GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL GOING UNDERGROUND: 5 SUBWAY FILMS
A mystery screening at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival takes you beneath the city’s streets for a film event in the subway. Cinema has long had affection for the warren-like tunnels and passageways of the underground – here are five of our favourite metro films 1 THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123 (Joseph Sargent, 1974) New York City is the place to start with films set on the subway. This heist movie, starring Walter Matthau as a Metropolitan Transit Authority worker who’s forced to negotiate with Robert Shaw’s pre-Reservoir Dogs colour-coded gang of train hijackers, really gets into the operational detail of NYC’s subway system.
2 THE FRENCH CONNECTION (William Friedkin, 1971) Much of New York’s subway is, in fact, elevated above the streets. Friedkin’s gritty thriller makes fine use of that geographical feature by having Gene Hackman’s cop give chase to a criminal who’s boarded an El train by driving a car really, really fast along the street directly beneath. It’s one of the finest car chase sequences of all time, filmed for real without city permits!
3 ZAZIE DANS LE METRO (Louis Malle, 1960) The Paris Metro, arguably the second best-known subway system in the world, is put to great use in Louis Malle’s zippy social satire. Offloaded onto her uncle by her mother, who wants to spend some time with her lover, the irrepressible and uncontrollable titular 12-year-old girl decides to ditch her childminder and explore the city via public transport.
4 SKYFALL (Sam Mendes, 2012) The London Underground, the world’s oldest, was given its most spectacular cinematic treatment to date in the latest James Bond adventure, the first to use the UK capital as its prime location. In a homoerotic scene that would have had Alfred Hitchcock laughing in his grave, Javier Bardem’s gay villain throws (or thrusts) an entire (and entirely phallic) tube train at Daniel Craig. 5 KONTROLL (Nimród Antal, 2003) Older than the NYC Subway and the Paris Metro, Budapest’s Metro system received a rare cinematic outing in Nimród Antal’s black comedy (pictured). The film’s title refers to the ticket inspectors who ensure passengers pay their fares, who work in teams engaged in close rivalry and who challenge each other to ‘run the rails’, a dangerous dare akin to Pamplona’s Running of the Bulls. (Miles Fielder)
progresses, you begin to see that she’s a different kind of species, a different breed of person from the others. She’s fragile even though she wants to appear strong, and Nicole brought these qualities.’ Filmed in Nashville, Tennessee, Stoker relocates the macabre feel of Chan- wook’s celebrated Vengeance Trilogy (Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance) to the US, with the director’s regular cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon creating a lush, beautiful sheen that belies the dark, twisted motivations of the characters. Lauded for his soundtrack for Drive, Clint Mansell contributes a dramatic score, but it’s a collaboration between Chan-wook and Phillip Glass that creates Stoker’s most striking scene; a piano duet between India and Uncle Charlie. Like the corridor battle in Oldboy, it’s a moment that transcends the story to create a weird, disturbing poetry of its own.
‘I decided to make my i lm consciously Hitchcockian’ ‘The piano scene was in the original script, but I could immediately see an opportunity for me. Rather than take a written piece of music from an old master, I wanted to do something entirely new, so I approached Phillip Glass. I’m a long term fan, not just of his major work, but for his less known scores, like the one he did for a film some- people might class as a B-movie, the horror film Candyman.
‘For me, this scene is not a piano performance, it’s a metaphor for sexual intercourse, and because it’s between a teenager and her uncle, it’s incestuous. Phillip told me he has a four-hand piano piece he had written as a husband and wife duet, and where the husband has to put his arm around his wife in order to play the correct notes. So if you look at the postures from Mia and Matthew, the way they move, you can see these moments of ecstasy, the roused emotion of a sexual act. At that moment, the audience can imagine that India’s uncle might be the fantasy of a young girl, or some kind of phantom . . .’
Stoker screens at Glasgow Film Festival, Sat 16 & Sun 17 Feb, and is on general release from Fri 1 Mar. ■ Secret Subway, Sun 17 Feb, see glasgowfilm.org/festival for meeting point.
24 Jan–21 Feb 2013 THE LIST 15