Waltzing Tilda

Last week, I went to the flicks to see Italian offering I Am Love, starring Tilda Swinton. I noticed in the bookshop while I was waiting for the screening to start that she was gracing the front of various May magazines, including two separate (and very disparate) covers for Dazed & Confused. And I can't recommend the film highly enough, with its glamorous Milan setting, 1950s/60s-style panning shots, and obsessive almost to the point of hilarious sexual focus on food and nature. It did, however, have a fine ability to make me sob uncontrollably while trying to cycle home, and, despite the low probability of being spotted in a state of disarray (it was fairly early on a Sunday), I was unfortunate enough to find myself bumbling past a colleague and then bumping into a friend. Oh well.


I like Tilda Swinton; she seems to pick some great movies to be in. The last thing I saw was Jim Jarmusch's weird but wonderful The Limits Of Control, and she's great in The Beach (on telly this week, I believe), Thumbsucker and as the ice queen White Witch in The Chronicles Of Narnia. I'm a wee bit behind and have only just got Burn After Reading on DVD, so don't go spoiling it for me now.


Tilda also has to be commended for her brilliant schemes at bringing first-class film to rural remote Scotland, where she lives. In 2008, she collaborated with director Mark Cousins on The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema Of Dreams, a cheap-seats cinema brought back to life for a couple of weeks. In 2009, the pair hauled a mobile movie house, the Screen Machine, around the Highlands for A Pilgrimage film festival. Gives "road movie" a new slant, eh?

"It [is] a genuine experiment," said Swinton, in The Guardian. "I thought – you know what, we don't know what we're doing. We mightn't be able to move this an inch, and when we did, I couldn't be more amazed. What's it going to be next year? Airborne or in freefall?"

Cannae wait!