Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 113: Thu Apr 23

Lianna (Sayles, 1983): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.15pm

This is a 35mm screening from Lost Reels. The presentation will include an online Q&A discussion with filmmaking legend John Sayles and his producer and partner Maggie Renzi.

Time Out review:
John Sayles is spokesman for his generation, the babies of the post-war boom who made love and fought their wars within themselves. Their growing pains came late: Lianna (Linda Griffiths) is thirty, married and the mother of two, when she falls in love with Ruth (Jane Hallaren), her night-school teacher. Sayles sympathetically maps the hurricane-like effects of this on Lianna's life - thrown out by her philandering husband, cold-shouldered by her straight friends, stormy scenes with her lover - his sparkling dialogue illuminating every aspect of Lianna's sexuality with a zeal that is almost proselytising. The love scenes are infused with a tender erotic glow that deepens the shadows around the titillation of Personal Best, and the comedy in Lianna's post-coital glee as she cruises other women and announces herself as gay to people in launderettes is irresistible. A gem, rough-hewn by Sayles and polished to perfection in peerless performances.

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 112: Wed Apr 22

Bad Timing (Roeg, 1980): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6pm

This film is part of the intriguing 'Cinema and Sound' programme curated by Mark Jenkin. Here are the full details of the season and here is the directo's introduction to the movie:
'When it comes to the creative use of sound, I could have picked any Nicholas Roeg movie as a key influence. Bad Timing is the film that most clearly, simply and effectively illustrates the potential of sound to confound the expectations of the viewer, and to open up the creative potential of the form in the starkest way.'

As with a number of movies by director Nicolas Roeg the producers did not know or, possibly, like what they had on their hands here and this was poorly distributed at the time.

It isn't surprising the film suffered indifferent attention from the studio and puzzlement from the critics on release as this is a disturbing and complicated work. Labyrinthine plotting; cross-cutting; masculinity crisis and dazzling camerawork - all the touches associated with Roeg are here. If you like the Roeg oeuvre you are in for a treat. The ending stayed with me for quite some time. Here's an essay by the excellent Richard Combs on the movie.

Time Out review:
One of Nicolas Roeg's most complex and elusive movies, building a thousand-piece jigsaw from its apparently simple story of a consuming passion between two Americans in Vienna. Seen in flashback through the prism of the girl's attempted suicide, their affair expands into a labyrinthine enquiry on memory and guilt as Theresa Russell's cold psychoanalyst lover (Art Garfunkel) himself falls victim to the cooler and crueller investigations of the detective assigned to her case (Harvey Keitel in visionary form as the policeman turned father-confessor). But where Don't Look Now sustained its Gothic intensity with human intimacy, this film seems a case-example of how more could have been achieved with less editing, less ingenuity, less even of the bravura intelligence with which Roeg at one point matches Freud with Stalin as guilt-ridden spymasters.
Don Macpherson

Here (and above) is the trailer.