Category: cinema

It is easy to feel protective of Shirley Henderson on this gloomy winter afternoon. Is she warm enough? Does she want to put the heating on? “Aye, I’m OK,” she says from her home in Fife, a few strands of chestnut hair falling over her glasses as she huddles close to the laptop. “It’s a wee bit blowy out. But I’m at the age where you can get too warm, so I’m all right.” Her giggle is helium-high: the sort of sound you want to trap, like in one of those toy moo boxes, so that you can play it when you’re down in the dumps. Hearing Henderson laugh, or say “Sorry darlin’?” when she hasn’t quite heard your question makes you feel as if you’ve been cuddled.

Her allusion to the menopause, though, takes a moment to sink in. Though 58, she looks barely old enough to be online without parental controls. (No suspension of disbelief was required when she played a mother who dresses as her own adolescent daughter to sit an exam in May Contain Nuts.) Henderson came to prominence in the 1990s as one of the UK’s most probing, unpredictable character actors. After being spattered with excrement in Trainspotting, she won pivotal roles in two masterpieces: she was a soprano pining for her son in Mike Leigh’s Gilbert-and-Sullivan extravaganza Topsy-Turvy, and a feisty hairdresser smacking her lips at London life in the rhapsodic Wonderland. That was the first and best of her six collaborations with the director Michael Winterbottom, as well as the one which got her hooked on improvising.

Henderson’s new film, The Trouble With Jessica, brings her back to the capital, though this is a precisely drilled comedy, as macabre as its Hitchcockian title might suggest, with no room for ad-libs. She plays Sarah, who is about to sell her swanky London home, rescuing herself and her husband (Alan Tudyk) from financial disaster. Their closest friends (Rufus Sewell and Olivia Williams) drop in for a celebratory dinner, bringing with them the irritating Jessica (Indira Varma), who then has the temerity to kill herself in the garden, thus imperilling the sale. If only she had died elsewhere …

The corpse-shifting scheme turns out to be the making of Sarah. “She finds a kind of freedom in being the leader,” Henderson agrees. “She has this brutal, selfish idea. But what I was trying to do was get you to like her and feel a wee bit sorry for her. It’s OK to hate her for a moment. Yes, she’s bad but she is also sad and trapped. And she’s a smart lady to come up with all this!”

Henderson is the movie’s engine, her arms going like pistons as she scurries around placating police officers, nosy neighbours and the house’s prospective buyer. The sound of her heels clicking on the floor becomes a kind of metronome against which the action is paced and played. “I started to hear that clickiness myself,” she says. “I thought: ‘That’s the sound of her stress.’ She is this modern woman, trying to be everything, bring up her daughter, love her husband, take on this house they can’t afford, but bits are breaking off.”

When preparing for a role, Henderson comes to her little room to experiment with accent, movement, gesture: the pencil marks that will add up to the final portrait. “I start off thinking: ‘How will I ever be able to do this? What’s the first thing I’m going to do in the wee place where I practice?’ Then gradually, you realise it’s happening. You’re not thinking too much, you’re not forcing it. It’s there.” She refers to that “wee place” with such reverence that I’m picturing a glowing grotto or candle-lit shrine. “It’s just a tiny wee room,” she says chirpily. “That’s where I am now. If I’m up here, I feel I’m away from the world.” All I can see of it is the comfy coat hanging on the door behind her.

To think, it was here – or somewhere like it in a previous home – that Henderson first worked out how Hogwarts’ bathroom-dwelling ghost Moaning Myrtle would sound as she bleated her way through lines such as: “I was just sitting in the U-bend thinking about death.” It was here, too, that she practised warning Bridget Jones about disloyal boyfriends (“Even if he isn’t shagging her already, Bridge, he’s thinking about it”) and decided on the sad-but-sinister coochy-coo whisper of Frances, the lonely misfit manipulated by a psychopath in the second series of Happy Valley. And this must have been where she crafted her cameo as Agatha Christie in the madcap whodunit See How They Run, as well as her voice work as Quackety Duck Duck in the children’s series Lovely Little Farm and as the mewling Babu Frik in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

It was in this room, too, that Henderson would have worked out how to play the frantic Sarah in The Trouble With Jessica – if she’d been given more time, that is, rather than being offered the role three days before she was due on set. Possibly someone dropped out at short notice, she concedes. But this is also the way independent movies work, with the money often falling into place at the 11th hour. That’s how it was in 2017 with Never Steady, Never Still, where Henderson had just three weeks to adopt a Canadian accent and perfect the tremors of a woman suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

This shrewdness and versatility have made her a mascot of the international indie and arthouse scenes. She has worked with Kelly Reichardt (on the frontier western Meek’s Cutoff) and Todd Solondz (on the Happiness sequel Life During Wartime). She played Tilda Swinton’s PA in Bong Joon-ho’s Okja, and a tormented crone mutilating herself in pursuit of youth in Matteo Garrone’s Grimm-like Tale of Tales.

