Los Angeles, (IANS) Australian actress Elizabeth Debicki has clinched a Primetime Emmy Award for the Best Supporting Actress in a Drama for her role as Princess Diana in the hit streaming show 'The Crown'.
This marks the first time an Australian actress has won in the category.
During her acceptance speech, she said, "I didn't write anything down because I'm very superstitious and now I'm in a real pickle, so I'm going to do this quickly. Peter (Morgan), thank you. Thank you for making this show. Thank you for trusting me with this."
'The Crown' is a historical drama television series about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. It is created and written by Peter Morgan, who developed the series from his film 'The Queen' and his stage play 'The Audience', which also focused on Queen Elizabeth.
The series consists of six seasons spanning almost six decades, and begins shortly before the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten in 1947 and ends with the 2005 wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.
Elizabeth Debicki, who was born in Paris, France, to a Polish father and an Australian mother of Irish descent, became interested in ballet early in life and trained as a dancer until deciding to switch to theatre.
In 2010, she completed a bachelor's degree in drama at the Victorian College of the Arts of the University of Melbourne before she went on to star in several projects like 'The Great Gatsby', 'Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2', 'Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3', 'The Night Manager', and 'The Crown'.
This year’s Sydney Film Festival’s rich offerings of films more than compensated for the minor technical issues that led to some screenings being interrupted.
Out of the 40-odd films I saw, here are my top five, along with some notable mentions and three disappointments (including a genuine dud).
1. The Girl with the Needle
Cowritten and directed by Swedish filmmaker Magnus von Horn, The Girl with the Needle is loosely based on the story of notorious early-20th century serial killer Dagmar Overbye.
But this is no procedural true crime film, painstakingly attempting to recreate crimes with historical accuracy. It’s a stylish Danish nightmare dazzling with cinematic acrobatics right from the opening sequence, in which black and white faces hideously morph, looking at the viewer like deranged figures from a hellish circus. It is, indeed, one of the most terrifying films I’ve seen.
The narrative follows the struggles of new mother Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) as she gives her baby to Dagmar’s informal adoption agency and begins working with her as a wet nurse, unaware of what’s really going on.
Sonne is as self-assured as ever – and none of the actors put a foot wrong here. Seasoned Danish film star Trine Dyrholm is exceptional in bringing nuance to what could have become a caricaturishly evil role as Dagmar. And Besir Zeciri endows Peter, a war-wounded veteran who can only find employment in a circus freakshow, with an unexpected warmth and tenderness.
The Girl with the Needle features some of the most distressing sequences one could find in a commercial film. Its meticulously rendered shades of German expressionism never distract from its smorgasbord of horrors, offering an almost unbearably bleak vision of the world in the aftermath of the Great War. If only all films were this good!
2. Dying
I’d normally suppress a yawn if you told me I had to sit through a three-hour social realist drama about the everyday difficulties of a bourgeois German conductor and his family. Yet writer-director Matthias Glasner’s Dying is a near perfect film (no surprise it won four prizes at the German Film Awards).
The film is complex and engrossing – deeply sad in places and hysterical in others – formally controlled, but underpinned by an anarchic sensibility. It is life-affirming without any skerrick of sentimentality.
Lars Eidinger is astonishingly good as maestro Tom, who is trying to keep his career on track as his family life crumbles around him. He is matched by Lilith Stangenberg, mesmerising as his unhinged sister Ellen. Robert Gwisdek is equally exceptional as the highly strung composer and friend Bernard, while Corinna Harfouch anchors the film’s first section as Tom’s far from maternal mother, Lissy.
At one point, Ingmar Bergman’s 1982 period film Fanny and Alexander is playing on the TV (Tom watches it every Christmas). Even though Dying feels like a contemporary film committed to interrogating the difficulties of being in the modern world, there’s something of late Bergman here as it unfolds across its epic length.
It is a three-hour film about middle-class life, but like a great 19th-century novel, it never feels long. The fact that nothing particularly extraordinary happens is testament to how well-made the film is.
3. Kill
Director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s Indian action film Kill is cheesy, sentimental and at first seems remarkably silly.
Commando Amrit, played by beefy TV star Lakshya, is travelling to New Delhi by train with his buddy, fellow commando Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan). His true love Tulika (Tanya Maniktala) is also on board and has recently become engaged to another man through an arrangement by her wealthy father, Baldev Singh Thakur (Harsh Chhaya), who happens to own the train company. When a group of 30-plus bandits led by the charming but ice-cold Fani (Raghav Juyal) move to rob the train, Amrit must defend Tulika, her family and the rest of the passengers.
