Hi Cork Cultural Companions
Welcome to the Triskel Cinema Newsletter.
Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective - Part I continues tonight with the chilling psychological horror-satire masterpiece Funny Games (1997) one of Haneke’s most incisive and confrontational explorations of middle-class manners, disruption and screen violence.
Funny Games introduces us to a husband, wife and young son, who arrive at their peaceful lake house for a vacation. A knock on their door: two teenage boys, dressed in tennis whites, asking to borrow some eggs. When their requests are rebuffed, the teens begin to terrorise the family, taking them hostage and forcing them to play sadistic games for their own amusement.
Nearly 30 years old, Funny Games remains a nerve-shredding, spellbinding watch; though most of the violence stays offscreen, this merciless satire confronts the viewer, frequently breaking the fourth wall and asking us to think about about our own consumption of violence as entertainment.
Tomorrow, we screen the haunting post-apocalyptic drama Time of the Wolf. Starring Isabelle Huppert, Time of the Wolf is the story of a family fleeing an unspecified catastrophe, encountering menacing strangers and trying to survive in a lawless landscape; once again, Haneke masterfully explores the breakdown of norms, morality and human nature.
On Wednesday, Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective - Part I comes to a close with The Piano Teacher. A transfixing story of power, control, sexuality and transgression, this erotic psychological drama stars frequent Haneke collaborator Isabelle Huppert in one of her greatest screen performances (and that’s saying something).
The Piano Teacher is the story of Erika Kohut, a deeply repressed professor at a Vienna music conservatory. Erika lives an intensely stressful and bitter life; she has a love-hate relationship with her controlling mother and little outlet for her desires, lingering around sex shops and engaging in more perverse acts with a careful distance. Trapped and on the edge, she enters into an intense and destructive affair with a charismatic student, which spirals into a queasy masochistic dynamic.
One of the most startling and critically acclaimed films of the 2000s, The Piano Teacher “still holds the same fraught charge it did a quarter of a century ago” (Financial Times ★★★★★); it's a film that is “ambitious, profoundly articulate, and despite its avoidance of sentimentality and sermonising, very compassionate” (Time Out ★★★★★).
Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective continues with Part 2 from Sunday 27 - Wednesday 20 July, as we screen Amour, Benny’s Video, Happy End and Hidden (Caché).
Screening until Wednesday, The Salt Path is an adaptation of Raynor Winn’s celebrated memoir, and tells the extraordinary story of a middle-aged couple who, facing eviction and a tragic health diagnosis, embark on a trek across the gorgeous, treacherous Cornish, Devon and Dorset coastline - a life-changing journey of 630 miles. With stunning performances from Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, don't miss this bittersweet, deeply moving drama. We recommend this Guardian interview with Winn, Isaacs and Anderson.
This Thursday, don't miss two fantastic documentaries exploring trailblazing artistic figures. For the final time, we screen literary documentary Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story; a favourite with Triskel audiences, this finely constructed film is a deep dive into the life of the celebrated Irish writer. We also screen S/He is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary, a fascinating look at Genesis P-Orridge, lead singer of Throbbing Gristle, industrial music innovator and avant-garde hero.
Next week, it's Wes Anderson time at Triskel Cinema, as we bring you The Phoenician Scheme. A madcap, very funny, surprisingly warm, gorgeously directed adventure tackling redemption, capitalism, and father-daughter relationships, The Phoenician Scheme has basketball battles, hand grenades as gifts, Benicio del Toro on top form and Michael Cera with a wonderfully bizarre European accent. What more could one ask for at the movies?
From Sunday 6 July, we also screen the artful docudrama E.1027: Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea. This stylish chronicle of architecture, creativity, authorship, misogyny, and a triangle of complex relationships blends archival footage and dramatized scenes into a captivating whole.
See you soon,
Gillian and the team at Triskel
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