Shirley (film)

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Movie
Original title Shirley
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 2020
length 107 minutes
Rod
Director Josephine Decker
script Sarah Gubbins
production Sarah Gubbins,
David Hinojosa ,
Simon Horsman ,
Elisabeth Moss ,
Sue Naegle ,
Jeffrey Soros
music Tamar-kali
camera Sturla Brandth Grøvlen
cut David Barker
occupation

Shirley is a thriller of Josephine Decker , who in January 2020 at the Sundance Film Festival premiered. The biography tells about the American writer Shirley Jackson , who is played by Elisabeth Moss .

action

Mid-20th century in a small Vermont town. Shirley Jackson has just published the short story The Lottery in the New Yorker , making a name for herself as an author. She lives in a spacious house with her husband, Stanley Hyman, who is a professor at Bennington College, an all-female college. He also invited Rosemary and Fred Nemser to one of their famous cocktail parties, which Shirley is reluctant to endure. The PhD student Fred is his new teaching assistant on a temporary basis.

Stanley offers the newlywed couple to live in their house until they find an apartment of their own. Rose is supposed to take care of Shirley and help with the housework, which is not an easy task since she is extremely reluctant to crawl out of bed to eat. Already at the first dinner she throws some insolence at her new flatmates. She suffers from writer's block and hasn't left the house in ages. When she goes to a faculty party hosted by the dean's wife, Shirley purposely pours red wine on a fancy couch. The horrified hostess can hardly believe that Shirley is trying to get the stain out by rubbing, and not by dabbing, as the perfect housewife does.

Rose and Fred have become permanent residents. Over the months, Rose and Shirley have grown closer. Shirley sees Rose as a kind of muse who has brought her back to writing. She is now working on her second novel, inspired by the disappearance of Bennington student Paula Jean Welden in 1946. Although Stanley is the most trustworthy critic of his wife and also wanted her to find her way back to writing, the manuscript she wrote can be about one At first he didn't approve of the missing student at his college, but then, after reading it, he had to admit that his wife had made a masterpiece with Hangsaman .

Biographical

Shirley Jackson was best known for her horror novels and stories

The American writer Shirley Jackson portrayed in the film was best known for her short story The Lottery and the novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle . In The Lottery , Jackson tells of an American village that every year randomly selects a sacrifice for ritual stoning and then actually carries it out in the story. Though she made a name for herself as a horror novel and story writer for creating an atmosphere of discomfort, her work was valued for allegory and social commentary, which she practiced with a dexterous tact. She also wrote two humorous books on parenting, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, with tips for young mothers. Her parenting books were successful precursors to books such as Jean Kerr's Please Don't Eat the Daisies or, later, the essays by Nora Ephron .

Shirley Jackson married in 1940 the literary critic and professor at Bennington College Stanley Edgar Hyman and had four children with him. In an interview, she said that despite her writing career, the focus is always on the family, raising children and the household, and writing only makes up fifty percent of her life. She died August 8, 1965 in North Bennington, Vermont, at the age of 49.

production

The film is based on the novel Shirley: A Novel by Susan Scarf Merrell , which was published in June 2014 by Blue Rider / Penguin Books. In it, Merrell tells of the writer Shirley Jackson , who lives with her husband Stanley Edgar Hyman in their home in Bennington.

Directed by Josephine Decker , while Sarah Gubbins adapted Merrell's novel for the film. Like the book, the film is more of a biographical-literary fantasy that freely mixes fact and fiction, according to Justin Chang on NPR . Even Roger Ebert critic Sheila O'Malley noted Shirley is not a biopic but rather a film about Jackson, one is told of her short stories, in style. For example, Decker made the decision to portray Shirley and Stanley as a childless couple. In reality, they had four children.

Elisabeth Moss took on the role of Shirley Jackson, Michael Stuhlbarg plays her husband Stanley Hyman. Odessa Young and Logan Lerman play their house guests Rose and Fred Nemser. The shooting took place in autumn 2018.

Singer-songwriter Tamar-kali contributed the film music . She not only used the piano and a string quartet with violins and cello for the recording , but also contributed her voice to six of the pieces. In order to create a dreamy and feverish mood, Tamar-kali allowed himself to be influenced by Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, a national Bulgarian women's choir and internationally known world music ensemble. The soundtrack album, which comprises a total of 21 pieces of music, was released for download on June 5, 2020 by Milan Records.

It premiered on January 25, 2020 at the Sundance Film Festival . From February 24, 2020, Shirley was shown at the Berlin Film Festival in the newly introduced Encounters competition section and was also nominated for the Teddy Awards . In mid-April 2020 the film should be shown as part of the Tribeca Film Festival . One month before the start of the festival, it was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and postponed to a previously unknown date. The film has been available on various streaming platforms in the USA since June 5, 2020. In August 2020 he was presented at the Sarajevo Film Festival . The online edition will take place via the in-house festival VoD platform.

reception

Reviews

Of the reviews listed on Rotten Tomatoes , 87 percent are rather positive, with the film receiving an average rating of 7.6 out of a possible 10 points. The marital conflicts and games with those from the film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Mike Nichols and his literary source .

