Glasgow Film Festival 2010
Learning curve In just a few years Brit actress Carey Mulligan has gone from guesting in Doctor Who to winning an Oscar nomination for her role in An Education. As her film, The Greatest, hits the Glasgow Film Festival, she tells James Mottram how she’s learning to love the spotlight
C urrently offering an enigmatic smile on the cover of Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood issue, you have to wonder how Carey Mulligan managed to stop herself beaming wildly when Annie Leibovitz took that snap. Snagging Golden Globe, Bafta and Oscar nominations for her role in An Education, in which she beautifully essayed a 16-year-old girl who falls under the spell of an older man, it’s staggering to think that she was an unknown just twelve months ago. That was before she was tagged as a ‘one to watch’ in European Film Promotion’s Shooting Star actor showcase, and before An Education and The Greatest premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Shortly after these events, Mulligan – still only 24, lest we forget – was hailed as the year’s most exciting discovery.
For once, it’s not proved to be hyperbole. While she’s proved herself adept in shouldering a lead in An Education, she’s been just as potent in supporting roles – notably as the wife of a missing marine in Jim Sheridan’s recent
Brothers. Much the same can be said for The Greatest, which receives its UK premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival. US trade paper Variety praised her ‘bracing resilience’ as Rose, a young pregnant women whose 18- year-old boyfriend is killed in a car crash. With Pierce Brosnan and Susan Sarandon cast as his parents, the film ‘lasts pregnancy’, as Mulligan puts it, as they take Rose into their home and prepare for the baby’s birth. the duration of my
Despite her appearance in Brothers and also playing a prostitute in Michael Mann’s John Dillinger biopic Public Enemies, the London- born Mulligan estimates The Greatest is ‘my biggest American accent role’ to date. Given she will soon be seen in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street sequel Money Never Sleeps, playing daughter to corporate raider Gordon Gekko, Greatest was something of a baptism of fire for the elfin-like Mulligan, who admits she felt ‘inhibition’ speaking with a Stateside brogue. ‘It’s fear of that may change. Yet The
EUROPEAN Applause
EUROPEAN Bluebeard
GALA Leaving
STATE OF INDEPENDENTS
Big Fan
WORLD She, a Chinese
Powerful Danish drama about an alcoholic actress and mother starring mighty Dogme poster girl Paprika Steen. Cineworld Renfrew Street, 1.15pm, Fri 19 and 6.30pm, Sat 20 Feb.
Provocative, sexually demonstrative French filmmaker Catherine Breillat’s take on the French folktale of a murderous aristocrat. The Grosvenor, 6pm, Fri 19 Feb. Cineworld Renfrew Street, 9.15pm, Sat 20 Feb. Steamy French drama starring Kristin Scott Thomas as a married women who leaves her husband for a hunkier younger model, but her husband proves to be a vengeful man. GFT, 6.15pm, Fri 19 Feb.
Interesting drama in the ‘obsessive simpleton’ mould from the writer of 2008 Mickey Rourke hit The Wrestler. Cineworld Renfrew Street, 7pm, Fri 19 Feb and 2.15pm, Sat 20 Feb. Humourous and quirky China to Britain immigrant comedy/drama from Chinese writer/director Xiaolu Guo, arguably the greatest living female filmmaker. Cineworld Renfrew Street, 8.45pm, Fri 19 Feb and 4.15pm, Sat 20 Feb.
22 THE LIST 18 Feb–4 Mar 2010