When the title card appears 40 minutes into the film, suddenly emblazoned on the screen, it seems like a distracting quirk at first. But it begins to make sense as the train rolls on. All of the violence and bone-crushing action of the first section is mere preamble, leading to a point of transition from an extremely violent but fun action film, to a much darker – and bloodier – revenge film.
Kill is an exceptionally well-wrought genre film. The kinetic and balletic action recalls the golden era of Hong Kong action cinema, but with hammers, daggers and sickles instead of guns and the frenetic staging of hand-to-hand combat instead of poetic slow-motion footage. It is also a great example of a film being more than the sum of its parts. No element is perfect, yet they come together to transcend these limitations, its flow reaching sublime levels by the end.
There’s also an undercurrent of sadness throughout. We see an India of haves and have-nots, of families of bandits struggling to survive and of the supreme violence sustaining the social and political order. As Fani says to Amrit near the end: “Who kills like this? I killed four of your people. You finished off 40 of my family. You’re not a protector. You’re a monster. A fucking monster.” The title says it all.
4. Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story
Biographical films about celebrities inevitably feel gossipy. Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is no exception. But it is so well made (and well-resourced, one would imagine, as it’s produced by DC) that it moves beyond its tabloid-like qualities.
Interviews with Reeve’s friends and colleagues, including Susan Sarandon, Glenn Close and Jeff Daniels, are interspersed with home footage shot by Reeve and his family throughout his career and during his recovery from the near-fatal riding accident that left him paralysed and breathing through a respirator for the rest of his life.
Reeve’s close friendship with “brother” Robin Williams assumes central importance, with the film implying the two men were so emotionally dependent on each other that Williams would probably still be alive if Reeve hadn’t died in 2004.
But the most interesting parts of the film involve carefully assembled archival footage looking at how Reeve’s decision to play Superman negatively impacted his career and personal life. He never starred in another profitable film, and his father and colleagues such as William Hurt loathed his decision to play a comic book character.
This is counterpointed with his post-accident career as a director and disability advocate. Interviews with Reeve’s children add a genuinely tragic sense of pathos to this slick, well-made and emotionally exhausting “true Hollywood” story. It’s everything one could want from such a documentary.
5. Kneecap
Cowriter-director Rich Peppiatt’s Kneecap is a riotous, irreverent biopic following the career of Belfast drug-dealers Móglaà Bap and Mo Chara as they team up with high school music teacher DJ Próvai to become the first Irish-language rap group, Kneecap.
The real Kneecappers cowrote the film and play themselves and, given none of them are actors, do so remarkably well. They’re joined by Irish heavyweights Josie Walker, playing the detective who has it in for them, and Michael Fassbender, playing MóglaÃ’s father, an old-school Irish radical who has been on the run for the past few decades.
The film depicts their hedonistic drug use and anarchic disregard for the law in the context of their radical political motivation to speak Irish against the colonial English. And while it may be a bit cartoonish in its presentation of Belfast’s history and the struggle to keep Gaelic alive, it is a music biopic after all.
Kneecap is violent, coarse and laced with infectiously good humour – a genuinely fun film, buoyed by its charismatic stars and lively style. Only the most stringent moralist wouldn’t enjoy this one!
Notable mentions
It’s extremely difficult to pick a top five when 15 or so of the films I saw were standouts. And this is testament to the quality of the festival’s selection.
It was a pleasure watching heavyweight Sean Penn go head-to-head with Dakota Johnson in writer-director Christy Hall’s Daddio, even if the story takes an uninteresting turn in the final third. Despite the banality of the premise – a New York cabbie chats with a passenger – and the inanity of some of the dialogue, this romantic ode to urban life in all its alienated, fluoro-lit techno glory is so well crafted that we happily go along for the ride.
Of the lot, I only found three films disappointing.
The first, Among the Wolves, is a Belgian-French documentary in which a photographer and illustrator lie waiting in a tiny, makeshift building to encounter wild wolves. While some of the footage is striking, the film is let down by its scientific inaccuracy, such as references to the “alpha male” wolf – a term and concept that has long been discredited. Such innacuracy is a cardinal sin for a documentary, which is supposed to inform the viewer.
Though critically acclaimed, Hollywood horror film The Substance – a story of an ageing entertainer who turns to a mysterious substance to stay young (with unsurprisingly horrific ramifications) – feels neither new nor particularly interesting. And while it’s great to see Demi Moore and Dennis Quaid back on the big screen, their caricaturish characters make the whole thing seem like a boring joke: an inflated short film that is both irritatingly silly and painfully didactic.
