Now that I’ve been on the receiving end of one, I have to confess: I get the hype of film festival standing ovations.
To be clear, the ovation wasn’t actually for me — I just happened to be the one welcoming Martin McDonagh to the stage after the Middleburg Film Festival screening of his film Wild Horse Nine. But it’s an incredible feeling to watch an audience respond so strongly to a film that they leap to their feet the moment the person who created it enters the room.
Middleburg, a small festival in the picturesque historic town of Middleburg, Virginia, isn’t usually famous for its ovations. This isn’t a Venice or Cannes situation where everyone feels obliged to keep clapping even if they don’t know why. But the Wild Horse Nine ovation fit the weekend’s ebullient vibe — and it made my second trip to Middleburg, where I stayed as a guest at the festival’s luxe home base, the Salamander Resort, all the more exciting. (I get why, logistically, every film festival headquarters doesn’t include a well-appointed hotel lobby with multiple fireplaces, but Middleburg makes a strong case for trying.)
Located about 45 minutes west of Washington, D.C., Middleburg inevitably draws a politically savvy crowd — multiple international ambassadors were greeted at events throughout the weekend — who bring slightly different tastes than more industry-focused festival attendees. During my Q&A with McDonagh, it was clear that at least some people had personal investments in the film’s story about CIA meddling abroad (though if any were assassins like John Malkovich’s character in the room, they kept it to themselves). But as much as well-heeled, well-connected patrons make Middleburg possible, the audiences are much more diverse than that. Just as I did last year, I talked to multiple moviegoers with day jobs in the D.C. area who love movies and take advantage of the $125 day pass and nearby Airbnbs to spend a weekend somewhere beautiful, locked inside watching great movies.
So what actually connected with this crowd?
Like many regional festivals, Middleburg will eventually announce its own audience-award winners, and with both La Bola Negra and Elsinore playing here, they could very well repeat their big September wins at the Toronto International Film Festival. I caught La Bola Negra for a second viewing and watched it captivate another audience, inevitably boosted by the in-person presence of its star Guitarricadelafuente, who performed his original song “La Nieve” for an intimate crowd following the screening. (More on Guitarrica, and the unbelievably arresting effect of his direct eye contact, below!)
Shortly after that performance, I chatted up some Middleburg regulars fresh off seeing Club Kid. They went into Jordan Firstman’s debut feature expecting to feel alienated by the sex- and drug-fueled world it’s set in — and instead totally fell in love. That’s been a common sentiment around Club Kid ever since its Cannes premiere, and it’s gratifying to see it playing as well as I expected on the regional festival circuit.
The only other major screening I made time for was I Play Rocky, which blew the roof off at its Toronto premiere and was a hit in Middleburg as well, with the guy behind me at one point murmuring to his companion, “I love this!” The closing-night after-party, hosted on the outdoor pool deck at the Salamander despite chilly temperatures, was also I Play Rocky-themed, with punching bags at the entrance and cheesesteaks and Italian subs on hand. The film’s supporting stars Jay Duplass and P.J. Byrne circulated through the party, but I also spotted writer-director Tony Gilroy (he was in town to present Behemoth!). I didn’t get to ask Gilroy what he thought of Rocky, but I did see him earlier in the day at Wild Horse Nine, a Searchlight Pictures release like Behemoth! It was a useful reminder that these smaller festivals can be an invaluable opportunity for awards contenders to actually see each other’s movies, something that can feel impossible at bigger events.
My real pick for Middleburg’s breakout hit, though, is Wicker, which played before Elsinore on Saturday, with star Olivia Colman in attendance for both. (Seeing Colman catching up on emails in the lobby beforehand, with no one stopping to bother her, was a quintessential Middleburg experience.) She wasn’t nearly as incognito at the raucous Q&A following Wicker, a wry but touching fantasy in which she plays a lonely village fisherwoman who marries a man made of wicker (played by Alexander Skarsgård in incredible prosthetics) and ends up with the best marriage in town. I’m told that in the scene where the happy couple is so happy together they break their bed, the mostly female Middleburg audience actually screamed.
Wicker had a quiet premiere at Sundance earlier this year but seems to be picking up major steam in recent weeks, with clever marketing and seemingly genuine viral enthusiasm. (A cute boutique in downtown Middleburg put a sign out front that read, in part, “a man made of wicker is hard to find.”) Opening in theaters this weekend, Wicker could be a perfect conclusion to the year of Heated Rivalry, Wuthering Heights, Off Campus and Verity, with some of that carnal, female-driven BookTok energy finally making it to the screen. If Wicker hits big enough, we might even start talking about Colman as a serious contender in the best actress race, as Jacqueline Coley floated on the Prestige Junkie podcast earlier this month. At the very least, I’ve got it on my predictions for best makeup, because if you can make Alexander Skarsgård into a wicker man and keep audiences lusting after him, you’ve really done something special.
