This month you are all officially invited to the prom. The second in our series of film screenings and club nights, Party at the Pictures, will be a belter: John Hughes’ 80s classic Pretty in Pink, followed by a live DJ set.
In a Guardian piece entitled “Why I’d Like to Be… Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink”, Hadley Freeman writes that Ringwald’s character Andie is “one of the best young female characters in cinema.” Hughes created for his muse (Ringwald starred in two other John Hughes movies, Sixteen Candles and the Breakfast Club) a complex, relatable and flawed character: one that Freeman and teenage girls like her could immediately recognise themselves in.
David O Russell has saved his best female characters in recent times for his own muse, Jennifer Lawrence, who has been Oscar nominated for her portrayal of Joy Mangano: a struggling single mother-turned-shopping channel sensation and inventor of the self-wringing mop. In Joy, O Russell and co-screenwriter Annie Mumolo have created a dreamy slice of surrealism that nonetheless deals with the cut-throat world of American business in which Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper recreate the same chemistry we saw between them in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle.
As another pair of frequent collaborators, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have been praised for their crackling chemistry in Sisters. The Saturday Night Live stars reunite as middle-aged siblings reluctant to let go of the childhood home their parents plan to sell. Fans of Fey’s Golden Globe-winning 30 Rock or Poehler’s Parks and Recreation won’t be disappointed by this comedy which deals with the pathos and humour that comes with shedding our adolescent selves- including, in the sisters’ case, their taste in clothing: “We need a little less Forever 21 and a little more Suddenly 42.”
A close female relationship is explored again in The Danish Girl, the latest film from The King’s Speech director Tom Hooper. Centring around the shared life of the film’s central characters, Einar (played by The Theory of Everything’s Eddie Redmayne) and Gerda Wegener, Lucinda Coxon’s screenplay examines the mechanisms of the couple’s marriage: the happiness of their life together, the sources of frustration and support that they function as for each other’s careers as artists, and Gerda’s encouragement of Einar’s timid first steps towards a trans lifestyle. Of course, these are steps that may inevitably lead Einer away from Gerda, a fact that adds poignancy to Gerda’s support of her journey.
In The Assassin, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s critically-acclaimed wuxia tale, a young woman must return to the man she left behind long ago, only to kill him. Nie Yinniang has been trained by a nun from a young age to assassinate corrupt officials. Having failed to kill one such official, moved by the presence of his young son, Yinniang is given the mission of killing her former betrothed (and, incidentally, cousin) as a punishment and a method of eradicating any lingering compassion in her hardened assassin’s heart. The Assassin was selected by Sight and Sound as the best film of 2015, due largely to the ‘sheer beauty’ of its scenery, which captivated audiences in Cannes, where Hsiao-hsien picked up the Best Director award.
Like The Assassin’s titular killer, Hugh Glass is on a murderous quest in Birdman director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant. Glass’ mission is fuelled by a fanatical desire for revenge against the two men who left him to die following a brutal bear attack in the forests of 19th century Wyoming. Leonardo DiCaprio has been tipped to finally win an Oscar for his portrayal of the mountain man whose true story is being told in this breathtaking epic.
From the punishing terrain of the icy North American wilderness through which Glass struggles, to the bleak landscapes of a secluded Icelandic valley in writer-director Grímur Hákonarson’s Rams. Similar in tone and subject matter to 2013’s surprise hit Of Horses and Men, this darkly comic drama follows two neighbouring sheep farmers and brothers who haven’t spoken in over forty years. As a fatal degenerative disease threatens their flocks, they are forced to communicate at last. The hardship and plainness of the brothers’ lives, and their dedication to their livestock, is explored in this naturalistic portrayal of farming life.