A Deeper Guide is a new monthly column from pop-up cinema club Deeper Into Movies, where actors, directors and other creatives share their most inspiring cinematic pleasures. For more information about upcoming screenings, visit their website.

In Sarah Blakley Cartwright’s acclaimed new book Alice Sadie Celine, a woman begins an affair with her adult daughter’s best friend and mayhem breaks loose. Set over the course of several decades, the novel – released at the end of last year – explores the challenges and beauty of motherhood, daughterhood and friendship. In the words of Chloë Sevigny (who is also the voice of the audiobook), we’re “obsessed”. 

For the second instalment of our Deeper Guide series, we spoke to Blakley Cartwright about the cinematic inspirations behind Alice Sadie Celine – from Kelly Reichardt’s “deceptively modest” Showing Up, to Pedro Almodóvar’s captivating Parallel Mothers.

PARALLEL MOTHERS (2021, PEDRO ALMODÓVAR)

“This improbable switched-at-birth story is underpinned by a secondary story of Penelope Cruz’s character’s plight to exhume her family member from an unmarked mass grave, having been assassinated by the falangistas at the start of the Spanish Civil War. The themes of anti-imperialism and disinterment echo the A-story in which the two women are exposed, their secrets unearthed. It’s the teenage Milena Smit who steals the show as Ana.

“The film showcases Almodóvar’s high aesthetic, most notably Anna in athletic Miu Miu. An exemplar Almodóvar, the stage-like film leads to a spectacular confrontation that explores maternal attachment and questions of victimisation and control, secrets and the aftermath of trauma.” 

WHITE OLEANDER (2002, PETER KOSMINSKY)

“In voiceover narration, Astrid guides us through a psychologically intense period that follows when her mother, a beautiful sociopath, murders her boyfriend. We are treated to successive portraits of households as Astrid home-hops within the foster system, enduring various forms of mistreatment. She either tries to assimilate within or reacts against the different households. It’s a great cast, with Renée Zellweger and Michelle Pfeiffer bringing great power to their respective roles. (The film suffers, technically, from its episodic nature, though that’s something I personally don’t much mind.)

“Ultimately, although she ages out of the system, Astrid cannot free herself from the grip of her mother. It’s a theme that I love: disillusionment with madness, no matter how beautiful the packaging.” 

WHAT MAISIE KNEW (2012,  SCOTT MCGEHEE AND DAVID SIEGEL)

“I love a story of surrogate parenthood. This film, written by my father, is my favourite of recent cinema. It is based on the Henry James novel of the same name. The film’s rich emotional exploration is attained through the lens of a child caught between her two divorcing parents. The child’s stunning performance brings the exquisite script to life. Little Maisie and the mother’s bartender boyfriend are united in not being taken seriously by the mother character. They forge a bond, allowing Maisie to improvise a tentative family out of the surrounding adults at her disposal.” 

SHOWING UP (2022, KELLY REICHARDT)

“In this intimate slice of life tale, the great Michelle Williams is a sculptor attempting to prepare a new show while also paying her bills, only compounded by the fact that she has a day job in arts administration, with her mother as her boss. She alternately begrudges and shares camaraderie with the artists surrounding her. I lived in Oregon for four years at the start of my twenties; this territory is familiar and dear to me. If it’s a sendup of that culture, it is only in the most tender of ways. A rescued pigeon is a platform for themes of confinement and flight, while also avoiding heavy-handed meaning-making. It is a deceptively modest portrait of someone trying to stay in her own lane while the confusion of life unfolds around her.” 

Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN (2001, ALFONSO CUARÓN)

“Y Tu Mama Tambien voices so many of the themes that preoccupy me: self-definition, the weight of the past, identity exploration, transitory connections, temporary selves, youthful liberties. Connection before, during, and—most influentially for me – after a crucial breakdown of trust. Sexual betrayal, across boundaries of class and age. Sexy older women!

“The film is scorchingly hot, with a dose of dry wit, bordering on irony, that never poisons the sex but, by some alchemical trick, only adds to it. Set against Mexico’s new liberalisation and democratisation, the specter of death here is not debilitating but rather a catalyst that sets everything in motion.”

THE FAVOURITE (2018, YORGOS LANTHIMOS)

“In this story, the men have been dispensed with. Matters here are in female hands, specifically those of Olivia Colman’s fragile and capricious Queen Anne, a pillar of silly severity. At the heart of this triangle of women is the queen’s perverse, petulant, and shifting preference for ‘favourites’ between two of our greatest actresses, played by Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz. The ladder climbing plays for influence and dominance are so demoralising recognisable, yet articulated with such irreverent humour, that the viewer forgets she is watching a period drama set in the 18th century.”