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Lucile Hadžihalilovi ’s much-anticipated sopho- more film, Évolution, follows Nic (Max Brebant),

a prepubescent boy living a simple shoreside life in a mysterious, austere village populated by uniform mother-son pairings. In this seemingly idyllic setting, Nic can’t help but indulge his existential curiosity, despite his mother’s warnings to conform. During last year’s London Film Festival, we met with

Tales from the Deep INTERVIEW: Rachel Bowles

this ingenious director to discuss Évolution’s strange Jungian nightmare.

Despite the critical and commercial success of her 2004 debut, Innocence, Hadžihalilovi explains that she found the pre-production of Évolution to be an arduous process. “It was very difficult to get finance,” she re-calls, “so that was the reason for this long production time.” The film was ten years in the making.

One of her biggest hurdles was simply getting across to the money people what the project was. “All the time it was, ‘we don’t get it.’ Even if we worked a lot on the script to try to make it more understandable, more acceptable, and in narrative terms, to explain more, it was still very hard. Sometimes the film

seemed impossible to make.”Hadžihalilovi prevailed, and getting the film out

in the world is something that clearly excites her. “I’m so surprised that people react so well to the film – people seem to understand it and don’t find it so bizarre!” She’s particularly pleased at how well Évolu-

tion seems to have gone down with UK audiences. “It is a very big pleasure and honour,” she says of the response at London Film Festival. “A lot of [non-industry] people go to see the films here, so it is not like it’s separate from its intended audience. That’s important to me.”

In fact, Hadžihalilovi reckons the film might be even more resonant with audiences in the UK than in

THE CINESKINNYN0 2 | 20 – 22 FEBTHESKINNY.CO.UK / CINESKINNY

There’s something lurking in the depths in Évolution. Director Lucile Hadžihalilović shines a light on its mysteries

Sat 20 Feb, GFT, 8.15pm | Sun 21 Feb, GFT, 11am

continues…

her home nation. “I think that the people here could poten- tially understand more of the film than the French,” she suggests. “I think metaphorical and imaginary worlds are perhaps not something easily intelligible to a French audience – especially when the imaginary world comes from your own country. When you’re from outside, maybe it is more exotic and therefore acceptable. I think that [in the UK] people, because of its literature or cinema, can be more familiar with my kind of approach. And also the usage of genre elements aren’t so separate from mainstream and auteur cinema in the UK – like Under the Skin, where Jon[athan Glazier] did something different. I think people will be more able to, let’s say, ‘get’ Évolution here.”

Hadžihalilovi sees the film as a fairy tale: “it’s a story about children and imagination and growing up.” This des- cription could also fit Innocence, but with girls swapped for boys and Évolution’s sci-fi swapped for the gothic. The new film’s strain of body horror brings to mind an ethereal HP Lovecraft mixed with David Cronenberg; intangible yet gro- tesque, all tentacles and anxiety surrounding biological heritage and sexual reproduction.

“ It’s a story about imagi-nation and growing up” Lucile Hadžihalilović

The horrors of female biology are displaced onto boys in Évolution – why the switch? “Of course the fears at the heart of the film are based on my own fears as a child,” Hadžihalilovi admits. “But it wouldn’t have been as interesting to have a little girl go through these fears. As a boy, it is even scarier to have this idea of burying a live creature in your body, so, of course, the horror is stronger, more nightmarish.”

In this uncanny, intensely grotesque way, Évolution explores and interrogates the expectations that society has for both boys and girls. “In Évolution, it is the reverse because it is the boy who does what girls are supposed to do,” explains

Hadžihalilovi , “so it was a play with those embodied gender roles, which I think is interesting. Women are the threat for once! They are the strong and active ones, while the boys are the passive element. It was something that I liked to play with.”

Perhaps for this reason, Hadžihalilovi chose unknown 13-year-old Brebant to play Nic. “He has an emotive quality,” she says, “yet we tried to have him act with a neutral expres- sion, so that it’s not like you are looking at him, but more like you are looking through him; he’s the vehicle through whom you can enter into the story, into the space.”

