'Medusa Deluxe' an arthouse film in guise of a crowd pleaser: Thomas Hardiman

New Delhi: "Medusa Deluxe" director Thomas Hardiman says he wanted to offer viewers the best of both worlds in his debut feature film, a one-shot whodunnit set amid a hairdressing contest, which he describes as an experimental and engaging piece of cinema.

The English-language film, currently streaming on MUBI India, revolves around the murder of Mosca, the presumed frontrunner of the coveted competition.

According to the filmmaker, a hairdressing contest seemed like a "culturally valuable" setting for him to base his maiden feature film. He has previously made short films such as "Time on My Hands" (2012), "Stories Without Endings" (2015), and "Pitch Black Panacea" (2020).

"I want to send people out with a kind of joy. But I also want it to have an element of seriousness, realism and heartfelt emotion. I looked at hairdressing as how you present yourself to the world. It's culturally valuable and then you also have this space of a salon, the backbiting and fun that you get when hairdressers get together.

"I felt that's the space that I can be comedic in. I can ponder between those two poles and I can give you something that’s at once, fun and engaging and at the same time heartfelt. But it is also experimental cinema in a way, it's an arthouse film in the guise of a crowd pleaser," Hardiman told PTI in an interview.

The London-based director said he was "this weird guy" who sat at the back of the hair salon for a year to write the script of the film.

"I brought it together through deep research and deep love for hairdressing and the passion for it. At the same time, when you are the weird guy who is taking notes, you probably are pretty lonely so maybe the film is filling a hole in my soul," he added.

"Medusa Deluxe" draws its title from the popular Greek myth about the gorgon Medusa, described as a woman with living venomous snakes in place of hair with the power to turn those who gaze into her eyes into stone.

She is said to have angered goddess Athena, either due to her boastfulness or because of an ill-fated affair with Poseidon. She is transformed into a vicious monster and later killed by Perseus.

The Roman version of the myth describes Medusa as a beautiful maiden, who is raped by Neptune in goddess Minerva's temple. Minerva then punishes Medusa by transforming her hair into snakes.

The British director, who termed the myth around Medusa "misogynistic", said his movie was always meant to turn the story on its head.

"There is a subtextual reference that we are obviously in the backstage of the hairdressing competition. You have the serpentine corridors. There are clear references and allusions to it throughout the film but at the same time, there's something in there that I wanted to challenge a little bit.

"I had always felt that Medusa is a sexist myth, it's a clearly misogynistic myth. To me, it's completely wrong that you had this incredibly headstrong, interesting, intelligent woman who is put on the outskirts of town and othered. That's why it's 'Medusa Deluxe', a contemporary version of this myth and completely taking ownership of it and breaking it giving it a completely renewed context," he added.

His movie is not just about breaking the myth of Medusa but also genres and structures of storytelling, Hardiman said.

"The film is about breaking everything. It's about breaking murder mysteries, about breaking storytelling. It's about doing something that takes us to the edge and that, to me, felt personal. It was something that was there in the subtext of the film." Hardiman said he took to filmmaking after he got a job making sets on children's films and TV in the UK which led him into producing and eventually he worked on the 2014 thriller drama "Catch Me Daddy".

The director, who counts Michelangelo Antonioni, Claire Denis, Leos Carax, Robert Altman, and Ken Loach among his cinematic influences, said he is a cinephile.

"There are other sorts of inspiration where sometimes you need people to show you that it is possible that you can actually pick up a camera and actually make something... I just love cinema. I just can't get enough of it. I can talk about it for hours," he added.

"Medusa Deluxe" stars Clare Perkins, Kayla Meikle, Lilit Lesser, Debris Stevenson, Anita-Joy Uwajeh, Kae Alexander, Harriet Webb, Darrell D'Silva, Luke Pasqualino and Heider Ali.