Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 174: Mon Jul 2

Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt, 2008): Lexi Cinema, 6.30pm


Lexi Cinema introduction to this 'London Film School season' screening:
Welcome to your neighbourhood film school, a new series of hosted screenings exploring film history and introducing current debates in cinema culture.  Fill in the gaps in your film knowledge and join the conversation.  London has one of the most exciting and diverse cinema scenes in the world, and we welcome the writers, critics, curators and cultural commentators of the capital to NW10. Tonight's screening is introduced by Little White Lies magazine editor, David Jenkins.


Time Out review:
‘If a person can’t afford dog food, then they shouldn’t have a dog,’ snaps a preppy store clerk to Wendy (
Michelle Williams) after catching her stealing food for her beloved yellow-gold retriever, Lucy. The clerk’s sentiment captures the debate at the heart of this brilliant, desperately sad Steinbeckian fable from American director Kelly Reichardt. It’s Reichardt’s third full-length feature (‘Old Joy’ was in cinemas last year), but only her first masterpiece. The film it most resembles is De Sica’s neo-realist landmark, ‘Umberto D’ (without the craven sentimentality and doggie anthropomorphism), but ‘Wendy and Lucy’ also contains thematic overlaps with many other great movies, such as the starkness and instability of communal life in Altman’s ‘McCabe and Mrs Miller’, the muted despair in the Dardennes’s ‘Rosetta’ and the austere, heart-wrenching poetry of Kiarostami’s ‘Where Is the Friend’s House?’. But central to it all is Michelle Williams’s beautifully restrained and humane performance (her best by some stretch) which embodies the pent-up frustrations, doubts, fears and dilemmas that this lonely soul has been burdened with. Her nuanced and naturalistic delivery wrings poignant truth from the realities of Wendy’s struggle for perseverance and dignity, where every decision is crucial, and every futile cry of ‘Lucy!’ stabs directly at the heart. It’s what makes this film the small miracle that it is.

David Jenkins

You can read the full review here.

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

 

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