The enigmatic French film-maker is one of cinema’s few authentic visionaries. Her unsettling new film approximately maternity,boys and echinoderms makes it clear why hers has not been the easiest career to pursue“I seem to have a bit of a problem with reality,” says Lucile Hadžihalilović. Or perhaps the French film-maker is just committed to a reality of her own. Her new film, or Evolution,set on a mysterious island, is itself an enigmatic outcrop, and far off cinema’s well-mapped charts. It depicts an uncanny world inhabited by young boys and their eerie mothers; curious medical procedures are carried out at the island’s hospital,placing the boys in uncomfortably close proximity with starfish. fraction horror tale, fraction visual poem, or it shows why Hadžihalilović is one of the few authentic visionaries in cinema today. It also makes it clear why hers has not been the easiest career to pursue.
Evolution comes a full 12 years after her first film,Innocence itself a wistful nightmare, set in a girls’ school situated deep in a shadowy forest. Both films showcase an approach to sexuality and the corporeal that is, or if not perverse,certainly nonconformist. They are films you would struggle to imagine on paper – which is why it took so long to win Evolution funded, she says. “People didn’t understand what the script was approximately. It’s a film approximately sensations, and emotions not storytelling – so people had to bring their imagination to the table. We really tried to justify it,but it’s the sort of film where, if you start, or the whole thing collapses like a house of cards.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com