Did You See This?

Spooky and Sexy

Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Fairly early in Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in U.S.A (1966), “the movie suddenly rises like a breathy aria and croons a gentle dirge,” wrote Michael Atkinson in 2018. Left alone in a bar, Marianne Faithfull sings an a cappella version of “As Tears Go By,” the song written for her by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham. “The song may be Jagger and Richards’s masterpiece (Wong Kar Wai might second the vote),” wrote Atkinson, “but you wouldn’t have known it until Faithfull burbles it almost under her breath, low enough for only us to hear it.”

When Faithfull died on Thursday at the age of seventy-eight, Guardian music critic Alexis Petridis remembered her as one of the few stars of the 1960s welcomed into “a world shaped by punk,” primarily on the strength of her 1979 album Broken English, a furious, synth-infused comeback after years lost to addiction and homelessness. The raw depth of her voice in these years made her an ideal interpreter of Brecht and Weill, and her collaborators would include Nick Cave, Beck, Emmylou Harris, Blur, Metallica, Pulp, and PJ Harvey.

As an actor, Faithfull appeared alongside Glenda Jackson in the Royal Court Theatre’s 1967 production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and costarring with Alain Delon in Jack Cardiff’s The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968), she won a fresh wave of fans in France. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw notes that Faithfull was “a poignantly frail Ophelia opposite Nicol Williamson’s prince and Anthony Hopkins’s king” in Tony Richardson’s Hamlet (1969). She appeared as Empress Maria Theresa in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) and was nominated for a European Film Award for her performance as a sixty-year-old widow stumbling into an unexpected career in Sam Garbarski’s Irina Palm (2007).

Sara Driver cast Faithfull as a ghost haunting a down-and-out jazz musician (Alfred Molina) in When Pigs Fly (1993). “I met Marianne in London when I was trying to make a film based on Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies,” Driver told Hillary Weston last summer. “She told me about her experience of being in a coma after an overdose and about the colors she had seen and things she’d felt. I realized that she was the perfect ghost—she’s someone who had really been there and back. And she was just so wonderful to work with.”

This week’s highlights:

  • A new fiftieth-anniversary restoration of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock opens today at IFC Center in New York. On Valentine’s Day, 1900, three schoolgirls and a teacher go missing during an excursion to the Australian outback. In her 2014 essay, Megan Abbott noted that while Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel “plays it cool, more interested in social mores and their unraveling, the movie is all heat.” In the New York Times, J. Hoberman observes that the film “has echoes of L’avventura and Psycho, two movies that create an existential void when a main character vanishes less than midway through. It is more genteel yet more erotically charged than either—‘both spooky and sexy,’ Vincent Canby wrote in his 1979 New York Times review—and, like the Rock itself, has cast a resilient spell.”

  • “I’m always interested in when and how an actor with a flourishing or well-established career might take a flyer on a role that’s out of their presumed wheelhouse, and why the filmmakers might cast them that way,” writes Farran Smith Nehme, who has put together our Criterion Channel program Cast Against Type: Heroes as Villains. In her latest newsletter, Nehme has notes on all eleven films, starting with Roy Ward Baker’s Don’t Bother to Knock (1952), featuring Marilyn Monroe as a babysitter passing herself off as a jet-setter. Rarely do we “see Monroe play consuming, unchecked anger,” writes Nehme. “The character of Nell, marked by untreated mental illness and abuse suffered as a child, perhaps echoed aspects of Monroe’s own life, but she dove into the character’s complexity and brought out the young woman’s pathos too.”

  • Leos Carax’s “ostentatiously intelligent films, hypermediated by film history, are all in frantic search of a worldview to adopt,” writes Anna Shechtman in an essay for the New York Review of Books, a close reading of It’s Not Me (2024) that expands to an assessment of the oeuvre. “It’s tempting to write a history of anything as a history of bad dads,” writes Shechtman. “The history of art, the history of war, capitalism, and love: mauvais pères all the way down, a cycle that can’t seem to be broken. But Carax turns this quasi-Freudian self-exoneration—It’s not me, it’s my bad dad—into a self-implicating statement of purpose. Before he made his first film, Leos Carax changed his name. Born Alex Christophe Dupont in 1960 to a French journalist father and an American film critic mother of Russian Jewish origin, he has been disclaiming patrilineage, while making its onus his perpetual theme, since his first feature films, Boy Meets Girl (1984), Bad Blood (1986), and The Lovers on the Bridge (1991).”

  • For the New Yorker, Victoria Uren talks with Catherine Breillat about Last Summer, her evolving stance on #MeToo, and her public dispute with Asia Argento. “I expected her to be more pugilistic,” writes Uren, “but she spoke about most subjects with a bemused smile. She wanted to tell me about her upbringing in rural France (‘the sticks’); about other films she wants to make (her next will be based on ‘the perfect crime,’ which she discovered in a police blotter); about her directorial style (demanding, but aware enough of her actors’ limits so as not to ‘massacre their grace’). The only time that she bristled was on the subject of her reception. Critics ‘usually don’t want to understand that I’m a romantic, when I know I am,’ she told me.”

  • Let’s wrap with recent tributes to David Lynch. “Why did he mean so much, to so many?” asks Dennis Lim in a piece for Film Comment. Writing his 2015 book on Lynch, Lim came to think of the project “as an anatomy of a sensibility. It was a sensibility at once elusive and ubiquitous, a way of seeing and sensing that applied to entire categories of experience and yet suggested something possibly different to each of us. No wonder this loss feels so profound. As with all things Lynchian, it was personal.” Writing about Laura Dern for Metrograph Journal, Beatrice Loayza observes that in Blue Velvet (1986), she “straddles archetypal girlhood and its ruin,” and at 4Columns, Loayza writes that “Lynch’s women, for all their beauty and mystique, possess dark truths that cut through his worlds of heightened artifice like blades.” Further reflections on Lynch and his art come from Joshua Rothman (New Yorker), Will Frazier (Yale Review), and at MoMA, Francisco Valente, Sean Egan, Steve Macfarlane, and Jason Persse.

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