‘The Mastermind’ and ‘My Sister and Other Lovers’

Still from ‘The Mastermind’

The characters in Kelly Reichardt’s films tend to drift and wander, trying to find their way through the world in search of solace or contentment; they are unremarkable people, except for their capacity to keep on living in solitude or on the margins of society. The films are often about what is sometimes called ‘the American condition’, and that is true of her latest work, ‘The Mastermind’, which has interesting social undercurrents, perhaps especially for those of us who reached adulthood in the early 1970s, the period in which it is set. Apart from the film’s style, which can bring to mind Stephen Shore’s ‘American Surfaces’ photographs (like Reichardt, he teaches at Bard College), there are many references to the Vietnam war, student protests, and the Nixon presidency; they form an essential part of its meaning, even though this isn’t immediately obvious, either to the viewer or the protagonist, who is caught up in the arrangements and consequences of his museum robbery, the ostensible subject of the film.

‘The Mastermind’ (the title is ironic) is sustained by a fine performance from Josh O’Connor, who plays the main character, J.B.Mooney, as a gentle, pensive, but fundamentally self-serving misfit.The heady days of the late 1960s are over, and the hangover has begun. Like the privileged Benjamin Braddock in ‘The Graduate’, which was released at the end of 1967 and became hugely successful the following year, ‘J.B.’ wants to be ‘different’, although this isn’t how he would put it himself. Brought up in a prosperous Massachusetts family, he is an art school dropout and underemployed carpenter whose nebulous aspirations don’t match his current way of living; a charming dilettante who considers himself above both conformity and overt rebellion, he can cheerfully leave two rowdy sons with his exasperated wife so he can try to persuade his generous mother to bankroll a new cabinet-making project, while also spending time convincing three henchmen to help stage a robbery at the local museum.

The heist itself takes place swiftly and shambolically; the gang has to negotiate its retreat by avoiding a young girl in a beret reciting French verse and an elderly couple who realise that something unusual is going on. It then becomes clear that ‘J.B.’ hasn’t really worked out what to do next, and the rest of the film is about what happens when a self-interested man, oblivious to the needs of other people, runs away and tries to escape from the clutches of conventional society. Like many of his generation, he has been living in a dream world, but he is soon harshly brought back to the reality of Nixon’s America, which has disturbing resemblances to that nation today.

Christopher Lasch, at the end of the 1970s, wrote a popular and influential book, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations. The Vietnam war had ended in American failure a few years earlier; Jimmy Carter’s liberal presidency was lurching toward its own downfall in an energy crisis, with soaring inflation, Cold War tensions, and problems in the Middle East. American pride, confidence and optimism were ebbing away, and Ronald Reagan was soon to lead the country towards the Right. Lasch provided a new explanation for this ‘diminished condition’. America, he wrote, was immersed in narcissism, a harmful transformation of its traditional individualism; while the individualist aspired to virtues of self-reliance and self-discipline, the narcissist was self-absorbed and self-indulgent, seeking shallow sociability, pleasure and self-awareness. Modern narcissists, he suggested, have a ‘therapeutic sensibility’, viewing mental and physical health as a form of ‘salvation’, but for the most part they actually feel empty and inauthentic.

Many of these characteristics were also to be found elsewhere in the Western world. Both troubled and cheerful, Hideous Kinky is the story of an English woman, Julia, who decides, in 1972, to move to Morocco from London with her two young daughters. There they struggle to establish something like the life they knew at home, and while Julia immerses herself in a quest for personal and spiritual fulfilment, her daughters resist and rebel. Hideous Kinky, later filmed with Kate Winslet in the main role, was inspired by the author's own experiences as a child; Esther Freud, daughter of the artist Lucian Freud and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, lived in Marrakech for eighteen months with her older sister Bella and her mother. Although usually described as a novel, the book is as much a memoir as a work of fiction.

About thirty years after the publication of Hideous Kinky, Esther Freud has written another book, My Sister and Other Lovers, that returns to the same characters, and it tells how the girls grew up and began to question their unconventional upbringing. Opening with Lucy, Bea, and their mother once again on the move, it is now well into the 1970s; Julia has a son from another failed relationship, and they are on a ferry to Ireland to stay for a while with her parents, as they have no money and nowhere else to go. Bohemian life was sunny and exotic in Morocco, but rootlessness in England is darker and less agreeable; they wait for buses in the rain, hitch lifts, and share rooms in communal homes where walls are cracked, the carpets grubby and worn. Even a stay in a Scottish manor house is fraught and uneasy; the girls eat tinned food on the floor, play on frozen lakes, and roam freely without supervision. ‘I love your mother’, says one of Lucy’s friends later in the book; ‘Remember how she never minded what we did?’

Lucy, and by extension Esther Freud, try to understand; they avoid criticism and condemnation. We are told that Julia kept her daughters secret from her parents, preferring a fragile life to disapproval and the possibility of ending up in an institution for unmarried mothers. Her refusal to conform, while in many ways admirable, has unhappy consequences, especially for Bea, who at one point suffers at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend; Julia (who isn’t referred to by name in this book) later refuses to believe her memories. In the absence of parental stability, the two sisters form a close relationship, but it is complex and not always harmonious. Bea, angry and hurt, is determined to escape from her mother and the past; Lucy tries hard to reconcile them. Both as a teenager and then as an adult, the sensitive Lucy is aware of her own failings, eventually realising that she has always been searching for new families and finding that the replacements were even more precarious than her own; she also discovers that she has chosen to love men who will probably leave her. Every man in the book, not unlike J.B.Mooney, seems to be vexing.

For further exploration:

An article about ‘The Mastermind’: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/oct/22/art-heist-louvre-theft-the-mastermind-kelly-reichardt-josh-oconnor

An interview with Esther Freud: https://observer.co.uk/culture/books/article/esther-freud-i-wrote-these-books-i-threw-the-bomb

Imge on index page: still from ‘The Mastermind’

Current listening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjN-MUp3q8A

Esther and Bella Freud, by their father, Lucian Freud