Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 13: Sat Jan 13

 Looking for Mr Goodbar (Brooks, 1977): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 5.45pm

 
This 35mm presentation is part of the 'Scala: Sex, drugs and rock and roll cinema' season at BFI Southbank. Tonight's screening is introduced by season curator Jane Giles. The movie also screens on January 22nd. Full details here.

Peter Bradshaw wrote about the film in an article he wrote for the Guardian to coincide with the release of Gaspar Noe's film Love. Here is an extract:
Diane Keaton plays a teacher: here, specifically a teacher of hearing-impaired children, a touch that accentuates her utterly respectable, in fact, laudable life. She gets involved in casual sex with men she meets in seedy bars. It ends in shocking violence. It is as if female sexuality is always a natural fit for the erotic thriller or crime thriller genre, and undoubtedly, Goodbar pathologises female sexuality to some extent, indicating that for a woman to have an interest in recreational sex is symptomatic of damage, and essentially tragic in origin and destiny. The film has been occasionally reviled and dismissed, but is arguably ripe for rediscovery as a confrontational exploitation classic from the Martin Scorsese/Paul Schrader 70s. It is not available on DVD. 

Here (and above) are the opening credits.

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