The Girls review – poignant coming-of-age romance is an understated gem of Sri Lankan cinema

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Sumitra Peries’ 1978 film about teenage sisters and thwarted romance is laden with passions that can’t be spoken aloud Here is a gem of South Asian cinema from 1978, by the Sri Lankan director and editor Sumitra Peries. With its lucid monochrome cinematography and calm, natural, unselfconscious performances, there is a freshness and warmth to this film. It is often on the brink of melodrama or soap opera, many shots having a tendency to slow zoom into the actors’ faces, and yet The Girls is in fact rather understated. A great deal of its poignancy resides in this very suppression of emotion. We are in a world of passions that can’t be spoken aloud. It is a story through whose entire running time I wistfully hoped for a happy ending, but that is what Peries ruthlessly withholds from her audience. Kusum (Vasanthi Chathurani) is a studious, serious teen from a poor family with a scholarship to a very good school. Her father is seriously ill and her mother works hard to make ends meet. She...
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Eileen review – Anne Hathaway transfixes in off-kilter thriller

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Sundance film festival: the Oscar winner gives a pitch-perfect turn in an adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s hit novel that doesn’t push its weirdness far enough

There’s a fantastically well-measured performance from Anne Hathaway in the strange, if not quite strange enough, thriller Eileen, an adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Booker prize-shortlisted novel. She’s an actor who doesn’t always find her sweet spot, admirably trying to show extensive range for a star of her high wattage, yet often not proving to be the right match for her material, big swings frustratingly filed away as big misses.

Hathaway has an outsized energy that can jar with roles that require a performer who can more convincingly, quietly disappear, and so in Eileen, where her character Rebecca is exploding into the drab world of 1960s Massachusetts as a glamorous, and potentially dangerous, bombshell, it’s a match-up that feels like kismet. Her arrival is a ground-shifter for bored 24-year-old Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) whose life consists of caring for her cruel alcoholic father (a horribly believable Shea Wigham, a sterling character actor long overdue for more attention), controlling her sexual desire and working a thankless job as a secretary at a juvenile facility. When Rebecca joins the staff as a psychologist, Eileen, like the men surrounding her, is unable to stop staring, a sudden flash of colour in an otherwise muted world.

Eileen premiered at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

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