Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

Stephen Frears has a career approaching over half-a-century, directing films of astonishing variety, beauty, and daring, and yet many often have trouble remembering his name. The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears celebrates this great filmmaker, beginning with a short biography of Frears, general observations on unifying themes and styles in his oeuvre, and the characterization of his manner of directing. By focusing on 10 key films, Lesley Brill finds coherence in Frears' characteristic irony and in his concentration on many kinds of love. In movies such as My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity, The Queen, Philomena, and many others, Frears portrays widely varied situations and characters with a combination of insight, skepticism, and sympathy. He has the passionate, unjudgmental focus of an artist who stands simultaneously at a distance from his subjects and within their worlds. Through Frears' work is widely admired, Brill argues that he has attracted little scholarly writing because of a combination of the diffidence of his self-presentation and the difficulty of explicating the complex ideas and characters of his films. The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears is meant to inspire others to further examine his films individually and his career as a whole.

Brill deftly navigates through a layered weave of characters and social settings which are far more than what they seem. ... Brill’s analysis is always relevant and interesting, his writing style is clear and accessible and yet articulate and nuanced, and there’s more than enough here to hold the attention of both the casual and the academic viewer of Frears’ work., This is a valuable and stimulating study of a major director who until now has eluded sustained critical attention. Frears once said that he always made films in order to learn things; this book is the place to start if you want to learn about Frears., Can a case be made for the “consistently inconsistent” Stephen Frears, who’s staunchly maintained, “I’m just the bloke who gets hired,” as a cinematic auteur? Armed with a formidable appreciation of Frears’s direction of performers, an exquisite sensitivity to his visual design, and a deep sympathy with his representations of love in its many varieties, Lesley Brill presents compelling evidence why audiences who have enjoyed films as different as My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons, The Queen, and Philomena can profit from closer attention to the endlessly resourceful ironist behind them all., Lesley Brill demonstrates once again why he ranks among the most incisive and articulate of auteur critics. This study of Stephen Frears provides a thorough, well-argued, and persuasive account of one of world cinema’s most important practicing directors.

Lesley Brill is Professor of English and Film Studies at Wayne State University, USA, and former Chair of the English Departments of Wayne State and the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. He has published articles on film, literature, and photography, along with three books on film: The Hitchcock Romance (1988), John Huston’s Filmmaking (1996), and Crowds, Power, and Transformation in Cinema (2006).