01
The Congress
Why this pick
Its fractured blend of lived experience, fantasy and artistic self-revision echoes Providence’s interest in identity as something invented, recast and painfully negotiated.
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
MOVIE1977 1h 50m CHE
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Movies like
Providence
Drama
CINEHUNCH / THE NEXT FRAME
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
If you loved Providence, try these.
01
02
The Other Side of the Wind
Why this pick
A caustic portrait of an ageing artist assembled through competing perspectives, with formally restless storytelling and the same uneasy overlap between performance, memory and cruelty.
03
All That Jazz
Why this pick
Fosse turns a self-destructive creator’s final reckoning into a flamboyant, mordant hallucination, matching Providence’s theatrical artifice and bracing emotional self-examination.
04
8½
Why this pick
An artist’s memories, desires and unfinished work flow into one another with playful formal freedom, offering a more exuberant counterpart to Providence’s authorial labyrinth.
05
The Spider's Stratagem
Why this pick
Its son’s investigation into his father becomes a poised maze of myth, repetition and unreliable remembrance—an intimate puzzle with Providence’s elegant, unsettling artificiality.
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01 / THE STORY
A little about the film.
On the eve of his 78th birthday, the ailing, alcoholic writer Clive Langham spends a painful and sleepless night mentally composing and recomposing scenes for a novel in which characters based on his own family are shaped by his fantasies and memories, alongside his caustic commentary on their behaviour. His son Claude appears as a cold and unforgiving prosecuting lawyer, who revels in spiteful repartee. His second (illegitimate) son Kevin features as an idealistic soldier accused of the mercy-killing of an old man who was being hunted down. Sonia, the wife of Claude, shows sympathy with Kevin and seems eager to seduce him in protest at her husband's callousness. Clive also invents the character of Helen, as Claude's mistress, but she bears the features of Clive's dead wife Molly who committed suicide. Clive's imagination is also haunted by scenes of an autopsy on the corpse of an old man, a military round-up of elderly people who are detained in a sports stadium, and a dark tangled forest in which a hunted man metamorphoses into a werewolf. Before Clive loses consciousness, it is Kevin whom he sees as the werewolf in the forest; Claude shoots Kevin but seems to identify him with their father.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
The people who bring it to life.
Elaine Stritch
Molly Langham / Helen Wiener
Kathryn Leigh Scott
Miss Boon
Peter Arne
Nils
John Gielgud
Clive Langham
Ellen Burstyn
Sonia Langham
David Warner
Kevin Langham / Kevin Woodford
Denis Lawson
Dave Woodford
Cyril Luckham
Doctor Mark Eddington