La Bola Breakout
Maybe something about the crisp air and autumn leaves in Middleburg put everyone in a romantic mood.
“I think I’m in love with Guitarrica,” texted one journalist friend who interviewed the La Bola Negra star a few hours before I did.
That evening, after the singer — given name Alvaro Calvo — had performed two songs while winding through the crowd, my husband threatened to leave me for the Spanish singer and actor. Was he joking? It’s probably a good thing Guitarrica left town to make it to the Academy Museum gala before anybody could find out.
That’s precisely the effect La Bola Negra directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo knew he could have when they cast Guitarrica in his first-ever acting role, playing the “sad-eyes, little gay soldier” they imagined at the center of their decades-spanning epic about queer identity and Spanish history. “First of all, we wanted to choose someone that you want to look at, and he has that,” Ambrossi told me in our live onstage conversation in Toronto last month. He and Calvo wrote La Bola Negra with Guitarrica in mind to play Sebastian, a musician reluctantly recruited to join the fascist Nationalist side of the Spanish Civil War and who falls in love with a Republican captive (played by Miguel Bernardeau) in the process. Sebastian is the crux of the sprawling film, which spans three main storylines, and Los Javis bet everything on a musician who had never acted before.
“Singers — the good ones — have an extraordinary ability to be near catharsis,” Ambrossi continued back in September. “They have to find the connection to the song in a personal way, because there’s only them saying something.”
That power of connection is extremely evident in La Bola Negra as well as when you’re lucky enough to encounter the 29-year-old Guitarrica — who introduced himself to me as Alvaro — in person. We caught up in a hotel conference room just after he’d taken part in the festival’s songwriters and composers panel and just before he introduced the film screening — a whirlwind, but nothing compared to the global concert tour he’d wrapped up just two weeks ago.
He’s been performing his second album, Spanish Leather, which he describes as “a good bridge” to link to La Bola Negra.
“It was like a gift came from heaven when I was finishing this album that talked so much about self-discovery and identification,” he tells me, about playing Sebastian. “He’s someone not able to live all of this. There was kind of a conflict to get into his skin.”
Below is a selection from our conversation at Middleburg about how he learned to get into Sebastian’s mindset — maybe even deeper than he should have — and the difference he sees between performing onstage and onscreen.
So when you’re performing onstage, you can immediately feel the connection with the audience. Then when you’re on a set, you don’t have any of that. That feels like such a hard transition; how do you get used to it?
Obviously, when you’re on stage, the energy comes from a sense of communion with the audience, and you don’t have an audience on set. But when we started rolling, I felt it mostly because you could see everybody on set doing their own job. The ones doing the lighting, doing the makeup — they were just on with their job and trying to put their soul into it because they believed in it. There was a communal sense of pushing everything further.
I imagine the character gets under your skin in a way he wouldn’t if you’d already been in 30 movies. It’s probably hard to draw that kind of boundary on your first film.
Yeah, I think it’s true. It got really personal very quickly. But I’m also someone who doesn’t know how to erase that boundary because I like not having that boundary.
Is it healthy, though?
I don’t know, but it’s fun. Not fun, but when I put myself into a project, it’s like you’re putting your soul out into it and into everything you do. And this was the only thing that I knew how to do. And when you’re doing an album, you’re obviously soaking in everything that is around you. I think it’s the same when you’re playing a character, especially when it carries so much weight, not just because of the character, but because of the whole story happening around it.
Does performing in your music videos prepare you for this?
I used to be the shyest person — actually, my nickname comes from not wanting people to know who I was. I would put my music on SoundCloud, and people would listen, but it wouldn’t put a face to the music. And when I started touring, or people started listening to my music, I was really stuck on my guitar, and it was kind of a shield for me and a gun at the same time — it was a way of hiding myself. So music has helped me feel more comfortable with myself and put my stories into my lyrics, being more explicit about my own life. And that eventually encourages you to grow as a person. It lets you be people you’re not allowed to be in real life. So at the end of the day, you’re interpreting and adopting alter egos, and that’s like performing a character.
Does performing music still feel like performing a character, or does it more feel like you’re up on stage as yourself?
I feel that I’m performing a character. I just finished my tour two weeks ago in Madrid, and I remember Carlos González, who plays Alberto in La Bola Negra, came to the show. He was like, “I didn’t know you had such aggressiveness on stage.” That’s the only place where I allow myself to be that kind of person.
So is the shield still there?
The shield is still there, but not on stage. The boundary between the stage and real life — that’s where the shield is.
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