We Have to Talk: MILFs on the Southbank
Priscilla, Queens and the Desperate.
Welcome to We Have to Talk, a fortnightly newsletter in which Sam and George exchange their most pressing and ridiculous reflections on pop culture. Subscribe to get a hot mess of tepid takes directly into your inbox, twice a month.
This week the boys head to the London Film Festival where they are pursued by sinister MILFs, encounter a vacuum-sealed Paul Mescal, and receive a firm PSA on how not to have sex.
G: Hey, Sam - happy London Film Festival! We’ve both been dragging our corpses back and forth between central cinemas over the past week to catch some of the year’s best movies, with a bunch of auteurs back on the Southbank this year, including Sofia Coppola, Todd Haynes, Martin Scorsese, David Fincher and Richard Linklater. If you shut your eyes and read that list aloud, you could almost trick yourself into thinking it’s 2003 - you’re at your local HMV (or Video-Ezy, for the Kiwis), on your third sugar high of the day, trying to pick the right film to nurture the budding cinephile within you. In both timelines, you must resist the pull of the newest Saw.
Let’s do a little round-up of what we’ve seen, but I want you to go first, Sam - I have to confess I’ve only seen three films so far, all of which have been quite mid, and I suspect you’re having better luck. Is the now-flowered cinephile within you being fed, or is she wilting away?
S - Hello from a wilting flower, George. Due to day-job related stress and a general feeling of malaise, I’ve taken a more subdued approach to LFF this year with only six films under my belt. I have to agree with you; I had the highest of hopes but it has ended up pretty mid. Or maybe I’ve just been hungover.
One constant of my festival experience has been the presence of the Sinister MILF; between Haynes’ May December, and Breillat’s Last Summer I spent my first weekend at LFF pursued by randy older women throwing caution to the wind to pounce on their young prey. The two films make an interesting double bill – both are interested in how performing victimhood is a means to assuage guilt and exert influence – though Last Summer is formally straightforward where the slippery May December looks different however you hold it to the light. They had me wondering, in a post-Me-Too moment, are predatory women the easiest vessels through which to grapple with questions about sex and power? But where May December is ambiguous about its central couple’s dynamic, Last Summer takes the frenchest possible route by being incredibly randy for its 17 year old star, who, strangely, is the spitting image of Death in Venice’s one time “Most Beautiful Boy in the World,” Bjorn Adresen.
The Sinister MILF even followed me into Miyazaki’s latest, The Boy and The Heron, in which the titular boy finds out his widowed father is about to have another child with his stiff and removed Aunt, whose remoteness precipitates his quest. Heron is not quite top-flight Miyazaki, but it really comes together for a deeply moving final act, and marks a new high-water mark in technical achievement for the animator. But for all its visual flights of fantasy, the Oedipal relationship at its core was what really interested me. I now dream of Miyazaki tackling one of Mishima’s many bitchy-little-novellas about sublimated desires within splintered families. A boy can dream!
But tell me George, what have been your mid-lights so far?
G: Ah, the sinister MILFs! Your future career in film programming will be daring and boundless, Sam. There’s arguably also a sinister DILF at the festival, in Priscilla - though Elvis wasn’t actually a dad when he met her, it’s an age gap relationship all the same. I’ve still not seen it, but am I correct in thinking you loved it?
I should take a moment here to mention LFF does have some massive bangers, which I have been lucky enough to already see - namely, the outstanding debut How to Have Sex, which moved me like nothing else this year. If you can picture the centre of a triangle between Aftersun, Eighth Grade and Spring Breakers, it’s this film. I had a five-minute weep after watching it at Cannes, and haven’t stopped thinking about its haunting depiction of youth, sex and social power ever since. I’m also a major Killers of the Flower Moon, May December, and Poor Things stan.
In terms of new stuff, my favourite so far was probably The Lost Boys, a French drama about two boys falling in love in a juvenile detention centre. It’s a little slight, but does contain some quite radical ideas about what true liberation might look like for those trapped within the judicial system, and how queerness manifests in an environment sequestered away from society.
I think I speak for you as well when I say I was fairly blasé about Eileen, despite some enjoyable Carol Aird cosplaying from Anne Hathaway, but the biggest disappointment for me so far has been Foe - a strong concept executed with laughable dialogue, a confusing reveal, and, tragically, average performances from Ireland’s greenest clovers, Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal. It was a rather punishing two hours, in which my main thought was ‘Foe, no,’ and it should have been ‘Foeck yes!!’
