous screenings taking place throughout the UK. With Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter as well as Meryl Streep in main roles, Suffragette is among the most highly anticipated films slated to come out in 2015.

Along with the news of its BFI London Film Fest premiere date, Suffragette has revealed two new look slightly different looks into surprisingly explosive upcoming film. Mulligan plays Maud, a working wife and mother who gets swept up by the foot soldiers of a growing feminist movement. Bonham Carter and Streep play fellow members of the movement, while villainous authority figure Brendan Gleeson seeks to dismantle their organization. Fancy period costumes are abound. The two newly released trailers have overlap, though the UK trailer is less ham-fisted in its unveiling of information.

Suffragette is scheduled to be released in New York and Los Angeles on October 23rd, expanding to more cities in the following weeks. While its BFI London Film Fest premiere is scheduled for October 7th, it’s worth noting that the gala has been advertised as Suffragette‘s “European Premiere,” leaving the door open for an appearance at a North American-set fall film festival.

Watch the first trailer here

Check out the Suffragette UK trailer below:

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