Creating this isolated, coastal communal “space” is central to Évolution’s storytelling. Filmed in Lanzarote, the littoral village seems to be on the cusp of the tropics, yet cool breezes and stark interiors point to an uncanny horror just under the surface of this paradise. Just as Nic is drawn over and over again into the glistening azure waters, to dive for another glimpse of a boy’s rotten corpse that he finds under a beautiful blood red starfish, the viewer wants to uncover the rotting, grotesque secrets behind the breathtaking beauty of Évolution’s immersive, sensual world. Hadžihalilovi stresses the cen-trality of her soundscape to this.

“It is a very important element in the film,” she says. “We were unable to use natural sounds from the production, so the sound editor, Laura Díez Mora, really worked hard recreating the waves to give them this quality of strength, and to have them sound interesting and not always the same. We had the sounds of the wind and the little elements, because I thought that the sounds should belong to this place too, it shouldn’t be from something outside. We want to give a feeling of birth, interiority, an inner feeling, a kind of dreamy mood, something oneiric but at the same time a kind of suspense or pressure, and it shouldn’t be through effects.”

Hadžihalilovi , wanting to sustain a suspenseful tone throughout, found that traditional horror scores did not work, and instead decided to use the Ondes Martenot, an obscure electronic instrument from the 1920s, known for its eerie sound. “It is very strange but also familiar, and it gives a sense of melancholy.”

Hadžihalilovi nicknames Évolution’s uncanny coastline “Martenot waters”. We strongly recommend you dive in.

SAT 20HIGHLIGHTS

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from MarsGFT, 11.15pmSay goodbye to David Bowie with the farewell concert in which Bowie said goodbye to his alien rocker alter ego, Ziggy Stardust.

Miles AheadGFT, 9pmDon Cheadle certainly looks the part as Miles Davis in this freeform riff on the jazz genius’s life. Cheadle also di-rects, and we hear his visuals match Davis’ music’s cool.

Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation | CCA, 3.30pmArmed with only a Betamax camera and their weekly pocket money, three 11-year-olds remake Raiders of the Lost Ark. There may be better films at GFF (including Steven Spielberg’s original), but few were made with such heart.

REVIEWS

With her cinematic swan song, legendary filmmaker Chantal Akerman gets pro- foundly personal, training her static, unblinking camera on her ailing mother, Natalia, a Polish-born Belgian and Auschwitz survivor who died in 2014. The effect is both powerful and alienating. Akerman’s obsession with lengthy shot duration leads to gradual revelation, as she lets scenes in Natalia’s flat unfold as lived, framed through narrow doorways just as in her most famous work, Jeanne

Dielman. Natalia’s kitchen even bears a striking similarity to Jeanne’s.

Akerman has insisted her mother always remained at the centre of her work, and here their relationship is characte-rised by an ineffable emotional distance and incongruity of experience. As the title implies, this home movie is not a simple playact of a family relationship – it’s more of a coming to terms with interpersonal history, and the larger cultural history that shaped it. Even as she re-appropriated the amateur film genre, Akerman remained the iconoclast par excellence, celebrating but refusing to be ‘ghettoised’ by gender, sexuality, or even from whence she came. (Michelle Devereaux)

Director: Chantal Akerman

Starring: Natalia Akerman,

Chantal Akerman

No Home Movie

Sat 20 Feb, CCA, 5.45pm

Sun 21 Feb, CCA, 1pm

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Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

“ Legendary filmmaker Chantal Akerman gets profoundly personal”

The Boy and the BeastCCA, 3,15pmWith Hayao Miyazaki now retired, who will claim his crown as the master of anime? Rising ‘toon talent Mamoru Hosoda, director of Wolf Chil-dren and this inventive buddy movie, might be that heir.

DisorderGFT, 8.30pmWe’re hearing great things about this home invasion thriller starring Diane Kruger and ubiquitous hunk Matthias Schoenaerts.

The Adventures of Robin HoodGFT, 10.30amYou’ve probably seen it a dozen times on wet weekend telly, but don’t miss this chance to experience Errol Flynn swashing his buckle on the big screen. Costner and Crowe, hang your heads in shame.

