How To Talk To Girls At Parties
John Cameron Mitchell gives us the answer
Film. After making a sensation out of competition at Cannes last year, How To Talk To Girls At Parties by John Cameron Mitchell opened the Champs-Élysées Film Festival 2018. We met the director for the occasion.
Interview : Jacky Goldberg
Since 2010 and the beautiful Rabbit Hole, we had lost track of John Cameron Mitchell. He comes back with How To Talk To Girls At Parties adapted from a novel by Neil Gaiman (British geek guru, author of novels and comics like Sandman or Stardust).A thwarted love story, a Romeo and Juliet between a punk (Alex Sharp) and an alien (Elle Fanning), in the suburbs of London.
“A Romeo and Juliet love story, between a punk and an alien in London. ”
The movie takes place in 1977 with the release of Never Mind the Bollocks by the Sex Pistols and The Clash, by the eponym group. It is with this energy, coupled with a saucy science-fiction (based on latex, chakras, and strange sexual practices), that John Cameron Mitchell wanted to connect to. As in his cult movies Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus, music, sexuality and quest for identity are linked, like three points of a triangle that feed each other. But in How To Talk To Girls At Parties, a new belief takes root throughout the film to hatch at the end. The movie stays in a kind of spatial buddhism incarnated by the high priestess alien Queen Boadicea (embodies by a demoniacal Nicole Kidman). Her mantra : « evolve or die ». This essential evolution is symbolized by the love between Enn and Zan, whose union will form the missing chakra, the one of the heart, key to the elevation. Out of step, funny and moving, How To Talk To Girls At Parties appears as an experimental punk tale whose eccentricity is at the height of its lucidity.
L M.B.
