Folies à deux pour la saison du Cancer
Your monthly 💌 from Zodiac Film Club
Merci beaucoup GCSE French for injecting some je ne sais quoi into our subject line this month. It is officially summer, and also Cancer season, so we have time travelled to our teenage years for a soupçon of ennui, a smattering of sensitivity and a lot of journalling.
As longtime followers of Zodiac know, we are in our feelings at this time of the year and the official title of those feelings is Summertime Sadness. This state of mind lends itself perfectly to sitting in dark cinemas, going down internet wormholes and general aimless meandering, which should hopefully render the Zodiac newsletter even more potent.
Speaking of sitting in the dark, there’s a ton of great screenings and seasons out there this time of year. First up, our great friend Token Homo is putting on a wild late night 50th anniversary celebration of John Waters’ Female Trouble at the Rio Cinema on Saturday 13th July. We shall be there with cha cha heels on! We’re also all over the Marguerite Duras season at the ICA. If we were in Bristol, we’d be sorely tempted by the Stephanie Rothman nurse-sploitation flick The Student Nurses, showing Thursday 25th July in 35mm as part of Cinema Rediscovered.
In terms of new releases, we’re allowing ourselves to get a little excited about Longlegs, Maxxxine and, of course… Twisters. What are y’all seeing over summer?
xoxo Zodiac
Lately we’ve been watching…
Demonlover - Five stars but we can’t explain why. Anyone?
Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini - Usually love true crime and anything Erin Lee Carr is involved with in particular, but there was a strange lack of insight or any new information with this one, which prompted the question: why?
Twister - Prep for Twisters, and because weather is also the villain of our lives this month.
Wimbledon (tournament not Paul Bettany film) - Feeling rather hard done by when the men’s singles players don’t kiss at the end of the match. Challengers really has done a number on us.
Techno Viking. We’re latecomers to this viral video of the early 2000s and its lore.
We love it when you comment or DM and tell us what you’re watching, or that you heartily disagree with our opinions. xoxo
Charming/Ghastly
Charming: Celebrities wearing really expensive outfits at Glastonbury (noughties Kate Moss would NEVER, she might not even have showered), pygmy goats and the delicate way they eat animal feed out of your hand, those farms where you can buy little bags of animal feed for 40p each and walk around Marie-Antoinetting, those foot peel acid sock things, the look of glaminis (mini gladioli for the small-space dweller).
Ghastly: The class-traitor-y feeling of really wanting Anya Taylor-Joy’s £500+ Rabanne top, not having any land to keep pygmy goats on, waiting for the peeling of the feet to begin, the scent of glaminis (like sawdust in a bad way), getting COVID for the third time (being house-bound in summer makes us feel like Colin from The Secret Garden).
Films for Cancer Season ♋
The moody moon mother of the Zodiac, your Cancer friend wants to nurse you and feed you broth with a spoon, but also wants to be slightly put out about it. There’s nothing our moon-ruled sisters enjoy more than the emotional waxing and waning of a co-dependent relationship — you may have to send out a search party when you don’t hear from them for the first six months of a new romance. Not for Cancer the long-distance lover or the casual hook-up, these romantic souls want their partners to move in as fast as possible: that’s when the real fun of complete mind-body melding can begin. In tribute to the Cancerian desire for closeness, our films this month are all about overly intense relationships.
Cancer babes include: Princess Diana, Dolly the Sheep, Cyndi Lauper, Ginger Rogers AND John Leguizamo.
In the Realm of the Senses (1976)
An erotic true-crime movie with unsimulated sex scenes AND gorgeous mise-en-scène — only in the seventies (sigh). Based on the sad story of sometime geisha Sada Abe, and her lover and eventual murder victim Kichizō Ishida, In the Realm… tells a no-holds-barred story of sexual obsession. When a hotel maid begins an affair with her employer, their mutual obsession gradually grows, cutting them off from everything but each other. Retreating to a teahouse for a days-long lovemaking session, their erotic games spin increasingly out of control…. We promise you’ll never look at the egg in your Tonkotsu ramen the same way again.
The second of three true-crime films in this month’s list (what’s more intense than risking prison time together?), Heavenly Creatures takes the opposite approach to In the Realm of the Senses, forgoing most of the gory, salacious details in favour of an in-depth look into the minds of the perpetrators. Having decided to base their story on a sensational 1954 murder case, in which teenagers Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme murdered Parker’s mother, director Peter Jackson and his writing partner Fran Walsh conducted their own research, interviewing dozens of people involved in the case and reading Parker’s diaries. The resulting film is an emotionally heightened journey through the fantasy world of two bright and creative, but hopelessly disturbed and unhappy teen girls. Maybe part of what makes the film such an enduring classic was the intense relationship experienced by its lead actresses. Jackson reported both of them staying in character for some time after filming wrapped, and Melanie Lynskey has spoken publicly about how bereft she felt after falling out of touch with co-star Kate Winslet.
Secret languages, shared womb, same face — is there a more intense relationship than the one between twins? Certainly not in this biopic of the so-called “silent twins” June and Jennifer Gibbons, siblings whose speech issues caused them to live an isolated life. Retreating from society, their shared imaginative universe and creative endeavours are all that sustains them, until the pull of the adult world proves too strong.
This one had been on our watchlist for a while, and we found it full of pleasing elements, from a plethora of astrology on film quotes (we wonder if that’s canon or an invention of the screenwriter) to a make-up application scene that rivals those of Sofia Coppola films. Our only criticism centres on the moments when the film tries to become a musical — it doesn’t work nearly as well as it did in director Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s previous film, the brilliant mermaid horror The Lure. The sexy T-Rex tracks on soundtrack communicate true teen-girl longing much more effectively.
We write this one with goosebumps. Holy fuck, this film! We don’t actually remember how we found it or what made us sit down and watch it one rainy afternoon at the beginning of this year — probably because it broke our brains a little bit. It’s directed by Mélanie Laurent, who most will recognise as movie theatre manager/resistance fighter Shoshanna in Inglourious Basterds, but is also a prolific and talented director.
When alluring new student Sarah wants to be friends with her, shy 17-year-old Charlie is thrilled to be chosen. But as the obsessive new friendship inevitably goes awry, the consequences are cruel and violent. From Me Without You to Thirteen, intense female friendships are certainly well-trodden territory on screen, but there’s something about this terrifying film and its gripping performances that feel truer than every version that’s come before. Sorry close friends, we’ll be reducing you all to casual acquaintances from this point on, just to be on the safe side.
Honourable Mentions: My Best Fiend (1999), Shirley (2020), Sybil (2018), Love Me If You Dare (2003).
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Recommended Reading, Watching, Listening 📚
The NY Times Read Like the Wind column, our favourite source of obscure book recommendations. It’s for subscribers only, but, you know, there are ways…
We came across this short story, ‘Hold Your Fire’, by Chloe Wilson, which is thrillingly derisory: it feels like it’s narrated by Laura Dern’s character in Big Little Lies.
A new book How Directors Dress, from A24, details what directors wear to work. Having only read the Foreword thus far, in which Joanna Hogg discusses her love for Yohji, we have already set up new eBay alerts for archival pieces we’ll probably never buy.
Off-screen Gossip 🍸
Flashback to Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling winning the MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss to help you all prep for the transition to Leo season later this month.
need some Marguerite Duras programming in LA so bad