Jane Mills announces a CALL FOR PAPERS for SISTERHOOD - A symposium hosted by the Sydney Literature and Cinema Network

Genevieve Lemon, Karen Colston, Sweetie

Sisterhood

A symposium hosted by the Sydney Literature and Cinema Network

17 July 2026

The University of Sydney

Symposium Overview

From the ancient tales of Psyche and her sisters to contemporary feminist novels and films, from the Brontë sisters’ literary explorations to cinematic adaptations of Austen and Alcott, sisterhood has been central to women’s writing and filmmaking. This symposium asks: How do literary and cinematic texts represent the complexities of sister relationships? What narrative strategies do writers and filmmakers employ to explore sisterly love, rivalry, and ambivalence? How do representations of sisterhood intersect with questions of gender, sexuality, race, class, and national identity? And how have depictions of sisterhood evolved from nineteenth-century novels through classical Hollywood to contemporary screen media? 

This symposium invites scholars of literature and cinema to explore representations of sisterhood across literary and screen texts. From novels and poetry to film and television, sisterhood has been a rich site for examining questions of female identity, desire, rivalry, and solidarity.  

Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Topics and Themes

The symposium will feature a keynote address by Associate Professor Jane Mills examining cinematic representations of female sibling relationships. Drawing on decades of scholarship and personal reflection, the keynote will explore the paradoxes of screen sisterhood, from the tender collaborations of the McDonagh sisters and Lillian and Dorothy Gish to the sororophobia of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, from the psychological complexity of Sweetie and Georgia to the alternative possibilities offered by Love Serenade and Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. Mills’ address will take us through questions such as are there films that withhold moral judgment while representing sisters with disparate attributes? Has the #metoo movement impacted how sisterhood is portrayed on screen? And how can cinema help us understand the desire to be both the same as and different from another woman, which at times makes sisterhood seem impossibly difficult?

Rebecca Frith, Miranda Otto, Love Serenade

We welcome proposals that will expand on these themes for 20-minute papers addressing representations of sisterhood in literature, film, television, and other screen media. Topics may include but are not limited to:

-       Sororophobia and female rivalry in classical and contemporary cinema

-       Sisters in specific national cinemas, film movements, or genres (horror, noir,      melodrama)

-       Sisters in documentary and non-fiction film

-       Female filmmaking siblings (McDonagh sisters, Wachowski sisters, etc.)

-       Historical evolution of sister representations from silent cinema to the present

-       Sisterhood in animation and children’s cinema

-       Lost sisters, absent sisters, and ghostly presences in fiction and film

-       Transmedia storytelling and sisterhood

-       Critical and Theoretical Frameworks

-       Psychoanalytic approaches to sister relationships

-       Queer theory and sisterhood

-       Narrative theory and sister relationships

We welcome submissions from scholars at all career stages, including graduate students, early career researchers, and established academics. 

Submission Guidelines

Please submit you abstract to sisterhoodsymposium@gmail.com by 6 April 2026. 

Abstract Requirements:

-       300 words maximum

-       Include your name, institutional affiliation, email address, and paper title

-       Include a brief biographical statement (100 words maximum)

Selected papers may be considered for publication in an edited collection or special journal issue following the symposium.

For questions about the symposium or submission process, please contact the Sydney Literature and Cinema Network: literatureandcinemanetwork@gmail.com

On Chris Blackwell and Island Records - Rod Bishop reviews a recent autobiography - THE ISLANDER My Life in Music and Beyond, by Chris Blackwell (Nine Eight Books, UK, 2022)

In 1972, the founder of Island Records, Chris Blackwell, served as executive producer on Perry Henzell’s ground-breaking Jamaican film The Harder They Come. 
A vibrant, eye-popping, reggae-pounding, rude-boy film, Blackwell had suggested Jimmy Cliff for the main role and included some of his songs on the soundtrack. After the film became a hit, Cliff walked away from any deal with Island Records and signed with EMI. 
Blackwell was disappointed: “I was upset about that because I knew the way to break him was through the rebel character he portrayed in the film. But when the three Wailers walked into the office, here was the real thing.”