Film-making is always a circus. Three days to prepare for The Trouble With Jessica, though, sounds more like a farce. “It was manic,” she admits. “I had a ton of questions but there was no time.” Did she at least have her own dinner party memories to draw on? “You mean grownup dinner parties with couples?” she asks. “I don’t live that kind of life, do you? I’d rather go out to a restaurant because then you can get away quick if the chat gets too heavy.” What about hosting one? “No, no,” she says, covering her face with her hands. “I’d take everybody out before I did that.” Kill them, you mean? “Yeah, I’d get rid of them all. Haha! No, I’d take them out for supper, or for ice-cream. Let’s go out for pudding. Let’s go to the cinema.”

Or to the theatre. Henderson had one of the proudest moments of her career in 2018 when she won an Olivier award for playing a woman suffering from dementia in Conor McPherson’s stage musical Girl from the North Country, which was brimming with radical new arrangements of Bob Dylan numbers; Henderson’s rendition of Like a Rolling Stone, evolving from tentative to rollicking, was especially sublime. During her acceptance speech, she referred to her teenage diary, written when she arrived in London from Kincardine at 17 to study at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where she was part of the same intake as her future Happy Valley co-star Sarah Lancashire. Henderson had given herself five years to sing on the London stage. It took a bit longer than that. Then again, she’s been busy.

How would she describe herself back then? “I was a wee girl with a wee Dannimac raincoat,” she says. “I knew nothing. I didn’t know I knew nothing. But that was fine. I wanted to learn. As a person, I was very quiet. Not chatty like I am today!”

She said in her speech that when Girl from the North Country arrived, it was everything she had been looking for. What is she looking for now in a script? “It’s a feeling,” she says. “A nervous feeling. But good nervous. Not a feeling like I know I can do it – I never feel that – but that I want to jump in and find out.” I think back to something she said earlier, when she was describing her character in The Trouble With Jessica. “My own natural energy, I suppose, is to always keep going. She has that too. She’s not done yet.” Neither is Henderson. Not by a long chalk.

Nearly seven years ago, the film-makers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine went to Texas to see government in action, albeit one run by teenagers. The country was well into the Trump administration – Muslim bans and kids in cages dominated the headlines – when the two began filming an annual American Legion convention known as Boys State, a weeklong mock government simulation for 1,000 high school boys, in the summer of 2018. The duo tried to film a similar state program for girls, but were rebuffed; they ended up with Boys State, an incisive Apple TV+ documentary that captured the chaos, promise and peril of young masculinity in the US and went on to win the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020.

But what if the girls were present? How well can a government simulation work without women? “There was unfinished business at Boys State,” McBaine told the Guardian, “which is that every time a cluster of boys or the legislature or even candidates at Boys State brought up the topic of abortion, it got very awkward very quickly. Because to their credit, many of the boys felt like it was not okay to talk about that issue without girls in the room.” The two wanted a Girls State, where such issues would be top of mind. “What we didn’t know, timing-wise, was how top of mind it was going to be,” said McBaine.

Girls State, the duo’s follow-up for Apple TV+, was filmed in Missouri in June 2022, mere days before the supreme court officially overturned Roe v Wade. The film buzzes with energy, from abortion supporters to opponents (and there are both), that critical decisions are about to be made for them. “We knew that we were there talking about girls’ political issues. And then in a couple of weeks, men would decide it for us,” said Nisha Murali, a judicial branch participant who brought with her an annotated copy of the leaked Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health decision. “The knowledge that in real life, it wasn’t actually in our control and the fact that we were going to see a very concrete example of it not being in our control, influenced the way we interacted with politics at Girl State.”

Like its predecessor, Girls State embeds with several participants for a verité-style weeklong tour of hopes and heartbreak, dorm room hangs and rallies, speeches and mock proceedings. As in Texas, the Missouri girls program skews white; one participant, Tochi, ruefully notes that she’s probably the first Black person some participants from small, rural towns have met. Though still strictly separated by gender, Missouri Girls State was held concurrently to the boys for the first time in 2022, at the same campus. The program would necessarily be different from the boys in some ways – less testosterone, of course. A different navigation of social pressures and expectations. Fewer actual lawmakers available to bless the proceedings. Significantly less precedent in state and federal government, as the glass ceiling remains merely cracked.

