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Wednesday – Bengali Car wash – Sonali Campion

Tuesday – Route 66 – Lauri Saksa

Monday – Action in the Edinburgh College of Arts – Will Granger

Sunday – Happiness is a choice which requires effort at times – Ursa Mali

This play will mess with your mind. Gloria Lagou (Decadence) brings another drama out of mid-twentieth-century obscurity, and like Decadence, The Maids is small-scale but high-impact.

Jean Genet’s 1947 play was inspired – if that is the right word – by two brutal murders in Le Mans fourteen years before. It transpired that two maids in a lawyer’s house had surprised the lady of the house and her daughter in the dark, gouged out their eyes and then bludgeoned them to death with a hammer.

In the first scene, Genet presents the audience with a confrontation between Madame and Solange, her eerily deferent maidservant. Madame is tyrannical and yet strangely insecure, and when Solange protests her total devotion to her mistress you feel that she is somehow in charge. A dance ensues. Madame, the oppressive harridan like a caricature out of The Rugged-Trousered Philanthropist, and Solange, the hollow-eyed servant who speaks more powerfully through her silences and her self-deprecation than Madame does through all her bluster. It is pure class struggle. Marx’s wettest wet dream. ‘The fall of your dress, I’m arranging your fall from grace.’ Suddenly, Solange strikes her mistress: ‘Madame thought she was protected by the barrier of flowers?’

Yet all is not as it seems. Just when you think you understand where the play is moving, it changes direction and focus, until you are no longer sure who the characters are or what they are doing. Identity, real life and fantasy blur and chicane in a shadow-world of total possibility. Genet toys with the viewer, tosses you about and leads you away into the mists like a will o’ the wisp. The key word for this play is control: everybody thinks they have it, even you in the audience, but it slips from your fingers just as you grasp it.

Lagou’s production is excellent in every respect. With only three actors, the cast have been able to focus closely on every single word and gesture. Roseanna Frascona’s Madame glimmers with a precarious charisma and is strangely sympathetic at times. Her pangs of conscience are made to seem wholly consistent with her proud and oppressive character. Rachel Dedman as Claire is also convincing, but pride of place goes to Frances Hackett playing Solange. She manages the role with an ethereal ambiguity; you can never quite place her.

‘I can see in your eyes that you hate me, that you loathe me,’ says Madame.

Claire’s eyes light up. ‘I love you, I would follow you anywhere!’

You almost suspect she is telling the truth. Every concept in this play bleeds into its opposite: love into hatred, power into weakness, and Madame’s overbearing perfume struggles to dominate the acrid smell of the maids’ bleach. The Maids will take you unresistingly by the hand and lead you on a merry dance through your own assumptions and expectations. This is a subtle and mature presentation of a play that deserves far more attention than it gets, and I recommend it wholeheartedly to anybody who thrives on instability and fantasy.

The Maids is at the Frewin Undercroft (near the Union), Tues-Sat, 19.30

Women Without Men is the feature film debut of Shirin Neshat, the Iranian visual artist who has become renowned for her explorations of Islam and gender relations. Adapted from the novel by Iranian author, Shahrnush Parsipur, the film weaves together the lives of four Iranian women in 1953 when a coup d’état backed by the Americans and British removed the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh. The four women represent different social classes and the film details how each of them is mistreated by the society in which they live, leading them to visit a garden outside of Tehran which is a literal and metaphorical refuge from the injustices of their lives.

The acting of the four main women is universally strong and Hungarian actress, Orsolya Tóth, is particularly impressive as the mute, anorexic prostitute, Zarin. A scene in which she rubs her body raw in a public bath is gruelling to watch but her expression of hurt and anxiety is moving throughout. The main male characters are also well portrayed though there is a tendency to let them fall into pastiche meaning that the characterisation of men as bad guy and women as martyrs at times seems a little contrived.

The emphasis of the film is the marginalisation of the female in Islamic society, especially clear when Amir Khan (Essa Zahir) asks Faezah (Pegah Ferydoni) to marry him, telling her in an off hand way that his current wife will become her servant; to this she asks whether she will be the servant of his third wife, leaving him speechless but still oblivious to his own misogyny. The shots of Iran are at times stunning, as we might expect from someone who is known for her artistic video installations. The garden to which the women retreat is particularly beautiful and the contrast between the peacefulness of the Iranian countryside and the trouble of the city is captured with skilful ease.

But despite having a moving plot, strong acting and some fantastic cinematography, Women Without Men doesn’t quite add up to the sum of its parts. It tries to do too much and there is not time to build a relationship with all the characters, particularly Farrokhlagha, the upper class wife of an Iranian general. It is worth watching for the beauty of the filming but if you’re looking for a thorough exploration of the contradictions of Iranian culture I suggest you look elsewhere.

Created as part of Liverpool’s tenure as a European City of Culture, Kicks appears to be a standard football film billing itself as ‘a compelling tale about two teenage girls infatuated with celebrity’. However the synopsis and marketing cruelly underrates the film. The press release states ‘Nicole and Jasmine bond over a mutual obsession for premiership footballer, Lee Cassidy. Fuelled by their fantasy of meeting him, they track him down and before they know it their dream has become a nightmare’ suggesting that this is merely a football fanatic story. Whoever is responsible for marketing has clearly missed the mark as the power in the film lies in the social questions it raises. Teenage adolescence, first love, friendship, fanaticism, football culture and even rivalry are all addressed at least at some level during the film.