Chris Blackwell today with his Blackwell Rum

In 1973, Blackwell advanced £4000 to Bob Marley and The Wailers for their first album Catch a Fire. Never had a reggae band recorded an album as a unified statement; previously they were albums made from a collection of singles.
Seeking a wider audience, Blackwell took the eight-track tapes and with The Wailers approval, added steel guitar, synthesizer, organ and clavinet for “more of a drifting, hypnotic-type feel than a reggae rhythm.” He was intent on making Marley a rock star, rather than a black musician restricted to black radio stations.
After The Harder They Come, Catch a Fire was his second Jamaican cross-over in two years. A film and an album that transported the energy of reggae, and its Rastafarian religious culture, to an unsuspecting world.
This double-hit from Jamaica was hugely successful and with Marley in his portfolio, nothing would ever be the same for Blackwell. Variety was later to call him: “indisputably one of the greatest record executives in history.”
Blackwell was brought up in Jamaica by wealthy parents: his mother was a Costa Rican born Jamaican heiress and his father came from Anglo-Irish roots. They were wealthy enough to provide him with rent, living expenses and start-up financing well into his adult life. And send him to Harrow in the UK for his public-school education.

Catch Fire Album Cover

Back in Jamaica during the 1950s, Blackwell immersed himself in the mento and calypso music of Kingston, laboriously selling records from the boot of his car to jukeboxes and the growing “sound system” dancehalls across the island.  His expertise at choosing hit tracks and working the room with Kingston’s music production industry put him in prime position to select musicians when new sounds emerged – ska, rock-steady, reggae and dub. 
At the age of 22, joined by Leslie Kong and Graeme Goodall (an Australian), with start-up funding from his parents (as you do), he established Island Records in 1959.
A record executive who still boasts of wearing shorts and “flipflops”, he relocated Island Records to London in the early 1960s where his inhouse operating style was generally regarded as “organized chaos”.
Above all, Blackwell believed in discovering virtually unknown talent who promised to have long careers, as he had done with Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley. The “underdogs, misfits and rejects” he was prepared to support even when album after album failed, stemmed from his conviction in the integrity of their musical talent, and the likelihood of that talent becoming future household names.
Island signings included the Spencer Davis Group, Nick Drake, John Martyn, Fairport Convention, Free, Sparks, King Crimson, Traffic, Toots and the Maytals, Roxy Music, Cat Stevens, Bob Marley and The Wailers, Steve Winwood, Mott the Hopple, The B-52s, Jethro Tull, Grace Jones, Nico, Marianne Faithfull, Tom Waits, John Cale, Eno, King Sunny Adé, Angéligue Kidjo, Robert Palmer and U2. 
He passed on Pink Floyd (“too boring, the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life”); and Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale (“unmarketable”); and punk (“not enough bass and rhythm”); and Elton John (“too shy and even staid”). The Rocketman didn’t speak to him for another 15 years.
Island grew into what was regarded as the greatest independent record company in the world with 100 employees in the UK and 120 in the USA.
In 1989, Blackwell sold Island to Polygram for $300 million. U2 had negotiated 10% ownership in Island in return for a delayed $10 million in royalty payments for their album The Joshua Tree, payments delayed by one of Island’s many revenue crises. U2 collected $30 million from the sale of the company.
After the success of The Harder They Come and the follow-up Jamaican film Countryman, Blackwell set up an Island film company, with a distribution division that included Kiss of the Spider Woman, Koyaanisqatsi, The Hit, El Norte, and Stop Making Sense. He has 19 producer credits listed on IMDB.
Blackwell’s autobiography is heavily detailed, poorly indexed and lacking in personality insights. I lost count of the number of “my wife at the time…” without learning anything about them.