ONLINE REVIEWS

Évolution

Arabian Nights

Road to Civil War: Marvel Renaissance

Brand New Testament

Head to theskinny.co.uk/cineskinny for more reviews, including...

Gabriel Lichtman’s whimsical pseudo-detective tale revolves around young lawyer Lucas’s attempts to imitate the sleuthing skills of his treasured detective novels after a first date ends in him awa- kening to discover that the beautiful woman who chanced into his life the day before has robbed him blind.

The film has charm and the cast is rounded out with lively characters – like The Pelican, an aspiring actor happy to

lend his overacting skills to any lawyer in need of a pretend witness – but Lichtman never really does enough with his meta-detective premise. The mystery arises, a few throwaway references to Agatha Christie are made and then it’s all solved and resolved in an oddly spite-ful final set piece.

It’s far from ‘my life savings have been stolen!’ bad – actually, it’s a perfectly en- joyable flick – but Lucas’s disappointment when he wakes up to find that the night that showed such promise has not panned out at all as he would have liked is just a little too relatable when the end credits roll. (Ross McIndoe)

Memories can be distorted to reframe the past in a more favourable light, but what happens when the truth becomes unavoidable? Joachim Trier’s Louder than Bombs opens with the birth of Jonah’s son, but is far more concerned with death. Jonah (Eisenberg) is the son of famed war photographer Isabelle Reed (Huppert), who died two years ago in a car crash. His brother Conrad (Druid), only 12 at the time, doesn’t know her death was a suicide. It’s a secret that

threatens to rupture the family’s delicate dynamic once revealed in a forthcoming New York Times article.

Perceiving memory as something malleable, Trier’s delicate use of flash-backs and sound allows the narrative to inch along like a cortège, beautifully conceptualising how the mind seeks to reorganise the entropy of memories into a satisfying narrative. As the membrane between reality and fabrication becomes perilously thin, Isabelle’s aura adopts greater significance for each family member, with Louder than Bombs effort- lessly evolving into an abstract, yet emotionally intelligent ghost story. (Patrick Gamble)

Director: Joachim Trier

Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Gabriel Byrne,

Isabelle Huppert, Devin Druid, Rachel

Brosnahan, Ruby Jerins, Megan Ketch

Louder Than Bombs

Sun 21 Feb, GFT, 5.35pm

Mon 22 Feb, GFT, 3.30pm

Sun 21 Feb, CCA, 9pm

Mon 22 Feb, CCA, 1.30pm

Director: Gabiel Lichtman

Starring: Javier Drolas, Ines Palombo,

Martin Slipak

How to Win Enemies

The Boy and the Beast

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“ An abstract, yet emotionally intelligent ghost story”

SUN 21HIGHLIGHTS

“ The film has charm and the cast is rounded out with lively characters”

The Pearl ButtonCCA, 8.45pmGreat Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán (Nostalgia for the Light) investigates the significance of water in his nation’s tragic history.

Arabian NightsGFT, 6.15pmMiguel Gomes’ last film was the spellbinding Tabu, and word is he works similar magic with this sly, three-part remix of Scheherezade’s classic fairy tales. Don’t miss part one.

NetworkBBC Scotland, 7pmThe idea of watching Sidney Lumet’s merciless media satire inside the bowels of Scotland’s home of TV news is too delightful to pass up. Here’s hoping it doesn’t inspire Reporting Scotland’s Sally Magnusson to lose her shit on air

GFF Box Office

Order tickets from the box office at

www.glasgowfilm.org/festival

or call: 0141 332 6535

or visit: Glasgow Film Theatre

12 Rose Street, Glasgow, G3 6RB

info@glasgowfilmfestival.org.uk

Forgotten Poet INTERVIEW: Jamie Dunn

How do giants of cinema fall through the cracks of critical opinion? It’s a question you’ll be asking your-

self if you make it along to Glasgow Film Festival’s screen-ings showcasing the work by forgotten French filmmaker Julien Duvivier. Glasgow Film Festival co-director Allan Hunter, who programmed the Discovering Duvivier strand, points to, in this case, the rise of the nouvelle vague in the late 1950s, and with it, a sweeping aside of Duvivier’s generation.

