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| self-portrait of Joanna Hogg, 1980 |
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| Hogg on the set with Tilda Swinton |
CAPRICE B+ Great Britain (28 mi) 1986 d: Joanna Hogg
Expressing a fun and playful side not seen in her other films, this is Joanna Hogg’s graduation short at the National Film and Television School starring a then unknown Tilda Swinton, listed in the credits as “Matilda” Swinton, a reminder of just how early in her career this is, having met when they were just ten years old, placed in the same dormitory as boarding school students at the West Heath Girls’ School in southeast London in 1971. One thing that’s already apparent at this early stage is just how extraordinary Tilda Swinton is as an actress, exhibiting a wide range of emotions and facial expressions, where she’s just so transparently revealing. Known for playing eccentric and enigmatic characters, working with directors like Derek Jarman, Wes Anderson, and Luca Guadagnino, with no formal training, yet she’s capable of shifting between sexes and centuries, sprinkling in mainstream films with indie roles, Swinton won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Tony Gilroy’s MICHAEL CLAYTON (2007), having begun her career working for Derek Jarman in the experimental and challenging film CARVAGGIO (1986), which was made immediately following this film. She ended up making nine films with Jarman, part of a collective queer movement in London, a time when British culture was being eviscerated by Thatcherism, part of the Conservative government’s “family values” campaign that whipped up hysterical levels of homophobia when so many of her friends were ravaged by AIDS in the 80’s and 90’s, including Jarman who died in 1994, a year Swinton went to 43 funerals, all AIDS-related deaths, leaving lifelong scars that are so deep that it’s hard for her to return to London anymore. Joanna Hogg, on the other hand, moved to Florence, Italy for a year to study photography before returning to London to work as an assistant to an advertising photographer in Soho, finding herself experimenting with the equipment on weekends, switching her focus to film school after discovering Derek Jarman’s Super 8 films, who gave her a camera to make her own Super 8 film PAPER (1982), a study of kinetic sculpture artist Ron Haselden for her entry into the National Film and Television School, where she resented how she was patronized by her all-male professors who created a learning environment that was generally hostile towards women. After graduation, with few prospects of breaking into the film industry, she directed several music videos for artists such as Alison Moyet and Johnny Thunders in an era of punks and the art school cool of David Bowie, including Johnny Hates Jazz - Shattered Dreams (Official Music Video) YouTube (3:26) with 33 million views to date that reworked ideas from this graduation film, a stepping stone for a career in television over the next decade before she decided she needed to have more creative control, making her first feature film UNRELATED (2007) two decades after this thesis film was made, a straightforward character drama that is her least experimental work to date, winning praise as a “breakthrough” artist and “most promising newcomer” at nearly 50-years old.
Hogg’s relatively late career start as a feature filmmaker was an uneasy fit for most critics, too slow for commercial appeal, too psychologically remote for mainstream critics, also too white and upper class to have any contemporary relevance, yet there is always more to her films than what we see at first glance, often mystifying the viewer with its contradictory effects, as there’s something aesthetically internal that make them difficult to decipher. But for sheer joy and unbridled enthusiasm, it’s hard to temper one’s appreciation for this short mixed media film, where our protagonist is literally swallowed up by the pages of a fashion magazine, which is a bit like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, Alice in Wonderland - Falling down the rabbit hole YouTube (3:38), where you never know who or what you will encounter. All shot on a single stage, where only the backdrops change, using a camera borrowed by Derek Jarman, the film is a comic satire on the world of product placement in fashion magazines, where everything is about selling wares to as many customers as possible, where this literally transports us directly into the imaginary universe of the magazine itself, with each product model literally beckoning us to buy what they’re selling, becoming an overwhelmingly crass experience, like an inescapable nightmare. Yet the playfulness on display is endearing, especially when our guide through this magical mystery tour is none other than Tilda Swinton, with this film presenting both her and the director with their first chance at an artistic partnership, bonding together as boarding school students who “mutually loathed” private school, as it was designed to sculpt young minds for lives of privilege and produce bourgeois wives for the rich and powerful. Like her other films, this mirrors her own personal experience, as Hogg was once caught smuggling a copy of Playgirl magazine into her West Heath dormitory, and the headmistress disciplined her by seating her in her office and asking her to turn every page of the magazine and offer commentary, which this film does in glorious color, a fusion of pop color with social critique, as embodied by Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 Choses que Je Sais d’Elle) (1967), opening up a phantasmagorical world to a bespectacled and shy woman named Lucky (Tilda Swinton), becoming a dark fantasia about the fashion-magazine industry, inspired by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s THE RED SHOES (1948) and Technicolor Hollywood musicals. Lucky is a star-eyed young woman who is religiously obsessed by the glamor magazine Caprice, awaiting each new issue with a devoted fandom that knows no bounds, living and dying with each release, yet right from the outset the magazine cover girl (Rachel Byrd) speaks to her, inviting her inside, taking a zany dive into the surreal depths of 1980’s candy-colored pop and fashion culture, something of a cartoonish blend of comic touches and glam spectacle.