Blanche Blackwell, "constantly pursued" by Errol Flynn

His time with Errol Flynn, who he regarded as having “helped popularize Jamaican music” during the 1950s, is an exception. Flynn, who constantly pursued Blackwell’s mother, was a role model for the young entrepreneur and his only role model in this autobiography. 
Among many Flynn anecdotes, the Tasmanian actor recommended a “crack” Australian group called The Caribs to Blackwell. A house band playing mento and calypso in a tourist hotel in Surfers Paradise in the 1950s, Flynn helped them move permanently to Jamaica where they played residences in clubs and formed the backing band for Blackwell’s early studio recordings.
Ever a pragmatist, Blackwell had unique ideas on album covers:
“I really believe if people see something that looks good, subconsciously they’ll think maybe there’s something going on inside, on the record. There were times when someone came out with a cover which was better than the record itself, so I’d have to send them back to remake the record.” 

On 4K UHD - David Hare recommends "the 4K of the year" - BEN HUR (William Wyler, USA, 1959)

Another recent release is Warner's huge and vastly gorgeous, manifestly detailed new 4K two disc (Plus third BD extras disc) steelbook set of 1959's Ben Hur, directed by the great William Wyler with a superb score (some think his best) from Miklos Rosza, second unit direction by the great Yakima Canutt for the Chariot Race and a cast of thousands including grand muscle and toga work from Chuck Heston and Stephen Boyd.

On those two let's remind ourselves of second string writer Gore Vidal (one of at least four more) on outlining the motivation for the two old adolescent friends, Judah (Heston) and Messala (Boyd) now reuniting after a youthful love affair only to be ripped apart by Judah's monotheistic zealotry. The first embrace has Heston literally slathering and drooling over Messala's neck. This barely concealed queerness gets another huge workout in the late Act 1 galley slave sequence when Jack Hawkins, fresh from The Bridge on the River Kwai takes to adopting Chuck as his "son" (one word for it) , fortuitously indeed as this grace and favour ultimately leads the "hero" into getting the rounds of a lifespan to shadow his near invisible contemporary, Jesus Christ. The movie darts around the religiosity very nicely but that's Wyler for you. A total expert at extracting the essences of narrative from the acres of flowery prose in the original novel.

Whatever else you want to make of it the show is genuinely epic with absolutely expert, tight direction from Wyler who stuck with the seemingly unwieldy 2.65 Aspect Ratio of the new Metro65 anamorphic 70mm format which manages to set everything up basically from (rarely) full wide to medium wide to occupy the focal depth with detail of importance while the script blocks and stages the players with long takes and very great, limpid technique. Wyler has a very attractive tic, not noticed by me previously, of doing edits from wider to closer shots of the same actor while speaking or listening to animate what Gore Vidal and the other credited and uncredited writers kept of the original thousand pages Lew Wallace nightmare.

The movie, I must confess has the very grand status of having introduced me to my first stirrings of homosexuality as a boy child, in particular the raft scene with Chuck and Jack Hawkins cut loose from the wreckage on the Roman barge. Hawkins and me both could not get enough of Chuck's very fine figure at this stage of his career (the year after he got Welles the gig to make Touch of Evil at Universal.) If anyone could ever be said to have tamed a performance of range and sublety out of Chuck, it was Wyler.

All the cast members are right, and fine, even Dame Frank Thring, late of Melbourne, playing Balthasar as a screaming dinner party queen. It works. He works, and everyone around him works with it. Even in his first shot and dialogue Thring manages to eyeball-undress Chuck and lick him remotely from top to toe in five seconds of screen time.

Movies like this don't get made any more. They're actually too sophisticated and the audiences are no longer there to really "get" them.

I recommend this as 4K of the year so far.

At the French Film Festival 2026 - Tom Ryan looks over ONCE UPON A TIME MICHEL LEGRAND (David Hertzog Dessites, 2024), THE PARTY'S OVER (Antony Cordier, 2024), CLASS REUNION (Jérôme Commandeur, 2025) and THE FRENCH JOB (Dominique Baumard, 2024)

Down Under’s 37th French Film Festival, courtesy of Palace cinemas, begins in a week or so. Multiple sessions around the country of 38 films spread across 37 days. To date I’ve only been able to see a few and they’re a mixed bag. But they’re also an entrée sufficient to whet the appetite for more.  

