Volume 25 Issue 1 - September 2019

The Song of Names
LUKE DOYLE
companion to their upcoming third record of the same name. Split
into three chapters, the visual album follows three generations of
a working-class family in the American Northeast. Following the
screening, fans will have the opportunity to experience some of The
Lumineers’ upcoming release in a live performance, followed by a
Q&A with the band and III’s director Kevin Phillip.
Music-Themed Movies (Including Two Musicals)
Cameron Bailey writes in his program note for Red Fields, “From
award-winning dramatic filmmaker Keren Yedaya (Or, Jaffa) comes
a complete surprise: her first musical. Adapting Hillel Mittelpunkt’s
rock opera Mami, Yedaya fast-forwards this story of a gas station
cashier from its original 1980s setting to the present day. Gorgeous
traditional music shares the soundtrack with pulsing electronic beats,
while inventive dance numbers lift this wild fantasia into La La Land
territory.”
Programmer Diana Sanchez on Lina from Lima: “At once a
delightful renovation of the musical comedy and a timely examination
of the realities of migrant labour, the inventive debut fiction feature
from Chilean director María Paz González tackles weighty themes
with a light touch and a saucy sense of humour . . . Most remarkable
are the moments when Lina’s humble surroundings transform into
soundstages upon which she bursts into songs that fuse Peruvian folk
music with music-video tropes and, in one of the film’s most dazzling
sequences, a miniature version of a Busby Berkeley extravaganza.”
François Girard’s The Song of Names, from the book by Norman
Lebrecht (slippedisc.com), is the director’s latest sweeping historical
drama, about a man searching for his childhood best friend – a Polish
violin prodigy orphaned in the Holocaust – who vanished decades
before on the night of his first public performance. Clive Owen and
Tim Roth star in Girard’s return to a music-themed film (after 32 Short
Films About Glenn Gould and The Violin).
The Audition, Ina Weisse’s follow-up to her acclaimed film, The
Architect, focuses on a violin teacher in a music high school in
Germany who favours one of her students over her own son. “What
fascinates me is the process of how music is created,” Weisse told
cineuropa.org. “The husband of [star] Nina Hoss’ character is a violin
maker, so this will be an opportunity to show how sounds evolve.
Featuring the German-based Kuss String Quartett.
Renée Zellweger plays Judy Garland in English theatre director
Rupert Goold’s Judy, an adaptation of Peter Quilter’s successful
musical End of the Rainbow, which chronicles the final months
of Garland’s life in London before her death in 1969. As she
prepares for her five-week sold-out concert run, Garland battles
with management, charms musicians, reminisces with friends and
adoring fans and begins a whirlwind romance with Mickey Deans,
her soon-to-be fifth husband. According to Vanity Fair, Garland’s
daughter Liza Minnelli wrote on Facebook in June that “I have never
met nor spoken to Renée Zellweger . . . I don’t know how these
stories get started, but I do not approve nor sanction the upcoming
film … in any way.”
Australian director Unjoo Moon makes her feature film debut with
I Am Woman, the story of Helen Reddy who, in 1966, landed in New
York with her three-year-old daughter, a suitcase and $230 in her
pocket. Within weeks she was broke. Within five years she was one of
the biggest superstars of her time, the first ever Australian Grammy
Award winner and an icon of the 1970s feminist movement. She wrote
the anthem, I Am Woman, a rallying cry for a generation of women
to fight for change. Tilda Cobham-Hervey plays Reddy and Danielle
Macdonald plays her friend, legendary New York-based Australian
rock journalist and club owner Lillian Roxon.
With their significant others away on the battlefields of Afghanistan,
a group of British women form a choir and discover the infectious
joy of music in Military Wives, directed by Peter Cattaneo (The Full
Monty) and inspired by true events.
Riz Ahmed (The Night Of) and Olivia Cooke star in Sound of Metal,
the directorial debut of Darius Marder. According to Variety, the story
follows a drummer (Ahmed), whose life and relationship with his
bandmate girlfriend are turned upside-down when he unexpectedly
begins to lose his hearing and he must go to great lengths to recapture
the woman and the music he loves. A large number of the cast has
been drawn from the deaf community.
In Coky Giedroyc’s How To Build a Girl, based on the semi-autobiographical
novel by Caitlin Moran (who shares the screenplay credit),
Beanie Feldstein plays a 16-year-old aspiring music critic who lands
in London in the 1990s and succeeds despite the boys’ club culture
of the day.
10 | September 2019 thewholenote.com