Purr-fect casting: is Orangey the most important movie cat ever?

A new retrospective celebrates the work of the cat credited with roles in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Comedy of Terrors and Rhubarb In the midst of Oscar season, it becomes evident just how much work it takes to win an Academy Award, both in on-screen work and off-screen campaigning. Consider, however, that multiple actors have won more than one Oscar. (Emma Stone, one of this year’s best actress nominees, won twice in the past decade.) Only a single cat, meanwhile, has twice won the Patsy – the Picture Animal Top Star of the Year. (The award, given by the American Humane Association, not to be confused with the Humane Society, was discontinued in 1986.) That cat is Orangey, the subject of a small retrospective at New York City’s Metrograph cinema. Plenty of rep houses will play a movie like Breakfast at Tiffany’s around Valentine’s Day; the Metrograph is going deeper into the Orangey catalogue for a wider variety of titles and genres. Breakfast at Tiffany’s does offer Orangey his mo...

Timestalker review – Alice Lowe’s anti-romcom is a darkly hilarious spin through history

The actor and film-maker’s ingenious comedy sees her play a gamut of characters who meet gory ends chasing a not-worth-it love interest

The Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly – but couldn’t be sure if the butterfly wasn’t the one having the dream about him. Film-maker Alice Lowe dreams her way into a cosmically recurring persona in this likably chaotic, flawed comedy; she plays a woman who regenerates Blackadderishly throughout the years, from the 1680s to the 1980s, forever in love with the same man, forever destined to sacrifice herself for him, almost but not quite in possession of the knowledge that this guy is unworthy of her. At each stage, the incarnations of the past are perhaps dream-memories and the personae of the future are prophecies. Or … is she just very, very mad?

In 1688, Lowe is Agnes, a humble Scottish maidservant who is enamoured of a heretical preacher (Aneurin Barnard) who is about to be executed. In 1793, she is a poutingly bored noblewoman who conceives an erotic fascination for a dandy highwayman in the Adam Ant style, with the memorably annoying name of Alex O’Nine Ribbons (again Barnard). And in 1980, with leg-warmers and a frizzy hairstyle which makes her look like Barry Gibb or the Cowardly Lion, she plays a British woman in a drolly unconvincing-looking New York who has become a stalker-superfan of a new romantic pop star (Barnard once more). In addition, she is briefly to be seen as a magician’s assistant in Cleopatra costume in 1940 and even more briefly – almost subliminally – as some kind of Jane Eyre-ish schoolmarm in 1847 who is decapitated by a carriage wheel. (This last episode is so bafflingly fleeting that some of it must surely have been lost in the edit.)

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