Sponsored by
Frozen River ends film society season
NEXT Wednesday the 2009/10 season of the Eastbourne Film Society comes to an end when the society screens the film Frozen River, this being the work for which Melissa Leo was Oscar-nominated.
As usual the screenings are at the Curzon Cinema with seats available for the general public.
This particular film is a drama which in the best sense of the term could be described as a woman's picture.
It was directed by Courtney Hunt from her own screenplay and the two leading characters are both women: one is Ray Eddy, a wife and mother deserted by her husband (this is Leo's role) and the other is Lila, a Mohawk woman played by Misty Upham who no less than Leo deserves the highest praise for her performance.
The film gains from having a striking and unfamiliar setting, the St. Lawrence River on the Canadian border, but it is in its own right an absorbing and dramatic tale about how two desperate women get drawn into smuggling people across that border in order to earn enough to survive.
When Quentin Tarantino praised the film, he described it as an exciting thriller and in some ways it is.
Nevertheless when using the phrase a woman's picture to describe it one has in mind not only the fact that women were key to the making of it but also the approach to the story.
However suspenseful certain scenes are, the heart of the movie lies in the way that two contrasted women initially hostile to one another find their attitudes changing to such an extent that their feelings are transformed.
That's an aspect which might never have been explored in the same central way had Frozen River been a film conceived by a male writer/director.
Email to a friend
Print this page
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Eastbourne
Monday 13 February 2012
Today
Light rain
Temperature: 2 C to 7 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: North west
Tomorrow
Cloudy
Temperature: 4 C to 7 C
Wind Speed: 16 mph
Wind direction: North west
