MADELEINE
SYNOPSIS
In a small American town a mundane event offers a glimpse in to a normally unseen world of mysterious connections.
A businessman rushes for his train but just misses it. As he waits for the next service another world seems to open up before him and we witness a series of disparate characters each enter their own state of delusion, rapture or heightened awareness.
Festival premiere - 59th BFI London Film Festival 2015:
Online premiere - Directors Notes 2019:
https://directorsnotes.com/2019/02/22/ollie-verschoyle-madeleine/
Dazed and Confused 'Five shorts that will blow your mind at LFF'
CAST
Business Man - Jared Kelner
Young Girl - Trina Catterson
Salesman - Jay Pingree
Mrs Caldwell - Suzanne Du Charme
Old Man - Wayne Anderson
Young Boy - Jason Pagan
CREW
Writer / Director - Ollie Verschoyle
Producer - Dee Meaden
Co-Producer - Jay Pingree
Director of Photography - Ollie Verschoyle
1st Assistant Camera - Michelle McCabe
2nd Assistant Camera - Tenzin Kalden
Sound Recordist - Mike Fitzgerald
Hair & Make Up - Bates Jaffe
Baton Twirling Coach & Choreographer - Kathy Catterson
Graphic Props - Richard Ward
Editor - Domenico Favata
Sound Design & Mix - Doppler and Dubbs
Music - Jon Opstad
Colourist & Online Editor - William H.W. Read
Still Photography - Jay Pingree
Press:
Omeletto April 2019:
‘A girl twirls a baton on a soccer field. An old man stands on his lawn and stares out at the world. A salesman of”sensory time travel” visits a client, who remembers a morning in a cafe. A man on his way to work misses his train out of the suburbs. A young boy wanders off into the woods, where he has a strange encounter. But at one crucial moment, they become linked through a moment of piercing awareness. Writer-director Ollie Verschoyle has crafted a hypnotic composite portrait of strangers who share one exquisitely crafted moment of interconnection in American suburbia. Using a unique mixture of fantasy and naturalism, it uses the tools of cinema to create a odd, beguiling synchronicity of consciousness when four strangers pierce through the veils of their individual realities to glimpse at the mysterious, beautiful present reality that connects them. Verschoyle takes on both director and cinematographer roles, and the narrative and visual development in the film are yoked in a particularly intimate way. Exquisitely photographed with piercing clarity, the film has a precise eye for the small details of suburbia: the sprinklers, trees, lawns, signs, and cars that seem invisible to most people as they go about their daily lives. The film’s achievement is how it seems to foreground this layer of sensory “detritus,” and in the act of bringing it attention, imbues the stuff of ordinariness with a mysterious beauty. Colors seems particularly important in this slice of the world, with yellow linking all the characters. The color of optimism and happiness, it seems to suffuse each character’s world with a particularly luminous light, elevating the ordinary. Sound also plays a strong part in the overall musicality of the film. The score is particularly effective, both evocative and haunting, especially during the more traditionally suspenseful sequences of the short. The sound design is layered in an unusual way, connecting each separate character. There is no real traditional dialogue, underscoring a sense of the uncanny. The editing has its own rhythm, attuned to the small shifts in sound, movement and light that link all the characters. Cuts often happen over matching movement, propelling character towards a moment of change. As the moment builds and unfolds, the interplay of sound and visuals seem to orchestrate themselves into a convergence, a collective “deep breath” that pierces through each character’s world and links them all together, by virtue of simply being alive at the same moment of time and space. Some characters seems to be lost in the past, others frozen by fear and others simply present — but the pause takes them all out of their ordinary reality into a brief transcendence. The title “Madeleine” evokes not a character name, but the famed madeleine pastry that plays such a pivotal role in Marcel Proust’s modernist literary achievement “In Search of Lost Time.” Like its literary antecedent, the short film is a poetic meditation about how we experience time, carrying the past and sometimes even the future in our present. Rarely, though, do we often look up out of our concerns and simply become alive to the world happening around us. “Madeleine” creates that uncanny transcendent moment when we stop, pause and become aware of the magic behind the mundane surfaces of life — when we are aware of our aliveness, in fact, and see it for the remarkable feat that it is.’
Indie Frontiers:
https://www.indiefrontiers.com/home/film-review-glow-yellow-madeleine-2015-by-ollie-verschoyle
‘Let me be clear: motion pictures have no rules. Well, except that they move in some fashion, I guess. Aspiring filmmakers often turn to screenwriting books to teach them how to tell stories. Many of them are filled with good advice based on robust historical evidence. The books say, “This film evoked Greek tragedy, and it won the Oscar; that film ambled for two hours and then erupted into an orgy of destruction, and it wowed Cannes.” If you want to make a movie, the authors insist, go and do likewise. Forms and functions demand iteration and obedience.
But movies can do anything. As long as they move. Madeleine, Ollie Verschoyle’s tense and whimsical short film, makes its own rules. It’s a distinctive experience, full of life, texture, color, and hypnotic sound. It’s less a narrative than a moment. Verschoyle’s film is closest in style and feel to the gentler works of David Lynch, or Shane Carruth’s arthouse science fiction masterpiece Upstream Color. Verschoyle’s objective is to induce a unique state of mind, and the conventions of traditional narrative filmmaking just won’t do. But that doesn’t mean Madeleine is antagonistic to the audience. No, it’s quite charming, with a gentle portrayal of American small town life that sits comfortably beside Lynch’s Twin Peaks.
As in Lynch’s small town mystery series, the woods in Madeleine are full of danger, or at least the spirit of it. The film’s blend of fear and wonder is amoral, like nature herself. The same beautiful landscape you admire today could kill you tomorrow. Both are natural. They’re both right outside your front door, and encroaching on your memory, written in feelings beyond words. By eschewing conventional narrative, Madeleine speaks a language older than literature, placing its contemporary small town world in an ancient dreamtime continuity. It’s pure filmmaking; no other medium can do what Madeleine does, in quite the way it does it. Madeleine rules, because it plays by its own.’