It didn’t help that one week before, I’d seen a superior artificial intelligence film in The Creator, which I absolutely loved - forgettable narrative aside, it was a truly transporting cinematic experience. Have you seen or will you see, Sam, and what else have you got lined up?
S - Raves for The Creator are music to my ears as an OG Gareth Edwards Stan! I ended up bailing on yesterday’s rush queue for How to Have Sex as I thought I might be living the film for real (alas, best laid plans). Invoking Spring Breakers and Aftersun really has me regretting that decision.
The highlight for me has undisputedly been Glazer’s troubling Zone of Interest, seemingly a cinematic treatment of Bauman’s ‘Modernity & The Holocaust’ thesis, about how the ‘productive’, colonising, systems of modernity inevitably subjugate our humanity. I’m still chewing over the film; if my interpretation of the final sequence holds water its really SAYING SOMETHING, but I will need a second go-round before doing a deep dive.
Sadly, Priscilla was a bit of a bust, with Sofia Coppola content to play the hits in an almost beat-for-beat Marie Antoinette retread. Both Priscilla and Eileen felt a little listless, as both are stories of young woman eventually deciding to become people of action. Apologies to Jeanne Dielman, but waiting two hours for someone to act is hardly the stuff of propulsive cinematic narrative. I also felt Priscilla suffered from the productions’ proximity to the real woman; in the film she’s a perfect victim, never anything but dutiful and kind. And as May December taught us, passivity can be a route to power, and I know Coppola intimately understands how young people navigate that particular road.
Lastly, not to harp on this newsletter’s pet theme, but the film really needed a sex scene once they finally beat the stultifying, lugubrious atmosphere of their sexless marriage. Once the drought broke, I wanted to know, how did Priscilla push Elvis through his raging Madonna-Whore complex?
But I will say this; of all the sex pests knocking around at this year’s festival, Elordi’s Elvis was, to me, the finest. Any final thoughts George, or shall we draw the veil there?
G: Final note from me is a shout-out to another non-LFF film I watched last week: Of an Age, a queer coming-of-age story set in the suburbs of Melbourne, which is devastating, extraordinary and deserving of a wider audience. And though we’ve been a bit sour about LFF this year, there’s clearly still some magic in the air; only days after watching, I ran into the director Goran Stolevski at a party (he’s here with his newest film Housekeeping for Beginners, which won the Queer Lion at Venice). Like the massive loser I am and always will be, I accosted him at the party to share how much I loved Of an Age, and he honestly just seemed grateful someone had seen it - which is why I always endeavour to tell people when I love their work. That is a hint, readers, our DMs are open.
Until next time, Sam. I pray for better films in our future!
From the Drafts:
It was a good performance, but no one named Cailee Spaeny has any business winning an Oscar. Who’s next? Pepe Le Pew? (S)
Speaking of Kale in Spain: I may be the only person alive who saw her “breakout” performance in Pacific Rim: Uprising, which I was forced to watch before interviewing Hollywood’s dullest nepo baby, Scott Eastwood. Vibes were off in 2018. (G)
While having the pleasure of sitting next to a charming French director and their production partner at a recent screening, I couldn’t help but wonder, are anti-bed bug measures in place at the BFI? (S)
Poetic Netflix behaviour I recently witnessed on a plane: a woman watching Extraction 2 on her phone, but once she hit the much-publicised one-shot prison escape scene, she smashed the 10-second skip button like her life depended on it and fast-forwarded the whole thing. (G)
Spotted: Both Phoebe and Isobel Waller-Bridge at Sunday night’s screening of Eileen at Curzon Mayfair, not sitting together. Do I smell a sisterly feud? Did Isobel fall on Donald Glover’s side of that “different creative vision”? (G)
The Week that Was:
Sam is watching: I think this has been adequately covered.
George is reading: Trash! I needed a break from stuffy literary fiction, so I just smashed through Better the Blood by Michael Bennett, a crime novel that tackles colonisation in New Zealand, and Release, a gay YA from Patrick Ness. Let’s just say neither are winning Pulitzers.
Sam is listening to: The new Sufjan Stevens album, the new Mykki Blanco album, and shortly, the new Troye Sivan album. Three stages of gay life.
George went and saw: Democracy in action, voting in the New Zealand general election at the high commission off Trafalgar Square last week. I forgot how much I loved officious Kiwi women with clipboards named Sue.