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The angelic Rachel. |
Mike Gray opened his introduction to this
week’s Film Club screening at the Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre by telling
an attentive audience that he felt we were in for something different. Electrick
Children (2012) is a coming of age drama that tells the fascinating
story of Rachel, a 15 year-old girl raised in a fundamentalist Mormon family in
Utah, Western United States, who believes that she has been made pregnant
through listening to a rock music tape that she discovered on her 15th
birthday. Following this immaculate conception she flees her family home and
goes to Las Vegas to search for the singer on the tape, accompanied by her
brother Mr. Will who is suspected by their parents of carrying out the
procreation of his sister and had been banished by the family.
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Mormon rural home life. |
The angelic looking Rachel is played by the
18 year-old Julia Garner, who you will probable know from another exceptional
independent American movie Martha
Marcy May Marlene (2011) her debut feature film. Rachel’s brother is played
by Liam Aiken (The
Killer Inside Me 2010) who was at one time auditioned for the part of Harry
Potter. Billy Zane appears as her preacher father and Rory Culkin is Clyde who
falls in love with Rachel when they meet up in Las Vegas.
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Rachel is bewitched by the bright lights of the big city....... |
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............Mr Wills does not feel the same way! |
Mike went on to tell us that the 28 year-old
Rebecca Thomas, whose directorial feature film debut this is, was born in Las
Vegas and was also raised in a Mormon family and studied for 18 months to be a
missionary in male dominated Japan. Changing direction she made the short film Ivan Sings (2009) about a male rape
victim who hires a group of Russ Meyer revenge babes to kill his attacker and
wrote Nobody Knows You Give a Damn (2009)
where a young mother suffering from post-partum depression makes an unusual and
unexpected encounter.
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New friends in Las Vegas. |
After returning from our break Mike, who
lived and worked in America for awhile, indulged us in a little of the background
to the Mormon Church including the fact that it was not only Utah where they
first settled but a good deal of western America. They also own the land that
the gambling city of Las Vegas is built upon allegedly collecting huge amounts
of rent! The film did however reflect a serious issue within the church of
young girls running away from their normal rural home life attracted by the
bright lights of the city. But the film
treated the difference between the secular world and the spiritual world in a
very nonjudgmental way, which in it self was very refreshing for a modern
independent film.
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Clyde and Rachel leave the wedding! |
The movie, which was the opening film at this
years Berlin Film Festival, was very well received by the RBCFT audience and it
was agreed that it was an ideal movie for a “Monday night” and comments were
passed that it is a great shame that films like this could not get a wider
distribution but as good as the film was it did not attract a significantly
large audience at the Dumfries cinema. Both the young actress Julia Garner and
director Rebecca Thomas showed great promise and are certainly two people to
keep your movie eye out for.
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