TEETHING PROBLEMS
EARWIG A girl with teeth made of ice is just the tip of the weirdness in Hadzihalilovic’s latest...
When I was a teenager, the first films I watched by myself were horror films,” smiles French auteur Lucile Hadzihalilovic, whose surreal offerings – Innocence, Evolution and now the extraordinary Earwig – would give David Lynch nightmares. “It was mesmerising for me to see the Italian gialli or the American horrors from the ’70s.
“So much of it was expressing something deep and mysterious and complex, and sometimes very beautiful. Dario Argento’s films were very attractive and very seductive, in a way.”
Adapted from Brian Catling’s 2019 novel, Earwig is set somewhere in Europe in the mid-20th century. Within a large-but-oppressive abode shrouded in sepulchral shadows, middle-aged Albert (Paul Hilton) cares for a girl named Mia (Romane Hemelaers), each day fitting her a set of teeth that he sculpts from her own saliva, collected in vials and frozen into ice. Occasionally the phone rings and a male voice enquires after the girl. Then said voice tells Albert to ready Mia for the outside world…
Is Albert actually Mia’s father? Is the woman he dreams of his late wife, and did they once live in the country house in the painting he often stands
before? What does local barmaid Celeste (Romola Garai) have to do with anything? And who is sinister stranger Laurence (Alex Lawther)? Well, you won’t get any clear-cut answers, so better to luxuriate in the baleful beauty and menacing mystery, and to steel yourself for bursts of violence and perverse sexuality.
“Hmmm, I’ve never gone to see a shrink,” says Hadzihalilovic when Teasers points out that each of her films deal with children being readied for a rite of passage. “But I can see. Each time, I try to run away from that, and I end up talking about the same thing.”
So was her own journey into adulthood traumatic? “Well, there was nothing really dramatic,” she insists. “The thing that first affected my coming of age was very much going to see films on my own. At the time, I was living in Morocco, in Casablanca. It was mainly men in the cinema. And when I was 13 or 14, I was not allowed by my parents to go by myself, because I guess they were a bit scared that I would be harassed or something. But I went there with a girlfriend, and it was so exciting. Both the emotion on the screen, and the emotion to be part of an adult world – mainly men – in the cinema was also something very strong.”
She ponders. “Casablanca is an isolated place, in a way, and all my films are about children in isolation, being protected but suffocated. So maybe I am saying something about my teenage time!” EARWIG OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 10 JUNE.
‘All my films are about children in isolation, being protected but suffocated’ LUCILE HADZIHALILOVIC
When an impossibly good-looking Norwegian band called a-ha released their first single ‘Take On Me’ in 1985, no-one could have predicted its success. A flop when it was issued a year earlier, it was remixed and given a groundbreaking part-animated video – with lead singer Morten Harket bursting out of a comic book. The result? Number 1 in 26 countries and – by now – over a billion streams on Spotify.
As a-ha: The Movie shows, they were a lot more than one breakout smash. “I still think they are an underestimated band, the band that deserved to be respected more,” muses the film’s Norwegian director, Thomas Robsahm. “Maybe they were too handsome. Maybe the video, maybe the name of the band…” He’s not the only one who thinks this: Coldplay have acknowledged their influence, while U2’s Adam Clayton called them “misunderstood” and far more “creative” than many thought.
Retelling the a-ha story, with interviews and juicy clips from the bighaired ’80s when they were catapulted to stardom with their first album Hunting High And Low, Robsahm depicts a band that were more clean-cut than many others – touring with their spouses instead of groupies. “In a way, you could
say, at least in the beginning, it was very little sex, drugs and rock’n’roll,” laughs Robsahm. “Except with their wives!”
Covering the band’s follow-up disc Scoundrel Days, followed by the theme song for 1987’s 007 outing The Living Daylights, Robsahm goes, ahem, hunting high and low, as the band’s popularity wanes after a rock-oriented turn. After a split in the ’90s, a-ha reformed and continued touring and making albums. Initially, Robsahm’s “dream” was to film them recording their tenth LP, 2015’s Cast In Steel – something akin to The Beatles’ Let It Be film.
When that didn’t work out, he began shooting as they toured in 2016 and rehearsed for their subsequent MTV Unplugged performance. Naturally documenting a band – Morten, keyboardist Magne Furuholmen and songwriter/guitarist Pål Waaktaar-Savoy
– that’s been more on than off for well over three decades comes with issues. “The hard thing is to get them together, even for an interview, even just to talk. It’s very easy to do with them separately, but very difficult as soon as there’s something to do together.”
Now Robsahm characterises them as “friendly” to each other – rather than outright friends – but the impression left by a-ha: The Movie is a band still driven by creative urges and one that refuses to wallow in ’80s nostalgia. Touring the UK this summer, they’ve also got a new album, True North, due for release in the autumn. “What happens after that it’s impossible to say,” says Robsahm. Maybe another Bond theme? What a thought…
‘I still think they are an underestimated band’ THOMAS ROBSAHM
A-HA: THE MOVIE OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 20 MAY.