Jung & Film – Maleficent

Jung & Film – Maleficent

PRESENTERS: John Gosling, Renee Ramsden, Grace Reid
Venue: CG Jung Centre, 87 Main Road, Rosebank, Cape Town 7700
Time: Friday 15 February 2019 18:00 for 18:30

Run time: 97 minutes

The film’s story is an example of what The Guardian’s film critic Peter Bradshaw calls “that emerging post-‘Wicked’ genre, the revisionist-backstory fairytale,” but it’s affecting. It has a primordial edge that the clumsy filmmaking can’t blunt. There are moments in “Maleficent” that are profoundly disturbing, in the way that ancient myths and Grimm fairy tales are disturbing. They strike to the heart of human experience and
create the kinds of memories that young children—young girls particularly—will obsess over, because on some level they’ll know, even without the benefit of adult experience, that the film is telling them a horrible sort of truth.

But it’s also a film of resonant gestures and dream logic, in which ancient and contemporary predicaments jostle against each other: romantic betrayal or sexual assault, and their psychological aftermath; the fundamental differences between male and female minds; the way that patriarchal culture fuses women’s sense of self-worth to their bodies; even the tangled maternal impulses that independent single women who never wanted kids might experience when they have to care for a child. The movie is a mess, but it’s a rich mess. It has weight. It matters. (Matt Zolle Seitz)

Please book your ticket through the SAAJA Office by emailing saaja@mweb.co.za