Oscar contenders and women of substance – what to watch, read and see this week
I just finished watching The Studio, Seth Rogen’s hilarious Apple TV satire of life inside an old school Hollywood production company. One of the standout episodes was set in the audience at the Golden Globes. It perfectly captures the peculiar theatre of awards shows: stars smiling and clapping furiously while hoping the person next to them loses.
It got me thinking about this weekend’s Oscars – who will be taking the big prizes, and who will be applauding graciously while quietly gnashing their teeth. In anticipation, I asked the arts team who or what they’d like to see winning on Sunday night.
I’d personally love to see Michael B. Jordan take home best actor. It’s a supremely competitive category this year, but his dual performance as identical twin brothers Smoke and Stack in Sinners blew me away. It’s testament to his talent that while watching I so easily forgot that such a recognisable actor wasn’t in fact two different people.
Naomi Joseph, arts and culture editor:
I would love to see The Secret Agent win. It’s a stylish and smart film that challenges its audiences while keeping them gripped. I baulked at the two-hour 40-minute length, but watching it, I was absorbed. The structure is inventive, the music is brilliant and the costume and set design are immaculate. It’s incredibly ambitious, and there are many things that shouldn’t work – like the meandering narrative and the abrupt tonal shifts – but everything comes together to make a complex yet coherent film. It is truly a masterpiece.
Jane Wright, commissioning arts editor:
An exquisite, wonderfully slow film, watching Hamnet is like walking through a painting. The pleasure is in the unfolding of its story, leading you in with visual delights, rich historical detail and moving performances. You could not help but weep at the final scene when the soaring strings of Max Richter’s On The Nature of Daylight rise as the camera fixes on Jessie Buckley’s face. She says nothing, but you are acutely aware of every thought going through her head. I think she’s extraordinary. Best film and best actress for me.
Life in the aftermath
No doubt some of the filmmakers and stars in attendance will use the opportunity to spotlight the ongoing conflict in Iran.
Now available for the first time in English, Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur is an innovative feminist story set in Iran. The novel follows five women and the circumstances that lead them to leave their lives and begin again in a garden on the outskirts of Tehran.
Written in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 revolution, it was immediately banned on publication. Shortly afterwards, Parsipur was arrested and jailed for her frank and defiant portrayal of women’s sexuality.
The novel insists that authoritarianism doesn’t begin in the halls of power; it begins in the household, within layered patriarchal systems that confine women’s autonomy. Parsipur’s blending of realism and magical elements mirrors the instability of a society in crisis.
Read more: Women Without Men: a novella that tells the history of Iran through women’s bodies
The legacy of another conflict is the subject of director Kei Ishikawa’s new adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of the Hills.
The story unfolds across two timelines. England in the 1980s, where a mother and daughter struggle to come to terms with the suicide of the latter’s older half-sister; and Nagasaki in the 1950s, as the city grapples with the trauma of the atomic bomb.
Our reviewer, professor of Japanese studies Jennifer Coates, found the film to be a rich exploration of the atomic bombings of Japan and their continuing impact. She writes that the “subtle performances and beautiful cinematography of Ishikawa’s film create an inviting and nostalgic atmosphere that allows the disturbing themes of this important book to be gently drawn out”.
Women of substance
A couple of weeks ago I went to the press preview of A Woman of Substance in Leeds. It was a treat to see the screening in my own city, especially as the series was largely set and filmed in Yorkshire.
Some subscribers may remember the first adaptation of Barbara Taylor Bradford’s novel, which aired on Channel 4 in 1985. The saga of Emma Harte – the Yorkshire maid who becomes one of the richest women in the world – was a ratings juggernaut.
This new eight-part remake arrives with a curious mix of nostalgia and reinvention: an attempt to revive the glossy melodrama of the 1980s bonkbuster while reframing its heroine for a contemporary audience.
We asked television expert Beth Johnson, herself based in Leeds, what she made of the first episode. She thought the new adaptation looked well poised to replicate the addictive pacing that made Bradford’s novel such a phenomenon.
A Woman of Substance is streaming now on Channel 4
The first photograph by Catherine Opie I ever saw was Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993). It’s a large print showing a child-like doodle: two stick women holding hands in front of a simple square house. What carved it into my memory was that this doodle was scratched into her skin. It remains one of the most evocative images of longing for a family that I have ever seen.
A new exhibition of Opie’s work – To Be Seen at the National Portrait Gallery – includes this print. The show places Opie’s portraits “in dialogue with the permanent collection” by hanging them side by side. For our reviewer, the curation “reminded me that the National Portrait Gallery was one of the first galleries I remember enjoying at 15 or 16. I loved it because there were faces everywhere. [And] the faces on the walls began to change how I saw the faces of the visitors in the gallery.”
Catherine Opie: To Be Seen is at the National Portrait Gallery until May 31
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