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In Fabric Director: Peter Strickland Talent: Fatm
a Mohamed, Marianne Jean-Baptise, Leo Bill, Hayley Squires Released: 28 June Varda by Agnès Director: Agnès Varda Released: 19 July Peter Strickland is arguably the most fascinating living English director, a confabulist whose films are fetish objects as much as works of conventional storytelling. Here, he follows his exquisite 2014 erotic melodrama The Duke of Burgundy with something equally rarefied, but slightly more diffuse. In Fabric follows the passage of a haunted dress, which we first encounter in a bizarre department store staffed by Strickland regular Fatma Mohamed. The dress is purchased by Sheila (Jean-Baptiste), a bank teller making a cautious return to the dating pool. Unfortunately for Sheila, all manner of malfeasance follows the dress, and she finds her life, her sanity, and her washing machine all swiftly in disarray. The first half of In Fabric is as enjoyable as Strickland has ever been – swapping the Giallo and ‘Eurotica’ vocabulary of its precursors for a reworking of tropes from 1970s British studio Amicus Films, whose flair for the gimmicky and the ghoulish here acquires the patina of honestto-goodness art. Jean-Baptiste is also on top form – her empathetic performance enriching Strickland’s arcane world with flesh-and-blood humanity, much as Sidse Babett Knudsen’s did in The Duke of Burgundy. Things begin to unravel somewhat, however, in the more broadly comic second half, as the dress passes to new owners Reg and Babs (Bill and Squires). At times, this section could even be mistaken for the work of Ben Wheatley (who receives an executive producer credit), making it the first time a Strickland opus has resembled anybody’s filmmaking but his own. Still, In Fabric is largely a delight, and Strickland’s characteristic warping and looping reasserts itself for a haunting final passage that hints at all kinds of subterranean psychological and sociological interpretations. Even when his hold loosens, he remains the master of his own mysteriously, magnificently onanistic domain. DT Agnès Varda died, aged 90, on March 29 this year. It is truly fitting that her swansong is her reflections on her remarkable career. The Belgian-born French film director, photographer and artist is regarded as central to the development of the widely influential French New Wave film movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Never eschewing the experimental, Varda also broke boundaries with her documentary realism and unorthodox approach to social commentary. Varda by Agnès are her reflections, on her style and choices, played out against a number of lectures, reconstructions combined with clips from her films and superimpositions of herself back into the original frames. Whether she is looking at the daily lives of Parisians in Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), looking at the Black Panthers through her 16mm in ’68 or reconstructing the life of her late husband Jacques Demy in Jacquot de Nantes (1991), Varda is always surprising and upending convention. Indeed, it was late in life when Varda started earning her due credits reaping an honorary Oscar in 2017, working with street artist JR on a crowd-funded documentary Faces Places and being commissioned by the Liverpool Biennal to create a three-channel video installation combining extracts from three of Varda’s films. She also graced the cover of The Gentlewoman, in their 2018 Autumn/Winter issue, with her signature bowl-cut, dip-dyed hair. “Three words are important to me: inspiration, creation and sharing. Inspiration is why you make a film. The motivations, ideas, circumstances and happenstance that ignite your desire to make a film. Creation is how you make the film. With what means, what structure? Alone or not alone? In colour or not? Creation is work. The third word is sharing. You don’t make films to watch them alone. You make them to share them.” Essential for any cinephile. MMD 77