Little White Lies # 81

I’ll be deadly honest with you: if you told me a year ago that we’d be putting out an issue of Little White Lies with Renée Zellweger on the cover and celebrating a brand new music biopic, I’d look at you with a quizzical eye and chuckle nervously. We often hear people say things like, “it’s a Little White Lies movie”, which usually translates that it’s got a indie flavour, slightly left field subject matter, visually very stylish.

It’s a very certain type of film. But the view from the inside is that all movies are Little White Lies movies, or at least have the potential to be. Is there anything more amazing than the feeling of going to see a film for which your expectations are somewhat muted, and then being completely swept off your feet by it? You’re just left there, gawping at the screen and hoping your seat neighbours don’t spot the tear tramlines when the lights go up.

This is exactly what happened to me at a screening of Rupert Goold’s Judy, the story of Judy Garland’s haphazard residency at London’s Talk of the Town at the tail end of 1968 and through to 1969 – the year that would end up being her last. In the lead role is Renée Zellweger, taking up the task of representing a real celebrity – one of the most beloved of the modern age, no less – and making her Hollywood colleagues look like rank amateurs. Hers is not a performance powered by affectation and conspicuous showboating, but one which is blessed with the weight of history and an understanding of deep sorrow. When a film feels right, then it’s right. And Judy feels right for this moment, and out 81st cover film.

On the cover…

Pierre Mornet is a Parisian illustrator who mixes melancholy with a dash of surrealism. For this portrait of Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland, he used acrylic paint on paper.