Once Upon a Time Michel Legrand / Il était une fois Michel Legrand  (2024)

The words on the dressing-room door, “Maestro Michel Legrand”, might have provided director David Hertzog Dessites with the title for his wonderful warts-’n’-all documentary about the legendary French music maker who died in 2019 at the age of 86. Instead, Dessites has opted for the “once upon a time” fairy-tale allusion that refers us both to the magic that Legrand bestowed on the world and his sense of himself as a child, encountering life with a wide-eyed wonder. For him, the film insists, the workplace was simply a playground that unleashed his adventurous spirit (and, occasionally, his temper). 

The glorious final sequence merges three aspects of his life: his moving final concert in the Pierre Boulez Auditorium at the Philharmonie de Paris in December 2018 (a couple of months before his death); a stirring montage of him in performance at various points in his career, both at the piano and wielding the baton; and a compelling interview with him shortly before he died. 

“I believe that one is born an adult or a child,” he tells Dessites, “and one doesn’t change.” Legrand clearly knows that his time is running out – his encounter with a mysterious life-threatening illness earlier in the year has prepared him for the end – and he’s not holding back. “I’ve been marked by all that matters to a child and I have forgotten all that is of no interest to a child… Destiny guides us, emboldens us, makes us lazy, lets us fly, keeps us grounded. But, in the end, we are possessed by mysterious forces that lead us where they will, and we can only follow.”

The impressionistic portrait of Legrand that precedes all this casts him as a man in love with life, the open-armed gesture of embrace that brings his performances to a close signifying a childlike joy at what he’s doing and expressing his gratitude to the musicians and the audience who’ve been sharing it with him. Director Danièle Thompson says of his collaborations with Jacques Demy, “They are films touched by grace.”  It could be a description just as aptly applied to Legrand himself.

He performs with a smile never far away, except when things go wrong in rehearsal. When that happens, we see him speaking his mind, but those who suffer his wrath don’t bear a grudge, seemingly unanimous in their recognition that “he had a wonderful way of saying sorry”, and forgiving of a man they regard as a genius.

Michel Legrand

Shot over a period of two years, Dessites’ film smartly appraises Legrand’s many achievements as a composer, performer, and collaborator. Numerous filmmakers and fellow musicians enthuse about what he brought to their work, and, combined with an abundance of interviews with Legrand over the years, all of this allows a revealing glimpse of the man behind the music (although there’s scarcely anything about his life away from his work). 

Legrand’s pleasure in what he does is winning: his pride in the way he’s always been able to surprise filmmakers with the scores he’s brought to them; his lack of interest in the accolades that have accompanied his achievements. “Hollywood has honoured you with three Oscars. How has this changed your life?” asks an eager reporter at a press conference in the US, evidently expecting gush. “Not at all,” Legrand fires back without hesitation. And you believe him.

Thoroughly researched and brilliantly assembled, Once Upon a Time Michel Legrand is a key festival highlight, an absolute treat for anyone in interested in Legrand, 20th-century music, or French cinema.

 

The Party’s Over! / Classe Moyenne (2024)

Antony Cordier’s fourth feature certainly doesn’t pull its punches. In the pitch-black comedy, the class war is full-on, it’s being waged between two families and the battleground is a luxurious estate in the south of France. 

The Trousselards are filthy rich. Lawyer Philippe (Laurent Lafitte) is the obnoxious patriarch; Laurence (Élodie Bouchez) is his past-it actress wife; and their spoilt-brat daughter, Garance (Noée Abita), has brought Mehdi (Sami Outabali), her law graduate fiancée from the other side of the tracks, to meet her parents at their holiday home. 

The Azizis work for the Trousselards and try to do the right thing by them. Father Tony (Ramzy Bedia), apologising to teenage daughter Marylou (Mahia Zrouki), leaves in the midst of her birthday dinner to fix some blocked water pipes in his employers’ villa. Like his supportive wife, Nadine (Laure Calamy), he knows to keep his discontent under wraps. But the Trousselards aren’t easy to please.

