Two films made last year explored the wrenching, real-life story of the Florida-based local news reporter Christine Chubbuck who in 1974 took her own life on live television. Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine was a tricksy moral maze of a movie that explored the ethical dilemma of being a parasite of tragedy. By comparison, Antonio Campos’s Christine is less experimental in its approach, but this elegant, achingly sad study of debilitating depression is by no means a conventional piece of film-making. Deftly sidestepping any of the obvious narrative choices, this film confirms Campos (Afterschool, Simon Killer) as one of the most intelligent and consistently surprising film-makers working in US indie cinema.
Playing the troubled Christine, Rebecca Hall is extraordinary. Her voice is low, but there’s a hard, abrasive edge to it that sounds like an attack, even when it isn’t. At dinner with a colleague, she stabs her lettuce with such ferocity that it looks like she is subduing an uprising on her plate rather than sampling her salad. And this force, always a notch or two higher than is needed or normal, is evident everywhere in her life. This, together with her resistance to prurient blood-and-guts journalism, places her at odds with the head of the failing television station where she works.
It’s an eloquently structured piece. Campos uses repetition of certain scenes – Christine’s volunteer work as a puppeteer, for example – to track the way depression spreads like an ink stain across her psyche. This is a quality package throughout. The score, by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, is full of nervy woodwind and off-kilter rhythms; the production design is a meticulous symphony in tobacco browns. In some ways, Christine can be viewed as a companion piece to Campos’s debut, Afterschool. Both deal with the alienating, dehumanising effects of violence in the media, albeit from different sides of the lens. It’s certainly the stronger of the two films that tackle Chubbuck’s strange, sorry story.
- In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123
- In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14
- In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255
