Act 3 review – queer art history and life reflections from masters of metatextuality

Telluride film festival Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s absorbing documentary is a parallel take on their relationship and a nascent drama on artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor are artists and film-makers from Ireland who have created eerie and suspenseful psychological dramas in parallel with a strand of complex and self-questioning essay movies. They explore ideas about history and identity, ruminating on their creative selves and metatextually examining (or re-examining) their own work. You may call it the “Alfred Hitchcock” and “Chris Marker” sides to their work. Sometimes, their documentaries act as a kind of commentary on the fiction feature they are developing at the same time: like The Future Tense, a film about the ideas encountered during a planned movie about the pro-IRA English heiress Rose Dugdale, a project which came to fruition as the drama Baltimore . Now, they have made a strangely mesmeric, deeply personal, mysteriously stylised film called Act 3, which may itself yet herald a conventional drama about its notional subject. It is structured around Molloy and Lawlor having a weirdly self-aware dialogue about their lives together over 40 years, filmed singly in shot-reverse-shot (was each holding the camera on the other?) but speaking quietly and slowly, as if under hypnosis. Continue reading...