Ramzy Bedia, Mahia Zrouki, Laure Calamy
The Party's Over

And when things go wrong and the simmering tensions burst through the surface order, the two families find themselves drawn deeper and deeper into dangerous waters, exacerbated by all the male chest-beating, female duplicity and unspoken racial tensions. Mehdi offers to serve as the go-between to try to ease the escalating agitation, but nobody seems willing to compromise.

Cordier’s approach is almost anthropological as his film tracks move and counter-move in the conflict. The Trousselards might be loathsome from the start, but once the Azizis’ long-suffering toleration of their employers’ condescension explodes into open antagonism, nobody can be trusted to do the right thing. They’re all products of their places in the social hierarchy. Even Mehdi’s motives become increasingly murky. And, at the end, only the picturesque, sun-drenched setting remains as it was when the film began.

The Party’s Over! was originally released in France as Classe Moyenne, which translates literally as “Middle Class”, or “Bourgeoisie”. The English-language title provides a neat enough ironic pun, declaring that something’s coming to an end, that the “good times” are over, but it only seems appropriate after you’ve seen the film. Beforehand, it might be announcing a belated sequel to a Blake Edwards film with Peter Sellers.

 

Class Reunion / T’as pas changé

Laurent Lafitte, who plays the reprehensible Philippe Trousselard in The Party’s Over! is at it again in Jérôme Commandeur’s lacklustre comedy, Class Reunion (originally, T’as pas changé, which literally translates as "You Haven't Changed".

His Hervé is one of a trio of now middle-aged men who were at school together 30-or-so years ago at Clemenceau High, where they fancied themselves as “the school stars”. The other two are the seriously depressed Jordy (played by Commandeur), whom we initially meet contemplating suicide, and Maxime (François Damien), an arrogant jerk of the first order, and they’re brought together again, along with other classmates – including Vanessa Paradis as lost soul Anne – by the death of a schoolmate. 

Vanessa Paradis and Jérôme Commandeur,
Class Reunion

Alas, aside from a couple of funny moments – including a blackly comic funeral scene farewelling the not-so-dear departed to the tune of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” – Class Reunion falls flat. And the lack of compromise that gives The Party’s Over! its oomph is in sharp contrast to the tedious reassurance proffered here.

Set alongside the present-day reunion, the flashback scenes indicate that, initially at least, little has changed over the years (as the French title indicates): these characters led wretched lives back then and have continued doing so ever since. But then their reunion waves a magic wand and, hey presto!, home truths are faced, fences are mended, sins are forgiven, and everybody goes home happy. Except perhaps the audience. 

 

The French Job / Les règles de l'art (2024)

Something of a companion-piece to Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, a wry tale about disaffected masculinity and an art theft gone wrong, Dominique Baumard’s extremely enjoyable The French Job (like The Mastermind) draws its inspiration from a real-life case. In 2010, five paintings were stolen from Le Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris’s 4th arrondissement, a crime that Baumard and his writing collaborator Benjamin Charbit use creatively for their openly fictional purposes. 

Three perpetrators are introduced at the start – Jo, “The Artist”, aka “the climber” (Steve Tientcheu), Eric, “The Dealer” (Sofiane Zermani), and Yoni, “The Appraiser” (Melvil Poupaud) – the plot eventually drawing them together according to their various assigned roles in the heist. But an accomplished unit they are not. 

Melvil Poupaud and Sofiane Zermani in The French Job

Each has specific skills: Jo goes about burglarising the gallery with impressive efficiency, making the job look very much like a walk in the park, although it could all have gone wrong so easily; Eric is a fast-talking, chain-vaping con artist, so clearly an untrustworthy operator that it’s astonishing that he ever gets to do business with anyone; and Yoni, is a luxury-watch repairer whose hesitant ways make him eminently corruptible and who quickly finds himself in out of his depth. Only his down-to-earth wife (Julia Piaton) seems to have any grasp of life in the real world, Yoni and Eric caught up in wild schemes that eventually (and in a supreme irony) reduce Jo to something of an innocent bystander.