Elisabeth Moss plays Shirley Jackson in the title role

Ekkehard Knörer writes in the taz that the center of the film is undoubtedly Elisabeth Moss , who throws herself into this role as if she had been born for it: "With good or illegible faces to bad games, in unclothed clothes, with imperious glasses, not standard-beautiful, but often attractive as if by willpower. A field of gravity of its own, made up of body and mind, a wild attractor that dominates, shapes and bends the cinematic and psychological space at will. ”The film is good, although not entirely on the level of itself, but Moss makes it an event.

Marina Ortner from the Austrian online film magazine Uncut thinks that Shirley is a film that is set in the 1950s, but still takes up topics and deals with them in a way that hits the nerve of today, an almost perfect film that simply has nothing missing, an aesthetic and intellectual experience that appeals to all the senses. Ortner explains about Sarah Gubbins' exciting, clever and snappy script that not only tells about the search for these two women for their identities, but also examines the structural disappearance of female personalities in married households in the 1950s. This is done by juxtaposing two married couples. Shirley and Stanley on the one hand, played by Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg in top form, are not a traditional married couple, but they are not equal due to Shirley's mental instability. To suddenly have a traditional wife in the house, Stanley obviously likes . The two women and their fates merge more and more into one another, and Josephine Decker feverishly tells of the madness of being (house) women and of the redemption through emancipation .

In her review, Roger Ebert critic Sheila O'Malley specifically addresses the scene in which Jackson deliberately pours her glass of red wine on the sofa at the dean's party and the hostess gasps because she is more appalled at that moment is that Jackson doesn't know how to remove such a stain properly than about the stain itself. The more you think about this scene, the more this moment becomes important: "There are women who know that they have a stain ' and there are women who haven't received the memo and instead try to 'rub off' the stain, which makes it worse. The women who 'dab' banish the women who 'rub' from the sisterhood of women. "

Awards

Hollywood Critics Association's Midseason Awards 2020

  • Award for best independent film

Berlin International Film Festival 2020

  • Nomination in the art house competition "Encounters"
  • Nomination for the Teddy Award

Sundance Film Festival 2020

  • Nomination in the US Dramatic Competition ( Josephine Decker )
  • Received the US Dramatic Special Jury Award - Auteur Filmmaking

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.sundance.org/projects/shirley
  2. ↑ a b Mark Olsen: Elisabeth Moss and Josephine Decker reveal 'inner sorcery' of Sundance premiere 'Shirley'. In: Los Angeles Times, January 25, 2020.
  3. ↑ Todd McCarthy, 'Shirley': Film Review. In: The Hollywood Reporter, January 25, 2020.
  4. ^ Peter Debruge: 'Shirley': Film Review. In: Variety, January 25, 2020.
  5. ^ A b Justin Chang: Elisabeth Moss Shines As Writer Shirley Jackson In This Smart, Surprising Film. In: npr.org, June 4, 2020.
  6. ↑ a b Ekkehard Knörer: Who's Afraid of Shirley Jackson ?: Head over heels. In: taz, February 25, 2020.
  7. ↑ a b Ann Hornaday: In 'Shirley', Elisabeth Moss delivers a ferocious star turn as writer Shirley Jackson. In: The Washington Post, June 2, 2020.
  8. ↑ a b c d e Sheila O'Malley: Shirley. In: rogerebert.com, June 3, 2020.
  9. ↑ Mike Fleming Jr: Elisabeth Moss And Michael Stuhlbarg To Star In Feature Thriller 'Shirley'. In: deadline.com, May 16, 2018.
  10. ↑ a b David Ehrlich: Sundance Wish List: 60 Films We Hope Will Head to Park City in 2020. In: indiewire.com, November 18, 2019.
  11. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jun/12/tamar-kali-shirley-original-soundtrack-review
  12. ^ Morgan Rojas: Composer Tamar-kali on the supernatural sounds of Shirley. In: cinemacy.com. Accessed June 16, 2020 (Video)
  13. ↑ Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares - Full Performance Live on KEXP on YouTube (Video)
  14. ↑ https://filmmusicreporter.com/2020/05/29/shirley-soundtrack-details/
  15. ↑ Sundance Film Festival 2020: Program. In: sundance.org. Accessed December 21, 2019 (PDF; 1.1 MB)
  16. ↑ Encounters program complete: Vitality of cinema in all its forms. In: berlinale.de, January 17, 2020.
  17. ↑ feature film. In: teddyaward.tv. Retrieved February 11, 2020.
  18. ^ Rebecca Rubin: Hugh Jackman, Pete Davidson Movies to Screen at Tribeca Film Festival. In: Variety, March 3, 2020.
  19. ↑ Marc Malkin: Tribeca Film Festival Postponed Due to Coronavirus. In: Variety, March 12, 2020.
  20. ↑ https://www.sff.ba/en/news/11339/kinoscope-2020-lineup-unveiled
  21. ↑ Shirley. In: Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved June 29, 2020.
  22. ↑ Marina Ortner: The housewife in delirium. In: uncut.at, February 26, 2020.
  23. ↑ Erik Anderson: 'Da 5 Bloods' a big winner with Hollywood Critics Association's Midseason Awards. In: awardswatch.com, July 2, 2020.
  24. ↑ Arthouse for connoisseurs and the curious: the Berlinale series "Encounters". In: Der Tagesspiegel, January 17, 2020.