The Cancer urge to live in an Almodóvar film 🏠
Your monthly love letter from Zodiac Film Club 💌
Happy five days ‘til Barbie! Whatever your feelings about busty dolls and the relationship between entertainment and product placement, you have to admit this is the first time in a while that there’s been a summer blockbuster this exciting, and with this much of a wide-ranging appeal on the horizon. And with a woman at the healm no less.
Astrologically speaking, this summer is fudging exhausting. Shadow healing, childhood wounds, Venus retrograde, meaningful growth. It’s all a lot of (inner) work. That’s why we need a really pink-hued movie more than ever.
If B-word isn’t your bag though, there are other things to see this month. Obvs Oppenheimer is coming out the same day for the double-feature film girlies. Our mates over at T A P E Collective are distributing the really fun Shabu (see below). If you’re local and you love football and fundraising, there’s a charity preview screening of Scrapper (female-directed father-daughter flick) happening at Hackney Picturehouse tomorrow to raise money for Rushmore Primary School. It’s right by our HQ, dm us if you want something from our bookshop without having to pay for the postage. Speaking of books, we were super lucky to get a preview copy of The Love Witch director Anna Biller’s Gothic horror novel, Bluebeard’s Castle, and of course it’s our new fave. We’ll be stocking it when it comes out this autumn, so stay tuned for your spooky season read…
xoxo Zodiac
Lately we’ve been watching…
Shabu (2023) A Rotterdam teen crashes his grandmother’s car and has to spend the summer figuring out how to pay for the damage. But it’s a documentary. And it made us cry. We can’t explain, just go see it.
The Appointment (1981) A lovely follower recommended this when we did a shoutout for eerie films recently. Oh my God, one of the best openings in horror film history.
Dream Lover (1993) Madchen Amick is flawless, she’s wearing a beige twin-set, she’s ruining an innocent man’s life – good for her. And let’s call a spade a Spade(r), James is always great value. To be enjoyed with a generosity of spirit and a penchant for '90s double denim.
The Comfort of Strangers (1990) Couldn’t have put it better than this Letterboxd review.
Charming/Ghastly: 🎭
Charming: The summer tradition of randomly running into people: friend edition, Barbie fever, planning what to wear to Barbie, the entire Barbie marketing campaign but namely the Barbie-can sign, rose season (flowers, not wine, we would never mispunctuate), big industry-rocking strikes, petrichor, beaver-based news stories.
Ghastly: The summer tradition of randomly running into people: nemesis edition, urban wildflower meadows (charming in theory, hayfever-sufferer euthenasia pits in practice), handover notes, humidity The Sun (newspaper not centre of universe), Sicilian mafia-themed Scotch whiskey – purely on aesthetic taste level.
Films for Cancer Season ♋
They say home is where the heart is, but we’d like to propose that home is wherever your Cancer companion is. Though perhaps not quite as snappy, it’s nonetheless true, as Cancers are the rulers of the fourth house of home life, and boy are they excellent hosts! Exuding an unfalteringly sincere desire to protect and nurture, our crustacean comrades flourish most in July when everyone wants to come visit them in their Beatrix Potter-esque cottages.
In ode to the Cancerian love of staying in, this month we’re recommending films we’d like to live in. This economy may forever stand between us and our very own Barbie dreamhouses, but there will always be fantasy film spaces to escape to.
Our fave Cancers are: Margot Robbie, Olivia Newton John, Selena Gomez, Lindsay Lohan, AND Courtney Love
The film that launched a thousand GIFs – were you even on Tumblr in the mid-2000s if you didn’t feverishly repost *that* bath scene? While the student riots of 1968 rage outside, a wide-eyed American is seduced by a suspiciously sensuous pair of French twins, in *thee* primal scene of many a Millennial teenhood. More importantly though, the mise en scene behind the menage á trois is a stunning Parisian apartment, with the perfect balance of bohemian abundance and shabby, debauched glamour. Forget truth-or-dare-sex-acts, that claw foot bath with brass fixtures is enough to raise anyone’s pulse! Long story short, we’re eternally obsessed with the theme of parents leaving their spacious property in the hands of the youth (unconscious fantasy?) and could take or leave the sibling seduction – oh, and Viva La Tumblr!