Written by Hogg and David Gale, shot by David Tattersall, this whimsical film was not understood at the time, viewed as a superficial, juvenile exercise by her professors, the exact opposite of the more serious British social realism films being taught in film school, and can be seen as a declaration of Hogg’s independence, filtered through a postmodernist lens while filled with pizzazz and personality. Stylistically ambitious, the film has elaborate sets and dramatic lighting, fusing the exuberance of the highly stylized singing and dancing in Chantal Akerman’s visionary GOLDEN EIGHTIES (1986) with the splendorous set pieces of Powell and Pressburger, climbing a grand staircase to heaven just like the one featured in Powell and Pressburger’s A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946). Lucky is thrust in the middle of a larger-than-life fashion magazine, suddenly finding herself trapped in the pages of the magazine that initially seems like her road to liberation, where a first glimpse of the gorgeous fashion models in a pastel-colored fantasy sequence elicits her response, “I just dream of looking like that,” immediately getting a makeover and given a chic look, where she’s literally ecstatic about the idea of rubbing elbows with the people she idolizes. But as she moves through different articles of the magazine, she’s drawn deeper and deeper into a labyrinthean cave where she finds herself in a maze of photo shoots, perfume ads, fashion layouts, and society pages, with someone selling their products around every corner, all trying to trap her in their captivating world of commerce, including a Douglas Furbanks (Anthony Higgins) matinee idol, a male model in black-tie attire who romances her with suave caresses and kisses, yet she’s forced to continually keep on the move in what amounts to a vacuous consumerist wonderland, as she suddenly finds herself at odds with her own desires, moving from enchantment to disillusion. Perhaps most telling is a sequence that amounts to an entire music video, with girls in colored dresses doing a fully choreographed dance routine in front of a nightclub as Jackie Jones (Helen Cooper), “the hippest music editor Caprice has ever had,” introduces her to Billy Pez (Robert Parnell), a Billy Idol lookalike singing Games We Play, but of course, he turns out to be a cad in real life, instantly turning her off with his supreme arrogance, as all she represents to him is a potential buyer. Though dated by a synthesizer soundtrack that places the film in the 1980’s, viewers can still relate to what Lucky is going through, as it’s a different kind of transformation, where at the center of it are all the pressures thrown at young women to look and behave in a certain way. In the end, Lucky is offered a dream job at her favorite fashion magazine, but rejects it because she’d rather keep her integrity intact than sell her soul to an industry that would crush it. What’s important is the discovery of her own voice, demonstrating a feminist, formalist sensibility by standing up to these powerful forces, accentuating advertising’s corrosive effects on women’s consciousness and identity, as all the relationships on display are transactional and surface-level. For Hogg, a young woman who loved fashion magazines, this eye-opening film helps us understand the dark side of what they represent to young women wanting desperately to be accepted.
Joanna Hogg’s Closet Picks Criterion picks on YouTube (4:22)
Caprice (1986) on Vimeo entire film may be seen on YouTube (27:50)
