There's a brutalist kind of shopping mall in Camber called belconn and Mall Belcon Blcnan. I love the staircase is like the Museum of modernat Isn't that that they've got? Except it's in Canberra.
And there's a Peter Alexander here.
Who needs MoMA From The Australian. This is the weekend edition of The Front. I'm Claire Harvey. Today. I'm joined by our entertainment reporter Jordie Gray, one of the Australian's youngest and brightest. She covers cinema in the Marvel era of Rippling ABS and CGI, when films are enormously expensive but creatively boring. But for Jordy, the film that is Shaping is the year's best. Her contender for the Best Picture, Oscar,
cost just ten million dollars to make. It's a period drama named after a type of architecture that's particularly hard to love, starring a couple of actors who aren't Pemsworth's. It's so long. There's a fifteen minute interval baked in. It's the Brutalist. Here's the plot. A Hungarian jew Laslo Toth played by Adrian Brody survives the horrors of book involved concentration camp in the Holocaust and begins rebuilding his
life in rural Pennsylvania. He's an architect, but he finds himself working in his cousin's furniture business until he meets the ultra charismatic Harrison Lee van Buren played by Guy Pearce, who commissions him for an ambitious building project. The relationship between these two men, all wrapped up in trauma and control, is making a point of its own about the uneven relationship between artists and the powers that govern their lives.
The movie is brutalist, so it's a big, heavy, outsized object.
That's director Brady Corbet in a recent interview with Jordie his movie cleaned up at the recent Golden Globes, winning Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Motion Picture, despite breaking with every current day hit movie convention.
Here's Jordy, I don't think it is a maybe about architecture.
It's just filled with architecture, specifically brutalist architecture, which rose to prominence after World War II. You know the style huge, generally concrete monstrosities or marvels, depending on your perspective. Think the Uts Building if you're in Sydney, or the High Court Building or National Gallery if you've ever visited Canberra. I grew up in Camera where even the bus stops a brutalist. Brutalism made a virtue of the stark choices.
After World War II, a lot of buildings were needed, concrete was cheap, and for his movie, Brady Corbey, who wore sunglasses throughout his interview with Jordi by the Way, brought his obsession with detail to life.
For us, it was very important to try and find ways of representing architecture, not just presenting it and the film's design, with the film's music, even the film's titles, which are constructivist at the end, like we were always trying to do our best to represent brutalism.
Movies today are shot on digital cameras that record to a drive. Corbet shot his movie on film, and not just that, he used VistaVision, a widescreen film format not used in Hollywood since the early nineteen sixties.
Part of just the quality of the image really just come from torturing the negative and you get so much character from the grain. It's funny because nowadays with QC for streaming and stuff. Every time I make a movie, it bounces back to me because they think it's a mistake and we're so accustomed now to everything originating in four or six K. But for me, movies look like this, this sort of artifact. It's something really tangible and I think really transporting to the period.
Did you enjoy this movie?
I loved it, but I wouldn't say it's an enjoyable movie. It's three and a half hours. There's a baked fifteen minute intermission, and the first half played, and then I ran to the bathroom to text with my friends, like, this is a best film I've seen in so long. I'm so excited. And then the second half is just like tragedy and trauma. So I loved the experience of watching the film because I truly did not know what direction it was going to take at any moment. The
way it looks is so breath taking. Five minutes into it, there's this shot of a bus and the greens are so vivid that I started crying because I was like, oh my gosh, like, movies don't look like this anymore. It looks so good. I just admire the goal and
the guts of it all. Like Brady Corbey said himself in his Gone Glades acceptance speech that no one was asking for a three and a half hour maybe on brutalism, and the fact that he got it off the ground filmed this decade spanning thing for under ten million dollars should be celebrated. I like what he stands for, and I think that his sentiment will resonate with people that care about movies.
Brutalism is not an easy form of architecture to love. It's not a kind of a lovable word. It's not really doesn't really sound like there's going to be a date movie.
Oh depends on what kind of relationship you have. I think no, it is. It's achingly romantic. It's basically Brady Callby making a movie about how hard it is to make movies. And I think the Van Buren character is like the film industry. To him.
This was the only way that I could really make a movie about making a movie. Unfortunately, the documentary of the making of our movies would not look like Burden of Dreams or a Heart of Darkness, because it'd be much more administrative than that. I think that writing this with my wife was something like an exorcism and a way for us to sort of channel a lot of
our frustration and rage about this process. Most companies that are financing movies nowadays are especially risk averse, so it's very tricky and it requires a hugelep of faith, not just from financiers but from absolutely everyone involved, because to make movies like this it's a huge investment of time for very little financial return.
Coming up, how Guy Peas menaced his way to a Best Supporting Actor nomination. When it came to casting the role of mid century American industrialist Harrison le van Buren. The Brutalists director Brady Corbey set his sights on one particular Australian guy, Piers.
Yeah, he's amazing.
I really love guy Luks played their role.
I wanted somebody that was still really attractive in the role. There was, of course a version of the American industrialist that was geriatric, but I wanted there to be this virility. I wanted to feel that these two men were in some ways at least physically evenly matched.
But it was Piece's approach to accidents that really attracted Corbe to him. And Pierce has been nominated for best supporting actor.
It is no coincidence that fate brought us together on the aid of my mother's dad.
I'm good at reading the signs.
I saw his performance years ago and Todd Haynes Mildred Pierce. It really stuck with me. It's just such a fantastic performance. He was doing a sort of variation of the mid century dialect on that project, and that is really difficult to pull off, and he just fucking nailed it.
Yeah, he's so sensational in this From the moment he walks into the screen like he is in that character, you don't have to adjust to anything. He plays that role so well that he threatens to still the movie from Adrian Brady. He's so watchable.
The reception obviously has been fantastic. But if the film also functions even just a little bit commercially, because we obviously we don't need to make a billion dollars on a movie that was made for so little, I would hope that that would help the cultural shift along a little bit and you know, hopefully create a little bit more space for really challenging works about adults for adults, because it's increasingly rare.
Jordy Gray's story about the Brutalist is live now at the Australian dot com dot a you Slash Review. Thanks for joining us on the front this week. Our team is Jasper Leek, Kristin Amyot, Leah Tamaglue, Tiffany Dimak, Joshua Burton, Stephanie Coombs and Nate Claire Hoppy.