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Flying Blind – Film Review

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The micro-budget thriller follows a politically charged affair between a British woman and an Algerian student

by Stephen Dalton | April 9, 2013 | Hollywood Reporter

Flying Blind Still - H 2013

A love story colored by the paranoid political climate of the War on Terror, this micro-budget British thriller was shot by first-time feature director Katarzyna Klimkiewicz for around $500,000. Helen McCrory, of Skyfall and Harry Potter fame, leads a mostly unknown cast in a noir-ish suspense yarn with potential appeal to Homeland fans. Opening in British theaters this week, this BBC-backed co-production has a small-screen feel. In overseas markets, TV seems the most likely launch platform, though a beefed-up Hollywood remake is not out of the question.

McCrory plays Frankie, a forty-something college lecturer and high-flying aeronautics expert based in the southwestern English city of Bristol. In the middle of designing the next generation of military drone aircraft, she meets handsome young French-Algerian student Kahil (Najib Oudghiri). Though he is half her age, there is clear sexual chemistry between them. Crossing barriers of age, class, race and culture, their initially hesitant attraction soon blossoms into a highly charged affair, with a frisson of S&M and plenty of spontaneous rough sex in rain-slicked public alleyways.

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Helen McCrory: ‘I used to think sexually charged roles were exploitative. Now I’m in my forties, I think it’s art’

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Bagging the sort of sexually charged roles that reflect the complex reality of middle age

by Liz Hoggard | April 6, 2013 | The Independent

“I seem to be incredibly low,” Helen McCrory complains, swivelling in her modish chair. In the arch-tones of a tabloid journalist, she declares: “Helen McCrory seems to have shrunk enormously since I last saw her. So it was no surprise when she told me she was starring in The Hobbit. I knew she was Welsh, but really?”

At a private members’ club, wolfing down breakfast, McCrory, 5ft 3in, looks like an angelic child rather than a woman of 44 who just happens to be married to Britain’s most desirable man – Damian Lewis, 42, the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning star of Homeland. These days we see her on the red carpet, wearing slinky Marchesa frocks and De Beers diamonds. But McCrory seems enviably normal, with the actor’s gift of intimacy and silliness. In that deep, thespy voice she can segue from Chekhov to contact lenses, and make both sound equally thrilling.

In the past two years she has played a Cabinet minister in Skyfall, terrified as Narcissa Malfoy in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and was hand-picked for Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning children’s film. Oh, and she’s just received an Olivier Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role as a fortysomething daughter at odds with her ageing hippie mother, played by Julie Walters, in The National’s The Last of the Haussmans. It was a performance to make you howl and weep with recognition.

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