In Contention

Tag: Martha Marcy May Marlene

  • ‘Martha Marcy,’ my, my, my

    After the film caused a major splash at Sundance in January and continued the discussion at Cannes in May, it’s safe to say I’ve been champing at the bit to see what Sean Durkin’s “Martha Marcy May Marlene” had in store. I expected an above average indie experience with highlights of talent to likely be scattered across projects in the future, sure. But I didn’t expect such a complete, layered, visionary construction.

    I share Guy’s feelings out of Cannes pretty much word for word. It’s an elegantly structured film that not only finds a unique way of telling backstory but bleeds it into the present in such a way as to put the viewer right in the paranoid perspective of the troubled Martha (Elizabeth Olsen). And it’s not just writerly chops on display from the first-time feature filmmaker. Durkin weaves this menagerie of slow-boiling intrigue while getting quality work out of his actors.

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  • On the origins of ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’

    Sean Durkin’s stunning debut feature “Martha Marcy May Marlene” has been running a steady marathon in terms of buzz-building ahead of its late-October release: first came breathless critical plaudits and the Best Director prize at Sundance in January, while a well-received appearance in the Un Certain Regard strand at Cannes kept things humming through the summer lull.

    Expect the acclaim to continue through the fall festival run: it’s booked for Toronto, though as Kris speculated last week, it’ll probably pop up in Telluride beforehand. (Finally, I’d count on a London Film Festival date in October.)

    The buzz isn’t there by sheer good fortune: as I wrote in my Cannes review, Durkin’s film is a startlingly assured and unsettling fusion of meticulous character study and full-throttle psychodrama, centered on a sharply etched breakout performance by Elizabeth Olsen that handily defies any pundits to define the young actress by her more famous twin sisters.

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  • Telluride guessing game

    (UPDATED: 8/29)

    Now that the Toronto and Venice line-ups have been unveiled (though we have a few more Toronto announcements to come), I figured I’d take a few stabs at sussing out the Telluride crop this year. I haven’t been a good journalist and called around or anything. Just spinning my wheels.

    One studio that always has a big presence at Telluride is Sony Pictures Classics, and this year, honchos Michael Barker and Tom Bernard have a full plate once again. Of that stable, David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method” is hitting both Venice and Toronto. It’s very possible, then, that it will kick things off in the Rockies.

    Roman Polanski’s “Carnage,” meanwhile, was announced as a Venice play this morning. It would be easy enough for the team to bring the film there and not worry about getting the filmmaker in town (seeing as he can’t legally step foot in the country), saving his press run for Venice. (7/28 UPDATE: The film has been set for New York fest, so it seems unlikely we’ll see it in Telluride.)

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  • POST-CANNES: “Martha Marcy May Marlene” (****)

    [Apologies for leaving my Cannes coverage in limbo as I unwound in Paris before returning to London housekeeping. A handful of films from my festival viewing roster are still owed some discussion in grouped capsule form, and I’ll get to those this weekend — hey, the films aren’t going anywhere, so why stick to the parameters of the festival diary? I’ll begin, however, with the last of my individual reviews from this year’s Cannes, and the last of my three four-star finds of the fest.]

    Elizabeth Olsen’s face is an ellipsis, a perturbingly lovely marker of concerns unspoken and unresolved, in writer-director Sean Durkin’s “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” a sharp blackberry winter of a debut feature that perhaps invites a re-evaluation of how we define the modern horror film. Little happens in the course of Durkin’s curtly time-shifting narrative that is definably horrific, yet the constricting rhythms of the editing combine with the between-the-lines anxiousness of Olsen’s performance to instil a kind of objectless dread in the audience, playing their preconceptions of the film’s sensationalistic subject matter against its own craftier revelations. Watching it, in short, feels like being slowly strangled from behind.

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  • What will be this year’s Sundance story?

    I must confess, this year’s Sundance Film Festival kind of passed me by. Admittedly, I’ve been distracted by a busy couple of weeks on the awards circuit, but the Sundance coverage I did follow suggested a high-quality if nonetheless rather quiet festival, one with fewer noisy breakout films than usual.

    In the last few years, it’s been worth keeping an eye (or an ear, rather) on the Sundance buzz, as the festival has birthed a number of future critical hits, and even awards-season success stories: recent Best Picture nominees “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Precious,” “An Education” and now “The Kids Are All Right” and “Winter’s Bone” all premiered there, as did “Frozen River,” “Blue Valentine” and a plethora of Oscar-nominated documentaries. (No fewer than four of this year’s Best Documentary Feature nominees are Sundance babies.)

    So it’s easy to assume at least one film from this year’s Sundance crop is something we’ll still be talking about a year from now — but where the crossover potential for a film like “The Kids Are All Right,” or a performance like Jennifer Lawrence’s, was immediately evident, this year’s potential Sundance “stories” don’t seem quite as obvious.

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