Cruelly this is its main strength as the film is stodgy and the script is basic in places. The line ‘I’m Lee Cassidy. You’re just fucking nobodies’ is particulary onerous given that it panders to the cliché prima donna footballer. Subtlety is also a weakness – the burning of papers to signify the purging of an obsession, hugging a tyre tenderly to demonstrate an adolescent desire for love – all begin to grate after a while.

What is gratifying is the new talent within the film. The film is carried by the two young stars – Nichola Burley and Kerrie Hayes – who bring life into the screen and are extremely convincing as two young teenagers fraught with adolescence and desire and brought together through this from two very different backgrounds. The actresses’ attribute this to the concentration of character experienced on set – the time frame to shoot was extremely short as the sets were small – creating an intense experience. This isolation, they believe, aided in their portrayal of their characters adding that the extreme scenes shot with Cassidy (played rather apathetically by Jamie Doyle) were done without meeting him before perhaps adding to its passion and energy.

Kicks is shot in some stunning locations around Liverpool, Eduard Grau’s warm-coloured photography brings life into the most urbane settings such as the Docksides. This beauty is obviously reflective of the financial backing of Liverpool based Northwest Vision and Media but the general message of the film seems to portray Liverpool negatively – characterizing it as obsessive over the media, celebrity culture and obviously its’ football club.
The girls agree that there is ‘huge pride in Liverpool football club’ within the city but defend the film saying that they can either take it as ‘an insult or take it on board.’
Poppy Hodgson

Oxford local Ben Hervey could only be described as unassuming jack-of-all film trades. A critic, screenwriter, and lecturer who has made an early mark as the author of a British Film Institute book on the 1968 classic horror film, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Hervey completed his doctorate on turn-of-the-century Victorian horror literature here at Oxford, but attributes his passion for the creepy-crawlies to a fascination with horror starting at a young age. ‘I’ve always been a horror enthusiast, although I was forbidden from watching them as a child. For Night of the Living Dead, my parents were out, and I was aware that they would come back at any moment. I had sat right next to the TV with my finger on the stop button, inches away from the screen.’

At age seven or eight, he saw Don’t Look Now, which remains his favorite horror film. However, as I can attest from the terrifying character of Ursula in The Little Mermaid, fright can also come with a PG rating. Hervey agrees. ‘I was very traumatized by films that weren’t specifically horror. Jack the Giant Killer was a crude children’s fantasy film that was intensely disturbing to me.’

So, magic beans aside, now that he’s viewed a few more movies away from the watchful eye of Mum and Dad, what exactly defines a good horror flick? You mean it’s not all about gobs of gore and copious carnage? ‘For me, the most compelling horror is that which undermines our sense of reality to some extent. One thing that the best horror films have in common with some Victorian literature is finding ways to impart the feeling that the physical world around is almost a charade or mirage, and that there’s a larger, eerier and more threatening reality behind it.’ For those like me, blubbering wimps who would rather undergo a root canal than watch a Saw film, there may lie a less threatening comparison in Hitchcock. ‘There’s not a very big sense of mystery in Hitchcock, except maybe in The Birds,’ Hervey explains. ‘There’s something very profound and pregnant about the way the birds are just sitting there afterwards and you’re just much more aware of how volatile the world is.”‘

However, this mysterious aspect of horror films remains an anomaly in today’s exceedingly violent, and often senseless, films. ‘The tendency of horror now – and Night of the Living Dead is an important step towards this – is a more materialist form about violence and the destruction of the human body. Often the best horror films show virtually nothing, are very inexplicit, but have created a sense of mystery.’ He cited the recently released House of the Devil, set in 1980 at the height of American panic about Satanism. Hervey also downplays shock value, which can make audiences immune and indifferent. Instead, he favours a more excruciating approach: ‘Just to mercilessly let stuff simmer, without any kind of shock or violence interrupting that, can be the most effective.’

His book on Night of the Living Dead is well-regarded, but Hervey feels guilty about contributing to the critic culture that has tethered the often unappreciated Romero to the undead. ‘I believe that he doesn’t want to read my book, because he refuses to look back on that stage.’ Yet that isn’t to take away from the importance of the film: ‘I think it’s fair to say that horror movies up until Night of the Living Dead were about horror and evil and dark forces, but they were ultimately about the abilities of people to overcome them. It was the first horror film in which everyone dies, and that was absolutely shocking. I’ve spoken to people who saw it when it was first shown and there were people just left sitting in their seats, because they didn’t have enough of a sense of the film having rightly ended.’

Surprisingly enough for a critic, Hervey dismisses the notion that all horror films can be examined from a critical angle. ‘It’s sort of become a cliché that horror films were meant to represent a society’s anxieties and I think these days, it’s very easy for filmmakers to borrow a little bit of extra credibility by making some superficial gesture towards that,’ Hervey clarifies. ‘For example, the Hostel films have these nods towards being some sort of commentary on Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo Bay. But I can’t help thinking that filmmakers like Eli Roth are just attempting to ride the coattails of people like Romero with obvious nudges to suggest that they’re doing something ideologically interesting, when in many ways Hostel is just a retread of civilized Americans going abroad and meeting rural menace genre that’s been around for decades.’

Aside from more cinematic dismemberment, is there anything for horror audiences on the horizon? Hervey thinks that horror’s influence is creating an exciting fusion with the mainstream. ‘Maybe the positive things that have been happening in horror have been somewhat outside. What can be done by sort of contaminating mainstream cinema with horror elements, I think that’s where the fun is. In the meantime, I think horror is waiting for another defining film to come along.”