But rarely does a film so resolutely reaffirm a sense of the absurd hubris of humans as Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed mega-flop, Megalopolis. This cartoonish, incoherent mess set in a dystopian version of the United States, “New Rome”, is howlingly bad in places.
Imagine the worst parts of The Hunger Games and Fellini Satyricon (1969) crossed with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and you begin to get a sense of the kind of self-indulgent, heavy-handed nonsense that is Megalopolis.
Side-splittingly funny moments come courtesy of bad dialogue (“Utopias become dystopias,” actor Giancarlo Esposito says at one point with a straight face). And stilted acting by Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza had the (remaining) audience in stitches. Megalopolis is like one of the great fiascos from days gone by – the 21st century’s Heaven’s Gate – and there is definitely something delightful about the existence of this US$120 million (roughly A$180 million) flop.
But as a dud, Megalopolis is the outlier. And in a year following Barbie, Oppenheimer, Napoleon and Poor Things (talk about heavy-handed cinema), much of the menu of this year’s Sydney Film Festival once again proves there are still good filmmakers out there making good films.
Lore tells a bleak, uncommon, and harrowing tale of a Nazi siblings traverse across war-ravaged Germany in search of their grandmother's home following the imprisonment of their parents. Directed by Australian director Cate Shortland (AFI winner for Somersault), and written by Shortland and Robin Mukherjee, this international co-production screened at the Sydney Film Festival as part of the Official Competition. Recently Lore won the Audience Award at the Locarno Film Festival, and is set to screen at this month's Toronto International Film Festival. Featuring a breakthrough role from Saskia Rosendahl, this is a stirring and emotionally resonating war drama that comes highly recommended. Lore is set during 1945 and the fall of the German resistance. With their SS father (Hans-Jochen Wagner) and mother (Ursina Lardi) imprisoned by American and Russian forces, and abandoned to face an uncertain fate, Hannelore (Saskia Rosendahl) takes charge of the rest of her family - her younger sister Liesel (Nele Trebs), twins Jurgen (Mika Seidel) and Gunther (Andrei Frid) and baby brother, Peter - guiding them across the perilous countryside towards their grandmother's house in Hamburg. On the road the children face the punishing conditions, experience distressing sights and find their health suffer, and along the way Hannelore begins to better understand the consequences of her parents' actions, come of age, and accept responsibility for her family. Lore tells an uncommon tale set during an accurately recreated historical period. At the centre of this tale is Lore, our complex heroine. Having been raised in privilege and taught that Jews are not to be trusted and an enemy to her family, she is reluctant to allow Thomas (Kai-Peter Malina), a young man they discover hiding out in an abandoned house, to become their traveling companion. Initially, when he follows the group from a distance, Lore resists his attempts to reach out to her, but ultimately becomes
drawn to him out of comfort and sexual desire and he assists them on several occasions; most importantly passing through patrols. Lore begins to understand what is required for her family to make it, offering up scraps of jewellery and even sexual favors. Thomas aids them without any expected compensation, but his Jewish papers present a challenge to Lore's morality. Her innocence is almost completely lost over the course of the journey, as her confusing adolescent emotions begin to influence her decisions.Sympathising with these characters could have been difficult, but it remains emotionally involving because we understand that the children are innocent and have been raised to accept their parents' political affiliations. Understanding that the children need to have some hope, Lore doesn't reveal their parents' fates, and as a result they are so confused by the situation that they believe they will again be united with their parents at their grandmother's house. The tense atmosphere - which captures a reality as grim as they come and offers up a suffocating level of foreboding - is beautifully conveyed in the stunning photography courtesy of Adam Arkapaw (Snowtown and Animal Kingdom), one of Australia's best DP's. You feel every step the children make through the mud, and can almost smell the stench of death surrounding them. Lore is also very effectively scored by Max Richter, and the young actors all deliver mature performances. Rosendahl, especially, is outstanding. She is a young actress to watch after this career-defining role. The conclusion is powerful because it is evident how much Lore has changed - coming to terms with her family's accountability and adjusting her own prejudices having learned that they never would have made it without the aid of Thomas, considered a friendly to the American forces. The emotions that weigh on her having turned Thomas away, knowing that he would not be welcomed to her grandmother's house, involves heartbreaking revelation. This is a satisfying and very well crafted film from Cate Shortland, and having not seen Somersault, I'd now like to see from where her vision has evolved. Source: The Film Emporium