Baumard directs with witty economy and the performances are all spot-on. Poupaud is brilliantly funny as the forever flummoxed Yoni, his discomfort palpable as he becomes Eric’s dupe, Zermani gets Eric’s con-man babble exactly right, and the film is a comic delight. 

While the English-language title might initially suggest something in the order of The French Connection, it quickly becomes clear that, as with The Mastermind, irony rules here. The French title, Les règles de l'art, makes a neat pun of its own, idiomatically referring to doing things by the book. Which is definitely not the case with this lot.

On Blu-ray - David Hare discovers Otakar Vavra and his film KRAKATIT (Czechoslovakia, 1948)

Until now I'd never watched any 40s post-war Czech movies, indeed one was unaware of any such tradition prior to the stirring of Eastern New Waves in then-Czechoslovakia and Poland beginning in the sixties.

Whammy! Here's a 1948 Science Fiction/mnemonic Noir with a nuclear sub-thread and a cast and art direction that looks like Universal post-Weimar high contrast nitrate gimcrackery.

The astonishing screens above are from Krakatit, a movie directed by a total unknown to me, Otakar Vavra. The material is presented with the most sophisticated mise-en-scene you could imagine from, say Hollywood High B pictures in the late 40s, just as Noir was tapering out as as a mode/quasi-genre/ethic and giving way to post-war paranoia.

Vavra's film involves a moderately convoluted narrative of near-death leading to a rediscovery of past buried weapons now hidden around the bombed wastelands of Czechoslovakia. The players are all unknown to me which only speaks to my total ignorance of this corner of cinema but all of them are effective and engaging. Releasing label for this treasure is the estimable Deaf Crocodile who have taken an already expert 2016 restoration (with input from the Norwegian Film Institute) and they've further massaged it into an even more beautiful 2K image that looks as gorgeous as the B&W nitrate stuff coming out on the big labels like Indicator and Criterion. I picked one cigarette burn/reel marker at the 50 minute -or-so mark but it's the only one and not indicative of any sub-generation patch-up material or re-comb. It's pure nitrate.

Blu-ray cover

Announcing a new publication by Cinema Reborn presenter Ivan Cerecina - ASSEMBLY LINES: MONTAGE IN POSTWAR FRENCH FILM

We are pleased to announce the publication of Assembly Lines: Montage in Postwar French Film, written by one of our Cinema Reborn presenters, Ivan Cerecina  of the University of Sydney)   Click here for Ivan's website

The book examines the re-emergence of montage as an aesthetic figure and historiographical principle post-1945, via a study of the early films of three important filmmakers of that postwar generation: Nicole Vedrès, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker. It is published by the prestigious University of Minnesota Press. 

 

The book is available for pre-order in Australia until the end of February for the reduced price of $40 AUD, via The Nile Bookstore

  

Readers from outside Australia can purchase the book via the  University of Minnesota Press's website 

From the Archive: On HUMAN CAPITAL (Paolo Virzi, Italy, 2013) - Tom Ryan talks to Stephen Amidon &, in Part 2, director Paolo Virzi, about the first screen adaptation of Amidon's novel.

The 2013 Italian film Il capitale umano / Human Capital represents the fortuitous meeting of two complementary sensibilities. One belongs to novelist Stephen Amidon (above), on whose 2004 novel (also titled Human Capital) it was based; the other to the film’s director and co-writer, Paolo Virzi. Both the novel and the film are political thrillers consistent with concerns evident in their creators’ other work. 

Amidon (who’s also reviewed films for The Sunday Times and The Financial Times) is the author of eight novels – Human Capital was the fifth – as well as two collections of short stories, the second of which, Echolocation, is due for publication later this year [see the author's website]. Most of his work deals with the ways in which social forces frame the trajectory of our lives. Underpinning the noirish thrust of The Primitive (1996), Security (2009) and The Real Justine (2015) is an empathetic humanist impulse that believes that everyone has their reasons. That assessing life simply on the basis of surface appearances is never enough. And the same concern pervades the gripping social drama of novels such as The New City (2000) and his latest, Locust Lane (2023). 