But the differences, as observed by the film-makers and noted by the participants, felt more stark and corrosive. There were lectures on dress code (not so for the boys) and rules on never walking alone, because they’re sharing the campus with boys. Formal proceedings were undercut by a current of boosterism, an emphasis on “hey, girl!” positivity and sparkles rather than the gristle of government. “It just had an immediate kind of, like, child’s birthday party vibe,” said McBaine. “And that was in contrast to these girls that we just met and spent a lot of time with, who were debate champions, student body presidents, accomplished kids.”

“It was a lot more feminist empowering, and all that,” said Emily Worthmore, a Tracy Flick-type striver who immediately began a campaign for the program’s highest office of governor. “I did feel like it took precedent over the importance of politics as part of the program. And I didn’t think that that was necessarily fair to girls.” Part of the film’s enjoyment is watching the girls’ dawning awareness of the program’s patronizing limitations; Worthmore, a self-professed conservative, turns her intensity from electoral politics to chronicling the differences between the two. Her critiques find common ground with two liberal gubernatorial candidates, Cecilia Bartin, a fiery public orator, and Faith Glasgow, more blunt and intense.

Whereas Boys State dove headfirst into the politicking, from earnest canvassing to dirty tricks, Girls State takes its time. The participants declare their political identities, go to pep rallies, banter about having friends from the other side of the aisle over cafeteria trays, sing Pitbull lyrics while gathering early in the morning. “The way we edited the film is a direct representation of how we felt and what we witnessed that week, which is that the girls program is very slow to get started and get into its politics,” said McBaine. Boys State immediately divides the participants into two groups, leading to intense tribalism, but also “that they build their parties from scratch and therefore get into the meat and potatoes conversations more quickly, have more time to debate them. So it feels more substantive and more adult.”

The difference in pace was frustrating; as one participant puts it in the film, “I’m a little sick of the fluff.” Still, the girls eventually get down to business, debating a supreme court case on abortion rights and electing a governor, on both platform and personality. Throughout, there’s a tension between digging into one’s beliefs and fear of engaging too deeply; in a country this polarized, with this many girls from so many towns across the state, the third rail is always within reach.

“It’s not a naive optimism that they embody. They’re very aware of the barriers that they face in their lives and the existential threats they face politically and globally,” said Moss. “And yet they aren’t cynical and they do throw themselves into this process of politics and beyond Girl State.”

As in politics, life goes on, even as gridlock remains or confidence falters. The film ends with a haunting post-script on the end of Roe v Wade, as well as several trajectories projecting out of the conference crucible into college. Worthmore and Murali have returned to volunteer at a somewhat reformed Girls State; Glasgow is studying political science at the University of Missouri. “None of us know what we’re doing. We’re all insecure. We’re all anxious. We’re all terrified,” said Bartin, now a freshman at Brown University. “But how you present yourself doesn’t have to be all consuming. Being a woman, I think we’re told so often that you have to present yourself a certain way. That’s not something that men are told,” she added. “Present yourself how you want to and let the world accept you.”

Despite the stakes outside the mock government halls, the girls maintained a remarkable, hopeful sense of curiosity, a desire to hear each other out. “I think we get really caught up in our own echo chambers and own social circles, and we forget that we’re all people,” said Glasgow. “And that if we’re able to talk about where our opinions come from, we can gain a deeper understanding for the other side, maybe compromise on some issues or, if nothing else, continue to love each other more.”

During one fateful week in June 2000, terror gripped the town of Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as fighting between the armies of Rwanda and Uganda left thousands dead, injured, or disabled. Years on, the harrowing bloodshed, named the “six-day war” by local people, remains a taboo topic. Shedding light on the plight and resilience of the survivors, prolific documentarian Dieudo Hamadi follows their tireless mission for reparations, as they set sail to the capital Kinshasa where they will present their demands to the government.

Shot in intimate closeup, the difficult journey constitutes the film’s emotional centre. Avoiding maudlin sentimentality or voyeuristic ethnography, these boat sequences offer an unvarnished, clear-eyed look at the interpersonal dynamics of a marginalised community in which both solidarity and discord coexist. Conflicts are inevitable; the survivors are crammed on to a rudimentary wooden barge with plastic tarps as their only shield from torrential rain and other harsh weather conditions. At one point, one man loudly laments the quality of the food provided by the women, to their dismay. Against these moments of tension, a shared resolution in seeking compensation from a negligent system emerges as a uniting force, one that cuts across private differences.

