A WOMAN OF HER TIME: JULIE CHRISTIE

It is significant that Julie Christie (1941–) rose to fame in England in the early 1960s, a country on the cusp of social change. In one of her earliest and most emblematic roles, she played the youthful, vivacious Liz in John Schlesinger’s much-admired Billy Liar (1963). Confidently swinging her handbag and smoking cigarettes, she didn’t just dream of leaving her humdrum surroundings, she got on a train and left. As John Walsh wrote 50 years later: “It’s a movie that vividly heralded the Sixties world of freedom, romance and escape”, an emerging sensibility embodied by Christie’s character. A rising international star, her next breakout role was in Schlesinger’s modish Darling (1965), shot in London, Paris and Rome, and winning Christie the Best Actress Oscar. She ensured that her character had a “look” carefully matched to the locations, and when the film became a major hit in America her “British New Wave” style took the country by storm. The press crafted a narrative of rebellion and adventure around her, and she became a role model for a generation of women seeking a modern feminist identity – thoughtful, as well as independent and sexually autonomous. These early roles established Christie as an emblem of the “Swinging Sixties”, but this dominant public image de-emphasised her considerable gifts as an actor. The quality of her work is demonstrated by the varied and often-adventurous films she went on to make in the late 1960s and 1970s, including roles as the vulnerable, conflicted young upper-class woman in Losey’s The Go-Between (1971), as the haunted and suggestible mother in Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) and, most indelibly and touchingly, as the matter-of-fact, world-weary madam in Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). In the 1980s, Christie increasingly turned down high-profile roles in favour of auteur-driven projects and engaged deeply with the question of how to maintain her feminist principles in a highly gendered industry. The Gold Diggers (1983) was a critical turning point for Christie and director Sally Potter, using the star’s influence to convince the BFI Production Board to finance the making of a radical feminist film with an all-female crew. Christie continues to act into her 80s, with significant roles over the last three decades, most memorably as a woman slowly “lost” to Alzheimer’s in Sarah Polley’s heartbreaking Away from Her (2006). This season profiles six key performances by one of the defining actors of modern cinema.

Wednesday 6 May

7:00pm DARLING

John Schlesinger (1965) 128 mins – M

Christie’s iconic performance as an ambitious yet fickle-minded model (Diana Scott) in Schlesinger’s romantic drama won her international recognition, including the BAFTA and Academy awards for Best Actress. Schlesinger’s cynical take on the emerging consumer society of “Swinging Sixties” London follows Diana’s ascendancy up the social scale as she toys with the affections of two older men: a TV reporter (Dirk Bogarde) and an advertising executive (Laurence Harvey). The film’s moral ambiguity and frank sexuality marked a turning point in the acceptance of permissive subjects in mainstream cinema. Music by John Dankworth.

4K DCP

9:25pm BILLY LIAR

John Schlesinger (1963) 98 mins – PG

A daydreaming undertaker’s clerk drifts between fantasy and the fear of adulthood in this key work of the British New Wave, adapted by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall from their stage version of the former’s novel. One-time actor Schlesinger presides over an accomplished ensemble, with Tom Courtenay giving Billy’s evasions a sharp, restless energy. But it’s Christie – in her breakout role – who jolts the film awake. As the incandescent Liz, she embodies the possibility of a life beyond Billy’s half-hearted daydreams, her spontaneity and emotional clarity cutting through the film’s greyscale malaise.

Wednesday 13 May

7:00pm MCCABE & MRS. MILLER

Robert Altman (1971) 121 mins – MA 15+

A brothel entrepreneur (Warren Beatty) joins forces with an opium-addicted madam (Julie Christie, in a wonderfully modulated performance). Altman’s sleety folk Western is one of his most affecting and sadly humanistic films. Loosely based on Edmund Naughton’s novel, Altman’s moody masterpiece is an extraordinarily atmospheric and intemperate portrait of frontier life, the rise of modern capitalism and the “beautiful losers” who populate his greatest work. Hauntingly scored with songs by Leonard Cohen, it also features Shelley Duvall, Michael Murphy and Keith Carradine. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond pre-flashed the film stock to create the evocative, de-saturated images; Pauline Kael called it a “beautiful pipe dream of a movie”.

4K DCP.

CTEQ ANNOTATION
Just Some Jesus Looking for a Manger: McCabe & Mrs. Miller
by Adrian Danks

9:15pm THE GO-BETWEEN

Joseph Losey (1971) 116 mins – M

Christie plays a romantic young aristocrat in this exquisitely judged English pastoral drama set at the end of the Victorian era (where the past is indeed a “foreign country”). Seemingly resigned to the overwhelming influence her social class will have on her future, she confides in a schoolboy who visits for the summer holidays. In L. P. Hartley’s novel, the boy’s narration as an old man frames the story, but Harold Pinter’s brilliant adaptation also uses a flashforward technique to undercut the tale’s nostalgia. Winner of the 1971 Cannes Palme d’Or, its wonderful cast also includes Alan Bates, Edward Fox, Michael Redgrave and Margaret Leighton. Music by Michel Legrand.

4K DCP.

Wednesday 20 May

7:00pm THE GOLD DIGGERS

Sally Potter (1983) 89 mins – G

Made with an entirely female crew and partially shot in Iceland by Babette Mangolte (Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman…), this landmark of 1980s feminist counter-cinema emerged from a unique moment in film history. When the film’s protagonist (Christie) has to try to recollect her memories in order to discover who (or what) she is, the viewer shares her labour in putting the fragments together. An inventive and provocative fantasy of song and dance featuring an abundance of allegorical motifs, forking narratives and cinematic riddles, its wilfulness and “determination to laugh in the face of [male] power” (So Mayer) unsettled many contemporary critics.

8:45pm AWAY FROM HER

Sarah Polley (2006) 110 mins – M

Christie was nominated for an Academy Award for her “career-defining performance” (Jonathan Rosenbaum) as a woman whose diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease reveals a wedge in her marriage to Grant (Gordon Pinsent). Tender scenes are set against an idyllic snowbound landscape, made picturesque so as to underline the cruelties of ageing. Adapted from a short story by Alice Munro, Polley’s debut feature is a small-scale drama and an actor’s showcase, with Christie’s career-capping performance standing out. With Olympia Dukakis and Michael Murphy.

35mm print courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive, Australia