 

It’s a theme that also runs through Peter Chelsom’s 2020 adaptation of Security, which transfers the Connecticut setting of Amidon’s novel to the Italian seaside town of Forte dei Marmi. The film was made for an Italian company (Indiana Production), shot in Italian and subsequently picked up by Netflix for an international release (and can still be found there). As Chelsom put it in Variety, “It’s a kind of companion piece to Human Capital in that it’s both the same novelist and the same producers. Similarly, it starts with a crime that takes the duration of the film to solve. And while Human Capital asks the question ‘What is the price of a human life?’ Security asks, ‘What is the price we pay for security in an ever-threatened world?’”

 

Now in his mid-60s, like Amidon, writer-director Virzi (above) has made 17 films to date. Human Capital is the eleventh and his most recent is Cinque Secondi/Five Seconds (2025), which is likely to turn up at this year’s Italian Film Festival. As is evident in films such as Caterina in the City (2003), which pivots on the chasm between those who live within the circle of power in Italian society and those who exist outside it, and the family saga, The First Beautiful Thing (2010), Virzi shares Amidon’s commitment to his characters’ humanity and view of their social circumstances. 

 

As the filmmaker explains in Part 2 of this feature, in the following interview, the pair never met in person until after the movie was finished. But they got on, leading to Amidon collaborating (with several other screenwriters, even if not especially successfully) on the screenplay for Virzi’s first English-language feature, The Leisure Seekers (2017), starring Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren.

 

                                                                        ***

 

Amidon’s Human Capital takes place in a superficially comfortable Connecticut in the spring of 2001 (the date becomes significant). A compelling story of our times, it winds together the experiences of three families implicated in the hit-and-run killing of a cyclist. As it does so, it also paints a savagely sardonic portrait of the workings of contemporary capitalism.

 

Virzi’s Human Capital shifts the setting to the wealthy Brianza region in northern Italy, changes the names of the characters, rearranges the chronology of the plot – the cyclist’s death happens at the start rather than a third of the way in – and adjusts the dramatic emphases accordingly.

 

Intriguingly, the respectable 2019 remake of Human Capital, (available for rental on Amazon Prime), written by Oren Moverman and directed in the US by Marc Meyers, returns the drama to Amidon’s Connecticut setting. But, acknowledging the writers of Virzi’s film in the closing credits, it also begins with the cyclist’s death, its subsequent withholding of information about who was behind the wheel of the car lending the film a whodunnit thread.

 

                                                                        ***

 

I interviewed Amidon by email and Virzi by Skype late in 2013, for a feature I was writing about Human Capital for the arts pages of The Australian.    

Interview with Stephen Amidon

 

“I think Stephen must be genetically Italian.” 

(Peter Chelsom, Variety, June 22, 2020)

 

“I sometimes feel I should borrow Trollope's How We Live Now as the title for all my books.” (Stephen Amidon)

TR: Why does it take an Italian production to adapt your novel to the screen?

 

Stephen Amidon: Well you might ask. My books have always done pretty well in Italy for reasons I do not fully understand, so it was not entirely surprising. But, still, the fact that Paolo Virzi was able to make a successful adaptation of this very American story remains a source of great surprise to me. I think the fact that the book's themes – money, greed, the often-crippling love for our children – are universal might explain a lot. But I also put it down to plain old serendipity.

 

When did the filmmakers approach you? What promises did they make to persuade you to release the rights? 

 

I received a call from an Italian writer/journalist named Antonio Monda in the summer of 2011 saying that Paolo wanted to talk to me. Antonio is something of a celebrity in America – he is a real rainmaker who runs an actual salon in his New York City apartment, where famous people gather every Sunday. (I've never been). Anyway, Paolo wrote me a charming and intelligent letter with his take on the story, and that was all it took. He got it. I'd seen two of his movies already so I knew he was good. I must confess, the idea intrigued me more than worried me.

 

You must feel gratified by the film’s nomination for the best foreign film Oscar?