The brutal reality endured by the disabled victims – which includes inadequate prosthetics, financial precariousness, familial maltreatment, and more – is punctuated with scenes from a play written and performed by the survivors themselves. This radical, formally inventive interplay between documentary and fiction embodies the full sweep of political resistance: against the obstacles of political indifference, the film sees the path towards revolution and justice as one that brings together direct action and creative expression.

Born in London, Imogen Poots, 34, was cast in the film V for Vendetta when she was in her teens. In 2013, she played the daughter of porn baron Paul Raymond in The Look of Love and won best supporting actress at the British independent film awards. Her other films include 28 Weeks Later, Vivarium, Green Room, The Father and The Teacher. She stars as Rose Dugdale in Baltimore, which has just opened in cinemas. She lives between London and New York.

What is your greatest fear?
Cockroaches.

What was your most embarrassing moment?
I once asked a young woman if she had ever heard of the musician Laura Marling, insinuating I knew Laura Marling, to which she replied: “I am Laura Marling.”

Aside from a property, what’s the most expensive thing you’ve ever bought?
Therapy.

Describe yourself in three words
Two sturdy teeth.

What would your superpower be?
Curing insomnia with the flick of a wrist.

What makes you unhappy?
Lukewarm coffee.

What do you most dislike about your appearance?
I’ve learned to roll with it.

If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?
Video rental.

Who would play you in the film of your life?
Barry Keoghan in a big blond wig.

What scares you about getting older?
I’m actually looking forward to getting older.

Who is your celebrity crush?
One of my favourite authors, Renata Adler. There is a black and white photograph of her with this long braid and it’s so hot.

Which book are you ashamed not to have read?
I’ve been lugging around Doris Lessing’s books, which I have yet to read.

What did you want to be when you were growing up?
A visual artist.

What is the worst thing anyone’s ever said to you?
People give me a hard time about my hats. Over Christmas, this drunk woman shouted something about me having a shit hat because I had a red beanie on. Last week at a party, someone gave me a hard time for wearing a cap. I just think about melting ice caps when this happens.

What is your guiltiest pleasure?
Saying thank you very much with a curtsy when somebody tells me how wonderful I was in a play or a film because they’ve mistaken me for another actor.

What does love feel like?
Completely nuts.

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
I do this thing where I say, “Have I told you this before?” before I’ve said what the thing is. I did this to my friend last weekend and she said, “Imogen, I don’t know what you are about to say.”

If you could edit your past, what would you change?
I would have been OK with feeling shy. In my teenage years, I thought being an actor meant that you had to be a little more performative.

When’s the last time you changed your mind about something significant?
I always thought I would be a terrible driver because I’m sort of a wafty person, but it turns out I am very good at staying in between the lines. I passed my test last year.

What keeps you awake at night?
All of it.

Film-makers Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy have a restless creativity and alertness to ideas which continues to be uniquely valuable. Now they have made a vivid, intense, true-crime drama about the inner life of the late Rose Dugdale, the wealthy English heiress and debutante who was radicalised at Oxford, joined the IRA and in the early 70s was involved in an art theft from a stately home in the Irish republic – and also helped drop homemade bombs from a stolen helicopter on to a police station.

Baltimore should really be seen in tandem with Lawlor and Molloy’s recent personal essay film The Future Tense about the film-makers’ own complex sense of evolving identities in Ireland and England, inspired by their own experiences making this Dugdale movie. With great intelligence and care, they make the most of a mid-range budget; a bigger Hollywood biopic would undoubtedly have given us Rose’s debutante ball at Buckingham Palace and the later bizarre helicopter attack as two big set pieces (perhaps with two star names in cameo for the royals in the ball scene). Instead, Lawlor and Molloy stage something that is smart and supple and more intimate: the heist scene with three other IRA men, with its chaotic and paranoid aftermath, intercut with moments from her own girlhood, presented as memories or fragments, equivalent in dramatic value to Rose’s nightmares and her terrified sense of what she still might have to do.

Imogen Poots is excellent as Dugdale, seen almost throughout in searching closeup, wondering whether she has it in her to execute a possible witness in cold blood. Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Lewis Brophy and Jack Meade are strong as her conspirators and Dermot Crowley is outstanding as Donal, a gentle innocent bystander with fading eyesight, reading To Kill a Mockingbird in braille in his cottage as he receives a disturbing visit from Dugdale. An entirely absorbing, coolly low-key movie.