Telluride film festival
Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s absorbing documentary is a parallel take on their relationship and a nascent drama on artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.
Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor are artists and film-makers from Ireland who have created eerie and suspenseful psychological dramas in parallel with a strand of complex and self-questioning essay movies. They explore ideas about history and identity, ruminating on their creative selves and metatextually examining (or re-examining) their own work. You may call it the “Alfred Hitchcock” and “Chris Marker” sides to their work.
Sometimes, their documentaries act as a kind of commentary on the fiction feature they are developing at the same time: like The Future Tense, a film about the ideas encountered during a planned movie about the pro-IRA English heiress Rose Dugdale, a project which came to fruition as the drama Baltimore.
Now, they have made a strangely mesmeric, deeply personal, mysteriously stylised film called Act 3, which may itself yet herald a conventional drama about its notional subject. It is structured around Molloy and Lawlor having a weirdly self-aware dialogue about their lives together over 40 years, filmed singly in shot-reverse-shot (was each holding the camera on the other?) but speaking quietly and slowly, as if under hypnosis.
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore are such fascinating subjects. Glad this film brings their story to light.
Wait, did they film these intimate conversations singly in the same room? That sounds incredibly awkward yet artistic.
Forty years together and they still make cinema feel like a puzzle. I need to see this.