“In the fizz and energy of the first films from Godard and Truffaut, Duvivier was very much considered part of the plodding old-guard of French cinema whose films were staid and unadventurous,” explains Hunter.

At least one of the Cahiers du Cinéma crew – Claude Chabrol – later recanted on that dismissal, calling Duvivier “an auteur who didn’t declare himself.” And in general there are signs that his reputation is on the rise, with recent res- torations and the release of a Criterion boxset in the US last year. “Critic Ginette Vincendeau recently called Duvivier ‘one of the missing pieces in the great mosaic of French 1930s cinema,’” notes Hunter. “I think we are really only just getting the chance to see how good he was.”

Duvivier did have one bona fide hit that’s stayed in cir- culation: the energetic crime caper Pépé le Moko, which starred Jean Gabin as a gangster hiding out in the colourful casbahs of Algiers; it’s one of the films that helped define the French star’s earthy persona across the world. What else can we expect to find while unearthing his work?

“One of the things about Duvivier is just how versatile he was,” says Hunter. “As well as being a key pillar of the poetic realist movement, along with the likes of Marcel Carne and Jacques Feyder, he could also turn his hand to thrillers, social dramas, ensemble pieces. His best films are lyrical and bittersweet with a rueful understanding of human foibles.

There is a sparkle in the dialogue, a graceful fluidity in the camera movement but frequently an under-lying sense of melancholy.”

The three films showing in the Discovering Duvivier strand ooze these qualities. La belle équipe (1936), which screened at the festival on Thursday, follows five factory workers who win the lottery and decide to invest in a cafe. Hunter says the “sense of optimism in their endeavour and the fragility of the camaraderie is very much seen as a reflection of the ‘Front Populaire’ era.”

La fin du jour (1939), meanwhile, is set in a retirement home for actors. Hunter suggests that “it might even have been an influence on Dustin Hoffman’s Quartet,” but don’t hold that against Duvivier. Finally there’s Panique (1946), a tense adaptation of a George Simenon novel. “Its pessimistic view of human nature and the dangers of mob rule make it seem very contemporary,” notes Hunter.

“ I think we are really only just getting the chance to see how good he was”

Duvivier’s clout with future filmmakers wasn’t too shabby either. “Ingmar Bergman cited Duvivier as one of the reasons he became a filmmaker,” Hunter tells us. “So, in that respect he was an influential figure on subsequent generations.”

We also ask Hunter if the Frenchman’s influence can be seen in any more contemporary artists, and he kindly sticks his neck out: “I’m not sure if anyone else would agree, but I can see echoes of Duvivier in, say, the films of Sofia Coppola or even Charlie Kaufman, which suggests some kind of link to our closing gala of Anomalisa.”

We’ll leave the last word to Duvivier’s most celebrated peer, Jean Renoir, who said: “If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to cinema, I would place a statue of Duvivier above the entrance.” Entering the GFT, the only effigy you’ll find is of Mr Cosmo, but on its screens you’ve two more chances to sample some of Duvivier’s sparkling and poetic cinema. Don’t miss them.

Julien Duvivier was a celebrated auteur in his day, but the Frenchman’s work and reputation has slipped from our view. Glasgow Film Festival’s mini-retrospective hopes to give a boost to this filmmaker ripe for rediscovery

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La fin du jour: Sun 21 Feb, GFT, 6pm | Panique: Tue 23 Feb, GFT, 6.30pm

The Pearl Button

MON 22HIGHLIGHTS

Produced by The Skinny magazine in association with the Glasgow Film Festival:

Editor-in-Chief Rosamund West

Editor Jamie Dunn

Subeditor Will Fitzpatrick

Lead Designer Sigrid Schmeisser

Picture Editor Sarah Donley

Digital Editor Peter Simpson

Comm. Director Nicola Taylor

Sales George Sully

Claire Collins

Illustration Elena Boils

La fin du jourPanique