Why are hotels such fantasy spaces? Possibly the sense of leaving behind the trappings of your own life but still having everything you need. A lighter, less burdened, more main-character version of yourself. No cinematic hotel supplies this liminal feeling more than Alan Resnais' film student staple. In the palatial interiors and manicured gardens of a grand holiday resort, two people have conflicting memories of having met before. Don't try to understand this hypnotic flick, just let it wash over you, and enjoy the gorgeous costumes by Coco Chanel. This isn't one for short attention spans – seriously, put your phones away and watch it on as big a screen as you can find.
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
A woman going through a break-up finds her apartment inundated with strangers and their various problems. Although this film isn't one of the director's many collaborations with production designer Antxon Gomez, it still really sticks in our heads as a quintessential Pedro Almodovar set. From the collaged opening titles to the artificial city backdrop visible from Pepa's enviable terrace, everything about Women on the Verge... is highly stylised. If we lived there we'd keep chickens too (reportedly they wandered freely around the set all through filming), but we'd never trash it the way Pepa does over the course of the movie.
Edit: Ooh just noticed this film is in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie Letterboxd list. Synchronicity.
In Peter Strickland’s wonderfully ornate erotic thriller, Evelyn, a young lepidopterologist, studies dutifully and performs domestic tasks under the exacting eye of her lecturer Cynthia. What is initially depicted as the womens’ daily routine is soon revealed to be scripted foreplay, as Cynthia pushes the boundaries of her lover’s subservience. We love the world that Strickland creates – in which there exist only women (all coupled up), zero pollution (everyone rides bikes!) and only one job (studying butterflies). The lush set design and cinematography emphasise the contrast between the controlled and furtively sexy interior of the house and wild, buzzing land outside. In other words, it extols the virtues of both the great outdoors and the comfort of the home, and that’s just the sort of balance we need in our life.
Honorable Mentions: Chungking Express (1994), Supiria (1977) [minus the murders], The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) [minus the murders], and Hakumei to Mikochi (2018) [anime show about tiny women who live in the woods]
Recommended Reading, Watching, Listening 📚
Set design articles on Architectural Digest
Yes, enviable as our IMDB-like brains are, we also do research for these newsletters, and sometimes we like the share the fruits of our labour with you. It turns out that Architectural Digest have hundreds of articles all about set design, some of our faves are a homage to Mia’s purple Y2K apartment in Love Actually (honestly a big interiors influence for us in the early 2000s), a piece on classical Hollywood production designer Cedric Gibbons and Mia Cade’s meditations on Black movies that explore the concept of home.
One of TV’s most banging theme tunes
A house we wouldn’t want to live in, but God, what a track.
The Horror of Girlhood Video Essay
Sarah’s sister (Leo babe Alice) sent us a bunch of video essays in an effort to persuade us to do some Zodiac videos. We loved this one by Final Girls Studios on the horrors of girlhood explored through Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (which we screened a few years ago). So many fun facts, a ton of in-depth analysis and a wormhole into further reading. At around 40 mins, it’s a great lunchbreak watch.
Off-screen Gossip 🍸
In upcoming film news this month there’s Greta Gerwig’s Narnia deal and a new version of summertime sadness classic Bonjour Tristesse starring Chloe Sevigny. Cool, but not overly exciting given the fact that the film industry is fast becoming an IP remake factory. Here's an idea for Hollywood. Instead of adapting the same films over and over again every few decades, how about parallel reality remakes, where directors who passed or got replaced get to have their turn to do the exact same film. For example, next summer we all get to watch Amy Seimetz's version of The Idol and David Lynch shows us his take on Cherry Falls. Then we vote on which we like best and erase the loser from history.