Very gratified, especially for Paolo, the actors and screenwriters Francesco Bruni and Francesco Piccolo. They really worked very hard and with great inspiration, so any recognition they can get is well-deserved. I am also pleased that they were able to win the Davide di Donatello award – Italy's Oscar – over stiff competition that included Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty (2013), which won last year's Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

 

Do you see all of the characters as victims in one way or another?

 

Absolutely. I believe that capitalism in its current iteration really does have a tendency to distort human behaviour and relationships. As Herbert Marcuse pointed out, all these technological breakthroughs of the past 100 years should be decreasing the amount or work and stress we are experiencing, and yet it seems to be having the opposite effect, with crippling debt and longer work weeks and ever- expanding material aspiration. It's crazy. And then there is the notion of false needs. Drew [Dino in the film] has a perfectly good life which he almost destroys because he wants more; Quint [Giovanni] is a multi-millionaire and yet he works himself nearly to death to accumulate more wealth. It’s like they are bewitched by money.

 

What do you feel about the changes Paolo Virzi and his co-writers have made?

For example, the different ending?

 

I really don't have a strong opinion about this, though I know others do. To be honest, though, I sort of liked it. I feel like I can be somewhat brutal with my poor characters – it's nice to see someone else cutting them some slack.

 

And the shift of the accident from Chapter 10 to the film’s opening?

 

I think one of the master strokes of the screenplay is the way it re-arranges certain plot elements to make the story more coherent as a filmed drama. The relocation of the accident to the opening scene is one of these inspired changes.

The variation to your structuring of the story? [While the novel moves back and forth between four characters, with occasional temporal overlaps, the film rewinds events through the experiences of three of them before, like the book, bringing them together for the “Final Chapter”]

 

I actually wrote a screenplay of Human Capital for an American producer many years ago, and I feel that I was in some ways defeated by my own narrative structure. The changes made by Paolo, Bruni and Piccolo had me slapping my forehead. Of course!

The transformation of Carla’s project from a cinema one to a theatre one? 

 

I was so taken with Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi's performance that I hardly noticed it. It didn't really change the plot at all, so I was fine with it.

 

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Human Capital

The reduction of Luca’s uncle/your David to a peripheral character?

This was disappointing, and I know Paolo would have liked to do more with David. He was one of the book's main characters, and also one of my favourite ones. To be honest, I think it was simply a matter of fitting him into the running-time.

 

The film, I think, makes the adult characters in the film, especially the male ones, much harder-edged, less sympathetic than they are in the way you flesh them out in the novel. Are you comfortable with this?

 

I’m not being coy, but that's a very difficult question for me to answer. I've always been fond of this book and its characters, so when I saw the movie I was sort of like a child sitting in wonder, rather than a film critic (a job I held in London for several years, as it happens).  

 

My point is I brought so much knowledge about them to my experience that I felt very sympathetic toward them. But I see your point. People talk about film and novels in the same breath, but they are such incredibly different media. I believe a lot of the very astute points you are making have more to do with the demands of producing a movie rather than deep aesthetic choices. Characters have to be more vivid, more external. Their dramas are performed, rather than inwardly felt. This can lead to them becoming more extreme. 

 

I see your novel as “a story of our times”. How does that sit with your feelings about it?

My main comment is thank you – that was my intent. I've always tried to follow Tom Wolfe's suggestion that novelists need to provide a snapshot of the times in which they find themselves trapped. I sometimes feel I should borrow Trollope's The Way We Live Now [1875] as the title for all my books.

 

In terms of its ironic function, do you think the film changes anything by replacing 9/11 with a downturn in the Italian economy?

My American editor once remarked that Human Capital is the only novel he knows that uses 9/11 as a deus ex machina – a hedge-fund manager bets on markets to fall and benefits mightily when the Twin Towers tumble, allowing him to save his career and rescue his family.  

 

But, yes, I think that the film might lose a little not having this hugely ironic signpost, but makes up for it by having Valeria deliver that incredible money line (which I did not write) to her husband as they prepare for their victory party:  "You bet on the downfall of this country, and you won." 

 

If you’d been directing the film, what would you have done differently?

 

I would have failed!  

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Part Two - Tom's conversation with Paolo Virzi will be published shortly