Julie Moggan director of Guilty Pleasures

Just like many documentarists, Julie Moggan got into cinema through the interest of observing people and the world around us. To this anthropologist, visual expressions were a consequence of the need to reflect on the world she saw and the discoveries she made. In college, her final study investigated the lives of a family from Kosovo one year after the war, helping them get to London so that the sick father could receive the treatment he lacked in his homeland.

After this powerful experience, Moggan studied at the National Film and Television School in the UK, where she did a series of short films, such as Huda and Juman, reflecting on the effects of the war in Iraq, and Letters to an Unborn Child. Her graduation film, however, turned out to be radically different to the cinema she had done so far. In Waiting for a Lift, a Beck’s Futures student award-winner, she proposes a lighter theme on common people in Britain and their dreams, with a lot of humour. “I didn’t know that Waiting for a Lift would turn out to be quite funny. It’s a sad-funny film, and when I screened it for the first time, it was such a pleasure to hear people laughing. From then on I saw the importance of making people laugh.”

This 30-minute film would be a turning point in her career as a filmmaker. The passion for observation did not change, but Moggan says: “I suppose I came to realize that some of my favourite films were really about everyday life. That was the kind of film I was really falling in love with. I realized I wanted to do some anthropology at home”. From that moment on, her attention was turned to ordinary topics and middle-class issues. The classic Freudian question “What do women want?” encouraged her to look at middle-aged British women and ask herself why it was that every four seconds one Mills & Boon novel was sold in the world. These books, as Moggan knew, were rather formulaic romantic stories mixed with well-behaved sexuality; making this a perfect entrance into the world of mature women, who happen to constitute the major readership of Mills & Boon.

As her research progressed, she found out that these books were translated all over the world, and this gave the anthropologist the idea of comparing women from different cultures in their appreciation of the books. With the help of the Internet, ads and some publishers, she came to meet three women - in England, India and Japan - and decided to discover their stories and their fantasies. One thing lead to another: these women’s stories allowed Moggan to investigate their relationships with their husbands, and then with the authors of the books… Soon she would be focusing as much on women as she was on men, both in diverse ages. From Japanese housewives to British male models who pose for Harlequin’s covers, Moggan ended up diving into the whole universe of mass culture and middle-class desires.

More than two years of footage, 150 hours of material and six months of editing later, Guilty Pleasures was ready. This sweet yet rather critical portrait of the relationship between people and standardized culture shows a lot of humour and intense scenes, as the books lead the director to the characters’ personal problems and frustrations. The unstable situation of Moggan’s own love life – she had just ended a long-term relationship – allowed her to bond with these people and develop real friendships. However, the funny portraits raised severe ethical issues for her, as her concerns were turned into not dressing up a ridiculous image of these people. “Ever since I started making more funny films, this was an issue. I always make films about people I like, who I really love. I think there is a fine line between laughing at people or with people, and we do laugh at people sometimes. But I think people are funny and it’s OK to laugh at [them] sometimes. I hope this film stayed on the right side of that.”

When questioned about the radical change of topic from the political situation in Kosovo to popular culture, she minimizes this transformation: “There is absolutely a value in speaking of everyday life. It seems that people give more importance to political topics, they think their films can make a difference, I suppose, and that’s really amazing and valid. I started with that and then I came to realize that I don’t think that documentaries really change much… I don’t know, but I think there should be a place for all of these approaches.” As proof of this, Julie Moggan points out the Finnish film Steam of Life, about men discussing inside a sauna, as her favourite film at IDFA 2010.

For a different point of view on everyday life, and for a fine but not pedagogical approach to the concerns of the average people, Guilty Pleasures proves to be a very good choice in the IDFA selection.

By Bruno Carmelo