Philippa Hawker

2 weeks ago | insidestory.org.au | Philippa Hawker

Spare and haunting, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These works in undemonstrative ways. The prose has an inexorable quality, a kind of flow; the accumulation of detail is graceful, precise and telling. There is an apparent simplicity in the events it describes that might suggest it would be easy to bring to the screen. But there are considerable challenges in its quiet, distilled narrative and in the nature of its central character, Bill Furlong, a restrained, elusive figure.

2 weeks ago | australianbookreview.com.au | Philippa Hawker

Umberto Eco said of Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Count of Monte Cristo (1846) that ‘it is one of the most exciting novels ever written and on the other hand, it is one of the most badly written novels of all time and in any literature’. It was the unnecessary length and the repetitions that appalled him most. Yet when he tried to produce a more elegant, distilled translation, he gave up: he began to wonder if the repetitions and redundancies were a necessary part of its structure.

4 weeks ago | insidestory.org.au | Philippa Hawker

Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada begins with the preparation of a room. There’s a practised efficiency as well as a ritual quality to the way three people unpack boxes, move furniture, shift a Christmas tree, set up cameras, monitors and lights, mark a spot on the floor with an x made out of gaffer tape. This is a rare straightforward moment in a film with an apparently simple premise: the recording of the recollections of a dying man.

1 month ago | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Philippa Hawker

In 1972, 19-year-old Maria Schneider was cast in her first lead role, opposite Marlon Brando. After the film’s premiere, one of America’s best-known critics proclaimed it a masterpiece for the ages. For Schneider, the trauma she experienced on the set of Last Tango in Paris was only the beginning. For French filmmaker Jessica Palud, Schneider’s story needed to be told, but not as it had been in the past. It was time for a different perspective.

2 months ago | insidestory.org.au | Philippa Hawker

In his enveloping, tactile Grand Tour (currently in cinemas), Portuguese director Miguel Gomes takes us on a hectic yet leisurely adventure in storytelling that blurs boundaries between past and present, fiction and documentary, black-and-white and colour, absurdity and melancholy, and mixes languages and cinematic conventions. The film begins as a story of colonial anxiety borrowed from a travel piece by Somerset Maugham.