Good Scene / Bad Scene
Chosen by Sophie Fiennes, the director of 'hoover Street Revival'
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Your support makes all the difference.Good: 'The Virgin Spring' (Ingmar Bergman, 1960)
This is a really horrific 14th-century fable about a young girl from a rural hamlet in Sweden who is raped and murdered by a gang of goatherds. The girl's father then kills the gang, but he's traumatised by the pointless revenge and admonishes God for both acts of violence. In the final scene he picks up his dead daughter, and where her body has lain water suddenly erupts - the virgin spring of the title. There's a sensation that nature or cosmic consciousness has responded to his call - the water will wash the blood off the father's hands. It's filmed in a direct and simple way with striking black and white contrasts that emphasise the opposing forces of impending darkness and a girl's innocence. Watching these men and women living out their actions and pain has been almost gratuitous, but then the bubble of water twists the whole film to a new meaning - it ends hopefully. There's a feeling that man yearns to overcome the instinct to kill and seek revenge, and desires to be clean - like the virgin spring.
Bad: 'Secrets & Lies' (Mike Leigh, 1996)
Everybody loved Brenda Blethyn (above) in this film, but I find her performance like a cartoon of a working-class woman. When she's introduced she's in her small red-brick two-storey terraced house and starts to speak in an "ooh, sweetheart" way. Her character doesn't develop, which frustrated me. Despite the dramatic events in her life - she discovers that she's the mother of a black girl - her character remains a loveable cockney. There's no humanity or depth to her internal drama, and I worry that people are laughing at this stereotype of a stupid, working-class mother. I shoot documentary films and one of the things you never assume is that you have got your head around a character - people will always say and do the unexpected. You never get inside Blethyn's character, nor does it seem that she is allowed to be human - which is especially disappointing since Mike Leigh's process is all about encouraging actors to improvise from real life.
Interview by Jennifer Rodger
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