BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

‘Excuse me, can you go back the same way?’ The taxi turns around. This is the first manoeuvre in a film whose English title anticipates its narrative twists. Except this isn’t the same way, this is...

February 11, 2022 | NEW RELEASES

Mustang

Deniz Gamze Ergüven on ‘Mustang’ Five years ago you were at the Cinéfondation workshop for young filmmakers at Cannes, struggling to develop Kings, a script about the Los Angeles riots. Then your c...

February 11, 2022 | SEEN & HEARD

Desert Hearts

Although it has become a cult classic due to its explicit lesbian sex, Desert Hearts is a wonderfully well-made film with a host of appealing attributes. Steeped in moody, classic country and weste...

February 11, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Victim

John Coldstream on ‘Victim’ Artistic endeavour too often attracts exaggerated claims. In my research, I attempted to identify films that had genuinely made an impact not merely on the minds of tho...

February 10, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Rope

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. At the very end of Truffaut’s interview book, Hitchcock comes up with a ‘dream’ project: 24 hours in the life of a city. ‘It starts ...

February 10, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Philosophical Screens
Jules et Jim

François Truffaut’s lyrical and melancholic journey through the lives of the participants in a love triangle makes for one of his most adored films; Jules et Jim offers a profound and complicated p...

February 10, 2022 | FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT
FOR THE LOVE OF FILMS

Fish Tank

Andrea Arnold on ‘Fish Tank’ ‘The thing about the film industry is that it’s incredibly middle-class, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘All the people who look at it and study it and talk about it – write abou...

February 10, 2022 | SEEN & HEARD

The Story of Adele H.

François Truffaut on ‘The Story of Adele H.’ It was in 1969 that I first felt I wanted to make a film whose heroine would be Adèle Hugo. I had just read in the collection ‘Bibliothèque Introuvable’...

February 9, 2022 | FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT
FOR THE LOVE OF FILMS

Go Fish

This is a fish story about not the one that got away, but the one that got caught and won the trophy. Caught big time, in other words. But it’s also a cautionary tale, one about marketing, identity...

February 9, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Brokeback Mountain

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The prose style of Annie Proulx’s 1997 story ‘Brokeback Mountain’, first published in the New Yorker, is doggedly brisk. The moment ...

February 9, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

The Woman Next Door

Mike Figgis on ‘The Woman Next Door’ The following scene takes place 19 minutes and 45 seconds into François Truffaut’s 1981 film, The Woman Next Door: Bernard (Gérard Depardieu) is in a supermar...

February 8, 2022 | FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT
FOR THE LOVE OF FILMS

My Own Private Idaho

At the opening of Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, we look down a very long stretch of two-lane highway, bisecting the desert scrubland, curving upwards as it disappears into the distant mounta...

February 8, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Happy Together

+ intro by Yi Wang, Queer East (on Tuesday 8 February only) A trip to Buenos Aires reveals the dark side of love as a gay couple (Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung) struggle with jealousy, co-dependenc...

February 8, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

The Watermelon Woman

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Twenty-five years after Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, the first US feature directed by an ‘out’ Black lesbian, you can count ...

February 7, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

La Peau douce

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. Truffaut’s La Peau douce was greeted with a certain coolness at Cannes. Was it really understood? The film is about an editor of a ...

February 6, 2022 | FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT
FOR THE LOVE OF FILMS

Mississippi Mermaid

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. A contemporary review Oddly enough, after Moreau’s obsessive hunt in La Mariée était en noir, and before the more jocular manipulati...

February 6, 2022 | FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT
FOR THE LOVE OF FILMS

Maurice

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. A contemporary review After the near-perfection of A Room with a View, which transformed an only intermittently entertaining piece o...

February 6, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Rent

After seeing Rent soon after it opened on Broadway, director Chris Columbus (Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) was so inspired, he immediately corralled his 1492...

February 5, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Finally Sunday!

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. It is in the nature of wheels to turn full circle. Two years after attacking the Cannes jury as ‘a pack of incompetents who doze thr...

February 5, 2022 | FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT
FOR THE LOVE OF FILMS

Fahrenheit 451

Nicolas Roeg on Fahrenheit 451 I’ve always felt that, although Truffaut was greatly revered and admired, at the same time, in terms of film and how much he loved film, he was underestimated. Becaus...